There's the issue of what to do. At the moment, there seems to be a lot of division and non-answers on that. If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions won't do anything to help. Even massive cuts might not do the trick. Ok well going back to the pre-industrial era isn't an option, though some green groups do like the idea. That would entail a massive loss of life and loss of quality of life. So no go there.
Likewise carbon credits, carbon exchanges, that kind of shit won't do anything. Playing money games and shuffling things around on spreadsheets does not enact any kind of real change. While economic incentives can help move things in certain directions, this won't really do that much and mostly will serve to enrich those that play the exchanges (see Wall Street).
Ok so, we'll need something else. Some geoengineering to change what is happening, or we'll need to do R&D on solutions not to change what is happening, but to survive and adapt to the changes that are going to happen. So what are those then? What are the proposals, what do they cost, what are the risks, the benefits, etc, etc? Also where are the green groups pushing for them, advocating for it?
Right now, it seems to be not just that there are people who do not believe that climate change is real, or is a problem (or a big enough problem to warrant large scale action), but there seems to be little in the way of solutions from those that do believe. "Just cut emissions," does not seem to be a solution that will be useful. "Cap and trade," seems to just maintain the status quo, while funneling money around to poorer countries. None of the popular solution with the climate change advocates seem to be one that would actually deal with the issue.
Is it such a surprise then that politicians don't seem to want to act on it?
I mean suppose I tell you that you have a real problem with your house, it is slowly deteriorating towards a collapse. I am able to prove this to your satisfaction, and I am able to show you that the reason is related to water use. Any time you run water though your pipes, it moves things further along. Also, as best as I can tell, even if you stopped running water entirely, you are already past the point where you can save it, it WILL collapse, all you can do is slow it.
However as solutions, I propose you just try and use less water. Maybe crap in a bucket and dump it outside instead of using your toilet. I also propose you "cap and trade" your usage, you don't actually have to decrease the amount you use, but you just pay your neighbours when you use over a certain amount. None of my solutions involve fixing the problem, or rebuilding, or reinforcing, just trying to prolong things and/or shuffling funds around.
Are you going to do what I suggest? Or are you going to ignore me?
That's one of the real problems I see is that the solutions climate change advocates seem to put forward aren't useful solutions by their own models. If we are already past a tipping point where even drastic emissions cuts won't help, well then we need to stop worrying about emissions and start worrying about either how to geoengineer a change, or how to simply deal with the changes that are coming.
As Todd Howard pointed out during a keynote "Your ideas are not as important as your execution." The games that are loved and that endure are not the ones that had some amazing idea that nobody could have every thought of before. Heck, they often draw heavily on literature, film, myth, and popular culture. Rather they are the ones that execute their vision well, that are fun to play, that are a good ride.
I can't think of a single game that I've seen succeed just because the idea was so good and so unique. Always, always, always, it was accompanied with good execution. In fact many of my all time favourites are not particularly original ideas.
Good example? Civ 4. One of the all time greats in my opinion. I still play it from time to time. However an amazing original idea it is not. As the number implies, it is the 4th game in the series, they've done the same thing 3 times before. Also it wasn't an original concept to begin with, Civilization was a board game before it was a computer game. That aside, the idea of "a game where you conquer the world" is not that original of an idea.
The reason it is a great game (and its successor not quite as good in my opinion) is the execution. It is well put together, fun to play, well tested, well balanced, has good visuals and music, it is stable, and so on and so forth.
If you think the only thing that will make your game succeed is that its amazing idea be protected until it is released, well then it will fail. Good games are ones that would be good, even if someone had done something like them before, and does something like them after. They stand on their own.
You don't get awarded tax exempt status and then are allowed to do as you please. If that were the case, every company ever would start out as a charity, get tax exempt status, and then change over.
So you have to file and show that your activities still warrant tax exempt status, that you aren't violating the rules for it. For example suppose you run a non-profit and you get a massive donation, some billionaire leaves you a billion dollars. You decide cool, you'll pay all of it to yourself as salary for that year. I mean the entity is still "non-profit" right? Your salary is a cost, so no profit was made!
Ummm... no. You'd get in all kinds of trouble for that. Doesn't matter what kind of games you tried to play. Hence, you have to file taxes to show that your operations are indeed non-profit, that the money you receive goes to pay for the operation of your organization, not to enrich yourself.
If you want an organization to enrich yourself, that's fine, but that is called a business, and you have to pay taxes on that.
It is not hard to remember, in particular because with an organization of any reasonable size you'd want to hire an accountant to do your taxes. If you are a non-profit, you'd hire an accountant who knows how to deal with that.
Any business taxes, profit or non-profit, are a bit complex and this isn't unique to the US. So you hire an accountant. Just part of doing business. My parents used to run a small business in Canada, about 5 employees including themselves. They hired an accountant to do their taxes. It wasn't that expensive and the accountant made sure everything was in order and the Canadian government was happy.
Well same shit here. X.org should have paid someone (or some firm) a couple of grand a year to do their tax accounting.
You find that many places post these amazing Speedtest scores. There was some ISP in Riga (Latvia) that was showing extremely high results... However when you do some more extensive testing it doesn't seem to bear out. So why is that? Well because they run their own Speedtest server and operate their stuff like a big WAN.
It is not so hard to provide a big link internal to your network. It is a lot harder (meaning more expensive) to provide enough backhaul to make it fast to the majority of the world.
I mean I can truthfully say I have a gig here at work. I can do a Speedtest to show it... to the Speedtest server in our datacenter down the hall. Off campus I still see good connection speeds, but nowhere near a gig, as we have only about a gig of bandwidth for the whole campus.
Most US ISPs don't offer big links to customer houses, but they do tend to keep oversubscription manageable so you usually get around your rated bandwidth. What you find is that places that offer off the charts Internet speeds for cheap prices are doing WAN like setups and there isn't the backhaul to support it.
There are more than a few people out there who seem to think that there are two positions one can be in: #1 and utter crap, at least when it comes to the US. So if the US isn't #1 in something, then it is utter crap, a third world shithole, a loser, etc.
In come cases it is the overly zealous "We're #1" America lovers who really do think the US is the best EVAR at everything. They just can't handle second best at anything, ever.
In more cases it is people who like to hate on the US, for whatever various reasons, and thus see it as a way to say "See! Look at how bad the US is! It isn't the best! It sucks!"
It is very silly, but you see it on Slashdot plenty given that the site has a large number of users with poor world awareness and a dislike for the US (most of them being US citizens).
The same shit went on when there was a story about China having the #1 super computer on the Top 500 list, for the moment. Somehow the fact that the US has the the #2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 (half the top 10, in other words) didn't seem to matter. The US wasn't #1, so clearly they fail.
At least not as people normally think of it. When you talk about "credit score" what 99.9% of people mean is your FICO score. This is not getting factored in for FICO. Rather this is for people who don't have a normal credit history. If you have a standard credit history with the credit bureaus, a FICO score will be calculated on that and that's the thing lenders will look at. Nobody gives a shit about your Facebook friends if you have a history of paying debts on time.
This is for people who, for whatever reason, don't have a credit score. This is an alternate way to try and evaluate their risk potential. How good an idea is it? I dunno, guess we'll have to see. However this is not something that is just getting added to your credit score, sensationalist headlines to the contrary.
There are plenty of groups that want you to use torrent to distribute their stuff, and some that require it. MMOs have gotten to like to use torrents for their patches, since they are often very large. Their autopatcher uses torrents to accelerate things, and you don't have a choice in the matter. They WANT you to help redistribute their stuff, takes the load off their servers.
If the copyright holder is the one who created, posted, and seeded, the torrent, well then they are implicitly giving permission.
Same shit as a company posting things on their website. They can't go and post something for download, but then claim you didn't have permission to download it.
A popular thing here on/. which the original poster did is to turn any story either about China doing something bad, or the US doing something bad in to a "Oh look at how bad the US is, they can't say anything to China!" or "OMG the US is worth than China/Russia, they are more free!" Or equally stupid shit like that.
In no way is China relevant to this. What's more, the idea that only if a nation is perfect that it could level any criticism at another is completely ludicrous.
It is just spin, just crap to try and hate on the US and allies for no particular reason. So the GP had a good point: China does some pretty bad shit, things that even the imperfect countries that are the UK and US might have an issue with.
If people want discussions of the problems with western governments to stay on topic, something I think is a good idea, then the first step is to stop dragging in China et al at every opportunity. What the US, UK, etc do is good or bad, right or wrong, regardless of what they say to China, regardless of how they compare to China, etc.
If you want to start playing the "compare and contrast" game, well then don't be surprised when others come back in kind.
Ya I have to day at my work at least the Linux servers are certainly NOT easier than the Windows servers to administer. The Linux lead spends a lot of time dicking around in the command line messing with scripts and settings to get everything working and managed nice. It works, don't get me wrong, we have a functional setup and process, but this idea that it is somehow easy and magic is false and speaks to a lack of experience.
When I see someone who proposes something like "replace Windoze (lol I totally stuck it to Microsoft misspelling their software!) with Linux" as a magic fix for needing less people in a big enterprise to me it says this is someone who has installed Linux on their desktop, and maybe a personal web server, and somehow thinks that means they know all about enterprise administration. They figure what is true for them must be true for 50,000 systems. I mean after all, the fact that they had Windows crash on them one time clearly means it is unstable and unsupportable!
Windows does a lot right for the enterprise. Their authentication service is really good. AD really does the trick for managing a large collection of systems and users. We use it as the backend for everything, Windows, Linux and Mac and yes, we've tried it other ways (we used to do Sun LDAP and IDsync as the backend, what a nightmare to make work). Anyone who says Microsoft doesn't have good tools for large scale management is really just saying they don't have experience in a large scale setting with Windows and other OSes.
Also that suggestion is funny, given that the NSA likes and uses Linux for a number of things. You might want to look up who gave us SELinux (hint: the NSA). Ever wonder why it has such paranoid, granular, control if you want it? That's why.
New Intel drives do, as they use the Sandforce chipset. However Samsung drives don't. Samsung makes their own controller, and they don't mess with compression. All writes are equal.
Also 14TB sounds a little low for a write limit. MLC drives, as the XM25 was, are generally spec'd at 3000-5000 P/E cycles. Actually should be higher since that is the spec for 20nm class flash and the XM25 was 50nm flash. Even assuming 1000, and assuming a write amplification factor of 3 (it usually won't be near that high) you are talking 52TB if the drive has no internal overprovisioning, which it probably does.
As an example, AnandTech tested a Samsung 840 TLC drive. The 250GB drive was able to take about 266TB of incompressible data, which translates to a bit more than 1000 P/E cycles.
If you have a high write workload, their MLC drives aren't that much. A 512GB 840 Pro drive will run you like $450. That should get you somewhere in the realm of 1.5PB of writes before it fails, maybe more.
Most UPSes these days are line-interactive. That means they are not doing any conversion during normal operation. The line power is directly hooked to the output. They just watch the line level. If the power drops below their threshold, they then activate their inverter and start providing power. So while their electronics do use a bit being on, it is very little. The cost isn't in operation, it is in purchasing the device and in replacing the batteries.
That aside SSDs don't have problems with it (it was a firmware bug, Samsung fixed it) and if your data is important, you probably don't want to rely on your journal to make sure it is intact. When you get in to real high end, reliable, storage, power backup is a big thing. Our Equallogic has dual full redundant power supplies on all units, which they wanted plugged in to separate circuits (one is line only, one is generator backed), redundant controllers, and the NAS has internal batteries backing the cache in case of power failure, ones that last quite awhile.
There's a big difference between "a journal that means the filesystem isn't in an inconsistent state (usually)" and "a setup where one doesn't lose any data."
If you are concerned about efficiency costing you money in your computers (it likely costs less than you think) then your PSU is the place to look. If you didn't specifically buy a good one, it is probably 80% or less efficient. You can get them a bit above 90% if you try, and match them to the load.
You'd need a better network to have any use. A modern 7200rpm drive is usually around the speed of a 1gbit link, sometimes faster, sometimes slower depending on the workload. Get a RAID going and you can generally out-do the bandwidth nearly all the time.
SSDs are WAY faster. They can slam a 6gbit SATA/SAS link, and can do so with nearly any workload. So you RAID them and you are talking even more bandwidth. You'd need a 10gig network to be able to see the performance benefits from them. Not that you can't have that in your house, but you don't because it is damn expensive. Lacking that, you'll notice very little improvement over magnetic drives.
Also to be technically correct (the best kind of correct) you probably don't have a SAN in your home. A SAN is a separate network, purely for storage devices, not connected to your LAN. It is a FC/FCoE/iSCSI/whatever backend that your storage devices talk on, and then there's a different network that your clients use to talk to the storage server (which is on both networks).
Usually, once you have your computer set up with your programs, you don't write a ton of data. A few MB per day or so. Samsung drives come with a little utility so you can monitor it.
As a sample data point I reinstalled my system back at the end of March. I keep my OS, apps, games, and user data all on an SSD. I have an HDD just for media and the like (it is a 512GB drive). I play a lot of games and install them pretty freely. In that time, I've written 1.54TB to my drive. So around 11GB per day averaged out, though realistically about 500GB of that was done the first day, since I installed the system, put the apps on, then changed my mind with regards to UEFI boot, and reinstalled the system.
I think some people believe that since they have a lot of data, they must write a lot and thus the write limit would be problematic. However the data you have is usually largely static. Your delta is fairly small and thus not that problematic to flash.
So while I wouldn't want to use TLC flash drives in a backup system or something, there really isn't an issue in a desktop. If you do have an atypical situation where you have very write intensive workloads, well you can always have a magnetic (or SLC flash) secondary disk for them. But for desktop usage, you just aren't going to write that much to your disk.
States want to give less money to state schools. Well, when there's less coming in from taxes they can either cut services, or raise prices. "Do more with less," is a line from uninformed PHBs and politicians, it just doesn't work that way. Many universities have done both, cut some services, and raised rates.
or the banks? Because you can't have it both ways: Either the government regulates money for various reasons (crime, abuse, economic stability) or it doesn't. You can't have a situation where the nifty "hacker" currency that you like is exempt for all regs and you can do what the fuck ever with it, but traditional monetary instruments are regulated to try and stop shit like what happened in 2008 (in no small part because of the repeal of many regulations).
So you have to decide how you feel about government regulation of the economy, currency, investments, etc, and then be consistent with it. Reason isn't just to not be a hypocrite (though that is a good one) but because if instruments and investments denominated in dollars are regulated but ones in Bitcoins are not, well guess what all the Wall Street scum will do? That's right, use Bitcoins.
NDEs are something that only a small percentage of the population experience. Most people just black out. Same deal with blood loss in the brain due to a centrifuge or the like. The government has studied it on military pilots and while most black out, some have NDE like experiences. At this point, we don't know why only some people experience it.
That is the point all you TPM-ranters seem to be missing: It is 100% optional to use. In most cases I've seen, it is off by default because people just don't give a shit about it. On my system I go and have a look in device manager and, oh look, there's no "Security Devices" category, which is where the TPM appears if it is turned on. My board either shipped with it off, or without one (I haven't bothered to check in the BIOS) and it is a new Z77 board.
I could see the issue if this was being required, but it isn't. You can choose to turn it off (or more likely to just not turn it on). Then there's no issue.
It really seems like something that some people just want to be a big evil issue so they pretend it is. There's lots of screaming about it, that is backed up by a big lack of knowledge about it. Just chill out, don't use it, and go on.
Also not only does Windows 8 not need secure boot, it doesn't even need UEFI. You can run it on a system with a BIOS, or on a UEFI system in BIOS emulation. My desktop is set up like that. My motherboard had some issues with UEFI boot as well as my video card, so BIOS mode it is. My laptop did not, so it is UEFI boot (it is faster) though without secure boot, it is just regular ass UEFI boot.
I swear these paranoid types need to spend a bit of time getting their learn on about new technologies before whining about them. You'd think if you cared so much about privacy and control you'd actually take the time to understand what thing do or do not affect it.
The amount of knee-jerk that goes on with this shit is pretty amazing.
Well their terminology may be a bit off but the idea is actually correct: You can't, at this point, be "cured" of alcoholism. You can stop drinking and that is what you need to do, but the addictive nature is still there. If you start again, you'll overdo it and spiral down the addict path. If your brain/body is such that it will get addicted to alcohol, then it will always be that way, and no amount of time will change that.
That's really what they are saying and it is correct. You don't cure an addiction, as in become such that you won't get addicted to the substance, you just stop taking the substance.
As an example take a look at nicotine. There actually are people who do not become addicted to it, my mother is one of them, they are just very rare. Most people, if you use it more than a little bit you WILL get addicted. We all understand that, so those of us that don't wish to get addicted avoid it. Also once you've quit smoking, you recognize that you can't start again, you can't do it "just a little bit," you'll get hooked again.
Well for alcoholics, that is how alcohol works. Most people, 90%ish, aren't like that. They do not get addicted. However for alcoholics it works like nicotine, they do get addicted. So the only answer is avoidance. There's no amount of time after which you are "cured" and can no safely drink, you just need to stay away.
Same thing goes for any addiction. You are never "cured" you just stop taking the substance. You can't ever go back to taking it, or you'll head down the path of addiction again.
They don't subsidize phones, that is one of the reasons they are less. So you either need to bring your own, or pay the full cost, which can be $600-700 for top of the line smartphones.
I don't think this is a bad thing, I like T-Mobile for ending the subsidized contract nonsense but you do need to consider that price wise.
So my anecdotal evidence based on newer drives (2012 and 2013 drives)? Zero failures over 5 drives. So I guess that mean by his crazy/hot scale that SSDs are perfectly stable, not at all crazy!
Look, drives fail. All of them, in the long run. It is a question of how often, and how long. I've had plenty of HDDs fail on me in my career in computer support. I don't have stats on SSD vs HDD failure rates, and it would seem neither do you, and neither does that dude. However if you reason for disliking them is you've had a whole one drive and it has failed, well that's a bad reason.
Far too many people on Slashdot need to do some foreign travel, or at least a good glass of perspective and soda. The US is far from perfect on, well, all fronts. In terms of privacy there have been some very disturbing developments lately (though anyone who thinks it is the first time needs to learn history). However that does not automatically mean the US is horrible, the worst country in the world, that other countries have no abuses, or at least none worth mentioning.
Russia has real, real problems in terms of human rights, basic freedoms, government control, and so on. They are sliding towards the bad old days of a soviet like system at an alarming rate. It is far worse than anything happening in the US. Now none of that means what is happening in the US is good, but please stop with the bullshit.
Honestly it is a literally childlike view of things where there is only a binary system of morality: good and bad, and they are always opposed. So if the US does something bad they are bad and that means anyone against the US must be good.
They don't do any in the consumer space, I know of, but they make heavy hitting enterprise SSDs. They don't normally sell them to channels, they sell them to VARs like Dell who use them in their stuff.
Look at Ubuntu: They support standard releases for a year (they've reduced it) and LTS releases for 5 years. That means from the date of initial release. RHEL is 10 years of support for their 5 and 6 releases (7 for 3 and 4) and then you can buy 3 more years of support for extra money.
OS-X is a bit different in that Apple supports two version older than the current one. That in practice means about 3-4 years of support, but is harder to plan since you don't know how fast releases will come, you don't get a defined, guaranteed, cycle.
So... Where's the company that gives a much longer/better support cycle? Because I sure don't see it.
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There's the issue of what to do. At the moment, there seems to be a lot of division and non-answers on that. If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions won't do anything to help. Even massive cuts might not do the trick. Ok well going back to the pre-industrial era isn't an option, though some green groups do like the idea. That would entail a massive loss of life and loss of quality of life. So no go there.
Likewise carbon credits, carbon exchanges, that kind of shit won't do anything. Playing money games and shuffling things around on spreadsheets does not enact any kind of real change. While economic incentives can help move things in certain directions, this won't really do that much and mostly will serve to enrich those that play the exchanges (see Wall Street).
Ok so, we'll need something else. Some geoengineering to change what is happening, or we'll need to do R&D on solutions not to change what is happening, but to survive and adapt to the changes that are going to happen. So what are those then? What are the proposals, what do they cost, what are the risks, the benefits, etc, etc? Also where are the green groups pushing for them, advocating for it?
Right now, it seems to be not just that there are people who do not believe that climate change is real, or is a problem (or a big enough problem to warrant large scale action), but there seems to be little in the way of solutions from those that do believe. "Just cut emissions," does not seem to be a solution that will be useful. "Cap and trade," seems to just maintain the status quo, while funneling money around to poorer countries. None of the popular solution with the climate change advocates seem to be one that would actually deal with the issue.
Is it such a surprise then that politicians don't seem to want to act on it?
I mean suppose I tell you that you have a real problem with your house, it is slowly deteriorating towards a collapse. I am able to prove this to your satisfaction, and I am able to show you that the reason is related to water use. Any time you run water though your pipes, it moves things further along. Also, as best as I can tell, even if you stopped running water entirely, you are already past the point where you can save it, it WILL collapse, all you can do is slow it.
However as solutions, I propose you just try and use less water. Maybe crap in a bucket and dump it outside instead of using your toilet. I also propose you "cap and trade" your usage, you don't actually have to decrease the amount you use, but you just pay your neighbours when you use over a certain amount. None of my solutions involve fixing the problem, or rebuilding, or reinforcing, just trying to prolong things and/or shuffling funds around.
Are you going to do what I suggest? Or are you going to ignore me?
That's one of the real problems I see is that the solutions climate change advocates seem to put forward aren't useful solutions by their own models. If we are already past a tipping point where even drastic emissions cuts won't help, well then we need to stop worrying about emissions and start worrying about either how to geoengineer a change, or how to simply deal with the changes that are coming.
As Todd Howard pointed out during a keynote "Your ideas are not as important as your execution." The games that are loved and that endure are not the ones that had some amazing idea that nobody could have every thought of before. Heck, they often draw heavily on literature, film, myth, and popular culture. Rather they are the ones that execute their vision well, that are fun to play, that are a good ride.
I can't think of a single game that I've seen succeed just because the idea was so good and so unique. Always, always, always, it was accompanied with good execution. In fact many of my all time favourites are not particularly original ideas.
Good example? Civ 4. One of the all time greats in my opinion. I still play it from time to time. However an amazing original idea it is not. As the number implies, it is the 4th game in the series, they've done the same thing 3 times before. Also it wasn't an original concept to begin with, Civilization was a board game before it was a computer game. That aside, the idea of "a game where you conquer the world" is not that original of an idea.
The reason it is a great game (and its successor not quite as good in my opinion) is the execution. It is well put together, fun to play, well tested, well balanced, has good visuals and music, it is stable, and so on and so forth.
If you think the only thing that will make your game succeed is that its amazing idea be protected until it is released, well then it will fail. Good games are ones that would be good, even if someone had done something like them before, and does something like them after. They stand on their own.
You don't get awarded tax exempt status and then are allowed to do as you please. If that were the case, every company ever would start out as a charity, get tax exempt status, and then change over.
So you have to file and show that your activities still warrant tax exempt status, that you aren't violating the rules for it. For example suppose you run a non-profit and you get a massive donation, some billionaire leaves you a billion dollars. You decide cool, you'll pay all of it to yourself as salary for that year. I mean the entity is still "non-profit" right? Your salary is a cost, so no profit was made!
Ummm... no. You'd get in all kinds of trouble for that. Doesn't matter what kind of games you tried to play. Hence, you have to file taxes to show that your operations are indeed non-profit, that the money you receive goes to pay for the operation of your organization, not to enrich yourself.
If you want an organization to enrich yourself, that's fine, but that is called a business, and you have to pay taxes on that.
It is not hard to remember, in particular because with an organization of any reasonable size you'd want to hire an accountant to do your taxes. If you are a non-profit, you'd hire an accountant who knows how to deal with that.
Any business taxes, profit or non-profit, are a bit complex and this isn't unique to the US. So you hire an accountant. Just part of doing business. My parents used to run a small business in Canada, about 5 employees including themselves. They hired an accountant to do their taxes. It wasn't that expensive and the accountant made sure everything was in order and the Canadian government was happy.
Well same shit here. X.org should have paid someone (or some firm) a couple of grand a year to do their tax accounting.
You find that many places post these amazing Speedtest scores. There was some ISP in Riga (Latvia) that was showing extremely high results... However when you do some more extensive testing it doesn't seem to bear out. So why is that? Well because they run their own Speedtest server and operate their stuff like a big WAN.
It is not so hard to provide a big link internal to your network. It is a lot harder (meaning more expensive) to provide enough backhaul to make it fast to the majority of the world.
I mean I can truthfully say I have a gig here at work. I can do a Speedtest to show it... to the Speedtest server in our datacenter down the hall. Off campus I still see good connection speeds, but nowhere near a gig, as we have only about a gig of bandwidth for the whole campus.
Most US ISPs don't offer big links to customer houses, but they do tend to keep oversubscription manageable so you usually get around your rated bandwidth. What you find is that places that offer off the charts Internet speeds for cheap prices are doing WAN like setups and there isn't the backhaul to support it.
There are more than a few people out there who seem to think that there are two positions one can be in: #1 and utter crap, at least when it comes to the US. So if the US isn't #1 in something, then it is utter crap, a third world shithole, a loser, etc.
In come cases it is the overly zealous "We're #1" America lovers who really do think the US is the best EVAR at everything. They just can't handle second best at anything, ever.
In more cases it is people who like to hate on the US, for whatever various reasons, and thus see it as a way to say "See! Look at how bad the US is! It isn't the best! It sucks!"
It is very silly, but you see it on Slashdot plenty given that the site has a large number of users with poor world awareness and a dislike for the US (most of them being US citizens).
The same shit went on when there was a story about China having the #1 super computer on the Top 500 list, for the moment. Somehow the fact that the US has the the #2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 (half the top 10, in other words) didn't seem to matter. The US wasn't #1, so clearly they fail.
At least not as people normally think of it. When you talk about "credit score" what 99.9% of people mean is your FICO score. This is not getting factored in for FICO. Rather this is for people who don't have a normal credit history. If you have a standard credit history with the credit bureaus, a FICO score will be calculated on that and that's the thing lenders will look at. Nobody gives a shit about your Facebook friends if you have a history of paying debts on time.
This is for people who, for whatever reason, don't have a credit score. This is an alternate way to try and evaluate their risk potential. How good an idea is it? I dunno, guess we'll have to see. However this is not something that is just getting added to your credit score, sensationalist headlines to the contrary.
There are plenty of groups that want you to use torrent to distribute their stuff, and some that require it. MMOs have gotten to like to use torrents for their patches, since they are often very large. Their autopatcher uses torrents to accelerate things, and you don't have a choice in the matter. They WANT you to help redistribute their stuff, takes the load off their servers.
If the copyright holder is the one who created, posted, and seeded, the torrent, well then they are implicitly giving permission.
Same shit as a company posting things on their website. They can't go and post something for download, but then claim you didn't have permission to download it.
A popular thing here on /. which the original poster did is to turn any story either about China doing something bad, or the US doing something bad in to a "Oh look at how bad the US is, they can't say anything to China!" or "OMG the US is worth than China/Russia, they are more free!" Or equally stupid shit like that.
In no way is China relevant to this. What's more, the idea that only if a nation is perfect that it could level any criticism at another is completely ludicrous.
It is just spin, just crap to try and hate on the US and allies for no particular reason. So the GP had a good point: China does some pretty bad shit, things that even the imperfect countries that are the UK and US might have an issue with.
If people want discussions of the problems with western governments to stay on topic, something I think is a good idea, then the first step is to stop dragging in China et al at every opportunity. What the US, UK, etc do is good or bad, right or wrong, regardless of what they say to China, regardless of how they compare to China, etc.
If you want to start playing the "compare and contrast" game, well then don't be surprised when others come back in kind.
Ya I have to day at my work at least the Linux servers are certainly NOT easier than the Windows servers to administer. The Linux lead spends a lot of time dicking around in the command line messing with scripts and settings to get everything working and managed nice. It works, don't get me wrong, we have a functional setup and process, but this idea that it is somehow easy and magic is false and speaks to a lack of experience.
When I see someone who proposes something like "replace Windoze (lol I totally stuck it to Microsoft misspelling their software!) with Linux" as a magic fix for needing less people in a big enterprise to me it says this is someone who has installed Linux on their desktop, and maybe a personal web server, and somehow thinks that means they know all about enterprise administration. They figure what is true for them must be true for 50,000 systems. I mean after all, the fact that they had Windows crash on them one time clearly means it is unstable and unsupportable!
Windows does a lot right for the enterprise. Their authentication service is really good. AD really does the trick for managing a large collection of systems and users. We use it as the backend for everything, Windows, Linux and Mac and yes, we've tried it other ways (we used to do Sun LDAP and IDsync as the backend, what a nightmare to make work). Anyone who says Microsoft doesn't have good tools for large scale management is really just saying they don't have experience in a large scale setting with Windows and other OSes.
Also that suggestion is funny, given that the NSA likes and uses Linux for a number of things. You might want to look up who gave us SELinux (hint: the NSA). Ever wonder why it has such paranoid, granular, control if you want it? That's why.
New Intel drives do, as they use the Sandforce chipset. However Samsung drives don't. Samsung makes their own controller, and they don't mess with compression. All writes are equal.
Also 14TB sounds a little low for a write limit. MLC drives, as the XM25 was, are generally spec'd at 3000-5000 P/E cycles. Actually should be higher since that is the spec for 20nm class flash and the XM25 was 50nm flash. Even assuming 1000, and assuming a write amplification factor of 3 (it usually won't be near that high) you are talking 52TB if the drive has no internal overprovisioning, which it probably does.
As an example, AnandTech tested a Samsung 840 TLC drive. The 250GB drive was able to take about 266TB of incompressible data, which translates to a bit more than 1000 P/E cycles.
If you have a high write workload, their MLC drives aren't that much. A 512GB 840 Pro drive will run you like $450. That should get you somewhere in the realm of 1.5PB of writes before it fails, maybe more.
Most UPSes these days are line-interactive. That means they are not doing any conversion during normal operation. The line power is directly hooked to the output. They just watch the line level. If the power drops below their threshold, they then activate their inverter and start providing power. So while their electronics do use a bit being on, it is very little. The cost isn't in operation, it is in purchasing the device and in replacing the batteries.
That aside SSDs don't have problems with it (it was a firmware bug, Samsung fixed it) and if your data is important, you probably don't want to rely on your journal to make sure it is intact. When you get in to real high end, reliable, storage, power backup is a big thing. Our Equallogic has dual full redundant power supplies on all units, which they wanted plugged in to separate circuits (one is line only, one is generator backed), redundant controllers, and the NAS has internal batteries backing the cache in case of power failure, ones that last quite awhile.
There's a big difference between "a journal that means the filesystem isn't in an inconsistent state (usually)" and "a setup where one doesn't lose any data."
If you are concerned about efficiency costing you money in your computers (it likely costs less than you think) then your PSU is the place to look. If you didn't specifically buy a good one, it is probably 80% or less efficient. You can get them a bit above 90% if you try, and match them to the load.
You'd need a better network to have any use. A modern 7200rpm drive is usually around the speed of a 1gbit link, sometimes faster, sometimes slower depending on the workload. Get a RAID going and you can generally out-do the bandwidth nearly all the time.
SSDs are WAY faster. They can slam a 6gbit SATA/SAS link, and can do so with nearly any workload. So you RAID them and you are talking even more bandwidth. You'd need a 10gig network to be able to see the performance benefits from them. Not that you can't have that in your house, but you don't because it is damn expensive. Lacking that, you'll notice very little improvement over magnetic drives.
Also to be technically correct (the best kind of correct) you probably don't have a SAN in your home. A SAN is a separate network, purely for storage devices, not connected to your LAN. It is a FC/FCoE/iSCSI/whatever backend that your storage devices talk on, and then there's a different network that your clients use to talk to the storage server (which is on both networks).
Usually, once you have your computer set up with your programs, you don't write a ton of data. A few MB per day or so. Samsung drives come with a little utility so you can monitor it.
As a sample data point I reinstalled my system back at the end of March. I keep my OS, apps, games, and user data all on an SSD. I have an HDD just for media and the like (it is a 512GB drive). I play a lot of games and install them pretty freely. In that time, I've written 1.54TB to my drive. So around 11GB per day averaged out, though realistically about 500GB of that was done the first day, since I installed the system, put the apps on, then changed my mind with regards to UEFI boot, and reinstalled the system.
I think some people believe that since they have a lot of data, they must write a lot and thus the write limit would be problematic. However the data you have is usually largely static. Your delta is fairly small and thus not that problematic to flash.
So while I wouldn't want to use TLC flash drives in a backup system or something, there really isn't an issue in a desktop. If you do have an atypical situation where you have very write intensive workloads, well you can always have a magnetic (or SLC flash) secondary disk for them. But for desktop usage, you just aren't going to write that much to your disk.
States want to give less money to state schools. Well, when there's less coming in from taxes they can either cut services, or raise prices. "Do more with less," is a line from uninformed PHBs and politicians, it just doesn't work that way. Many universities have done both, cut some services, and raised rates.
or the banks? Because you can't have it both ways: Either the government regulates money for various reasons (crime, abuse, economic stability) or it doesn't. You can't have a situation where the nifty "hacker" currency that you like is exempt for all regs and you can do what the fuck ever with it, but traditional monetary instruments are regulated to try and stop shit like what happened in 2008 (in no small part because of the repeal of many regulations).
So you have to decide how you feel about government regulation of the economy, currency, investments, etc, and then be consistent with it. Reason isn't just to not be a hypocrite (though that is a good one) but because if instruments and investments denominated in dollars are regulated but ones in Bitcoins are not, well guess what all the Wall Street scum will do? That's right, use Bitcoins.
NDEs are something that only a small percentage of the population experience. Most people just black out. Same deal with blood loss in the brain due to a centrifuge or the like. The government has studied it on military pilots and while most black out, some have NDE like experiences. At this point, we don't know why only some people experience it.
That is the point all you TPM-ranters seem to be missing: It is 100% optional to use. In most cases I've seen, it is off by default because people just don't give a shit about it. On my system I go and have a look in device manager and, oh look, there's no "Security Devices" category, which is where the TPM appears if it is turned on. My board either shipped with it off, or without one (I haven't bothered to check in the BIOS) and it is a new Z77 board.
I could see the issue if this was being required, but it isn't. You can choose to turn it off (or more likely to just not turn it on). Then there's no issue.
It really seems like something that some people just want to be a big evil issue so they pretend it is. There's lots of screaming about it, that is backed up by a big lack of knowledge about it. Just chill out, don't use it, and go on.
Also not only does Windows 8 not need secure boot, it doesn't even need UEFI. You can run it on a system with a BIOS, or on a UEFI system in BIOS emulation. My desktop is set up like that. My motherboard had some issues with UEFI boot as well as my video card, so BIOS mode it is. My laptop did not, so it is UEFI boot (it is faster) though without secure boot, it is just regular ass UEFI boot.
I swear these paranoid types need to spend a bit of time getting their learn on about new technologies before whining about them. You'd think if you cared so much about privacy and control you'd actually take the time to understand what thing do or do not affect it.
The amount of knee-jerk that goes on with this shit is pretty amazing.
Well their terminology may be a bit off but the idea is actually correct: You can't, at this point, be "cured" of alcoholism. You can stop drinking and that is what you need to do, but the addictive nature is still there. If you start again, you'll overdo it and spiral down the addict path. If your brain/body is such that it will get addicted to alcohol, then it will always be that way, and no amount of time will change that.
That's really what they are saying and it is correct. You don't cure an addiction, as in become such that you won't get addicted to the substance, you just stop taking the substance.
As an example take a look at nicotine. There actually are people who do not become addicted to it, my mother is one of them, they are just very rare. Most people, if you use it more than a little bit you WILL get addicted. We all understand that, so those of us that don't wish to get addicted avoid it. Also once you've quit smoking, you recognize that you can't start again, you can't do it "just a little bit," you'll get hooked again.
Well for alcoholics, that is how alcohol works. Most people, 90%ish, aren't like that. They do not get addicted. However for alcoholics it works like nicotine, they do get addicted. So the only answer is avoidance. There's no amount of time after which you are "cured" and can no safely drink, you just need to stay away.
Same thing goes for any addiction. You are never "cured" you just stop taking the substance. You can't ever go back to taking it, or you'll head down the path of addiction again.
They don't subsidize phones, that is one of the reasons they are less. So you either need to bring your own, or pay the full cost, which can be $600-700 for top of the line smartphones.
I don't think this is a bad thing, I like T-Mobile for ending the subsidized contract nonsense but you do need to consider that price wise.
Let me direct you to two facts:
1) Anecdotal evidence isn't very valid.
2) That was written in 2011.
So my anecdotal evidence based on newer drives (2012 and 2013 drives)? Zero failures over 5 drives. So I guess that mean by his crazy/hot scale that SSDs are perfectly stable, not at all crazy!
Look, drives fail. All of them, in the long run. It is a question of how often, and how long. I've had plenty of HDDs fail on me in my career in computer support. I don't have stats on SSD vs HDD failure rates, and it would seem neither do you, and neither does that dude. However if you reason for disliking them is you've had a whole one drive and it has failed, well that's a bad reason.
Far too many people on Slashdot need to do some foreign travel, or at least a good glass of perspective and soda. The US is far from perfect on, well, all fronts. In terms of privacy there have been some very disturbing developments lately (though anyone who thinks it is the first time needs to learn history). However that does not automatically mean the US is horrible, the worst country in the world, that other countries have no abuses, or at least none worth mentioning.
Russia has real, real problems in terms of human rights, basic freedoms, government control, and so on. They are sliding towards the bad old days of a soviet like system at an alarming rate. It is far worse than anything happening in the US. Now none of that means what is happening in the US is good, but please stop with the bullshit.
Honestly it is a literally childlike view of things where there is only a binary system of morality: good and bad, and they are always opposed. So if the US does something bad they are bad and that means anyone against the US must be good.
They don't do any in the consumer space, I know of, but they make heavy hitting enterprise SSDs. They don't normally sell them to channels, they sell them to VARs like Dell who use them in their stuff.
Look at Ubuntu: They support standard releases for a year (they've reduced it) and LTS releases for 5 years. That means from the date of initial release. RHEL is 10 years of support for their 5 and 6 releases (7 for 3 and 4) and then you can buy 3 more years of support for extra money.
OS-X is a bit different in that Apple supports two version older than the current one. That in practice means about 3-4 years of support, but is harder to plan since you don't know how fast releases will come, you don't get a defined, guaranteed, cycle.
So... Where's the company that gives a much longer/better support cycle? Because I sure don't see it.