This thread is an excellent example of why metric is, in general, easier. Imperial is so loaded with caveats, non-rounded numbers and region-specific changes that no one can remember what the correct conversions are anymore. And even when people do remember, they're only correct to 1 significant digit (8 pounds vs. 8.33...whatever the actual numbers are) whereas metric conversions are very accurate, I'd be surprised if it was less than 6 significant digits in the 1L = 1kg water at standard conditions conversion.
Well, since they're somewhat chummy with the artists, they could allow the RIAA the rights to copy the music for that purpose.
You seem to have the mistaken impression that the artists own the copyrights. In at least 95% of cases, the artist is required to sign over the copyrights to all their music to the record label. The record labels can distribute whatever they want, whenever they want. They can modify it however they want, including adding copy protection wherever and however they want (something that has many musicians whom they have done this to up in arms).
also cubes are ok, but no more than 2 people per and make them large enough, and with walls high enough to give some sense of privacy.
If I were you, I'd raise my standards. A lot.
That's miles away from acceptable in my books. Private offices are the only way to code. I am speaking from experience here, as my company went from 1- or 2-person private offices with lockable doors, to a big open area with cubicles. Not only did we lose many of our best programmers, but from all I've seen the remaining people are operating at about half as productive as they used to be. They tried to satisfy our demands for private offices by dropping in a few permanent walls to divide up the cubicle farms, alas, it does not appear to have worked very well...
Now that overclocking can be done in the software on most computers, it's accessible to people who don't know better than to kick the speed up 2x... These are the people Intel is afraid of (and rightly so).
A nice theory, but if this were the case, there would be no reason for the stepping B chip to remove the ability to disable the 'feature'. The fact is, Intel would much prefer power users to buy a very-high-margin Xeon or Extreme Edition or whatever new multi-core CPUs they have coming up (all of which they currently avoid, because the hefty cache and other features make them very poor for overclocking). They decidedly do not want them taking the latest bargain-basement equivalent to the Celeron 300A and overclocking the shit out of it.
At worst, a conspicuous bridge that needs to be soldered on the CPU like AMD used to do is more than obscure enough to keep out the people who don't know what the hell they're doing. It should not require trickery from motherboard manufacturers to work around actual electronics on the chip. The last thing I want is to have to my CPU and motherboard and other components engaged in electronic warfare with one another.
I'm really really tired of people trying to protect the 'stupid people'. Let natural selection eat these morons (or at least their money). Please. For the good of the human race.
I've heard this "solution" bandied about often enough. But it's not as easy as it sounds, in a practical sense. Female programmers are unfortunately very few in number compared to the males in the field. From what I hear, there are a much larger number of females graduating into the field now than there were when I graduated only a few years ago and even when I was in school it was much better than it had been before then. Which is good, but it also means, that if the company does happen to come across a female programmer, she is more likely to be relatively inexperienced, and therefore unsuitable for a lead programmer position or anything else where she would get any creative or directional control.
Also, female programmers are, in my purely anecdotal experience, less likely than males to get excited about the prospect of joining a game company, presumably because of the lack of good experiences they have had with games. For many of the gamer guys I know, on the other hand, working at a game company is something of a nirvana, and any job openings are applied to with the appropriate amount of religious fervor.
The only solution I can see is to simply get more female programmers out there. There needs to be some way to attract women to the computer engineering disciplines. Eventually they'll filter down into the gaming companies, and from there into positions of creative control, and then we'll start to see the sort of games that attract girls.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the female approach to games. Hell, I'd probably want to play it. I just think that it's not likely to happen in the near future. I think it's a bigger problem than just "the games aren't made by women". There is something on a very fundamental level of these technical fields that is keeping women out. It probably has something to do with the way women tend to use the computer as a communication and information tool, while men tend to use it as an engineering or entertainment tool.
Anyway, good luck to all the female programmers out there. We need your skills in this industry. The more people that realize it, the better.
People also used to eat with their hands off dirty floors and tables, and thought that bleeding people with leeches to get rid of the bad blood was the best way to cure diseases.
Surely cellphones are entirely responsible for the majority of the quality of life we have these days. They're the panacea of humanity. We couldn't ever live without them.
By your definition, I'm not sure that anything at all can be called a discovery. That would make it a pretty meaningless and useless word, wouldn't it?
If no one has ever seen a meson like this before then -- regardless of whether they've been flying around the universe for billions of years -- I consider it a discovery, because we (humanity) have never noticed it before now. It's new. It's a discovery.
Yes, it is totally unreasonable. I, for one, object to being shuffled into a "smaller cubbyhole", working on a smaller desk area, being more cramped and having less buffer room between the "walls" and other people. Psychological thing, perhaps, but not any less important because of that. Bring back offices with decent space, and most everyone in the company would be quite a bit happier, and work quite a lot harder, like we all used to when we felt the company cared about us.
My employer can replace my two 21" CRTs over my dead body.. er, I mean letter of resignation. They've certainly tried.
Yes. That was sarcasm. Two drives failing in a RAID 5 also means you're dead. Two drives failing in a RAID 1+0 means you have a 33% chance of being dead. I'd put my money on the RAID 1+0, despite the fact that the OP was trying to suggest that it's the most dangerous because it only takes two drive failures to maybe kill it (which is actually only true in a 4-drive RAID 1+0. Add another mirror set, and you have to wait for 3 drives to fail, and even then there's only a 5% chance that all three drives were the 3 mirrors of one stripe).
Yeah, because if two drives fail in a RAID 5 configuration it'll work just fine. And a 2-drive RAID 1 also works fine if two drives fail.
If you're having two drives fail before you can get one replaced you need better hardware or a better failure notification system, or both.
And, speaking from personal experience, and both the theoretical and real-world benchmark tests, I can say quite firmly that the software RAID 1+0 on my dual P3 1GHz fileserver does give a 'spead boost'. Not the theoretical maximum of 4x read 2x write, obviously, but certainly a noticable speed boost.
And finally, you complain about a writing performance hit under RAID 1? Have you ever even used or benchmarked a RAID 5 system? Computing parity information, unelss you have a *very* expensive RAID 5 controller, puts RAID 5 well behind every other type of RAID when it comes to writing speed.
Like seriously man, have you ever even experimented with different RAID setups, or are you just extrapolating these ideas from something you read on the web?
Yeah, and charging money for a release candidate without even offering a free upgrade to the real version when it's ready? How's that for repaying the people who are ostensibly your beta testers.
This sounded interesting, until I saw their pricing practices.
Perhaps, but there's no reason that people like the ACLU can't argue that one should be able to have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street in downtown Baltimore.
Besides, if you think people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, get out your camera, head downtown, and start taking pictures of everyone you see passing by. You will quickly discover that many people do indeed have a very real expectation of privacy, reasonable or otherwise. And if they decide to take you to court over your photograph, they'll win too. Many photographers, even street photographers, use written model releases because of this. Only the brashest will not at least ask your permission after the picture has been taken.
Well, to be fair, there are some special applications which require ultraexpensive, ultrapure metals, alloys like steel included -- chemistry and laboratories come to mind.
But to suggest that anyone would use these sort of things to build the sort of product you'd see on an infomercial proclaiming that it uses super-strong steel is ludicrous. Obviously they're getting the cheapest materials available. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell it to you for that LOW LOW PRICE!
The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk.
From all I've ever heard, the really important part of a DoD wipe doesn't take hours, and more importantly, doesn't come on a floppy disk.
People love to call things by important-sounding terms, but often they're only half-truths. A favourite of mine: "industrial-strength". Are your kitchen knives, perhaps made out of "industrial-grade stainless steel"? Think about how much steel is required for most industrial processes -- does it seem more likely that the big factory will splurge an extra $50/ton for top-grade steel to make their lawnmower blades, or will they see switching to bargain-basement steel as a few million dollars they can easily cut out of their budget?
Who are you talking to? Did you just feel a need to invent a platform for espousing the greatness of NCsoft? I don't see a single person in the 15 comments so far who is even remotely suggesting that NCsoft is the devil, or even really complaining about them.
The only person who said something somewhat negative was suggesting that MMOs are crappy boring levelling treadmills. This person is, for the most part, right. I am tired of MMOs too. Give me another good singleplayer experience like Morrowind, and that's a hundred times better than any miserable collection of powerlevellers and griefers and all the other garbage that non-tightly-knit online communities tend to attract.
If anyone of you out there have been working on this kind of thing for emacs or Eclipse 5 years ago
You seem to be vastly underestimating the likelihood of Emacs having a tool like this. Emacs is an operating system built around a text editor. It has mail clients written in it, games written in it, networking programs written in it, speech programs written in it, and much much more. I hate Emacs personally (yay vim!) but you have to admit, Emacs can do everything and the kitchen sink. I would be mildly surprised if no one had ever coded some sort of automatic todo list for source code in it.
At least the size of the moon, maybe a little bigger.
Yes, I know you're joking. But it would need to be much, much, much, much bigger than the Moon. (it already is bigger, obviously)
It's simply a matter of perspective: Close one eye, hold a quarter up to your other eye to block out your screen. Easy, right? Now try moving it to be halfway between your eye and the monitor. You'd need something about the size of a dinner plate. to cover the same screen.
It's simple. Someone at OSConf in Toronto this year had no trouble taking out the entire WLAN with a laptop broadcasting in Ad-hoc mode on the same channel, same SSID.
First of all, as a realtor it is quite likely that she is doing 360-panorama shots of each room to do a virtual tour. Realtors around here are doing it all the time. This requires a lot of pictures if you want to be able to stitch them together easily.
Secondly, shoot now think later is a valid photography mindset. Especially if you're on a fixed timeframe. A not-100%-perfect snapshot is better than not having had a chance to take a picture at all. With film, this was an expensive mindset but some did it anyway. With digital, there is no reason *not* to do so.
Have you been living in the wonderful world of 20 years ago? CRT monitor burn-in is almost nonexistant for any modern, decent-quality monitor. You would have to try very hard to get a monitor to burn in these days.
Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen. But they only comprise a minority of CRTs, and to lump all CRTs in there as having a burn-in problem is a bit unfair, I think.
Admittedly CRTs don't last as long as they used to, I guess because of the precision they require to accomplish things we take for granted like variable refresh rates, variable resolution, and 0.22 dot pitch. Monochrome 40x25 isn't that hard to do legibly. But they still have a longer useful lifetime than any of the competing display technologies. Which isn't to say they're the best. They're big, HEAVY, power-guzzling monsters, and I'd love to have an OLED display myself.
If I can use OLED displays for my photographic work, rock on. I look forward to it. Until then, I shall put up with my 21" beta-radiation-box. Oh, and as long as I'm making photographer wishes, I hope they give me some cheap white OLEDs for household lights too. All this 3200K tungsten light makes my camera sad.;)
Well, I suspect that simply 'turning them off' may not be as black as you'd expect. Traditional LEDs are actually little metallic bits when they're turned off. Not black at all. Are OLEDs black? I don't know, but I suspect not. Obviously OLEDs have been used in commercial applications and however they are solving this problem the displays are 'black enough' when off. But who knows how this will translate into the harshly demanding world of computer displays?
I guess we'll find out soon enough, but it's something to think about.
I'm impressed, you managed to use this guy's inoffensive and amusing signature to segue into an unrelated environmentalist tirade.
Congratulations, you're a bleeding heart hippie.
P.S. There are only a few places you can economically get coal from. Telling them to stop this sort of mining is impossible as long as people are buying it. On the other hand, coal-fired powerplants are horrific polluters, and there are numerous other ways to generate electricity, which any respectable power company could switch to. Putting pressure on companies that build coal-fired powerplants is a slightly less irrational solution to this problem. Consider it.
Slashdot Mirror
Counterpoint: Aperture grille CRTs (aka Sony Trinitron)
This thread is an excellent example of why metric is, in general, easier. Imperial is so loaded with caveats, non-rounded numbers and region-specific changes that no one can remember what the correct conversions are anymore. And even when people do remember, they're only correct to 1 significant digit (8 pounds vs. 8.33...whatever the actual numbers are) whereas metric conversions are very accurate, I'd be surprised if it was less than 6 significant digits in the 1L = 1kg water at standard conditions conversion.
Well, since they're somewhat chummy with the artists, they could allow the RIAA the rights to copy the music for that purpose.
You seem to have the mistaken impression that the artists own the copyrights. In at least 95% of cases, the artist is required to sign over the copyrights to all their music to the record label. The record labels can distribute whatever they want, whenever they want. They can modify it however they want, including adding copy protection wherever and however they want (something that has many musicians whom they have done this to up in arms).
also cubes are ok, but no more than 2 people per and make them large enough, and with walls high enough to give some sense of privacy.
If I were you, I'd raise my standards. A lot.
That's miles away from acceptable in my books. Private offices are the only way to code. I am speaking from experience here, as my company went from 1- or 2-person private offices with lockable doors, to a big open area with cubicles. Not only did we lose many of our best programmers, but from all I've seen the remaining people are operating at about half as productive as they used to be. They tried to satisfy our demands for private offices by dropping in a few permanent walls to divide up the cubicle farms, alas, it does not appear to have worked very well...
Now that overclocking can be done in the software on most computers, it's accessible to people who don't know better than to kick the speed up 2x ... These are the people Intel is afraid of (and rightly so).
A nice theory, but if this were the case, there would be no reason for the stepping B chip to remove the ability to disable the 'feature'. The fact is, Intel would much prefer power users to buy a very-high-margin Xeon or Extreme Edition or whatever new multi-core CPUs they have coming up (all of which they currently avoid, because the hefty cache and other features make them very poor for overclocking). They decidedly do not want them taking the latest bargain-basement equivalent to the Celeron 300A and overclocking the shit out of it.
At worst, a conspicuous bridge that needs to be soldered on the CPU like AMD used to do is more than obscure enough to keep out the people who don't know what the hell they're doing. It should not require trickery from motherboard manufacturers to work around actual electronics on the chip. The last thing I want is to have to my CPU and motherboard and other components engaged in electronic warfare with one another.
I'm really really tired of people trying to protect the 'stupid people'. Let natural selection eat these morons (or at least their money). Please. For the good of the human race.
I've heard this "solution" bandied about often enough. But it's not as easy as it sounds, in a practical sense. Female programmers are unfortunately very few in number compared to the males in the field. From what I hear, there are a much larger number of females graduating into the field now than there were when I graduated only a few years ago and even when I was in school it was much better than it had been before then. Which is good, but it also means, that if the company does happen to come across a female programmer, she is more likely to be relatively inexperienced, and therefore unsuitable for a lead programmer position or anything else where she would get any creative or directional control.
Also, female programmers are, in my purely anecdotal experience, less likely than males to get excited about the prospect of joining a game company, presumably because of the lack of good experiences they have had with games. For many of the gamer guys I know, on the other hand, working at a game company is something of a nirvana, and any job openings are applied to with the appropriate amount of religious fervor.
The only solution I can see is to simply get more female programmers out there. There needs to be some way to attract women to the computer engineering disciplines. Eventually they'll filter down into the gaming companies, and from there into positions of creative control, and then we'll start to see the sort of games that attract girls.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the female approach to games. Hell, I'd probably want to play it. I just think that it's not likely to happen in the near future. I think it's a bigger problem than just "the games aren't made by women". There is something on a very fundamental level of these technical fields that is keeping women out. It probably has something to do with the way women tend to use the computer as a communication and information tool, while men tend to use it as an engineering or entertainment tool.
Anyway, good luck to all the female programmers out there. We need your skills in this industry. The more people that realize it, the better.
You mean, in the 15 minutes (generous estimate) that it takes from boot to completing and installing the necessary windows updates.
Smells like it's-happened-to-me.
People also used to eat with their hands off dirty floors and tables, and thought that bleeding people with leeches to get rid of the bad blood was the best way to cure diseases.
Surely cellphones are entirely responsible for the majority of the quality of life we have these days. They're the panacea of humanity. We couldn't ever live without them.
By your definition, I'm not sure that anything at all can be called a discovery. That would make it a pretty meaningless and useless word, wouldn't it?
If no one has ever seen a meson like this before then -- regardless of whether they've been flying around the universe for billions of years -- I consider it a discovery, because we (humanity) have never noticed it before now. It's new. It's a discovery.
Yes, it is totally unreasonable. I, for one, object to being shuffled into a "smaller cubbyhole", working on a smaller desk area, being more cramped and having less buffer room between the "walls" and other people. Psychological thing, perhaps, but not any less important because of that. Bring back offices with decent space, and most everyone in the company would be quite a bit happier, and work quite a lot harder, like we all used to when we felt the company cared about us.
My employer can replace my two 21" CRTs over my dead body.. er, I mean letter of resignation. They've certainly tried.
Yes. That was sarcasm. Two drives failing in a RAID 5 also means you're dead. Two drives failing in a RAID 1+0 means you have a 33% chance of being dead. I'd put my money on the RAID 1+0, despite the fact that the OP was trying to suggest that it's the most dangerous because it only takes two drive failures to maybe kill it (which is actually only true in a 4-drive RAID 1+0. Add another mirror set, and you have to wait for 3 drives to fail, and even then there's only a 5% chance that all three drives were the 3 mirrors of one stripe).
Yeah, because if two drives fail in a RAID 5 configuration it'll work just fine. And a 2-drive RAID 1 also works fine if two drives fail.
If you're having two drives fail before you can get one replaced you need better hardware or a better failure notification system, or both.
And, speaking from personal experience, and both the theoretical and real-world benchmark tests, I can say quite firmly that the software RAID 1+0 on my dual P3 1GHz fileserver does give a 'spead boost'. Not the theoretical maximum of 4x read 2x write, obviously, but certainly a noticable speed boost.
And finally, you complain about a writing performance hit under RAID 1? Have you ever even used or benchmarked a RAID 5 system? Computing parity information, unelss you have a *very* expensive RAID 5 controller, puts RAID 5 well behind every other type of RAID when it comes to writing speed.
Like seriously man, have you ever even experimented with different RAID setups, or are you just extrapolating these ideas from something you read on the web?
Yeah, and charging money for a release candidate without even offering a free upgrade to the real version when it's ready? How's that for repaying the people who are ostensibly your beta testers.
This sounded interesting, until I saw their pricing practices.
Perhaps, but there's no reason that people like the ACLU can't argue that one should be able to have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street in downtown Baltimore.
Besides, if you think people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, get out your camera, head downtown, and start taking pictures of everyone you see passing by. You will quickly discover that many people do indeed have a very real expectation of privacy, reasonable or otherwise. And if they decide to take you to court over your photograph, they'll win too. Many photographers, even street photographers, use written model releases because of this. Only the brashest will not at least ask your permission after the picture has been taken.
Well, to be fair, there are some special applications which require ultraexpensive, ultrapure metals, alloys like steel included -- chemistry and laboratories come to mind.
But to suggest that anyone would use these sort of things to build the sort of product you'd see on an infomercial proclaiming that it uses super-strong steel is ludicrous. Obviously they're getting the cheapest materials available. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell it to you for that LOW LOW PRICE!
The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk.
From all I've ever heard, the really important part of a DoD wipe doesn't take hours, and more importantly, doesn't come on a floppy disk.
People love to call things by important-sounding terms, but often they're only half-truths. A favourite of mine: "industrial-strength". Are your kitchen knives, perhaps made out of "industrial-grade stainless steel"? Think about how much steel is required for most industrial processes -- does it seem more likely that the big factory will splurge an extra $50/ton for top-grade steel to make their lawnmower blades, or will they see switching to bargain-basement steel as a few million dollars they can easily cut out of their budget?
Ahh, marketing-speak, how we love ye.
Who are you talking to? Did you just feel a need to invent a platform for espousing the greatness of NCsoft? I don't see a single person in the 15 comments so far who is even remotely suggesting that NCsoft is the devil, or even really complaining about them.
The only person who said something somewhat negative was suggesting that MMOs are crappy boring levelling treadmills. This person is, for the most part, right. I am tired of MMOs too. Give me another good singleplayer experience like Morrowind, and that's a hundred times better than any miserable collection of powerlevellers and griefers and all the other garbage that non-tightly-knit online communities tend to attract.
If anyone of you out there have been working on this kind of thing for emacs or Eclipse 5 years ago
You seem to be vastly underestimating the likelihood of Emacs having a tool like this. Emacs is an operating system built around a text editor. It has mail clients written in it, games written in it, networking programs written in it, speech programs written in it, and much much more. I hate Emacs personally (yay vim!) but you have to admit, Emacs can do everything and the kitchen sink. I would be mildly surprised if no one had ever coded some sort of automatic todo list for source code in it.
At least the size of the moon, maybe a little bigger.
Yes, I know you're joking. But it would need to be much, much, much, much bigger than the Moon. (it already is bigger, obviously)
It's simply a matter of perspective: Close one eye, hold a quarter up to your other eye to block out your screen. Easy, right? Now try moving it to be halfway between your eye and the monitor. You'd need something about the size of a dinner plate. to cover the same screen.
It's simple. Someone at OSConf in Toronto this year had no trouble taking out the entire WLAN with a laptop broadcasting in Ad-hoc mode on the same channel, same SSID.
Idiot. *mutter*
First of all, as a realtor it is quite likely that she is doing 360-panorama shots of each room to do a virtual tour. Realtors around here are doing it all the time. This requires a lot of pictures if you want to be able to stitch them together easily.
Secondly, shoot now think later is a valid photography mindset. Especially if you're on a fixed timeframe. A not-100%-perfect snapshot is better than not having had a chance to take a picture at all. With film, this was an expensive mindset but some did it anyway. With digital, there is no reason *not* to do so.
Because Paintball hurts? Because you can't play it for 8 hours without being utterly exhausted?
Because the weather might suck if you're biking or running outside, or maybe the sun is too hot for you?
I'm not saying these are all good reasons. But there are reasons, and people do have reasons like those and other reasons too I'm sure.
screen burn issue that plagues CRT
;)
Have you been living in the wonderful world of 20 years ago? CRT monitor burn-in is almost nonexistant for any modern, decent-quality monitor. You would have to try very hard to get a monitor to burn in these days.
Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen. But they only comprise a minority of CRTs, and to lump all CRTs in there as having a burn-in problem is a bit unfair, I think.
Admittedly CRTs don't last as long as they used to, I guess because of the precision they require to accomplish things we take for granted like variable refresh rates, variable resolution, and 0.22 dot pitch. Monochrome 40x25 isn't that hard to do legibly. But they still have a longer useful lifetime than any of the competing display technologies. Which isn't to say they're the best. They're big, HEAVY, power-guzzling monsters, and I'd love to have an OLED display myself.
If I can use OLED displays for my photographic work, rock on. I look forward to it. Until then, I shall put up with my 21" beta-radiation-box. Oh, and as long as I'm making photographer wishes, I hope they give me some cheap white OLEDs for household lights too. All this 3200K tungsten light makes my camera sad.
Well, I suspect that simply 'turning them off' may not be as black as you'd expect. Traditional LEDs are actually little metallic bits when they're turned off. Not black at all. Are OLEDs black? I don't know, but I suspect not. Obviously OLEDs have been used in commercial applications and however they are solving this problem the displays are 'black enough' when off. But who knows how this will translate into the harshly demanding world of computer displays?
I guess we'll find out soon enough, but it's something to think about.
I'm impressed, you managed to use this guy's inoffensive and amusing signature to segue into an unrelated environmentalist tirade.
Congratulations, you're a bleeding heart hippie.
P.S. There are only a few places you can economically get coal from. Telling them to stop this sort of mining is impossible as long as people are buying it. On the other hand, coal-fired powerplants are horrific polluters, and there are numerous other ways to generate electricity, which any respectable power company could switch to. Putting pressure on companies that build coal-fired powerplants is a slightly less irrational solution to this problem. Consider it.