Are you implying that the republicans are better than the democrats at balancing the national budget? Because to my knowledge the last time the national budget was balanced was under the Democrats, and the republicans under Bush and co. just added more and more to the national debt with their expensive and never ending wars in the middle east.
Not at all. Reagan was the first US president to borrow insane amount of money and then squander them on tax discounts for the very rich, and Bush junior took this to new levels, even though the economy at times had high activity. If Obama can even ease the rate of which the US borrows money and make the US public aware that this is a serious issue, he will have done a fine job.
It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again. We are draining Earth resources and should try to expand to space. If it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't ever have visited or learned so much more about Earth. This way we never get intergalactic flights nor can live on other planets.
The basis for a good space programme with adequate long term funding is a good economy. The US have been borrowing like there is no tomorrow and is heading directly into the economic abyss of despair if the US government doesn't change direction from the economic policies of the past. It makes sense to cut NASA's budget now to afford a decent space programme in the future. Not cutting NASA's budget now will make its budget much worse in the future.
This is, of course, wrong. Such local installations are normally done with "sudo", which does not require root passwords.
kpackagekit is for those who doesn't install software from the command prompt but prefer a "click-and-drool" interface, so 'sudo' isn't an option. Besides that, 'sudo' has a very coarse security model, you can either install all kinds of software with 'sudo yum/apt/rpm etc' or nothing at all. kpackagekit allows for a much finer and more secure model, like only allowing the user to install signed packages from approved repos when logged in from a local console which can be a good security compromise for some user cases.
Oh no! They've put the WordPerfect 5.0 interface on a mouse!
A lot of people seem to forget that WP 5.x was fully menu and mouse-driven. The many keyboard shortcuts where for those who wanted to work fast without the slow downs of reaching out for the mouse. WP 5.x was faster and much more ergonomically sound too than modern word processors in that respect.
WP would never need a 18 button mouse, in fact it was fully functional without a mouse at all.
I still miss my WordPerfect 5.1 and the "reveal code" (Alt-F3) function.
I don't think the issue is that computers are much better than card catalogs, that fact is just given. The issue here is that once common knowledge are forgotten, so that when the OP used an old catalog system that baffled him, he thought that organizing journals by printing city was an error. But that system is centuries old and so common that even today scholary sources often includes the books printing city even though it doesn't make sense nowadays. Within a generation this more than 500 year old system seemed to have been forgotten. I don't yearn for when card catalogs ruled, I find them extremely limited compared to quering a DB, but I do think that some knowledge of historical ways of organizing books should be taught students at the Universities library courses.
Well, organizing books by listing them in which city they are from (printed) is among the oldest way of cataloging printed books. The practice goes back to Gutenberg and the so called "incunabula" period where book dealers/printers/publishers (often the same persons) would make book catalogs out a certain city. So if you needed a certain edition of a title, you would have to track it by such book catalogs, since the Leipzig edition would be different from the Mainz edition.
It is of course sad that once such common knowledge among scholars now seems forgotten, probably not a hindrance when working with modern sources, but still necessary to know when working with old stuff, just like knowing that words/names starting with J were filed under I etc. Many academics still puts the printing city in their sources, though many seems to have forgotten why they do so.
You just happened to stumble into a book/journal catalog organized by a centuries old and previously very well known method. The error wasn't in the card catalog or the way it was organized, but in that no one ever told you about these ancient methods in your library course.
I always found humor in literature overrated. A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Humor in literature is in fact vastly underrated because a lot of insecure people have the primitive feeling that if it is fun, then it can only be inferior art. Humorous books aren't wall-to-wall jokes, but often subtle literary works employing a wide array of literary devices to convey the authors intentions. Joseph Heller's "Catch 22", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", Franz Kafka's "The Castle", Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are all humorous works of the highest literary grade. Try a funny book someday, you may like it.
The handset is called "Odin 99". Odin, or Wotan, also happens to be a Norse warrior god that Germanic tribes worshipped by hanging people in trees and impale them by spears: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin
Did 3D acceleration even exist when Vesa Local Bus slots was all the rage? For good DOS acceleration one would get a card with a et4000 chip from Tseng Labs, or later a Cirrus Logic chips, but it was still 2D aceleration. WordPerfect 5.x (perhaps even the 4.X) even had build in support for et4000 acceleration: Wicked fast scrolling on the screen before printing the document on the extremely slow tractor-fed dot-matrix printer.
I also remember getting an AMD 486DX2 80MHz, because the VLB followed the bus-clock, so 40 MHz was gave a nice speed boost compared to the Intel standard 33MHz bus-clock.
Now a days my main demand to my 3D card is that it is fanless so my pc stays quiet, and I haven't even bothered to overclock my latest CPU even though my bios provides effortless and safe overclocking. Am I getting old:-( or is just because that present day hardware is fast enough for all my needs?:-)
i think anyone who catches the milder form now will have resistance come wintertime
Well, soldiers who had the Spanish Flu (the Grippe) in its non lethal form in 1917 and 1918 did have a higher survival rate than people who hadn't had the flu before, but the mortality rate was quite high anyway as I understand it. So a previous infection doesn't necessarily give immunity.
The flu kills thousands of people every year. Why does this one have a special name?.
Flu usually kills the very old and the very young. From what I have read, this one is different; it kills young and healthy persons, a segment that rarely dies from normal flu. The so called Spanish Flu (or Grippe) from around the first world war had a very similar fatality pattern. Since that pandemic attack killed at least 50 million people around the world it is clear that this new flu must be taken very, very seriously. There doesn't seem to be that much hard evidence around regarding the symptoms though; does it attack the lungs in the same way as the Grippe? It appears that the Grippe turned peoples own immune system against themselves which is why young healthy persons with good immune systems died in such large numbers and often so violently fast.
From what little info I have seen it appears that this swine Flu attack and kills some young and healthy persons, while other victims have very mild symptoms; that is the exact same pattern as the first major wave of the Grippe. According to some researchers this attack pattern caused the Grippe virus strain to be refined to the extremely deadly strain it was when it attacked again. Some victims died within an hour of having the first symptoms, and people would literally drop dead without warning while walking in the streets, pupils in classrooms would suddenly fall over their desk dead.
The money the city put up to finance the fiber is an investment, not a subsidy, so Stokab earns a profit for the city when it leases the dark fiber. According to their 2007 yearly report, Stokab had a rentability of 9.6% of the total investment. So the taxpayers of Stockholm doesn't subsidy the network as such; they did put up the money, but they earn interest on them. Besides that, cheap and fast fiber internet has created a lot of jobs for the city over the years (=more money).
Notice that Stokab isn't a ISP; they only lease dark fiber (point-to-point, ring or start topologies) to companies or ISP's who supply their own equipment to light up the fiber.
If a huge truck hits you from behind, you'll die. If you run out of gas on rail road tracks in front of a train, you will die. If you're going too fast in mountain passes and dive off a cliff, you will die.
Don't focus on problems, but on solutions if you want to change something. Modern day ejector-seats as found in military aircrafts could in some modified form save the driver and passengers in all three scenarios. Yes, such solutions would be difficult to implement in a cheap way within 11 years, but OTOH, 11 years ago I was explaining people about this Internet thing where one could send electronic mail across the globe, but only pay for a local telephone call to an ISP.
41.000 people where killed in the US in 2007 and a staggering 2.491.000 were injured. So the problem is clearly worth looking into for both engineers and politicians.
As I see it, the problem isn't that examination standards are falling, but that they encourage the education system to "teach to pass tests" not "teach to learn the the students critical thinking. From the article: "Science examination standards at UK schools have eroded so severely that the testing of problem-solving, critical thinking and the application of mathematics has almost disappeared." If it was only the examinations that had become easier, then the problem wouldn't have been so serious. The problem is the combination of lower examination standards/and/ that the teaching standards are lowered from "learning critical thinking" to "rote memory learning designed to pass tests".
Where I live the Linux versions of the eeepc 901 are impossible to get, Asus simply refuses to release them. They give no reasons, but it is well known that MS have been very active in negotiating with vendors like Asus in trying to curb Linux version sales. It is interesting to note in this regard how MS has backed down on their "maximum 80GB hdd" for using MS-XP, since Asus are selling 120GB XP version of their eeepc's.
Anyway, I find it impressive that Linux sales amounts to a whopping 30% of the eeepc's.
I hate Government oppression as anyone but I've got to call you out here. I think the Olympic Committee was hoping that the Chinese government would clean up it's act for it's people as a direct result of planning The Games.
Oh, so you really believe that the IOC choose China as host nation? Pretty naive considering the amount of corruption that usually decides it (google IOC and corruption). Anyway taken on face value it is very interesting that IOC choosed a host nation based on _political_ reasons, not neutral sports reasons.
In some respects this is true, there has been great infrastructure and environmental improvements in China recently. In terms of infrastructure, you might like to consult this interesting article, PART 1, PART 2 comparing the difference between credit crunch enlaboured American cities and shining new developments in China.
I don't care about Chinese propaganda, anyway, even if China improved their infrastructure because of the Olympics, what has that got to do with it being an extreme dictatorship. The Autobahn in Germany can't excuse the Nazi dictatorship.
In terms of environmetal issues, Greenpeace have applauded many of the Chinese Governemnt's efforts. Efforts include a focus on reducing emmisions and river pollution, switching to renewable energy sources such as hydro and geo-thermal, expanding public transportation and air quality improvements. In America, the government is actively trying to prevent any improvements relating to global warming.
Bejing is so horribly polluted that it is beyond belief, even when stopping half the private car traffic and closing down some factories visibility can still get as low as one km. because of smog. In fact the ruling classes in China doesn't give a toss about pollution. Yeah, they might do some propaganda projects and they may talk about doing something, but everyday reality is that China is an ecological disaster and that environmentalist are seen as state enemies and persecuted and jailed. Greenpeace may applaud some Chinese initiatives but Greenpeace themself could never be allowed to work inside China. Unions are also strictly forbidden so that workers can't get organized and combat slave wages an deadly dangerous working enviroments.
In terms of censorship, also recall that employees at the American Environment Protection Authority have been prevented from talking to journalists. How's that for "extreme censorship"? Also, don't forget about warrentless wire tapping and the subsequent bill to protect the government and telcos from any repercussions.
Don't give me that crap. Yes there are incidents in the western world but they are exceptions, not the norm like in China. Your examples are also telling; Warrantless wiretapping can be politically discussed in the west, not so in China. As an US citizen you can openly criticise the US president and even replace him by a free election if you disagree with his actions. That is impossible in China. China is a ruthless dictatorship with an unknown amount of political prisoners, secret executions, torture, censorship and corruption. The Chinese cleptocrazy (ruling classes with the purpose of stealing from the majority) are exploiting the Chinese population to enrichen themselves.
Remember that testing for doping is overseen by the Olympic Committee, not the Chinese government. You should also be aware that America is involved with doping too and stripped of medals.
I can see you don't know a lot about doping, as I cycling fan I unfortunately do. So let me tell you that you are wrong; IOC only deals with doping control during the Olympics. But only the stupid get caught that way. "out-of-competition" controls the rest of the year is the important part since that is when the athletes dope, and that is performed by local federate organizations. Or in Chinas case, isn't. No I am not aware that America (if you by America means the US Government) is involved in organized doping, there isn't even any rum
You're right, but not the way you think. Modern science was started by the Catholic church. The dark ages were brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire. Had it not been for the church we might well still be in the dark ages.
(I think it is a shame you got a "Flamebait" moderation, even though I disagree with you)
While the Christian universal church did keep both reading and writing alive, I don't think it could be credited for the creation of modern science. And don't forget that among the first thing the newly Christianized Roman Empire did was to outright forbid any non-christian education, so all universities were closed.
IMHO the major reason why the Christian church didn't outright ban all heathen books was because of the lesson learned by Julian the Apostate the last pagan emperor who actually forbade Christians to read/use pagan text in their education. The results were predictable; the Christians then got a third rate education, severely lacking any effective teaching in rhetoric, law, etc. The church didn't seem to forget that lesson so despite many attempts by pious people to ban heathen books the church resisted. The church however was very selective in what they found interesting to keep, so very few Greek scientific works survived because of the Church. IMHO, the church's positive influence in western civilization are more to be found in its energetic work to tame the extremely violent warrior aristocracy that ruled the western Europe.
I think it is a scandal that China ever came to host the Olympics. From extreme censorship to massive doping and outright cheating; the Chinese proudly admitted how they told certain Chinese players to loose games so a more "correct" player could be chosen. Chinese doping is as organized as in the former East Germany and there is absolutely zero interest in combatting doping in China since the Olympic games are being used politically to show how superior the Chinese dictatorship is; doping means medals and medals means political strength. If this is the norm for what IOC finds acceptable then IOC better change or face sanctions themselves. Democratic countries should seriously reconsider if they should continue to support sporting events that glorify dictatorships.
Fedora by design isn't a *real* distro. It is a testing ground for RHEL. Now, Fedora is usable, and nice and all. But Ubuntu is a *real* distro, you don't have to pay for the "full" version. With Ubuntu, you get Debian cleaned up. With Fedora you get all the bits and pieces that make up RHEL in a developer-oriented way.
You just like Debian is the testing ground for Ubuntu? It would in fact be much more precise to describe Fedora as a testing ground for Ubuntu too, since the technology pioneered there drips back into Ubuntu. Ubuntu is probably a nice distro, but it is not known for its technological contributions to Linux, unlike e.g. Red Hat or Novell who pays a lot of software engineers to improve or develop core Linux software, that e.g. distroes like Ubuntu can use.
Intel needs to give people a real distro, not a "trial" version of RHEL.
There you go again. Fedora is a real distro and a fine one too, a good mixture of the most modern software and maturity. Please state what kind of software Fedora lacks to become a "real" distro.
I have using Linux for many years, and one thing I don't get about distro fan-boys like you is why you need to bad-mouth other distros than you favorite-distro-of-the-month, especially when you are unable to back it up with technical arguments.
And by the way, RPM (at least the "true" RPM versions) seem to be outdated and DEB in most ways is superior. (Note: Not trying to start a flame war, but merely stating facts)
That are some really impressive technical arguments you gave there - not! I wonder if you actually know what DEB or RPM is? Please give an actual example why rpm is outdated to dpkg? Well, you can't. Try to read 'man rpm' one day to get a overview of what you are talking about.
1. We are talking past each others. I talk about what can be done to improve SSD lifetimes, you talk about what happens if one doesn't implement those things.
2. First my main point that you still seem to have misunderstood is, that 10K or 100K or whatever the rating is, isn't the maximum number of writes. A block doesn't die at writes number 10.001 or 100.001. The number is a guaranteed statistical _minimum_, not a average or a maximum. The source I gave put the typical number of writes a SLC SSD block could sustain to between 200K and 1M writes. My 500K was only arbitrary in the sense it was a somewhat average between these to numbers, but it is still much more precise than quoting the 100K minimum as a maximum as you do.
Regarding that MLC SSD are much more common than than SLC, then it depends. My perspective was what notebook manufacturers actually used in their products. To my knowledge the main OS SSD on all the SSD based notebooks I know of has been SLC. Perhaps the new Asus EEE PC 16G is only based on MLC SSD's, no hard data yet, so the alleged cheapness and slowness compared to the original Samsung/Hynix SSD may be caused by other things. So at least regarding notebooks SLC's are still much more popular than MLC's. I am sure that MLC SSD's will be more popular in the future but by then they will also have extended their actual lifespan expendency with much more than a maximum of 5K per block as you quote.
Regarding spare blocks; they need to be spare so that the OS/FS doesn't panic if a block is lost when the SSD is 100% full.
We probably can't agree about much regarding SSD's, but it really is a complicated matter since there is so many factors at play. Personally I would have no problems using a SLC SSD as my HDD in the mini-notebook I intend to buy. I do think that they are superior as a notebook storage option.
No, this statement will not be put to bed, because it is based on facts - measured physical quantities. And here's one thing to ponder: if an application writes to the disk 100 times per second, how much will your 4GB SSD going to last? If you have only 1GB of space left, then wear leveling can only count on the blocks that don't contain data. And if the blocksize for the Flash RAM device is 128KB (which is typical, but there are also 256KB Flash RAMs), then the number of blocks you can spread out the writes is 8192. If the SSD is based on MLC Flash (as is, sadly, becoming typical) then you can write up to 10.000 times per block. Assuming perfect wear leveling, the device will last less than 819200 seconds which is 9 days and a few hours.
You fail to consider several things: 1. Static wear levelling/leveling rotate the blocks being written to so both "empty" and "full" blocks are being used, so the amount of free space on the filesystem doesn't matter. 2. The 100.000 writes often quoted are a guaranteed statistical _minimum_, not a average or a maximum. According to some sources the typical cell will endure 200K-1M writes. http://www.solidkor.com/en/technology/414we.html 3. A typical SSD has spare blocks (just as HDD have spare blocks). So when a block is toast it is just marked as "bad" and a spare block is used instead. 4. Let us not forget ECC schemes that may extend the life of a block significantly.
All this adds up to a considerable lifespan for SSD's. Let's for arguments sake say that that a SSD has 1 megabyte of spare blocks per 1 gigabyte storage. So if one were to read continuously to one 128 kilobyte block it would take: (500k writes=assumed lifespan of a block)*(8 the number of spare blocks)=4M writes, and still not a single block lost in the sense that the filesystem/OS still sees 1 gigabyte of storage.
Fritz Lang was Catholic, though he had some Jewish blood. Hitler claimed that Jewish ancestry was the same as being a Jew, but he wasn't beyond making exceptions for people that were useful to him. If Lang had agreed to make propaganda films, it's likely his ancestry would've been overlooked.
First of all, I really do think that the OP is wrong about Hitler liking Metropolis. It is so out of character for Hitler, and it is likely that the OP confuses Hitler with Goebbels. While the Goebbels story is probably untrue, it is not completely out of character that a more intellectual nazi like Goebbels could appreciate Metropolis. A little googling seems to confirm my suspicion. The only Hitler-Lang connection I can find is the allegation that Hitler liked Langs filmatization of the "Die Niebelungen" which I find much more plausible.
Regarding whether Langs Jewish ancestry would have hindered a career as a loyal propagandafilm maker for the regime, I really do think the answer is yes. I know the regime tolerated some "mischlinge" like E. Milch from the Luftwaffe, but they where few. It is also known that Hitler had lists compiled of these mischlinge so they could be dealt with after the war was over- (See B.M. Rigg).
No. MS bought 25% non-voting shares a few years ago for $135M dollars. Then they sold the shares to a venture capital company (Vector -- Paul Allen is one of the investors) for $13M (i.e. less than 10% of the original cost). The shares had a veto on acquisitions. Corel was in the process of trying to make several acquisitions when Vector threatened to squelch all the deals unless the board recommended a Vector buyout. Vector ended up buying out the company for about $110M IIRC. However the company had about $65M in cash at the time, so the overall cost was $45M plus their initial $13M -- grand total of $58M. A little while ago, Vector did an IPO of 25% of the stock and got about $60M IIRC
So instead of being 25% directly owned of MS, WordPerfect is now owned 100% of a MS controlled socket puppet firm. That greedy MS sells anything below marketvalue just shows their "friendly" affiliation.
M$ doesn't play stupid games to stop things from being ported. They play ridiculously Machiavelian games to make huge sums of cash for themselves and their friends.
Yes they do. The Stacker-case, and how MS behaved with Quarterdeck QEMM and DESQview just shows how mean spirited MS where. Don't forget the SCO case, it is obvious that there are several leads back directly to MS. IMHO MS isn't just a greedy company they also have streaks of psychopathic behavior (cough*Gates*Ballmer*cough).
P.S. I lost my job at Corel when my department was dissolved following the Vector takeover;-)
Sorry to hear, hope it turned out good in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you implying that the republicans are better than the democrats at balancing the national budget? Because to my knowledge the last time the national budget was balanced was under the Democrats, and the republicans under Bush and co. just added more and more to the national debt with their expensive and never ending wars in the middle east.
Not at all. Reagan was the first US president to borrow insane amount of money and then squander them on tax discounts for the very rich, and Bush junior took this to new levels, even though the economy at times had high activity. If Obama can even ease the rate of which the US borrows money and make the US public aware that this is a serious issue, he will have done a fine job.
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It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again. We are draining Earth resources and should try to expand to space. If it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't ever have visited or learned so much more about Earth. This way we never get intergalactic flights nor can live on other planets.
The basis for a good space programme with adequate long term funding is a good economy. The US have been borrowing like there is no tomorrow and is heading directly into the economic abyss of despair if the US government doesn't change direction from the economic policies of the past. It makes sense to cut NASA's budget now to afford a decent space programme in the future. Not cutting NASA's budget now will make its budget much worse in the future.
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This is, of course, wrong. Such local installations are normally done with "sudo", which does not require root passwords.
kpackagekit is for those who doesn't install software from the command prompt but prefer a "click-and-drool" interface, so 'sudo' isn't an option.
Besides that, 'sudo' has a very coarse security model, you can either install all kinds of software with 'sudo yum/apt/rpm etc' or nothing at all. kpackagekit allows for a much finer and more secure model, like only allowing the user to install signed packages from approved repos when logged in from a local console which can be a good security compromise for some user cases.
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Duh!
I forgot to close the italics bracket: The first line is a quote, the rest is my comment.
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Oh no! They've put the WordPerfect 5.0 interface on a mouse!
A lot of people seem to forget that WP 5.x was fully menu and mouse-driven. The many keyboard shortcuts where for those who wanted to work fast without the slow downs of reaching out for the mouse. WP 5.x was faster and much more ergonomically sound too than modern word processors in that respect.
WP would never need a 18 button mouse, in fact it was fully functional without a mouse at all.
I still miss my WordPerfect 5.1 and the "reveal code" (Alt-F3) function.
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I don't think the issue is that computers are much better than card catalogs, that fact is just given. The issue here is that once common knowledge are forgotten, so that when the OP used an old catalog system that baffled him, he thought that organizing journals by printing city was an error. But that system is centuries old and so common that even today scholary sources often includes the books printing city even though it doesn't make sense nowadays. Within a generation this more than 500 year old system seemed to have been forgotten. I don't yearn for when card catalogs ruled, I find them extremely limited compared to quering a DB, but I do think that some knowledge of historical ways of organizing books should be taught students at the Universities library courses.
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Well, organizing books by listing them in which city they are from (printed) is among the oldest way of cataloging printed books. The practice goes back to Gutenberg and the so called "incunabula" period where book dealers/printers/publishers (often the same persons) would make book catalogs out a certain city. So if you needed a certain edition of a title, you would have to track it by such book catalogs, since the Leipzig edition would be different from the Mainz edition.
It is of course sad that once such common knowledge among scholars now seems forgotten, probably not a hindrance when working with modern sources, but still necessary to know when working with old stuff, just like knowing that words/names starting with J were filed under I etc.
Many academics still puts the printing city in their sources, though many seems to have forgotten why they do so.
You just happened to stumble into a book /journal catalog organized by a centuries old and previously very well known method. The error wasn't in the card catalog or the way it was organized, but in that no one ever told you about these ancient methods in your library course.
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I always found humor in literature overrated. A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Humor in literature is in fact vastly underrated because a lot of insecure people have the primitive feeling that if it is fun, then it can only be inferior art. Humorous books aren't wall-to-wall jokes, but often subtle literary works employing a wide array of literary devices to convey the authors intentions. Joseph Heller's "Catch 22", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", Franz Kafka's "The Castle", Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are all humorous works of the highest literary grade.
Try a funny book someday, you may like it.
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Clever analogy :-)
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The handset is called "Odin 99". Odin, or Wotan, also happens to be a Norse warrior god that Germanic tribes worshipped by hanging people in trees and impale them by spears:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin
Coincidence?
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Did 3D acceleration even exist when Vesa Local Bus slots was all the rage? For good DOS acceleration one would get a card with a et4000 chip from Tseng Labs, or later a Cirrus Logic chips, but it was still 2D aceleration. WordPerfect 5.x (perhaps even the 4.X) even had build in support for et4000 acceleration: Wicked fast scrolling on the screen before printing the document on the extremely slow tractor-fed dot-matrix printer.
I also remember getting an AMD 486DX2 80MHz, because the VLB followed the bus-clock, so 40 MHz was gave a nice speed boost compared to the Intel standard 33MHz bus-clock.
Now a days my main demand to my 3D card is that it is fanless so my pc stays quiet, and I haven't even bothered to overclock my latest CPU even though my bios provides effortless and safe overclocking. Am I getting old :-( or is just because that present day hardware is fast enough for all my needs? :-)
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i think anyone who catches the milder form now will have resistance come wintertime
Well, soldiers who had the Spanish Flu (the Grippe) in its non lethal form in 1917 and 1918 did have a higher survival rate than people who hadn't had the flu before, but the mortality rate was quite high anyway as I understand it. So a previous infection doesn't necessarily give immunity.
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The flu kills thousands of people every year. Why does this one have a special name?.
Flu usually kills the very old and the very young. From what I have read, this one is different; it kills young and healthy persons, a segment that rarely dies from normal flu. The so called Spanish Flu (or Grippe) from around the first world war had a very similar fatality pattern. Since that pandemic attack killed at least 50 million people around the world it is clear that this new flu must be taken very, very seriously. There doesn't seem to be that much hard evidence around regarding the symptoms though; does it attack the lungs in the same way as the Grippe? It appears that the Grippe turned peoples own immune system against themselves which is why young healthy persons with good immune systems died in such large numbers and often so violently fast.
From what little info I have seen it appears that this swine Flu attack and kills some young and healthy persons, while other victims have very mild symptoms; that is the exact same pattern as the first major wave of the Grippe. According to some researchers this attack pattern caused the Grippe virus strain to be refined to the extremely deadly strain it was when it attacked again. Some victims died within an hour of having the first symptoms, and people would literally drop dead without warning while walking in the streets, pupils in classrooms would suddenly fall over their desk dead.
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Stokab that runs the dark fiber network in Stockholm is a regular company owned by the City of Stockholm. http://www.stokab.se/templates/StandardPage.aspx?id=306/
The money the city put up to finance the fiber is an investment, not a subsidy, so Stokab earns a profit for the city when it leases the dark fiber. According to their 2007 yearly report, Stokab had a rentability of 9.6% of the total investment. So the taxpayers of Stockholm doesn't subsidy the network as such; they did put up the money, but they earn interest on them. Besides that, cheap and fast fiber internet has created a lot of jobs for the city over the years (=more money).
Notice that Stokab isn't a ISP; they only lease dark fiber (point-to-point, ring or start topologies) to companies or ISP's who supply their own equipment to light up the fiber.
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If a huge truck hits you from behind, you'll die. If you run out of gas on rail road tracks in front of a train, you will die. If you're going too fast in mountain passes and dive off a cliff, you will die.
Don't focus on problems, but on solutions if you want to change something. Modern day ejector-seats as found in military aircrafts could in some modified form save the driver and passengers in all three scenarios. Yes, such solutions would be difficult to implement in a cheap way within 11 years, but OTOH, 11 years ago I was explaining people about this Internet thing where one could send electronic mail across the globe, but only pay for a local telephone call to an ISP.
41.000 people where killed in the US in 2007 and a staggering 2.491.000 were injured. So the problem is clearly worth looking into for both engineers and politicians.
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As I see it, the problem isn't that examination standards are falling, but that they encourage the education system to "teach to pass tests" not "teach to learn the the students critical thinking. /and/ that the teaching standards are lowered from "learning critical thinking" to "rote memory learning designed to pass tests".
From the article: "Science examination standards at UK schools have eroded so severely that the testing of problem-solving, critical thinking and the application of mathematics has almost disappeared."
If it was only the examinations that had become easier, then the problem wouldn't have been so serious. The problem is the combination of lower examination standards
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Where I live the Linux versions of the eeepc 901 are impossible to get, Asus simply refuses to release them. They give no reasons, but it is well known that MS have been very active in negotiating with vendors like Asus in trying to curb Linux version sales. It is interesting to note in this regard how MS has backed down on their "maximum 80GB hdd" for using MS-XP, since Asus are selling 120GB XP version of their eeepc's.
Anyway, I find it impressive that Linux sales amounts to a whopping 30% of the eeepc's.
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I hate Government oppression as anyone but I've got to call you out here. I think the Olympic Committee was hoping that the Chinese government would clean up it's act for it's people as a direct result of planning The Games.
Oh, so you really believe that the IOC choose China as host nation? Pretty naive considering the amount of corruption that usually decides it (google IOC and corruption). Anyway taken on face value it is very interesting that IOC choosed a host nation based on _political_ reasons, not neutral sports reasons.
In some respects this is true, there has been great infrastructure and environmental improvements in China recently. In terms of infrastructure, you might like to consult this interesting article, PART 1, PART 2 comparing the difference between credit crunch enlaboured American cities and shining new developments in China.
I don't care about Chinese propaganda, anyway, even if China improved their infrastructure because of the Olympics, what has that got to do with it being an extreme dictatorship.
The Autobahn in Germany can't excuse the Nazi dictatorship.
In terms of environmetal issues, Greenpeace have applauded many of the Chinese Governemnt's efforts. Efforts include a focus on reducing emmisions and river pollution, switching to renewable energy sources such as hydro and geo-thermal, expanding public transportation and air quality improvements. In America, the government is actively trying to prevent any improvements relating to global warming.
Bejing is so horribly polluted that it is beyond belief, even when stopping half the private car traffic and closing down some factories visibility can still get as low as one km. because of smog. In fact the ruling classes in China doesn't give a toss about pollution. Yeah, they might do some propaganda projects and they may talk about doing something, but everyday reality is that China is an ecological disaster and that environmentalist are seen as state enemies and persecuted and jailed. Greenpeace may applaud some Chinese initiatives but Greenpeace themself could never be allowed to work inside China. Unions are also strictly forbidden so that workers can't get organized and combat slave wages an deadly dangerous working enviroments.
In terms of censorship, also recall that employees at the American Environment Protection Authority have been prevented from talking to journalists. How's that for "extreme censorship"? Also, don't forget about warrentless wire tapping and the subsequent bill to protect the government and telcos from any repercussions.
Don't give me that crap. Yes there are incidents in the western world but they are exceptions, not the norm like in China. Your examples are also telling; Warrantless wiretapping can be politically discussed in the west, not so in China. As an US citizen you can openly criticise the US president and even replace him by a free election if you disagree with his actions. That is impossible in China. China is a ruthless dictatorship with an unknown amount of political prisoners, secret executions, torture, censorship and corruption. The Chinese cleptocrazy (ruling classes with the purpose of stealing from the majority) are exploiting the Chinese population to enrichen themselves.
Remember that testing for doping is overseen by the Olympic Committee, not the Chinese government. You should also be aware that America is involved with doping too and stripped of medals.
I can see you don't know a lot about doping, as I cycling fan I unfortunately do. So let me tell you that you are wrong; IOC only deals with doping control during the Olympics. But only the stupid get caught that way. "out-of-competition" controls the rest of the year is the important part since that is when the athletes dope, and that is performed by local federate organizations. Or in Chinas case, isn't. No I am not aware that America (if you by America means the US Government) is involved in organized doping, there isn't even any rum
You're right, but not the way you think. Modern science was started by the Catholic church. The dark ages were brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire. Had it not been for the church we might well still be in the dark ages.
(I think it is a shame you got a "Flamebait" moderation, even though I disagree with you)
While the Christian universal church did keep both reading and writing alive, I don't think it could be credited for the creation of modern science. And don't forget that among the first thing the newly Christianized Roman Empire did was to outright forbid any non-christian education, so all universities were closed.
IMHO the major reason why the Christian church didn't outright ban all heathen books was because of the lesson learned by Julian the Apostate the last pagan emperor who actually forbade Christians to read/use pagan text in their education. The results were predictable; the Christians then got a third rate education, severely lacking any effective teaching in rhetoric, law, etc. The church didn't seem to forget that lesson so despite many attempts by pious people to ban heathen books the church resisted. The church however was very selective in what they found interesting to keep, so very few Greek scientific works survived because of the Church.
IMHO, the church's positive influence in western civilization are more to be found in its energetic work to tame the extremely violent warrior aristocracy that ruled the western Europe.
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I think it is a scandal that China ever came to host the Olympics. From extreme censorship to massive doping and outright cheating; the Chinese proudly admitted how they told certain Chinese players to loose games so a more "correct" player could be chosen. Chinese doping is as organized as in the former East Germany and there is absolutely zero interest in combatting doping in China since the Olympic games are being used politically to show how superior the Chinese dictatorship is; doping means medals and medals means political strength.
If this is the norm for what IOC finds acceptable then IOC better change or face sanctions themselves. Democratic countries should seriously reconsider if they should continue to support sporting events that glorify dictatorships.
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Fedora by design isn't a *real* distro. It is a testing ground for RHEL. Now, Fedora is usable, and nice and all. But Ubuntu is a *real* distro, you don't have to pay for the "full" version. With Ubuntu, you get Debian cleaned up. With Fedora you get all the bits and pieces that make up RHEL in a developer-oriented way.
You just like Debian is the testing ground for Ubuntu? It would in fact be much more precise to describe Fedora as a testing ground for Ubuntu too, since the technology pioneered there drips back into Ubuntu. Ubuntu is probably a nice distro, but it is not known for its technological contributions to Linux, unlike e.g. Red Hat or Novell who pays a lot of software engineers to improve or develop core Linux software, that e.g. distroes like Ubuntu can use.
Intel needs to give people a real distro, not a "trial" version of RHEL.
There you go again. Fedora is a real distro and a fine one too, a good mixture of the most modern software and maturity. Please state what kind of software Fedora lacks to become a "real" distro.
I have using Linux for many years, and one thing I don't get about distro fan-boys like you is why you need to bad-mouth other distros than you favorite-distro-of-the-month, especially when you are unable to back it up with technical arguments.
And by the way, RPM (at least the "true" RPM versions) seem to be outdated and DEB in most ways is superior. (Note: Not trying to start a flame war, but merely stating facts)
That are some really impressive technical arguments you gave there - not! I wonder if you actually know what DEB or RPM is? Please give an actual example why rpm is outdated to dpkg? Well, you can't. Try to read 'man rpm' one day to get a overview of what you are talking about.
1. We are talking past each others. I talk about what can be done to improve SSD lifetimes, you talk about what happens if one doesn't implement those things.
2. First my main point that you still seem to have misunderstood is, that 10K or 100K or whatever the rating is, isn't the maximum number of writes. A block doesn't die at writes number 10.001 or 100.001. The number is a guaranteed statistical _minimum_, not a average or a maximum. The source I gave put the typical number of writes a SLC SSD block could sustain to between 200K and 1M writes. My 500K was only arbitrary in the sense it was a somewhat average between these to numbers, but it is still much more precise than quoting the 100K minimum as a maximum as you do.
Regarding that MLC SSD are much more common than than SLC, then it depends. My perspective was what notebook manufacturers actually used in their products. To my knowledge the main OS SSD on all the SSD based notebooks I know of has been SLC. Perhaps the new Asus EEE PC 16G is only based on MLC SSD's, no hard data yet, so the alleged cheapness and slowness compared to the original Samsung/Hynix SSD may be caused by other things. So at least regarding notebooks SLC's are still much more popular than MLC's. I am sure that MLC SSD's will be more popular in the future but by then they will also have extended their actual lifespan expendency with much more than a maximum of 5K per block as you quote.
Regarding spare blocks; they need to be spare so that the OS/FS doesn't panic if a block is lost when the SSD is 100% full.
We probably can't agree about much regarding SSD's, but it really is a complicated matter since there is so many factors at play. Personally I would have no problems using a SLC SSD as my HDD in the mini-notebook I intend to buy. I do think that they are superior as a notebook storage option.
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No, this statement will not be put to bed, because it is based on facts - measured physical quantities. And here's one thing to ponder: if an application writes to the disk 100 times per second, how much will your 4GB SSD going to last? If you have only 1GB of space left, then wear leveling can only count on the blocks that don't contain data. And if the blocksize for the Flash RAM device is 128KB (which is typical, but there are also 256KB Flash RAMs), then the number of blocks you can spread out the writes is 8192. If the SSD is based on MLC Flash (as is, sadly, becoming typical) then you can write up to 10.000 times per block. Assuming perfect wear leveling, the device will last less than 819200 seconds which is 9 days and a few hours.
You fail to consider several things:
1. Static wear levelling/leveling rotate the blocks being written to so both "empty" and "full" blocks are being used, so the amount of free space on the filesystem doesn't matter.
2. The 100.000 writes often quoted are a guaranteed statistical _minimum_, not a average or a maximum. According to some sources the typical cell will endure 200K-1M writes.
http://www.solidkor.com/en/technology/414we.html
3. A typical SSD has spare blocks (just as HDD have spare blocks). So when a block is toast it is just marked as "bad" and a spare block is used instead.
4. Let us not forget ECC schemes that may extend the life of a block significantly.
All this adds up to a considerable lifespan for SSD's.
Let's for arguments sake say that that a SSD has 1 megabyte of spare blocks per 1 gigabyte storage. So if one were to read continuously to one 128 kilobyte block it would take:
(500k writes=assumed lifespan of a block)*(8 the number of spare blocks)=4M writes, and still not a single block lost in the sense that the filesystem/OS still sees 1 gigabyte of storage.
But read more:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
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Fritz Lang was Catholic, though he had some Jewish blood. Hitler claimed that Jewish ancestry was the same as being a Jew, but he wasn't beyond making exceptions for people that were useful to him. If Lang had agreed to make propaganda films, it's likely his ancestry would've been overlooked.
First of all, I really do think that the OP is wrong about Hitler liking Metropolis. It is so out of character for Hitler, and it is likely that the OP confuses Hitler with Goebbels. While the Goebbels story is probably untrue, it is not completely out of character that a more intellectual nazi like Goebbels could appreciate Metropolis. A little googling seems to confirm my suspicion. The only Hitler-Lang connection I can find is the allegation that Hitler liked Langs filmatization of the "Die Niebelungen" which I find much more plausible.
Regarding whether Langs Jewish ancestry would have hindered a career as a loyal propagandafilm maker for the regime, I really do think the answer is yes. I know the regime tolerated some "mischlinge" like E. Milch from the Luftwaffe, but they where few. It is also known that Hitler had lists compiled of these mischlinge so they could be dealt with after the war was over- (See B.M. Rigg).
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No. MS bought 25% non-voting shares a few years ago for $135M dollars. Then they sold the shares to a venture capital company (Vector -- Paul Allen is one of the investors) for $13M (i.e. less than 10% of the original cost). The shares had a veto on acquisitions. Corel was in the process of trying to make several acquisitions when Vector threatened to squelch all the deals unless the board recommended a Vector buyout.
Vector ended up buying out the company for about $110M IIRC. However the company had about $65M in cash at the time, so the overall cost was $45M plus their initial $13M -- grand total of $58M. A little while ago, Vector did an IPO of 25% of the stock and got about $60M IIRC
So instead of being 25% directly owned of MS, WordPerfect is now owned 100% of a MS controlled socket puppet firm. That greedy MS sells anything below marketvalue just shows their "friendly" affiliation.
M$ doesn't play stupid games to stop things from being ported. They play ridiculously Machiavelian games to make huge sums of cash for themselves and their friends.
Yes they do. The Stacker-case, and how MS behaved with Quarterdeck QEMM and DESQview just shows how mean spirited MS where. Don't forget the SCO case, it is obvious that there are several leads back directly to MS. IMHO MS isn't just a greedy company they also have streaks of psychopathic behavior (cough*Gates*Ballmer*cough).
P.S. I lost my job at Corel when my department was dissolved following the Vector takeover ;-)
Sorry to hear, hope it turned out good in the end.
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