This rhetorical question points out a nasty little secret that we in the computer industry do not like to discuss: Why are TV sets, DVD recorders, MP3 players, cell phones, and other software-laden electronic devices reliable and secure but computers are not?
Well, that was the fastest I've been able to determine "I don't need to read anymore." I've seen in a while. Embedded software is the shittist, most bug-laden crap I"ve had to ever deal with. From cellphones that spontaniously turn off, crash, or delete your address book to DVD players that freeze up and require powercycling to keep watching the movie, software sucks.
Also, MP3 players and Cellphones and DVD recorders _ALL_ have "Emergency Updates" to fix bugs, but there's no mechanism to inform the user of this, except for the occasional cell network that sends you a "please update now!" SMS.
He's right. They're just computers running programs. Why can't they just work? Because software engineers really, REALLY suck at writing good code. Is it that unimaginable that scaling up to the complexity of an operating system with tens of also large programs interacting may have more problems? Apparently, it is.
On the IDE front, when you load a file, you load the entire file. If it's a 10MB file, you load all 10MB. Thread priority is irrelevant. Hence, your anti-virus software appears to be hogging the drive while it's reading it. (I should note this depends upon how the software accesses the file. It's also possible to only read in segments of a large file, thus allowing other processes access to the disk in-between requests for segments, I would hope most AV software uses this approach)
On the SCSI front, if a process starts loading a file, you can request multiple other files from the same drive while AV requested file loads. The large file load only has bandwidth impact on I/O, which if the thread is low-priority will allow the higher priority game thread(s) 100% access.
Were you just simplifying here, or do you not understand Queuing vs non-queueing systems? I would have ignored it except for the comment on AV software. _ALL_ software should request as much data as it needs as quickly as possible, and let the OS handle resource allocation. Your seperate drive comment is sometimes OK, but you have to remember to manually scan it from time to time. Even legit game CDs sometimes come with unexpected bonuses, and it's worse if you're getting games from slightly shady sources.
All operating systems post DOS don't allow one process to request a 10-gb fileread and hard-lock the disk for the next hour. NCQ gets around the fact that nothing but the drive really understands the physical geometry of data, and requests things in such a way that the head sits idle due to rotational latency. If you submit the request to the drive NCQ it can internally re-order the reads to return the entirety of your request in the shortest time.
Isn't PCI-X 133mhz 64bit now? Takes quite a lot of I/O to saturate that bus.
And Linux is finally supporting SATA NCQ, thank god.
No matter how many positive diggs something gets, ten reports buries it. Ten, not ten percent.
And there's no list of who's doing it or any way to tell, so it might as well just be veto powers given to the owners and favored sponsors. Yeah. That's like Diebold double-book accounting systems, it's designed for abuse.
You do realize that the virus wasn't calling the explot_to_gain_root() syscall, right? It was doing file I/O to a specific file that it had already opened and gained access to. And that failed, because of a GCC bug that caused the kernel to tromp on the userspace registers.
In fact, it would bite any program doing direct syscalls rather then using libc, so it might break linux handwritten asm code as well.
The retail memory crashed at 421 MHz while the review sample was able to reach 471 MHz before crashing. On April 12, we found that the used processor was the culprit, because it did not overclock reliably enough. We will repeat this test next weekend.
On August 21, 1992, the siege began in earnest. Six U.S. marshals, armed and camouflaged, went onto Weaver's property to conduct undercover surveillance. When Weaver's dogs started barking, they shot one of them.
Weaver's 25-year-old friend Kevin Harris and 14-year-old son Sammy and saw the dog die. Sammy Weaver fired his gun towards the agents as his dad yelled for him to come back to the cabin. "I'm coming, Dad," were Sammy Weaver's last words before he was shot in the back and killed by a U.S. Marshal.
Kevin Harris, witnessing the agents' killing of the dog and child, fired at the agents in self-defense, killing one of them.
D'oh! There goes your argument! And that's not some right-wing milita's view on it either, Kevin Harris was aquitted of manslaugter. (I believe on self-defense grounds)
They later shot his wife while she was standing in the doorway holding an infant.
Hint: What happened is a fucking atrocity and so far nobody has been held accountable for it.
No, one 18 month for 'obstruction of justice' isn't being held accountable for murder. Feel safe?
Probably the worst thing that came out of Ruby Ridge was the fact that the only people who give a shit about it are white-power groups like stormfront.
To recap for the retards:
To coerce his testimony on a group he was affiliated with, they set him up on weapons charges. He refuses, and flees. After he misses his court appearance (which they know they gave him the wrong date) they get an arrest warrant. They then proceed to execute the warrant with 400 personell, a military hostage-rescue unit, and Kill-on-Sight orders for _ALL_ persons, not just the target.
Now, is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like an execution squad sent as punishment for not cooperating? Note they shot-to-wound the suspect, but shot-to-kill his family and pets. Then of course the people involved were promoted and given bonuses for good behavior. The only scapegoat was Michael Kalhoe, who was sentanced a modest 18 months for destroying documents relating to the incident.
Randy weaver was cleared of all original charges, and spent 18 months himself for failure to appear in court. How even that stuck is a mystery to me, given the documented proof the clerk gave him the wrong date. I guess it's every good citizen's responsibility to know exactly when the courts require them, even when not given notice.
Pointing out my own error, my timeline was off. Waco was due to the original CAN, a group that has it's own problems, but wasn't CoS. It was still a clash of religeons, as Rick Ross of CAN hated the Davidians, and was the one instigating the issue in the local papers. Pretty directly linked to both BATF and later FBI involvement in the case.
It'd be pretty horrible if we had a government that would cold-bloodly shoot women and children in a battle between religeons. Such as Scientology using their newly-aquired front the 'Cult Awareness Network' to pressure the BATF into wiping out David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.
Or a government that will kill your wife while she's holding a baby, as punishment for not cooperating with them. Ruby Ridge.
Yeah, it'd be just peachy if the widespread broadcast of those atrocities could spur people to get their fat lazy asses off their couches. But hey, Friends is coming up next!
You also forgot the "teachers" who like to make their finals based on what they said in class, not on any of the other material. The only way to study for them is to take copious and exacting notes and memorize them. And of course, you have no idea which type of teacher it is unless you know your way around campus and who's taken the class before. So, if your teacher wants to sit up front and monologue about a topic for his 55 minute lecture period, use your laptop to take notes. If they actually have a class where you're learning something by application, you don't need to take as many notes so they can be on paper. Even then, have you tried to grep your dead-tree notebook for a specific word?
Either way, my vote is 'supreme jackass' and if you got stuck with him/her as a teacher drop it so you don't hurt your GPA. These are the power-tripping assholes who love to flunk students just to fuck your GPA.
As for 'moving on', I have. I went into tech and have 10 years experience now. One of these years I may get a degree so I can break the 6-digit salary mark, but at this point in my career my college history means jack-all, but those kinds of people _do_ piss me off, because they can fuck someone else's life up pretty bad with their bullshit ideas.
fuck you. I was flunked out of college because of a jackass like you who insisted that the only way to take the bullshit remedial english course he was teaching was to turn in handwritten essays. So I went from AP english to kindergarten.
Since my handwriting is and has always been bad due to muscle problems, I failed. Since it was a mandatory class, I lost my scholarship. All due to a fucking luddite like you.
Eh. Cisco works like microsoft works. I've had my share of router trap/reset cycles, module failures and route storms with cisco gear. You just keep disabling features until
you get a subset that works.
As for 'custom hardware', when you get to the point that you need to route 10gig-e at line-speed, then you buy 'custom hardware'. Below that, you drop in quad 100m cards into a linux/BSD box and run something like quagga (or now XORP). I'm willing to bet that not many people here have many routers that really need those kinds of line speeds, so we can all white-box it for a small fraction of the price. I know my linux (100meg) router gets a once-a-year reboot for kernel upgrades. My linux NAT at home gets rebooted every time the power goes out longer then the UPS can handle...
The only other thing that you can't get with open source is cisco hot-failover. And from the people who need that level of reliability, you can't get that from cisco either.:) To be fair, it works now, but they were selling it for quite a while in a very VERY buggy state. I'd be very exited to see an open-source router project that handles paired or triad server configurations with VIP and lockstep state updates, for true multipath redundancy. Good luck on that one, though.
Another area where WoW is a lot better than EQ in its reward scheme since most good items are soulbound when you use them which precludes a LOT of items from being farmed, and it precludes people from reselling their uber gear to losers for gold when they upgrade. The BOE's and tradeitems are where most of the farming occurs in WoW.
Another area where iTunes is a lot better then allofMp3 in it's buisness practice since all tracks downloaded are DRM locked to a single person which precludes a LOT of otherwise legal resale, and it precludes people from using them full-quality in 'unapproved' portable devices or when they upgrade....
Blizzards problem with farming is A) it takes forever and a ton of luck to get those
special items and B) You can't attack the farmers hoarding the items and C) there are EXTREMELY limited drop sites compared to the number of players.
Let's compare to EVE: There are very VERY few 'uber' items. They blow up when you die, so they're used even more rarely. They're not that much better then their freely available counterparts. Anyone and everyone can make the basic gear that 90% of the playerbase is using. A lucky few (8-20 people per item) can make the advanced "Tech 2" gear, a situation which is always a point of contention and is "going to be fixed, someday". The named/faction stuff is either dropped off enemies or given as rewards for missions. Most of it is barely different then the tech-1 basic units except in rare situations (fitting constraints on a tight-fit ship). Oh, and there are hundreds of agents of all levels so there's no real 'hoarding' of agents. As for the farmers, it's open season on them. You can either take a direct security hit and blow them up, or get their macros to do something stupid and then blow them up 'legally'. Or, if you're bored, just push their ships out of range of what they're doing. They'll sit in space until their controller gets around to manually fixing them.
The demand for low-end ores (what the macroers and chinese miners go after) is so high that they can't even significantly depress the market. They do keep it down to a tolerable level, which is great for all players who want to buy battleships. (They take a TON of low-end ores to build)
As for making money via a game? Go for it. I'm in a corp that has access to a TON of resources, so I have more then enough 'isk' for whatever I fly. If someone doesn't have that support but does have a good job, $20 will buy them enough isk to fly for quite a while as long as they're not stupid. I don't think it's "cheating" like it is in WoW. WoW is specifically a timesink. You spend 4 hours in queue, then 4 hours camping a raid boss to get one trinket. If you avoid either of those waits you're "not playing the game" and "exploiting". (Yes, I'm using hyperbole, but it IS the feeling of the game.) There's no "one way" of doing things in EVE, so who cares if I buy some poopsock time from someone else rather then doing it myself? You can't buy yourself a significant advantage, and if you show up with a billion ISK faction ship, expect us to laugh at you while we blow it up in disposable 200k frigates.
I'm calling shenannigans. What AV program removed mIRC? That sounds suspiciously like 'Microsoft AV deletes firefox!'
Re:Which MMORPG has the biggest world population?
on
World of Queuecraft
·
· Score: 1
EVE online.
only one shard (+ a seperate 'test' server) and 24,000 people online at peak. Generally 10-13,000 when I play.
They've done it right, and there's really not enough love for this game. The majority of the world is player controled, and if the alliance you're part of loses their hold on terretory, the new owners WILL slaughter you and drive you out as well. It's an incredible amount of fun.
Ahh, yes, "scalable". When HURD has managed to "scale" to "running on a desktop class system" over the course of how many years of development? How many HURD clusters are out there?
For those who missed out, the 'scalability' is because the kernel delegates tasks off to non-kernel helpers via (pipes/shared memory/IPC/flavor of the week). The problem is, of course, that trying to do so correctly ends up being a more expensive task then doing it in an "ancient" monolithic kernel.
And at the same time, linux has moved more and more jobs into kernel-mode threads to achieve the benefits of the scheduler for tasks such as: NFS daemon, events, softIRQ, ACPI, RAID, IDE, Async IO and various filesystem helpers.
Especially "Nobody really saw it live". OH KAY MISTER SMARTY PANTS. That whole speed of light thing means nobody at all saw it "live", they saw it a whopping 56 microseconds AFTER IT HAPPENED.
Either way, those of us who were watching the launch on TV saw it live, our school turned it off as soon as they realized something went wrong. We were all watching for the first teacher in space, as were probably most people who say they saw it live.
And don't try to tell me that a 15 second relay means we didn't watch it "live", in the conventional sense. "live" means "not later that night on the news". "live" means they didn't just interrupt your soaps to replay what just happened. "live" means you were watching it BEFORE the tradgdy and saw it happen yourself, before the news was all over it.
#2 is just as bad. Yes, the "challenger" shuttle itself did not explode, but it was next to a fuel tank that did "explode", and that caused it's distruction. I'm so much smrtr thn u kauze I Ply smnantk gameez! From NASA's 51-L postmortem:
At 73.124 seconds,. a circumferential white vapor pattern was observed blooming from the side of the External Tank bottom dome. This was the beginning of the structural failure of hydrogen tank that culminated in the entire aft dome dropping away. This released massive amounts of liquid hydrogen from the tank and created a sudden forward thrust of about 2.8 million pounds, pushing the hydrogen tank upward into the intertank structure. At about the same time, the rotating right Solid Rocket Booster impacted the intertank structure and the lower part of the liquid oxygen tank. These structures failed at 73.137 seconds as evidenced by the white vapors appearing in the intertank region.
Within milliseconds there was massive, almost explosive, burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank.
At this point in its trajectory, while traveling at a Mach number of 1.92 at an altitude of 46,000 feet, the Challenger was totally enveloped in the explosive burn. The Challenger's reaction control system ruptured and a hypergolic burn of its propellants occurred as it exited the oxygen-hydrogen flames. The reddish brown colors of the hypergolic fuel burn are visible on the edge of the main fireball. The Orbiter, under severe aerodynamic loads, broke into several large sections which emerged from the fireball. Separate sections that can be identified on film include the main engine/tail section with the engines still burning, one wing of the Orbiter, and the forward fuselage trailing a mass of umbilical lines pulled loose from the payload bay.
Sure sounds like the blowtorch effect of the SRB o-ring failure cutting into and igniting the hydrogen fuel tank caused an explosion to me, which directly caused the orbiter to break up. Had the o-ring leak been on the far side, not cut into the main fuel tank, would the orbiter have still spontainously disintegrated at 73 seconds into the flight?
#3 isn't so much a persistant myth as a comforting white lie. Yes, we all know at least some of them lived through the structural breakup. No, we don't like to think about them on a terminal ballistic arc that peaked at 63,000 feet and ended up smacking the ocean at 200mph.
#7 is not a myth either, it's very true. While yes, one specific thing could have been fixed, people fail to realize just how many possible things could go wrong. At some point, you have to either go for it, or scrap the program. While it's sad, none of the 7 astronauts expected this to be as safe as stepping outside for a quick walk in the garden. The launch was the day after the 19th anniversary of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that claimed 3 lives.
No. Because AC isn't the only use of energy. Ovens, C&C, Lathes, pressure chambers, industrial presses, robotic welders, computers and monitors, lighting in interior rooms... that demand won't shift. So if every single building moved their cooling to night time, it would be an enormous benefit.
So, have they figured out who used the physical keys to unlock your office and steal your company laptop yet? No? Well, here's hoping they figure that one out eventually.
Because it's designed to be read in a text terminal, with source code which is also generally (gasp) 80 columns.
I know some of you new Eclipse/Visual Studio DOT NET guys love 30000 character lines, and don't get me started on perl, but for the projects I work on having long lines is a drawback. And has email REALLY improved since the mid 90s? I force HTML to downconvert to text and strip all the bullshit markup before it hits my inbox. No blinky pictures, no flash graphics, no webbugs, no <FONT SIZE +5000><FONT COLOR=BLOOD RED> <BOLD><UNDERLINE><ITALIC><BLINK><MARQUEE> tags.
Those of us with functioning braincells and an attention span greater then a gnat miss the email of the 90s.
Because it was ruled that x86-286-386-486-586 was just a serial number, and they couldn't trademark it. So they altered 'pente' (5) into a trademarkable brand. Then promptly realized that 'septeium' wasn't a good name, so the next generation was the 'pentium II'. Now, pentium 4 days, next gen would be, Pentium 5. That's STILL trademarkable, because nobody can make a 'pentium ' anything.
But I sure as hell can make an 841 processor and one-up the name game.
P.S. Heard of AT&T Labs lately? They spent all their money re-logoing. AT&T -> Lucent -> Aguient -> something -> nothing.
For home use, it's perfect. Sell one extra google stock option and add on gig-e, DL-DVDRW +/-, and a gig switch for your network.
I'm running a similar setup, except it's a full AMD64, more ram, bigger video card and it doubles as my always-on linux workstation Smaller drives, though, I bought it last year before the 320s came down to $140 a piece.
So now you know how much a 1.5TB home storage array costs. Don't lose data again!
That's totally wrong. The whole point of using memory instead of a hdd is because of speed; the long time for your mp3 player to fill is due to the transfer rate of whatever you're hooking it up to (ie usb).
You're totally wrong on that. Flash memory is NOT SDRAM. Write speeds (per chip) are on the order of 128 kilobytes per second. Contrast that with harddrive speed, which are on the order of 20 megabytes per second. Even with faster flash and slower laptop drives, that's 100x speed difference. TWO orders of magnitude.
In summary, this guy is dreaming if he thinks anyone will buy flash harddrives in the next 5 years. Even high-end cameras went to microdrives rather then flash storage just to get the picture->picture time down to a reasonable level.
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Also, MP3 players and Cellphones and DVD recorders _ALL_ have "Emergency Updates" to fix bugs, but there's no mechanism to inform the user of this, except for the occasional cell network that sends you a "please update now!" SMS.
He's right. They're just computers running programs. Why can't they just work? Because software engineers really, REALLY suck at writing good code. Is it that unimaginable that scaling up to the complexity of an operating system with tens of also large programs interacting may have more problems? Apparently, it is.
"Bush! We've got Bush!" just dosn't have the same mystique anymore.
I hope it's not horrible, but I'm going to re-watch the original tonight anyway.
All operating systems post DOS don't allow one process to request a 10-gb fileread and hard-lock the disk for the next hour. NCQ gets around the fact that nothing but the drive really understands the physical geometry of data, and requests things in such a way that the head sits idle due to rotational latency. If you submit the request to the drive NCQ it can internally re-order the reads to return the entirety of your request in the shortest time.
Isn't PCI-X 133mhz 64bit now? Takes quite a lot of I/O to saturate that bus.
And Linux is finally supporting SATA NCQ, thank god.
And there's no list of who's doing it or any way to tell, so it might as well just be veto powers given to the owners and favored sponsors. Yeah. That's like Diebold double-book accounting systems, it's designed for abuse.
In fact, it would bite any program doing direct syscalls rather then using libc, so it might break linux handwritten asm code as well.
They later shot his wife while she was standing in the doorway holding an infant.
Hint: What happened is a fucking atrocity and so far nobody has been held accountable for it. No, one 18 month for 'obstruction of justice' isn't being held accountable for murder. Feel safe?
Probably the worst thing that came out of Ruby Ridge was the fact that the only people who give a shit about it are white-power groups like stormfront.
To recap for the retards:
To coerce his testimony on a group he was affiliated with, they set him up on weapons charges. He refuses, and flees. After he misses his court appearance (which they know they gave him the wrong date) they get an arrest warrant. They then proceed to execute the warrant with 400 personell, a military hostage-rescue unit, and Kill-on-Sight orders for _ALL_ persons, not just the target.
Now, is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like an execution squad sent as punishment for not cooperating? Note they shot-to-wound the suspect, but shot-to-kill his family and pets. Then of course the people involved were promoted and given bonuses for good behavior. The only scapegoat was Michael Kalhoe, who was sentanced a modest 18 months for destroying documents relating to the incident.
Randy weaver was cleared of all original charges, and spent 18 months himself for failure to appear in court. How even that stuck is a mystery to me, given the documented proof the clerk gave him the wrong date. I guess it's every good citizen's responsibility to know exactly when the courts require them, even when not given notice.
Pointing out my own error, my timeline was off. Waco was due to the original CAN, a group that has it's own problems, but wasn't CoS. It was still a clash of religeons, as Rick Ross of CAN hated the Davidians, and was the one instigating the issue in the local papers. Pretty directly linked to both BATF and later FBI involvement in the case.
Or a government that will kill your wife while she's holding a baby, as punishment for not cooperating with them. Ruby Ridge.
Yeah, it'd be just peachy if the widespread broadcast of those atrocities could spur people to get their fat lazy asses off their couches. But hey, Friends is coming up next!
XP's login box pops up a warning if your capslock is on as well. Very useful on a laptop where there is no capslock indicator.
Either way, my vote is 'supreme jackass' and if you got stuck with him/her as a teacher drop it so you don't hurt your GPA. These are the power-tripping assholes who love to flunk students just to fuck your GPA.
As for 'moving on', I have. I went into tech and have 10 years experience now. One of these years I may get a degree so I can break the 6-digit salary mark, but at this point in my career my college history means jack-all, but those kinds of people _do_ piss me off, because they can fuck someone else's life up pretty bad with their bullshit ideas.
fuck you. I was flunked out of college because of a jackass like you who insisted that the only way to take the bullshit remedial english course he was teaching was to turn in handwritten essays. So I went from AP english to kindergarten. Since my handwriting is and has always been bad due to muscle problems, I failed. Since it was a mandatory class, I lost my scholarship. All due to a fucking luddite like you.
As for 'custom hardware', when you get to the point that you need to route 10gig-e at line-speed, then you buy 'custom hardware'. Below that, you drop in quad 100m cards into a linux/BSD box and run something like quagga (or now XORP). I'm willing to bet that not many people here have many routers that really need those kinds of line speeds, so we can all white-box it for a small fraction of the price. I know my linux (100meg) router gets a once-a-year reboot for kernel upgrades. My linux NAT at home gets rebooted every time the power goes out longer then the UPS can handle...
The only other thing that you can't get with open source is cisco hot-failover. And from the people who need that level of reliability, you can't get that from cisco either. :) To be fair, it works now, but they were selling it for quite a while in a very VERY buggy state. I'd be very exited to see an open-source router project that handles paired or triad server configurations with VIP and lockstep state updates, for true multipath redundancy. Good luck on that one, though.
Blizzards problem with farming is A) it takes forever and a ton of luck to get those special items and B) You can't attack the farmers hoarding the items and C) there are EXTREMELY limited drop sites compared to the number of players.
Let's compare to EVE: There are very VERY few 'uber' items. They blow up when you die, so they're used even more rarely. They're not that much better then their freely available counterparts. Anyone and everyone can make the basic gear that 90% of the playerbase is using. A lucky few (8-20 people per item) can make the advanced "Tech 2" gear, a situation which is always a point of contention and is "going to be fixed, someday". The named/faction stuff is either dropped off enemies or given as rewards for missions. Most of it is barely different then the tech-1 basic units except in rare situations (fitting constraints on a tight-fit ship). Oh, and there are hundreds of agents of all levels so there's no real 'hoarding' of agents. As for the farmers, it's open season on them. You can either take a direct security hit and blow them up, or get their macros to do something stupid and then blow them up 'legally'. Or, if you're bored, just push their ships out of range of what they're doing. They'll sit in space until their controller gets around to manually fixing them.
The demand for low-end ores (what the macroers and chinese miners go after) is so high that they can't even significantly depress the market. They do keep it down to a tolerable level, which is great for all players who want to buy battleships. (They take a TON of low-end ores to build)
As for making money via a game? Go for it. I'm in a corp that has access to a TON of resources, so I have more then enough 'isk' for whatever I fly. If someone doesn't have that support but does have a good job, $20 will buy them enough isk to fly for quite a while as long as they're not stupid. I don't think it's "cheating" like it is in WoW. WoW is specifically a timesink. You spend 4 hours in queue, then 4 hours camping a raid boss to get one trinket. If you avoid either of those waits you're "not playing the game" and "exploiting". (Yes, I'm using hyperbole, but it IS the feeling of the game.) There's no "one way" of doing things in EVE, so who cares if I buy some poopsock time from someone else rather then doing it myself? You can't buy yourself a significant advantage, and if you show up with a billion ISK faction ship, expect us to laugh at you while we blow it up in disposable 200k frigates.
I'm calling shenannigans. What AV program removed mIRC? That sounds suspiciously like 'Microsoft AV deletes firefox!'
only one shard (+ a seperate 'test' server) and 24,000 people online at peak. Generally 10-13,000 when I play.
They've done it right, and there's really not enough love for this game. The majority of the world is player controled, and if the alliance you're part of loses their hold on terretory, the new owners WILL slaughter you and drive you out as well. It's an incredible amount of fun.
My 1080i copy of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers begs to differ. Let me know when any HD content is actually available.
Hint: The internet has had true HD rips of TV and movies for ever. HD-Xvid looks extremely good. 720p fits on a single layer DVD, 1080i on a DL.
Ahh, yes, "scalable". When HURD has managed to "scale" to "running on a desktop class system" over the course of how many years of development? How many HURD clusters are out there?
For those who missed out, the 'scalability' is because the kernel delegates tasks off to non-kernel helpers via (pipes/shared memory/IPC/flavor of the week). The problem is, of course, that trying to do so correctly ends up being a more expensive task then doing it in an "ancient" monolithic kernel.
And at the same time, linux has moved more and more jobs into kernel-mode threads to achieve the benefits of the scheduler for tasks such as: NFS daemon, events, softIRQ, ACPI, RAID, IDE, Async IO and various filesystem helpers.
Either way, those of us who were watching the launch on TV saw it live, our school turned it off as soon as they realized something went wrong. We were all watching for the first teacher in space, as were probably most people who say they saw it live.
And don't try to tell me that a 15 second relay means we didn't watch it "live", in the conventional sense. "live" means "not later that night on the news". "live" means they didn't just interrupt your soaps to replay what just happened. "live" means you were watching it BEFORE the tradgdy and saw it happen yourself, before the news was all over it.
#2 is just as bad. Yes, the "challenger" shuttle itself did not explode, but it was next to a fuel tank that did "explode", and that caused it's distruction. I'm so much smrtr thn u kauze I Ply smnantk gameez! From NASA's 51-L postmortem:
Sure sounds like the blowtorch effect of the SRB o-ring failure cutting into and igniting the hydrogen fuel tank caused an explosion to me, which directly caused the orbiter to break up. Had the o-ring leak been on the far side, not cut into the main fuel tank, would the orbiter have still spontainously disintegrated at 73 seconds into the flight?#3 isn't so much a persistant myth as a comforting white lie. Yes, we all know at least some of them lived through the structural breakup. No, we don't like to think about them on a terminal ballistic arc that peaked at 63,000 feet and ended up smacking the ocean at 200mph.
#7 is not a myth either, it's very true. While yes, one specific thing could have been fixed, people fail to realize just how many possible things could go wrong. At some point, you have to either go for it, or scrap the program. While it's sad, none of the 7 astronauts expected this to be as safe as stepping outside for a quick walk in the garden. The launch was the day after the 19th anniversary of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that claimed 3 lives.
No. Because AC isn't the only use of energy. Ovens, C&C, Lathes, pressure chambers, industrial presses, robotic welders, computers and monitors, lighting in interior rooms... that demand won't shift. So if every single building moved their cooling to night time, it would be an enormous benefit.
So, have they figured out who used the physical keys to unlock your office and steal your company laptop yet? No? Well, here's hoping they figure that one out eventually.
Because it's designed to be read in a text terminal, with source code
which is also generally (gasp) 80 columns.
I know some of you new Eclipse/Visual Studio DOT NET guys love 30000
character lines, and don't get me started on perl, but for the projects
I work on having long lines is a drawback. And has email REALLY improved
since the mid 90s? I force HTML to downconvert to text and strip all the
bullshit markup before it hits my inbox. No blinky pictures, no flash
graphics, no webbugs, no <FONT SIZE +5000><FONT COLOR=BLOOD RED>
<BOLD><UNDERLINE><ITALIC><BLINK><MARQUEE> tags.
Those of us with functioning braincells and an attention span greater then
a gnat miss the email of the 90s.
Anyone remember WHY they went to 'Pentium'?
Because it was ruled that x86-286-386-486-586 was just a serial number, and they couldn't trademark it.
So they altered 'pente' (5) into a trademarkable brand. Then promptly realized that 'septeium' wasn't a good
name, so the next generation was the 'pentium II'. Now, pentium 4 days, next gen would be, Pentium 5. That's
STILL trademarkable, because nobody can make a 'pentium ' anything.
But I sure as hell can make an 841 processor and one-up the name game.
P.S. Heard of AT&T Labs lately? They spent all their money re-logoing.
AT&T -> Lucent -> Aguient -> something -> nothing.
As has been pointed out, you have more money then the average slashdot reader, so I'm going to post a ghetto solution for the rest of us.
Linux, SATA, software raid5.
Promise SATAII150 TX4 PCI SATA
Motherboard with onboard SATA, onboard video, onboard 10/100
AMD Semperon 64
512m DDR RAM:
6x 320GB drives
case/powersupply
$1144.39 with shipping at newegg, 10 minutes of shopping.
Total storage: 1.5 gig (1490 * 2^20)
Software RAID5, LVM2, NFS + SMB/CIFS + WebDAV (apache2) exports.
For home use, it's perfect. Sell one extra google stock option and
add on gig-e, DL-DVDRW +/-, and a gig switch for your network.
I'm running a similar setup, except it's a full AMD64, more ram, bigger
video card and it doubles as my always-on linux workstation Smaller drives,
though, I bought it last year before the 320s came down to $140 a piece.
So now you know how much a 1.5TB home storage array costs. Don't
lose data again!
You're totally wrong on that. Flash memory is NOT SDRAM. Write speeds (per chip) are on the order of 128 kilobytes per second. Contrast that with harddrive speed, which are on the order of 20 megabytes per second. Even with faster flash and slower laptop drives, that's 100x speed difference. TWO orders of magnitude.
In summary, this guy is dreaming if he thinks anyone will buy flash harddrives in the next 5 years. Even high-end cameras went to microdrives rather then flash storage just to get the picture->picture time down to a reasonable level.