Somehow, I'm going to have to say "not freaking likely".
I ran (for about a year) debian slink (2.1 iirc) on a P120 with 96MB of RAM and an 800MB disk. It was almost unusable, even with that RAM upgrade (from 32MB).
That was with icewm and whatever the 'lightweight' browser was for the day (circa 2003). "Usable" is not a word I'd use to describe it unless we're talking about single-instance web browsing or IM.
Let's see: you can currently buy a capable Atom based mini-ITX board with a dual core processor for under $70 - sufficient system for a small office network server, workstation, and pretty much any common task. It's got lower power use than the competitors in the same price range as well as more performance. (In fact, the Atom boards are a bit cheaper than the cheapest Via and AMD board/CPU combos - and mostly fanless.)
Now consider that the latest Atom has a TDP of 2 watts, and in-use power utilization about average for existing smartphone platforms. It might not immediately/seamlessly boot Windows 7, but I'd wager a bet that someone will figure out how to get it to work on account of it being an x86 chip. And a common Linux distro might very well be able to install without too much kludgery, too.
This is something that just a couple years ago (when Atom first came out, there about) everyone said was impossible: Intel would never have anything that would compete with ARM processors on power utilization and performance. Yet these Mooreland CPUs appear to have just as much (if not more) performance than the latest, greatest Snapdragon and the iPad's SoC. Also consider how incredibly fast Intel came to market with this CPU (vs. the much more linear progression we've seen in the ARM platforms over the past decade).
I'm a Debian guy, but I should note: you can do this on RedHat/CentOS, too - though the 'minimal install' has grown substantially in recent years.
I really wish the 'minimal install' would not include such 'necessities' like snmpd and a mail daemon. I neither need nor want those security-issue packages on many installs (or want an alternative) and they're not appreciated. (BSDs are particularly prone to this nonsense. Sendmail and bind? Seriously? Can I get the machine pre-rooted?)
Yeah, I've got a MobilePro 780 - it has 32MB RAM; I've got X running on it with ion3 under NetBSD. NetBSD 2.0. It barely runs - and this is an old TinyX (nanox? I can't recall) X server.
I had a P133 with 16MB of RAM, too. That ran icewm well.
The problem is that this isn't 1997, and X implementations are significantly bloated these days compared to back then. There have been a lot of changes - many have which have been acceptable improvements (memory use for performance improvements, support, etc.). Even the 'tiny' X implementations have this problem.
I've already posted in this thread elsewhere, but I just thought I might add: Google is likely part of your problem (inability to find anything useful).
I've noticed lately that Google has become much less of a useful resource when looking up technical information. You're more likely to find a useful link with "stupid" queries, but any level of complexity results in two out of three being only-sorta related. It's a mess, and historically useful search formatting (quoting, -, +, etc.) no longer really help.
I really hope a better alternative comes along soon (or google releases "geek.google.com" or some such thing - with the old indexing). The lack of good search results (nay, worse results) has really made my life more difficult.
Yet, that does not actually solve the problem. If you think it does, you don't understand the problem.
These devices only have 128M of RAM. That's not much: you won't be running X terribly well, nevermind a modern desktop. And the available packages for 'lightweight' stuff is woefully unequipped for something like this.
What the OP really should be looking at is MeeGo/Moblin or Maemo - though with only 128M of RAM, they might be a bit under powered for even that.
Back in the day (ie, when the MobilePro 780 and similar "netbooks" were about and popular with Linux hackers - maybe 8-9 years ago), there were some non-trivial limitations to booting Linux or a BSD on the devices.
The problem was that there was no way to actually boot Linux natively without chainloading from within CE. Sure, the hardware worked, but the CE ROM address was hardcoded within the "BIOS", and there was no way to circumvent it.
As a result, booting was/is a 5-minute (manual) process due to CE's boot. It's highly cumbersome.
Additionally (and possibly somewhat related), I noticed that around 2004 or so, all of the "mobile computing" or "Borg-like computing" project pages, targeted products, and the like just sort of disappeared. Stuff like the "matchbox PC" from Stanford, twiddler keyboards (think that's what they called them), IR (etc.) keyboards for Palm, et al, and misc. other peripherals became difficult to find. No new products were coming to market in that segment.
Cool project pages where people had some interesting software work for mobile computing (including novel input/output devices) just kind of stopped being updated. Kernel porting and hardware support projects (eg. Linux on the MobilePro 780/880) were abandoned. I don't get it, but I'm going to have to guess that emergence of the first widely accessible smartphones distracted these adventurous types, or the hackable geek-preferred hardware simply dried up. It's really too bad. (Maybe the economy or impending adulthood had somethign to do with it, too?)
That said, I have good news and bad news: the good news is that it looks like the "embedded" computer with a keyboard is coming back (See: Viliv S7). Unfortunately, I also suspect that x86 Intel hardware will dominate the market instead of the "cooler" ARM hardware (OMG, Mooreland is impressive). We'll see how much that matters, but I hope "not very" - and we're able to have our cake and eat it too, despite (because of?) the Intel badging.
My hope (and guess) is that we'll have decently powerful MeeGo/Moblin/Maemo powered cell phones at a reasonable price within two years or so - whether that's what the vendor shipped on them or not.
And before you argue with me, be aware that I have a doctorate in animal agriculture, so unlike most/.er's my opinions on this topic are actually informed ones.
How about 1st and 2nd hand ranching experience?
10 thousand acres per head of cattle.
I'd love to see the source of that number.
The land is too arid to be grazed annually, and the number of head varies. So 150-200 head will graze a third of the land one year, then move on to another the next, and so on.
My understanding of moving from 'free range' to intensive barn-raised animals is largely attributable to several factors, the largest being specialization (husbandry vs. husbandry + land management + machinery maintenance + so on). It's more efficient in that less indepth knowledge in a mix of fields is necessary.
Not sure where you're getting "far more land for feed, animal housing", etc. figures from, but let me help you understand: much of the land used for ranching can not produce crops in any commercially viable fashion: we're talking yields under 15 bushels/acre (with fertilizing), assuming enough water could be acquired. This is, in the scheme of things, a use of 0 acres to raise said cattle: there's no way in hell you're going to get the land to produce anything else.
I know someone who just went 'organic free-range' with their cattle. Why? Well, they were already mostly doing it - not for dogmatic reasons, but because that's how they raised their cattle. The minor changes they made to get into 'organic' compliance actually saved them money, never mind being able to sell the resulting meat for more per pound.
I live in a small apartment. I've just got a 24" LCD hooked up to a fanless system; I watch netflix DVDs, netflix and hulu online, as well as the occasional torrented TV show. Being as the apartment is smaller, it's not such a big deal. Consider: just a couple years ago, a 20" TV was the norm. I'm not seeing a problem with my 24" widescreen. It gives me a lot more options, and I don't have to sit through (nearly as many) commercials.
I really, really hate commercials.
Honestly, it's more than enough "media" for me: how the hell am I going to watch more than one or two shows a night and still get things done? I've no idea how people can justify 2-3 hours a night watching commercial-laden TV.
Now I'm just waiting for someone to post the numbers of gallons of water a beef-eating sysadmin uses. (Note: such numbers are largely crap, short of the ones for cooling a datacenter.)
This is an innovation and an improvement. It's not something to be poo-pooed. If we can make better use of the resources we have, everyone wins.
I should note that I'm not for industrial farming: free-range meats are by far preferable, largely because they make better use of land. But if we're going to farm industrially, making better use of cattle barns seems like a good step in reducing ecological impact - doesn't it?
As far as the whole "meat is wasteful", something many anti-meat people don't realize is that most cattle are raised on open land which isn't suitable for anything else. We're talking semi-arid land which is barely able to support native grasses - 10 thousand acres per head of cattle.
These ranchers only then "finish" their cattle for a week or so to fatten them for market. This land is being put to good use: you'd be hard pressed to "grow" anything, unless we're talking about scrub brush. Not every locale in the US is the Shenandoah Valley.
Newspapers have always been sensationalist, at least in America. Going back to the US Revolution, there were competing papers which had very drastically differing slants.
The difference, I think, was that the articles were typically pretty black and white: you knew where they stood due to the support of or outright attacks against the paper's subjects. They were openly biased and, with regularity, also fairly entertaining to read as a result.
Today, so-called journalists masquerade their bias behind an air of "impartiality" and "professionalism". That's bullshit. To acknowledge an unavoidable personal bias is professional; to cloak it behind soft words and half-criticism (or only reporting on the things that put your agenda in the right light) is cowardly childishness.
That's kind of pathetic. It takes "good writing" right out to the shed.
Honestly, there are plenty of good examples where well-written headings win: somewhere like The Onion is a good example. No, it's not news, but it masquerades as it more often than not (as commentary) - and the headlines are entertaining. Likewise, you've got sites like Digg and Slashdot which (despite the poor editing) have good headlines and summaries which, usually, at least tell you what you're going to read after you click through.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of dates on content. This is particularly bad on blogs, but it's present on many news sites and forums as well. What the hell? In today's Internet world, where everything is time-sensitive and time-pertinent, what is the point of not having a date on your content? It can bring something technical from "this could be useful" to "it isn't useful, but I won't know it until trying it because there's no date".
On its face, the anti-missile defense systems for wide dispersal are a stupid idea. Why?
How many missile attacks have there been on the US?
On account of that number being "0", what is the most likely means of getting a nuclear device into the United States?
Compared to said missile defense systems, how much would it cost to:
1) Cease immigration from hostile nation-states and/or start profiling intelligently? 2) Start trying to effectively patrol the borders? 3) Reduce the number and size of enclaves in which likely Islamists can hide (through deportation of illegals).
Somehow, despite the effort, I suspect the cost would be cheaper than the missile systems. But regardless of anything like that, it won't be attempted due to such efforts biting the hand that feeds... and "new shiny" makes good copy.
Seagate has taken that design philosophy to heart and will soon be releasing 7" and 10.5" drives to meet demand.
On what merit do you say that?
I seem to recall that there was a good engineering reason (aside from "let's make it smaller and cheaper") behind ditching the larger disks. We don't see 5.25" drives any longer for the same reasons. I'm not sure what those reasons are, but I seem to recall it has to do with centerfugal force, and the damage that can be done to the disk when a) it's tilted while running or b) simply by running, it decreases some performance/operational metric.
It might be possible that the people taking part in this study have developed a discrimination bias which leads them to think "criminals are more likely to be ugly".
It's a "class" thing. If you're at Cornell, chances are you're around a lot of people who are "well bred". Your type doesn't commit crimes, obviously - but people "below" you do. Because they did not have a coddled upbringing (or for whatever reasons) they're more likely to exhibit traits that are found "ugly": yellow teeth, overweight, bad complexion, asymmetrical faces, no gym bodies, etc.
It'd be similar to the whole "black people commit more crimes" cultural bias that leads many people to instinctively avoid sketchy black people on the streets.
Another thing to consider: good looks are often associated with good nutrition, which is associated (in one way or another) with higher intelligence. This would mean the 'pretty' criminals would be less likely (statistically) to make stupid mistakes, less likely to have conclusive evidence held against them, and less likely to have actually done the crime in the first place.
That is, provided such correlation is actually true to begin with (in all cases).:P
Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium [wikipedia.org]. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
My god: why?!
Let's say 3000 years from now someone were to discover such a tomb - a scientifically advanced civilization skilled in the sciences of the earth, sky, and mind.
What do you think their response would be if they were to find a tomb full of complexly-encoded data? Might they even not recognize it as such, initially?
It's somewhat presumptuous that their encoding methods would be even remotely similar to our's: they may have made an entirely different approach to "computing", for instance. Maybe they were mathematically/electrically/whatever advanced enough to not even bother with the 'binary' approach to computing.
As such, they're stuck with a pretty much indecipherable mess: without having a clue what the binary data is supposed to translate to. What is the binary transitory to?
You're up against a situation many, many times more complex than deciphering ancient Egyptian hyroglyphs due to lack of context. At least with hyroglphs, you've got the possibility of figuring things out due to the common pictographic representation - but even still it's a shot in the dark.
So much of language is culturally derived, but short of that, it's numerical in basis (and how a solution might be derived). If you're only dealing with 2 basic symbols, derived into 16 hexadecimal symbols, and then finally into a "real actual data" format (or even with binary -> usable), you've got no basis on which to derive results.
I'm sure there's a term for it, but I don't know it: you've got a "blind spot" between the available data (binary) and what it's conveying.
In my opinion, the best way to do it would be as follows: * Your tomb itself would be accessible only with great strength (say, the weight that 20 strong men could push aside with levers). Make the door, and its surrounding encasement, of a material which does not weather or oxidize readily. On the door, inscribe (deeply) the purpose of the vault ("Tomb of Knowledge, 2010 AD, Whatever Solar Epoch") in numerous common languages. (Use a different font for each language so that their differences are somewhat indicated.) * Inscribe (in human-readable sizes) every single major human language, and the more esoteric/divergent minor written languages, onto a set of plaques and place them within a tomb in a geologically calm, mountainous area. * On these plaques you would have basic instructions as to what the tomb is, in each of the languages. The plaques would, when possible, be spaced so as like words are on the same location of associated plaques. * Then, pick the most common and/or easily interpretable/universal language and inscribe the bulk of your "human anthology" on those. Make sure a dictionary/thesaurus/etc. is written (and labeled) at the beginning of the stack; like in a library, 'section hangers' would point you in the right direction. * They would be within an inner vault, possibly only accessible through brute force (a lot of it) or solving a riddle derived from the knowledge in the entry vault - and hidden - to prevent its looting and destruction.
(You know, document your fucking work. Unlike 99% of sysadmins/programmers out there who make the most esoteric systems imaginable and then leave it to the birds. Assholes.)
The biggest problem with something like this is including "useless" information. If you're going to store something for an eon (or even 50 years), it better better be very important: history, science (which would include technology), classic literature, DNA records, extinct species, religious texts and the "work of cultures", and so on in decreasing importance. Likely also of significance (because this is what archeologists go gaga over today) would be including significant information about the everday lives and cultures of our societies.
My grandmother very well might buy a 3TB disk. Many grandmothers are heavily into photos, videos and the like of their children and grandchildren. Mine is: she's constantly taking pictures and video (to the point of obsession). That adds up.
But she's also "stuck" on XP due to her age and comprehension ability: learning the differences between XP and Vista was too much, and W7 would be as well, I am certain.
Not that a contradiction to the rule negates the rule, or anything. Just saying.:)
She's been using a RAID NAS device, which is nearing capacity. I'm pretty sure it runs Linux. Guess its probably time to upgrade that for her.
While at the same time, Linux systems are not on this treadmill - largely due to software design.
With Windows systems, the hardware you get is usually just 'adequate' for the software, even if you get a higher end system. This is less the case with W7, but it's been the case with every release so far. Furthermore, upgrades down the line are either not possible (OS X and the limited lifecycle) or tend to hit performance pretty hard (Windows service packs).
The average life cycle of my Linux systems has, so far, been about 5 years, with new memory and/or replacement disks being purchased either when they were cheap (RAM) or due to failure (hard disk). An Athlon 550 I bought in early 1999 ('98?) functioned well until I relegated that system to 'file server' and got an IBM Thinkpad X30 in 2004. That laptop lasted until last April (until the third disk failed and I decided it was time to replace it - 512M was actually getting a little tight due to Firefox and the desire to virtualize).
Throughout this time, I've not "skimped" and kept old software, and I've not gotten agitated by lack of performance (the x30 came close with the RAM limitation, though). No, the systems haven't been suitable for gaming, but then neither are most new systems, either. I suspect this Phenom II will last a good number of years for me: certainly 3 years.
(Granted, I've also been somewhat fortunate to get new systems right after the latest-greatest is cheap enough to consider buying - eg. DDR3 - allowing me to upgrade my RAM several years into use for 'pennies').
Older than 5 years? They seem to discard support for 10.5 already, and that's only out the gate for 3. Good luck finding any support for that or anything older at this point: either move to the latest-greatest from Apple or you're left in the (software) legacy dust.
Also, there was nothing wrong with the G4 you tossed. I've got one running Linux right now: I've taken the fans off/out, and I'm running it off CF as a "router with balls", doing all my router/ipsec/etc. stuff. It's also got a Samba 4 W2k AD domain on it, which when you consider the underlying system it's running on, is kinda ironic.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, I'm going to have to say "not freaking likely".
I ran (for about a year) debian slink (2.1 iirc) on a P120 with 96MB of RAM and an 800MB disk. It was almost unusable, even with that RAM upgrade (from 32MB).
That was with icewm and whatever the 'lightweight' browser was for the day (circa 2003). "Usable" is not a word I'd use to describe it unless we're talking about single-instance web browsing or IM.
"Intel has already won"?
Let's see: you can currently buy a capable Atom based mini-ITX board with a dual core processor for under $70 - sufficient system for a small office network server, workstation, and pretty much any common task. It's got lower power use than the competitors in the same price range as well as more performance. (In fact, the Atom boards are a bit cheaper than the cheapest Via and AMD board/CPU combos - and mostly fanless.)
Now consider that the latest Atom has a TDP of 2 watts, and in-use power utilization about average for existing smartphone platforms. It might not immediately/seamlessly boot Windows 7, but I'd wager a bet that someone will figure out how to get it to work on account of it being an x86 chip. And a common Linux distro might very well be able to install without too much kludgery, too.
This is something that just a couple years ago (when Atom first came out, there about) everyone said was impossible: Intel would never have anything that would compete with ARM processors on power utilization and performance. Yet these Mooreland CPUs appear to have just as much (if not more) performance than the latest, greatest Snapdragon and the iPad's SoC. Also consider how incredibly fast Intel came to market with this CPU (vs. the much more linear progression we've seen in the ARM platforms over the past decade).
I'm a Debian guy, but I should note: you can do this on RedHat/CentOS, too - though the 'minimal install' has grown substantially in recent years.
I really wish the 'minimal install' would not include such 'necessities' like snmpd and a mail daemon. I neither need nor want those security-issue packages on many installs (or want an alternative) and they're not appreciated. (BSDs are particularly prone to this nonsense. Sendmail and bind? Seriously? Can I get the machine pre-rooted?)
"Should" work?
Yeah, I've got a MobilePro 780 - it has 32MB RAM; I've got X running on it with ion3 under NetBSD. NetBSD 2.0. It barely runs - and this is an old TinyX (nanox? I can't recall) X server.
I had a P133 with 16MB of RAM, too. That ran icewm well.
The problem is that this isn't 1997, and X implementations are significantly bloated these days compared to back then. There have been a lot of changes - many have which have been acceptable improvements (memory use for performance improvements, support, etc.). Even the 'tiny' X implementations have this problem.
I've already posted in this thread elsewhere, but I just thought I might add: Google is likely part of your problem (inability to find anything useful).
I've noticed lately that Google has become much less of a useful resource when looking up technical information. You're more likely to find a useful link with "stupid" queries, but any level of complexity results in two out of three being only-sorta related. It's a mess, and historically useful search formatting (quoting, -, +, etc.) no longer really help.
I really hope a better alternative comes along soon (or google releases "geek.google.com" or some such thing - with the old indexing). The lack of good search results (nay, worse results) has really made my life more difficult.
Yet, that does not actually solve the problem. If you think it does, you don't understand the problem.
These devices only have 128M of RAM. That's not much: you won't be running X terribly well, nevermind a modern desktop. And the available packages for 'lightweight' stuff is woefully unequipped for something like this.
What the OP really should be looking at is MeeGo/Moblin or Maemo - though with only 128M of RAM, they might be a bit under powered for even that.
Maybe; maybe not.
Back in the day (ie, when the MobilePro 780 and similar "netbooks" were about and popular with Linux hackers - maybe 8-9 years ago), there were some non-trivial limitations to booting Linux or a BSD on the devices.
The problem was that there was no way to actually boot Linux natively without chainloading from within CE. Sure, the hardware worked, but the CE ROM address was hardcoded within the "BIOS", and there was no way to circumvent it.
As a result, booting was/is a 5-minute (manual) process due to CE's boot. It's highly cumbersome.
Additionally (and possibly somewhat related), I noticed that around 2004 or so, all of the "mobile computing" or "Borg-like computing" project pages, targeted products, and the like just sort of disappeared. Stuff like the "matchbox PC" from Stanford, twiddler keyboards (think that's what they called them), IR (etc.) keyboards for Palm, et al, and misc. other peripherals became difficult to find. No new products were coming to market in that segment.
Cool project pages where people had some interesting software work for mobile computing (including novel input/output devices) just kind of stopped being updated. Kernel porting and hardware support projects (eg. Linux on the MobilePro 780/880) were abandoned. I don't get it, but I'm going to have to guess that emergence of the first widely accessible smartphones distracted these adventurous types, or the hackable geek-preferred hardware simply dried up. It's really too bad. (Maybe the economy or impending adulthood had somethign to do with it, too?)
That said, I have good news and bad news: the good news is that it looks like the "embedded" computer with a keyboard is coming back (See: Viliv S7). Unfortunately, I also suspect that x86 Intel hardware will dominate the market instead of the "cooler" ARM hardware (OMG, Mooreland is impressive). We'll see how much that matters, but I hope "not very" - and we're able to have our cake and eat it too, despite (because of?) the Intel badging.
My hope (and guess) is that we'll have decently powerful MeeGo/Moblin/Maemo powered cell phones at a reasonable price within two years or so - whether that's what the vendor shipped on them or not.
And before you argue with me, be aware that I have a doctorate in animal agriculture, so unlike most /.er's my opinions on this topic are actually informed ones.
How about 1st and 2nd hand ranching experience?
10 thousand acres per head of cattle.
I'd love to see the source of that number.
The land is too arid to be grazed annually, and the number of head varies. So 150-200 head will graze a third of the land one year, then move on to another the next, and so on.
My understanding of moving from 'free range' to intensive barn-raised animals is largely attributable to several factors, the largest being specialization (husbandry vs. husbandry + land management + machinery maintenance + so on). It's more efficient in that less indepth knowledge in a mix of fields is necessary.
Not sure where you're getting "far more land for feed, animal housing", etc. figures from, but let me help you understand: much of the land used for ranching can not produce crops in any commercially viable fashion: we're talking yields under 15 bushels/acre (with fertilizing), assuming enough water could be acquired. This is, in the scheme of things, a use of 0 acres to raise said cattle: there's no way in hell you're going to get the land to produce anything else.
I know someone who just went 'organic free-range' with their cattle. Why? Well, they were already mostly doing it - not for dogmatic reasons, but because that's how they raised their cattle. The minor changes they made to get into 'organic' compliance actually saved them money, never mind being able to sell the resulting meat for more per pound.
"My computer is my TV, you insensitive clod!"
I live in a small apartment. I've just got a 24" LCD hooked up to a fanless system; I watch netflix DVDs, netflix and hulu online, as well as the occasional torrented TV show. Being as the apartment is smaller, it's not such a big deal. Consider: just a couple years ago, a 20" TV was the norm. I'm not seeing a problem with my 24" widescreen. It gives me a lot more options, and I don't have to sit through (nearly as many) commercials.
I really, really hate commercials.
Honestly, it's more than enough "media" for me: how the hell am I going to watch more than one or two shows a night and still get things done? I've no idea how people can justify 2-3 hours a night watching commercial-laden TV.
I have to wonder: where is the IRC connection?
I'm sure there was probably a movie in the 1980s which used the term "geek girl".
Yes, but some anime/manga is fantasized and 'idealized' child rape for those who like such things.
It doesn't matter that they look like a cartoon; the end fantasized result (within the human mind) is the same.
Now I'm just waiting for someone to post the numbers of gallons of water a beef-eating sysadmin uses. (Note: such numbers are largely crap, short of the ones for cooling a datacenter.)
This is an innovation and an improvement. It's not something to be poo-pooed. If we can make better use of the resources we have, everyone wins.
I should note that I'm not for industrial farming: free-range meats are by far preferable, largely because they make better use of land. But if we're going to farm industrially, making better use of cattle barns seems like a good step in reducing ecological impact - doesn't it?
As far as the whole "meat is wasteful", something many anti-meat people don't realize is that most cattle are raised on open land which isn't suitable for anything else. We're talking semi-arid land which is barely able to support native grasses - 10 thousand acres per head of cattle.
These ranchers only then "finish" their cattle for a week or so to fatten them for market. This land is being put to good use: you'd be hard pressed to "grow" anything, unless we're talking about scrub brush. Not every locale in the US is the Shenandoah Valley.
Newspapers have always been sensationalist, at least in America. Going back to the US Revolution, there were competing papers which had very drastically differing slants.
The difference, I think, was that the articles were typically pretty black and white: you knew where they stood due to the support of or outright attacks against the paper's subjects. They were openly biased and, with regularity, also fairly entertaining to read as a result.
Today, so-called journalists masquerade their bias behind an air of "impartiality" and "professionalism". That's bullshit. To acknowledge an unavoidable personal bias is professional; to cloak it behind soft words and half-criticism (or only reporting on the things that put your agenda in the right light) is cowardly childishness.
That's kind of pathetic. It takes "good writing" right out to the shed.
Honestly, there are plenty of good examples where well-written headings win: somewhere like The Onion is a good example. No, it's not news, but it masquerades as it more often than not (as commentary) - and the headlines are entertaining. Likewise, you've got sites like Digg and Slashdot which (despite the poor editing) have good headlines and summaries which, usually, at least tell you what you're going to read after you click through.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of dates on content. This is particularly bad on blogs, but it's present on many news sites and forums as well. What the hell? In today's Internet world, where everything is time-sensitive and time-pertinent, what is the point of not having a date on your content? It can bring something technical from "this could be useful" to "it isn't useful, but I won't know it until trying it because there's no date".
On its face, the anti-missile defense systems for wide dispersal are a stupid idea. Why?
How many missile attacks have there been on the US?
On account of that number being "0", what is the most likely means of getting a nuclear device into the United States?
Compared to said missile defense systems, how much would it cost to:
1) Cease immigration from hostile nation-states and/or start profiling intelligently?
2) Start trying to effectively patrol the borders?
3) Reduce the number and size of enclaves in which likely Islamists can hide (through deportation of illegals).
Somehow, despite the effort, I suspect the cost would be cheaper than the missile systems. But regardless of anything like that, it won't be attempted due to such efforts biting the hand that feeds... and "new shiny" makes good copy.
I have paid top-of-the-line antivirus software.
Well then. This is evidently your problem. :)
Seagate has taken that design philosophy to heart and will soon be releasing 7" and 10.5" drives to meet demand.
On what merit do you say that?
I seem to recall that there was a good engineering reason (aside from "let's make it smaller and cheaper") behind ditching the larger disks. We don't see 5.25" drives any longer for the same reasons. I'm not sure what those reasons are, but I seem to recall it has to do with centerfugal force, and the damage that can be done to the disk when a) it's tilted while running or b) simply by running, it decreases some performance/operational metric.
It might be possible that the people taking part in this study have developed a discrimination bias which leads them to think "criminals are more likely to be ugly".
It's a "class" thing. If you're at Cornell, chances are you're around a lot of people who are "well bred". Your type doesn't commit crimes, obviously - but people "below" you do. Because they did not have a coddled upbringing (or for whatever reasons) they're more likely to exhibit traits that are found "ugly": yellow teeth, overweight, bad complexion, asymmetrical faces, no gym bodies, etc.
It'd be similar to the whole "black people commit more crimes" cultural bias that leads many people to instinctively avoid sketchy black people on the streets.
Probably not.
Another thing to consider: good looks are often associated with good nutrition, which is associated (in one way or another) with higher intelligence. This would mean the 'pretty' criminals would be less likely (statistically) to make stupid mistakes, less likely to have conclusive evidence held against them, and less likely to have actually done the crime in the first place.
That is, provided such correlation is actually true to begin with (in all cases). :P
Essentially I keep coming back to punch-cards or similar. Not into paper, but into something like anodized titanium [wikipedia.org]. The colour spectrum available there could allow something like 4 or 8 bit encoding per dot. Not entirely sure about how small you can make the dots, nor how close together you can put them if you want more than just two colours.
My god: why?!
Let's say 3000 years from now someone were to discover such a tomb - a scientifically advanced civilization skilled in the sciences of the earth, sky, and mind.
What do you think their response would be if they were to find a tomb full of complexly-encoded data? Might they even not recognize it as such, initially?
It's somewhat presumptuous that their encoding methods would be even remotely similar to our's: they may have made an entirely different approach to "computing", for instance. Maybe they were mathematically/electrically/whatever advanced enough to not even bother with the 'binary' approach to computing.
As such, they're stuck with a pretty much indecipherable mess: without having a clue what the binary data is supposed to translate to. What is the binary transitory to?
You're up against a situation many, many times more complex than deciphering ancient Egyptian hyroglyphs due to lack of context. At least with hyroglphs, you've got the possibility of figuring things out due to the common pictographic representation - but even still it's a shot in the dark.
So much of language is culturally derived, but short of that, it's numerical in basis (and how a solution might be derived). If you're only dealing with 2 basic symbols, derived into 16 hexadecimal symbols, and then finally into a "real actual data" format (or even with binary -> usable), you've got no basis on which to derive results.
I'm sure there's a term for it, but I don't know it: you've got a "blind spot" between the available data (binary) and what it's conveying.
In my opinion, the best way to do it would be as follows:
* Your tomb itself would be accessible only with great strength (say, the weight that 20 strong men could push aside with levers). Make the door, and its surrounding encasement, of a material which does not weather or oxidize readily. On the door, inscribe (deeply) the purpose of the vault ("Tomb of Knowledge, 2010 AD, Whatever Solar Epoch") in numerous common languages. (Use a different font for each language so that their differences are somewhat indicated.)
* Inscribe (in human-readable sizes) every single major human language, and the more esoteric/divergent minor written languages, onto a set of plaques and place them within a tomb in a geologically calm, mountainous area.
* On these plaques you would have basic instructions as to what the tomb is, in each of the languages. The plaques would, when possible, be spaced so as like words are on the same location of associated plaques.
* Then, pick the most common and/or easily interpretable/universal language and inscribe the bulk of your "human anthology" on those. Make sure a dictionary/thesaurus/etc. is written (and labeled) at the beginning of the stack; like in a library, 'section hangers' would point you in the right direction.
* They would be within an inner vault, possibly only accessible through brute force (a lot of it) or solving a riddle derived from the knowledge in the entry vault - and hidden - to prevent its looting and destruction.
(You know, document your fucking work. Unlike 99% of sysadmins/programmers out there who make the most esoteric systems imaginable and then leave it to the birds. Assholes.)
The biggest problem with something like this is including "useless" information. If you're going to store something for an eon (or even 50 years), it better better be very important: history, science (which would include technology), classic literature, DNA records, extinct species, religious texts and the "work of cultures", and so on in decreasing importance. Likely also of significance (because this is what archeologists go gaga over today) would be including significant information about the everday lives and cultures of our societies.
My grandmother very well might buy a 3TB disk. Many grandmothers are heavily into photos, videos and the like of their children and grandchildren. Mine is: she's constantly taking pictures and video (to the point of obsession). That adds up.
But she's also "stuck" on XP due to her age and comprehension ability: learning the differences between XP and Vista was too much, and W7 would be as well, I am certain.
Not that a contradiction to the rule negates the rule, or anything. Just saying. :)
She's been using a RAID NAS device, which is nearing capacity. I'm pretty sure it runs Linux. Guess its probably time to upgrade that for her.
While at the same time, Linux systems are not on this treadmill - largely due to software design.
With Windows systems, the hardware you get is usually just 'adequate' for the software, even if you get a higher end system. This is less the case with W7, but it's been the case with every release so far. Furthermore, upgrades down the line are either not possible (OS X and the limited lifecycle) or tend to hit performance pretty hard (Windows service packs).
The average life cycle of my Linux systems has, so far, been about 5 years, with new memory and/or replacement disks being purchased either when they were cheap (RAM) or due to failure (hard disk). An Athlon 550 I bought in early 1999 ('98?) functioned well until I relegated that system to 'file server' and got an IBM Thinkpad X30 in 2004. That laptop lasted until last April (until the third disk failed and I decided it was time to replace it - 512M was actually getting a little tight due to Firefox and the desire to virtualize).
Throughout this time, I've not "skimped" and kept old software, and I've not gotten agitated by lack of performance (the x30 came close with the RAM limitation, though). No, the systems haven't been suitable for gaming, but then neither are most new systems, either. I suspect this Phenom II will last a good number of years for me: certainly 3 years.
(Granted, I've also been somewhat fortunate to get new systems right after the latest-greatest is cheap enough to consider buying - eg. DDR3 - allowing me to upgrade my RAM several years into use for 'pennies').
Older than 5 years? They seem to discard support for 10.5 already, and that's only out the gate for 3. Good luck finding any support for that or anything older at this point: either move to the latest-greatest from Apple or you're left in the (software) legacy dust.
Also, there was nothing wrong with the G4 you tossed. I've got one running Linux right now: I've taken the fans off/out, and I'm running it off CF as a "router with balls", doing all my router/ipsec/etc. stuff. It's also got a Samba 4 W2k AD domain on it, which when you consider the underlying system it's running on, is kinda ironic.
On a related note, those technologies advertised as "unhackable", "absolutely secure", "provably secure", etc. consistently fail to deliver.
You must be familiar with SonicWall, then.