Not true at all. You think it's more biased, but it's most likely just that you're more violently opposed to the particular brand of bias on Fox than on the other channels. I know that holds true for me, but in the reverse: I can't watch most of those other channels because the fundamental principles ('first beliefs') the reporters hold are plainly evident in the "biased" speech they use when interviewing and discussing - or even the particular slant or perspective they decide to take on a story.
News isn't so much news anymore as it is an action call from a political perspective. Yes, they're all guilty. One side operates off a "neocon lite" agenda with (at times) a strong seasoning of constitutional fervor, the other operates off of whatever they're calling the leftist agenda to destroy American principles (or the fascist and liberty agendas, respectively - depending on how you're coming at it).
It's hard (nigh impossible) to not be biased when there is no possible way to actually be unbiased due to the polarization of the political spectrum.
People already have yeast in their body, particularly if they have a high sugar intake (ie any westerner). There's yeast everywhere; what makes the inside of your body different?
Granted, it's not the kind of yeast you can make bread with (easily). But it's still there, feeding on sugars.
But what if the person is a diabetic, or pre-diabetic, and consumes no non-organic sugars or wheat? There would be minimal sugar-yeast in their body.
Along the lines of a broader application, however, this tool could be used for broader applications - both health and otherwise. Yeast in the blood is, I believe, suspected to be contributory to various ill health symptoms, and pretty much anyone in the western world has a lot of it due to sugar intake. It'd be useful for diabetics and pre-diabetics simply to keep sugar levels down (ie if it eats yeast, it'll allow for yeast to grow more rapidly due to the disproportionate sugar/yeast ratio).
Finally, couldn't it be harnessed for other applications as well?
What really need to happen is something similar to what happened to the GIF file format. In that case it was decided to develop a new image file format called PNG. There is room for doing the same thing with the file system. Although FAT is common, if everyone could agree an open alternative, and then encourage hardware manufacturers to provide the necessary drivers to Windows users, then we could finally move forward.
There's a big, big problem with that idea. Yes, it would be technically possible to implement something like this (trivial, even: just strip all multiuser functionality from ext2, and you'd already be mostly done.
The problem is that all current and past MS systems treat non-MS filesystems as "empty". Yes, there is a 3rd party ext2 driver for Windows. But that does not allow products not using MS 'technology' to enter the market. Maybe there's a way to put the driver on a small 1-2Mb partition, and have it get automatically installed on said system if it's not there already, but I don't see that happening to any useful degree: people will just format them, if possible, to MS formats (or simply not be able to access them).
Or you could be witty, and try something like, "I'm compensating." If they laugh in a non-scornful manner, they might just be a) witty enough and b) somewhat interested.
The OP is an idiot. More manly, he wants? Getting laid regularly is pretty manly. Maybe that's his problem: he's not getting laid regularly, and therefore lacks manliness.
While it's kind of weak, using his netbook as a pantie remover is not entirely morally abject.
There is a bit of a difference between ram use on linux and windows desktops, Linux tends to require less ram than a windows system to run, windows is far more likely to use all your ram and page out.
There's a fundamental difference in HOW Linux and Windows Vista (or XP) use RAM, and it's more substantial than just "more or less".
Obviously, if you've got bad RAM (say, only in the 3rd DIMM), and you rarely reach past the 2nd DIMM, you're not going to likely to notice the RAM problem for some time.
Linux will, depending on how the kernel/distro is configured, usually avoid caching into the top 100Mb of your RAM, instead swapping out as necessary. You can change the swappiness pretty easily (google vm.swappiness); this is really useful on laptops with slow disks and sufficient RAM; however, if you've got a lot of RAM, I suspect the common or even 'power' user will rarely, if ever use more than 1.5Gb.
The problem with Vista and bad RAM is that Vista is very, very aggressive in pre-caching data. If you're using all your RAM, you're going to notice RAM problems quickly.
It's not just the Windows culture, it's also Windows itself.
Yes, I will agree with you that if the system doesn't have OEM-installed crapware, a static install, good hardware, stable drivers, it will typically be pretty damn stable. But how often does that happen? The list is short:
* Well-done corporate hardware images * The dedicated hobbyist who is willing to go through testing and regression for (possibly) weeks until he gets it right.
Also, Windows - even Vista - will shit all over itself as the system ages from natural use. In this case, "natural use" is someone installing an application they need for a handful of tasks, and uninstalling it later. Or just installing it, often. These are often not crapware, just crappy software and/or installers. Quickbooks, Act!, and quite a few others. (Ironically, one way to partially delay this Windows stability corruption is to simply delete the files and not use the uninstaller.)
This is a completely unavoidable situation for a power user. I've only known one person to avoid instability by doing things like this, though this guy is an absolute wizard when it comes to Windows subsystems (he 'custom builds' his Windows install, which is currently an amalgamation of various hacked 2k, XP, and Vista DLLs, features, etc.). But this guy is an exception, and doing things which are well outside the realm of expected (or even accepted) Windows user behavior.
Funny, that was my experience of over 14 years of computer ownership: not a single disk failure, while the disk was 'mine' and in use, regardless of the age of the equipment.
This includes all the servers I've ever administered for companies. (Note, this does NOT mean I've put weight in my rare 'gift' and abused backups.)
I say "was", because recently I had 2 of 3 disks in a RAID array die within a handful of hours, followed by my personal USB hard drive 'backup' failing while attached to another system. Thankfully, no data was lost, but that's a lot of S to HTF in a fairly short period of time, to one person, when it's never happened before.
I would suspect you've got problematic hardware. That's the most likely cause of Windows FUBAR.
My experience with Linux, Windows, and glitchy hardware is fairly epic. Back in late '96, I got my first personal computer. It was from a fly-by-night shop, with sub-par parts: an integrated SiS motherboard, cheap RAM, Quantum Bigfoot drive. In retrospect, this computer likely had RAM problems when I got it, as in W95 is was more unstable than I was expecting.
Years went on, and I kept using this computer: I was a young geek who couldn't afford another $1500+ for a computer, after all. I heard that there was this linux thing that was rock-solid stable, so I decided to give it a try.
Long story short, the instability in the system got worse and worse - to the point where Windows would occasionally crash while or shortly after booting, but always several times an hour. I was down to using Linux for 99% of everything, and had mostly stopped gaming. Linux, while it wasn't rock-solid-stable, would only crash 2-3 times a day at the outside (in '99).
In '99, I did manage to patch and build the kernel with BadRAM, and that improved things measurably. (But it was time for a new system, anyway.)
Might try patching your kernel with BadRAM (not sure if Ubuntu does by default): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BadRAM
One or two books? Are you crazy? Don't school books cost ~100 average still, or have the costs gone up that much in the last 5 years?
I think the most expensive book I ever bought was ~$180. I also shared books when possible (unlike a computer, which isn't something easily shared, unless with a roommate. Sorta.)
I never heard of there being any 'security' problems. But I think that was largely due to the fact that it was a pretty small school, with most of the knowledgeable CS students actually either involved in the school's IT, or being friends with those who were.
I do recall that it was a fairly temporary thing (didn't last all school year, IIRC).
That's kind of a cop-out argument, in my experience. Yes, MySQL exhibits this kind of performance problem - but so does any db type app on OS X (10.4 and 10.5, in my experience). Take "FileMaker" which is a native, original MacOS app. Absolutely dogged in OS X with a sizable database - and performance is better under even Windows.
You can notice it in OS X with any non-GUI application which has high I/O. There's a lot more time spent in "wait" than should be.
Oh really? And what happens if there's war, destabilizing society (and reliable electrical power), for a scant decade? Or, for that matter, a multi-decade disaster?
Our data retention is firmly tied to electricity and electronics. We are unable to access it without electricity, and without electronics (and their further construction) we are unable to further retention.
As time goes on, we will be exponentially less likely to be able to retrieve said data - due to loss of human knowledge and equipment. It's not so simple as just picking up where we were; we'd have to start over at a much lower level, as everything we've got (short of printed documents) would likely be largely useless for the purpose of reproduction.
I figure that a generation after (compatible!) computers are no longer made, or 10 years after power ceases to be readily available to the common person/company, we will cease to have any sort of digital data retention (short of things written/printed on paper).
I would argue that most of the data out there is of the "Facebook", "Porn" and "Financial" variety. That's kind of a grim outlook on how we'll be presented to future archeologists.
But he even touches on the more interesting facet of this briefly - no one can read the damn Hieroglyphs any more, so what does it matter that it lasted 4000 years?
I suspect that the reason we can't read it 4000 years later is due to a number of social reasons which we are unable to know for certain, but able to hypothesize on. For instance, it might be the case that:
They never intended for other civilizations would want to read their stuff (it's inside sealed tombs, mostly, after all).
They didn't realize that their civilization would become extinct
They didn't realize other civilizations wouldn't use their methods for written language
Their written language was never intended to be precise, but abstract and contextual to their own society.
While our current methods aren't perfect, aside from the actual data preservation problem, we're pretty well off. Back in ancient Egypt, it's not likely that the ability to read and right was anything near commonplace - in all likelihood, it was more of a minimalist 'cult' of a couple hundred people who performed such tasks, as was the case in many ancient societies. Were there rules and guidelines for reading and writing so it could be easily and consistently understood?
We live in a data society, so those things are integral. Our languages are, for the most part, very clearly defined, composed of many small parts which make up the whole (as opposed to hieroglyphs, which are hit-or-miss): while not fully phonetic, English (and most other Latin based languages) could be deterred in a reasonable fashion.
I imagine that if you wanted to preserve information in a format which would survive the ages, it'd be much easier to do than it'd have been in times past. Take a couple thousand reasonably thin slabs of marble or granite (harder stone) and deeply etch the material in a readable sized, clear font. Then, provide a couple dozen/hundred tablets of clear pictographs with their linguistic equivalent - think, "children's book" or "hooked on phonics" - as well as latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes (and whatever else you might be able to convey in such a manner).
Oh really? I qualified for completely free tuition at the state colleges in Minnesota and South Dakota (and likely a couple other states that hold tuition reciprocity with Minnesota) when I attended due to my income level. There would have been no other way that I'd have been able to live on my own and take a full course load.
When you're living off of what you make working part time or FT at a crappy place, $700 is a freaking huge investment. That's like, 2-3 months of food!
One of the problems with printing facilities on campus is that it requires students to go to where the printers are.
A good solution is to subnet off printers, with automatic domain login and printer negotiation, to allow for students to print to their dorm's printer -or if they're in the library or study room, whichever printer is closest. Each printer gets a subnet, and if there's a student on said subnet, that's where s/he prints.
As far as doing away with computer labs... that really doesn't seem like a good idea to me. What if someone can afford tuition, but can't afford a laptop/desktop? Such things should be optional for higher education - seriously. (It's one thing if you're a science major, another if you're an arts major.) At least minimal computer labs should be maintained: 1, 2
On the other hand, I feel sorry for campus support staff - student employees and full-time 'professional' employees alike. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of a headache all those different Windows versions, Macs, and Linux machines would cause on a network, given that the network will be largely "administered". I can see some fairly draconian policies cropping up as the result of worms and things: you've got to have version $x of antivirus version $y installed, and you've got to hand over control of your (Windows) machine to the Directory (incl. automatic updates and the like) if you want to use campus computing services.
Kind of reminds me what (IIRC) was done on my college campus in late 2000/early 2001 after Win2k came out. Anyone who had W2k was required to be on the domain in a limited role or their MACs would be blacklisted (on account of how the NT4 domains were set up for labs and the like, IIRC) for fear of what someone might do with a machine that possesses network Administrator privileges.
Many people run headless Mac OS X systems and they're OK.
And how many of those people are slashdotted?
Lots of people don't know how to tune apache+whatever database in order to handle slashdot-type loads (hint: the defaults don't work).
And if they did, is there a way to 'tune' OS X to compensate for the horrible kernel I/O handling? There have been a handful of tests demonstrating OS X's 'server' inadequacies in this department - notably, here and here. Seriously: 1/10th the performance of the same software running on Linux is really quite absurd. Maybe it's better in 10.5, and maybe it'll be better still in 10.6, but my experience with dbs in 10.5 are still pretty lackluster, even if they're better (I don't know).
Yes, there's the --skip-thread-priority build option for MySQL, which supposedly increases OS X mysql performance. Are you referring to this? If so, how much does it improve performance?
There's a big difference between "SATA drive in a custom, proprietary drive caddy" and "SAS drive" - not only in terms of functionality, but also in terms of quality.
In short, half the reason why SAS is of a lower capacity isn't because then they can leech you of your money for higher capacity storage - though I'm sure that's a consideration. SAS, and other industrial drives, will often not jump the gun and implement higher densities, instead preferring to use those same enhancements to increase disk reliability and speed.
Cars are, first and foremost, for getting from point A to point B. The ideal is to do so comfortably.
The touchscreen looks like it would do anything but. I can imagine:
1) The backlit display interfering with night vision, even at a very low brightness level 2) Being unable to do simple - trivial - things, like change the radio station or skip a CD/mp3 track without looking away from the road. 3) Being able to quickly and efficiently finding (visually) the appropriate widget to tell you the information you're looking for.
That touchscreen doesn't even have widgets of a size and type which help you quickly identify what you're looking for! They look like mock-buttons, ffs! Weather/temp in particular.
Unless you program them to deal with that kind of thing, too. A lot of people have horrible writing ability and a marginal ability to parse odd sentence structures. I don't see how this would be any different.
The trick, I think, would be largely based on a collection of word dictionaries, broken down and categorized by subject, verb, etc. to make things easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true at all. You think it's more biased, but it's most likely just that you're more violently opposed to the particular brand of bias on Fox than on the other channels. I know that holds true for me, but in the reverse: I can't watch most of those other channels because the fundamental principles ('first beliefs') the reporters hold are plainly evident in the "biased" speech they use when interviewing and discussing - or even the particular slant or perspective they decide to take on a story.
News isn't so much news anymore as it is an action call from a political perspective. Yes, they're all guilty. One side operates off a "neocon lite" agenda with (at times) a strong seasoning of constitutional fervor, the other operates off of whatever they're calling the leftist agenda to destroy American principles (or the fascist and liberty agendas, respectively - depending on how you're coming at it).
It's hard (nigh impossible) to not be biased when there is no possible way to actually be unbiased due to the polarization of the political spectrum.
People already have yeast in their body, particularly if they have a high sugar intake (ie any westerner). There's yeast everywhere; what makes the inside of your body different?
Granted, it's not the kind of yeast you can make bread with (easily). But it's still there, feeding on sugars.
But what if the person is a diabetic, or pre-diabetic, and consumes no non-organic sugars or wheat? There would be minimal sugar-yeast in their body.
Along the lines of a broader application, however, this tool could be used for broader applications - both health and otherwise. Yeast in the blood is, I believe, suspected to be contributory to various ill health symptoms, and pretty much anyone in the western world has a lot of it due to sugar intake. It'd be useful for diabetics and pre-diabetics simply to keep sugar levels down (ie if it eats yeast, it'll allow for yeast to grow more rapidly due to the disproportionate sugar/yeast ratio).
Finally, couldn't it be harnessed for other applications as well?
First thought: that must be a gay man
Second thought: or maybe a bearded lady
Third thought: a gay geeky man with a scrubby beard?
What really need to happen is something similar to what happened to the GIF file format. In that case it was decided to develop a new image file format called PNG. There is room for doing the same thing with the file system. Although FAT is common, if everyone could agree an open alternative, and then encourage hardware manufacturers to provide the necessary drivers to Windows users, then we could finally move forward.
There's a big, big problem with that idea. Yes, it would be technically possible to implement something like this (trivial, even: just strip all multiuser functionality from ext2, and you'd already be mostly done.
The problem is that all current and past MS systems treat non-MS filesystems as "empty". Yes, there is a 3rd party ext2 driver for Windows. But that does not allow products not using MS 'technology' to enter the market. Maybe there's a way to put the driver on a small 1-2Mb partition, and have it get automatically installed on said system if it's not there already, but I don't see that happening to any useful degree: people will just format them, if possible, to MS formats (or simply not be able to access them).
Or you could be witty, and try something like, "I'm compensating." If they laugh in a non-scornful manner, they might just be a) witty enough and b) somewhat interested.
The OP is an idiot. More manly, he wants? Getting laid regularly is pretty manly. Maybe that's his problem: he's not getting laid regularly, and therefore lacks manliness.
While it's kind of weak, using his netbook as a pantie remover is not entirely morally abject.
There is a bit of a difference between ram use on linux and windows desktops, Linux tends to require less ram than a windows system to run, windows is far more likely to use all your ram and page out.
There's a fundamental difference in HOW Linux and Windows Vista (or XP) use RAM, and it's more substantial than just "more or less".
Obviously, if you've got bad RAM (say, only in the 3rd DIMM), and you rarely reach past the 2nd DIMM, you're not going to likely to notice the RAM problem for some time.
Linux will, depending on how the kernel/distro is configured, usually avoid caching into the top 100Mb of your RAM, instead swapping out as necessary. You can change the swappiness pretty easily (google vm.swappiness); this is really useful on laptops with slow disks and sufficient RAM; however, if you've got a lot of RAM, I suspect the common or even 'power' user will rarely, if ever use more than 1.5Gb.
The problem with Vista and bad RAM is that Vista is very, very aggressive in pre-caching data. If you're using all your RAM, you're going to notice RAM problems quickly.
It's not just the Windows culture, it's also Windows itself.
Yes, I will agree with you that if the system doesn't have OEM-installed crapware, a static install, good hardware, stable drivers, it will typically be pretty damn stable. But how often does that happen? The list is short:
* Well-done corporate hardware images
* The dedicated hobbyist who is willing to go through testing and regression for (possibly) weeks until he gets it right.
Also, Windows - even Vista - will shit all over itself as the system ages from natural use. In this case, "natural use" is someone installing an application they need for a handful of tasks, and uninstalling it later. Or just installing it, often. These are often not crapware, just crappy software and/or installers. Quickbooks, Act!, and quite a few others. (Ironically, one way to partially delay this Windows stability corruption is to simply delete the files and not use the uninstaller.)
This is a completely unavoidable situation for a power user. I've only known one person to avoid instability by doing things like this, though this guy is an absolute wizard when it comes to Windows subsystems (he 'custom builds' his Windows install, which is currently an amalgamation of various hacked 2k, XP, and Vista DLLs, features, etc.). But this guy is an exception, and doing things which are well outside the realm of expected (or even accepted) Windows user behavior.
Funny, that was my experience of over 14 years of computer ownership: not a single disk failure, while the disk was 'mine' and in use, regardless of the age of the equipment.
This includes all the servers I've ever administered for companies. (Note, this does NOT mean I've put weight in my rare 'gift' and abused backups.)
I say "was", because recently I had 2 of 3 disks in a RAID array die within a handful of hours, followed by my personal USB hard drive 'backup' failing while attached to another system. Thankfully, no data was lost, but that's a lot of S to HTF in a fairly short period of time, to one person, when it's never happened before.
Odds and MTBF are funny things.
I would suspect you've got problematic hardware. That's the most likely cause of Windows FUBAR.
My experience with Linux, Windows, and glitchy hardware is fairly epic. Back in late '96, I got my first personal computer. It was from a fly-by-night shop, with sub-par parts: an integrated SiS motherboard, cheap RAM, Quantum Bigfoot drive. In retrospect, this computer likely had RAM problems when I got it, as in W95 is was more unstable than I was expecting.
Years went on, and I kept using this computer: I was a young geek who couldn't afford another $1500+ for a computer, after all. I heard that there was this linux thing that was rock-solid stable, so I decided to give it a try.
Long story short, the instability in the system got worse and worse - to the point where Windows would occasionally crash while or shortly after booting, but always several times an hour. I was down to using Linux for 99% of everything, and had mostly stopped gaming. Linux, while it wasn't rock-solid-stable, would only crash 2-3 times a day at the outside (in '99).
In '99, I did manage to patch and build the kernel with BadRAM, and that improved things measurably. (But it was time for a new system, anyway.)
Might try patching your kernel with BadRAM (not sure if Ubuntu does by default): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BadRAM
One thing toddlers have on slugs, though. Mine didn't die the last time I put salt on it.
One or two books? Are you crazy? Don't school books cost ~100 average still, or have the costs gone up that much in the last 5 years?
I think the most expensive book I ever bought was ~$180. I also shared books when possible (unlike a computer, which isn't something easily shared, unless with a roommate. Sorta.)
I never heard of there being any 'security' problems. But I think that was largely due to the fact that it was a pretty small school, with most of the knowledgeable CS students actually either involved in the school's IT, or being friends with those who were.
I do recall that it was a fairly temporary thing (didn't last all school year, IIRC).
That's kind of a cop-out argument, in my experience. Yes, MySQL exhibits this kind of performance problem - but so does any db type app on OS X (10.4 and 10.5, in my experience). Take "FileMaker" which is a native, original MacOS app. Absolutely dogged in OS X with a sizable database - and performance is better under even Windows.
You can notice it in OS X with any non-GUI application which has high I/O. There's a lot more time spent in "wait" than should be.
Probably the best post in the thread, IMO.
Oh really? And what happens if there's war, destabilizing society (and reliable electrical power), for a scant decade? Or, for that matter, a multi-decade disaster?
Our data retention is firmly tied to electricity and electronics. We are unable to access it without electricity, and without electronics (and their further construction) we are unable to further retention.
As time goes on, we will be exponentially less likely to be able to retrieve said data - due to loss of human knowledge and equipment. It's not so simple as just picking up where we were; we'd have to start over at a much lower level, as everything we've got (short of printed documents) would likely be largely useless for the purpose of reproduction.
I figure that a generation after (compatible!) computers are no longer made, or 10 years after power ceases to be readily available to the common person/company, we will cease to have any sort of digital data retention (short of things written/printed on paper).
I would argue that most of the data out there is of the "Facebook", "Porn" and "Financial" variety. That's kind of a grim outlook on how we'll be presented to future archeologists.
But he even touches on the more interesting facet of this briefly - no one can read the damn Hieroglyphs any more, so what does it matter that it lasted 4000 years?
I suspect that the reason we can't read it 4000 years later is due to a number of social reasons which we are unable to know for certain, but able to hypothesize on. For instance, it might be the case that:
They never intended for other civilizations would want to read their stuff (it's inside sealed tombs, mostly, after all).
They didn't realize that their civilization would become extinct
They didn't realize other civilizations wouldn't use their methods for written language
Their written language was never intended to be precise, but abstract and contextual to their own society.
While our current methods aren't perfect, aside from the actual data preservation problem, we're pretty well off. Back in ancient Egypt, it's not likely that the ability to read and right was anything near commonplace - in all likelihood, it was more of a minimalist 'cult' of a couple hundred people who performed such tasks, as was the case in many ancient societies. Were there rules and guidelines for reading and writing so it could be easily and consistently understood?
We live in a data society, so those things are integral. Our languages are, for the most part, very clearly defined, composed of many small parts which make up the whole (as opposed to hieroglyphs, which are hit-or-miss): while not fully phonetic, English (and most other Latin based languages) could be deterred in a reasonable fashion.
I imagine that if you wanted to preserve information in a format which would survive the ages, it'd be much easier to do than it'd have been in times past. Take a couple thousand reasonably thin slabs of marble or granite (harder stone) and deeply etch the material in a readable sized, clear font. Then, provide a couple dozen/hundred tablets of clear pictographs with their linguistic equivalent - think, "children's book" or "hooked on phonics" - as well as latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes (and whatever else you might be able to convey in such a manner).
Oh really? I qualified for completely free tuition at the state colleges in Minnesota and South Dakota (and likely a couple other states that hold tuition reciprocity with Minnesota) when I attended due to my income level. There would have been no other way that I'd have been able to live on my own and take a full course load.
When you're living off of what you make working part time or FT at a crappy place, $700 is a freaking huge investment. That's like, 2-3 months of food!
One of the problems with printing facilities on campus is that it requires students to go to where the printers are.
A good solution is to subnet off printers, with automatic domain login and printer negotiation, to allow for students to print to their dorm's printer -or if they're in the library or study room, whichever printer is closest. Each printer gets a subnet, and if there's a student on said subnet, that's where s/he prints.
As far as doing away with computer labs... that really doesn't seem like a good idea to me. What if someone can afford tuition, but can't afford a laptop/desktop? Such things should be optional for higher education - seriously. (It's one thing if you're a science major, another if you're an arts major.) At least minimal computer labs should be maintained: 1, 2
On the other hand, I feel sorry for campus support staff - student employees and full-time 'professional' employees alike. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of a headache all those different Windows versions, Macs, and Linux machines would cause on a network, given that the network will be largely "administered". I can see some fairly draconian policies cropping up as the result of worms and things: you've got to have version $x of antivirus version $y installed, and you've got to hand over control of your (Windows) machine to the Directory (incl. automatic updates and the like) if you want to use campus computing services.
Kind of reminds me what (IIRC) was done on my college campus in late 2000/early 2001 after Win2k came out. Anyone who had W2k was required to be on the domain in a limited role or their MACs would be blacklisted (on account of how the NT4 domains were set up for labs and the like, IIRC) for fear of what someone might do with a machine that possesses network Administrator privileges.
Many people run headless Mac OS X systems and they're OK.
And how many of those people are slashdotted?
Lots of people don't know how to tune apache+whatever database in order to handle slashdot-type loads (hint: the defaults don't work).
And if they did, is there a way to 'tune' OS X to compensate for the horrible kernel I/O handling? There have been a handful of tests demonstrating OS X's 'server' inadequacies in this department - notably, here and here. Seriously: 1/10th the performance of the same software running on Linux is really quite absurd. Maybe it's better in 10.5, and maybe it'll be better still in 10.6, but my experience with dbs in 10.5 are still pretty lackluster, even if they're better (I don't know).
Yes, there's the --skip-thread-priority build option for MySQL, which supposedly increases OS X mysql performance. Are you referring to this? If so, how much does it improve performance?
There's a big difference between "SATA drive in a custom, proprietary drive caddy" and "SAS drive" - not only in terms of functionality, but also in terms of quality.
In short, half the reason why SAS is of a lower capacity isn't because then they can leech you of your money for higher capacity storage - though I'm sure that's a consideration. SAS, and other industrial drives, will often not jump the gun and implement higher densities, instead preferring to use those same enhancements to increase disk reliability and speed.
Cars are, first and foremost, for getting from point A to point B. The ideal is to do so comfortably.
The touchscreen looks like it would do anything but. I can imagine:
1) The backlit display interfering with night vision, even at a very low brightness level
2) Being unable to do simple - trivial - things, like change the radio station or skip a CD/mp3 track without looking away from the road.
3) Being able to quickly and efficiently finding (visually) the appropriate widget to tell you the information you're looking for.
That touchscreen doesn't even have widgets of a size and type which help you quickly identify what you're looking for! They look like mock-buttons, ffs! Weather/temp in particular.
Unless you program them to deal with that kind of thing, too. A lot of people have horrible writing ability and a marginal ability to parse odd sentence structures. I don't see how this would be any different.
The trick, I think, would be largely based on a collection of word dictionaries, broken down and categorized by subject, verb, etc. to make things easier.