Translation: we picked a (FreeBSD based) software stack years ago and stuck with it instead of moving to something better as they came along, because we'd made in-house modifications to the code base and not released them to the community. Now it's far behind the mainstream and we need help to stay competetive.
The one that interests me the most (because it impacts me most directly) is XenServer. It's supposedly based on RedHat as well, and they do a degree of kernel hackery to get all their Xenery to work. I'd be curious to see where that will go, given that XenServer development isn't exactly what you'd call cutting-edge in many regards: Citrix seems to just cut and release, with little regard for many important things like documentation being up to date or full hardware support.
You can be a certified unix without actually acknowledging/adhering the basic principles of what make Unix uh, what made it appealing. In those regards, OSX is almost entirely a failure (as are window management/DEs like KDE4 and GNOME, to a large degree - KDE3 was significantly better in the 'glue' regard).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Small is beautiful.
MacOS itself is quite monolythic in design. There is no "minimal install". There is no "small", for that matter.
Make each program do one thing well.
They've got applications which do a couple things well, and they borrow a great deal of BSD tools, which do one thing well. I don't know that it has any quality other than "uses the BSD tools" that makes it Unix-y. Applescript and/or the other scripting integration, maybe, but it's not exactly accessible or that easily leveraged.
Build a prototype as soon as possible.
Choose portability over efficiency.
Well, this is certainly very true for OSX: it runs on phones and "servers", and it isn't terribly efficient.
Store data in flat text files.
XML fail.
Use software leverage to your advantage.
Honestly, not it's strong suite, unless you're considering the App Store as part of "OS X".
Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
Not so much. (But then, FreeBSD, with periodic, fails in this regard. It increases lock-in and decreases portability...)
Avoid captive user interfaces.
Massive, massive fail.
Make every program a filter.
Not so much, in as far as there's really not much of a linear divide between CLI and GUI. CLI tools are treated as a "god mode", for the most part.
The 10 lesser tenets are not universally agreed upon as part of the Unix philosophy and, in some cases, are hotly debated such as Monolithic Kernels vs. Microkernels:
Allow the user to tailor the environment.
Apple: there is one GUI, and one GUI only. Do not even think of changing something significant, like mouse focus.
Make operating system kernels small and lightweight.
They did pretty well in this regard.
Use lowercase and keep it short.
Yep, that's exactly what they (didn't) do: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12505262
Save trees.
... buy a new Mac every time a new one comes out? Lithium is much more expendable.... and so on.
So where does it leave us - the people who dislike shitty GUI and CLI interfaces/implementations?
For being a mouse-driven OS, it sucks at it. There is an obscene amount of mousing required for some of the most basic tasks, and keyboard shortcuts only mildly improve the matter. Want to avoid carpel tunnel? Don't get a Mac. (Have they fixed the "big screens need a high-mpg vehicle to navigate" slow scrolling problem, yet? Last I looked, short of using drivers from Microsoft and/or a Microsoft mouse, there was no work around.)
Console interface? Sure, it's got bash, or tcsh, or zsh, or whatever the hell you want to use. The filesystem sucks nuts, and it's horribly inaccessible in that the pathnames are long with spaces. It's got a crude mix-match of BSD utilities, so if you want anything relatively modern or featureful, you've got to use something crude and poorly conceived (due to it being based on ports) like Darwin Ports. It fits in well with the (legacy) Apple approach of "why upgrade it if it's working well?" but on a modern system it's somewhat pathetic.
It's short-sighted, though, and I'd argue that it's a bit of a feedback loop.
Honestly, there really isn't all that much in-shoring going on, from what I've seen. Sure, you've got call centers and a couple other things, but IT as a whole does not seem to have gotten much in-shoring - particularly jobs relating to programming. As someone in the Dakotas, this is what I've observed:
Jobs going overseas:
* programming (by far the greatest) * dba work (via MSPs, mostly) * some sysadmin work (via MSPs).
Jobs getting inshored: * dba and sysadmin work (remote MSPs/support) * helpdesks (eg. Cisco in Omaha).
As the trend may suggest, the industry is optimizing. There aren't as many in-house programmers for medium sized businesses, because it's cheaper to contract out the work to some firm in Nebraska than it is to have 2-3 guys on staff to do the work for you. The same is true for sysadmin work: much more is handled by MSPs (paying slightly less to their employees than would occur internally, but at the same time being more efficient in their employee area of focus and time allocation, making it beneficial all-around). This is particularly true for the small-medium business market, even if the organization isn't pushing their whole operation to MSPs (eg. hire a firm to manage their Linux servers if they've only got a handful and their internal staff can't hack anything but vendored stuff).
On the flip side, I'd argue the bigger reasons why IT and CS are being avoided is because of a combination of the following:
* It doesn't pay as well as it did during the boom. * There is little stability/high turnover due to the following * Employers do not respect you or the time it reasonably takes to accomplish the job properly. * Correlatively, there are tight deadlines coupled with under-funding. * There is little opportunity for 'real science' or inventive IT within the field (proportionately speaking)
Why would I want a job with day-trader level stresses (responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in equipment/assets at any one time) for the same kind of salary a engineering draftsman would make, with the likely 'career ceiling' around somewhere that a civil engineer would be making in 5-10 years after getting their PE - who's going to have a much more stable career, to boot? There's a reason that engineering has seen a boom in the past decade, in terms of the number of graduates.
I concur with you wholeheartedly. Frankly, I'd consider the companies on this list to be the most litigious, most likely to push one under the table to law enforcement, and least favorable to do business with. I should note, this is after seeing the headline and thinking "Wow, cool, Microsoft is improving. I've thought they've had some decent products over the last couple years, and have been particularly non-hostile."
Ditto on the alcohol and firearms. A firearm in the home is much more likely to be used to preserve life of the house's tenants than save it. Alcohol, in addition to being a great medical aide, is also (IMO) a superior antidepressant/coping mechanism than, say, SSRI antidepressants.
And tobacco. In terms of those harmed and business ethics, they're at least on par with "Big Pharma", and it's unlikely that they can pull too many favors due to the political hostility in play against them due to people thinking "what I think is good for me is good for you, too".
Are you saying this as affirmation to what I said, or as a misguided and poorly reasoned contradiction?
"It's as unobtainable as finding a country with precisely 0 greedy assholes" fits the criteria of "not an obtainable goal". In other words, not humanly possible.
You kinda hit the nail on the head - focus is on SSDs.
Hard drive prices have been dropping for the 1-2Tb drives for the past two years or so. I picked up two Hitachi 1Tb drives for just a hair over $100 two years ago (still going strong, no complaints), on a special. Today, cheaper 1Tb drives can be had for around $60/each, and 2Tb drives for under $100.
However, the cost decreases per Gb have been much more significant (as a proportion) on the SSD front. A 30Gb "cheap" SSD cost about $180 a year ago. Today, you can pick up a 50Gb for around $60 that has a Sandforce controller and gets twice the throughput of the cheaper one.
Spinning disks are becoming niche. Most people really don't need (or even use) all that much space on their hard drives. Hell, my 'main' Windows 7 machine at home has a 120Gb drive in it; despite having about 10 games, Office, and a handful of other things installed, there's still space on the drive - and even my 'light use' appears to be more significant than what most people use, judging from the PCs I've repaired. 10Gb of non-application data seems to be on the high end, and most of that is usually family videos and pictures (and/or porn).
Today, I think the primary market for hard drives is moving towards the data center/server room/colo. "Any old disk" at 10k/15k RPM will do the trick in most servers, and if you need more storage than that, there are those 5Tb+ SANs available. Even most small/medium companies don't have much more than 1Tb of data that needs to be backed up - if that (assuming they're not doing Exchange or the like).
I figure that in a couple years, we'll start to see systems from Dell/HP/etc. shipping primarily with SSD storage, with a hard disk option/included (depending on which system we're talking about). Laptops will be doing the same. The price for hard drives will potentially start going up, as demand from the OEMs decreases. Hard drives will once again become the domain of geeks (of all stripes - photography, video, hoarders, porn addicts etc) and business.
His means were what people such as you seem to think his agenda was. If it were, the results would have been somewhat aligned with the goals (50% effectiveness) - assuming the agenda had any merit or possibility in the first place. The possibility that Marxism was not and is not an obtainable goal seems to escape most people.
It's hard to make something up from nothing, and it's counterproductive if you are trying to make arguments you want other people to understand.
Not so. Idealized Marxism is something from nothing, and people quite understand (or at least, cling on to) the ideal. Like all radicalized systems of government, it tends to ignore the facts of human nature in its implementation and fail utterly.
I actually think that may have been the same basic vein of argument Plato was making - along the lines of political/social/cultural organizations, and possibly existentialism.
I have a hard time believing that any civilization could be so orderly to get all citizens to build their cities in circles.
There have been numerous smaller/extinct civilizations which have been found which are of circular design throughout the world. I seem to recall hearing/reading about them in Europe, Asia, and South America, but there may have been more.
Of non-trivial import are Persian Sassanian urban design - Babylon as well as Baghdad were/are circular cities. Even the modern urban sprawl mimicks this design, in poor abstract: everything radiates from the center. A circular city design is the height of good engineering: it may cost more to construct, initially, and involve more headache involving the construction of buildings on a perfect square, but there are many arguments for it. (For one, transportation is more efficient due to the average of distance from point A to point B always being shorter than were it to be from point
And building a circular canal means a spoke and ring system of waterways, when any semi-sane engineer would just settle for a spoke and hub system, no need to lay out perfect rings.
Spoke and ring would allow for more consistent subdivision of land as well as enable more intensive agriculture (due to consistent delivery of water). You will also need fewer canals dug (in terms of land volume used) with spoke and ring than with spoke and hub, saving labor. (With the spoke and ring system, several large hubs could more effectively distribute heavy rain water evenly, vs. a spoke and hub, which would tend to have the water pool near the hub instead of making it to the outlying area, on account of soil permeability.)
Also consider, spoke and ring makes it easier to construct adjoining roadways and bridges from the city center to the outlying areas without causing pathway congestion towards the city center.
Plato's Atlantis may be fiction, but it's possible that it's myth built on historical fact. There were numerous token records of a 'lost civilization' as well as confirmation within other tomes of antiquity. The problem is that the documents/sources referenced by these tomes are long since destroyed (eg. in Alexandria), so there's no independent corroboration.
When you combine the myth-for-teaching having been based on a similar historic record with other, surrounding historic information, the possibility starts to look a bit stronger. There is some strong contention with the "Egyptology" approach to dating things, as well as the cloistered method in which "Egyptology" is practiced. It tends to ignore other scientific disciplines and their findings (eg. such as the actual age of the pyramids or sphinx). The congruous nature in which the pyramids were made, as well as the mimicking pyramids of the Americas and elsewhere, all aligned in similiar fashions, the question of "was there a long-lost civilization that had the power to span the globe?" This posses an opening for "Atlantis".
It's kind of like if I were to go to Africa and find a mummy with a Gameboy-like device at his feet, inside the coffin. The only thing left would be the PCB and plastic casing, as the rest had completely rotted/decayed. The plastic is brittle with age and the PCB has cracked, so it's obviously of antiquity. Yet, it's out of place: I have to assume either it was placed there in contention or it's a legitimate artifact, and the current understanding of the timeline is wrong. The pyramids across the world, aligned "perfectly" in a geographically congruent fashion, suggest just such a scenario.
I'm of the opinion that if there were an Atlantis, it was at such a time period that any records of it (statues, buildings, the results of industrial processes, etc.) would have either long been utterly destroyed, or be unrecognizable to us as such due to their erosion and antiquity or to their inclusion into our own status quo existence (eg. the 'old' churches in England, built upon old burial/rite sites, which demark an even more aged site - the significance of which has long since been lost). If we find Atlantis, we're not goign to find pillars sticking from the soil or ocean floor with mosaics still intact unless by some miraculous scenario the entire island was hermetically sealed. What we may find is a pile of rubble, pebbles, and dirt with chemical traces suggesting the presence of metals. (After all, even cities destroyed by disaster in the past 2000 years have very little evidence of their existence remaining, and then only after years of excavation; what of a city 5,000 - 10,000 years old?)
That is "one thing" though I'd not necessarily consider it "good".
Wind is effective for small-scale localized power consumption. Much bigger or beyond that and it tends to cause more problems than its worth (in terms of power grid distribution).
I'm not sure it's worth it, to be honest. The cost involved is significant due to infrastructure and upkeep, and nevermind the catastrophic environmental damage (both at the installation site as well as the consumed construction materials/mining required).
As for the browsers in question, I can't personally speak.
However, what I can say is this: there are irritating bugs shared by both ff3 and chromium based browsers (caching implementation), and I'd suspect they'd be present on safari as well. If IE4 has fixed the problem, and IE doesn't have it, it's likely the average user would notice, I suspect: I've experienced 2-3+ second waits when going to a page because the browser is too stupid to be able to actually go to the page and ignore the cache.
Hacker guy: Yeah, I know. Just think how much faster I could have done it if you hadn't shot my best friend five minutes ago, didn't have a knife in my back, and I didn't have to power the mainframe with this hamster wheel.
That, right there. Whiskey on the keyboard. Shame!
That said, you reminded me of Hackers, where they're talking about 586 RISC processors and the like. It was bad, really bad - but it was close enough in enough regards that it spurred my budding interests to figure out what the hell they were talking about. It was a "cool" film for a teen, and but between the computer mysticism and Jollie's breasts, it pretty much pushed me over the edge into geekdom.
Today, I waste most of my time delved into much of the same things - albeit at a more... realistic, and less dramatic, sure, but still - I enjoy it.
Also, I want an AMD Bobcat and a couple SSDs, man. Who's sending them to me? So sexy.
There used to be a lot more diesels on the road than there are now, as a proportion - such as in the 70s and 80s. Buick's shit 5.7l dieseline engine pretty much ruined an entire generation or two's opinion of the things.
The reason diesel is more expensive now is due to the cost of making (first, until a couple years ago) low sulfur diesel, and now ultra low sulfur diesel, combined with the different (additional) taxes placed on the fuel at several points throughout production. Diesel itself - traditional, real diesel - is relatively inexpensive to make, as it's one of the first things spun off the crude oil. Gasoline, on the other hand, is simply a byproduct of this process. The percentage of diesel produced from crude can be changed/fluctuated in proportion to gasoline based on need (though this is not a 1:1 conversion - a lot of the energy value in the crude is lost when converting it to the lesser gasoline).
So really, diesel is more expensive now, in part, because of increased demand for gasoline. The rest is government regulation.
As someone who does have one of these rare (older, purely mechanical) diesels, let me just say: I'm pleased as punch by this development as well.
Why?
Because ethanol sucks, on a number of reasons. Here are a couple marks against ethanol, in case anyone's interested/haven't read/observed these things themselves:
* Ethanol actually decreases the effectiveness of the gasoline in most vehicles. This isn't just on a 1:1 comparison to regular/traditional unleaded, but in absolute terms: Say you put in 10 gallons of 10% ethanol gas in the tank. You will get 90% (or less, usually) of the mileage realized with 9 gallons of ethanol-free fuel. In other words, it takes more gas to get the same distance, if that gas has ethanol in it, even after compensating the volume consumed by the ethanol. (I don't know why this is, overtly - energy required to burn the water?) * The subsidies involved divert agricultural efforts from legitimate crop production, driving up food costs - from corn meal to chips and beef. * Land which would normally lay fallow (for the production/preservation of game, for instance, or to simply allow the soil to recover) have been converted over to corn production due to government subsidies. * Significant to me: ethanol makes gasoline unsuitable as an additive to vegetable oil for 'straight mix' burning in a diesel engine due to it's low boiling point (isobutanol just skirts above the 'safe' threshold to avoid vapor lock and/or build-up post shutdown).
When you need your sofa moved, help re-roofing your house, or maybe someone to do your lawn for you when you're out of town - things anyone should be able to help with - just remember your attitude as it pertains to PC repair. They should have no problem dropping what they're doing and give you a hand, on your schedule.
That's the attitude most approach us with for help with their computers, anyway. It should be a two-way street. IF it isn't, there's a discrepency in your friendship(s).
Look, I have no problem helping friends when they're in need. The problem is that it's not just friends, it's people who "know you do computers". If there's the suggestion they might have to pay, they get agitated. Most won't even offer a beer or a glass of whatever while you're doing your 'magic'. If you refuse, they get PO'd.
So, I don't do that nonsense anymore. Simply put. Let them be pissed (and many will, when you say no, you won't do it for free), that's their perogative as an inferior human being.
I would not be amazed if the actual number of failed drives is about 8 times lower than HDD.
I would. Who bothers returning/RMAing a failed hard drive if it's one of the cheap models? Or after 2-3 years of use? Hardly anyone. They trash them and get new ones.
The only reason that was momentous (no pun intended) was because it was IBM that it happened to. At the time, they were the authority on reliable storage, and it came as a bit of a shock to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: we picked a (FreeBSD based) software stack years ago and stuck with it instead of moving to something better as they came along, because we'd made in-house modifications to the code base and not released them to the community. Now it's far behind the mainstream and we need help to stay competetive.
The one that interests me the most (because it impacts me most directly) is XenServer. It's supposedly based on RedHat as well, and they do a degree of kernel hackery to get all their Xenery to work. I'd be curious to see where that will go, given that XenServer development isn't exactly what you'd call cutting-edge in many regards: Citrix seems to just cut and release, with little regard for many important things like documentation being up to date or full hardware support.
10.7v lions? Where can I get those batteries? They must be huge...
Oh! Entertainment devices and phones! Are we counting VCRs and TiVOs now, too?
You can be a certified unix without actually acknowledging/adhering the basic principles of what make Unix uh, what made it appealing. In those regards, OSX is almost entirely a failure (as are window management/DEs like KDE4 and GNOME, to a large degree - KDE3 was significantly better in the 'glue' regard).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Small is beautiful.
MacOS itself is quite monolythic in design. There is no "minimal install". There is no "small", for that matter.
Make each program do one thing well.
They've got applications which do a couple things well, and they borrow a great deal of BSD tools, which do one thing well. I don't know that it has any quality other than "uses the BSD tools" that makes it Unix-y. Applescript and/or the other scripting integration, maybe, but it's not exactly accessible or that easily leveraged.
Build a prototype as soon as possible.
Choose portability over efficiency.
Well, this is certainly very true for OSX: it runs on phones and "servers", and it isn't terribly efficient.
Store data in flat text files.
XML fail.
Use software leverage to your advantage.
Honestly, not it's strong suite, unless you're considering the App Store as part of "OS X".
Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
Not so much. (But then, FreeBSD, with periodic, fails in this regard. It increases lock-in and decreases portability...)
Avoid captive user interfaces.
Massive, massive fail.
Make every program a filter.
Not so much, in as far as there's really not much of a linear divide between CLI and GUI. CLI tools are treated as a "god mode", for the most part.
The 10 lesser tenets are not universally agreed upon as part of the Unix philosophy and, in some cases, are hotly debated such as Monolithic Kernels vs. Microkernels:
Allow the user to tailor the environment.
Apple: there is one GUI, and one GUI only. Do not even think of changing something significant, like mouse focus.
Make operating system kernels small and lightweight.
They did pretty well in this regard.
Use lowercase and keep it short.
Yep, that's exactly what they (didn't) do: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12505262
Save trees.
... buy a new Mac every time a new one comes out? Lithium is much more expendable. ... and so on.
So where does it leave us - the people who dislike shitty GUI and CLI interfaces/implementations?
For being a mouse-driven OS, it sucks at it. There is an obscene amount of mousing required for some of the most basic tasks, and keyboard shortcuts only mildly improve the matter. Want to avoid carpel tunnel? Don't get a Mac. (Have they fixed the "big screens need a high-mpg vehicle to navigate" slow scrolling problem, yet? Last I looked, short of using drivers from Microsoft and/or a Microsoft mouse, there was no work around.)
Console interface? Sure, it's got bash, or tcsh, or zsh, or whatever the hell you want to use. The filesystem sucks nuts, and it's horribly inaccessible in that the pathnames are long with spaces. It's got a crude mix-match of BSD utilities, so if you want anything relatively modern or featureful, you've got to use something crude and poorly conceived (due to it being based on ports) like Darwin Ports. It fits in well with the (legacy) Apple approach of "why upgrade it if it's working well?" but on a modern system it's somewhat pathetic.
It's short-sighted, though, and I'd argue that it's a bit of a feedback loop.
Honestly, there really isn't all that much in-shoring going on, from what I've seen. Sure, you've got call centers and a couple other things, but IT as a whole does not seem to have gotten much in-shoring - particularly jobs relating to programming. As someone in the Dakotas, this is what I've observed:
Jobs going overseas:
* programming (by far the greatest)
* dba work (via MSPs, mostly)
* some sysadmin work (via MSPs).
Jobs getting inshored:
* dba and sysadmin work (remote MSPs/support)
* helpdesks (eg. Cisco in Omaha).
As the trend may suggest, the industry is optimizing. There aren't as many in-house programmers for medium sized businesses, because it's cheaper to contract out the work to some firm in Nebraska than it is to have 2-3 guys on staff to do the work for you. The same is true for sysadmin work: much more is handled by MSPs (paying slightly less to their employees than would occur internally, but at the same time being more efficient in their employee area of focus and time allocation, making it beneficial all-around). This is particularly true for the small-medium business market, even if the organization isn't pushing their whole operation to MSPs (eg. hire a firm to manage their Linux servers if they've only got a handful and their internal staff can't hack anything but vendored stuff).
On the flip side, I'd argue the bigger reasons why IT and CS are being avoided is because of a combination of the following:
* It doesn't pay as well as it did during the boom.
* There is little stability/high turnover due to the following
* Employers do not respect you or the time it reasonably takes to accomplish the job properly.
* Correlatively, there are tight deadlines coupled with under-funding.
* There is little opportunity for 'real science' or inventive IT within the field (proportionately speaking)
Why would I want a job with day-trader level stresses (responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in equipment/assets at any one time) for the same kind of salary a engineering draftsman would make, with the likely 'career ceiling' around somewhere that a civil engineer would be making in 5-10 years after getting their PE - who's going to have a much more stable career, to boot? There's a reason that engineering has seen a boom in the past decade, in terms of the number of graduates.
Why would you use the cat for power generation when you've got a nuclear steam generator onboard? Harness it directly.
I concur with you wholeheartedly. Frankly, I'd consider the companies on this list to be the most litigious, most likely to push one under the table to law enforcement, and least favorable to do business with. I should note, this is after seeing the headline and thinking "Wow, cool, Microsoft is improving. I've thought they've had some decent products over the last couple years, and have been particularly non-hostile."
Ditto on the alcohol and firearms. A firearm in the home is much more likely to be used to preserve life of the house's tenants than save it. Alcohol, in addition to being a great medical aide, is also (IMO) a superior antidepressant/coping mechanism than, say, SSRI antidepressants.
And tobacco. In terms of those harmed and business ethics, they're at least on par with "Big Pharma", and it's unlikely that they can pull too many favors due to the political hostility in play against them due to people thinking "what I think is good for me is good for you, too".
Are you saying this as affirmation to what I said, or as a misguided and poorly reasoned contradiction?
"It's as unobtainable as finding a country with precisely 0 greedy assholes" fits the criteria of "not an obtainable goal". In other words, not humanly possible.
Here's something else that might scare you: breathing oxygen produces CO2 - and what's more, you can die by breathing too much oxygen.
You kinda hit the nail on the head - focus is on SSDs.
Hard drive prices have been dropping for the 1-2Tb drives for the past two years or so. I picked up two Hitachi 1Tb drives for just a hair over $100 two years ago (still going strong, no complaints), on a special. Today, cheaper 1Tb drives can be had for around $60/each, and 2Tb drives for under $100.
However, the cost decreases per Gb have been much more significant (as a proportion) on the SSD front. A 30Gb "cheap" SSD cost about $180 a year ago. Today, you can pick up a 50Gb for around $60 that has a Sandforce controller and gets twice the throughput of the cheaper one.
Spinning disks are becoming niche. Most people really don't need (or even use) all that much space on their hard drives. Hell, my 'main' Windows 7 machine at home has a 120Gb drive in it; despite having about 10 games, Office, and a handful of other things installed, there's still space on the drive - and even my 'light use' appears to be more significant than what most people use, judging from the PCs I've repaired. 10Gb of non-application data seems to be on the high end, and most of that is usually family videos and pictures (and/or porn).
Today, I think the primary market for hard drives is moving towards the data center/server room/colo. "Any old disk" at 10k/15k RPM will do the trick in most servers, and if you need more storage than that, there are those 5Tb+ SANs available. Even most small/medium companies don't have much more than 1Tb of data that needs to be backed up - if that (assuming they're not doing Exchange or the like).
I figure that in a couple years, we'll start to see systems from Dell/HP/etc. shipping primarily with SSD storage, with a hard disk option/included (depending on which system we're talking about). Laptops will be doing the same. The price for hard drives will potentially start going up, as demand from the OEMs decreases. Hard drives will once again become the domain of geeks (of all stripes - photography, video, hoarders, porn addicts etc) and business.
You've got it backwards.
Stalin's dream was totalitarian control.
His means were what people such as you seem to think his agenda was. If it were, the results would have been somewhat aligned with the goals (50% effectiveness) - assuming the agenda had any merit or possibility in the first place. The possibility that Marxism was not and is not an obtainable goal seems to escape most people.
It's hard to make something up from nothing, and it's counterproductive if you are trying to make arguments you want other people to understand.
Not so. Idealized Marxism is something from nothing, and people quite understand (or at least, cling on to) the ideal. Like all radicalized systems of government, it tends to ignore the facts of human nature in its implementation and fail utterly.
I actually think that may have been the same basic vein of argument Plato was making - along the lines of political/social/cultural organizations, and possibly existentialism.
I have a hard time believing that any civilization could be so orderly to get all citizens to build their cities in circles.
There have been numerous smaller/extinct civilizations which have been found which are of circular design throughout the world. I seem to recall hearing/reading about them in Europe, Asia, and South America, but there may have been more.
Of non-trivial import are Persian Sassanian urban design - Babylon as well as Baghdad were/are circular cities. Even the modern urban sprawl mimicks this design, in poor abstract: everything radiates from the center. A circular city design is the height of good engineering: it may cost more to construct, initially, and involve more headache involving the construction of buildings on a perfect square, but there are many arguments for it. (For one, transportation is more efficient due to the average of distance from point A to point B always being shorter than were it to be from point
And building a circular canal means a spoke and ring system of waterways, when any semi-sane engineer would just settle for a spoke and hub system, no need to lay out perfect rings.
Spoke and ring would allow for more consistent subdivision of land as well as enable more intensive agriculture (due to consistent delivery of water). You will also need fewer canals dug (in terms of land volume used) with spoke and ring than with spoke and hub, saving labor. (With the spoke and ring system, several large hubs could more effectively distribute heavy rain water evenly, vs. a spoke and hub, which would tend to have the water pool near the hub instead of making it to the outlying area, on account of soil permeability.)
Also consider, spoke and ring makes it easier to construct adjoining roadways and bridges from the city center to the outlying areas without causing pathway congestion towards the city center.
Plato's Atlantis may be fiction, but it's possible that it's myth built on historical fact. There were numerous token records of a 'lost civilization' as well as confirmation within other tomes of antiquity. The problem is that the documents/sources referenced by these tomes are long since destroyed (eg. in Alexandria), so there's no independent corroboration.
When you combine the myth-for-teaching having been based on a similar historic record with other, surrounding historic information, the possibility starts to look a bit stronger. There is some strong contention with the "Egyptology" approach to dating things, as well as the cloistered method in which "Egyptology" is practiced. It tends to ignore other scientific disciplines and their findings (eg. such as the actual age of the pyramids or sphinx). The congruous nature in which the pyramids were made, as well as the mimicking pyramids of the Americas and elsewhere, all aligned in similiar fashions, the question of "was there a long-lost civilization that had the power to span the globe?" This posses an opening for "Atlantis".
It's kind of like if I were to go to Africa and find a mummy with a Gameboy-like device at his feet, inside the coffin. The only thing left would be the PCB and plastic casing, as the rest had completely rotted/decayed. The plastic is brittle with age and the PCB has cracked, so it's obviously of antiquity. Yet, it's out of place: I have to assume either it was placed there in contention or it's a legitimate artifact, and the current understanding of the timeline is wrong. The pyramids across the world, aligned "perfectly" in a geographically congruent fashion, suggest just such a scenario.
I'm of the opinion that if there were an Atlantis, it was at such a time period that any records of it (statues, buildings, the results of industrial processes, etc.) would have either long been utterly destroyed, or be unrecognizable to us as such due to their erosion and antiquity or to their inclusion into our own status quo existence (eg. the 'old' churches in England, built upon old burial/rite sites, which demark an even more aged site - the significance of which has long since been lost). If we find Atlantis, we're not goign to find pillars sticking from the soil or ocean floor with mosaics still intact unless by some miraculous scenario the entire island was hermetically sealed. What we may find is a pile of rubble, pebbles, and dirt with chemical traces suggesting the presence of metals. (After all, even cities destroyed by disaster in the past 2000 years have very little evidence of their existence remaining, and then only after years of excavation; what of a city 5,000 - 10,000 years old?)
That is "one thing" though I'd not necessarily consider it "good".
Wind is effective for small-scale localized power consumption. Much bigger or beyond that and it tends to cause more problems than its worth (in terms of power grid distribution).
I'm not sure it's worth it, to be honest. The cost involved is significant due to infrastructure and upkeep, and nevermind the catastrophic environmental damage (both at the installation site as well as the consumed construction materials/mining required).
As for the browsers in question, I can't personally speak.
However, what I can say is this: there are irritating bugs shared by both ff3 and chromium based browsers (caching implementation), and I'd suspect they'd be present on safari as well. If IE4 has fixed the problem, and IE doesn't have it, it's likely the average user would notice, I suspect: I've experienced 2-3+ second waits when going to a page because the browser is too stupid to be able to actually go to the page and ignore the cache.
How old were you when the movie came out?
I was a teenager. I didn't know better. Hackers was like geek candy, particularly when you play the Angelina Jolie Breasts angle.
Also, RISC is good. Without RISC and it's buddhist approach, you would not have your blazing fast smartphones or $100 set-top boxes.
Hacker guy: Yeah, I know. Just think how much faster I could have done it if you hadn't shot my best friend five minutes ago, didn't have a knife in my back, and I didn't have to power the mainframe with this hamster wheel.
That, right there. Whiskey on the keyboard. Shame!
That said, you reminded me of Hackers, where they're talking about 586 RISC processors and the like. It was bad, really bad - but it was close enough in enough regards that it spurred my budding interests to figure out what the hell they were talking about. It was a "cool" film for a teen, and but between the computer mysticism and Jollie's breasts, it pretty much pushed me over the edge into geekdom.
Today, I waste most of my time delved into much of the same things - albeit at a more... realistic, and less dramatic, sure, but still - I enjoy it.
Also, I want an AMD Bobcat and a couple SSDs, man. Who's sending them to me? So sexy.
There used to be a lot more diesels on the road than there are now, as a proportion - such as in the 70s and 80s. Buick's shit 5.7l dieseline engine pretty much ruined an entire generation or two's opinion of the things.
The reason diesel is more expensive now is due to the cost of making (first, until a couple years ago) low sulfur diesel, and now ultra low sulfur diesel, combined with the different (additional) taxes placed on the fuel at several points throughout production. Diesel itself - traditional, real diesel - is relatively inexpensive to make, as it's one of the first things spun off the crude oil. Gasoline, on the other hand, is simply a byproduct of this process. The percentage of diesel produced from crude can be changed/fluctuated in proportion to gasoline based on need (though this is not a 1:1 conversion - a lot of the energy value in the crude is lost when converting it to the lesser gasoline).
So really, diesel is more expensive now, in part, because of increased demand for gasoline. The rest is government regulation.
As someone who does have one of these rare (older, purely mechanical) diesels, let me just say: I'm pleased as punch by this development as well.
Why?
Because ethanol sucks, on a number of reasons. Here are a couple marks against ethanol, in case anyone's interested/haven't read/observed these things themselves:
* Ethanol actually decreases the effectiveness of the gasoline in most vehicles. This isn't just on a 1:1 comparison to regular/traditional unleaded, but in absolute terms: Say you put in 10 gallons of 10% ethanol gas in the tank. You will get 90% (or less, usually) of the mileage realized with 9 gallons of ethanol-free fuel. In other words, it takes more gas to get the same distance, if that gas has ethanol in it, even after compensating the volume consumed by the ethanol. (I don't know why this is, overtly - energy required to burn the water?)
* The subsidies involved divert agricultural efforts from legitimate crop production, driving up food costs - from corn meal to chips and beef.
* Land which would normally lay fallow (for the production/preservation of game, for instance, or to simply allow the soil to recover) have been converted over to corn production due to government subsidies.
* Significant to me: ethanol makes gasoline unsuitable as an additive to vegetable oil for 'straight mix' burning in a diesel engine due to it's low boiling point (isobutanol just skirts above the 'safe' threshold to avoid vapor lock and/or build-up post shutdown).
If your friends
When you need your sofa moved, help re-roofing your house, or maybe someone to do your lawn for you when you're out of town - things anyone should be able to help with - just remember your attitude as it pertains to PC repair. They should have no problem dropping what they're doing and give you a hand, on your schedule.
That's the attitude most approach us with for help with their computers, anyway. It should be a two-way street. IF it isn't, there's a discrepency in your friendship(s).
Look, I have no problem helping friends when they're in need. The problem is that it's not just friends, it's people who "know you do computers". If there's the suggestion they might have to pay, they get agitated. Most won't even offer a beer or a glass of whatever while you're doing your 'magic'. If you refuse, they get PO'd.
So, I don't do that nonsense anymore. Simply put. Let them be pissed (and many will, when you say no, you won't do it for free), that's their perogative as an inferior human being.
I would not be amazed if the actual number of failed drives is about 8 times lower than HDD.
I would. Who bothers returning/RMAing a failed hard drive if it's one of the cheap models? Or after 2-3 years of use? Hardly anyone. They trash them and get new ones.
The only reason that was momentous (no pun intended) was because it was IBM that it happened to. At the time, they were the authority on reliable storage, and it came as a bit of a shock to everyone.