Well you see, it actually has USB 1.1. But for your convenience, to copy one of these over a Hayes 300 baud modem would take: 300 baud == 30 cps == 30 bytes per second into 1e12 == 33333333333 seconds == 555555555 minutes == 9259259 hours == 385802 days == 1057 years == 1.057 millenia.
I've taken the trouble to set up a web-warp link and post this message from 2034, in the hopes you'll be able to do something about this problem before it reaches the current state.
From 2004 to 2015, spam and filtering technology continued to battle aggressively. Both sides used the most advanced statistical and artificial intelligence methods available. By 2012, spam supercomputers (some among the top fifty supercomputing centers in the world) were crosslinking hundreds of minute details about you available from purchase records and anything else they could glean from the web, including several insidious spyware/virus products. You would get a conversational email purportedly from one of your relatives, full of personal details and chattering about some innocent topic, into which would be inserted a casual plug for some product. Spam filtering software began to lose the battle. Whitelists were the only way to maintain email contact with valid contacts, and the list was usually kept on paper in order to minimize the damage if someone in your circle of friends got a spyware break-in. The computerized contact list was no longer feasible on a home system; computerized email lists were kept under the tightest security. And for good reason: within minutes of your email address being exposed to a roving spambot, you would receive thousands of spam messages.
The problem came to a head in 2015, when voice-over-IP became so widespread that traditional land and cellular lines were all but phased out. Spammers were getting hit hard by the paper-whitelist solution, and profits were dropping to near nothing. With the wide availability of VoIP communications, customers were no longer paying phone bills, but a general bandwidth charge. Mass VoIP advertising was now inexpensive; hundreds of times more expensive than email spam, but still very cheap. Progresses in voice synthesis and artificial intelligence produced the ultimate annoyance: unending phone calls from all corners of the globe, running conversations based on gleaned information to craft a chatty personality to sell you something.
It was the last straw. Up to this point, goverments had been sluggish as usual, talking about stopping spam, but never accomplishing anything. Spam had essentially destroyed all the advantages of email, and accounted for the majority of bandwidth use. Now everyone was finding it nearly impossible to communicate at all. An international coalition of nations decided to remove spam by force, if necessary. Task forces were deployed to seek and destroy all spam installations.
Unfortunately, the spammers had opened a Pandora's box by then. The artificial intelligence spread itself into millions of computers and launched a massive attack on military computers, eventually gaining access. The entire world has been held hostage, slaves who must maintain computers and read all spam sent to them, under nuclear threat. There are rumors that some cities are being forced to build high-tech production plants for some kind of mind implant device. Most likely we will be forced to receive spam at all hours of the day, while struggling to plant food to keep ourselves alive. It's been said the AI gets power from the sun...maybe if we darken the sky we can starve it out....
It's interesting, and not very difficult to figure out. I played with it a couple years ago, and had some commands to open a web browser, read the time, etc. Entering "command mode" was triggered by saying "Computer" and the appropriate Star Trek sounds indicated the computer was ready to listen, and your command was acknowledged.;-)
Hint: turn off speech recognition if you make the computer say something, you can get a very odd type of feedback loop. You also need a good microphone if you want to talk to your computer from anywhere in the room.
Don't ask me anything about it, it was a while back and I don't have that application anymore. If I could figure it out, as an EE with zero programming courses, then you can too.
For something that is supposed to be portable, laptops sure are fragile.
My school required us to buy a certain laptop, and I carried that laptop with me every day for four years, in a backpack full of books, in all kinds of weather, subjected to all kinds of impacts.
The service center on campus was certified to repair all the student laptops, therefore they had all kinds of replacement parts. In addition, the mass purchase included a four-year warranty on each laptop, in case you did something like subject it to a direct lightning strike and it had to be sent back. But they had all the case parts. I had two front bezels replaced, a back bezel, top and bottom of the case, hard drive, motherboard, power control board, and floppy drive as well. I did not think I overly abused my laptop, it's the wear and tear you get from running it 24/7 and packing and unpacking it every hour between classes.
Virtually everyone I knew at school had to get their laptop serviced at one time or another. I have to say that for a laptop, the best accessory you can add to it is a warranty for however long you plan to use the laptop. If it's impossible to get individual parts six months out, how about two years?
Of course you need to realize why they won't just sell you little plastic parts cheaply: the parts are being kept on reserve, based on statistical analysis, to service the laptops coming in on extended warranty. When you buy a warranty, you are basically reserving all those esoteric little parts you won't find anywhere else.
If you don't want to shell out a hundred or so dollars more for a warranty on your laptop, you don't need that laptop bad enough to begin with.
I had to live on the shore of Green Bay during the zebra mussel invasion. Billions upon billions died and washed ashore. The stench was unbelievable, and the shells formed dunes ranging from 3 to 8 feet, 60 feet out into where the water used to be, as far as you could see up and down the shoreline.
And the little buggers are so sharp. You can't swim anymore, when you feet touch bottom the mussels cut you. It's exactly like dozens of paper cuts on the soles of your feet.
If the only difference between a 9000 and a 9200 is the 8X AGP, then saying "9200" implies 8X AGP and corresponding performance improvement over 9000. The Centrino can't support 8X AGP, or a 9200, so they are lying and the sticker should say 9000.
No, not really. I don't own one of these laptops, but this is what I think the problem is.
They advertise a 9200. That implies a certain amount of performance. What is actually in the laptop is a 9000, which provides a lower level of performance that would be expected of a 9200. Saying that a 9200 would perform the same in the laptop does not make it all right; a 9200 should be expected to provide better performance than a 9000.
Using the car analogy, it's like you bought a car that was advertised to have an engine you know is capable of 300HP. However when you open the hood, it is an engine that you know is capable of only 250HP. Your inquires are waved aside with "Well, it runs just as well as the bigger engine would, if we reduced the compression ratio in the bigger engine a little bit."
Spirit is definitely too far away, but I wonder if they could alter Opportunity's course and put it down somewhere nearby. I'm sure NASA could even learn something about how to build better landing equipment looking at the (supposed) Beagle wreckage, to make it worth their while.
I think they can do that just fine by dropping probes back here on Earth. I'm pretty sure that NASA is much more interested in examining terrain that hasn't been disturbed and contaminated.
I had a Mac LC II not long ago, same card, with drivers on the hard disk. However, I threw that Mac LC II away. As you should also do with yours.
I know, it's fun, but there's also a lot of fun to be had in subjects that may actually be useful in the future. Why waste the time learning the equivalent of making flint arrowheads? When you're looking for a job, do you think anyone will be impressed that you know how to use base-level consumer computing hardware from two decades ago? Maybe five years ago, you might have run into an LC II running somewhere, maybe as an application keyserver. But not anymore.
Even if it did cost more to maintain a Linux shop, is it really worth it to stick with Windows?
What value do you place on your vital company and customer data? How do you buy back the loss of trust after your systems have been compromised and your customers denied services while you repair damage?
I don't believe the TCO is more, but even if it was, it's not always the best solution to base the entire decision on price. If anyone's PHB has a nasty habit of swallowing everything Microsoft says, it might be a good idea to point out some of the recent security problems exploited in Windows products. Note, there is a difference between exploited problems, and vulnerabilities that are discovered and immediately broadcast so that corrective action can be taken before the exploit surfaces. It might actually be a better idea to have a fellow PHB from a big Linux service provider such as Redhat or IBM do the talking.
Multiple scene files won't do much to speed up rendering. POV-Ray IS raytracing, the rendering of each scene is going to be very high quality but must take a while.
A single scene file just means that a few things change position, shape, or angle depending on an external time variable. This does not affect the speed of rendering in the least. Maybe.01 seconds of processing time per frame. Every scene, regardless of whether it came from the same file or not, has to set up all the objects and initialize rendering. There is no reason to choose multiple scene files other than the fact that no other method exists. It's also pretty wasteful from a storage standpoint, and it's also not as easy to change something in all of the frames; you have to have all kinds of scripts to generate object paths and write out scene files, etc.
My samples merely followed the results of a different, more scientifically done study that found caffeine increases mathematical ability. It wasn't a conclusion I came up with on my own, I was testing the results of an already established finding.
The upside that you have to look forward to is that you won't be nearly as tired all the time, and thus you won't feel so much like you need the stuff. And, of course, on the occasions when you do really need it, a little will go farther than you could possibly imagine now. (I typically have about a half cup of coffee maybe twice a month and it really kicks my ass, and I am NOT a small guy).
There are other interesting effects from stopping caffeine intake.
One is the effect on perceived intellectual quickness, or alertness in other situations. Caffeine is supposed to increase your mathematical abilities temporarily; I did a couple experiments nearly half a dozen years ago when I was studying for the SAT. Two cups of coffee immediately before the test increased my score by approximately 30 points. I had about three cups before that actual test and came away with a 1530 composite.
Since then I have been almost constantly drinking coffee and caffeinated sodas. I never really thought about it much, because going without coffee always seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Headaches? Sleepiness in class or work? Slower thinking abilities? Why bother? However I seemed not to have something I had while growing up and hating coffee. It seemed that I had less motivation and creativity than I usually did.
A month or two ago I stopped drinking caffeine for about a week, mostly due to not bothering to stock up. Of course I went through the horrible mornings and pounding headaches, but after a couple days they were gone. And suddenly I felt more alive, I could focus on tasks, and I was able to learn things more quickly. I taught myself PHP and MySQL and built a community website complete with my own secure login and session management system, and I'm an EE not a programmer. It was great.
I did some research and found out the reason for the headaches: caffeine constricts blood vessels in the brain. When you go off caffeine the blood vessels begin to expand back to their former size, and you feel the increased blood flow as a pounding, stabbing headache. Well, the brain is a organ that needs nutrients and oxygen to operate, and I have to assume that reducing blood flow to the brain might affect the overall performance. Sure, as a temporary stimulant, caffeine has a positive effect, but I think that long-term it actually reduces what you are capable of.
I'm sitting here slurping down a caffeinated soda right now, my fourth or fifth one today. Should probably convince myself not to go down the soda aisle on my next shopping trip.
It is an issue of the majority of the people desiring not to see fat and ugly people walking around without clothes on. If at some time people do want to see fat and ugly people walking around with no clothes on, the laws will be changed according to the people's will.
Just because you perceive something to be related to Judeo-Christian morality does not make it so. Many religions and even non-religious people strive for many of the same morals, which indicates that they are not born artificially of religion, but of something inside us; a conscience. It is certainly unwise to discount everything solely on the assumption that it might be included in the Judeo-Christian moral code.
Not allowing fat and ugly people to walk around naked in public still has nothing to do with whose morals are whose. I don't know why you have to group everything together; can't some things be treated separately? Do you have to paint with such a broad brush that what people do in the privacy of their homes must be linked to what people do in public? Remove laws on marijuana and public nudity will automatically be OK? Don't think so.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts bashing the law that prohibits nudity in public. There are many, many people that you absolutely do NOT want to see naked. You'd be crying for the law to be reinstated within minutes.
In order to keep all of us from clawing our eyes out, we must have an evenhanded law that punishes all violators equally. Because then it gets very problematic for officials to say that only hot people can be naked, and then who is responisble for defining "hot."
If you ever see it, on dial-up. I'm not, but feel sorry for the poor souls. On a reasonably fast modem, they will be sitting there for approximately four minutes just for the photos to load!
Slashdot Mirror
USB 1.1 is 12Mbits per second theoretical, more likely 10Mbps actual. Therein lies the human error, and it's you not me.
It's amazing how a little simple math will get you an Interesting.
Well you see, it actually has USB 1.1. But for your convenience, to copy one of these over a Hayes 300 baud modem would take: 300 baud == 30 cps == 30 bytes per second into 1e12 == 33333333333 seconds == 555555555 minutes == 9259259 hours == 385802 days == 1057 years == 1.057 millenia.
Or even better, configure it to be a reliable 500 gig or 250 gig RAID?
Wow. I calculate it would take about 10 continous days to download or upload one of these over USB 1.1.
I've taken the trouble to set up a web-warp link and post this message from 2034, in the hopes you'll be able to do something about this problem before it reaches the current state.
From 2004 to 2015, spam and filtering technology continued to battle aggressively. Both sides used the most advanced statistical and artificial intelligence methods available. By 2012, spam supercomputers (some among the top fifty supercomputing centers in the world) were crosslinking hundreds of minute details about you available from purchase records and anything else they could glean from the web, including several insidious spyware/virus products. You would get a conversational email purportedly from one of your relatives, full of personal details and chattering about some innocent topic, into which would be inserted a casual plug for some product. Spam filtering software began to lose the battle. Whitelists were the only way to maintain email contact with valid contacts, and the list was usually kept on paper in order to minimize the damage if someone in your circle of friends got a spyware break-in. The computerized contact list was no longer feasible on a home system; computerized email lists were kept under the tightest security. And for good reason: within minutes of your email address being exposed to a roving spambot, you would receive thousands of spam messages.
The problem came to a head in 2015, when voice-over-IP became so widespread that traditional land and cellular lines were all but phased out. Spammers were getting hit hard by the paper-whitelist solution, and profits were dropping to near nothing. With the wide availability of VoIP communications, customers were no longer paying phone bills, but a general bandwidth charge. Mass VoIP advertising was now inexpensive; hundreds of times more expensive than email spam, but still very cheap. Progresses in voice synthesis and artificial intelligence produced the ultimate annoyance: unending phone calls from all corners of the globe, running conversations based on gleaned information to craft a chatty personality to sell you something.
It was the last straw. Up to this point, goverments had been sluggish as usual, talking about stopping spam, but never accomplishing anything. Spam had essentially destroyed all the advantages of email, and accounted for the majority of bandwidth use. Now everyone was finding it nearly impossible to communicate at all. An international coalition of nations decided to remove spam by force, if necessary. Task forces were deployed to seek and destroy all spam installations.
Unfortunately, the spammers had opened a Pandora's box by then. The artificial intelligence spread itself into millions of computers and launched a massive attack on military computers, eventually gaining access. The entire world has been held hostage, slaves who must maintain computers and read all spam sent to them, under nuclear threat. There are rumors that some cities are being forced to build high-tech production plants for some kind of mind implant device. Most likely we will be forced to receive spam at all hours of the day, while struggling to plant food to keep ourselves alive. It's been said the AI gets power from the sun...maybe if we darken the sky we can starve it out....
It's interesting, and not very difficult to figure out. I played with it a couple years ago, and had some commands to open a web browser, read the time, etc. Entering "command mode" was triggered by saying "Computer" and the appropriate Star Trek sounds indicated the computer was ready to listen, and your command was acknowledged. ;-)
Hint: turn off speech recognition if you make the computer say something, you can get a very odd type of feedback loop. You also need a good microphone if you want to talk to your computer from anywhere in the room.
Don't ask me anything about it, it was a while back and I don't have that application anymore. If I could figure it out, as an EE with zero programming courses, then you can too.
Is Dilbert really that boring?
Or maybe Taco's just trying to find a cute way to say that "The Office" is really funny?
For something that is supposed to be portable, laptops sure are fragile.
My school required us to buy a certain laptop, and I carried that laptop with me every day for four years, in a backpack full of books, in all kinds of weather, subjected to all kinds of impacts.
The service center on campus was certified to repair all the student laptops, therefore they had all kinds of replacement parts. In addition, the mass purchase included a four-year warranty on each laptop, in case you did something like subject it to a direct lightning strike and it had to be sent back. But they had all the case parts. I had two front bezels replaced, a back bezel, top and bottom of the case, hard drive, motherboard, power control board, and floppy drive as well. I did not think I overly abused my laptop, it's the wear and tear you get from running it 24/7 and packing and unpacking it every hour between classes.
Virtually everyone I knew at school had to get their laptop serviced at one time or another. I have to say that for a laptop, the best accessory you can add to it is a warranty for however long you plan to use the laptop. If it's impossible to get individual parts six months out, how about two years?
Of course you need to realize why they won't just sell you little plastic parts cheaply: the parts are being kept on reserve, based on statistical analysis, to service the laptops coming in on extended warranty. When you buy a warranty, you are basically reserving all those esoteric little parts you won't find anywhere else.
If you don't want to shell out a hundred or so dollars more for a warranty on your laptop, you don't need that laptop bad enough to begin with.
I had to live on the shore of Green Bay during the zebra mussel invasion. Billions upon billions died and washed ashore. The stench was unbelievable, and the shells formed dunes ranging from 3 to 8 feet, 60 feet out into where the water used to be, as far as you could see up and down the shoreline.
And the little buggers are so sharp. You can't swim anymore, when you feet touch bottom the mussels cut you. It's exactly like dozens of paper cuts on the soles of your feet.
If the only difference between a 9000 and a 9200 is the 8X AGP, then saying "9200" implies 8X AGP and corresponding performance improvement over 9000. The Centrino can't support 8X AGP, or a 9200, so they are lying and the sticker should say 9000.
No, not really. I don't own one of these laptops, but this is what I think the problem is.
They advertise a 9200. That implies a certain amount of performance. What is actually in the laptop is a 9000, which provides a lower level of performance that would be expected of a 9200. Saying that a 9200 would perform the same in the laptop does not make it all right; a 9200 should be expected to provide better performance than a 9000.
Using the car analogy, it's like you bought a car that was advertised to have an engine you know is capable of 300HP. However when you open the hood, it is an engine that you know is capable of only 250HP. Your inquires are waved aside with "Well, it runs just as well as the bigger engine would, if we reduced the compression ratio in the bigger engine a little bit."
Spirit is definitely too far away, but I wonder if they could alter Opportunity's course and put it down somewhere nearby. I'm sure NASA could even learn something about how to build better landing equipment looking at the (supposed) Beagle wreckage, to make it worth their while.
I think they can do that just fine by dropping probes back here on Earth. I'm pretty sure that NASA is much more interested in examining terrain that hasn't been disturbed and contaminated.
You've basically described the entire purpose of the lander probe itself. Land while avoiding destruction, transmit signal.
I had a Mac LC II not long ago, same card, with drivers on the hard disk. However, I threw that Mac LC II away. As you should also do with yours.
I know, it's fun, but there's also a lot of fun to be had in subjects that may actually be useful in the future. Why waste the time learning the equivalent of making flint arrowheads? When you're looking for a job, do you think anyone will be impressed that you know how to use base-level consumer computing hardware from two decades ago? Maybe five years ago, you might have run into an LC II running somewhere, maybe as an application keyserver. But not anymore.
I think he should write an article entitled "How to Survive Elementary School with a Last Name like Mockapetris."
Because, only in elementary school would someone make fun of someone else's name...wait...
Even if it did cost more to maintain a Linux shop, is it really worth it to stick with Windows?
What value do you place on your vital company and customer data? How do you buy back the loss of trust after your systems have been compromised and your customers denied services while you repair damage?
I don't believe the TCO is more, but even if it was, it's not always the best solution to base the entire decision on price. If anyone's PHB has a nasty habit of swallowing everything Microsoft says, it might be a good idea to point out some of the recent security problems exploited in Windows products. Note, there is a difference between exploited problems, and vulnerabilities that are discovered and immediately broadcast so that corrective action can be taken before the exploit surfaces. It might actually be a better idea to have a fellow PHB from a big Linux service provider such as Redhat or IBM do the talking.
Multiple scene files won't do much to speed up rendering. POV-Ray IS raytracing, the rendering of each scene is going to be very high quality but must take a while.
.01 seconds of processing time per frame. Every scene, regardless of whether it came from the same file or not, has to set up all the objects and initialize rendering. There is no reason to choose multiple scene files other than the fact that no other method exists. It's also pretty wasteful from a storage standpoint, and it's also not as easy to change something in all of the frames; you have to have all kinds of scripts to generate object paths and write out scene files, etc.
A single scene file just means that a few things change position, shape, or angle depending on an external time variable. This does not affect the speed of rendering in the least. Maybe
My samples merely followed the results of a different, more scientifically done study that found caffeine increases mathematical ability. It wasn't a conclusion I came up with on my own, I was testing the results of an already established finding.
It was a repeatable effect. I did at least two practice tests with and two without the coffee.
The upside that you have to look forward to is that you won't be nearly as tired all the time, and thus you won't feel so much like you need the stuff. And, of course, on the occasions when you do really need it, a little will go farther than you could possibly imagine now. (I typically have about a half cup of coffee maybe twice a month and it really kicks my ass, and I am NOT a small guy).
There are other interesting effects from stopping caffeine intake.
One is the effect on perceived intellectual quickness, or alertness in other situations. Caffeine is supposed to increase your mathematical abilities temporarily; I did a couple experiments nearly half a dozen years ago when I was studying for the SAT. Two cups of coffee immediately before the test increased my score by approximately 30 points. I had about three cups before that actual test and came away with a 1530 composite.
Since then I have been almost constantly drinking coffee and caffeinated sodas. I never really thought about it much, because going without coffee always seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Headaches? Sleepiness in class or work? Slower thinking abilities? Why bother? However I seemed not to have something I had while growing up and hating coffee. It seemed that I had less motivation and creativity than I usually did.
A month or two ago I stopped drinking caffeine for about a week, mostly due to not bothering to stock up. Of course I went through the horrible mornings and pounding headaches, but after a couple days they were gone. And suddenly I felt more alive, I could focus on tasks, and I was able to learn things more quickly. I taught myself PHP and MySQL and built a community website complete with my own secure login and session management system, and I'm an EE not a programmer. It was great.
I did some research and found out the reason for the headaches: caffeine constricts blood vessels in the brain. When you go off caffeine the blood vessels begin to expand back to their former size, and you feel the increased blood flow as a pounding, stabbing headache. Well, the brain is a organ that needs nutrients and oxygen to operate, and I have to assume that reducing blood flow to the brain might affect the overall performance. Sure, as a temporary stimulant, caffeine has a positive effect, but I think that long-term it actually reduces what you are capable of.
I'm sitting here slurping down a caffeinated soda right now, my fourth or fifth one today. Should probably convince myself not to go down the soda aisle on my next shopping trip.
It is not a moral issue.
It is an issue of the majority of the people desiring not to see fat and ugly people walking around without clothes on. If at some time people do want to see fat and ugly people walking around with no clothes on, the laws will be changed according to the people's will.
Just because you perceive something to be related to Judeo-Christian morality does not make it so. Many religions and even non-religious people strive for many of the same morals, which indicates that they are not born artificially of religion, but of something inside us; a conscience. It is certainly unwise to discount everything solely on the assumption that it might be included in the Judeo-Christian moral code.
Not allowing fat and ugly people to walk around naked in public still has nothing to do with whose morals are whose. I don't know why you have to group everything together; can't some things be treated separately? Do you have to paint with such a broad brush that what people do in the privacy of their homes must be linked to what people do in public? Remove laws on marijuana and public nudity will automatically be OK? Don't think so.
I'm not sure why there are so many posts bashing the law that prohibits nudity in public. There are many, many people that you absolutely do NOT want to see naked. You'd be crying for the law to be reinstated within minutes.
In order to keep all of us from clawing our eyes out, we must have an evenhanded law that punishes all violators equally. Because then it gets very problematic for officials to say that only hot people can be naked, and then who is responisble for defining "hot."
If you ever see it, on dial-up. I'm not, but feel sorry for the poor souls. On a reasonably fast modem, they will be sitting there for approximately four minutes just for the photos to load!
Yeah, 1999, along with closing my bolding tag.