On some cars it's just a cost saving measure. By using the same bulb for turn signals and brakes you can save the cost of two bulbs, their sockets, 10 feet of wire from the turn signal relay, and you can use a smaller tail light lens which will be slightly cheaper to produce.
The weirdest was the mercury monarch from the late seventies which had an empty amber position on the tail light lens but the turns signals were still sharing the red brake lights.
* site license for $50,000 * per-cpu license for $2,500 * per user license for $200
The vendor adjusts the numbers so that they scale roughly the same in typical installation scenarios, and there is a minimum order size when choose per-user so it often works out pretty close no matter which option you choose. If one option is significantly cheaper, obviously that's what the customer will choose, but then the vendor holds back on the 30-70% discounts that are common in the enterprise software industry.
So, getting back to your point, licensing is only per-processor or per-whatever as a way to get a dialog going with the customer. The sales force is free to offer huge discounts, or not, or make up new licensing schemes, or take the VP's golfing, whatever the heck it takes to make their numbers. Little things like "licensing issues" are only an obstacle in press releases.
Solaris, both in the kernel, and in user space, has been fully multithreaded for years, i.e. since Solaris 2.1 or something.
What's been happening is that gradually, the kernel threading has adopted more fine-grained and performance-oriented locking. The first solaris versions 2.0 and 2.1 were indeed kernel multithreaded, but mainly for network and disk i/o. Other activities just got coarse-grained locks that basically held up the whole system for some obscure activity (heh, like fork). More recent solaris's are much better at only locking the activities that truly conflict, and locking them for the shortest time possible and amongst the fewest threads possible. Year after year, the solaris kernel has been scaling up to higher CPU counts, faster than linux has been able to and so far beyond windows it's not funny. It is entirely appropriate to leverage the multithreading capabilities of their OS by introducing hardware that is up to the task.
That's the kind of thing that should be in Jonathon's blog.
Once piece of advice that I wish I'd gotten 20 years ago was to make the distinction between spending on material goods vs. investing in assets.
Burglars/thieves/ne'er-do-wells tend to focus their attention on portable items that are easy to steal and easy to sell. Car stereos, jewelry, silverware, home entertainment systems, laptops, fur coats. Not only are they easy to steal, but co-incidentally they often depreciate quickly so you have already lost out on resale value even if nobody steals them.
In contrast, if you buy a 150 year old chest of drawers that weighs 100+ lbs and put a dingy doily on top...guess what, only the most sophisticated thief will see the value plus there is a good chance that in 10 years it will double in value.
Or maybe you made the decision to buy a house instead of renting an apartment. Now you have five or six digits in equity in the house. Common thief simply can't back up his van and "steal" your house. Or invest in your career or education...nobody can steal that from you.
They want my ipod or thinkpad? Great, good for them. They'll get pennies on the dollar for used goods that are now 2 generations old and have scratches all over them. They'll blow the money on drugs or some other vice and be back to nothing in a couple of days.
I got a large german shepherd from the animal shelter a couple of years ago. He barks really freakin' loud and has scared off more than his fair share of UPS and Fedex personnel over the years.
Thing is, I wish I had trained him to just wag his tail and lie down when a stranger approaches. Then I wouldn't worry so much that a heartless burglar would just shoot him. I mean, they can have my stereo and my computer collection if they really want it that bad. But if anything happened to my doggie I would be 1000 times more upset.
Wifi rollouts for corporate buildings and campuses often features dozens to hundreds of AP's. I predict it won't be long until multi-AP solutions become popular for home use; cost really isn't that high any more and it wouldn't take much software to get consumer-grade AP's to co-operate on handoffs.
Given all these reports that Java code can be made almost as quick as c/c++ (especially when number crunching), if not faster, why hasn't this happened before?
Java was very slow for several years. It still suffers from a large memory footprint, and if you are processing a stream or large data set you have to be somewhat intelligent about how you write your code so as to prevent copying lots of data unnecessarily.
In my view, it's probably more important that whatever reference algorithm is specified, that it be written so that people can read it. Then, if necessary, others can rewrite it in the same or different languages to improve it.
i'm no data thief, but in 30 seconds of pondering it's really clear that there are a whole bunch of ways to steal data. the IT dept only has to miss one and game over:
* boot from the USB drive itself (small linux partition) * boot from CD-rom (knoppix) * email the data to a throwaway account * stay late and print out a bunch of stuff in small font on duplex laser printer * plug in a cheapo wifi router then park 3 miles away with a directional antenna * open the case and just take the hard drive * or clone it, bring your own IDE cable * bring up a few interesting screens of data and take pictures with mini camera * install a backdoor via the floppy or cd-rom * wait for the business function to be outsourced and then offer some nice foreign person a $20000 bribe. * glued up USB/firewire ports...open the case and use a fresh cable * network share then plug in your laptop somewhere else in the building and it's probably accessible * a long time employee can just write down a few numbers on a notepad each day or just memorize 80 bytes of data until he gets out of the parking lot * speaker output probably still available...find suitable codec and just "play" the data to a recorder
If you can get 15 minutes alone with a machine, you can get whatever data you want. At best, turning off external devices in windows just prevents casual data theft by ameteurs and I have to think that ameteurs are probably more interested in the value of the hardware (steal a laptop) than they are in a customer list.
Re:Why Are These People So Naive?
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that quite often a smaller book is more readable and informative than a larger book. Publishers who emphasize quanity over quality probably have sound business reasons, but this simultaneously does a disservice the craft of writing and the pastime of reading.
Re:Why Are These People So Naive?
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 1
No, writing for money is fine. The big fat "intro to whatever" books that are 1200 pages are a problem and that is precisely because the authors are paid by the page. $20/page for the low end. Higher for more reputable tech authors. It's as laughable as paying programmers per line, but that's what they do.
And no more plot recycling. TNG and voyager became a weird combination of funny and annoying after a while because of all the plot recycling. It's almost inevitable since each new series has to have the same essential characters:
* captain married to ship: kirk, picard, janeway, sisco * devoid of emotion: spock, seven, tpol, early dax * insufferable physician: mccoy, crusher, hologram, bashir * engineer w/attitude: scotty, o'brien, jordi (not so much), that maqui chick on voyager * grumpy tactical person: seven, yar, worf, kira * stereotype-based aliens: all ferengi are greedy, all klingons are violent, all romulans/cardassians are sneaky, all vulcans are logical but conflicted * ships all have same tech: transporters, phasers, cloaking, shields, tractor beams, holodeck (tng and later)
I can't really blame the writers for not being able to come up with a new plot: the raw material of players, stages, and props is nearly fixed in stone.
For future reference, you need to do the disk cleansing before you give the resignation letter. Many companies will just escort you out of the building immediately.
Something very similar to this was debunked on mythbusters. The basic problem is that the stream splits into droplets with air gaps between, so no current flows and nothing happens. If you have a reference to a published account of this story, that would be interesting.
I resent people who try to convert it into a moral crusade.
Your examples, coffee and milk, come from renewable biological sources whereas oil is a finite resource and it is being used up. It just seems like it would be better to use it up somewhat more slowly than we are, so that (a) it lasts longer and (b) the shock of running out is less severe near the end.
That's not on the level of "though shalt not kill" or pro/anti choice in terms of moral crusades, but if there is no alternate source of cheap, portable energy by then, the economic impact will be devastating. Of course, this may not happen for another 50+ years so it's easy to ignore it.
if some people are foolish enough to spend $4 for a Starbucks coffee...
Agreed. And the winner for foolish consumer overpaying has to be bottled water. I've seen $5 for 1/2 liter bottle in a mini-mart/retail situation. That's almost $40 a gallon for something almost identical to what comes out of the tap for a fraction of a cent. Amazing.
[gas mileage as i actually observed, not EPA estimates.]
The 1st and 3d vehicles were hand-me downs but if you factor those (and the motorcycles) out and average the rest, 19 mpg seems to be my "comfort zone" for cars. Not very prius-like, but not Hummer-like either. I know a few people that just always buy 3/4 ton pickups/suburbans and other people that always buy civics. I'm thinking other people just have different mpg comfort zones and won't change until gas hits $3 or $4 a gallon and stays there.
And i'm with you on buying slightly used. only 2 of the vehicles above were purchased new. even the hand-me-downs were from my parents who bought them used. actually, one of the new ones (the 2002 outback) I got in 2003 as a year-end close out and got 15% off plus an generous trade-in so maybe that should count.
The tough part is, even if 4 environmentally sensitive people all switch to corollas or priuses, they are outnumbered consumption-wise by a single Ford Excursion or Chevy Suburban.
At some point, it's not enough to be good and environmentally responsible. Making a statement by getting a Prius has a value in and of itself, and it makes a statement that an SUV owner might notice next time he's at the gas station spending $75 on a tankful.
They won't notice the '94 Corolla, and it won't make them think.
The chemicals will gradually escape until there is very little left. Just pulling it out of the styrofoam and letting it sit in a well ventilated room for a week will take care of most computer equipment. If you purchase stuff during spring or fall you can just install it and leave a window open.
An alternative is to buy used or demo equipment that has been out of the packaging for months already.
I wouldn't call this inherent, but a flaw that I see in LCOS sets is that they all seem to use a color wheel to generate RGB from colorless LCOS array. Any motion of the head or twitching of your eyes yields out-of-sync color streaks. This makes it unwatchable for me, which is a shame because I really hate the window screen effect of plasmas and LCD projectors.
The straightfoward thing to do would be to use three LCOS chips, but perhaps that undoes any cost advantage that they might have had.
You could two brand new computers for $800 if you shop carefully. Or at least one very nice one. Either way you get a brand new operating system with a built-in software firewall.
I'm hoping that the technicians he/she called in didn't actually bill her for this, they just gave an estimate of what they would have charged. It's kind of irresponsible of them to force a poor user to pay so much money just to get her computer back to 1996 specifications.
It's probably more that the CSS stuff is just an annoyance to the developers and they just get enough CSS together to make their pages look halfway decent so they can get back to work on important stuff in Perl or C++ or something.
Slashdot Mirror
On some cars it's just a cost saving measure. By using the same bulb for turn signals and brakes you can save the cost of two bulbs, their sockets, 10 feet of wire from the turn signal relay, and you can use a smaller tail light lens which will be slightly cheaper to produce.
The weirdest was the mercury monarch from the late seventies which had an empty amber position on the tail light lens but the turns signals were still sharing the red brake lights.
Is there any evidence that spammers have co-workers or friends (who are not themselves also spammers)?
Presumably it would work like real glass: the light slows down upon entering the glass and then regains its original speed upon exiting.
You often get a choice (numbers made up):
* site license for $50,000
* per-cpu license for $2,500
* per user license for $200
The vendor adjusts the numbers so that they scale roughly the same in typical installation scenarios, and there is a minimum order size when choose per-user so it often works out pretty close no matter which option you choose. If one option is significantly cheaper, obviously that's what the customer will choose, but then the vendor holds back on the 30-70% discounts that are common in the enterprise software industry.
So, getting back to your point, licensing is only per-processor or per-whatever as a way to get a dialog going with the customer. The sales force is free to offer huge discounts, or not, or make up new licensing schemes, or take the VP's golfing, whatever the heck it takes to make their numbers. Little things like "licensing issues" are only an obstacle in press releases.
Solaris, both in the kernel, and in user space, has been fully multithreaded for years, i.e. since Solaris 2.1 or something.
What's been happening is that gradually, the kernel threading has adopted more fine-grained and performance-oriented locking. The first solaris versions 2.0 and 2.1 were indeed kernel multithreaded, but mainly for network and disk i/o. Other activities just got coarse-grained locks that basically held up the whole system for some obscure activity (heh, like fork). More recent solaris's are much better at only locking the activities that truly conflict, and locking them for the shortest time possible and amongst the fewest threads possible. Year after year, the solaris kernel has been scaling up to higher CPU counts, faster than linux has been able to and so far beyond windows it's not funny. It is entirely appropriate to leverage the multithreading capabilities of their OS by introducing hardware that is up to the task.
That's the kind of thing that should be in Jonathon's blog.
Once piece of advice that I wish I'd gotten 20 years ago was to make the distinction between spending on material goods vs. investing in assets.
Burglars/thieves/ne'er-do-wells tend to focus their attention on portable items that are easy to steal and easy to sell. Car stereos, jewelry, silverware, home entertainment systems, laptops, fur coats. Not only are they easy to steal, but co-incidentally they often depreciate quickly so you have already lost out on resale value even if nobody steals them.
In contrast, if you buy a 150 year old chest of drawers that weighs 100+ lbs and put a dingy doily on top...guess what, only the most sophisticated thief will see the value plus there is a good chance that in 10 years it will double in value.
Or maybe you made the decision to buy a house instead of renting an apartment. Now you have five or six digits in equity in the house. Common thief simply can't back up his van and "steal" your house. Or invest in your career or education...nobody can steal that from you.
They want my ipod or thinkpad? Great, good for them. They'll get pennies on the dollar for used goods that are now 2 generations old and have scratches all over them. They'll blow the money on drugs or some other vice and be back to nothing in a couple of days.
I got a large german shepherd from the animal shelter a couple of years ago. He barks really freakin' loud and has scared off more than his fair share of UPS and Fedex personnel over the years.
Thing is, I wish I had trained him to just wag his tail and lie down when a stranger approaches. Then I wouldn't worry so much that a heartless burglar would just shoot him. I mean, they can have my stereo and my computer collection if they really want it that bad. But if anything happened to my doggie I would be 1000 times more upset.
Wifi rollouts for corporate buildings and campuses often features dozens to hundreds of AP's. I predict it won't be long until multi-AP solutions become popular for home use; cost really isn't that high any more and it wouldn't take much software to get consumer-grade AP's to co-operate on handoffs.
Given all these reports that Java code can be made almost as quick as c/c++ (especially when number crunching), if not faster, why hasn't this happened before?
Java was very slow for several years. It still suffers from a large memory footprint, and if you are processing a stream or large data set you have to be somewhat intelligent about how you write your code so as to prevent copying lots of data unnecessarily.
In my view, it's probably more important that whatever reference algorithm is specified, that it be written so that people can read it. Then, if necessary, others can rewrite it in the same or different languages to improve it.
i'm no data thief, but in 30 seconds of pondering it's really clear that there are a whole bunch of ways to steal data. the IT dept only has to miss one and game over:
* boot from the USB drive itself (small linux partition)
* boot from CD-rom (knoppix)
* email the data to a throwaway account
* stay late and print out a bunch of stuff in small font on duplex laser printer
* plug in a cheapo wifi router then park 3 miles away with a directional antenna
* open the case and just take the hard drive
* or clone it, bring your own IDE cable
* bring up a few interesting screens of data and take pictures with mini camera
* install a backdoor via the floppy or cd-rom
* wait for the business function to be outsourced and then offer some nice foreign person a $20000 bribe.
* glued up USB/firewire ports...open the case and use a fresh cable
* network share then plug in your laptop somewhere else in the building and it's probably accessible
* a long time employee can just write down a few numbers on a notepad each day or just memorize 80 bytes of data until he gets out of the parking lot
* speaker output probably still available...find suitable codec and just "play" the data to a recorder
If you can get 15 minutes alone with a machine, you can get whatever data you want. At best, turning off external devices in windows just prevents casual data theft by ameteurs and I have to think that ameteurs are probably more interested in the value of the hardware (steal a laptop) than they are in a customer list.
The problem is that quite often a smaller book is more readable and informative than a larger book. Publishers who emphasize quanity over quality probably have sound business reasons, but this simultaneously does a disservice the craft of writing and the pastime of reading.
No, writing for money is fine. The big fat "intro to whatever" books that are 1200 pages are a problem and that is precisely because the authors are paid by the page. $20/page for the low end. Higher for more reputable tech authors. It's as laughable as paying programmers per line, but that's what they do.
And no more plot recycling. TNG and voyager became a weird combination of funny and annoying after a while because of all the plot recycling. It's almost inevitable since each new series has to have the same essential characters:
* captain married to ship: kirk, picard, janeway, sisco
* devoid of emotion: spock, seven, tpol, early dax
* insufferable physician: mccoy, crusher, hologram, bashir
* engineer w/attitude: scotty, o'brien, jordi (not so much), that maqui chick on voyager
* grumpy tactical person: seven, yar, worf, kira
* stereotype-based aliens: all ferengi are greedy, all klingons are violent, all romulans/cardassians are sneaky, all vulcans are logical but conflicted
* ships all have same tech: transporters, phasers, cloaking, shields, tractor beams, holodeck (tng and later)
I can't really blame the writers for not being able to come up with a new plot: the raw material of players, stages, and props is nearly fixed in stone.
For future reference, you need to do the disk cleansing before you give the resignation letter. Many companies will just escort you out of the building immediately.
Something very similar to this was debunked on mythbusters. The basic problem is that the stream splits into droplets with air gaps between, so no current flows and nothing happens. If you have a reference to a published account of this story, that would be interesting.
I resent people who try to convert it into a moral crusade.
Your examples, coffee and milk, come from renewable biological sources whereas oil is a finite resource and it is being used up. It just seems like it would be better to use it up somewhat more slowly than we are, so that (a) it lasts longer and (b) the shock of running out is less severe near the end.
That's not on the level of "though shalt not kill" or pro/anti choice in terms of moral crusades, but if there is no alternate source of cheap, portable energy by then, the economic impact will be devastating. Of course, this may not happen for another 50+ years so it's easy to ignore it.
if some people are foolish enough to spend $4 for a Starbucks coffee...
Agreed. And the winner for foolish consumer overpaying has to be bottled water. I've seen $5 for 1/2 liter bottle in a mini-mart/retail situation. That's almost $40 a gallon for something almost identical to what comes out of the tap for a fraction of a cent. Amazing.
This is kind of fun. we can have our own little conversation several days after the moderators have lost interest. wheee, i feel so free!
err, okay, back to the topic. by way of example, here's my car buying history, so far:
1971 mercury montego station wagon: 11 mpg
1977 pontiac trans am: 15 mpg
1978 mercedes 240D: 29 mpg
1983 mitsubishi starion: 22 mpg
1989 chevrolet corvette: 18 mpg
1992 kawasaki 250: 50 mpg
1994 MR2 turbo: 20 mpg
1994 honda 750: 40 mpg
2002 subaru outback: 20 mpg
[gas mileage as i actually observed, not EPA estimates.]
The 1st and 3d vehicles were hand-me downs but if you factor those (and the motorcycles) out and average the rest, 19 mpg seems to be my "comfort zone" for cars. Not very prius-like, but not Hummer-like either. I know a few people that just always buy 3/4 ton pickups/suburbans and other people that always buy civics. I'm thinking other people just have different mpg comfort zones and won't change until gas hits $3 or $4 a gallon and stays there.
And i'm with you on buying slightly used. only 2 of the vehicles above were purchased new. even the hand-me-downs were from my parents who bought them used. actually, one of the new ones (the 2002 outback) I got in 2003 as a year-end close out and got 15% off plus an generous trade-in so maybe that should count.
The only statement being made is the statement that you'll be getting every month from Toyota Credit.
You say that as if you wouldn't be getting a numerically larger statement from GMAC after buying a hummer or suburban...
I was difficult, but not impossible, to sing this to the tune of the "Irish Drinking Song" song from Whose Line.
The tough part is, even if 4 environmentally sensitive people all switch to corollas or priuses, they are outnumbered consumption-wise by a single Ford Excursion or Chevy Suburban.
At some point, it's not enough to be good and environmentally responsible. Making a statement by getting a Prius has a value in and of itself, and it makes a statement that an SUV owner might notice next time he's at the gas station spending $75 on a tankful.
They won't notice the '94 Corolla, and it won't make them think.
S as in sea
D as in double-u
W as in wye
The chemicals will gradually escape until there is very little left. Just pulling it out of the styrofoam and letting it sit in a well ventilated room for a week will take care of most computer equipment. If you purchase stuff during spring or fall you can just install it and leave a window open.
An alternative is to buy used or demo equipment that has been out of the packaging for months already.
I wouldn't call this inherent, but a flaw that I see in LCOS sets is that they all seem to use a color wheel to generate RGB from colorless LCOS array. Any motion of the head or twitching of your eyes yields out-of-sync color streaks. This makes it unwatchable for me, which is a shame because I really hate the window screen effect of plasmas and LCD projectors.
The straightfoward thing to do would be to use three LCOS chips, but perhaps that undoes any cost advantage that they might have had.
You could two brand new computers for $800 if you shop carefully. Or at least one very nice one. Either way you get a brand new operating system with a built-in software firewall.
I'm hoping that the technicians he/she called in didn't actually bill her for this, they just gave an estimate of what they would have charged. It's kind of irresponsible of them to force a poor user to pay so much money just to get her computer back to 1996 specifications.
It's probably more that the CSS stuff is just an annoyance to the developers and they just get enough CSS together to make their pages look halfway decent so they can get back to work on important stuff in Perl or C++ or something.