The mini has always been a victim to the "Road Apple" disease, where Apple is terrified of undercutting one of the other business units, so they intentionally cripple a piece of hardware somehow or just plain overprice it (sometimes both!). While it's true that the hardware in the currenty Mini is rather nice, the proper price point for it ($500, or $600 at the most) would undercut their hilariously overpriced 2.4 Ghz C2D with 2GB of memory for $1000 in 2011 white iBook too much.
The domain mass thing is somewhat interesting, but the whole story is about how Racetrack memory is going to be totally awesome in the future because mumble mumble. A link to the paper about the magnetic domain experiments would have gone over much better IMHO.
Can I ask Slashdot to not post any more stories about Racetrack memory until something interesting happens with it? I've been hearing about it for years, but thus far it's all theoretical or early experimental work. Just like Bubble memory, by the time this actually works conventional memory may be faster and cheaper and it will end up on the sidelines of history.
I'll be intrested when they have something like a DIMM form factor that is actually better than existing memory.
If it's lining their pockets and getting them elected, I fail to see how an action could be considered "irrational". That's why it's so important to have watchdogs with teeth in government, because corruption is rational. It's only when there is a danger of being caught with appropriately dire consequences does the equation change.
This is the truth. Engines seem to last forever these days, unless you break the timing chain on an interference engine or get into some other catastrophe. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it's almost always the transmission that does the car in, not the engine. Transmissions just have not caught up with the advances in longevity that engines have apparently enjoyed over the past few decades.
Then why won't they stick the damn 1.6 or 2.0 Ecoboost in a Fusion? Been waiting for that car since the Ecoboost was announced, and it is still a no-show.
Maybe you should point out that "slippery slope" arguments don't hold a lot of sway, because they require people who are acting rationally today to act irrationally in the future, simply because it's an expansion of an idea that was previously rational to them. It doesn't make sense, and if you hear someone using it know that they're basically agreeing with the current policy (or at least they can't form a sane counter to it).
This came up a lot in Gay Marriage for instance, where people couldn't really say no to two people in love getting married, so they started talking about people marrying sheep or dogs instead.
I don't think Al Gore was as two faced as people apparently think he was years ago. Corn Ethanol had its detractors, but it was really the only viable alternative energy game in town at the time (switchgrass Ethanol is still a no-show for instance). It's not like he was arguing against other forms of alternative energy, he was just advocating for what we could do now.
Hmm, so if someone enters 42.99.132.77 as their IP address, would that be IPv4 or v6? How would you tell in your scheme?
My complaint about using : is that it requires you to hold shift on most keyboards, which makes the addresses considerable more awkward to type. I would have been happier with , or even ; as the delimiter.
You're pretty much spot on. It's Secondlife minus the land barons, attachable penises, flying penises, monthly fee, horrible lag, and the uncanny valley.
Ok, so people still build big penis monuments, but they're not as obnoxious. The "scripting system" (redstone) is also a lot more limited than SL's scripting system.
But what you do get is a world that runs well and is effectively unlimited. You're not stuck choosing between paying hundreds of dollars a month, running a business, or being on some tiny worthless plot of land that prevents you from building anything more than the most primitive of objects. Also, the cave exploring can be a lot of fun and the combat system isn't a total disaster like SecondLife's.
You just punch the tree, make your pick, gather some coal, and go. Everything you need you can collect from the environment, and building is loads more straightforward than SLs tortured primitives.
Wow, so midnight "disappearances" of people in other countries is just the government respecting the individual's privacy? I never looked at it that way before.
When someone is arrested, isn't there a public record of it? Why not call the local police to verify instead of calling the guy directly? In fact being able to call him directly suggest that he has not been arrested.
Creating a press release describing how Anonymous isn't some group with centralized leadership doesn't seem like a crime to me either.
I can't help but to think that this sounds like media whoring at its worst. Basically a big prank pulled on the public at large.
It's simpler than that. By namedropping the website in her book, she would indirectly get millions of tween girls to turn 4chan into basically a big twilight fan board, as 4chans normal chatter (if you can call it that) gets crushed under the threads like "Edward/Jacob, which side are you on?"
On the other hand, Pedobear would have a field day if that happened.
How about an honest to god accent key instead? That would seem to be better than the otherwise mostly useless capslock key. I wouldn't mind that on all keyboards in fact, since it could be mapped to all sorts of useful functions depending on which program you're using. If you're writing equations, it could be mapped to produce the corresponding greek letter for instance.
Given how godawful slow Javascript has been in the past, there is a lot of room for improvement. Google is especially interested in fast Javascript, because so many of their services are very JS heavy and the quality of the user experience is harshly affected by old slow JS interpreters.
Heck, in the Clone Wars the Galactic Senate is pretty much in the pocket of the big corporate interests, and they're not shy about setting up parallels to our own congress. One of the most recent episodes had the Sith send terrorists to the capital in order to frighten the senators into action on a War funding bill that had a corporate governance rider attached to it, simply because the banking interests were pushing for deregulation of their industry. It looks like they're setting it up so that eventually the Republic isn't brought down by the Sith directly, but by bad housing loans.
At the very least, the tunnels need to be large enough for a maintenance workers to be able to walk the length of the project in relative comfort (no crawling on your hands and knees for 10km).
The costs go up substantially when you're digging under a city too, because you need to dodge (or reroute) all of the existing underground facilities, of which there can be a lot.
Sounds like it's going to have absurdly high up-front costs. Digging tunnels is expensive, and these guys want to run hundreds of miles of them? Who's going to put up the trillion or so dollars you would need to get the system up to a useful size? How long will it take for the energy savings to overcome the startup costs? Especially if you compare it to simple trains or trucks?
The problem with Carriers this small is that they can keep up just about enough birds to protect themselves, but no more. So it has barely any threat projection capability. Obviously this one won't even come with any aircraft, you would have to supply your own.
I guess we could fantasize about some billionaire grabbing this, fixing it up, and flying his personal jet off of it when he needs to dash off to a meeting somewhere, but it seems a lot more likely that it will just be broken up for scrap instead.
I have never once considered Robin a "Real Man with testosterone weeping out of every pore". I'm pretty sure that's not the image the state department guy was trying to get across either.
For some people it's just "plug in the external drive, flip the big switch in time machine".
Backups don't need to be complicated, what the essential truth is that you're not really doing anything more complicated than making a copy of your files. On that matter, what is the best free backup software for Windows? I've tried a few before and never found anything that worked right. Too many fail silently for dumb reasons like your network is down or for no apparent reason at all. The built-in windows one seems especially fragile, which is a shame, because backup/restore is something the OS has every right to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
The mini has always been a victim to the "Road Apple" disease, where Apple is terrified of undercutting one of the other business units, so they intentionally cripple a piece of hardware somehow or just plain overprice it (sometimes both!). While it's true that the hardware in the currenty Mini is rather nice, the proper price point for it ($500, or $600 at the most) would undercut their hilariously overpriced 2.4 Ghz C2D with 2GB of memory for $1000 in 2011 white iBook too much.
The domain mass thing is somewhat interesting, but the whole story is about how Racetrack memory is going to be totally awesome in the future because mumble mumble. A link to the paper about the magnetic domain experiments would have gone over much better IMHO.
Can I ask Slashdot to not post any more stories about Racetrack memory until something interesting happens with it? I've been hearing about it for years, but thus far it's all theoretical or early experimental work. Just like Bubble memory, by the time this actually works conventional memory may be faster and cheaper and it will end up on the sidelines of history.
I'll be intrested when they have something like a DIMM form factor that is actually better than existing memory.
If it's lining their pockets and getting them elected, I fail to see how an action could be considered "irrational". That's why it's so important to have watchdogs with teeth in government, because corruption is rational. It's only when there is a danger of being caught with appropriately dire consequences does the equation change.
In general: The other party can't consent. That's also why you can't marry 10 year olds in any civilized country.
This is the truth. Engines seem to last forever these days, unless you break the timing chain on an interference engine or get into some other catastrophe. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it's almost always the transmission that does the car in, not the engine. Transmissions just have not caught up with the advances in longevity that engines have apparently enjoyed over the past few decades.
Then why won't they stick the damn 1.6 or 2.0 Ecoboost in a Fusion? Been waiting for that car since the Ecoboost was announced, and it is still a no-show.
Maybe you should point out that "slippery slope" arguments don't hold a lot of sway, because they require people who are acting rationally today to act irrationally in the future, simply because it's an expansion of an idea that was previously rational to them. It doesn't make sense, and if you hear someone using it know that they're basically agreeing with the current policy (or at least they can't form a sane counter to it).
This came up a lot in Gay Marriage for instance, where people couldn't really say no to two people in love getting married, so they started talking about people marrying sheep or dogs instead.
I don't think Al Gore was as two faced as people apparently think he was years ago. Corn Ethanol had its detractors, but it was really the only viable alternative energy game in town at the time (switchgrass Ethanol is still a no-show for instance). It's not like he was arguing against other forms of alternative energy, he was just advocating for what we could do now.
Hmm, so if someone enters 42.99.132.77 as their IP address, would that be IPv4 or v6? How would you tell in your scheme?
My complaint about using : is that it requires you to hold shift on most keyboards, which makes the addresses considerable more awkward to type. I would have been happier with , or even ; as the delimiter.
Why not tar (or zip) up the directory before you copy it? It would almost certainly be faster and it's not that hard to automate.
You're pretty much spot on. It's Secondlife minus the land barons, attachable penises, flying penises, monthly fee, horrible lag, and the uncanny valley.
Ok, so people still build big penis monuments, but they're not as obnoxious. The "scripting system" (redstone) is also a lot more limited than SL's scripting system.
But what you do get is a world that runs well and is effectively unlimited. You're not stuck choosing between paying hundreds of dollars a month, running a business, or being on some tiny worthless plot of land that prevents you from building anything more than the most primitive of objects. Also, the cave exploring can be a lot of fun and the combat system isn't a total disaster like SecondLife's.
You just punch the tree, make your pick, gather some coal, and go. Everything you need you can collect from the environment, and building is loads more straightforward than SLs tortured primitives.
Wow, so midnight "disappearances" of people in other countries is just the government respecting the individual's privacy? I never looked at it that way before.
When someone is arrested, isn't there a public record of it? Why not call the local police to verify instead of calling the guy directly? In fact being able to call him directly suggest that he has not been arrested.
Creating a press release describing how Anonymous isn't some group with centralized leadership doesn't seem like a crime to me either.
I can't help but to think that this sounds like media whoring at its worst. Basically a big prank pulled on the public at large.
I thought the second rule was "No Scientologists".
It's simpler than that. By namedropping the website in her book, she would indirectly get millions of tween girls to turn 4chan into basically a big twilight fan board, as 4chans normal chatter (if you can call it that) gets crushed under the threads like "Edward/Jacob, which side are you on?"
On the other hand, Pedobear would have a field day if that happened.
How about an honest to god accent key instead? That would seem to be better than the otherwise mostly useless capslock key. I wouldn't mind that on all keyboards in fact, since it could be mapped to all sorts of useful functions depending on which program you're using. If you're writing equations, it could be mapped to produce the corresponding greek letter for instance.
Given how godawful slow Javascript has been in the past, there is a lot of room for improvement. Google is especially interested in fast Javascript, because so many of their services are very JS heavy and the quality of the user experience is harshly affected by old slow JS interpreters.
Heck, in the Clone Wars the Galactic Senate is pretty much in the pocket of the big corporate interests, and they're not shy about setting up parallels to our own congress. One of the most recent episodes had the Sith send terrorists to the capital in order to frighten the senators into action on a War funding bill that had a corporate governance rider attached to it, simply because the banking interests were pushing for deregulation of their industry. It looks like they're setting it up so that eventually the Republic isn't brought down by the Sith directly, but by bad housing loans.
At the very least, the tunnels need to be large enough for a maintenance workers to be able to walk the length of the project in relative comfort (no crawling on your hands and knees for 10km).
The costs go up substantially when you're digging under a city too, because you need to dodge (or reroute) all of the existing underground facilities, of which there can be a lot.
Sounds like it's going to have absurdly high up-front costs. Digging tunnels is expensive, and these guys want to run hundreds of miles of them? Who's going to put up the trillion or so dollars you would need to get the system up to a useful size? How long will it take for the energy savings to overcome the startup costs? Especially if you compare it to simple trains or trucks?
The problem with Carriers this small is that they can keep up just about enough birds to protect themselves, but no more. So it has barely any threat projection capability. Obviously this one won't even come with any aircraft, you would have to supply your own.
I guess we could fantasize about some billionaire grabbing this, fixing it up, and flying his personal jet off of it when he needs to dash off to a meeting somewhere, but it seems a lot more likely that it will just be broken up for scrap instead.
I have never once considered Robin a "Real Man with testosterone weeping out of every pore". I'm pretty sure that's not the image the state department guy was trying to get across either.
For some people it's just "plug in the external drive, flip the big switch in time machine".
Backups don't need to be complicated, what the essential truth is that you're not really doing anything more complicated than making a copy of your files. On that matter, what is the best free backup software for Windows? I've tried a few before and never found anything that worked right. Too many fail silently for dumb reasons like your network is down or for no apparent reason at all. The built-in windows one seems especially fragile, which is a shame, because backup/restore is something the OS has every right to handle.
Could be referring to a head crash, although I've never heard of modern drives actually doing that anymore.