Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist
Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.
That is to assume that the SS qualify as soldiers. Grandparent made no suggestion about the German Army, Navy and Airforce, who were fighting for their country in a war not of their personal making. The SDS, however, were Hitlers personal bully buys. They explicitly had a chain of command that did not pass through the normal military command. While they were sometimes used in positions alongside regular soldiers, they were also used where the regular army would have refused.
It is not reasonable to equate the SS with regular soldiers, either of 1945 Germany or 2004 America.
Reading the article, a more interesting point is that at least 30% - which probably accounts for a large slice of the US end European contribution - is from compromised machines. They believe most of those are directed from Russia.
Aside from the absence of Russia, the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction.
Do you really want to embed windows in a consumer device? Probably not - I certainly wouldn't. Since you are posting on/., you probably have some affection for Linux. But there are plenty of much lighter wight systems around, like QNX, vxWorks, which are also much more suitable for ebedded work. Windows is very, vety heavy. Yes, you can buy a 3GHZ x86 to run Windows - but a 1GHX Risc processor optimised for embedded work wil outperform it by two or three things and undercut its power consumption by 20 times.
Once you have ditched Windows, all the other OSes run on multiple platforms - Arm, PPC, MIPS, Coldfire, Hitachi H series... Linux is certainly available on Arm, PPC. Most of the others are available on more architectures.
Which means that if you chose one of these OSes and (usually) C++, you can move platforms with a recompile. (Not quite true, but near enough for overnment work).
I have experience of the Arm family, and they go like lightning when programmed right - much faster, MHz for MHz, than you would expect compared to Windows. And the power consumption is small to minuscule. And there are some very interesting new CPUs coming along obviously targeted as set-top boxes (sorry, NDA doesn't permit details and Google doesn't know yet). So what you need is for the set-top manufacuters to agree on a common OS like the mobile phome manufacturers have done (how about the same one, as a suggestion) and use the best of the new generation embedded processors.
do you have an emotional attachment to your TiVo remote? Or other well-designed objects?
You shouldn't have such an attachment. Good design shoud fade below your consciousness. Like a good pair of shoes; you shouldn't need to remember you are wearing them, they just work. You don't get an emotional attachement to light switches: they just work. When you get onew which doesn't, you curse it. If you do get such an emotional attachment, it means that there is a lot of bad design out there that you are reacting against. The fact that this article is interesting shows what a lot of badly designed handsets there are out there (see lots of preceding posts). Whioch shows how much of the time people are willing to accept mediocre results. OK, at first generation, results are bound to be mediocre: nobody did it before. But how many generations are we into remotes? About thirty years since the first domestic remotes came out, and domestic goods having a lifetime of two years at most. We have had 15 generations of remotes, and it is still newsworthy when someone tries to make a good one!
My experience is that where Open Source has commercial, paid-for support, the quality of that support is significantly better than the support from closed source software - for the same bucks. Of course, if you don't pay for support, you don't get it - TANSTAAFL.
Think about it: the closed source software got most of their money off you up-front. Support is not the main profit earner, it is a sideline. They will do the minimum they have to to keep you on the hook. Their best staff are probably routed to the development side of the business and have nothing to do with support, because they are busy implementing new bells and whistles under orders from marketing.
For an open source support outfit, however, support is the main money earner. If they don't keep you happy, then the paycheck goes away. They are therefore strongly motivated to do it well. Of course, they may be developers as well - probably are. But unlike commercial companies, the motivation is to keep the developers working on support because that is where the dollars come from. So the guy who handles your support call may well be a developer with a developers insight into the system, even if not the bit you have problems with.
In the Open/Closed argument, support is a winner, not loser, for OSS if there is commercial support
I also hear from people with a real interest in it that Windows Media 9 is seriously better quality for the same bit rate than any of the Open Source formats. You may not like it, but M$ have identified multimedia, and particularly moving pictures, as a major driver for future development. They have spent real money developing their proprietary format and, from the reports I have heard, it works.
You don't seriously measure liquid in pounds, do you?
Definitely. Fuel has a pretty large coefficient of expansionm, so that the same weight of fuel will have very different volumes in Arizona and Alaska. But it is the mass of the fuel which (a) delivers energy to the engines and (b) increases aircraft weight at takeoff. Fuel bowsers have converters to convert gallons-at-temperature into pounds (metricate to taste).
I would guess this is a tradeoff between resolving power and light gathering capacity. The high resolution of the Hubble was needed to observe that the two apparent galaxies were identical and therefore the same galaxy lensed by the intevening cluster. This needs the high resolution of Hubble, unaffected by the atmosphere. But with its relatively small mirror, Hubble cannot gather enougb photons for a good esposure. So you point Keck, with its 10 metre mirror, at the blur which it cannot resolve - and probably give it a longer exposure than you can get time for on the overbooked Hubble. And you get a much better spectrum. But it was Hubble which made the discovery, whaich arguably could not have been made from beneath the atmosphere.
Journalistic shorthand. It is the furthest galaxy yet discovered. Typical anthropocentricity - like Columbus "discovering" America, as if there hadn't been know to its native inhabitants for 11,000 years.
Our galaxy takes 200m-300m years to rotate. Current theories, I think, suggest that they take much the same time to form. But I think that is the sort of question this kind of observation is trying to answer. It may be part of the answer - if galaxies take longer to form than the apparent age of the universe when this one wes formed (which I don't think was the case), somebody's theories need changing. If not, it is another pebble of evidence on the side of current theories.
As I understand it, in the visible wavelengths we have something better down here. New telescopes with actively controlled lenses are claimed to be achieving as good results as Hubble, with all the advantages of ground basing and at a fraction of the cost.
It is in the infra-red, which cannot get through the atmosphere (well, some near-infra-red can) where you need space based telescopes. And while Hubble can do infra-red work, I don't think it is optimised for it. Which is why the Webb telescope will be an infra-red instrument.
A Hubble refit mission would probably cost something $250 million. For perhaps three times that, you could have this, which stikes me as even more exciting.
Hubble will stop working if it is not serviced. It is not a question of lack of users, it is things like propellant to aim it, replacement gyros for the ones wearing out spinning up there, and so on. Hubble asn't designed to work for ever - it was designed for regular service calls. So many of the bits have finite lives, and will reach the end of those lives in anothr couple of years.
I too vote for a service call. But as I understand it, NASA is not doing it on safety rather than money grounds. New safety rules say that the shuttle needs an external inspection before re-entry to avoud the problems last time. At ISS, that is is easy - look through the windows. And if a fault is found, you can wait at ISS while spares come up by rocket or another shuttle. At Hubble, you would have to do a dangerous EVA to check it. And you would have nowhere to wait for spares if you found damage that could not be repaired with on-board resources (Shuttle's endurance is about 10 days).
(em>People in the world aren't hungry because evil Americans build cities on fertile land. People in the world are hungry because they live under the thumb of brutal dictators. You want to feed the world? Promote freedom and capitalism around the world.
I beg to differ. People in the world are hungry because they have overpopulated their environment and outstripped its capacity to support them. It's a harsh truth, but still a truth: If we (humans) don't manage our fertility, natural forces will manage our mortality.very with war and strongly with misgovenment. Not only do warlords and dictators steal the foor for their own purposes, they destroy infrastructure, and dispirited farmers don't try again because they know it will be stolen.
You say the current team is a mess. Management probably know that and want you to fix it. So the question to you is - can you fix it?
If you cannot, you'll have a miserable time working with people you don't get on with on a "less cool" project. And you'll probably end up with a blot on your CV which will take a bit of rubbing out.
But that is the downside. The upside is that, if you can fix the team, you'll have a great time because your achieveing something (in human rather than technical terms). The un-coolness won't matter, and you'll have gold star on your CV.
So it is time to do a bit of self-evaluation. Are you up to it? Of course, you cannot know, but you can make a guess. And then you have to take a risk. But it is a risk either way. If you go for it, you may fail. If you don't it may be a while until the next opportunity comes along (though it will - very few things are Once In A Lifetime).
A decent laptop case, preferably one that doesn't look like a traditional laptop case
Or a fightbag/backpack with built-in laptop case. I recently went on a trip with a colleague who had one - I had my own pack and a traditional laptop in case. He had it much easier than me - only one thing to carry.
Must suck to be Apple right now though, considering they just released the mini iPods which are based on tech that is already looking rather inferior.
Have you compared the prices? The mini-iPod is aomething like $199, this is $5,999. Disk is likely to beat silicon in $/mByte for a very long time. Where CF beats disk is access time. And streaming players don't need good access time: once they are on track, they have better performance than CF.
In a dedicated device, this kind of capacity is going to be cheaper in disk. This wins where you need interchangeability (nobody had a good CF format hard disk drive, as far as I know), or ruggedness, or low power, or ultra-low noise. Specialist markets all.
Using a flash card would be worse than a disk. Sure it has access times an order of magnitude faster than a hard disk (200ns according to the first google hit for "compact flash access time") but bandwidth sucks at less than 20MB/s while cheap desktop drives are getting between 30-60 sustained (tom's hardware review of Seagate Baracudda 7200.7)
But for most operations on a normal desktop system, access time is 99% of total transfer time. Most disk transfers are of the order 4-16kb - less than 1 millisec while transferring. Whereas disk average access time struggles to reach 4 millisec. Excluding, of course, things like streaming video.
Furthermore since flash has limited flash cycles that is much less than that of a hard drive, your/tmp directory will have you buying a new card in no time.
Much more relevant. You would have to do without a swap partition (buy morE dram). I think some flas drives are clever wnough to map out bad blocks invisibly, so/tmp shouldn't kill you too soon.
But for $6k, how many complete disk based system can you drop/lose?
Because that $66 billion doesn't really exist: it is just the hypothetical price tag on the assets which the buyer is offering the shareholders of the company they want to buy. Much of it is probably new stock of their own which they intend to print to give the shareholders they buy out. If bidder and target are both trading at $10.00, the budder may be offering 13 of their shares for 10 of the originals. You can set a stock market price on these shares, but you couldn't eactually get the money out of the stock market: if you tried selling that many shares the stock price would plummet.
There is often a cash element in the offer: but that cash is usually borrowed from banks secured against things the buyer owns, and needs to be paid back.
The stock market only works because the money goes round and round. Someone who makes a killing on the market doesn't take the money out in greenbacks. Either they re-invest it, or they deposit it in a bank, which reinvests it, or they buy things from people who reinvest it.
the whole financial system is a giant lie which we have all agreed to tell each other. You cannot take more than a certain amount out of it, or the Emperor will be revealed to have not clothes and the whole system will fall.
I'm not a doctor, nor that knowledgeable about medicine. Still, I've read a little bit about autism. IMHO what you describe seems to me more like a severe attention deficit problem, than anything autism-related.
Again no expert - my knowledge comes from being Governor of a school with a specialist autism unit. But my impression is that there is a strong relationship betweem autism and attention deficit. The difference is more in the causes than in the results. In Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (as it is referred to here), the sufferer cannot concentrate because hyperactivity keeps distracting them from one objective to another. In the autistic case, there is no hyperactivity, but an inability to filter the world - to select which inputs relate to the task at hand and which do not - leads to the same effect of being unable to concentrate on a problem for long enough. In the hyperactive case, they are distracted by their own need to do something else. In the autistic case, they are distracted by the ticking of the clock or the sight of their own hand. But the end results can be the same.
Mild autism is therefore well handled by being geeky - erecting walls of "I'm not paying attention" and deliberately focussing on one objective and cutting out exactly that variety of experience which non-autistics say is the essnce of life and autistics find an unbearable distraction. One of the main techniques the school uses to teach autistic children is to give each a very bland and unstimulating workspace in which the only interesting thing is the topic they should be studying (i.e. no view out of the window, other pupils, jazzy posters).
Remember that autism is a spectrum. Everybody can find the world overwhelming and distracting at times. Autism is just the extreme case of this, when the world is so complicated that the suffer is unable to find reference points in the world, and resorts to strange and sometimes obsessive behaviour in order to nail down something in this mad world.
How on earth can you describe an analog watch as more intuitive than a digital watch? More elegant, certainly. But intuitive? A digital watch shows the numbers. If you can read them, you can tell the time.
Except that the numbers are not "the time". Time is a smooth variable, the numbers are an arbitrary subdivision onto it. I don't want to know that it is 10:47, I want to know that it is about yea-much before elven o'clock. For some purposes, minutes are too fine; sweep hands give me some easily recognised divisions (twelfths) and some intermediate values without going down to the details of the minutes.
It is much easier to "flick read" a sweep-hand system. There are far fewer ambiguities (confusing 6 or 3 with 8, for example).
Why is this story fall in the privacy category?Guns can kill people, so guns will kill people, so ban guns. RFID can infrine privacy, so RFID will infringe privacy, so ban RFID We need a sober discussion about it.
I suggests that items with RFID tags should be marked as such, the RFID tag should be easily removable, and it should be clear how to do so. A significant fine ($500?) should be imposed for putting a concealed RFID tag (without court warrent). It is, after all, easy enough to find if something has got a tag - they are designed to shout "I'm here". Treat it as a form of phone tapping/recording: legitimate if you know about it, an offence if you do it in secret (except with warrant).
The answer is - bit by bit. It is a fallacy to think that systems need to jump from state A to state B without passing through any ointermediate states. Flowers probably originally pollinated by the wind, for their own purpises, and bees originally raided flowers without concern for the flowers need. But the bees accidentally distributed the pollen better than the wind, so flowers that got pollinated by bees did better than those that didn't. An flowers that produced an excesss of sweet sap attracted more bees than those that didn't (a) got more bees and (b) got less pollen eaten, because the bees took the cheaper sap. And bees that worked out which kind of plants gave away this sweet sap ate better than those that didn't. And flowers that learmed to signal "Hey, I've got honey" go more than those which had honey and didn't advertise. And bes which learned to depend upon a slower which was successful (in part because they pollinated it) did better than those that didn't.
Evolution doesn't take flying leaps. It takes hundreds and thousands of tiny steps. All that it requres to get from A to B is that there is a continuous path from A to B, and that every single step along that path, however tiny, moves just a tiny bit closer to B.
Somebody has moddeled the formation of the eye from, essentially, blank skin, evolving through sensitive skin, a "visual pit", a simple cover over the pit, to developing the lens and focussing mechanism as we see it. This took something like 100,000 steps. And for each of those steps, the proto-eye that formed was just a tiny bit better than the one before and would therefore have benefitted its owner just a tiny bit. Of course, these steps would onlynhave happened very occasionally. But if a step only happened every 100 generations, and there were one generation a year (slow for insects and other small animals) to is only 10 million years - yasterday to geologists.
What doubters of evolution often don't realise is how tiny an advantage evolution can work on over enough generations. A 1% advantage is much more than enough spread through a whole population. If it is a 1% advantage ofer the whole range, the species advances (avolves) as a whole. If it is a 1% advantage in some areas not others (e.g. cold tolerance favours those at the cold end of the range) the species will split into two lines which will specialise in different areas.
To get on topic as to how this particular trait might have evolve, look at the largest grid we know - the world economy. This didn't spring to life in one leap. It evolved from very local communication (I give you meat, you give me sex), neigbourly communication (I give you meat, you give me axeheads), distant communications (I give you silver, you give me spices) to abstract communications (I give you green paper, you give me insurance policy) in many stages. You cannot pinpoint where "the economy" started. But it wasn't around 10,000 years ago, and it is around now.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist
Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.
That is to assume that the SS qualify as soldiers. Grandparent made no suggestion about the German Army, Navy and Airforce, who were fighting for their country in a war not of their personal making. The SDS, however, were Hitlers personal bully buys. They explicitly had a chain of command that did not pass through the normal military command. While they were sometimes used in positions alongside regular soldiers, they were also used where the regular army would have refused.
It is not reasonable to equate the SS with regular soldiers, either of 1945 Germany or 2004 America.
Reading the article, a more interesting point is that at least 30% - which probably accounts for a large slice of the US end European contribution - is from compromised machines. They believe most of those are directed from Russia.
Aside from the absence of Russia, the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction.
Do you really want to embed windows in a consumer device? Probably not - I certainly wouldn't. Since you are posting on/., you probably have some affection for Linux. But there are plenty of much lighter wight systems around, like QNX, vxWorks, which are also much more suitable for ebedded work. Windows is very, vety heavy. Yes, you can buy a 3GHZ x86 to run Windows - but a 1GHX Risc processor optimised for embedded work wil outperform it by two or three things and undercut its power consumption by 20 times.
Once you have ditched Windows, all the other OSes run on multiple platforms - Arm, PPC, MIPS, Coldfire, Hitachi H series... Linux is certainly available on Arm, PPC. Most of the others are available on more architectures.
Which means that if you chose one of these OSes and (usually) C++, you can move platforms with a recompile. (Not quite true, but near enough for overnment work).
I have experience of the Arm family, and they go like lightning when programmed right - much faster, MHz for MHz, than you would expect compared to Windows. And the power consumption is small to minuscule. And there are some very interesting new CPUs coming along obviously targeted as set-top boxes (sorry, NDA doesn't permit details and Google doesn't know yet). So what you need is for the set-top manufacuters to agree on a common OS like the mobile phome manufacturers have done (how about the same one, as a suggestion) and use the best of the new generation embedded processors.
do you have an emotional attachment to your TiVo remote? Or other well-designed objects?
You shouldn't have such an attachment. Good design shoud fade below your consciousness. Like a good pair of shoes; you shouldn't need to remember you are wearing them, they just work. You don't get an emotional attachement to light switches: they just work. When you get onew which doesn't, you curse it. If you do get such an emotional attachment, it means that there is a lot of bad design out there that you are reacting against. The fact that this article is interesting shows what a lot of badly designed handsets there are out there (see lots of preceding posts). Whioch shows how much of the time people are willing to accept mediocre results. OK, at first generation, results are bound to be mediocre: nobody did it before. But how many generations are we into remotes? About thirty years since the first domestic remotes came out, and domestic goods having a lifetime of two years at most. We have had 15 generations of remotes, and it is still newsworthy when someone tries to make a good one!
My experience is that where Open Source has commercial, paid-for support, the quality of that support is significantly better than the support from closed source software - for the same bucks. Of course, if you don't pay for support, you don't get it - TANSTAAFL.
Think about it: the closed source software got most of their money off you up-front. Support is not the main profit earner, it is a sideline. They will do the minimum they have to to keep you on the hook. Their best staff are probably routed to the development side of the business and have nothing to do with support, because they are busy implementing new bells and whistles under orders from marketing.
For an open source support outfit, however, support is the main money earner. If they don't keep you happy, then the paycheck goes away. They are therefore strongly motivated to do it well. Of course, they may be developers as well - probably are. But unlike commercial companies, the motivation is to keep the developers working on support because that is where the dollars come from. So the guy who handles your support call may well be a developer with a developers insight into the system, even if not the bit you have problems with.
In the Open/Closed argument, support is a winner, not loser, for OSS if there is commercial support
I also hear from people with a real interest in it that Windows Media 9 is seriously better quality for the same bit rate than any of the Open Source formats. You may not like it, but M$ have identified multimedia, and particularly moving pictures, as a major driver for future development. They have spent real money developing their proprietary format and, from the reports I have heard, it works.
You don't seriously measure liquid in pounds, do you?
Definitely. Fuel has a pretty large coefficient of expansionm, so that the same weight of fuel will have very different volumes in Arizona and Alaska. But it is the mass of the fuel which (a) delivers energy to the engines and (b) increases aircraft weight at takeoff. Fuel bowsers have converters to convert gallons-at-temperature into pounds (metricate to taste).
I would guess this is a tradeoff between resolving power and light gathering capacity. The high resolution of the Hubble was needed to observe that the two apparent galaxies were identical and therefore the same galaxy lensed by the intevening cluster. This needs the high resolution of Hubble, unaffected by the atmosphere. But with its relatively small mirror, Hubble cannot gather enougb photons for a good esposure. So you point Keck, with its 10 metre mirror, at the blur which it cannot resolve - and probably give it a longer exposure than you can get time for on the overbooked Hubble. And you get a much better spectrum. But it was Hubble which made the discovery, whaich arguably could not have been made from beneath the atmosphere.
Journalistic shorthand. It is the furthest galaxy yet discovered. Typical anthropocentricity - like Columbus "discovering" America, as if there hadn't been know to its native inhabitants for 11,000 years.
Our galaxy takes 200m-300m years to rotate. Current theories, I think, suggest that they take much the same time to form. But I think that is the sort of question this kind of observation is trying to answer. It may be part of the answer - if galaxies take longer to form than the apparent age of the universe when this one wes formed (which I don't think was the case), somebody's theories need changing. If not, it is another pebble of evidence on the side of current theories.
As I understand it, in the visible wavelengths we have something better down here. New telescopes with actively controlled lenses are claimed to be achieving as good results as Hubble, with all the advantages of ground basing and at a fraction of the cost.
It is in the infra-red, which cannot get through the atmosphere (well, some near-infra-red can) where you need space based telescopes. And while Hubble can do infra-red work, I don't think it is optimised for it. Which is why the Webb telescope will be an infra-red instrument.
A Hubble refit mission would probably cost something $250 million. For perhaps three times that, you could have this, which stikes me as even more exciting.
Hubble will stop working if it is not serviced. It is not a question of lack of users, it is things like propellant to aim it, replacement gyros for the ones wearing out spinning up there, and so on. Hubble asn't designed to work for ever - it was designed for regular service calls. So many of the bits have finite lives, and will reach the end of those lives in anothr couple of years.
I too vote for a service call. But as I understand it, NASA is not doing it on safety rather than money grounds. New safety rules say that the shuttle needs an external inspection before re-entry to avoud the problems last time. At ISS, that is is easy - look through the windows. And if a fault is found, you can wait at ISS while spares come up by rocket or another shuttle. At Hubble, you would have to do a dangerous EVA to check it. And you would have nowhere to wait for spares if you found damage that could not be repaired with on-board resources (Shuttle's endurance is about 10 days).
(em>People in the world aren't hungry because evil Americans build cities on fertile land. People in the world are hungry because they live under the thumb of brutal dictators. You want to feed the world? Promote freedom and capitalism around the world.
I beg to differ. People in the world are hungry because they have overpopulated their environment and outstripped its capacity to support them. It's a harsh truth, but still a truth: If we (humans) don't manage our fertility, natural forces will manage our mortality.very with war and strongly with misgovenment. Not only do warlords and dictators steal the foor for their own purposes, they destroy infrastructure, and dispirited farmers don't try again because they know it will be stolen.
You say the current team is a mess. Management probably know that and want you to fix it. So the question to you is - can you fix it?
If you cannot, you'll have a miserable time working with people you don't get on with on a "less cool" project. And you'll probably end up with a blot on your CV which will take a bit of rubbing out.
But that is the downside. The upside is that, if you can fix the team, you'll have a great time because your achieveing something (in human rather than technical terms). The un-coolness won't matter, and you'll have gold star on your CV.
So it is time to do a bit of self-evaluation. Are you up to it? Of course, you cannot know, but you can make a guess. And then you have to take a risk. But it is a risk either way. If you go for it, you may fail. If you don't it may be a while until the next opportunity comes along (though it will - very few things are Once In A Lifetime).
A decent laptop case, preferably one that doesn't look like a traditional laptop case
Or a fightbag/backpack with built-in laptop case. I recently went on a trip with a colleague who had one - I had my own pack and a traditional laptop in case. He had it much easier than me - only one thing to carry.
Silent, but expensive, keyboard and mouse replacement: Fingerworks Touchstream keyboard
Must suck to be Apple right now though, considering they just released the mini iPods which are based on tech that is already looking rather inferior.
Have you compared the prices? The mini-iPod is aomething like $199, this is $5,999. Disk is likely to beat silicon in $/mByte for a very long time. Where CF beats disk is access time. And streaming players don't need good access time: once they are on track, they have better performance than CF.
In a dedicated device, this kind of capacity is going to be cheaper in disk. This wins where you need interchangeability (nobody had a good CF format hard disk drive, as far as I know), or ruggedness, or low power, or ultra-low noise. Specialist markets all.
Using a flash card would be worse than a disk. Sure it has access times an order of magnitude faster than a hard disk (200ns according to the first google hit for "compact flash access time") but bandwidth sucks at less than 20MB/s while cheap desktop drives are getting between 30-60 sustained (tom's hardware review of Seagate Baracudda 7200.7)
/tmp directory will have you buying a new card in no time.
/tmp shouldn't kill you too soon.
But for most operations on a normal desktop system, access time is 99% of total transfer time. Most disk transfers are of the order 4-16kb - less than 1 millisec while transferring. Whereas disk average access time struggles to reach 4 millisec. Excluding, of course, things like streaming video.
Furthermore since flash has limited flash cycles that is much less than that of a hard drive, your
Much more relevant. You would have to do without a swap partition (buy morE dram). I think some flas drives are clever wnough to map out bad blocks invisibly, so
But for $6k, how many complete disk based system can you drop/lose?
Because that $66 billion doesn't really exist: it is just the hypothetical price tag on the assets which the buyer is offering the shareholders of the company they want to buy. Much of it is probably new stock of their own which they intend to print to give the shareholders they buy out. If bidder and target are both trading at $10.00, the budder may be offering 13 of their shares for 10 of the originals. You can set a stock market price on these shares, but you couldn't eactually get the money out of the stock market: if you tried selling that many shares the stock price would plummet.
There is often a cash element in the offer: but that cash is usually borrowed from banks secured against things the buyer owns, and needs to be paid back.
The stock market only works because the money goes round and round. Someone who makes a killing on the market doesn't take the money out in greenbacks. Either they re-invest it, or they deposit it in a bank, which reinvests it, or they buy things from people who reinvest it.
the whole financial system is a giant lie which we have all agreed to tell each other. You cannot take more than a certain amount out of it, or the Emperor will be revealed to have not clothes and the whole system will fall.
Sun's VM runs it much slower on the clients.
Have you checked that recently? We were startled at the speedup of the latest 1.4 release (1.4.03, if I remember rightly).
Again no expert - my knowledge comes from being Governor of a school with a specialist autism unit. But my impression is that there is a strong relationship betweem autism and attention deficit. The difference is more in the causes than in the results. In Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (as it is referred to here), the sufferer cannot concentrate because hyperactivity keeps distracting them from one objective to another. In the autistic case, there is no hyperactivity, but an inability to filter the world - to select which inputs relate to the task at hand and which do not - leads to the same effect of being unable to concentrate on a problem for long enough. In the hyperactive case, they are distracted by their own need to do something else. In the autistic case, they are distracted by the ticking of the clock or the sight of their own hand. But the end results can be the same.
Mild autism is therefore well handled by being geeky - erecting walls of "I'm not paying attention" and deliberately focussing on one objective and cutting out exactly that variety of experience which non-autistics say is the essnce of life and autistics find an unbearable distraction. One of the main techniques the school uses to teach autistic children is to give each a very bland and unstimulating workspace in which the only interesting thing is the topic they should be studying (i.e. no view out of the window, other pupils, jazzy posters).
Remember that autism is a spectrum. Everybody can find the world overwhelming and distracting at times. Autism is just the extreme case of this, when the world is so complicated that the suffer is unable to find reference points in the world, and resorts to strange and sometimes obsessive behaviour in order to nail down something in this mad world.
How on earth can you describe an analog watch as more intuitive than a digital watch? More elegant, certainly. But intuitive? A digital watch shows the numbers. If you can read them, you can tell the time.
Except that the numbers are not "the time". Time is a smooth variable, the numbers are an arbitrary subdivision onto it. I don't want to know that it is 10:47, I want to know that it is about yea-much before elven o'clock. For some purposes, minutes are too fine; sweep hands give me some easily recognised divisions (twelfths) and some intermediate values without going down to the details of the minutes.
It is much easier to "flick read" a sweep-hand system. There are far fewer ambiguities (confusing 6 or 3 with 8, for example).
Why is this story fall in the privacy category?Guns can kill people, so guns will kill people, so ban guns.
RFID can infrine privacy, so RFID will infringe privacy, so ban RFID
We need a sober discussion about it.
I suggests that items with RFID tags should be marked as such, the RFID tag should be easily removable, and it should be clear how to do so. A significant fine ($500?) should be imposed for putting a concealed RFID tag (without court warrent). It is, after all, easy enough to find if something has got a tag - they are designed to shout "I'm here". Treat it as a form of phone tapping/recording: legitimate if you know about it, an offence if you do it in secret (except with warrant).
What privacy problems remain?
The answer is - bit by bit. It is a fallacy to think that systems need to jump from state A to state B without passing through any ointermediate states. Flowers probably originally pollinated by the wind, for their own purpises, and bees originally raided flowers without concern for the flowers need. But the bees accidentally distributed the pollen better than the wind, so flowers that got pollinated by bees did better than those that didn't. An flowers that produced an excesss of sweet sap attracted more bees than those that didn't (a) got more bees and (b) got less pollen eaten, because the bees took the cheaper sap. And bees that worked out which kind of plants gave away this sweet sap ate better than those that didn't. And flowers that learmed to signal "Hey, I've got honey" go more than those which had honey and didn't advertise. And bes which learned to depend upon a slower which was successful (in part because they pollinated it) did better than those that didn't.
Evolution doesn't take flying leaps. It takes hundreds and thousands of tiny steps. All that it requres to get from A to B is that there is a continuous path from A to B, and that every single step along that path, however tiny, moves just a tiny bit closer to B.
Somebody has moddeled the formation of the eye from, essentially, blank skin, evolving through sensitive skin, a "visual pit", a simple cover over the pit, to developing the lens and focussing mechanism as we see it. This took something like 100,000 steps. And for each of those steps, the proto-eye that formed was just a tiny bit better than the one before and would therefore have benefitted its owner just a tiny bit. Of course, these steps would onlynhave happened very occasionally. But if a step only happened every 100 generations, and there were one generation a year (slow for insects and other small animals) to is only 10 million years - yasterday to geologists.
What doubters of evolution often don't realise is how tiny an advantage evolution can work on over enough generations. A 1% advantage is much more than enough spread through a whole population. If it is a 1% advantage ofer the whole range, the species advances (avolves) as a whole. If it is a 1% advantage in some areas not others (e.g. cold tolerance favours those at the cold end of the range) the species will split into two lines which will specialise in different areas.
To get on topic as to how this particular trait might have evolve, look at the largest grid we know - the world economy. This didn't spring to life in one leap. It evolved from very local communication (I give you meat, you give me sex), neigbourly communication (I give you meat, you give me axeheads), distant communications (I give you silver, you give me spices) to abstract communications (I give you green paper, you give me insurance policy) in many stages. You cannot pinpoint where "the economy" started. But it wasn't around 10,000 years ago, and it is around now.
And the moral of this weeks story is - Don't post when pissed.