No, I got that point, and I responded to it. It doesn't "just work" on pretty much any software system that you have to assemble yourself. You have to get the appropriate software to get it to work and install it.
I'm pretty sure he didn't assemble his own iMac. But maybe that's just me.
Why don't they make a drive that has variable rpm? You could even have the OS control the speed: 4200 when on battery and 7200 when plugged into an outlet.
Two factors possible:
1) The drives are smaller, right? Might be harder to design hardware for that small space. 2) Thermal death. Just because it's plugged in doesn't mean all those parts aren't still living right next to each other, trying not to kill each other.
And yet you think this would still be a good idea to spray on your clothes and wear around - ignoring the EU scientists and politicians who proposed these laws? My point was that we probably should not be rushing to paint everything with lead-based nanoparticles unless I am missing something regarding the technology.
Two possibilities: 1) The type of molecule they're using renders the lead innocuous somehow 2) The massive, massive environmental benefits would outweigh the environmental downside.
Dual boot tempts people to use MS software like IE, resulting in virii and spyware.
Or, you know, just download firefox. I'm in Windows maybe 5% of the time now, and will run Ad-aware months apart, and only find maybe a few tracking cookies. I think the last time was because I had to use IE to download a NoCD crack from somewhere.
Well, Mr. PJ, if you were to even cursorily glimpse the actual article you would seen that this is a direct quotation from the first paragraph in the linked article. Amazing, isn't is, what an ass a minor convenience has made you to be!
I agree with your post in general, but two things:
1) Direct quotes should be in "quotation marks." Funny how those clear things right up. 2) I read most of TFA, but skipped the intro and therefore didn't see that quote. Probably true of other people as well.
If your wife has a problem with you, why are you the one who has to go sleep on the couch? It's your damned bed too; if she doesn't want to be around you, she can take her whiny ass elsewhere.
There is a somewhat simple (although not entirely accurate) biological reason for some of this. Mainly, mens' hormones cycle every day, and we want to have sex pretty much all the time. Womens' cycle monthly, so they only really badly want to have sex for a few days each month.
Result? Men pretty much have to always be on their best behaviour to make sure they have a chance of impregnating women (not so coincidentally they're horniest when they're fertile). So women get to dictate certain things, or your genes don't propogate.
Of course, at the same time I've had ex's that after a while wanted me on a regular basis way more badly than I wanted them, which is why their exes. It's much more individual than that, but that's the general root cause.
ith an approximate 94% recycling rate, the lead-acid battery industry is just about as good as it gets.
Further, the cycle of lead from smelter -> battery manufacturer -> consumer -> old battery to smelter is as tight a closed loop as you'll find (short of a cow in a pasture).
98% recovery rate of _all_ packaging. All by offering a mere 10 cents per bottle.
And yet every few years some Conservative will spout off about privatising the damn thing. Despite truly ridiculous selection, rural community reach, and said environmental success.
ELECTRIC HEAT! IN CALIFORNIA? I realize you don't use it as heavily as someone in Wisconsin, but jeez, thats just stupid.
I live in Ottawa...and at least from a renters perspective the poeple I know with electric are much, much, much happier than people with oil heat. Judging by the other response you're implying gas is better...but I guess with older neighborhoods this may not be an option. It's certainly what my parents have in their suburb built in 1980, though.
But of course, we all live in the Golden State so that can't be true. As you so sagely and cleverly put it, we're all paying twice.
He said _often_. In Ottawa (i.e. 'Silicon Valley North'...blargh), for instance, you pay twice for maybe half the year, and pay less than once the other half.
Probably true. I was in a wal-mart a few years ago and noticed the ``buy american'' signs. They were printed in Red China.
Friends of mine are currently working in China, and the one WalMart they were in had only one sign in English - "Cherish Your Future. Do Not Shoplift."
Local "mom and pop" concern? How many of those do you really see? Albertsons and IGA (on the grocery side), Hastings (on the book side) and Best Buy and Circuit City (on the DVD/electronics side) are hardly more local than Wal-Mart is. I've never seen half-decent selections of those things at a local store.
There's a subtle difference between franchises and centrally owned chains. I have to use Canadian examples, but hopefully you'll follow me.
Home Hardware has been around for decades in Canada, and each one is different - the owners of each franchise have a lot of freedom. People like it, money stays local.
Mid 90s - enter Home Depot. "Lowest price on all items we sell". However, they only sell one brand of a lot of things - and that brand is only available there. Hrmmm...see a loophole here? Upshot is the store may be a lot bigger, but they hardly ever have the part you need - they just have a lot of far fewer things.
Later, rinse, repeat across different industries.
My local, independent video/dvd stores (The Invisible Cinema, Elgin Street Video) have far better selection than the chains (this is in a city of about 300 000). The Invisible Cinema also doubles as a small art gallery, and last year hosted a release party for a new Atari 7800 game. I shit you not.
For groceries we have a franchise called "Your Independent Grocer". They can be a bit pricier, but the selection is usually comparable to other grocery stores. If you can't find a good book store you're not really trying, I know of lots of _single genre_ stores, let alone used stores, and good old general mom and pop book stores with cats curled up on the window sill and such.
And if they don't have what you want? They'll probably order it for you. Keep coming back, they'll get to know you, start telling you about things you'd like and ordering them in without asking. Hell, my friend totally changed the Mountain Dew buying habits of our corner store in about 6 months of living down the street.
This really isn't as difficult as it sounds, except maybe on the pocket book. But it all works out in the end - in service, peace of mind, and above all not being gouged after everyone is finally driven out of the market.
Where I live the DSL does not behave like this, you can upload to an ftp server at full speed and download at full speed simultaneously. The cable provider however _is_ like this, you start an upload and it destroys your download speeds.
This is really a TCP limitation, and it all depends on the ratio of your upload and download speeds. You need a certain amount of upload bandwidth just to send ACK packets, otherwise your download will slow down because it thinks you're missing packets and will resend them. Newer TCP implementations help to alleviate this, but who knows how consistently they're implemented.
Okay...let's take the somewhat 'easy' case of one set for reading, one for writing. First - do read and writes happen at the same speed? Probably, but maybe not.
Second - are the reads and writes that are happening at the same time the same length? Almost definitely not.
Third - are the reads and writes going to be occuring 180 degrees apart all the time? Almost definitely not. You could say "just stop or start a little bit before or after the other", but that just makes the second point worse.
Fourth - is DMA set up to handle read and write at the same time? I think you'd need separate DMAs for this.
Fifth - scheduling algorithms for the heads. Not impossible, but not trivial to tune for performance either.
I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but I think in terms or real performance gains you'd be looking at something less than 50%, and certainly nowhere near 100%. And would probably cost more than 50% more. As someone else said, RAID would probably be better. And remember kids, the ID is for Inexpensive Disks.
it's much more easy to "fight for freedom" when you have no children to feed and you can travel the world, sleep at expensive hotels, eat at fancy restaurants, and this is all paid by someone else.
Do you also whine about how not everyone who can sing gets to make music videos? Or that not everyone who plays hockey gets to do it for a living? Or that not everyone who plays the stock market gets to be a broker?
The way things are going software development is soon going to be an 'amateur' thing, with only talented amateurs getting picked up by corporations/schools/etc (see OSDL, etc.). Sure lots of people will still need to code the tools they need as part of their jobs, but it will only be part of their job.
Actually, perhaps a better analogy is to mathematics. Lots of people need to do math to do their jobs, but very few of them get paid to be mathematicians. And yes, most of their work is 'open source', unless they're at the NSA.
but wouldnt a better understanding of an asteroids composition be the first step in developing an effective means of destroying one on a collision course with earth?
Wouldn't a better understanding of the difference between a comet and an asteroid help you to answer that question?
Not to say that we shouldn't be worried about comets as well, but they're a different problem, and have widely varying compositions.
...so its only raison-d'etre would be selling more consoles
Yeah, I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't wanna do THAT!
Don't forget that for a long time (still?) MS sold the consoles below cost - the classic make money on the games model (or even lose money on the console and the games, make money on crushing all opposition).
I even remember reading articles back in the day about Sony being concerned about people buying PS2s just as cheap DVD players (and maybe for one game, like FF X), since they were losing money on them and needed game sales to profit.
Some older buildings have layers of wire a foot thick - it's almost always cheaper to lay new on top of the old stuff rather than figure out the rats' nest of wiring.
You think that's bad, check out the downtown central office of the phone company in one of your older cities. It's only trouble when the floor is starting to crack.
Is to make it more desirable for people looking for 'one stop shopping.' e.g. why go to a real computer or audio store, when you can park once and compare between 'two' stores?
You must not cut and paste much; it drives me nuts to use an app that looks that much like it does in Linux and doesn't support X-11 cut and paste.
I believe this is configurable in about:config. Some distros may have it off by default, but I know Mandrake had it on because it broke middle-click opening of tabs for me. Which is far more important, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I got that point, and I responded to it. It doesn't "just work" on pretty much any software system that you have to assemble yourself. You have to get the appropriate software to get it to work and install it.
I'm pretty sure he didn't assemble his own iMac. But maybe that's just me.
Why don't they make a drive that has variable rpm? You could even have the OS control the speed: 4200 when on battery and 7200 when plugged into an outlet.
Two factors possible:
1) The drives are smaller, right? Might be harder to design hardware for that small space.
2) Thermal death. Just because it's plugged in doesn't mean all those parts aren't still living right next to each other, trying not to kill each other.
Plus how many of the "show company" players act as a USB drive with no external adaptor required?
Have you ever seen a Creative Muvo(/TX/NX)? There's many others, as well.
And yet you think this would still be a good idea to spray on your clothes and wear around - ignoring the EU scientists and politicians who proposed these laws? My point was that we probably should not be rushing to paint everything with lead-based nanoparticles unless I am missing something regarding the technology.
Two possibilities:
1) The type of molecule they're using renders the lead innocuous somehow
2) The massive, massive environmental benefits would outweigh the environmental downside.
Dual boot tempts people to use MS software like IE, resulting in virii and spyware.
Or, you know, just download firefox. I'm in Windows maybe 5% of the time now, and will run Ad-aware months apart, and only find maybe a few tracking cookies. I think the last time was because I had to use IE to download a NoCD crack from somewhere.
AFAIK Conan is about 6'4". Not quite the Irish Leprechaun.
Well, Mr. PJ, if you were to even cursorily glimpse the actual article you would seen that this is a direct quotation from the first paragraph in the linked article. Amazing, isn't is, what an ass a minor convenience has made you to be!
I agree with your post in general, but two things:
1) Direct quotes should be in "quotation marks." Funny how those clear things right up.
2) I read most of TFA, but skipped the intro and therefore didn't see that quote. Probably true of other people as well.
If your wife has a problem with you, why are you the one who has to go sleep on the couch? It's your damned bed too; if she doesn't want to be around you, she can take her whiny ass elsewhere.
There is a somewhat simple (although not entirely accurate) biological reason for some of this. Mainly, mens' hormones cycle every day, and we want to have sex pretty much all the time. Womens' cycle monthly, so they only really badly want to have sex for a few days each month.
Result? Men pretty much have to always be on their best behaviour to make sure they have a chance of impregnating women (not so coincidentally they're horniest when they're fertile). So women get to dictate certain things, or your genes don't propogate.
Of course, at the same time I've had ex's that after a while wanted me on a regular basis way more badly than I wanted them, which is why their exes. It's much more individual than that, but that's the general root cause.
All that math but you can't figure out after two tries that slashdot inserts spaces in plaintext URLs? And how to use a HREF tag? :)
ith an approximate 94% recycling rate, the lead-acid battery industry is just about as good as it gets.
Further, the cycle of lead from smelter -> battery manufacturer -> consumer -> old battery to smelter is as tight a closed loop as you'll find (short of a cow in a pasture).
Ahh, The Beer Store.
98% recovery rate of _all_ packaging. All by offering a mere 10 cents per bottle.
And yet every few years some Conservative will spout off about privatising the damn thing. Despite truly ridiculous selection, rural community reach, and said environmental success.
ELECTRIC HEAT! IN CALIFORNIA? I realize you don't use it as heavily as someone in Wisconsin, but jeez, thats just stupid.
I live in Ottawa...and at least from a renters perspective the poeple I know with electric are much, much, much happier than people with oil heat. Judging by the other response you're implying gas is better...but I guess with older neighborhoods this may not be an option. It's certainly what my parents have in their suburb built in 1980, though.
But of course, we all live in the Golden State so that can't be true. As you so sagely and cleverly put it, we're all paying twice.
He said _often_. In Ottawa (i.e. 'Silicon Valley North'...blargh), for instance, you pay twice for maybe half the year, and pay less than once the other half.
even considering the (marginal) power savings
Ummm..since when is more than 50% marginal?? They're saying it's a maximum of 30W, whereas AFAIK even my 2.53 P4 is somewhere around 70W.
Not to mention the ability to throttle back to 5W at low load. Get a grip.
Probably true. I was in a wal-mart a few years ago and noticed the ``buy american'' signs. They were printed in Red China.
Friends of mine are currently working in China, and the one WalMart they were in had only one sign in English - "Cherish Your Future. Do Not Shoplift."
Local "mom and pop" concern? How many of those do you really see? Albertsons and IGA (on the grocery side), Hastings (on the book side) and Best Buy and Circuit City (on the DVD/electronics side) are hardly more local than Wal-Mart is. I've never seen half-decent selections of those things at a local store.
There's a subtle difference between franchises and centrally owned chains. I have to use Canadian examples, but hopefully you'll follow me.
Home Hardware has been around for decades in Canada, and each one is different - the owners of each franchise have a lot of freedom. People like it, money stays local.
Mid 90s - enter Home Depot. "Lowest price on all items we sell". However, they only sell one brand of a lot of things - and that brand is only available there. Hrmmm...see a loophole here? Upshot is the store may be a lot bigger, but they hardly ever have the part you need - they just have a lot of far fewer things.
Later, rinse, repeat across different industries.
My local, independent video/dvd stores (The Invisible Cinema, Elgin Street Video) have far better selection than the chains (this is in a city of about 300 000). The Invisible Cinema also doubles as a small art gallery, and last year hosted a release party for a new Atari 7800 game. I shit you not.
For groceries we have a franchise called "Your Independent Grocer". They can be a bit pricier, but the selection is usually comparable to other grocery stores. If you can't find a good book store you're not really trying, I know of lots of _single genre_ stores, let alone used stores, and good old general mom and pop book stores with cats curled up on the window sill and such.
And if they don't have what you want? They'll probably order it for you. Keep coming back, they'll get to know you, start telling you about things you'd like and ordering them in without asking. Hell, my friend totally changed the Mountain Dew buying habits of our corner store in about 6 months of living down the street.
This really isn't as difficult as it sounds, except maybe on the pocket book. But it all works out in the end - in service, peace of mind, and above all not being gouged after everyone is finally driven out of the market.
Where I live the DSL does not behave like this, you can upload to an ftp server at full speed and download at full speed simultaneously. The cable provider however _is_ like this, you start an upload and it destroys your download speeds.
This is really a TCP limitation, and it all depends on the ratio of your upload and download speeds. You need a certain amount of upload bandwidth just to send ACK packets, otherwise your download will slow down because it thinks you're missing packets and will resend them. Newer TCP implementations help to alleviate this, but who knows how consistently they're implemented.
These streams will not be savable.
If you can see it with your eyes it is savable. This will always be true.
Plus... what is so hard about the engineering?
Okay...let's take the somewhat 'easy' case of one set for reading, one for writing. First - do read and writes happen at the same speed? Probably, but maybe not.
Second - are the reads and writes that are happening at the same time the same length? Almost definitely not.
Third - are the reads and writes going to be occuring 180 degrees apart all the time? Almost definitely not. You could say "just stop or start a little bit before or after the other", but that just makes the second point worse.
Fourth - is DMA set up to handle read and write at the same time? I think you'd need separate DMAs for this.
Fifth - scheduling algorithms for the heads. Not impossible, but not trivial to tune for performance either.
I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but I think in terms or real performance gains you'd be looking at something less than 50%, and certainly nowhere near 100%. And would probably cost more than 50% more. As someone else said, RAID would probably be better. And remember kids, the ID is for Inexpensive Disks.
it's much more easy to "fight for freedom" when you have no children to feed and you can travel the world, sleep at expensive hotels, eat at fancy restaurants, and this is all paid by someone else.
Do you also whine about how not everyone who can sing gets to make music videos? Or that not everyone who plays hockey gets to do it for a living? Or that not everyone who plays the stock market gets to be a broker?
The way things are going software development is soon going to be an 'amateur' thing, with only talented amateurs getting picked up by corporations/schools/etc (see OSDL, etc.). Sure lots of people will still need to code the tools they need as part of their jobs, but it will only be part of their job.
Actually, perhaps a better analogy is to mathematics. Lots of people need to do math to do their jobs, but very few of them get paid to be mathematicians. And yes, most of their work is 'open source', unless they're at the NSA.
but wouldnt a better understanding of an asteroids composition be the first step in developing an effective means of destroying one on a collision course with earth?
Wouldn't a better understanding of the difference between a comet and an asteroid help you to answer that question?
Not to say that we shouldn't be worried about comets as well, but they're a different problem, and have widely varying compositions.
...so its only raison-d'etre would be selling more consoles
Yeah, I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't wanna do THAT!
Don't forget that for a long time (still?) MS sold the consoles below cost - the classic make money on the games model (or even lose money on the console and the games, make money on crushing all opposition).
I even remember reading articles back in the day about Sony being concerned about people buying PS2s just as cheap DVD players (and maybe for one game, like FF X), since they were losing money on them and needed game sales to profit.
That is, one is playing the "male part" and the other the "female part" and both suspect the other of being a criminal - has that ever happened?
This is a common addendum to the joke. Although, since they'd in general both be playing teens, their chat wouldn't really be pedophilia, eh?
Oh what a twisted web we weave...
Some older buildings have layers of wire a foot thick - it's almost always cheaper to lay new on top of the old stuff rather than figure out the rats' nest of wiring.
You think that's bad, check out the downtown central office of the phone company in one of your older cities. It's only trouble when the floor is starting to crack.
Is to make it more desirable for people looking for 'one stop shopping.' e.g. why go to a real computer or audio store, when you can park once and compare between 'two' stores?
Boo-urns.
You must not cut and paste much; it drives me nuts to use an app that looks that much like it does in Linux and doesn't support X-11 cut and paste.
I believe this is configurable in about:config. Some distros may have it off by default, but I know Mandrake had it on because it broke middle-click opening of tabs for me. Which is far more important, IMO.