This is the price we pay for $10 keyboards and $20 Nikes....oh wait. I never thought that we should have let China join the WTO, but at the same time, trade has been one thing that has kept tensions between the US and China at minimal levels. Unplug them from the global grid at this point and we would have North Korea on a much more massive level. Last I checked the US has about 300 million people and China is what 1.6 billion now? The best we can hope to do is extend our influence as much as possible at this point or who knows, we may all be speaking chinese in the next 100 years....
Watched most of season 1. Then I got really annoyed when the video would halt partway through and reloading it involved watching the same number of commercials that I had watched up until that point. The quality is also pretty terrible. Its better than SD on youtube but its not really great. To make matters worse you cannot make the crappy image full screen. The best they do is a severe letterbox. I gave up and downloaded twin peaks and star trek from thepiratebay. they were dvd rips and the quality is superb. i could see this working for cbs if they a) upgraded the quality and reliability and b) offered northern exposure with the original music, which I would become an instant junky to. In a way I kind of can't wait until I could just pick any TV show I've not seen in a while (MASH, Night Court) and dial it up and watch whatever episode I want. I don't care if there are a few commercials, I mean I really didn't care then either. More targeted commercials would equal less ad time anyways. The british had it right with the BBC which is now regarded as a public cultural institution. So much of our cultural history is bound by copyright for an insanely long period of time. I can't think of any others....anyways I'm getting off track here.....
Fascinating. I still can see the value of a desktop system having an SSD though. Especially if the drive will likely outlast the machine. (kind of a problem these days)
Part of the problem is that HDDs require the read/write heads to float over the disk so closely. If you could space it out and beef up the arm apparatus so that it could potentially recalibrate itself if needed, then you would have a very reliable hard drive. If they can make a laser small enough to write on a modern disk at the current density, I would be highly impressed. Its a good theory, but I would probably rather see more of a pure optical system. Holographic storage baby! I can't wait for the future!
What about the life of a modern SSD? Is it true that they have gotten them to get within the threshold of millions of writes? Hard drives are terribly unreliable in practice, but it seems that an SSD would potentially hold up for years and years if you could do millions of writes and didn't swap to the drive. Hell why not just slap a 20GB SSD on the motherboard with linux preinstalled......? Heck, integrate it into the bios for all its worth. Can you say instant on? Maybe we will start seeing devices that can actually saturate SATA-II.....
I want to say that in 5 years the mechanical, magnetic hard drive will be dead, but something tells me that the density will give it an edge for quite a while longer than that unless some major breakthrough occurs in the manufacture of SSD.
$100 for a 120GB SSD is actually really cheap when you look at what a 4gig stick cost just a couple of years ago, so the real question is when does the cost/gigabyte ratio become equal? It would seem reasonable to assume that a SSD is much cheaper and far easier to produce than a hideously precise mechanical drive, so perhaps the answer isn't that long at all. Consider that in 2005 a 4GB thumbdrive cost roughly $33. In 2009 a 120GB SSD will cost roughly 100. (rough numbers here cost history-nazis!) Thats over an 800% decrease in price per gigabyte. Around the same time 320gb cost about $100. Now $100 will by you a 1TB drive. (maybe 1.5TB) A 300% decrease isn't bad but not at the same rate. Here is the real number though. That 1TB drive costs 0.10 per gigabyte, while the 120GB SSD costs 0.83 per gigabyte. At the current rate it seems it would likely take about 6-7 years for SSDs to become cost effective in comparison. Hell, I'm about to replace my aging 80GB SATA with another 80GB because they are like $35 or so. I don't need 80GB for just programs and whatnot. I have some big drives for the real data.....When 120GB SSDs are like $50 I'll start to get interested. Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.
But that was fucking great! I loved how it all sounded like SimCity theme music. (probably because of the MIDI instrumentation) Will Songsmith really take images and make songs out of them?
While the people should have a greater say I am still all for a republic versus a direct democracy. Think about it, if we had direct democracy in the states, abortion would be illegal, homosexuality would be a crime, etc.
from wikipedia:
"Ochlocracy (Greek: or okhlokratía; Latin: ochlocratia) is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of constitutional authorities. In English, the word mobocracy is sometimes used as a synonym. As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it's akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the easily moveable crowd," from which the term "mob" originally derives.[1]
As a term in civics it implies that there is no formal authority whatsoever, not even a commonly-accepted view of anarchism, and so disputes are raised, contended and closed by brute force might makes right, but only in a very local and temporary way, as another mob or another mood might just as easily sway a decision. It is often associated with demagoguery and the rule of passion over reason."
Our forefathers thought long and hard about direct democracy and realized that mob rule was one such pitfall. As to lobbying, it has been around since at least the beginning of the 19th century, but more likely since the dawn of the United States, however it has truly reached epic proportions these days.
Now I can exceed my Comcast transfer limit in just over 2000 seconds!
Now will someone please tell me where the billions of tax dollars we spent on communications infrastructure went to? Best I can get is 6/1.5mbps for $40. Not all that terrible if you compare you 768k/128k dsl which is still pretty common around here unfortunately, but really, not all that great. I mean clearly the cost of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure is not so high since the Asians seem to be doing it to great extent with much smaller markets and wealth to tap into. I doubt they are getting billions from their respective federal governments as well. Since when did corporate welfare become such a passable option? The white collars scoff at people collecting from the government and yet their employers are lining up at Washington with their hands out nearly every day now it seems. I hope they bankrupt us all and then, finally, perhaps we will see how foolish it is to support bad investments with tax dollars. Whatever happened to free markets? If you want to blame anyone, blame yourselves for becoming a country of nearly pure consumerism, for sitting on the couch watching TV, for creating the service industry to cater to your every lazy need, for slowly giving up the soul of what makes a culture alive and positive. Since major corporations seemingly hold a great deal of power in washington it would behoove anyone who wants to short circuit the power circle to dethrone the corporations that are spending millions and billions of dollars in washington in lobbying. You can't really blame your local idiot for taking their money. I mean, it is obviously, very tempting. Why not go after the real villians? Look up Monsanto for instance. You might find some interesting things. And hey, you should read up on some of Exxon's overseas adventures! But who am I to tell you what to think? Its funny because all this terrible stuff that is happening is reported on and in print in various ways and even reported by the government, etc, and just so very few people actually look. Why bother hiding anything when nobody is even looking or cares? Sure there's all kinds of secret, maybe conspiracy stuff, but hey, why get all crazy. People like rational concepts.
I know a lot of free thinkers lurk here and they are a very rare breed these days. I know a lot of you don't own/watch TV, have tuned out, been through a few trips, etc. Can you see a dying culture? Can you see the transformation? Its going to be pretty slow at first but as people start shocking back into what is really real and stop dreaming I think it could get a little crazy. Or maybe nothing will happen at all. Either way we're kind of fucked. Sorry for the random note at the end here, but I feel like rambling a great deal and why not? Bob Dylans on and as much as I can't stand the way he sings Blood on the Tracks is getting me all inspired to do some stuff.
Well it depends. I can't possibly bear to delete all 60gigs of star trek TNG or my Northern Exposure collection or Twin Peaks or Deadwood or etc etc etc. Do I delete the HD rip of Blade Runner? Do I delete all those MP3s I've never listened to (yet)? Or do I just go out and buy another drive and start filling it? What about the hundred or so PSX isos I have on my drive? The 30,000+ MP3s? Every issue of batman? Sandman? The Invisibles? How could I possibly delete any of it?! I'm starting to feel like my drive is a treasure trove of nostalgia and culture. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll die and my collection will become the next library of alexander to some future culture? That is once we have permanent holographic storage. Imagine 2PB in your pocket! It can't be that far away...1 gig drives were so insanely large 15 years ago.
How could you pass up on the 1969 427 Stingray? They just don't make them like that anymore....
I did drive an 03 Corvette and I will say that they are very, very nice and pretty quick off the line nothing really beats a classic. Lots of parts still around for those early muscle cars and the best part is that you don't have to deal with fancy complicated parts breaking like electronic ignition, fuel injection, ABS, etc. You just need an air gun, a good set of sockets and some pretty deep pockets.:)
Hey. I resemble that remark! Though, Pittsburgh is really the gateway to the rust belt and the midwest. I fail to see what is wrong with clinging on to guns. If society breaks into total social disorder the few people with guns will be the ones who start making all of the rules.
I gotta agree. The HD manufacturers have all had their ups and downs. I gotta admit thought that I've been real partial to WD so far and have had only one failure before EOL (still managed to recover 95%), but I'm not running a data server or anything but after many many drives the WDs have utterly failed so rarely. I have a Maxtor drive running on this box here that should have died months ago and it still keeps chugging along in defiance of the limits of ECC. Of course a low level format did wonders......
Oh gee. You probably don't realize it, but but there is an amazing amount of legacy code still running out there. I mean, you can still run code for burroughs mainframes on modern hardware. We're talking late 50s-early 60s code here. Lots of corporations have the heart and soul of their businesses running old 70s-80s style code on their mainframes. If it ain't broke...
You should look at the mainframes that are pumping out these days and what they will still run in emulation...its pretty amazing. That's not even counting the stuff like the AS/400 emulators on beige box PC and stuff along those lines. You can find jobs coding in RPG all the time (if you know how to actually code in RPG).
what camera was that? everything seems all washed out....and what is up with the dude on the phone? way to go piss off a bunch of cops there! i wouldn't want to see all those faces in the last picture!
It was the same problem with the PS2. It took developers a few good years to really start to push the hardware. Look at some of the later games that really push the envelope like say Final Fantasy XII or Shadow of Colossus. The PS2 was certainly capable of some nice visuals but the other consoles were ultimately superior while basically using off the shelf hardware. Developers were pushing the Xbox and the Gamecube almost nearly from day one. I think the cell has backfired, but not for the reason that Microsoft shares aspects of their core. Parallel processing is indeed the future, but not in the form of vector units, but rather general purpose chips. The one size fits all approach is inefficient but at the same time it has been the approach that has worked to fit the needs of modern computer users. Hardware should get easier to program on over time, certainly not harder. What happened to those predictions that in the future the average user will be able to code just by throwing some GUI elements together and maybe even describing the program to the computer a bit and having it generate the program for you? How far away are we from that day? (It seems an awfully long way away and the visual IDE is not the same as what I am describing here)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the price we pay for $10 keyboards and $20 Nikes....oh wait. I never thought that we should have let China join the WTO, but at the same time, trade has been one thing that has kept tensions between the US and China at minimal levels. Unplug them from the global grid at this point and we would have North Korea on a much more massive level. Last I checked the US has about 300 million people and China is what 1.6 billion now? The best we can hope to do is extend our influence as much as possible at this point or who knows, we may all be speaking chinese in the next 100 years....
Watched most of season 1. Then I got really annoyed when the video would halt partway through and reloading it involved watching the same number of commercials that I had watched up until that point. The quality is also pretty terrible. Its better than SD on youtube but its not really great. To make matters worse you cannot make the crappy image full screen. The best they do is a severe letterbox. I gave up and downloaded twin peaks and star trek from thepiratebay. they were dvd rips and the quality is superb. i could see this working for cbs if they a) upgraded the quality and reliability and b) offered northern exposure with the original music, which I would become an instant junky to. In a way I kind of can't wait until I could just pick any TV show I've not seen in a while (MASH, Night Court) and dial it up and watch whatever episode I want. I don't care if there are a few commercials, I mean I really didn't care then either. More targeted commercials would equal less ad time anyways. The british had it right with the BBC which is now regarded as a public cultural institution. So much of our cultural history is bound by copyright for an insanely long period of time. I can't think of any others....anyways I'm getting off track here.....
Fascinating. I still can see the value of a desktop system having an SSD though. Especially if the drive will likely outlast the machine. (kind of a problem these days)
Part of the problem is that HDDs require the read/write heads to float over the disk so closely. If you could space it out and beef up the arm apparatus so that it could potentially recalibrate itself if needed, then you would have a very reliable hard drive. If they can make a laser small enough to write on a modern disk at the current density, I would be highly impressed. Its a good theory, but I would probably rather see more of a pure optical system. Holographic storage baby! I can't wait for the future!
What about the life of a modern SSD? Is it true that they have gotten them to get within the threshold of millions of writes? Hard drives are terribly unreliable in practice, but it seems that an SSD would potentially hold up for years and years if you could do millions of writes and didn't swap to the drive. Hell why not just slap a 20GB SSD on the motherboard with linux preinstalled......? Heck, integrate it into the bios for all its worth. Can you say instant on? Maybe we will start seeing devices that can actually saturate SATA-II.....
I want to say that in 5 years the mechanical, magnetic hard drive will be dead, but something tells me that the density will give it an edge for quite a while longer than that unless some major breakthrough occurs in the manufacture of SSD.
$100 for a 120GB SSD is actually really cheap when you look at what a 4gig stick cost just a couple of years ago, so the real question is when does the cost/gigabyte ratio become equal? It would seem reasonable to assume that a SSD is much cheaper and far easier to produce than a hideously precise mechanical drive, so perhaps the answer isn't that long at all. Consider that in 2005 a 4GB thumbdrive cost roughly $33. In 2009 a 120GB SSD will cost roughly 100. (rough numbers here cost history-nazis!) Thats over an 800% decrease in price per gigabyte. Around the same time 320gb cost about $100. Now $100 will by you a 1TB drive. (maybe 1.5TB) A 300% decrease isn't bad but not at the same rate. Here is the real number though. That 1TB drive costs 0.10 per gigabyte, while the 120GB SSD costs 0.83 per gigabyte. At the current rate it seems it would likely take about 6-7 years for SSDs to become cost effective in comparison. Hell, I'm about to replace my aging 80GB SATA with another 80GB because they are like $35 or so. I don't need 80GB for just programs and whatnot. I have some big drives for the real data.....When 120GB SSDs are like $50 I'll start to get interested. Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.
But that was fucking great! I loved how it all sounded like SimCity theme music. (probably because of the MIDI instrumentation) Will Songsmith really take images and make songs out of them?
While the people should have a greater say I am still all for a republic versus a direct democracy. Think about it, if we had direct democracy in the states, abortion would be illegal, homosexuality would be a crime, etc.
from wikipedia:
"Ochlocracy (Greek: or okhlokratía; Latin: ochlocratia) is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of constitutional authorities. In English, the word mobocracy is sometimes used as a synonym. As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it's akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the easily moveable crowd," from which the term "mob" originally derives.[1]
As a term in civics it implies that there is no formal authority whatsoever, not even a commonly-accepted view of anarchism, and so disputes are raised, contended and closed by brute force might makes right, but only in a very local and temporary way, as another mob or another mood might just as easily sway a decision. It is often associated with demagoguery and the rule of passion over reason."
Our forefathers thought long and hard about direct democracy and realized that mob rule was one such pitfall. As to lobbying, it has been around since at least the beginning of the 19th century, but more likely since the dawn of the United States, however it has truly reached epic proportions these days.
http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/5107922
2 billion in 2005 alone!
Wow! I can see the CCTV cameras on every corner!
You must not live in the United States. Do you have any idea how much they are monitoring communications here?
Now I can exceed my Comcast transfer limit in just over 2000 seconds!
Now will someone please tell me where the billions of tax dollars we spent on communications infrastructure went to? Best I can get is 6/1.5mbps for $40. Not all that terrible if you compare you 768k/128k dsl which is still pretty common around here unfortunately, but really, not all that great. I mean clearly the cost of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure is not so high since the Asians seem to be doing it to great extent with much smaller markets and wealth to tap into. I doubt they are getting billions from their respective federal governments as well. Since when did corporate welfare become such a passable option? The white collars scoff at people collecting from the government and yet their employers are lining up at Washington with their hands out nearly every day now it seems. I hope they bankrupt us all and then, finally, perhaps we will see how foolish it is to support bad investments with tax dollars. Whatever happened to free markets? If you want to blame anyone, blame yourselves for becoming a country of nearly pure consumerism, for sitting on the couch watching TV, for creating the service industry to cater to your every lazy need, for slowly giving up the soul of what makes a culture alive and positive. Since major corporations seemingly hold a great deal of power in washington it would behoove anyone who wants to short circuit the power circle to dethrone the corporations that are spending millions and billions of dollars in washington in lobbying. You can't really blame your local idiot for taking their money. I mean, it is obviously, very tempting. Why not go after the real villians? Look up Monsanto for instance. You might find some interesting things. And hey, you should read up on some of Exxon's overseas adventures! But who am I to tell you what to think? Its funny because all this terrible stuff that is happening is reported on and in print in various ways and even reported by the government, etc, and just so very few people actually look. Why bother hiding anything when nobody is even looking or cares? Sure there's all kinds of secret, maybe conspiracy stuff, but hey, why get all crazy. People like rational concepts.
I know a lot of free thinkers lurk here and they are a very rare breed these days. I know a lot of you don't own/watch TV, have tuned out, been through a few trips, etc. Can you see a dying culture? Can you see the transformation? Its going to be pretty slow at first but as people start shocking back into what is really real and stop dreaming I think it could get a little crazy. Or maybe nothing will happen at all. Either way we're kind of fucked. Sorry for the random note at the end here, but I feel like rambling a great deal and why not? Bob Dylans on and as much as I can't stand the way he sings Blood on the Tracks is getting me all inspired to do some stuff.
Well it depends. I can't possibly bear to delete all 60gigs of star trek TNG or my Northern Exposure collection or Twin Peaks or Deadwood or etc etc etc. Do I delete the HD rip of Blade Runner? Do I delete all those MP3s I've never listened to (yet)? Or do I just go out and buy another drive and start filling it? What about the hundred or so PSX isos I have on my drive? The 30,000+ MP3s? Every issue of batman? Sandman? The Invisibles? How could I possibly delete any of it?! I'm starting to feel like my drive is a treasure trove of nostalgia and culture. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll die and my collection will become the next library of alexander to some future culture? That is once we have permanent holographic storage. Imagine 2PB in your pocket! It can't be that far away...1 gig drives were so insanely large 15 years ago.
How could you pass up on the 1969 427 Stingray? They just don't make them like that anymore....
I did drive an 03 Corvette and I will say that they are very, very nice and pretty quick off the line nothing really beats a classic. Lots of parts still around for those early muscle cars and the best part is that you don't have to deal with fancy complicated parts breaking like electronic ignition, fuel injection, ABS, etc. You just need an air gun, a good set of sockets and some pretty deep pockets. :)
Hey. I resemble that remark! Though, Pittsburgh is really the gateway to the rust belt and the midwest. I fail to see what is wrong with clinging on to guns. If society breaks into total social disorder the few people with guns will be the ones who start making all of the rules.
I think you missed the joke.
I gotta agree. The HD manufacturers have all had their ups and downs. I gotta admit thought that I've been real partial to WD so far and have had only one failure before EOL (still managed to recover 95%), but I'm not running a data server or anything but after many many drives the WDs have utterly failed so rarely. I have a Maxtor drive running on this box here that should have died months ago and it still keeps chugging along in defiance of the limits of ECC. Of course a low level format did wonders......
Here's to that! I'm not really insane...its just an insane world that I live in.....
Oh gee. You probably don't realize it, but but there is an amazing amount of legacy code still running out there. I mean, you can still run code for burroughs mainframes on modern hardware. We're talking late 50s-early 60s code here. Lots of corporations have the heart and soul of their businesses running old 70s-80s style code on their mainframes. If it ain't broke...
You should look at the mainframes that are pumping out these days and what they will still run in emulation...its pretty amazing. That's not even counting the stuff like the AS/400 emulators on beige box PC and stuff along those lines. You can find jobs coding in RPG all the time (if you know how to actually code in RPG).
oh yeah...bunch of my pictures at picasaweb.google.com/zosxavius :P
what camera was that? everything seems all washed out....and what is up with the dude on the phone? way to go piss off a bunch of cops there! i wouldn't want to see all those faces in the last picture!
A troll I have never seen and a truly great one to boot! Its going to be a great new year!
It was the same problem with the PS2. It took developers a few good years to really start to push the hardware. Look at some of the later games that really push the envelope like say Final Fantasy XII or Shadow of Colossus. The PS2 was certainly capable of some nice visuals but the other consoles were ultimately superior while basically using off the shelf hardware. Developers were pushing the Xbox and the Gamecube almost nearly from day one. I think the cell has backfired, but not for the reason that Microsoft shares aspects of their core. Parallel processing is indeed the future, but not in the form of vector units, but rather general purpose chips. The one size fits all approach is inefficient but at the same time it has been the approach that has worked to fit the needs of modern computer users. Hardware should get easier to program on over time, certainly not harder. What happened to those predictions that in the future the average user will be able to code just by throwing some GUI elements together and maybe even describing the program to the computer a bit and having it generate the program for you? How far away are we from that day? (It seems an awfully long way away and the visual IDE is not the same as what I am describing here)
Sounds like she would love the Keyboard for Blonds(tm).
https://www.keyboardforblondes.com/
How reliable does a geiger counter have to be when you are checking non-radioactive sources for radioactivity?
Why not just send the word file in place of the screen shot? :P
Who the hell reads the comments on digg?
I thought Roland was gone for good!
Its pretty bad when 80% of what I read here I saw on Digg 4 days ago......