I second that. My friends always say "oh hard drives never fail" but they don't work with 500+ computers. I would say our failure rate in any given year is 10% of those drives with the majority of those failures being newer drives. The old 3gb fujitsu drives last forever and a half but the newer ones (no matter what manufacture - ibm, seagate, maxtor, western dig, etc) fail about equally.
I help support around 500 computers with all types of hard drives (fujitsu, ibm, maxtor, seagate, western dig) and at LEAST 30-40 fail in any given year, sometimes more than that. Yes hard drives go down often and hard any more.
Personally I use a RAID 1 array anymore because I have had such bad luck with IDE drives in recent times.
Yeah I have a friend from Oman who can't go home because there isn't anyway he would get back. Out of his 12 friends, who live in various places in the mideast, who left over the summer (or christmas) to return home to visit their families, they are all college students here, not a single one got a visa. Everyone was denied. It is insane.
2. You're locked in a room with Richard Stallman and Bill Gates and have only a gun with two bullets in it (which you normally secrete on your person in case you ever get locked in a room with Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, etc). They both clear their throats to speak. What do you do?
A. Shoot Bill, hoping he hasn't got a tablet device (or the XP Security Vulnerability notes) crammed up his blazer
B. Shoot Richard, hoping he hasn't got the notes for his speech in front of his heart
C. Shoot Richard AND Bill and take your chances
D. Shoot yourself, twice, for getting into such a contrived situation
Not that I don't believe you but you should include some links/citations before making a statement like that (I know, crazy talk). I could only find the following:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Oh that stinkin' Fourth ammendment.. it was useless anyways. Sigh.
Hey that's right, i totally forgot about charon. It isn't inconcievable that we could have an Io-Jupiter type effect. Hrm. Food for thought.
Re:Not so methinks
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While I agree, in principle, with what you say the simple fact is we have no way of knowing how life on earth started. By all rights earth was a horribly inhospitable place 4 billion or so years ago. Using earth as an example we can say the following things are needed for life to start (here at least):
Water, liquid
Amino acids
Some sort of energy supply - be it chemicals, sunlight, etc
And that is it. You say life on pluto would never had a chance.. how do we know? We can't go back in time 4 billion years or so ago. Perhaps conditions on pluto where mightly different back then. Also the possibility of life 'landing' on pluto must be considered - in the form of bacteria spores, etc. Right now all that is needed on pluto for life would be a geothermal vent system and some liquid water. Really that's it. Remember in the deep ocean vent communities where bacteria live in water that's above the boiling point? Life adapts and quickly, we have no way of knowing how life started on this planet and to blanket rule out hte possibility of life on pluto just because the conditions aren't exactly like earths is a bit shortsighted in my opinion.
Also, let us not forget about... spam. Yes, my firneds gigabytes and gigabytes of hard-core voice-mailed, full screen video man-on-dog pr0n invading your email inbox sucking up all sorts of bandwith. Of course, if that where to happen maybe, just maybe, somebody would do something about the damm spammers.
To say the moon landing trip nuts will ever be satisified is like saying the JFK assasination nutballs will every be satisified. But, at any rate, for anybody who has the slightest inclination to believe these nutballs here is a link to Phil Blait's badastronomy page on the moon landing 'hoax': Here.
And, just for shits and jiggles, here is a link about Buzz Aldrin punching a man who did an ambush interview claiming he never landed on the moon here, or for you lazy people here is the summary:
It certainly did with Buzz Aldrin. Mr. Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, was ambushed by Mr. Sibrel with the Bible trick. On September 9, 2002, Mr. Sibrel jumped out at Mr. Aldrin with the Bible, daring him to swear on it. told Mr. Sibrel to go away repeatedly, and even asked for the police. When Mr. Sibrel physically blocked his path, Mr. Aldrin (who is 72, 5'10" and 160 pounds) punched Mr. Sibrel (37, 6"2" and 250 pounds) in the face.
Interesting. Shouldn't the yamato have a larger (Scale) gun considering her main guns where 18.1" inches?
I also got to thinking about how a smaller battleship (such as your s. dakota) could defeat her and all I could think of would be out-manouvering her using hit-run tactics. You are lucky in that respect since the s. dakota, with her short hull, has an excellent turning radius and good acceleration if she is somewhat lacking in armor/sea worthiness.
If the yamato does turn that slow it should be possible, now never piloted one of these things so i am probably totally wrong, but using the S. Dakota's higher speed/acceleration/smaller turning radius a series of hit/run on her stern should prove quite effective especially if you can damage her electronics/propellors/rudders. If you killed her rudder or damaged her props or ability to accelerate/manevoure in any way, shape, or form that would probably be the end of that battle. This would also limit the damage she could do to you. But if the yamato could get a nice broadside on you it would be over. Basically, if I where fighting that battle I would go balls-to-the-wall and use all the speed I had to try and out-manevoure her and do everything I could to prevent her from concentrating all 9 guns on me.
Your strategy has merit (and probably more than mine since I have never fought one of these things before) but I personally think it would be suicide, by the time you got in that close to be below her gun's she would have caused near-fatal damage to your craft. Also, as soon as you start taking on water you start to lose your speed/manevoure advantage.
7 ft long and 70 lbs, that would be quite a monster to pull out even with a floatation device, didn't even think about that part.
Hah! After much googling I found the following, I was wrong, it wasn't the british but the italian's on the LITTORIO class. Quoth:
The unconventional Pugliese underwater protection system consisted of a 40mm torpedo bulkhead which curved up from the outer bottom and then extended outboard to meet the lower edge of the armor belt. Within the space thus created between the void double bottom and this torpedo bulkhead was a liquid filled compartment, and within that was a void longitudinal drum with a diameter of 380cm with 6mm walls. The idea was that the explosion of a torpedo warhead would collapse the void drum within the liquid filled compartment, thus absorbing most of the explosive energy. The torpedo bulkhead was supposed to catch splinters and prevent further damage. This system was also adopted by the Russians for their Sovyetskiy Soyuz class super battleships (see my essay "The Super Battleships That Never Were" for a description of these ships). Unfortunately, it did not work as well in practice as it did in theory.
The yamato wasn't impossible to sink, that was kindof my point. You would have to defeat her using your wits, not just a slugfest. Find out her weak points (particularly her keel wasn't protected very well). What I should've said was that this hobby, to me, would be far more exciting if the ships where more detailed and more strategy was involved (finding out the weakness, exploiting them, etc).
I hate replying to my own comment but I also thought of a british battleship, I believe she was the Prince of Whales, that was constructed during the late 1920's-early 30's. To get around the provisions of the Washington Naval Treaty (which limited the tonnage a battleship could have thereby decreasing the amount of armor it could carry, etc), they used a system by which the ship could be 'flooded'. Basically a double hull was constructed and the outer hull could be flooded with water in effect adding alot of armor as water can quite easily absorb the blast impacts while staying under the tonnage restrictions (as long as her outer hull wasn't flooded). I wonder how/if it would be legal to construct this battleship?
An interesting hobby, and one that must indeed take alot of time. I was curious so I looked at the rules, and I found out a number of interesting things:
Only ships constructed between 1900-1946 may be used
Must be constructed exactly like originals
basically the ships armor must conform in size and purportion, with the original (model) ships
1. No means of delaying, or slowing down the sinking of any ship is allowed.
only electronics may be protected by watertight compartments
THe last two rules in particular are very interesting. Most battleships where constructed as to be divided into multiple watertight comparments (much like the titantic.. only better =)) and were almost impossible to sink. Take the battleship Yamato, the pride of WWII japanese Fleet, when it went on its suicide mission against the US fleet at Okinawa it took, IIRC, somewhere around 12 torpedo hit plus a large number of bombs before she finally went down. Personally, if they are going to all the detail of building the ships why not use watertight compartments like the real ships? Sure, it would take longer to go down but at least it would give a more fair battleship vs. battleship game. The battles would likely last alot longer, yes, but at least it would be far more realistic.
Otherwise, this entire exercise is fascinating, including model aircraft carrirs that can launch aircraft (!), torpedos, and the like, although it appears as though submarines have not yet been sanctioned.
Re:Time for a Cringely topic icon?
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 2
There already is a I, Cringley slashbox available. Just go to Preferences - Homepage - and scroll ALLL the way down to the customize slashboxes.
There ya go.
Re:Time for a Cringely topic icon?
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 2
actually he writes an article once a week or so. Personally I just have the cringley slashbox turned on..
What about specifing a really, really short 'life' for it to be cached.
I know in squid you can specifiy that anything over x minutes is to be discarded. Then again I'm not sure if squid can handle an entire ISP's worth of traffic (probably though).
That would solve your problem with caching illegal content if it was just discarded after, oh, say 90 minutes.
You also forgot about the insane policy of 'buying' drivers. We're talking about buying drivers for consumer scanners here! Even worse, alot of nice, business-quality scanners you have to buy the Firmware updates - stupidity at the highest level. Guess who isn't buying HP anymore...
The funniest thing is I bought an HP scanjet about 1 year ago. On the box it clearly said Win95/98/ME/2000 compatible. Get it home. Plug it in. "these drivers will not work with your OS, go to www.hp.com." Go to HP's site. They want me to pay 20$ for their fscking drivers! Needless to say the scanjet got returned defective.
Actually the shuttle is incapable or reaching GeoSynch orbit w/o substantional modifications - and dangerous ones (like a fuel tank in cargo bay, extra SRB, etc) or refueling at the ISS if that ever becomes a possibility. The highest altitude a shuttle has ever achieved, IIRC, is around 490 miles.
So if there really was a mess in GeoSynch they would just be screwed...
Re:The word is treason
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
I don't know of anyone that thinks the government should be required to be entirely truthful about ongoing operations in times of war. If a reporter discovers classified information and shares it, it is not a matter of the first amendment. It is a matter of treason, as if they'd discovered documents and sold them directly to a foreign power.
Fortunately for the United States the supreme court doesn't agree with you. I point out the obvious case of the pentagon papers.
What you propose is that the US becomes, in times of war, a totalitarian state. War is done for Politcal Reasons. It is an instrument of Politics. It is not done by a group of 'evil-doers' or 'mad-men'. Sure, that what might happen but all war starts for Political Reasons. As such it is critical that we question at all times the reasons for our leaders go to war. I will point out a few examples time for a history lesson.
1.) WWII (Germany) - Political reason behind Germany's need to go to war was simple: The versaille treaty had destroyed the country economically and its citizenry felt like they got the raw end of the stick. So in comes a new leader with a vision and bang there you go.
2.) WWII (Japan) - Japan needs access to raw materials which aren't present among the islands of japan itself. So we get the invasion of Korea, Manchuria, AND (more importanly) the dutch east indies. Remember, the whole point of pearl harbor and the attach on the US was to distract the US (and cripple her fleet) so Japan could gain access to the all important Oil Reserves in the Dutch East Indies.
3.) Iraq - iraq threatend the US (and by proxy world's) Oil reserves. A loss of Oil would cripple the US economy (worlds) and give iraq a power over the US. So we go to war to ensure our economy and geopolitical standing remains intact.
This isn't exactly something that should be a law. It's like outlawing putting your elbows on the table,farting at the table, etc.
It is simple bad manners that people need to realize. Maybe a sign 'please shut off your cell phones.' Alot of people just forget and alot of people just don't care. Fine. Use the ol' peer pressure to get them to realize that it is a damm good idea to turn off there cellphones. How much you want to bet that the person mr. fishbourne yelled at will never leave his/her cellphone on in a movie theater/play/whatever again?
Than again, if I have to hear another goddam cellphone go off in a movie I just might have to kill someone. Nothing ruins a nice porn.. er movie flick than a cellphone going off.
Slashdot Mirror
I second that. My friends always say "oh hard drives never fail" but they don't work with 500+ computers. I would say our failure rate in any given year is 10% of those drives with the majority of those failures being newer drives. The old 3gb fujitsu drives last forever and a half but the newer ones (no matter what manufacture - ibm, seagate, maxtor, western dig, etc) fail about equally.
I help support around 500 computers with all types of hard drives (fujitsu, ibm, maxtor, seagate, western dig) and at LEAST 30-40 fail in any given year, sometimes more than that. Yes hard drives go down often and hard any more.
Personally I use a RAID 1 array anymore because I have had such bad luck with IDE drives in recent times.
Yes, not a single one was able to return. Including his best friend who had a perfect 4.0... nice huh?
Yeah I have a friend from Oman who can't go home because there isn't anyway he would get back. Out of his 12 friends, who live in various places in the mideast, who left over the summer (or christmas) to return home to visit their families, they are all college students here, not a single one got a visa. Everyone was denied. It is insane.
Shamelessly stolen from the BOFH.
2. You're locked in a room with Richard Stallman and Bill Gates and have only a gun with two bullets in it (which you normally secrete on your person in case you ever get locked in a room with Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, etc). They both clear their throats to speak. What do you do?
A. Shoot Bill, hoping he hasn't got a tablet device (or the XP Security Vulnerability notes) crammed up his blazer
B. Shoot Richard, hoping he hasn't got the notes for his speech in front of his heart
C. Shoot Richard AND Bill and take your chances
D. Shoot yourself, twice, for getting into such a contrived situation
Not that I don't believe you but you should include some links/citations before making a statement like that (I know, crazy talk). I could only find the following:
Shanghai Cybrcafe Shut Down
Safegaurds.. you mean like this right:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Oh that stinkin' Fourth ammendment.. it was useless anyways. Sigh.
Hey that's right, i totally forgot about charon. It isn't inconcievable that we could have an Io-Jupiter type effect. Hrm. Food for thought.
- Water, liquid
- Amino acids
- Some sort of energy supply - be it chemicals, sunlight, etc
And that is it. You say life on pluto would never had a chance.. how do we know? We can't go back in time 4 billion years or so ago. Perhaps conditions on pluto where mightly different back then. Also the possibility of life 'landing' on pluto must be considered - in the form of bacteria spores, etc. Right now all that is needed on pluto for life would be a geothermal vent system and some liquid water. Really that's it. Remember in the deep ocean vent communities where bacteria live in water that's above the boiling point? Life adapts and quickly, we have no way of knowing how life started on this planet and to blanket rule out hte possibility of life on pluto just because the conditions aren't exactly like earths is a bit shortsighted in my opinion.Also, let us not forget about ... spam. Yes, my firneds gigabytes and gigabytes of hard-core voice-mailed, full screen video man-on-dog pr0n invading your email inbox sucking up all sorts of bandwith. Of course, if that where to happen maybe, just maybe, somebody would do something about the damm spammers.
I'd be a bit concerned about a company that promotes style over substance as the "office of the near future".
Hello.. this is Microsoft. I would be more concerned if they started promoting substance at all. Have you used Windows FisherPrice recently? =)
To say the moon landing trip nuts will ever be satisified is like saying the JFK assasination nutballs will every be satisified. But, at any rate, for anybody who has the slightest inclination to believe these nutballs here is a link to Phil Blait's badastronomy page on the moon landing 'hoax': Here.
And, just for shits and jiggles, here is a link about Buzz Aldrin punching a man who did an ambush interview claiming he never landed on the moon here, or for you lazy people here is the summary:
It certainly did with Buzz Aldrin. Mr. Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, was ambushed by Mr. Sibrel with the Bible trick. On September 9, 2002, Mr. Sibrel jumped out at Mr. Aldrin with the Bible, daring him to swear on it. told Mr. Sibrel to go away repeatedly, and even asked for the police. When Mr. Sibrel physically blocked his path, Mr. Aldrin (who is 72, 5'10" and 160 pounds) punched Mr. Sibrel (37, 6"2" and 250 pounds) in the face.
Interesting. Shouldn't the yamato have a larger (Scale) gun considering her main guns where 18.1" inches?
I also got to thinking about how a smaller battleship (such as your s. dakota) could defeat her and all I could think of would be out-manouvering her using hit-run tactics. You are lucky in that respect since the s. dakota, with her short hull, has an excellent turning radius and good acceleration if she is somewhat lacking in armor/sea worthiness.
If the yamato does turn that slow it should be possible, now never piloted one of these things so i am probably totally wrong, but using the S. Dakota's higher speed/acceleration/smaller turning radius a series of hit/run on her stern should prove quite effective especially if you can damage her electronics/propellors/rudders. If you killed her rudder or damaged her props or ability to accelerate/manevoure in any way, shape, or form that would probably be the end of that battle. This would also limit the damage she could do to you. But if the yamato could get a nice broadside on you it would be over. Basically, if I where fighting that battle I would go balls-to-the-wall and use all the speed I had to try and out-manevoure her and do everything I could to prevent her from concentrating all 9 guns on me.
Your strategy has merit (and probably more than mine since I have never fought one of these things before) but I personally think it would be suicide, by the time you got in that close to be below her gun's she would have caused near-fatal damage to your craft. Also, as soon as you start taking on water you start to lose your speed/manevoure advantage.
7 ft long and 70 lbs, that would be quite a monster to pull out even with a floatation device, didn't even think about that part.
Hah! After much googling I found the following, I was wrong, it wasn't the british but the italian's on the LITTORIO class. Quoth:
The unconventional Pugliese underwater protection system consisted of a 40mm torpedo bulkhead which curved up from the outer bottom and then extended outboard to meet the lower edge of the armor belt. Within the space thus created between the void double bottom and this torpedo bulkhead was a liquid filled compartment, and within that was a void longitudinal drum with a diameter of 380cm with 6mm walls. The idea was that the explosion of a torpedo warhead would collapse the void drum within the liquid filled compartment, thus absorbing most of the explosive energy. The torpedo bulkhead was supposed to catch splinters and prevent further damage. This system was also adopted by the Russians for their Sovyetskiy Soyuz class super battleships (see my essay "The Super Battleships That Never Were" for a description of these ships). Unfortunately, it did not work as well in practice as it did in theory.
The yamato wasn't impossible to sink, that was kindof my point. You would have to defeat her using your wits, not just a slugfest. Find out her weak points (particularly her keel wasn't protected very well). What I should've said was that this hobby, to me, would be far more exciting if the ships where more detailed and more strategy was involved (finding out the weakness, exploiting them, etc).
I hate replying to my own comment but I also thought of a british battleship, I believe she was the Prince of Whales, that was constructed during the late 1920's-early 30's. To get around the provisions of the Washington Naval Treaty (which limited the tonnage a battleship could have thereby decreasing the amount of armor it could carry, etc), they used a system by which the ship could be 'flooded'. Basically a double hull was constructed and the outer hull could be flooded with water in effect adding alot of armor as water can quite easily absorb the blast impacts while staying under the tonnage restrictions (as long as her outer hull wasn't flooded). I wonder how/if it would be legal to construct this battleship?
- Only ships constructed between 1900-1946 may be used
- Must be constructed exactly like originals
- basically the ships armor must conform in size and purportion, with the original (model) ships
- 1. No means of delaying, or slowing down the sinking of any ship is allowed.
- only electronics may be protected by watertight compartments
THe last two rules in particular are very interesting. Most battleships where constructed as to be divided into multiple watertight comparments (much like the titantic.. only better =)) and were almost impossible to sink. Take the battleship Yamato, the pride of WWII japanese Fleet, when it went on its suicide mission against the US fleet at Okinawa it took, IIRC, somewhere around 12 torpedo hit plus a large number of bombs before she finally went down. Personally, if they are going to all the detail of building the ships why not use watertight compartments like the real ships? Sure, it would take longer to go down but at least it would give a more fair battleship vs. battleship game. The battles would likely last alot longer, yes, but at least it would be far more realistic.Otherwise, this entire exercise is fascinating, including model aircraft carrirs that can launch aircraft (!), torpedos, and the like, although it appears as though submarines have not yet been sanctioned.
There already is a I, Cringley slashbox available. Just go to Preferences - Homepage - and scroll ALLL the way down to the customize slashboxes.
There ya go.
actually he writes an article once a week or so. Personally I just have the cringley slashbox turned on..
What about specifing a really, really short 'life' for it to be cached.
I know in squid you can specifiy that anything over x minutes is to be discarded. Then again I'm not sure if squid can handle an entire ISP's worth of traffic (probably though).
That would solve your problem with caching illegal content if it was just discarded after, oh, say 90 minutes.
IIRC it can be as low as 8 and as high as 42 light-minutes away from earth round-trip.
You also forgot about the insane policy of 'buying' drivers. We're talking about buying drivers for consumer scanners here! Even worse, alot of nice, business-quality scanners you have to buy the Firmware updates - stupidity at the highest level. Guess who isn't buying HP anymore...
The funniest thing is I bought an HP scanjet about 1 year ago. On the box it clearly said Win95/98/ME/2000 compatible. Get it home. Plug it in. "these drivers will not work with your OS, go to www.hp.com." Go to HP's site. They want me to pay 20$ for their fscking drivers! Needless to say the scanjet got returned defective.
Actually the shuttle is incapable or reaching GeoSynch orbit w/o substantional modifications - and dangerous ones (like a fuel tank in cargo bay, extra SRB, etc) or refueling at the ISS if that ever becomes a possibility. The highest altitude a shuttle has ever achieved, IIRC, is around 490 miles.
So if there really was a mess in GeoSynch they would just be screwed...
Fortunately for the United States the supreme court doesn't agree with you. I point out the obvious case of the pentagon papers.
What you propose is that the US becomes, in times of war, a totalitarian state. War is done for Politcal Reasons. It is an instrument of Politics. It is not done by a group of 'evil-doers' or 'mad-men'. Sure, that what might happen but all war starts for Political Reasons. As such it is critical that we question at all times the reasons for our leaders go to war. I will point out a few examples time for a history lesson.
This isn't exactly something that should be a law. It's like outlawing putting your elbows on the table,farting at the table, etc. It is simple bad manners that people need to realize. Maybe a sign 'please shut off your cell phones.' Alot of people just forget and alot of people just don't care. Fine. Use the ol' peer pressure to get them to realize that it is a damm good idea to turn off there cellphones. How much you want to bet that the person mr. fishbourne yelled at will never leave his/her cellphone on in a movie theater/play/whatever again? Than again, if I have to hear another goddam cellphone go off in a movie I just might have to kill someone. Nothing ruins a nice porn .. er movie flick than a cellphone going off.