If I had mod pts you'd have one of mine. That's one of the most insightful posts I've seen in a loooong time. But then you're already at +5 where you belong.
I'm going to remember that - there's a lot of wisdom in his management technique.
I'm curious to know what's more secure... your password, or the bit length of the key the system generates by hashing your password? On more than one occasion I've ran into someont that thought they had an impossibly long password, only to point out that sorry, that password is hashed to a 40 bit key, which nowadays is very practical to brute force.
Considering password fields will accept uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and most symbols, you have what... about 75 possibilities. That's a little over 6 bits per character. So if you have a 30 character password, that's over 180 bits of variance. It's still uncommon to see a password hash over 168 bits, so you are wasting your keystrokes to use such a long password. So for brute force purposes, there exists another password shorter than the one you're using that will also work.
The magnetic poles have been moving for what, millions of years, and science has known about this for many years now. Magnetic history found in rock has shown the poles have actually completely switched places several times in the past.
Why are they voluntarily blocking downloads? It's not like there's a Great Firewall of Australia to block them, and they're not based in Au, so do they really have to cave in? Or are they doing it voluntarily for good karma?
Typical example of a company taking their ball and going home.
Clearly uncovers their true intentions, the donation of the building had nothing to do with charity, it was only about making more money in the end. Not that the act is surprising, just the transparency of the act.
At the end of the day, inventory gets taken and if items sold don't match up to cash in registers, there's a problem. His scheme could have (not definately, but there is a chance) been discovered, and then it would have been a simple matter of looking at the security tapes and seeing who the offender is.
Working at a small retail shop, I'd have to disagree with that. Even being a small store with a small showroom, we do not do inventory more than once every 2 weeks - usually once a month. I can't imagine a large department store doing inventory any more than once a week, probably pulling inventory on like a few isles per evening. Inventory descrepencies of single missing items can go undiscovered for days or weeks. Week-old security tapes are not very helpful if the thief has an IQ above room temperature and doesn't make a daily habit of filching at the same store.
There's no good excuse for the cashiers. They deal with those products day in and day out. Particularly for stores like Target and K-Mart, many customers come in for only a handful of items, or a single item. Checkers with any experience should know that ringing up a basket of items that includes an iPod, totaling under $100 means something is wrong. I could see if the thief shaved say 10 or 20% off the price it could slip by most of the time, but cutting 95% off the price should ring a bell somewhere. If an employee cares that little for the benefit of the business that cuts their paycheck each week, they do not deserve to keep their job after letting something like that slip by. Letting something like a $4.99 iPod slip by indicates either indifference or gross neglegence, neither of which you want on your staff.
This would be nice if it had an educational twist on it. Keyboarding skills, math, ABCs, reading comprehension... that'd make a nice replacement for what we have at the school right now, and schools are always interested in low cost or no-cost technology.
Am I the only one finding the.DMG is not triggering an automatic download? Wrong mime type being sent maybe? Really annoying to click on the download link and suddenly see a screenful of garbage as safari now hangs for the next 4 minutes as it tries to render 9mb of trash. This from the direct link in the article, then when following the mirror links, silly me, I get hit AGAIN by 9.4mb of garbage.
Check out a PowerMac G5. The big dual processor water cooled beastes have a 1kw (yes, you read that correctly) power supply. All PMG5 supplies are the same size - they occupy the entire bottom 2 inches of the computer, side to side and front to back.
The upper class seem to do well with the people currently in control in the govt. The lower class does fairly well with the hand-outs. This leaves the middle class to support all three. Immigration is mainly by people in the lower class, where they stand to benefit by moving to the USA. Meanwhile, the middle class that are already IN the usa find their situation going downhill. So you see people that want in, and people that want out.
I don't know if it's urban legend or true, but I recall reading somewhere a long time ago that field medics in vietnam were authorized to piss on open wounds to intestines if they were going to be stuck in a combat zone awhile and there was no sterile water was available. Apparently intestines exposed to air die very quickly from dehydration, and without keeping them damp the patient may later require removal of his intestines. Unless you have a bladder infection, urine is apparently sterile.
My experience in working with direct disk control is a little stale, but the problem I was referring to is not which track you are on, but being in the "center" of a given track. I am assuming modern hard drives have a 1:1 ratio between stepper motor steps and disk tracks. Since there's no way to increase the resolution (reliably) to any more than a single step on the stepper, (half and quarter-tracking not being considered) if the head is say... 1/4 track off from its twin on the other arm, there's no way to correct for this since the stepper is pulling the head to where it believes is the center of the track and cannot deviate. Considering the extremely fine tolerance between individual tracks on a platter, it wouldn't be unreasonable for one head to be 1/2 track off in positioning from its twin, which would lead to a totally unreadable signal. You are lucky to get a good read 1/4 track off. And if your tolerance is randomly + or -, 1/4 track + on track 5 and 1/4 track - on track 6 will lead to "bleeding" of data between tracks.
So unless the heads can be physically aligned to within 1/4 track or better of eachother, (and I strongly doubt they can) then this idea will not work.
It's only a button click away! In the Displays system preference, do a colorsync calibration. Now when it asks you for gamma, DO NOT select "mac standard gamma". Choose one of the other two options available, such as "uncorrected gamma". That will get you your gamma that you are used to seeing on windows.
Actually, VirtualPC lets you use control-click for the missing mouse button. Works surprisingly well, as most mac users are accustomed to using shift, ctrl, option, and cmd as modifiers for the mouse button anyway. I still find myself holding ctrl when trying to pull up the cmm on a windows machine.
That's actually not a bad idea, although the software for interleaving heads at different locations would be scarry to write. Probably not terribly much more than current though, considering the command queueing capability of modern drives. The onboard controller card would certainly get more complex though.
That, and remember the reason HDs are rectangular is because of the arm assembly. If you want to add another one of those at the other end of the drive, the drive gets longer by about 2 inches. HD size is fairly well established at this point, so you might have serious problems fitting a drive like that into a standard case or enclosure.
Doubling the number of moving parts would also have to affect reliability and MTBF.
Last snag I can think of is that the head positioning would not be precisely identical for the two arms. So you'd have TWO heads running the top of platter 1 instead of 1 head. Unless they were perfectly aligned, they wouldn't be exactly on the same track on the platter, and that would have to affect performance as one head tried to read the data the other head wrote at a slightly different position.
Heh... this would also be a scarry nightmare for the data recovery places to try to deal with.
but there is no reason why a hard drive can't have multiple read/write heads to access different sectors of the disk as the same time
It's called "seek time". The more massive (heavy... more parts, more heads) the read arm has, the slower the seek time is. The heads have to travel a shorter distance, but it requires more time to move them that distance. You're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Though the idea of a single drive striping, say across platters, is a nice idea. Really even that could be done with one platter, since each platter has two surfaces. (top/bottom) Though that leaves many points of single failure still... onboard controller card, stepper motor, arm mechanics, any of which can fail and cause total data loss. About 1/2 the drive failures I've seen involve the drive no longer being able to spin up or stay spun up, so I don't think this can be considered anywhere near as failure-proof as say, a two drive mirror.
The advantage to raid1 is that, if one slice fails, you replace it and image the data back onto the new slice from the one that's still good. No data loss, and you only have to replace 1/2 your gear if you have a failure.
If you use 1/2 of a flash stick for each slice, and one slice fails, you what? Sure, the data is safe, but you still have to throw the whole stick away and get a new one. If it's an electrical failure, it's likely to take out the whole stick anyway since even though it's redundant memory it's still using one controller. Good way to increase read speeds tho, given proper controller design.
It sounds like you were just drag and dropping an entire folder each time, so you have to copy all the files even if few were changed. Get something like rsync (it's free!) and use that instead - it only copies what's necessary. I sync my 4gb flash drive (2gb used) once a week and it takes rsync about 10 seconds to complete the updates. It syncs my entire laptop to my server (55gb used) in about 8 minutes, over the network.
Now for me anyway, that's plenty fast and I wouldn't be able to justify buying a faster drive. Considering the capacity of the drives, (2gb max on the double speed one) there comes a point where faster isn't better because you can only go for so long before something runs out of space or data to copy.
It's all a matter of perspective. 28 seconds to duplicate a 140k floppy used to be awe-inspiring. I still remember waiting half an hour for a friend of mine's trash 80 to load a chess game off cassette.:P
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If I had mod pts you'd have one of mine. That's one of the most insightful posts I've seen in a loooong time. But then you're already at +5 where you belong.
I'm going to remember that - there's a lot of wisdom in his management technique.
to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.
I thought there was an international treaty banning the placement of weapons in space?
I'm curious to know what's more secure... your password, or the bit length of the key the system generates by hashing your password? On more than one occasion I've ran into someont that thought they had an impossibly long password, only to point out that sorry, that password is hashed to a 40 bit key, which nowadays is very practical to brute force.
Considering password fields will accept uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and most symbols, you have what... about 75 possibilities. That's a little over 6 bits per character. So if you have a 30 character password, that's over 180 bits of variance. It's still uncommon to see a password hash over 168 bits, so you are wasting your keystrokes to use such a long password. So for brute force purposes, there exists another password shorter than the one you're using that will also work.
The magnetic poles have been moving for what, millions of years, and science has known about this for many years now. Magnetic history found in rock has shown the poles have actually completely switched places several times in the past.
Why are they voluntarily blocking downloads? It's not like there's a Great Firewall of Australia to block them, and they're not based in Au, so do they really have to cave in? Or are they doing it voluntarily for good karma?
Typical example of a company taking their ball and going home.
Clearly uncovers their true intentions, the donation of the building had nothing to do with charity, it was only about making more money in the end. Not that the act is surprising, just the transparency of the act.
At the end of the day, inventory gets taken and if items sold don't match up to cash in registers, there's a problem. His scheme could have (not definately, but there is a chance) been discovered, and then it would have been a simple matter of looking at the security tapes and seeing who the offender is.
Working at a small retail shop, I'd have to disagree with that. Even being a small store with a small showroom, we do not do inventory more than once every 2 weeks - usually once a month. I can't imagine a large department store doing inventory any more than once a week, probably pulling inventory on like a few isles per evening. Inventory descrepencies of single missing items can go undiscovered for days or weeks. Week-old security tapes are not very helpful if the thief has an IQ above room temperature and doesn't make a daily habit of filching at the same store.
There's no good excuse for the cashiers. They deal with those products day in and day out. Particularly for stores like Target and K-Mart, many customers come in for only a handful of items, or a single item. Checkers with any experience should know that ringing up a basket of items that includes an iPod, totaling under $100 means something is wrong. I could see if the thief shaved say 10 or 20% off the price it could slip by most of the time, but cutting 95% off the price should ring a bell somewhere. If an employee cares that little for the benefit of the business that cuts their paycheck each week, they do not deserve to keep their job after letting something like that slip by. Letting something like a $4.99 iPod slip by indicates either indifference or gross neglegence, neither of which you want on your staff.
This would be nice if it had an educational twist on it. Keyboarding skills, math, ABCs, reading comprehension... that'd make a nice replacement for what we have at the school right now, and schools are always interested in low cost or no-cost technology.
'Ewing Oil filed for bankruptcy in the wake of massive accounting scandal.'"
Realistically, how could any oil company go bankrupt, even with a "massive accounting scandal"? They practically are minting money at the refinary.
like taking your PC in for a tune up at the service station
At least with my truck I don't have to take it in for a "tune up" once a month.
I prefer things that, rather than being easy to fix, just simply don't break themselves constantly.
Am I the only one finding the .DMG is not triggering an automatic download? Wrong mime type being sent maybe? Really annoying to click on the download link and suddenly see a screenful of garbage as safari now hangs for the next 4 minutes as it tries to render 9mb of trash. This from the direct link in the article, then when following the mirror links, silly me, I get hit AGAIN by 9.4mb of garbage.
Doshta no?
would that maybe be "grammar ninjai"?
Check out a PowerMac G5. The big dual processor water cooled beastes have a 1kw (yes, you read that correctly) power supply. All PMG5 supplies are the same size - they occupy the entire bottom 2 inches of the computer, side to side and front to back.
The upper class seem to do well with the people currently in control in the govt. The lower class does fairly well with the hand-outs. This leaves the middle class to support all three. Immigration is mainly by people in the lower class, where they stand to benefit by moving to the USA. Meanwhile, the middle class that are already IN the usa find their situation going downhill. So you see people that want in, and people that want out.
I don't know if it's urban legend or true, but I recall reading somewhere a long time ago that field medics in vietnam were authorized to piss on open wounds to intestines if they were going to be stuck in a combat zone awhile and there was no sterile water was available. Apparently intestines exposed to air die very quickly from dehydration, and without keeping them damp the patient may later require removal of his intestines. Unless you have a bladder infection, urine is apparently sterile.
My experience in working with direct disk control is a little stale, but the problem I was referring to is not which track you are on, but being in the "center" of a given track. I am assuming modern hard drives have a 1:1 ratio between stepper motor steps and disk tracks. Since there's no way to increase the resolution (reliably) to any more than a single step on the stepper, (half and quarter-tracking not being considered) if the head is say... 1/4 track off from its twin on the other arm, there's no way to correct for this since the stepper is pulling the head to where it believes is the center of the track and cannot deviate. Considering the extremely fine tolerance between individual tracks on a platter, it wouldn't be unreasonable for one head to be 1/2 track off in positioning from its twin, which would lead to a totally unreadable signal. You are lucky to get a good read 1/4 track off. And if your tolerance is randomly + or -, 1/4 track + on track 5 and 1/4 track - on track 6 will lead to "bleeding" of data between tracks.
So unless the heads can be physically aligned to within 1/4 track or better of eachother, (and I strongly doubt they can) then this idea will not work.
It's only a button click away! In the Displays system preference, do a colorsync calibration. Now when it asks you for gamma, DO NOT select "mac standard gamma". Choose one of the other two options available, such as "uncorrected gamma". That will get you your gamma that you are used to seeing on windows.
Actually, VirtualPC lets you use control-click for the missing mouse button. Works surprisingly well, as most mac users are accustomed to using shift, ctrl, option, and cmd as modifiers for the mouse button anyway. I still find myself holding ctrl when trying to pull up the cmm on a windows machine.
That's actually not a bad idea, although the software for interleaving heads at different locations would be scarry to write. Probably not terribly much more than current though, considering the command queueing capability of modern drives. The onboard controller card would certainly get more complex though.
That, and remember the reason HDs are rectangular is because of the arm assembly. If you want to add another one of those at the other end of the drive, the drive gets longer by about 2 inches. HD size is fairly well established at this point, so you might have serious problems fitting a drive like that into a standard case or enclosure.
Doubling the number of moving parts would also have to affect reliability and MTBF.
Last snag I can think of is that the head positioning would not be precisely identical for the two arms. So you'd have TWO heads running the top of platter 1 instead of 1 head. Unless they were perfectly aligned, they wouldn't be exactly on the same track on the platter, and that would have to affect performance as one head tried to read the data the other head wrote at a slightly different position.
Heh... this would also be a scarry nightmare for the data recovery places to try to deal with.
but there is no reason why a hard drive can't have multiple read/write heads to access different sectors of the disk as the same time
It's called "seek time". The more massive (heavy... more parts, more heads) the read arm has, the slower the seek time is. The heads have to travel a shorter distance, but it requires more time to move them that distance. You're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Though the idea of a single drive striping, say across platters, is a nice idea. Really even that could be done with one platter, since each platter has two surfaces. (top/bottom) Though that leaves many points of single failure still... onboard controller card, stepper motor, arm mechanics, any of which can fail and cause total data loss. About 1/2 the drive failures I've seen involve the drive no longer being able to spin up or stay spun up, so I don't think this can be considered anywhere near as failure-proof as say, a two drive mirror.
The advantage to raid1 is that, if one slice fails, you replace it and image the data back onto the new slice from the one that's still good. No data loss, and you only have to replace 1/2 your gear if you have a failure.
If you use 1/2 of a flash stick for each slice, and one slice fails, you what? Sure, the data is safe, but you still have to throw the whole stick away and get a new one. If it's an electrical failure, it's likely to take out the whole stick anyway since even though it's redundant memory it's still using one controller. Good way to increase read speeds tho, given proper controller design.
It sounds like you were just drag and dropping an entire folder each time, so you have to copy all the files even if few were changed. Get something like rsync (it's free!) and use that instead - it only copies what's necessary. I sync my 4gb flash drive (2gb used) once a week and it takes rsync about 10 seconds to complete the updates. It syncs my entire laptop to my server (55gb used) in about 8 minutes, over the network.
For comparison, a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 4gb USB2.0HS flash drive in a powerbook g4 with USB 2.0HS ports:
read 224mb: 17.2 seconds (13mb/sec)
write 224mb: 26.3 seconds (8.5mb/sec)
Those are for copying a single large file.
Now for me anyway, that's plenty fast and I wouldn't be able to justify buying a faster drive. Considering the capacity of the drives, (2gb max on the double speed one) there comes a point where faster isn't better because you can only go for so long before something runs out of space or data to copy.
It's all a matter of perspective. 28 seconds to duplicate a 140k floppy used to be awe-inspiring. I still remember waiting half an hour for a friend of mine's trash 80 to load a chess game off cassette. :P