And again: references. Doing a bit of Googling, it seems historians have wildly different beliefs about just how many people Stalin killed, with the high range being 20-30 million. With the vast number of different social and ethnic groups targetted by Stalin, I can't take your claim of "12 million jews killed" seriously. In fact, before Stalin got to power, there were no more than about 5 million Jews to begin with.
Russia has some terrible problems with values and priorities no doubt (HIV crisis, situation for orphans), but so far none of your wild claims seem to be backed up by the evidence.
Am I the only one who would like to see a preliminary injunction issued as soon as possible against the use of any AK-47 or derivative weapon that was not produced under license from the patent holders?
Few people in 2003 believed the intelligence data to be correct, including the heads of the CIA and MI6 - let alone the inteligence agancies in countries openly opposing the war. But it is not the CIA chief's job to hold press conferences or address the United Nations, it is their job to interpret the intelligence and give the facts including a "we are not sure".
"We are not sure" to politicians simply means "we can spin this any way we like" and so they did, even Colin Powel; someone I respected until his knowlingly spewing of blatant lies in front of the United Nations.
Out of the lot, I'd still like to see her as the next US President, but had Hillary actually listened to people who knew, rather than the Bush administration, she would have voted "no". But she turned out to be just as lazy a Senator as the rest of them and simply vote with the Fox News Channel on this one, for that, she SHOULD apologize.
The whole idea of the host computer (or camera, music player, etc) controling the filesystem on memory cards like these is rather repulsive anyway. This is consumer electronics stuff; cards shouldn't corrupt and become unusable until a reformat just because you pull them out without "ejecting" them.
The cards should be smart cards, with a storage API for the hosts to use for storage and retrieval. How it is actually done should be up to the processor in the card.
Yes, that would mean new drivers on every OS, but the initial pain of that is worth it in the long run.
While better at low bitrates (good for streaming!), it doesn't make a difference when you get to a reasonable rate, like 192-256, then they are just the same. Anything lower and they are audibly below the original CD quality, so I won't bother with that. Personally, I have switched to lossless. ALAC in my case because iTunes+iPod support it nicely.
I agree on the Zune B***S***; they probably mean they have _shipped_ 1 million unit that are now gathering dust on many store's shelves...
Google does one thing really well - search. Many of the ideas brewing are not a search replacement, they are either something completely different or an add-on to search.
I am sure Google ignores many of the 20% ideas that are actually quite good, but I doubt the ones they ignore are the kind of things that make search better; that is the kind of thing these geniusses spent 80% of their week on, after all.
The president should be there for the country, with no state bias whatsoever - that is what a 1-man-1-vote system would accomplish. The president can't do anything for a single state without both houses' aproval anyway.
The Senate and congres are there to fight for the individual states. And there, say, California will want to vote for something Alaska wants specifically because when California wants something next and it's a close call, they'll need Alaska's vote.
Plus presidents only care about swing states. Bush won Louisiana by a wide marging in 2000 and 2004 and what has he done to rebuild New Orleans? That's right, Jack Shit. Compare that to Hurricane relief that goes to a swing state like Florida...
One thing I notice about the difference between European and US airlines is how trigger happy you guys are on the seatbelt sign! Don't turn it off to begin with until cruise, then the slightest single bumb and it's own again for the (very quiet) next half hour. And then when it is on again for seemingly no reason and you are busting for the loo and decide to get up, the cabin crew starts shouting for you to sit down with a fear in their voice as if your untimely demise is imminent. Oh, and of course the movie is interupted by the cabin crew (in two or three languages if transatlantic) every single time the sign goes on.
BA on the other hand - depending on rate of climb - tends to turn it off well before cruise and when it is on during the flight even with a little rough weather, it is just treated as advisory and nobody will bat an eyelid if you get up for a walk. And they interupt only the first time it's turned on.
My sister works the cabin at KLM and they definitely still have a lot of fun. She took my mum along on a 4-day stopover in Johannesburg in December (of course she was seated on the upper deck) and - probably knowing they'd hang out for the next few days anyway - the captain even invited her for a tour of the flightdeck and with 20 minutes to go he came back to invite her to take the jumpseat for landing and talked he through it. (Jo'burg isn't exactly O'hare...) I doubt any US airlines would still do that!
Speaking of flaunting the rules: When I was in Kenya last year, the guys flying us back to Mombasa from the Masai Maara in a Czech made L410 decided to buzz the beach. It was easy to look over his shoulder at the instruments and he took it down too 100 feet! I asked him later if that was legal here and he just said: "It's Kenya, anything is legal":D
Well, I just moved to a GA friendly country (Australia) so I plan to start on my PPL soon. No big asperations, just something fun for the weekend.
Oh, and also: do you ever get that high? I have never seen a plane I was on break through FL390. But that could be because we in Europe don't have quite the severe weather systems like you guys get.
Good; I quite like being a passenger on A320s, more so than on 737s. I never cared much for 757s but that could be because most 757s I have been on were crappy old ones operated by Delta and United...
Most of my flying is short to medium haul in Europe, where 757s aren't very popular because they are designed to take a relatively small number of people quite a long way - something we don't need much over here. (767s are popular here because they do both short haul and transatlantic quite efficient; you can do the 500 mile monday morning LHR-CGN business run and then take it from LHR to JFK in the afternoon)
I am not sure what you mean; an A320/319/321 has a higher service ceiling than all but the newest 737-700/800. And the difference between 39K and 41K isn't that big anyway.
In fact, most pilots who have flown both will tell you the A320 is a much smoother ride in rough weather because the fly-by-wire responds so much faster to any unwanted movement than a non-FBW plane that just bounces around and with the auto pilot responding only to longer term deviations. (ie: the auto-pilot is happy as long as the course and altitude are OK, short pitch and roll changes aren't important) Having been a passenger way too many times on both, I have noticed the same.
DVD's maximum bitrate is 11 Mbit, but you'd run out of disc in about two hours if you did that - with no room for extras. Most DVDs actually run at 3-5 Mbit. (it is variable)
The problem with most HD systems is that they were designed with the crappy old MPEG2 codec in mind. This means ATSC *needs* almost 20Mbit to broadcast 1080p - a serious waste of bandwidth and it also makes for a less stable signal. Cable and sat broadcasters have switched to MPEG4/h.264 for their HD content so they can look better at lower bitrates.
The same could have been done for an HD DVD version; a standard DVD can average 6.5Mbit for 3 hours - that is plenty for 1080p using h.264. No need for expensive new disks and players...
I agree. If they wanted to make DVD better and support HD, they could have kept the exact same cheap disk and simply switch to h.264/AVC; 9gb would have been ample for 3 hours of 1080p content. There is no need for 50GB discs...
While it wouldn't have been backwards compatible with existing DVD players, every new player after the introduction would simply have support for the codec too. That and an HDMI output would make good players only slightly more expensive, not over a thousand.
Blu-ray wastes it expensive space by most movies using sledge-hammer high-mbit MPEG2 anyway. At least most HDDVD use MPEG4. (M$ codec)
The diversity in the US - meaning many different genres on many different stations in one market - has nothing to do with not paying royalties. It has much more to do with the way the US goverment operates the spectrum: you find an open frequency - you can have it. This means many stations operating and you can't make a buck if everyone sells the same thing. That is how you end up with a couple of urban, country, CHR, talk, adult contemporary, etc. in each market.
In Europe, traditionally, the airwaves were the domain of the goverment operated stations and only in the past decade or two have commercial broadcasters been allowed in most countries.
Also, stations pay based on profit (like XM and Sirius already do in the US) so no profit, no royalties. This means at most Clear Channel, AM/FM, et al would lose maybe 5-10% of their profit, not enough to put anyone out of business - be it corporate or independent radio.
That part of the photograph is not only out of focus and grainy, it is also well overexposed. Unless this red was the darkest of dark reds, it is entirely plauslible that they just faded into one white blob on this black and white image.
The misunderstanding of photography and the effects of contrast on film is what makes people come up with rediculous claims that the moon landings were a hoax because "there were no stars in the photographs" and "the crosshairs in the camera seem to dissapear behind the white space suits".
I don't think Mr. Lovelady identified himself by the colour pattern of his shirt; probably probably said it was him because he know where he was at the time of the shooting. That seems much more likely than the FBI telling him to say it was him.
This documentary proved to me there was only one shooter - most likely Oswald.
Well before the dawn of the Internet people had accounts set up with suppliers and all the needed to do was phone them up (ie: connect to the website), ask them if they had the product (ie: search) and then say: "I'll take it". The supplier would know where to ship it and where to get the money from.
If that isn't so close to one click shopping it would invalidate the patent, then I don't know what is...
VOA is a State Department operation. Good or bad, at the end of the day it is a propaganda outlet aimed at foreigners.
BBC is much less controlled by the British goverment than VOA is by the Americans, which is why the TV License (not "TV Tax") is collected by an independent organisation. This way, the goverment doesn't control the BBC's purse and has very little influence over content.
Obviously, there is always going to be some influence, just like goverment has influence over any commercial station, but the way the BBC operates and is funded is entirely different from VOA.
Yes and no. Postgres is probably 10% harder to start using, but when you have taken the time to read a little (and I mean a little) you will find that it is actually much easier and predictable in its configuration.
In fact, compared to Postgres, I find maintaining MySQL horrbly un-intuitive.
For instance, you actually create users with passwords first in Postgres, which you then GRANT things to - as opposed to MySQL's way of doing it all on one go. Obviously, the Postgres way takes an extra step, but makes much more sense as you reuse that same user over and over again in other grants without ending up with resetting passwords.
That is a great review; an actual real-world scenario buy guys who seem to know their database, not some spotty teenager who thinks a database benchmark is seeing how fast you can load 1 million records and then see how long a "select *" on that table takes...
As the article shows, every time they double the number of cores, Postgres gains 75% in performance - like any good application should do. At 4 cores, it is already twice as fast as MySQL under reasonable concurrency; I'd like to see this test on a 8-core server - my guess is MySQL wouldn't be much faster than it is now and Postgres would perform at least 3 times better than MySQL.
Oh, and Postgres doesn't think 0000-00-00 is a valid date, which is nice too.
Slashdot Mirror
Russia is not an "Islamic State".
And again: references. Doing a bit of Googling, it seems historians have wildly different beliefs about just how many people Stalin killed, with the high range being 20-30 million. With the vast number of different social and ethnic groups targetted by Stalin, I can't take your claim of "12 million jews killed" seriously. In fact, before Stalin got to power, there were no more than about 5 million Jews to begin with.
Russia has some terrible problems with values and priorities no doubt (HIV crisis, situation for orphans), but so far none of your wild claims seem to be backed up by the evidence.
I can't believe that such a wild claim without any reference gets modded "insightful" by anyone. Oh wait, this is Slashdot.
Can you please provide a link?
if it is slow copying files, you are probably running Vista disguised as Mac OS 8!
(I know, they really do look very similar)
Am I the only one who would like to see a preliminary injunction issued as soon as possible against the use of any AK-47 or derivative weapon that was not produced under license from the patent holders?
Few people in 2003 believed the intelligence data to be correct, including the heads of the CIA and MI6 - let alone the inteligence agancies in countries openly opposing the war. But it is not the CIA chief's job to hold press conferences or address the United Nations, it is their job to interpret the intelligence and give the facts including a "we are not sure".
"We are not sure" to politicians simply means "we can spin this any way we like" and so they did, even Colin Powel; someone I respected until his knowlingly spewing of blatant lies in front of the United Nations.
Out of the lot, I'd still like to see her as the next US President, but had Hillary actually listened to people who knew, rather than the Bush administration, she would have voted "no". But she turned out to be just as lazy a Senator as the rest of them and simply vote with the Fox News Channel on this one, for that, she SHOULD apologize.
The whole idea of the host computer (or camera, music player, etc) controling the filesystem on memory cards like these is rather repulsive anyway. This is consumer electronics stuff; cards shouldn't corrupt and become unusable until a reformat just because you pull them out without "ejecting" them.
The cards should be smart cards, with a storage API for the hosts to use for storage and retrieval. How it is actually done should be up to the processor in the card.
Yes, that would mean new drivers on every OS, but the initial pain of that is worth it in the long run.
While better at low bitrates (good for streaming!), it doesn't make a difference when you get to a reasonable rate, like 192-256, then they are just the same. Anything lower and they are audibly below the original CD quality, so I won't bother with that. Personally, I have switched to lossless. ALAC in my case because iTunes+iPod support it nicely.
I agree on the Zune B***S***; they probably mean they have _shipped_ 1 million unit that are now gathering dust on many store's shelves...
If a 1 mbit h.264 stream in SD looks as good as it does, a 4 mbit stream will do HD quite nicely.
Google does one thing really well - search. Many of the ideas brewing are not a search replacement, they are either something completely different or an add-on to search.
I am sure Google ignores many of the 20% ideas that are actually quite good, but I doubt the ones they ignore are the kind of things that make search better; that is the kind of thing these geniusses spent 80% of their week on, after all.
The president should be there for the country, with no state bias whatsoever - that is what a 1-man-1-vote system would accomplish. The president can't do anything for a single state without both houses' aproval anyway.
The Senate and congres are there to fight for the individual states. And there, say, California will want to vote for something Alaska wants specifically because when California wants something next and it's a close call, they'll need Alaska's vote.
Plus presidents only care about swing states. Bush won Louisiana by a wide marging in 2000 and 2004 and what has he done to rebuild New Orleans? That's right, Jack Shit. Compare that to Hurricane relief that goes to a swing state like Florida...
One thing I notice about the difference between European and US airlines is how trigger happy you guys are on the seatbelt sign! Don't turn it off to begin with until cruise, then the slightest single bumb and it's own again for the (very quiet) next half hour. And then when it is on again for seemingly no reason and you are busting for the loo and decide to get up, the cabin crew starts shouting for you to sit down with a fear in their voice as if your untimely demise is imminent. Oh, and of course the movie is interupted by the cabin crew (in two or three languages if transatlantic) every single time the sign goes on.
:D
BA on the other hand - depending on rate of climb - tends to turn it off well before cruise and when it is on during the flight even with a little rough weather, it is just treated as advisory and nobody will bat an eyelid if you get up for a walk. And they interupt only the first time it's turned on.
My sister works the cabin at KLM and they definitely still have a lot of fun. She took my mum along on a 4-day stopover in Johannesburg in December (of course she was seated on the upper deck) and - probably knowing they'd hang out for the next few days anyway - the captain even invited her for a tour of the flightdeck and with 20 minutes to go he came back to invite her to take the jumpseat for landing and talked he through it. (Jo'burg isn't exactly O'hare...) I doubt any US airlines would still do that!
Speaking of flaunting the rules: When I was in Kenya last year, the guys flying us back to Mombasa from the Masai Maara in a Czech made L410 decided to buzz the beach. It was easy to look over his shoulder at the instruments and he took it down too 100 feet! I asked him later if that was legal here and he just said: "It's Kenya, anything is legal"
Well, I just moved to a GA friendly country (Australia) so I plan to start on my PPL soon. No big asperations, just something fun for the weekend.
Cheers,
Bas.
Oh, and also: do you ever get that high? I have never seen a plane I was on break through FL390. But that could be because we in Europe don't have quite the severe weather systems like you guys get.
Good; I quite like being a passenger on A320s, more so than on 737s. I never cared much for 757s but that could be because most 757s I have been on were crappy old ones operated by Delta and United...
Most of my flying is short to medium haul in Europe, where 757s aren't very popular because they are designed to take a relatively small number of people quite a long way - something we don't need much over here. (767s are popular here because they do both short haul and transatlantic quite efficient; you can do the 500 mile monday morning LHR-CGN business run and then take it from LHR to JFK in the afternoon)
Ah, right, that is why it is a smoother ride. That makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining it!
I am not sure what you mean; an A320/319/321 has a higher service ceiling than all but the newest 737-700/800. And the difference between 39K and 41K isn't that big anyway.
In fact, most pilots who have flown both will tell you the A320 is a much smoother ride in rough weather because the fly-by-wire responds so much faster to any unwanted movement than a non-FBW plane that just bounces around and with the auto pilot responding only to longer term deviations. (ie: the auto-pilot is happy as long as the course and altitude are OK, short pitch and roll changes aren't important) Having been a passenger way too many times on both, I have noticed the same.
DVD's maximum bitrate is 11 Mbit, but you'd run out of disc in about two hours if you did that - with no room for extras. Most DVDs actually run at 3-5 Mbit. (it is variable)
The problem with most HD systems is that they were designed with the crappy old MPEG2 codec in mind. This means ATSC *needs* almost 20Mbit to broadcast 1080p - a serious waste of bandwidth and it also makes for a less stable signal. Cable and sat broadcasters have switched to MPEG4/h.264 for their HD content so they can look better at lower bitrates.
The same could have been done for an HD DVD version; a standard DVD can average 6.5Mbit for 3 hours - that is plenty for 1080p using h.264. No need for expensive new disks and players...
I agree. If they wanted to make DVD better and support HD, they could have kept the exact same cheap disk and simply switch to h.264/AVC; 9gb would have been ample for 3 hours of 1080p content. There is no need for 50GB discs...
While it wouldn't have been backwards compatible with existing DVD players, every new player after the introduction would simply have support for the codec too. That and an HDMI output would make good players only slightly more expensive, not over a thousand.
Blu-ray wastes it expensive space by most movies using sledge-hammer high-mbit MPEG2 anyway. At least most HDDVD use MPEG4. (M$ codec)
The diversity in the US - meaning many different genres on many different stations in one market - has nothing to do with not paying royalties. It has much more to do with the way the US goverment operates the spectrum: you find an open frequency - you can have it. This means many stations operating and you can't make a buck if everyone sells the same thing. That is how you end up with a couple of urban, country, CHR, talk, adult contemporary, etc. in each market.
In Europe, traditionally, the airwaves were the domain of the goverment operated stations and only in the past decade or two have commercial broadcasters been allowed in most countries.
Also, stations pay based on profit (like XM and Sirius already do in the US) so no profit, no royalties. This means at most Clear Channel, AM/FM, et al would lose maybe 5-10% of their profit, not enough to put anyone out of business - be it corporate or independent radio.
That part of the photograph is not only out of focus and grainy, it is also well overexposed. Unless this red was the darkest of dark reds, it is entirely plauslible that they just faded into one white blob on this black and white image.
The misunderstanding of photography and the effects of contrast on film is what makes people come up with rediculous claims that the moon landings were a hoax because "there were no stars in the photographs" and "the crosshairs in the camera seem to dissapear behind the white space suits".
I don't think Mr. Lovelady identified himself by the colour pattern of his shirt; probably probably said it was him because he know where he was at the time of the shooting. That seems much more likely than the FBI telling him to say it was him.
This documentary proved to me there was only one shooter - most likely Oswald.
LOL, yeah I got the memo...
But it's not fair!
Well, burst.com's patents didn't use the internet and somehow they seem to have a case. It should work both ways with prior art too, shouldn't it?
Oh well, like I really care...
Well before the dawn of the Internet people had accounts set up with suppliers and all the needed to do was phone them up (ie: connect to the website), ask them if they had the product (ie: search) and then say: "I'll take it". The supplier would know where to ship it and where to get the money from.
If that isn't so close to one click shopping it would invalidate the patent, then I don't know what is...
VOA is a State Department operation. Good or bad, at the end of the day it is a propaganda outlet aimed at foreigners.
BBC is much less controlled by the British goverment than VOA is by the Americans, which is why the TV License (not "TV Tax") is collected by an independent organisation. This way, the goverment doesn't control the BBC's purse and has very little influence over content.
Obviously, there is always going to be some influence, just like goverment has influence over any commercial station, but the way the BBC operates and is funded is entirely different from VOA.
Don't you mean 1920 * 1080 * 36?
AFAIK, there are 12 bits per color, per pixel.
Yes and no. Postgres is probably 10% harder to start using, but when you have taken the time to read a little (and I mean a little) you will find that it is actually much easier and predictable in its configuration.
In fact, compared to Postgres, I find maintaining MySQL horrbly un-intuitive.
For instance, you actually create users with passwords first in Postgres, which you then GRANT things to - as opposed to MySQL's way of doing it all on one go. Obviously, the Postgres way takes an extra step, but makes much more sense as you reuse that same user over and over again in other grants without ending up with resetting passwords.
That is a great review; an actual real-world scenario buy guys who seem to know their database, not some spotty teenager who thinks a database benchmark is seeing how fast you can load 1 million records and then see how long a "select *" on that table takes...
As the article shows, every time they double the number of cores, Postgres gains 75% in performance - like any good application should do. At 4 cores, it is already twice as fast as MySQL under reasonable concurrency; I'd like to see this test on a 8-core server - my guess is MySQL wouldn't be much faster than it is now and Postgres would perform at least 3 times better than MySQL.
Oh, and Postgres doesn't think 0000-00-00 is a valid date, which is nice too.