Dell Optiplex GX270: Celeron 2.00GHz, 256MB, 80GB HDD, combo drive, 17" monitor, USB WiFi adapter, v.92 modem, XP Pro: $1,352 after $50 rebate.
Apple eMac: G4 1.00GHz, 256MB, 80GB HDD, DVD-R/CD-RW, 17" flat CRT monitor, Airport Extreme, v.92 modem, OS X 10.2: $1,398.
Ok, I can play the pricing game too, except I won't even change your Mac selection.
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/series_di me n_desktops.htm
2.2 ghz Celeron, 80 gig HD, 256 MB memory, 15" flat panel, DVD+R/RW, XP Home Pro, V92 Modem, 10/100 ethernet, USB WiFi: $808.
The Mac is about 1.75 times as much as the PC, or 1408 - 808 = $590 dollars more.
I won't even bother arguing with you that the 2.2 ghz Celeron is faster than the 1ghz G4, since it doesn't really matter, the point is already quite clear that people pay A LOT more for a Mac than a PC. You may think it's worth it, and that'd fine. But don't try to confuse the issue and live in a fantasy world where PCs are just as expensive as Macs.
American spellings, definitions taking over?
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So does anyone find that the American spellings of these words are becoming more prevalent? One example I've always found interesting is the English billion vs the American billion. The english is 10^12, where the American billion is 10^9. It gets more screwy at trillion, where an English trillion is 10^18, while an American trillion is 10^12.
The point of mentioning this is that from what I've heard the American definitions of billion, trillion, etc are becoming more popular in the UK. Being an American I've always thought the English definitions were inconsistant, since they have a seperate name for 10^0, 10^3, 10^6, but then suddenly start only giving seperate names at 10^6 intervals.
Obviously the spelling of flavour vs flavor is fairly irrelevant, and doesn't have the same issues as the definition of billion does. But I'm still curious if spellings have that same bleed-over factor.
True, It doesn't make any argument they have less sound. But it does make me far less willing to bother reading the site and trusting anything it says.
I only have a limited amount of time, and I'd rather spend it reading credible sources than trying to determine if a non-credible source just happens to print something true. I don't bother looking for information from the weekly world news for similar reasons.
I think most physicists don't believe in the singularity. The singularity is an embarrasing reminder that we don't have a theory of quantum gravity.
String theory for instance solves the "singularity problem" nicely by just saying that a black hole is just a very energetic string. Then again string theory isn't currently the most usefull theory as it's far from complete.
I think you're probbably right about the reasons for using Gentoo (though I admit I've never actually used Gentoo).
However, I think that a kernel compile _is_ a fair measure of overall system performance. It involves lots of disk, memory, and processor access, so it's a decent indicator of across the board performance.
As far as kernel compile versions go, from the article:
The same 2.4.21 source was copied to all machines and compiled using the same options. However, it should be noted that the Debian system used gcc 3.3.1 whilst the Mandrake and Gentoo installations used gcc 3.3.2 .
So the kernel source was the same, not Gentoo source.
You say the performance problems are because they got the CFLAGS wrong. If this is the case it only seems to underscore how easy it is to screw up optimizations with Gentoo. It's great for people that know all the proper optimizations for a particular piece of hardware, but I think the majority of people just don't know this offhand.
In any case I find it very interesting the big differences you can see in performance between distributions on the same hardware (and I'm assuming similar kernel versions).
I can believe this is possible, but only because it's a large power trying to affect a much smaller power. Assuming this is true I'm sure Iraq or Bosnia knew about what was happening, but didn't have any way of stopping it. You're right though, you don't need stealth when the person you're attacking can't respond effectively to an attack.
It would also be considerably harder to perform a currency attack on the US simply because it's the largest single economy in the world. ($10 trillion GDP in 2001, vs $58 billion in Iraq and a mere $7 billion in Boznia).
"the 2.6 kernel is finally out and being used by AverageUser!" story.
Hardly... this is only the second test version of 2.6 that started in July. The 2.4 release had 12 test versions that stretched from May to December.
This is simply an optional kernel included with Mandrake. Linus himself has previously asked that distributors include a test 2.6 kernel option to encourage more testing.
I think his objection is that it was posted to the Front Page of slashdot. It should have been posted to something like Developers, as it's really not big enough news for a front page story IMO.
Having said that, the Secret Service does have counterfeit bills produced by Intaglio presses, and believe that they are being produced by the government of some country hostile to the U.S.-- because that's the kind of moxie it takes to get your hands on an Intaglio press.
Actually I think there's a decent amount of evidence that the perfect counterfeits are coming from Russia. (And thus probbably produced by the Russian mafia.) IIRC the percentage of perfect countefeits is higher in Russia than anywhere else. IANAME (I Am Not A Macro-Economist), but the state sponsored economic attack sounds pretty dicey to me, since to have any real affect on raising inflation you'd have to produce so many counterfeit bills it'd become obvious what the source of the bills was. (More obvious than tracking it down to a single country). How do you get rid of a 100s of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of currency without raising attention? Remember that most of US dollars aren't in the form of currency, but float around electronically. I suppose it's also possible the Russian government is producing them as a revenue source, but I'd hope US intelligence is good enough that they'd learn about that sooner or later.
The US isn't currently occupying and building settlements in a neighboring... uh... country? occupied territory? like Israel is. Israel also depends on the Palestinians for a large part of its economy (and workforce), so it's not just a simple matter of restricting travel.
In other words the people that are most pissed off at the US live fairly far away from the US (and not on a border country), and live in another country (and not an occupied territory). Having large numbers of them enter into the US is thus difficult.
The people most pissed of at Israel live within the occupied terrories, where border crossing into Israel is easy. Even if you aren't allowed to cross at the official border crossings, it isn't that difficult to cross elsewhere, to the point where they're building a frickin wall around the occupied territories to try to keep them out.
Thus, getting people willing to commit acts of terror into the US is much harder than getting them into Israel. Therefore there are far less of them in the US than in Israel.
Imagine what happens when they blow up a "bus in the middle of Missouri
A few dozen people die. People freak out for a week or so wondering if there will be more bus bombings. Then they realize that there aren't, and are quite relieved if this is the best Al-Queda can come up with then this terrorism thing is licked (And no, I'm not implying it is, or would be). Sorry, but a bus bombing would be a pretty weak follow up to taking down two buildings and part of the Pentagon. I think Al-Queda would try to kill more people than say Great White killed with a sparkler.
The bus bombings work in Israel because you have a large amount of guys willing to blow themselves up in Israel. People get scared if busses are blowing up every week. Suicide bombers are a lot more rare and and "valuable" in the US, so they certainly wouldn't be wasted on blowing up busses.
Your lead/acid car battery does the same thing. For this type of battery the problem is sulfation. Sulfer slowly builds up on the lead in the battery preventing it from working properly. I'd imagine something similar happens to NiCad batteries, NiMH batteries, and Lithium Ion batteries. (e.g. some slow irreversible chemical change happens to the electrolyte, or builds up on the metal).
I think people blame NiCad batteries more because they suffer from charge/discharge "wear" more than NiMH or Lithium Ion.
Personally I'd go for the word Nazi Youth. This woman sounds like she would have turned in her neighbor to the Gestapo for not saying Heil Hitler at the end of a conversation.
hahaha.. as if Apple isn't charging $129 every six months for the latest and greatest OS X.
Even RedHat charges for decent access to bug fixes (if you don't want to wait through demo up2date hell), and has recently instituted fairly limited continued support of the non Advanced Server product.
You can knock MS for a lot of things, but they're still ahead of the curve for OS updates as far as Redhat and Apple are concerned. The non-commercial linux installations like Debian of course have them beat. The point being that MS is one of the last major OS makers to consider charging for updates in some manor. (Sun still hasn't, but then Sun is really a hardware company).
And how is this different than how money laundering is done now with fake businesses? Currency is anonymous too, even more so than an ATM machine which has cameras on it.
Money laundering doesn't mean turning counterfeit money into real money, it means turning money earned through illegal activities into "legitimate" income. Like say you make money though selling millions of dollars worth of cocaine, you have to somehow hide the source of that income. You turn dirty money into clean money, thus the laundering part of money laundering.
This system is simply a way of transfering cash online. I don't see how this would be usefull for money laundering.
The article says the muzzle velocity is a mere 33 meters/second. For comparison a slingshot is about 95 meters/second, and a BB gun shoots at about 100 meters/second. High powered BB guns are available that fire at around 240 meters/second.
In other words this "dangerous weapon" has 1/3 the velocity of a slingshot. Yes, slingshots are dangerous if miss-used, but this thing is hardly as dangerous as you're making it out to be. Do you think we should have regulations on slingshots too?
I'd imagine that a lot of small companies don't want to deal with this sort of thing. Why a larger company wouldn't, I don't know.
1 foot accuracy of lat-long+altitude required.
on
Worlds Largest Telescope?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The project requires you know the position of your telescope to within 1 foot in all lattitude, longitude, and altitude. (Timing is critical and you need to know if a pulse arrived within a nanosecond of each other. 1 nanosecond is about 1 foot.) Standard GPS gives you somewhere around 15-30 foot accuracy at best. How are they planning on getting the needed positional accuracy if GPS doesn't provide it?
I do remember quite a while ago NASA developing some statistical method of getting extremely accurate GPS positional data from taking masses of GPS data over many weeks (IIRC it was accurate to something like centimeters). Unfortunately it was just a newspaper article, so the details were lacking. Could this be how they plan on getting the accurate positional data? Anyone know more about this?
Where are the crazed closed minded environmentalists in this article? I don't doubt they exist (crazed fanatics linger around every controversial topic), but I don't see how it relates to the story.
There were two scientists quoted from the article who were skeptical of the claim, and one who thought it was interesting. Given that this is one study, and the predicted results don't completely correlate to actual data the responses sound fairly run-of-the-mill for a new scientific claim.
You've made a good argument how violence in movies or video games could create more violent people. The thing you haven't shown at all is that this theory is correct. Persuasive arguments are very easy to make. I could probbably make an equally persuasive argument that violence is movies and videogames reduces violence because it releases peoples agressions in a nonviolent way.
Until one of us shows actual evidence that the theory is correct it's all just a pissing contest as to whose argument _sounds_ better. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that keeps these "violent media causes violence" theories going is that they offer a simple explanation for violence in the society, and a simple solution. People have a strong desire for explanations and solutions... more so than their desire for truth.
If you toss a baseball out of a car window when you're driving at 100 mph the ball isn't going to slow down to 0 by the back of the car. It maybe will loose 100 mph in comparison to the shuttle by the time it decelerates a bit from where it broke off to where it hits the wing. That's not such a big deal.
Yah, but if I toss a piece of foam out the window driving at 100 miles an hour, and I'm driving a semi-truck, I bet that piece of foam is going to slow down quite a bit by the time it gets to the end of the trailer. (And the orbiter is about 1.5 semi lengths). Baseballs have a large mass compared to surface area, foam has a small mass compared to surface area. Point being that foam will slow down much faster than a baseball.
I still think your question is intereresting, I just don't think the armchair comparisons to a baseball dropped from a car are at all valid.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I can play the pricing game too, except I won't even change your Mac selection.
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/series_d
2.2 ghz Celeron, 80 gig HD, 256 MB memory, 15"
flat panel, DVD+R/RW, XP Home Pro, V92 Modem, 10/100 ethernet, USB WiFi:
$808.
The Mac is about 1.75 times as much as the PC, or 1408 - 808 = $590 dollars more.
I won't even bother arguing with you that the 2.2 ghz Celeron is faster than the 1ghz G4, since it doesn't really matter, the point is already quite clear that people pay A LOT more for a Mac than a PC. You may think it's worth it, and that'd fine. But don't try to confuse the issue and live in a fantasy world where PCs are just as expensive as Macs.
So does anyone find that the American spellings of these words are becoming more prevalent? One example I've always found interesting is the English billion vs the American billion. The english is 10^12, where the American billion is 10^9. It gets more screwy at trillion, where an English trillion is 10^18, while an American trillion is 10^12.
The point of mentioning this is that from what I've heard the American definitions of billion, trillion, etc are becoming more popular in the UK.
Being an American I've always thought the English definitions were inconsistant, since they have a seperate name for 10^0, 10^3, 10^6, but then suddenly start only giving seperate names at 10^6 intervals.
Obviously the spelling of flavour vs flavor is fairly irrelevant, and doesn't have the same issues as the definition of billion does. But I'm still curious if spellings have that same bleed-over factor.
Translation: You have too much time on your hands and are transfering your un-realized sexual energies into doing useless things.
Next on the agenda: getting MacOS 7 to run on your PalmPilot.
In other words, on a 2000 kilocalories/day diet...
1 kilowatthour = 860 kilocalories.
2000/860 = 2.3 kilowatt hours
2300 watts-hours/24hours = 96 watts.
Pretty amazing that we humans only run on 96 watts of power.
True, It doesn't make any argument they have less sound. But it does make me far less willing to bother reading the site and trusting anything it says.
I only have a limited amount of time, and I'd rather spend it reading credible sources than trying to determine if a non-credible source just happens to print something true. I don't bother looking for information from the weekly world news for similar reasons.
I think most physicists don't believe in the singularity. The singularity is an embarrasing reminder that we don't have a theory of quantum gravity.
String theory for instance solves the "singularity problem" nicely by just saying that a black hole is just a very energetic string. Then again string theory isn't currently the most usefull theory as it's far from complete.
Call me crazy, but I'm a bit dubious of a site that has pseudo-science descriptions of auras as "bio-photons" stored in DNA.
However, I think that a kernel compile _is_ a fair measure of overall system performance. It involves lots of disk, memory, and processor access, so it's a decent indicator of across the board performance.
As far as kernel compile versions go, from the article:
So the kernel source was the same, not Gentoo source.
You say the performance problems are because they got the CFLAGS wrong. If this is the case it only seems to underscore how easy it is to screw up optimizations with Gentoo. It's great for people that know all the proper optimizations for a particular piece of hardware, but I think the majority of people just don't know this offhand.
In any case I find it very interesting the big differences you can see in performance between distributions on the same hardware (and I'm assuming similar kernel versions).
I can believe this is possible, but only because it's a large power trying to affect a much smaller power. Assuming this is true I'm sure Iraq or Bosnia knew about what was happening, but didn't have any way of stopping it. You're right though, you don't need stealth when the person you're attacking can't respond effectively to an attack.
It would also be considerably harder to perform a currency attack on the US simply because it's the largest single economy in the world. ($10 trillion GDP in 2001, vs $58 billion in Iraq and a mere $7 billion in Boznia).
I think his objection is that it was posted to the Front Page of slashdot. It should have been posted to something like Developers, as it's really not big enough news for a front page story IMO.
The US isn't currently occupying and building settlements in a neighboring... uh... country? occupied territory? like Israel is. Israel also depends on the Palestinians for a large part of its economy (and workforce), so it's not just a simple matter of restricting travel.
In other words the people that are most pissed off at the US live fairly far away from the US (and not on a border country), and live in another country (and not an occupied territory). Having large numbers of them enter into the US is thus difficult.
The people most pissed of at Israel live within the occupied terrories, where border crossing into Israel is easy. Even if you aren't allowed to cross at the official border crossings, it isn't that difficult to cross elsewhere, to the point where they're building a frickin wall around the occupied territories to try to keep them out.
Thus, getting people willing to commit acts of terror into the US is much harder than getting them into Israel. Therefore there are far less of them in the US than in Israel.
A few dozen people die. People freak out for a week or so wondering if there will be more bus bombings. Then they realize that there aren't, and are quite relieved if this is the best Al-Queda can come up with then this terrorism thing is licked (And no, I'm not implying it is, or would be). Sorry, but a bus bombing would be a pretty weak follow up to taking down two buildings and part of the Pentagon. I think Al-Queda would try to kill more people than say Great White killed with a sparkler.
The bus bombings work in Israel because you have a large amount of guys willing to blow themselves up in Israel. People get scared if busses are blowing up every week. Suicide bombers are a lot more rare and and "valuable" in the US, so they certainly wouldn't be wasted on blowing up busses.
Your lead/acid car battery does the same thing. For this type of battery the problem is sulfation. Sulfer slowly builds up on the lead in the battery preventing it from working properly. I'd imagine something similar happens to NiCad batteries, NiMH batteries, and Lithium Ion batteries. (e.g. some slow irreversible chemical change happens to the electrolyte, or builds up on the metal).
I think people blame NiCad batteries more because they suffer from charge/discharge "wear" more than NiMH or Lithium Ion.
Personally I'd go for the word Nazi Youth. This woman sounds like she would have turned in her neighbor to the Gestapo for not saying Heil Hitler at the end of a conversation.
hahaha.. as if Apple isn't charging $129 every six months for the latest and greatest OS X.
Even RedHat charges for decent access to bug fixes (if you don't want to wait through demo up2date hell), and has recently instituted fairly limited continued support of the non Advanced Server product.
You can knock MS for a lot of things, but they're still ahead of the curve for OS updates as far as Redhat and Apple are concerned. The non-commercial linux installations like Debian of course have them beat. The point being that MS is one of the last major OS makers to consider charging for updates in some manor. (Sun still hasn't, but then Sun is really a hardware company).
And how is this different than how money laundering is done now with fake businesses? Currency is anonymous too, even more so than an ATM machine which has cameras on it.
Money laundering doesn't mean turning counterfeit money into real money, it means turning money earned through illegal activities into "legitimate" income. Like say you make money though selling millions of dollars worth of cocaine, you have to somehow hide the source of that income. You turn dirty money into clean money, thus the laundering part of money laundering.
This system is simply a way of transfering cash online. I don't see how this would be usefull for money laundering.
The article says the muzzle velocity is a mere 33 meters/second. For comparison a slingshot is about 95 meters/second, and a BB gun shoots at about 100 meters/second. High powered BB guns are available that fire at around 240 meters/second.
In other words this "dangerous weapon" has 1/3 the velocity of a slingshot. Yes, slingshots are dangerous if miss-used, but this thing is hardly as dangerous as you're making it out to be. Do you think we should have regulations on slingshots too?
I'd imagine that a lot of small companies don't want to deal with this sort of thing. Why a larger company wouldn't, I don't know.
The project requires you know the position of your telescope to within 1 foot in all lattitude, longitude, and altitude. (Timing is critical and you need to know if a pulse arrived within a nanosecond of each other. 1 nanosecond is about 1 foot.) Standard GPS gives you somewhere around 15-30 foot accuracy at best. How are they planning on getting the needed positional accuracy if GPS doesn't provide it?
I do remember quite a while ago NASA developing some statistical method of getting extremely accurate GPS positional data from taking masses of GPS data over many weeks (IIRC it was accurate to something like centimeters). Unfortunately it was just a newspaper article, so the details were lacking. Could this be how they plan on getting the accurate positional data? Anyone know more about this?
Where are the crazed closed minded environmentalists in this article? I don't doubt they exist (crazed fanatics linger around every controversial topic), but I don't see how it relates to the story.
There were two scientists quoted from the article who were skeptical of the claim, and one who thought it was interesting. Given that this is one study, and the predicted results don't completely correlate to actual data the responses sound fairly run-of-the-mill for a new scientific claim.
You've made a good argument how violence in movies or video games could create more violent people. The thing you haven't shown at all is that this theory is correct. Persuasive arguments are very easy to make. I could probbably make an equally persuasive argument that violence is movies and videogames reduces violence because it releases peoples agressions in a nonviolent way.
Until one of us shows actual evidence that the theory is correct it's all just a pissing contest as to whose argument _sounds_ better. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that keeps these "violent media causes violence" theories going is that they offer a simple explanation for violence in the society, and a simple solution. People have a strong desire for explanations and solutions... more so than their desire for truth.
I still think your question is intereresting, I just don't think the armchair comparisons to a baseball dropped from a car are at all valid.