In the case of Germany, Italy and the UK, I imagine it's because so much investment is in the US. The European economy is weakened, perhaps fatally in the long term, by the long period in which so much investment went into US equities because Europe was perceived as stagnant and the US as the engine of growth. European stock markets seem largely to depend on US levels except that (in the case of the UK at least) when the Dow falls the UK markets fall more, when it rises they rise more slowly. This just reflects the financial realities. Europe will fall into line with US commercial law in the hope that this will protect some of its investments.
Although some right-wing republicans will doubtless welcome European dependence on the US economy, it isn't healthy. Having a world economy that depends on events in a single country with about 1/25 of the entire population is far from smart. Having laws written in an attempt to protect the interests of a small number of large corporations is trying to prevent change. The last non-US big highly centralised empire that tried to stop change was the Soviet Union. Remember? Just thirteen years ago?
This is science. If you have several possible methods of measuring things, try them all and look for inconsistencies. It's how the age of the Earth was first understood: the Victorians started to understand geological processes and understood that to weather rocks would take longer than the then current age for the Earth. Faced with a choice between a calculation done by a mad Irish bishop based on a bad translation of a book done by desert nomads, and evidence collected by geologists from all over the Earth, the part of the human race with brains went with the geologists. That's called scientific method.
Try reading the Bible. In fact, try learning some Hebrew. You'll get a shock, in fact a whole series of shocks. From the first verse of Bereshit (Genesis) in fact, where the word used for "God" (Elohim) is a plural form. What the Creationists say is usually what one verse taken out of context of the Bible says.
However, many theological writers have pointed out that the belief in multiple inhabited worlds is history-neutral as well as evolution-neutral. Terry Pratchett often makes this point in humorous ways: in one of his books parts of a continent are created 30000 years old two weeks ago, and in another he mentions the Creator installing perfectly faked fossils to fool future investigators.
To avoid misunderstandings, I'm an agnostic who thinks that the difference between Creationists and the Taliban is largely about what the law allows and geographical location, but I am aware that, just as there can be no proof of the existence of a universal God, there can equally be no proof of the scientific view of the history of the universe.
And if we find something with SETI and start sending them messages, better hope they have a reasonably liberal anti-spam policy.
The US stuck with air cooled aircraft engines long after everybody else had gone to water cooled because of fears about reliability. If you look around now, even small motorcycle engines are liquid cooled. OK, Harley (100th anniversary!) has stuck with air cooling, but that is a huge lump with relatively low power/weight ratio. Automotive liquid cooling is now very reliable: I've never opened the header tank cap on either of my cars between coolant replacements.
As for sodium exhaust valves, one reason they went was metallurgical: better steels and valve guide materials were invented. Another was that engines became, on the whole, smaller and multivalved, so the problem (the sheer distance from the valve face to the guide in big ports) has reduced. Perhaps when every computer has multiple small processors rather than one big one, notebooks can be cooled efficiently with a single flat plate. But, looking at the complicated and vulnerable fan/ducting arrangement on mine, I suspect that NEC are on to a winner.
Are you sure about VW buses burning? I thought it was an urban myth. I believed the main reason they used magnesium was availability rather than weight saving: no-one chooses to use Mg for blocks because its expansion coefficient is such that it makes it hard to retain bearings. It's fine for covers. It is also very hard indeed to make it catch fire in bulk because it melts. It is true, though, that once it is burning it is rather hazardous. Nearly as hazardous as a fuel tank going off... You don't pump water onto an auto fire in any case because it can splash spilt fuel and cause extra vapor ignitions from electrical shorts. Believe me, I worked in vehicle R&D for 5 years, and the only extinguishers allowed near the test beds were carbon dioxide, freon and dry powder.
This is basically a means for spreading the heat from the processor efficiently into the large flat surfaces that are the only heatsink you can get on laptops. The problem at present is that the processor occupies a small area and the heat has to escape sideways through a limited area of metal. A liquid flow can transfer heat much faster and spread it more efficiently because water actually has a greater heat capacity than metal, and the pumped flow can be faster than the conduction flow through metal.
Looking at the NEC design, as described in the article, I would have thought that the risk of leakage was far less than water entry via spillage, rain, or simple condensation.
As for pumps stopping, what happens with modern Intel CPUs when fans stop? They slow down and so control their own temperature. It's only AMD CPUs that suddenly fry themselves.
The basic idea isn't even new. Over 50 years ago exhaust valves in high performance engines were drilled through and part filled with sodium metal. As the valve got hot the sodium melted, then the vibration caused it to move around transferring heat from the hot valve face to the water cooled guide. Doubtless geeks at the time worried that the sodium would somehow escape and damage their engines.
This might be a brilliant classical reference, except that since both Hektor and Astyanax died at the end of the Trojan wars, I'm not quite sure how the "Romani" fits. Troiani? But why call it Hektor anyway? To be properly corny, it should be called something like "Canaletto."
Work is too boring today, but at least I didn't moderate this overrated.
The answer is NOT to have a compensation charge per CD or per CD burner. Quite apart from the fact that some of us use CD writers to produce backups of work, the entire principle that there should be specific legislation in favor of a commercial organisation creating a tax which goes to fund its revenue is wrong. Literally, it is fascism (a form of government in which big business is in direct league with the government).
The example of Prohibition shows that if enough people regard a law as a bad one, it will eventually fall. If enough people believe that there is a de facto monopoly in the music business which results in the product being hugely over-priced and managers being over-rewarded, and they choose to circumvent that over-pricing, the effect is no different from if they simply stop buying the product altogether, which is legal.
I can't resist a plug at this point for Terry Pratchett's book Soul Music which manages to make some of the issues amusing.
As a kid I read a book, written I think in the 1950s which I have never found again, called Metatopia. It was a kind of hybrid socialist/capitalist society and the author effectively predicted the internet, though an audio-only version based on telephones. (I am not making this up but, as I say, I've never seen it again or heard it referred to). Anyway, before this is marked off-topic by my personal stalker (are you having a good day?) the Metatopian transport system was based on small independent transport vehicles with, I think, overhead monorails. They couldn't overtake but the operating system ensured that the speed on any given section of track was some kind of average of what all the current travellers wanted - completely unrealisable with 50s technology but an interesting notion. What would be the people carrying efficiency of a flat version of a modern cablecar of the automatic type where the separation of the cars can vary with the traffic? It might be overkill for a short distance like the Montparnasse run (180M), but would it work on the level over a kilometre or so?
Did anyone else read an ordinary suburban family who live in an alternate video-game universe and think "So that's what all those ordinary suburban families do nowadays. That's why I never see them about anymore" ?
I once sat on the plane next to the guy who was the quality manager for a large hotel franchise. Yes, he really did get to travel round every exotic location in the world, frequently with family, to test to the limit the facilities, service, you name it. (during the flight he benchmarked the entire cabin crew, pointed out the one that would get promotion and the one who was heading for the DCM - interesting stuff.)
He said that during the Gulf war he had visited more than one hotel which usually had a significant number of visitors from arab countries, and turned up unannounced late at night in full gear with four "wives" in tow to check that the current Middle Eastern situation wasn't adversely affecting the guest experience. I guess that the hours were long and the reports tedious but the compensations were interesting. (including hiring the actresses, I suspect.)
It's not just Germany. My father was a corporate lawyer. Whenever he was asked for an opinion on litigation he would normally reply that there was a 50% chance of success. So he was told to get an opinion from an external law firm. Who would charge $tens of thousands and reply that the case was very complicated, that (wodges of paper), that the company had basically a reasonable case but (more paper) and so had a 50% chance of success. In the end he used to say "just give me the money now and I'll tell you again you have a 50% chance."
The opinion of one lawyer is worth precisely nothing, unless he's the judge and you haven't got enough money to escalate to a higher court.
The average professional photographer doesn't make a huge amount of money. It seems reasonable that if someone's work has been ripped off, they should be paid an amount equal to the usual fee rate for the actual usage, plus the costs of enforcement. In a more rational commercial environment, Corbis could simply have sent Amazon a bill. If Amazon refused to pay, then legal action would start. And Amazon would have the option of paying, then passing the bill back to the people posting copyright material on its site.
Back in the days before lawyers decided that the Constitution guaranteed them a percentage of everything, a part share in a couple of hotels and a condo, and a different colored SUV for every day of the week, good lawyers could write a letter that would start the process of negotiation without egos getting inflamed and everything ending up in court. It's better for business that way. But now CEOs are terrified of not being seen to do everything possible to extract every last cent and inflate the share price, and I suspect law firms milk this. Eventually the tide of opinion will turn, perhaps when those same CEOs decide to blame the tide of lawsuits for current underperformance and start to lobby government to fix the problem. Cynical? Yes. Realistic? Maybe
They can sell to whosoever they like. The situation would presumably be different if they had a monopoly (I say presumably because I don't know about New Zealand law) but that can't be said of CD duplication. It's essential that companies do have the right to refuse orders without giving reasons, because every order taken on involves some degree of commercial risk ranging from nonpayment to public liability. Were this not so, it would make for some interesting scams by dishonest buyers. The best protection for buyers is that salesmen as a breed want to be able to sell to anybody with money, and that provides a certain counterweighting to the caution of the legal and finance departments.
IBM is doing precisely what any 800lb gorilla would do in the circumstances. Very little. Why bother?
SCO is doing this to try and inflate, and keep inflated, a share price based on an extremely thin balloon. To keep that going, they have to keep shouting. If IBM makes specific replies, then SCO has something to use in the next press release. If they don't, it all has to come from within SCO. The longer it goes on, the greater the chance of SCO coming up with manifest contradictions, allegations that can easily be shown to be untrue in court, actual libel. SCO cannot afford to shut up and cannot afford simply to repeat themselves over and over, as with no new content the press will lose interest.
My personal interest in this is that 20 years ago we were involved with someone whose public utterances were very like those of Mr. McBride. He came up with so many allegations that our attorney started to believe that we were the liars, on the basis that no-one would make so many claims if they weren't true. But then it came to court...the originals of documents were mysteriously not to hand (faked photocopies). Witnesses were mysteriously unavailable. Foreign Chambers of Commerce had never heard of the companies he claimed we were in collusion with, who also seemed never to have occupied the claimed addresses. The guy fired his own lawyers. And suddenly he lost the case, a judge was telling him that he was considering whether there was a possibility of perjury, and he had huge legal bills to pay for both sides. I seriously believe that this man was so out of his tree that even as he faked documents, he actually believed he was reproducing something that "really" existed in the perfect world he lived in. Never underestimate the power of human self-delusion.
Not, of course, that I am suggesting for one moment that Mr. McBride is engaging in any improper activities, deluding himself, or seeking to rig the share price of a junk stock. I am sure that he is a totally ethical businessman and the merits of his case will soon become apparent.
Excellent. But can you imagine the reaction of the advertisers in the comics?
I suspect a lot of these scores are actually designed to stay close to a norm to protect from the wrath of suppliers. It's often instructive to compare product reviews in French, Italian and German magazines to those in the English speaking ones. Their journalists seem to work on the basis that US lawyers and marketeers can only read English and Spanish and won't find out what is being said about their boxes. I remember a French photographic magazine once describing, in a headline, a well known Japanese camera as having "ergonomie franchement horrible", and giving it one star. To read the US photo journals you'd think it turned you into Herb Ritts. Happy days.
Any sensible management is going to want to have some sort of control over how that big color printer is used. And if they have heavy print tin, they are going to want to be able to control the print queues. This is supposed to be _enterprise_ dammit! Not just a big MFP stuck next to the water cooler.
Sadly, the effective print monitoring tools like MegaTrack and FollowMe don't seem to run on Linux yet. Sadly because the sort of organisations that want to use enterprise Linux on X86 boxes may well be interested in the kinds of cost saving that you can get by keeping printing under control.
The conclusion is not justified by the scoring system. If points are awarded in intervals of half a point, as they seem to be here, then the quantisation error of each score is +/-0.25 points. A difference of half a point between the cumulative scores is just too small to be meaningful.
This isn't to say that the conclusion is wrong - it may be entirely correct. It's just to say that I get pissed off by pointless "scoring systems" that are apparently objective (they're numbers...) but are actually completely subjective and just intended to give a spurious authenticity to the conclusion. If they said "We think Red Hat's security is better and that's a reason to prefer it", fine.
And if you don't understand why a result based on a scoring system where the difference in scores is less than the expected uncertainty of the result is not valid, then what are you doing trying to benchmark a technical product?
No, the price tag was actually invented by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.) Quaker businessmen disapproved of negotiated pricing, which they saw as in some ways akin to gambling. The price ticket was invented to make a statement about honest business practices. And they would not have patented it, not only because it would be contrary to their beliefs but because, in Europe and the UK, you cannot patent a business method.
Er...is this fuel cells we're talking about? Sensitive things that tend to die when faced with impurities in the fuel supply? If they actually would run on gasoline = commercial IC engine fuel, that would be one thing, but they actually need converters even to use low MW hydrocarbons. The "reformer" itself is going to further limit the range of fuels by its own requirements.
I'm sure eventually we will get there, but the thing is, since we have workable prime movers with over 100 years of development, we won't tolerate unreliable or fragile fuel cells. I suspect that, just like fusion, fuel cells will take longer and cost more than the industry cares to admit. And, much as I dislike some of Bush's policies, I suspect that his attitude to protecting oil supplies is extremely pragmatic.
Strings hanging off strings hanging off strings? Surely a relational database? It's just as well Codd died before learning that the Incas beat him to 3NF by 500 years.
Now, can I interest the client for the db I'm working on in having it converted to Quipu? Should be good for a few trips to South America...
I'm totally alongside Vint Cerf on this one: almost goes without saying. But there are many, many snake oil merchants and most of them are not on the WWW. At least google turns up many references to a subject, and it is not too hard to find differing views. Anyone who gets their world view from the TV or the less responsible print media is likely to be getting just as much disinformation, without being shown the alternative sources.
Replying to an earlier post, the science teacher should not be too surprised that her class missed the point about hydrogen hydroxide. Only yesterday we had a link to an article in which a former head of a House Committee on Science appeared not to know the difference between helium and hydrogen, twice. Poor understanding of science is a general disease of society, not something the Internet has brought about.
Short answer: it's his typo. Given the opportunity for confusion, why not write "Helium 3" if that's what was meant? And, again, no-one has yet produced a working He3-D fusion power source. Which is going to be cheaper, mining the moon or working to improve solar and wind power systems?
I stand corrected on what the article thinks the Chinese want, but I maintain that its object is still FUD
"Third, as the nation in position to exploit moon resources, China could leapfrog the world in some important earthbound technologies. Scientists have acknowledged the usefulness of H3 in helping achieve nuclear fusion success. The moon appears to be a large source of naturally occurring H3, a commodity that would be of such value that the transport back to Earth would be economically feasible."
When I read this, I began to wonder if it was a spoof. Yes, tritium/deuterium fusion is easier to achieve than D/D fusion. What do you think they put in H-bomb warheads? But the idea that piles of tritium lie around on the Moon waiting to be picked up and shovelled into a re-entry vehicle is, frankly, bizarre. [note to anyone who doesn't get it: yes, I do know what tritium is like. I worked with it for years, which is why I feel slightly qualified to post on this subject.] Can any one point to where this one came from?
The number of H-bomb warheads in circulation demonstrates that there is not exactly a world shortage of tritium or ability to produce it; certainly as the US wasn't afraid of polluting the Colorado River, and the UK of polluting the Irish Sea, I can't imagine that the Chinese would be too worried about the side effects of massive tritium production.
Conclusion: this is an attempt to frighten paranoid hawks into believing that the Space Race must be resumed to prevent the Chinese from laying claim to all those tritium mines on the Moon. Whereas, actually, we might be better off with some serious international negotiation on space, perhaps even some cooperation. While articles like this one reinforce Chinese paranoia about US intentions, (the author makes it clear that the US must not lose domination in space) we all surely have more to gain by trying to defuse the potential tensions in advance. Which might mean that Dubya has to rethink his approach to ripping up international agreements, but would that be a bad thing?
Just being a spoil-sport, whyever build a heat exchanger like this? Even plumbers make the occasional bad solder joint on pipe; often the leak is so slow it doesn't matter in a heating system because the water evaporates, this results in the dissolved solid being left behind, and it eventually stops. But in this case, with distilled water, eventually there will be a puddle...
Why not use a standard domestic "radiator", i.e. heat exchanger? Pressure tested welded joints, cheap, all the surface area you want in one handy package. And then why not a standard central heating pump, usually with several speed settings and designed to be quiet. Use a header tank, have out and back branches, run the CPU cooler between the branches with a thermal sensor and possibly a flow switch and, if you are really worried about corrosion, one of those in-line transparent fuel filters.
Not, you understand, that I'm going to do any of this. I can't hear the server because it's away in a cupboard on the cold side of the house, and I'm certainly not allowing water cooling and plastic pipes near anything I work on.
Slashdot Mirror
Although some right-wing republicans will doubtless welcome European dependence on the US economy, it isn't healthy. Having a world economy that depends on events in a single country with about 1/25 of the entire population is far from smart. Having laws written in an attempt to protect the interests of a small number of large corporations is trying to prevent change. The last non-US big highly centralised empire that tried to stop change was the Soviet Union. Remember? Just thirteen years ago?
This is science. If you have several possible methods of measuring things, try them all and look for inconsistencies. It's how the age of the Earth was first understood: the Victorians started to understand geological processes and understood that to weather rocks would take longer than the then current age for the Earth. Faced with a choice between a calculation done by a mad Irish bishop based on a bad translation of a book done by desert nomads, and evidence collected by geologists from all over the Earth, the part of the human race with brains went with the geologists. That's called scientific method.
However, many theological writers have pointed out that the belief in multiple inhabited worlds is history-neutral as well as evolution-neutral. Terry Pratchett often makes this point in humorous ways: in one of his books parts of a continent are created 30000 years old two weeks ago, and in another he mentions the Creator installing perfectly faked fossils to fool future investigators.
To avoid misunderstandings, I'm an agnostic who thinks that the difference between Creationists and the Taliban is largely about what the law allows and geographical location, but I am aware that, just as there can be no proof of the existence of a universal God, there can equally be no proof of the scientific view of the history of the universe.
And if we find something with SETI and start sending them messages, better hope they have a reasonably liberal anti-spam policy.
As for sodium exhaust valves, one reason they went was metallurgical: better steels and valve guide materials were invented. Another was that engines became, on the whole, smaller and multivalved, so the problem (the sheer distance from the valve face to the guide in big ports) has reduced. Perhaps when every computer has multiple small processors rather than one big one, notebooks can be cooled efficiently with a single flat plate. But, looking at the complicated and vulnerable fan/ducting arrangement on mine, I suspect that NEC are on to a winner.
Are you sure about VW buses burning? I thought it was an urban myth. I believed the main reason they used magnesium was availability rather than weight saving: no-one chooses to use Mg for blocks because its expansion coefficient is such that it makes it hard to retain bearings. It's fine for covers. It is also very hard indeed to make it catch fire in bulk because it melts. It is true, though, that once it is burning it is rather hazardous. Nearly as hazardous as a fuel tank going off... You don't pump water onto an auto fire in any case because it can splash spilt fuel and cause extra vapor ignitions from electrical shorts. Believe me, I worked in vehicle R&D for 5 years, and the only extinguishers allowed near the test beds were carbon dioxide, freon and dry powder.
This is basically a means for spreading the heat from the processor efficiently into the large flat surfaces that are the only heatsink you can get on laptops. The problem at present is that the processor occupies a small area and the heat has to escape sideways through a limited area of metal. A liquid flow can transfer heat much faster and spread it more efficiently because water actually has a greater heat capacity than metal, and the pumped flow can be faster than the conduction flow through metal.
Looking at the NEC design, as described in the article, I would have thought that the risk of leakage was far less than water entry via spillage, rain, or simple condensation.
As for pumps stopping, what happens with modern Intel CPUs when fans stop? They slow down and so control their own temperature. It's only AMD CPUs that suddenly fry themselves.
The basic idea isn't even new. Over 50 years ago exhaust valves in high performance engines were drilled through and part filled with sodium metal. As the valve got hot the sodium melted, then the vibration caused it to move around transferring heat from the hot valve face to the water cooled guide. Doubtless geeks at the time worried that the sodium would somehow escape and damage their engines.
Ah. I forgot. My apologies, but then I can't be expected to remember everything Monty Python ever did. Or can I? This is, after all, /.
Work is too boring today, but at least I didn't moderate this overrated.
The example of Prohibition shows that if enough people regard a law as a bad one, it will eventually fall. If enough people believe that there is a de facto monopoly in the music business which results in the product being hugely over-priced and managers being over-rewarded, and they choose to circumvent that over-pricing, the effect is no different from if they simply stop buying the product altogether, which is legal.
I can't resist a plug at this point for Terry Pratchett's book Soul Music which manages to make some of the issues amusing.
As a kid I read a book, written I think in the 1950s which I have never found again, called Metatopia. It was a kind of hybrid socialist/capitalist society and the author effectively predicted the internet, though an audio-only version based on telephones. (I am not making this up but, as I say, I've never seen it again or heard it referred to). Anyway, before this is marked off-topic by my personal stalker (are you having a good day?) the Metatopian transport system was based on small independent transport vehicles with, I think, overhead monorails. They couldn't overtake but the operating system ensured that the speed on any given section of track was some kind of average of what all the current travellers wanted - completely unrealisable with 50s technology but an interesting notion. What would be the people carrying efficiency of a flat version of a modern cablecar of the automatic type where the separation of the cars can vary with the traffic? It might be overkill for a short distance like the Montparnasse run (180M), but would it work on the level over a kilometre or so?
Did anyone else read an ordinary suburban family who live in an alternate video-game universe and think "So that's what all those ordinary suburban families do nowadays. That's why I never see them about anymore" ?
He said that during the Gulf war he had visited more than one hotel which usually had a significant number of visitors from arab countries, and turned up unannounced late at night in full gear with four "wives" in tow to check that the current Middle Eastern situation wasn't adversely affecting the guest experience. I guess that the hours were long and the reports tedious but the compensations were interesting. (including hiring the actresses, I suspect.)
The opinion of one lawyer is worth precisely nothing, unless he's the judge and you haven't got enough money to escalate to a higher court.
Back in the days before lawyers decided that the Constitution guaranteed them a percentage of everything, a part share in a couple of hotels and a condo, and a different colored SUV for every day of the week, good lawyers could write a letter that would start the process of negotiation without egos getting inflamed and everything ending up in court. It's better for business that way. But now CEOs are terrified of not being seen to do everything possible to extract every last cent and inflate the share price, and I suspect law firms milk this. Eventually the tide of opinion will turn, perhaps when those same CEOs decide to blame the tide of lawsuits for current underperformance and start to lobby government to fix the problem. Cynical? Yes. Realistic? Maybe
They can sell to whosoever they like. The situation would presumably be different if they had a monopoly (I say presumably because I don't know about New Zealand law) but that can't be said of CD duplication. It's essential that companies do have the right to refuse orders without giving reasons, because every order taken on involves some degree of commercial risk ranging from nonpayment to public liability. Were this not so, it would make for some interesting scams by dishonest buyers. The best protection for buyers is that salesmen as a breed want to be able to sell to anybody with money, and that provides a certain counterweighting to the caution of the legal and finance departments.
SCO is doing this to try and inflate, and keep inflated, a share price based on an extremely thin balloon. To keep that going, they have to keep shouting. If IBM makes specific replies, then SCO has something to use in the next press release. If they don't, it all has to come from within SCO. The longer it goes on, the greater the chance of SCO coming up with manifest contradictions, allegations that can easily be shown to be untrue in court, actual libel. SCO cannot afford to shut up and cannot afford simply to repeat themselves over and over, as with no new content the press will lose interest.
My personal interest in this is that 20 years ago we were involved with someone whose public utterances were very like those of Mr. McBride. He came up with so many allegations that our attorney started to believe that we were the liars, on the basis that no-one would make so many claims if they weren't true. But then it came to court...the originals of documents were mysteriously not to hand (faked photocopies). Witnesses were mysteriously unavailable. Foreign Chambers of Commerce had never heard of the companies he claimed we were in collusion with, who also seemed never to have occupied the claimed addresses. The guy fired his own lawyers. And suddenly he lost the case, a judge was telling him that he was considering whether there was a possibility of perjury, and he had huge legal bills to pay for both sides. I seriously believe that this man was so out of his tree that even as he faked documents, he actually believed he was reproducing something that "really" existed in the perfect world he lived in. Never underestimate the power of human self-delusion.
Not, of course, that I am suggesting for one moment that Mr. McBride is engaging in any improper activities, deluding himself, or seeking to rig the share price of a junk stock. I am sure that he is a totally ethical businessman and the merits of his case will soon become apparent.
I suspect a lot of these scores are actually designed to stay close to a norm to protect from the wrath of suppliers. It's often instructive to compare product reviews in French, Italian and German magazines to those in the English speaking ones. Their journalists seem to work on the basis that US lawyers and marketeers can only read English and Spanish and won't find out what is being said about their boxes. I remember a French photographic magazine once describing, in a headline, a well known Japanese camera as having "ergonomie franchement horrible", and giving it one star. To read the US photo journals you'd think it turned you into Herb Ritts. Happy days.
Sadly, the effective print monitoring tools like MegaTrack and FollowMe don't seem to run on Linux yet. Sadly because the sort of organisations that want to use enterprise Linux on X86 boxes may well be interested in the kinds of cost saving that you can get by keeping printing under control.
This isn't to say that the conclusion is wrong - it may be entirely correct. It's just to say that I get pissed off by pointless "scoring systems" that are apparently objective (they're numbers...) but are actually completely subjective and just intended to give a spurious authenticity to the conclusion. If they said "We think Red Hat's security is better and that's a reason to prefer it", fine.
And if you don't understand why a result based on a scoring system where the difference in scores is less than the expected uncertainty of the result is not valid, then what are you doing trying to benchmark a technical product?
Oh well, rant over for now.
No, the price tag was actually invented by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.) Quaker businessmen disapproved of negotiated pricing, which they saw as in some ways akin to gambling. The price ticket was invented to make a statement about honest business practices. And they would not have patented it, not only because it would be contrary to their beliefs but because, in Europe and the UK, you cannot patent a business method.
I'm sure eventually we will get there, but the thing is, since we have workable prime movers with over 100 years of development, we won't tolerate unreliable or fragile fuel cells. I suspect that, just like fusion, fuel cells will take longer and cost more than the industry cares to admit. And, much as I dislike some of Bush's policies, I suspect that his attitude to protecting oil supplies is extremely pragmatic.
Now, can I interest the client for the db I'm working on in having it converted to Quipu? Should be good for a few trips to South America...
Replying to an earlier post, the science teacher should not be too surprised that her class missed the point about hydrogen hydroxide. Only yesterday we had a link to an article in which a former head of a House Committee on Science appeared not to know the difference between helium and hydrogen, twice. Poor understanding of science is a general disease of society, not something the Internet has brought about.
I stand corrected on what the article thinks the Chinese want, but I maintain that its object is still FUD
Can any one point to where this one came from?
The number of H-bomb warheads in circulation demonstrates that there is not exactly a world shortage of tritium or ability to produce it; certainly as the US wasn't afraid of polluting the Colorado River, and the UK of polluting the Irish Sea, I can't imagine that the Chinese would be too worried about the side effects of massive tritium production.
Conclusion: this is an attempt to frighten paranoid hawks into believing that the Space Race must be resumed to prevent the Chinese from laying claim to all those tritium mines on the Moon. Whereas, actually, we might be better off with some serious international negotiation on space, perhaps even some cooperation. While articles like this one reinforce Chinese paranoia about US intentions, (the author makes it clear that the US must not lose domination in space) we all surely have more to gain by trying to defuse the potential tensions in advance. Which might mean that Dubya has to rethink his approach to ripping up international agreements, but would that be a bad thing?
Why not use a standard domestic "radiator", i.e. heat exchanger? Pressure tested welded joints, cheap, all the surface area you want in one handy package. And then why not a standard central heating pump, usually with several speed settings and designed to be quiet. Use a header tank, have out and back branches, run the CPU cooler between the branches with a thermal sensor and possibly a flow switch and, if you are really worried about corrosion, one of those in-line transparent fuel filters.
Not, you understand, that I'm going to do any of this. I can't hear the server because it's away in a cupboard on the cold side of the house, and I'm certainly not allowing water cooling and plastic pipes near anything I work on.