" [...] the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, yet trails in rankings of life expectancy."
It's not really that we *spend* more on health care -- it's that we are charged more for health care.
If we "spent" more, that would imply that we devote more dollars to buy some "increased level" of health care. But the reverse is true. We pay more for similar services in the US than other countries -- with the clearest example being drug costs. Pharma companies charge considerably more for the same drugs in the US as compared to the price those same companies sell the drug for overseas.
The big laugh -- they say they charge US citizens more, because we can pay more.
A similar rationale is used for other products. Companies are expanding into lower income countries by dramatically lowering their prices. They want to get market share and to do so, they are willing to take less profit in what they hope will be a larger market.
The market size in the US is relatively stable. The only way they make more money in the US market is by raising prices. This is being done by selling smaller and smaller "portions" of "whatever" -- like selling you single songs on your cellphone for $2.99, where a more durable format, like a CD is sold at 12-18 dollars for 10 times as many songs.
This is the real reason for the push behind DRM -- those selling "songs" need to squeeze more money out of a, "virtually", flat inventory. So instead of selling durable goods with songs on them, they much prefer the pay-per-play model so they can continue to collect income on the same old inventory. Sure they add some small fraction of new songs each year, but this is nothing compared to the library they were able to resell when the market shifted from vinyl to CD.
With health care, providers can keep raising prices, since how many consumers can treat health spending as "discretionary"?;^/
"Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?"
Yes: increased the prosperity of the richest 1% at the expense of the other 99%.
The Gini inequality coefficient has risen about 4-6% points (10-15 relative percent) in the latest conservative political expansion.:-(
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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Who said I was rational?:-) I simply "voiced" an observation.
You describe the effect of religion. A shared delusion can be a remarkable socially unifying force. One of those religious dudes, speaking of religions, said you will know the good trees from the bad trees by the nature of their fruit,
So just look at the actions a religion brings forth. That is the fruit that comes from that "tree". Does the tree have fruits of happiness, contentment, peace? Or do we see more fruits of violence, oppression and hate?
I do know of at least one major religion, BTW, that encourages logical, rational examination -- not asking for a pure leap of faith but challenging the practicioner to critically examine the religion. Not in all cases does dogma silence rationality, but Tibetan Buddhism, in my understanding, seems to be singular in that regard.
-l
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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brianerst said "Unfortunately, rationally looking at your own religion is not a strength that many possess."
Um, maybe it has something to do with the non-rational nature of religion?
So basically the problem wasn't there in 2.6.10, but is in 2.6.16. If it was a processor specific problem (am not saying it is) in compiler generated code (rare, but it happens), almost anything changed might trigger the bad sequence. Almost any other change would likely steer around it -- like changing optimization options. Might try something less drastic though -- just try a different disk-i/o block scheduler. The default is the anticipatory scheduler which is optimized for throughput, but that may not be ideal for a desktop. The cfq scheduler allows setting priorities by process.
The default ties disk block priorities to the cpu-nice value when the block is created (i.e. -- it's not visible via the ionice program mentioned in the Documentation). Anyway -- since your problem is I/O related, just another scheduler might change things enough to steer around the problem.
Good luck...it's always fun living on the latest edge kernel...:^} -l
Mapping web "pixels", to more than one local pixel is "Zoom".
This isn't some broken text-only Zoom as implemented by IE and FF, but a true Zoom where everything on the page is resized, images, widgets, etc.
Besides the ability to "Zoom in", Opera also has the ability to "Zoom out".
So if you want to fit more on your screen, you can make pages smaller down to whatever size you can still read.
I find the properly implemented Zoom feature one of the best qualities in the Opera browswer. Um...great use for the Firefox Extension "Start in Opera" if you usually use FF; not that I'd know about that extension for any reason.:-)
Hmm....if it is bad code generated for your machine, that would be more a problem in gcc than in the kernel code. How much memory & swap? I run sched-yield, not preempt, 1000Hz clock interrupt, cfq-block i/o schedule. It's a Pentium3-based system, w/1Gmem + a 256M swapfile.
Good luck...just wanted to let you know it does work for some -- my machine is about 6 years old though -- maybe machines that old have had more testing...
I'm running 2.6.16, I was curious about your claim that:
find/usr -exec cat {} >/dev/null \;
hung "the system". Doesn't hang mine. Are you sure your system is configured correctly? Perhaps you are configuring swap @1-2x a physical memory size of 1-2G? Most people don't realize how bad a performance impact that will have on systems. Disk speeds haven't increased at the same pace as system memory. The swap formulae of the 1980's doesn't scale to large memory systems.
I tied both Dragon Naturally Speaking (costing ~ $500 or $600 at the time), and gave up the training problems and low recognition rates. I tried IBM's ViaVoice Professional, USB-Pro -- with digital signal processing in an included microphone and a digital connection to my computer. With a 1 paragraph training session, it was already over 95% and improving over Draggin'. It was easier to train, and you could train it on the text you were typing -- i.e. it was able to learn from corrections and merge them back into your voice profile.
Unfortunately, IBM released it in 2001-2002, then forgot about it. They've since gone onto their non-training voice recognition solutions for sale to businesses. They seem to have advanced, but not in any retail product.
Dragon has come out with updates, but from people who have used and trained on *both*, ViaVoice has higher accuracy (~1% difference). The ViaVoice product price has fallen, and Dragon has, of course, gone up....
Whatever product you get, get a fast 2+CPU machine with lots of RAM - 2GB or more. The ViaVoice algorithm adapts to your talking speed -- it will perform more looks and comparisons and have greater accuracy as the processor speed goes up. ViaVoice stops comparing when it runs out of time (your speaking has gotten too far ahead). But it listens to the words, in context, to determine spelling. The more memory it has, the more vocabulary it can pull into memory. Note -- I am saying get a dual-cpu (or dual core) machine, the faster the better.
Viavoice was also released on Linux, but without as much application support.
For coding support in voice products -- there just hasn't been enough demand.
But for "wrist support" -- try a multi-faceted approach. Maybe voice recognition, maybe a tablet for input? Ergo keyboards, trackballs? It's not a comfy field. There isn't a great financial incentive to develop voice input for coding when you can hire foreigners for peanuts, and keep having eager generations of new hackers to come and be sacrificial lambs on the keyboards of progress...;-)
Heat is a very important in the earlier failure of notebook computers when compared to desktops.
Increased heat from 50C to 90C is about a 12% increase in stored thermal energy (363K/323K =~ 1.12). That minor increase in energy is enough to add additional "excitement" to the insulating traces between adjacent circuits in the IC. As circuits are shrunk, that trace grows thinner, and as traces have narrowed, IC makers have had to use lower voltages to not short-circult those traces and different semiconcuctor materials.
The other probem with heat: thermal expansion. The greater the heat, the more most materials expand. On a circuit level, things only have to expand just enough to cause two conductors to develop a hairline separation. Open circuit = no juice => bad.
Such failure modes increase as function of temperature and the amount of time spent at higher temperatures. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had experience with a heat-sensitive laptop: they get too hot, they lock up. A friend of mine had this problem on her laptop sitting on a desk. I propped up the back end of her computer (tilting her keyboard and making that a bit more ergonomic in the process) and took a small cooling fan (120V), plugged into an AC adapter. Her computer lockup problems "went away" when she used the extra cooling.
I find it amazing the heat that is tolerated in a laptop, that would be considered "not good" in a desktop or server system. Dell has historically had problems with heat and fans coming on too often. They "fixed" the noise by raising the temperature threshold for various fan-increase events. Users had to come up with 3rd party Fan control utilities to override Dell's overly hot settings. While these laptops woudn't outright "crash", the CPU's would easily get to 75C where they would start auto-throttling due to overheating -- reducing performance noticably.
Heat: bad. And I've seen many more laptops with heat problems than in other system types.
If I update a Windows machine with their auto-update, I'm still required to read a long EULA and press 'ok'. MS has no problem with putting in a EULA change with each upate. So everyone who updates their computer once a month should be rereading EULA's to look for possible changes? What, you don't like it? It's a critical security fix...so a EULA agreement there would be enforceable? That's outrageous.
People marking post about the USA banning email servers, "funny", reminds me of how dogs wag their tail when they are nervous of a bigger dog taking their bone.;-/
Slight problem -- how do you tell who is an ISP? If I put up a comments section, I guess that makes me a "Service Provider?"
Rhetorical question: How does one tell who is responsible for retaining what logs? Answer: by requiring anyone who wants to provided services to register, post a "secure website" bond to AOL, or AT&T to ensure compliance? Uh...and how are P2P apps going to work in this scenario?
Yeah, I can see this working...as soon as they shut down public access to the internet and end-serfs find themselves on something as connected as USENET for P2P with only "licensed web service providers" able to provide "live" content.
Maybe the "FCC" will start issuing ISP licenses and begin monitoring "decency". Finally, media will be safe for children again...*cough*.
IBM advertised their "drop-resistant" laptops over a year ago with the same G-sensing, head-parking technology. Any reason why the same type of program wouldn't work on IBM (now Lenovo) notebooks or any manufacturers using similar technology?
The Original Poster didn't say if his office speakers were wired or wireless.
I've never experienced radiowave interference on my wired speakers, but know my house (neighborhood?) is nasty on radiowave interference. I tried purchasing some FM-speakers, but they couldn't receive a clean signal across my living room.
How is your network connection? Wired or wireless? Could it be the network signal being messed with before it hits your computer and you computer just amplifies and echo's out the interference?
I strongly doubt it's in the speaker wires. While I remember a friend of mine in college would play tricks on guys living in the next dorm room, he had a ham radio license and foot long antenna. Still he had to be less than a foot to cause the interference you are talking about -- holding the antenna parallel to the speaker wire that ran along the edge of next door room. Any farther, or disorient the antenna (not parallel to speaker wire) and there was no interference. He only did a few times when they were cranking music too loud -- they thought it was a problem in their setup, so they stopped cranking it so loud...:-)
However, a cellphone, given it's small antenna and the lower power (his ham setup ~10-30W; modern cellphone: max 3W), it would be hard pressed to generate the same interference.
I'd look to other causes than a cellphone for interference in wired speakers.
However, for 1/8th inch connector thin-wire computer audio, most of the wire I see is shielded. RadioShack sells shielded and unshielded audio cable in lengths up to 20-30 feet. It's not that expensive: less than 20 bucks for a 20 foot extension cord last time I bought some.
If you have background noise of 40db (not uncommon in a car), then if you turn the volume up loud enough to hear the soft parts, the loud parts get blasted out.
Happens all the time on TV -- real noticable on Sci-Fi, where they compress program volume down so that the max-sound is at about 65% (numbers are guestimates based on experience) of the dynamic range of the medium. Then the advertisers come in and balance commercials with the minimum range set to about 30%, and the loud spots peg up near 95%.
On reputable stations, they will balance the average output to some fixed standard, but on cheap-stations like scifi, they downgrade the program signal so advertising gets boosted way beyond normal. My volume setting on Sci-Fi channel is about 10-15% higher for program segments than on other channels -- but when commercials come on, prepare to get blasted.
Same happens with music devices. Not only is there a wide dynamic range available on the device (the more expensive the device, usually the wider the dynamic range), but it's compounded by users having to crank up the volume to drown out background noise. That makes the loud sections *way* too loud.
I solve the problem on most of my pre-recorded stuff by normalizing everything (though not usually compressing, as compressing causes loss of fidelity). Same problem happens on sound playback out of my computer. Play a video and sometimes I have to turn the volume up to 80% to hear anything, but play a WAV or some CD's, and they are already normalized to 98%. Ouch!
ScuttleMonkey posted: An anonymous reader writes "Capital Hill Blue is reporting that recently a retired Texas schoolteacher and his wife had a little run in with the Department of Homeland Security.
The article says that someone at JC Penny's credit card customer service claimed that Homeland Security had to be notified. There was no mention of Homeland Security actually being involved.
Maybe _everyone_ should block "aol" based email addresses. One might argue that this hurts the end-users, but without a collective "action" against "aol-based" email, AOL doesn't seem likely to budge.
If the users of aol begin noticing problems getting their email, they might be prompted change providers -- which ultimately hits AOL where it hurts -- in their pocketbook. Apparently AOL doesn't wish to listen to their users' complaints as there is too much profit to be made in ignoring them. The rest of the "internet" needs to ensure that "aol" gets the message: that such "damage" will not be tolerated.
AOL should be categorized as a "damaged" provider -- much like a provider that runs an open-SPAM relay. Let their email be blocked until they conform to "content-neutral", established, practices.
IBM did similar by requiring an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP for it's desktop control of ViaVoice even though the same accessibility library used on XP was made available for Win2k.
IBM doesn't check for your computer's _ability_ to run the software -- they just hard code the behavior based on what OS version you are running.
The software owners have the right to restrict / cripple their software however they choose.
As someone else pointed out -- if Skype had to come up with a reason (and I don't see any reason why they would), they could simply say they only tested on Intel and only wanted to support their tested configuration.:-(
pciminon said: What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code?... So what's the motivation for denying them? Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not?
What [who] does it hurt? Anyone who contributed code to the Linux-NTFS drivers under GPL, thinking that their contributions would only be licensed for use by those who agree to reciprocate and give back additions.
Having the code relicensed would violate the project's contributors' expectations and would be "stealing" contributor's code for use in a close-source, commercial product for some [monetary] "benefit" to Apple and its licensees.
Besides theft of the original contributors work, piecemeal "disposal" of "GPL-assets" harms the entire "GPL community" via: diminished martketshare and demand for GPL licensed products; and (if changes are not returned) lost opportunity in a reduced, GPL-licensed codebase.
Disposition of all GPL contributors' rights should not be considered casually if at all. There is tangible harm that is likely in proportion to the amount of code (or work) you have donated to the GPL-licensed codebase.
People who have not contributed to the GPL-licensed codebase or have little investment in it would be less likely to feel upset or annoyed about such losses.
Not that I disbelieve you, you understand, but the people that argue with me don't.
Burning a lump of coal produces more nuclear waste than using a lump of uranium? Who woulda thought?
Do we have to worry about coal-burrning countries creating nuclear-coal enrichment facilities and building nuclear "soot" bombs?
I'm for nuclear power, and such, but could you be a bit less vague about quantities, level of radioactivity?
There is radioactivity that comes both out of the earth and that which comes through the atmosphere (cosmic rays _can_ corrupt memory!).
Perhaps more important to/.er's: how likely is the radioactivity from coal to cause memory bit failures compared to the measured value for cosmic rays?:-) -l
As it grows, it learns and develops services on top of its core competency.
They they grow and develop more core competencies according to their skill. Google went (maybe still are to some extent) on a hiring spree for smart and skilled engineers. Doesn't it make sense they would have the intelligence to expand to other areas? If an engineer or a company only stays with one core competency, that's the quickest way to a dead-end career path.
Google is a star performer, and as long as they continue to show the morals evidenced by their resistance to the recent government harrassment, they are welcome.
People are just afraid of the maxim: power corrupts. When will Google start bending down a slippery slope of profits over integrity? It seems to be the American way, so why shouldn't we expect Google to do it? If they don't, aren't they somewhat "un-American" -- i.e. they aren't just one more "Yankee trader"?
In psychology, it is well known that people's opinion of someone can influence their behavior -- usually with the person gravitating toward expectations. I wonder if the same is true for companies. (*sigh*)
I love it when some big body, famous for posturing, blustering and not actually getting around to really doing someting issues a blustering posturing press release about what they are gonna do someday...
I remember a complaint recently about how the Microsoft world wasn't "User" oriented, but was more corporate oriented. No one here thought that was much surprising.
On the flip side financial market folks are looking at Apple to see if it can leverage some of its great success in the end-user market toward business.
Perhaps the very thing that made/makes MS successful in the corporate culture is also what makes it more vulnerable to creackers and the difficulties Apple has had getting into the Corporate World also provide roadblocks to crackers.
What do corporations and crackers have in common? They both like to own computers other people are using and control them.
MS made itself wide open to make networking easy -- to make it easy for Domain controllers to control PC's, for Admins to force policies on many users remotely -- to control users at their local consoles. Everything in Windows is about reducing TCO and moving toward zero-administration overhead so 1 cracker, or administrator can control 100's or 1000's of systems (or 10's of 1000's of botnets).
Perhaps I am naive about the remote administration tools of Apple based products, but I don't see them being dropped as easily into a corporation as easily, ready to setup and integrate into the network and have existing network policies easily control them. When I asked an apple-laptop (dunno what kind it was) owner about file sharing, she had no clue how to share them or how to browse local files on my house network available on SMB, CIFS or NFS.
Perhaps the features, that weren't designed into Apple computers that have slowed it down in the Corporation have also slowed down the hackers. That's not to say that MS got it right -- they took the fast, open and dangerous route -- and we see their legacy today. But that's what it has taken to be successful in the business market. Software companies have cared first about product and market, second about quality and security.
MS is now making a big show about security w/o addressing quality, but you can't have secrity w/o quality. Each bug can be a _potential_ exploit waiting for the right conditions, but if a company never bothers with quality, they'll never know how many potential problems they have nor how severe they are.
You think? You wanna bet your hearing on that? Consider this:
The earbuds are designed to form a tight seal with the ear to optimize bass reproduction with minimal power. You don't get as tight a seal with the over-the ear phones, as they are held on by a spring and sealed with foam.
The ear-buds are sealed and held in with pressure against the sides of the ear canal -- which transfers mechanical motion from the bud (holding the speaker) down into the ear canal.
The mechanics support a real-increased danger here from small increases in power, beyond what you would get with a non-sealed earphone design.
Slashdot Mirror
" [...] the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, yet trails in rankings of life expectancy."
;^/
It's not really that we *spend* more on health care -- it's that we are charged more for health care.
If we "spent" more, that would imply that we devote more dollars to buy some "increased level" of health care. But the reverse is true. We pay more for similar services in the US than other countries -- with the clearest example being drug costs. Pharma companies charge considerably more for the same drugs in the US as compared to the price those same companies sell the drug for overseas.
The big laugh -- they say they charge US citizens more, because we can pay more.
A similar rationale is used for other products. Companies are expanding into lower income countries by dramatically lowering their prices. They want to get market share and to do so, they are willing to take less profit in what they hope will be a larger market.
The market size in the US is relatively stable. The only way they make more money in the US market is by raising prices. This is being done by selling smaller and smaller "portions" of "whatever" -- like selling you single songs on your cellphone for $2.99, where a more durable format, like a CD is sold at 12-18 dollars for 10 times as many songs.
This is the real reason for the push behind DRM -- those selling "songs" need to squeeze more money out of a, "virtually", flat inventory. So instead of selling durable goods with songs on them, they much prefer the pay-per-play model so they can continue to collect income on the same old inventory. Sure they add some small fraction of new songs each year, but this is nothing compared to the library they were able to resell when the market shifted from vinyl to CD.
With health care, providers can keep raising prices, since how many consumers can treat health spending as "discretionary"?
-l
"Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?"
:-(
Yes: increased the prosperity of the richest 1% at the expense of the other 99%.
The Gini inequality coefficient has risen about 4-6% points (10-15 relative percent) in the latest conservative political expansion.
Who said I was rational? :-) I simply "voiced" an observation.
You describe the effect of religion. A shared delusion can be a remarkable socially unifying force. One of those religious dudes, speaking of religions, said you will know the good trees from the bad trees by the nature of their fruit,
So just look at the actions a religion brings forth. That is the fruit that comes from that "tree". Does the tree have fruits of happiness, contentment, peace? Or do we see more fruits of violence, oppression and hate?
I do know of at least one major religion, BTW, that encourages logical, rational examination -- not asking for a pure leap of faith but challenging the practicioner to critically examine the religion. Not in all cases does dogma silence rationality, but Tibetan Buddhism, in my understanding, seems to be singular in that regard.
-l
Um, maybe it has something to do with the non-rational nature of religion?
-l
So basically the problem wasn't there in 2.6.10, but is in 2.6.16. If it was a processor specific problem (am not saying it is) in compiler generated code (rare, but it happens), almost anything changed might trigger the bad sequence. Almost any other change would likely steer around it -- like changing optimization options. Might try something less drastic though -- just try a different disk-i/o block scheduler. The default is the anticipatory scheduler which is optimized for throughput, but that may not be ideal for a desktop. The cfq scheduler allows setting priorities by process.
The default ties disk block priorities to the cpu-nice value when the block is created (i.e. -- it's not visible via the ionice program mentioned in the Documentation). Anyway -- since your problem is I/O related, just another scheduler might change things enough to steer around the problem.
Good luck...it's always fun living on the latest edge kernel...:^}
-l
Mapping web "pixels", to more than one local pixel is "Zoom".
:-)
This isn't some broken text-only Zoom as implemented by IE and FF, but a true Zoom where everything on the page is resized, images, widgets, etc.
Besides the ability to "Zoom in", Opera also has the ability to "Zoom out".
So if you want to fit more on your screen, you can make pages smaller down to whatever size you can still read.
I find the properly implemented Zoom feature one of the best qualities in the Opera browswer. Um...great use for the Firefox Extension "Start in Opera" if you usually use FF; not that I'd know about that extension for any reason.
-l
Hmm....if it is bad code generated for your machine, that would be more a problem in gcc than in the kernel code. How much memory & swap? I run sched-yield, not preempt, 1000Hz clock interrupt, cfq-block i/o schedule. It's a Pentium3-based system, w/1Gmem + a 256M swapfile.
Good luck...just wanted to let you know it does work for some -- my machine is about 6 years old though -- maybe machines that old have had more testing...
I'm running 2.6.16, I was curious about your claim that: /usr -exec cat {} >/dev/null \;
find
hung "the system". Doesn't hang mine. Are you sure your system is configured correctly? Perhaps you are configuring swap @1-2x a physical memory size of 1-2G? Most people don't realize how bad a performance impact that will have on systems. Disk speeds haven't increased at the same pace as system memory. The swap formulae of the 1980's doesn't scale to large memory systems.
?
-l
I tied both Dragon Naturally Speaking (costing ~ $500 or $600 at the time), and gave up the training problems and low recognition rates. I tried IBM's ViaVoice Professional, USB-Pro -- with digital signal processing in an included microphone and a digital connection to my computer. With a 1 paragraph training session, it was already over 95% and improving over Draggin'. It was easier to train, and you could train it on the text you were typing -- i.e. it was able to learn from corrections and merge them back into your voice profile.
Unfortunately, IBM released it in 2001-2002, then forgot about it. They've since gone onto their non-training voice recognition solutions for sale to businesses. They seem to have advanced, but not in any retail product.
Dragon has come out with updates, but from people who have used and trained on *both*, ViaVoice has higher accuracy (~1% difference). The ViaVoice product price has fallen, and Dragon has, of course, gone up....
Whatever product you get, get a fast 2+CPU machine with lots of RAM - 2GB or more. The ViaVoice algorithm adapts to your talking speed -- it will perform more looks and comparisons and have greater accuracy as the processor speed goes up. ViaVoice stops comparing when it runs out of time (your speaking has gotten too far ahead). But it listens to the words, in context, to determine spelling. The more memory it has, the more vocabulary it can pull into memory. Note -- I am saying get a dual-cpu (or dual core) machine, the faster the better.
Viavoice was also released on Linux, but without as much application support.
For coding support in voice products -- there just hasn't been enough demand.
But for "wrist support" -- try a multi-faceted approach. Maybe voice recognition, maybe a tablet for input? Ergo keyboards, trackballs? It's not a comfy field. There isn't a great financial incentive to develop voice input for coding when you can hire foreigners for peanuts, and keep having eager generations of new hackers to come and be sacrificial lambs on the keyboards of progress...;-)
Heat is a very important in the earlier failure of notebook computers when compared to desktops.
Increased heat from 50C to 90C is about a 12% increase in stored thermal energy (363K/323K =~ 1.12). That minor increase in energy is enough to add additional "excitement" to the insulating traces between adjacent circuits in the IC. As circuits are shrunk, that trace grows thinner, and as traces have narrowed, IC makers have had to use lower voltages to not short-circult those traces and different semiconcuctor materials.
The other probem with heat: thermal expansion. The greater the heat, the more most materials expand. On a circuit level, things only have to expand just enough to cause two conductors to develop a hairline separation. Open circuit = no juice => bad.
Such failure modes increase as function of temperature and the amount of time spent at higher temperatures. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had experience with a heat-sensitive laptop: they get too hot, they lock up. A friend of mine had this problem on her laptop sitting on a desk. I propped up the back end of her computer (tilting her keyboard and making that a bit more ergonomic in the process) and took a small cooling fan (120V), plugged into an AC adapter. Her computer lockup problems "went away" when she used the extra cooling.
I find it amazing the heat that is tolerated in a laptop, that would be considered "not good" in a desktop or server system. Dell has historically had problems with heat and fans coming on too often. They "fixed" the noise by raising the temperature threshold for various fan-increase events. Users had to come up with 3rd party Fan control utilities to override Dell's overly hot settings. While these laptops woudn't outright "crash", the CPU's would easily get to 75C where they would start auto-throttling due to overheating -- reducing performance noticably.
Heat: bad. And I've seen many more laptops with heat problems than in other system types.
If I update a Windows machine with their auto-update, I'm still required to read a long EULA and press 'ok'. MS has no problem with putting in a EULA change with each upate. So everyone who updates their computer once a month should be rereading EULA's to look for possible changes? What, you don't like it? It's a critical security fix...so a EULA agreement there would be enforceable? That's outrageous.
Hmmm....
;-/
People marking post about the USA banning email servers, "funny", reminds me of how dogs wag their tail when they are nervous of a bigger dog taking their bone.
Slight problem -- how do you tell who is an ISP? If I put up a comments section, I guess that makes me a "Service Provider?"
Rhetorical question: How does one tell who is responsible for retaining what logs? Answer: by requiring anyone who wants to provided services to register, post a "secure website" bond to AOL, or AT&T to ensure compliance? Uh...and how are P2P apps going to work in this scenario?
Yeah, I can see this working...as soon as they shut down public access to the internet and end-serfs find themselves on something as connected as USENET for P2P with only "licensed web service providers" able to provide "live" content.
Maybe the "FCC" will start issuing ISP licenses and begin monitoring "decency". Finally, media will be safe for children again...*cough*.
Oi vey!
-l
IBM advertised their "drop-resistant" laptops over a year ago with the same G-sensing,
head-parking technology. Any reason why the same type of program wouldn't work on IBM (now Lenovo) notebooks or any manufacturers using similar technology?
-l
The Original Poster didn't say if his office speakers were wired or wireless.
I've never experienced radiowave interference on my wired speakers, but know my house (neighborhood?) is nasty on radiowave interference. I tried purchasing some FM-speakers, but they couldn't receive a clean signal
across my living room.
How is your network connection? Wired or wireless? Could it be the network signal being messed with before it hits your computer and you computer just amplifies and echo's out the interference?
I strongly doubt it's in the speaker wires. While I remember a friend of mine in college would play tricks on guys living in the next dorm room, he had a ham radio license and foot long antenna. Still he had to be less than a foot to cause the interference you are talking about -- holding the antenna parallel to the speaker wire that ran along the edge of next door room. Any farther, or disorient the antenna (not parallel to speaker
wire) and there was no interference. He only did a few times when they were cranking music too loud -- they thought it was a problem in their setup, so they stopped cranking it so loud...:-)
However, a cellphone, given it's small antenna and the lower power (his ham setup ~10-30W; modern cellphone: max 3W), it would be hard pressed to generate the same interference.
I'd look to other causes than a cellphone for interference in wired speakers.
However, for 1/8th inch connector thin-wire computer audio, most of the wire I see is shielded. RadioShack sells shielded and unshielded audio cable in lengths up to 20-30 feet. It's not that expensive: less than 20 bucks for a 20 foot extension cord last time I bought some.
Good luck.
-l
It's not about "volume" but "dynamic range".
If you have background noise of 40db (not uncommon in a car), then if you turn the volume up loud enough to hear the soft parts, the loud parts get blasted out.
Happens all the time on TV -- real noticable on Sci-Fi, where they compress program volume down so that the max-sound is at about 65% (numbers are guestimates based on experience) of the dynamic range of the medium. Then the advertisers come in and balance commercials with the minimum range set to about 30%, and the loud spots peg up near 95%.
On reputable stations, they will balance the average output to some fixed standard, but on cheap-stations like scifi, they downgrade the program signal so advertising gets boosted way beyond normal. My volume setting on Sci-Fi channel is about 10-15% higher for program segments than on other channels -- but when commercials come on, prepare to get blasted.
Same happens with music devices. Not only is there a wide dynamic range available on the device (the more expensive the device, usually the wider the dynamic range), but it's compounded by users having to crank up the volume to drown out background noise. That makes the loud sections *way* too loud.
I solve the problem on most of my pre-recorded stuff by normalizing everything (though not usually compressing, as compressing causes loss of fidelity). Same
problem happens on sound playback out of my computer. Play a video and sometimes I have to turn the volume up to 80% to hear anything, but play a WAV or some CD's, and they are already normalized to 98%. Ouch!
ScuttleMonkey posted:
An anonymous reader writes "Capital Hill Blue is reporting that recently a retired Texas schoolteacher and his wife had a little run in with the Department of Homeland Security.
The article says that someone at JC Penny's credit card customer service claimed that Homeland Security had to be notified. There was no mention of Homeland Security actually being involved.
-l
Maybe _everyone_ should block "aol" based email addresses. One might argue that this hurts the end-users, but without a collective "action" against "aol-based" email, AOL doesn't seem likely to budge.
If the users of aol begin noticing problems getting their email, they might be prompted change providers -- which ultimately hits AOL where it hurts -- in their pocketbook. Apparently AOL doesn't wish to listen to their users' complaints as there is too much profit to be made in ignoring them. The rest of the "internet" needs to ensure that "aol" gets the message: that such "damage" will not be tolerated.
AOL should be categorized as a "damaged" provider -- much like a provider that runs an open-SPAM relay. Let their email be blocked until they conform to "content-neutral", established, practices.
-l
IBM did similar by requiring an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP for it's desktop control of ViaVoice even though the same accessibility library used on XP was made available for Win2k.
:-(
IBM doesn't check for your computer's _ability_ to run the software -- they just hard code the behavior based on what OS version you are running.
The software owners have the right to restrict / cripple their software however they choose.
As someone else pointed out -- if Skype had to come up with a reason (and I don't see any reason why they would), they could simply say they only tested on Intel and only wanted to support their tested configuration.
-l
pciminon said: ... So what's the motivation for denying them? Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not?
What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code?
What [who] does it hurt? Anyone who contributed code to the Linux-NTFS drivers under GPL, thinking that their contributions would only be licensed for use by those who agree to reciprocate and give back additions.
Having the code relicensed would violate the project's contributors' expectations and would be "stealing" contributor's code for use in a close-source, commercial product for some [monetary] "benefit" to Apple and its licensees.
Besides theft of the original contributors work, piecemeal "disposal" of "GPL-assets" harms the entire "GPL community" via:
diminished martketshare and demand for GPL licensed products; and
(if changes are not returned) lost opportunity in a reduced, GPL-licensed codebase.
Disposition of all GPL contributors' rights should not be considered casually if at all. There is tangible harm that is likely in proportion to the amount of code (or work) you have donated to the GPL-licensed codebase.
People who have not contributed to the GPL-licensed codebase or have little investment in it would be less likely to feel upset or annoyed about such losses.
-l
Not that I disbelieve you, you understand, but the people that argue with me don't.
/.er's: how likely is the radioactivity from coal to cause memory bit failures compared to the measured value for :-)
Burning a lump of coal produces more nuclear waste than using a lump of uranium? Who woulda thought?
Do we have to worry about coal-burrning countries creating nuclear-coal enrichment facilities and building nuclear "soot" bombs?
I'm for nuclear power, and such, but could you be a bit less vague about quantities, level of radioactivity?
There is radioactivity that comes both out of the earth and that which comes through the atmosphere (cosmic rays _can_ corrupt memory!).
Perhaps more important to
cosmic rays?
-l
A company starts with one core competency.
As it grows, it learns and develops services on top of its core competency.
They they grow and develop more core competencies according to their skill. Google went (maybe still are to some extent) on a hiring spree for smart and skilled engineers. Doesn't it make sense they would have the intelligence to expand to other areas? If an engineer or a company only stays with one core competency, that's the quickest way to a dead-end career path.
Google is a star performer, and as long as they continue to show the morals evidenced by their resistance to the recent government harrassment, they are welcome.
People are just afraid of the maxim: power corrupts. When will Google start bending down a slippery slope of profits over integrity? It seems to be the American way, so why shouldn't we expect Google to do it? If they don't, aren't they somewhat "un-American" -- i.e. they aren't just one more "Yankee trader"?
In psychology, it is well known that people's opinion of someone can influence their behavior -- usually with the person gravitating toward expectations. I wonder if the same is true for companies. (*sigh*)
-l
I love it when some big body, famous for posturing, blustering and not actually getting around to really doing someting issues a blustering posturing press release about what they are gonna do someday...
Wake me up when it happens.
*meeeoowww*
-l
I remember a complaint recently about how the Microsoft world wasn't "User" oriented, but was more corporate oriented. No one here thought that was much surprising.
On the flip side financial market folks are looking at Apple to see if it can leverage some of its great success in the end-user market toward business.
Perhaps the very thing that made/makes MS successful in the corporate culture is also what makes it more vulnerable to creackers and the difficulties Apple has had getting into the Corporate World also provide roadblocks to crackers.
What do corporations and crackers have in common? They both like to own computers other people are using and control them.
MS made itself wide open to make networking easy -- to make it easy for Domain controllers to control PC's, for Admins to force policies on many users remotely -- to control users at their local consoles. Everything in Windows is about reducing TCO and moving toward zero-administration overhead so 1 cracker, or administrator can control 100's or 1000's of systems (or 10's of 1000's of botnets).
Perhaps I am naive about the remote administration tools of Apple based products, but I don't see them being dropped as easily into a corporation as easily, ready to setup and integrate into the network and have existing network policies easily control them. When I asked an apple-laptop (dunno what kind it was) owner about file sharing, she had no clue how to share them or how to browse local files on my house network available on SMB, CIFS or NFS.
Perhaps the features, that weren't designed into Apple computers that have slowed it down in the Corporation have also slowed down the hackers. That's not to say that MS got it right -- they took the fast, open and dangerous route -- and we see their legacy today. But that's what it has taken to be successful in the business market. Software companies have cared first about product and market, second about quality and security.
MS is now making a big show about security w/o addressing quality, but you can't have secrity w/o quality. Each bug can be a _potential_ exploit waiting for the right conditions, but if a company never bothers with quality, they'll never know how many potential problems they have nor how severe they are.
-l
And Apple will go with Intel Inside...
:-|
Oh, yeah, that one is really happening...nevermind.
You think? You wanna bet your hearing on that? Consider this:
The earbuds are designed to form a tight seal with the ear
to optimize bass reproduction with minimal power. You don't get as tight a seal
with the over-the ear phones, as they are held on by a spring and sealed with foam.
The ear-buds are sealed and held in with pressure against the sides of the ear
canal -- which transfers mechanical motion from the bud (holding the speaker) down
into the ear canal.
The mechanics support a real-increased danger here from small increases in power,
beyond what you would get with a non-sealed earphone design.
-l