Google got its start during a brief age where efficiency didn't matter at all. The Moore's curve was steep, Oil was $10/barrel, coal and gas were also at historical lows when adjusted for inflation and X86 PCs became a dirt-cheap commodity, land was cheap even in Silicon Valley and free open source *nix variants were reaching enterprise-class stability. Therefore cheapest/easiest way to build a massive international web infrastructure was to throw more X86 hardware at it.
Now that oil is nearly $100/barrel, huge demand has driven up the cost of even coal energy and electricity is becoming significantly more expensive even for locales which have not yet enacted carbon taxes; Google might be wise to consider hardware with a SWaP (Space Watts and Performance) of their IT infrastructure. Disclaimer, I work for Sun, I don't know if IBM, Intel , HP and Dell have yet made any progress in chip multithreading efficiency. But Sun's introductory Niagara servers (T1, T1000, T2000) already have 8 to 10 times the SWaP performance of conventional X86 web server architectures.
Blowing up a decaying satellite with a missile is, IMHO, the stupidest thing to do, and I have been an engineer working with satellite control systems for nearly 24 years by now.
I'm glad someone in the field agrees with me on this.
Mightn't the energy required to break something this big into mostly harmless pieces also send some shrapnel into a higher orbit which could endanger shuttle launches and landings for quit a while?
Will Atlantis be safely on the ground before LEO is polluted with the debris of this experiment for an indeterminate period of time?
If it falls outside the U.S. are they going to send the antisat missile into someone else's airspace?
China, France, India, Pakistan, the shrapnel of the old U.S.S.R. all still have nuclear missile, mightn't antisats flying through/near their airspace make them a bit edgy?
Didn't we sign some SALT or similar treaties against using weapons in space? If we decide to ignore this treaty, won't it be open season for satellites and space stations?
If a piece of an uncontrolled satellite causes harm, we could say "sorry, it was an accident, nothing could be done." But if we intentionally break it up and a fragment causes harm, aren't we more liable?
Still it might keep some bad stuff out of the hands of bad guys...And it might be pretty to watch over a wider area. It. reminds me of a farside cartoon with martians watching mushroom clouds over earth going "OOOOhh, ahhhhh!"
I'm not a rocket scientist but I don't think this is a bright idea. The fact that Bush's security advisers say it is a good idea is hardly a resounding vote of confidence.
O.K. I've answered the pro-gitmo troll above, now I have to answer this equally uninformed post from the opposite side of reality:
America isn't a legitimate state... exit polling suggests the last two elections were rigged. They have no right to exist, own property, have a military, etc. Because they are a bigoted evil colonial power.
People have become annoyed at news media "predicting" the outcome of an election before 99% of the country have a chance to vote, so many people intentionally give false answers to exit pollsters, others give false answers because "it's none of your business." If you understand how a democracy works, you'd understand the importance of a secret ballot.
America has repeatedly said it will take no options off the table.
Why should "America" (The United States of America) give away any points of negotiation before coming to the table? The U.S. hyperfocus on legal formalities can be irritating and counterproductive, but when dealing with wildcards like Hussein, Bin Ladin and Kim Il, I don't think it's appropriate for the U.S. to unilaterally give away any of their options.
If you visit America, you will hear people on the radio talk about turning the middle east into a piece of glass, etc. And it's not actually to protect themselves against terrorism (though it wouldn't be okay if it were)
Those talk show guys are meant to be entertaining, but the joke obviously doesn't work well outside of the trailer park audience.
, they are continuing a hundred year old policy of establishing a military presence around oil resources. This places them in the same category as Rome or the British Empire.
Until at least the 1930s, most U.S. oil came from places like Texas and Oklahoma. I guess you could say the U.S. had a presence there...
Also, you're wrong about the civilian deaths. America has killed more foreign civilians than any other outside country in history, perhaps with the exception of Nazi Germany.
What? I don't know what you see on your side of "the Great Firewall", but this is just nonsense. Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler (about 7 million) as was Mao Ze Dong (about 10 million.)
They claim the numbers in Iraq are low this time, but statistics out of America are always lies. Even if they say what the Americans want them to, they will still lie about it. Notice how they don't officially "keep track" of civilian deaths. Hell if anyone knows the real figures.
If they did keep track, would you believe them? How would they keep track? If you look at the dorctors without borders numbers that the sanctions caused more deaths than the war.
If your state is not a legitimate member of the international community, it has no right to exist. We can't destroy every such nation for obvious reasons, but we can fuck with them however we feel we need to. Why? Why not?
They are like cockroaches, almost totally unafected by radiation;-)
I owned one of those I picked up at an antique shop. They aren't geiger counters, the rely on ionization without the cascade amplification that happens inside of a geiger-mueller tube.
Look at the scale. You'd have to be inside a pile of pitchblend before the needle would move, and I doubt plutonium (an alpha emitter) would move the needle unless you somehow injected it inside the ionization chamber. They looked cool though, especially if you want to be a ghostbuster for haloween.
For radiation detection, you'd be better off with a silicon solar cell, neon bulb, CCD, computer with the old windowed ram, eeprom, reverse biased germanium diode, a glow-in-the-dark toy and one of those cheap "see-in-the-dark" scopes. The NYC law is ridiculous. As for NOx, SOx, O3 and other air quality issues, I've had the (mis)fortune of being able to detect those by breathing deeply. If it doesn't work, or hurts the air is full of sh**.
If Clinton and Guliani don't come out publicly against this insane law, they won't get my vote.
From the 517 pentagon case files, only 5% were picked up on the by American troops on battlefield. Only 8% are classified by Pentagon as Al Queda fighters. Out of nearly 600 men at Gitmo, only about 1-2 dozen men could provide useful information. The vast majority of the detainees were handed over by Pakistan and a significant number were detained as part of a bounty program. Al Queda bounties were higher than Taliban, so suddenly turning in your neighbor became much more profitable if you told the U.S. he is "Al Queda."
Create a default 5-year sunset clause on all laws, agencies, subsidies, taxes and czars created after 1787. That way Congress can muck with our lives "for the children" or "to protect us from terror" but the damage won't last for generations.
Abolish the federal reserve and other quasi federalized organizations. (Sallie Mae caused the price of education to skyrocket, Fed/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac caused the price of housing to skyrocket, Hillarycare no doubt will cause the cost of medical care to breach infinity. When "Federalized", TSA employees magically became dumber than dirt)
Tax gasoline enough to fully fund the 2+ Trillion dollar Iraq war.
Enforce a quid-pro-pro trade/immigration policy. #$&* the banana tariffs, I'm sick and tired of countries like India, Mexico and China with a one way immigration and trade policy. If you want our jobs, open your borders to our labor. If you want to sell here, you'd better buy our exports and create jobs here...
Remember that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Write that down somewhere, in ink.
Disband an alphabet soup of letter agencies. TSA is first, then DHS. The FBI and NSA were obviously useless before 9/11 so zap them, FEMA works perfectly unless there is a disaster, fire them. NASA seems to only be interested in PR "science" 300 miles up, give them early retirement and thank them for the moon missions 25 years ago. SSA will obviously be bankrupt soon, put them out of their misery, FHA is an anachronism no more useful in these days of credit craziness, peak oil and global wage arbitrage than CCC and WPA. The FCC has done nothing to prevent monopolies on the airwaves and are nothing but a rubber stamp for big industry (e.g. the analog TV ban). Disband the US patent office, they clearly don't encourage invention. Privatize the U.S. postal service and Amtrack.
Withdraw all troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, let Europe sort that out.
Hire Hollywood's best special effects director to create a $*8Tload of fake Osama Bin Ladins with hourly appearances demanding everything from brown beard dye to absinthe and holy wars in freedonia.
As of 1997, then Texas Governor George W. Bush did not even have a public email address, even though Texas Lt. Governor Bob Bollock did (demonstrating that it wasn't a technical problem with the governor's office, it was an TCP problem in the firewall between the outside world and W's brain.)
I once owned a Sony DSC-V3 digital camera. One of the most inconvenient "features" of this camera was that it illuminated your subject with a red LASER (not LED, true LASER spread through holographic diffraction grating, you could see the speckle interference...).
Focusing with this LASER gimmick annoyed my subjects and didn't worked particularly well so I turned it off 90% of the time only to find that Sony autofocus without this gimmick was even less accurate. The laser and poor autofocus was only one of the unfortunate features of this camera. The "RAW" mode was encrypted and locked to Sony software, there was no way to override Sony's bias towards small apertures in program mode, the Infrared mode was arbitrarily hard-coded to a specific program mode, and the firmware was closed and not upgradable. Quality control wasn't particularly good, I think the zeiss lens must've been assembled in a stone quarry instead of a clean room. I happily upgraded this and told myself to never again fall for Sony's proprietary gimmicks.
It's a bit early to declare that they've won, HP still has to provide the support they've signed up for. Sun "won" quite a few Linux seats with its own linux distribution (JDS) before discovering that Linux is expensive to support for enterprise customers because Linus considers API/ABI stability to be a bug, not a feature. How would you like to spend millions of dollars porting an application only to be told that
"Oh, you'll need to upgrade the kernel because Dell no longer makes hardware that works with that kernel this week and by the way, libc interfaces have changed so you'll have to recompile. What's the big deal, recompiling doesn't mean you have to spend billions requalifying everything. It does? Oh well, and oh you still make use of those old x.x.x_14 libc interfaces? Sorry, we're on x.x.x_17 now you'll have to port your application from Linux to Linux. Have a nice day!"
Who loses? Sun. This battle, maybe? But by time Linux 2.8 or 2.9 come along, NYSE might discover that it is far easier to port back to a stable Solaris/OpenSolaris platform than it is to keep up with Linus' whims.
Stability doesn't just mean you can run it in a closet for months without a reboot on the same hardware, anyone can do that (except perhaps Microsoft), stability means your software won't break when you patch or upgrade the O.S.
Unfortunately the guy seems to have a 1999 view of which operating systems are "proprietary" and seems to be confusing "unstable APIs" with "flexibility." Also, the cost of Red Hat or IBM Linux support can easily exceed the cost of Sun support.
The NYSE still runs numerous Unix systems, especially ones with Solaris, which is Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix derivative. Rubinow acknowledged that Solaris has the ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, including x86-based systems from Sun server rivals such as HP. But he added that he thinks Linux "affords us a lot of flexibility."
What kind of flexibility is he looking for? Unstable Linux APIs are bugs, not features. Opensolaris's biggest gaps are in embedded devices drivers for cheap tier 3 X86 hardware, and support for some consumer-level unsupported and legally encumbered software.
One technology that the NYSE isn't adopting so eagerly is server virtualization, which comes with a system latency price that Rubinow said he can't afford to pay. In a system that is processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, virtualization produces "a noticeable overhead" that can slow down throughput, according to Rubinow. "Virtualization is not a free technology from a latency perspective, so we don't use it in the core of what we do," he said.
I'm thankful for that. The 1989 ban on program trading was recently lifted, the Fed is panicing and the market is doomed to drop at least 20% (far more if measured in non-dollar currency.) The last thing we need is latency in the upcoming crash. Let's get it over with in nanoseconds. Actually, if he is so concerned about latency, why isn't he using BSD? BSD, Solaris and opensolaris have excellent observability tools(dtrace) for discovering system wide latency and performance problem. All three have more stable, documented interfaces than those in popular commercial Linux distributions. Bookmark this, in 2 years NYSE will rediscover the benefits of QA, documentation, API/ABI stability and observability. I already learned this lesson by trying to support a large organization on a popular commercial GNU/linux distribution.
"I'll provide the infinite number of monkeys, you edit. --Anonymous but sometimes attributed to Marlow or Shakespeare."
I can't believe this is a legitimate Nokia position paper. The document is full of typos and misinformation. Not only does it claim that ogg is proprietary, it suggests that MPEG2 or Flash would be more acceptable to Nokia. I hope someone from Nokia publishes a correction otherwise they'll lose some respect in open source communities and within the w3c.
Almost zero power isn't zero power. I've seen traditional sailboats exceed their predicted hull speed under bare poles (just mast, no sails) on Lake Michigan. Scale that up to the north Atlantic or southern ocean and you'd better be concerned about the wind cross section the kite cable presents.
Kites have another significant advantage over traditional sailboats when it comes to reducing power, you could always cut it loose and configure the kite and rigging to either be recoverable or sink to the bottom so whales don't try to eat it.
A promising idea if they've done their deep engineering homework. The biggest problems I forsee are the possibility of large gradients across the kite, slack and tortion from monster waves, lightning and how to dump excess power.
I found the device, it was called nucleostop and it filtered Nuclear generated electrons based on Tachyon signature;-) Here is a Sun blogger's English translation of this beautiful snake-oil product for the anti nuke industry.
Horse sense is what a horse has that keeps him from betting on people. -- WC Fields
I can't find the link to this device now, but I'd appreciate if other slashers can find it. I think someone on blogs.sun.com pointed out this ridiculous device. Plug the device into the wall and plug your appliances into it. It's supposed to remove "nuclear generated power." That's right, all of those electrons which were pushed to your house from turbines spun by steam generated from nuclear reactor heat are shunted away and the clean wind and coal generated electrons run your device. Classic!
I'd venture to guess that U.S. congress's change of the end of DST to be out of sync with Europe caused far more "y2k" type bugs than these occasional leap seconds ever did. You should have seen how confused the Sky+ box (European Tivo-like satellite service) became during that week when the schedule information for U.S. based programs was an hour off what it should have been.
I suggested that everyone on the ITU committee should be asked to read David Ewing Duncan's book "Calendar - Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year." Ponder the fact that it has taken thousands of years of struggles, scientific advancement and setbacks to get human time synchronized with astronomical time. Great rifts developed in societies and wars were fought over the accurate calculation of time. (Check out the Irish/Roman/Orthodox rift over the calculation of Easter). Now with a single vote, the ITU can undo thousands of years of human progress just to avoid mini "y2k errors." Why not fix the code?
Well, Since Hydrogen has but one newtron, Oxygen has 8 and Carbon has 6, you could do it a number of ways with a cyclotron:
Since D/R is fiscally (ir)responsible duopoly of parties, first the R's will spend $2 Billion of taxpayer money building of a SuperConducting Supercollider in Texas to help offset the economic ruin caused by a oil and housing bust, then D will promptly cancel it when it is 90% complete. Then D will occasionally send money to Switzerland to collaborate on their SuperCollider. R will try to destroy funding for that off chance the Swiss come up with fusion or something else that could ruin revenue for R's friends in the oil industry. Once the collider is more than 200% funded (i.e. ~ 50% built), you should have enough science or magnets or whatever it takes to smack a Hydrogen into the Oxygens at energy sufficient to occasionally cause a Helium 2 to fall off, leaving a few Carbon 6 atoms and a hell of a lot of radioactive waste which you send to Nevada and bury for a couple of million years.
But some people do like vinyl better. Audio tastes are funny. People become habituated to certain types of distortion and other artifacts in the sound.
Excellent point, which reminds me of an excellent article I read in a 1970 issue of Popular Electronics, The Experiment That Saved HiFi
People accustomed to listening to big band music on the 5000Hz frequency response of pre 1960s audio equipment and radio transmitters grew to prefer that sound. When the FCC was allocating bandwidth FM radio stations, this experiment which simulated poor audio frequency response by putting an acoustic filter (baffles) in front of a live band demonstrated that ignoring all of the distortion caused by the audio equipment, 10,000-20,000 Hz top end gives a much better sound.
While it's a baby step in the right direction, Watts alone as a "benchmark" is meaningless as is Watts/CPU. The VIC-20 likely beat the Z9 back in 1980.
If IBM is serious about server energy consumption, they should publish statistics using the SWaP (Space Watts and Performance) benchmark Sun has been promoting for several years or even "MFLOPS/Watt" or "Page serves/second/Watt"
If the Z9 can handle a typical highly threaded webserver load with fewer watts than something like Sun's T2000 Niagara while providing identical performance, IBM shouldn't be afraid to prove it.
Until then, I'll assume it's just another useless benchmark configured specifically to make IBM's products look better than its competitors.
Yeah it might be cool to put a data center in an abandoned missile silo, salt mine, catacomb or crypt. But the practical site administrator should look for low real estate costs, reliable low-cost green electricity. Companies no longer have to put their IT centers where their employees are. If you put data centers in places such as Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing where real estate and electricity demand are so high that you're paying 2-10x per square foot 2-10X per watt what you'd be paying elsewhere. If the datacenter is designed properly, it doesn't need a huge staff of on-site sysadmins and to be honest, if you can't find a good site sysadmin willing to work in Costa Rica, Tunisia, Norway or wherever electricity/real estate equation works out best, pay me enough and I'll be the site admin practically anywhere.
Thoughts from an amateur sailor/hacker
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Trans-Atlantic Robots
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· Score: 3, Informative
You're going to have to make the gear strong, waterproof, salt proof. With this short of notice you might consider a commercial autopilot/GPS with a serial interface to a computer which should be well sealed. If I were going to "roll my own" autopilot, I might consider utilizing a printer driver and mechanism but scale up the motors somehow.
Most commercial autopilots can't tack upwind. Since the trade-winds and gulf stream are against you, you're going to have to figure out how to tack.
You'll need a way to cut down sail. The simplest would be for the main and jib to be roller furling, but it's more difficult to have roller furling mains. Another option would be to use a tiny or heavily reefed main and have the jib/genoa be your main sail power. This sacrifices upwind performance for simplicity wind speed flexibility.
A mechanism to measure tidal drift and correlate it with predicted high/low tides would be useful. A dumb GPS based servo will waste lots of time and wind trying to correct course for tidal drift when it's possible that 6 hours later it will waste time and wind trying to correct course in the opposite direction!
If you wanted to be really smart, you'd try to measure and predict wind direction. For example, if you know a high pressure system is passing to your north, heading west to east, you should expect the wind to gradually clock around to the from northwest to northeast.
"Length must not exceed 4 meters" but North Atlantic waves regularly exceed 10 meters so your boat is going to be thrown around and shaken a lot and it will need to reorient itself.
You won't have lots of power to spare, so an efficient CPU and efficient OS will be necessary, a stripped down linux or qnx might work. For power and reliability's sake you might even consider something ancient, a 386 or 68000 on a
I agree with alien88 and so does the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ, FBI and other U.S. and British government agencies. This page has a nice summary of the studies including:
Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising -- A Report to the U.S. Congress http://www.ncjrs.org/works/index.htm This lengthy report has several references to lighting and crime which indicate that lighting's effect on crime is inconclusive. See chapter seven. These statements are contained in its conclusions:
"We can have very little confidence that improved lighting prevents crime, particularly since we do not know if offenders use lighting to their advantage. In the absence of better theories about when and where lighting can be effective, and rigorous evaluations of plausible lighting interventions, we cannot make any scientific assertions regarding the effectiveness of lighting. In short, the effectiveness of lighting is unknown."
Slashdot Mirror
Google got its start during a brief age where efficiency didn't matter at all. The Moore's curve was steep, Oil was $10/barrel, coal and gas were also at historical lows when adjusted for inflation and X86 PCs became a dirt-cheap commodity, land was cheap even in Silicon Valley and free open source *nix variants were reaching enterprise-class stability. Therefore cheapest/easiest way to build a massive international web infrastructure was to throw more X86 hardware at it.
Now that oil is nearly $100/barrel, huge demand has driven up the cost of even coal energy and electricity is becoming significantly more expensive even for locales which have not yet enacted carbon taxes; Google might be wise to consider hardware with a SWaP (Space Watts and Performance) of their IT infrastructure. Disclaimer, I work for Sun, I don't know if IBM, Intel , HP and Dell have yet made any progress in chip multithreading efficiency. But Sun's introductory Niagara servers (T1, T1000, T2000) already have 8 to 10 times the SWaP performance of conventional X86 web server architectures.
Blowing up a decaying satellite with a missile is, IMHO, the stupidest thing to do, and I have been an engineer working with satellite control systems for nearly 24 years by now.
I'm glad someone in the field agrees with me on this.Still it might keep some bad stuff out of the hands of bad guys...And it might be pretty to watch over a wider area. It. reminds me of a farside cartoon with martians watching mushroom clouds over earth going "OOOOhh, ahhhhh!"
I'm not a rocket scientist but I don't think this is a bright idea. The fact that Bush's security advisers say it is a good idea is hardly a resounding vote of confidence.
O.K. I've answered the pro-gitmo troll above, now I have to answer this equally uninformed post from the opposite side of reality:
America isn't a legitimate state... exit polling suggests the last two elections were rigged. They have no right to exist, own property, have a military, etc. Because they are a bigoted evil colonial power.People have become annoyed at news media "predicting" the outcome of an election before 99% of the country have a chance to vote, so many people intentionally give false answers to exit pollsters, others give false answers because "it's none of your business." If you understand how a democracy works, you'd understand the importance of a secret ballot.
America has repeatedly said it will take no options off the table.Why should "America" (The United States of America) give away any points of negotiation before coming to the table? The U.S. hyperfocus on legal formalities can be irritating and counterproductive, but when dealing with wildcards like Hussein, Bin Ladin and Kim Il, I don't think it's appropriate for the U.S. to unilaterally give away any of their options.
If you visit America, you will hear people on the radio talk about turning the middle east into a piece of glass, etc. And it's not actually to protect themselves against terrorism (though it wouldn't be okay if it were)Those talk show guys are meant to be entertaining, but the joke obviously doesn't work well outside of the trailer park audience.
, they are continuing a hundred year old policy of establishing a military presence around oil resources. This places them in the same category as Rome or the British Empire.Until at least the 1930s, most U.S. oil came from places like Texas and Oklahoma. I guess you could say the U.S. had a presence there...
Also, you're wrong about the civilian deaths. America has killed more foreign civilians than any other outside country in history, perhaps with the exception of Nazi Germany.
What? I don't know what you see on your side of "the Great Firewall", but this is just nonsense. Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler (about 7 million) as was Mao Ze Dong (about 10 million.)
They claim the numbers in Iraq are low this time, but statistics out of America are always lies. Even if they say what the Americans want them to, they will still lie about it. Notice how they don't officially "keep track" of civilian deaths. Hell if anyone knows the real figures.If they did keep track, would you believe them? How would they keep track? If you look at the dorctors without borders numbers that the sanctions caused more deaths than the war.
If your state is not a legitimate member of the international community, it has no right to exist. We can't destroy every such nation for obvious reasons, but we can fuck with them however we feel we need to. Why? Why not?They are like cockroaches, almost totally unafected by radiation ;-)
I owned one of those I picked up at an antique shop. They aren't geiger counters, the rely on ionization without the cascade amplification that happens inside of a geiger-mueller tube.
Look at the scale. You'd have to be inside a pile of pitchblend before the needle would move, and I doubt plutonium (an alpha emitter) would move the needle unless you somehow injected it inside the ionization chamber. They looked cool though, especially if you want to be a ghostbuster for haloween.
For radiation detection, you'd be better off with a silicon solar cell, neon bulb, CCD, computer with the old windowed ram, eeprom, reverse biased germanium diode, a glow-in-the-dark toy and one of those cheap "see-in-the-dark" scopes. The NYC law is ridiculous. As for NOx, SOx, O3 and other air quality issues, I've had the (mis)fortune of being able to detect those by breathing deeply. If it doesn't work, or hurts the air is full of sh**.
If Clinton and Guliani don't come out publicly against this insane law, they won't get my vote.
From the 517 pentagon case files, only 5% were picked up on the by American troops on battlefield. Only 8% are classified by Pentagon as Al Queda fighters. Out of nearly 600 men at Gitmo, only about 1-2 dozen men could provide useful information. The vast majority of the detainees were handed over by Pakistan and a significant number were detained as part of a bounty program. Al Queda bounties were higher than Taliban, so suddenly turning in your neighbor became much more profitable if you told the U.S. he is "Al Queda."
Here is a link to the "Habeus Schmaebeus" podcast: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/310_bonus.mp3 Listen to this and tell me you still believe all of the gitmo detainees are a threat to our country.
As of 1997, then Texas Governor George W. Bush did not even have a public email address, even though Texas Lt. Governor Bob Bollock did (demonstrating that it wasn't a technical problem with the governor's office, it was an TCP problem in the firewall between the outside world and W's brain.)
I once owned a Sony DSC-V3 digital camera. One of the most inconvenient "features" of this camera was that it illuminated your subject with a red LASER (not LED, true LASER spread through holographic diffraction grating, you could see the speckle interference...). Focusing with this LASER gimmick annoyed my subjects and didn't worked particularly well so I turned it off 90% of the time only to find that Sony autofocus without this gimmick was even less accurate. The laser and poor autofocus was only one of the unfortunate features of this camera. The "RAW" mode was encrypted and locked to Sony software, there was no way to override Sony's bias towards small apertures in program mode, the Infrared mode was arbitrarily hard-coded to a specific program mode, and the firmware was closed and not upgradable. Quality control wasn't particularly good, I think the zeiss lens must've been assembled in a stone quarry instead of a clean room. I happily upgraded this and told myself to never again fall for Sony's proprietary gimmicks.
;-)
Blue-Ray? Sound's cool!
And who wins? HP of course.
It's a bit early to declare that they've won, HP still has to provide the support they've signed up for.
Sun "won" quite a few Linux seats with its own linux distribution (JDS) before discovering that Linux is expensive to support for enterprise customers because Linus considers API/ABI stability to be a bug, not a feature. How would you like to spend millions of dollars porting an application only to be told that
"Oh, you'll need to upgrade the kernel because Dell no longer makes hardware that works with that kernel this week and by the way, libc interfaces have changed so you'll have to recompile. What's the big deal, recompiling doesn't mean you have to spend billions requalifying everything. It does? Oh well, and oh you still make use of those old x.x.x_14 libc interfaces? Sorry, we're on x.x.x_17 now you'll have to port your application from Linux to Linux. Have a nice day!"
Who loses? Sun.
This battle, maybe? But by time Linux 2.8 or 2.9 come along, NYSE might discover that it is far easier to port back to a stable Solaris/OpenSolaris platform than it is to keep up with Linus' whims.
Stability doesn't just mean you can run it in a closet for months without a reboot on the same hardware, anyone can do that (except perhaps Microsoft), stability means your software won't break when you patch or upgrade the O.S.
Unfortunately the guy seems to have a 1999 view of which operating systems are "proprietary" and seems to be confusing "unstable APIs" with "flexibility." Also, the cost of Red Hat or IBM Linux support can easily exceed the cost of Sun support.
The NYSE still runs numerous Unix systems, especially ones with Solaris, which is Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix derivative. Rubinow acknowledged that Solaris has the ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, including x86-based systems from Sun server rivals such as HP. But he added that he thinks Linux "affords us a lot of flexibility."
What kind of flexibility is he looking for? Unstable Linux APIs are bugs, not features. Opensolaris's biggest gaps are in embedded devices drivers for cheap tier 3 X86 hardware, and support for some consumer-level unsupported and legally encumbered software.
One technology that the NYSE isn't adopting so eagerly is server virtualization, which comes with a system latency price that Rubinow said he can't afford to pay. In a system that is processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, virtualization produces "a noticeable overhead" that can slow down throughput, according to Rubinow. "Virtualization is not a free technology from a latency perspective, so we don't use it in the core of what we do," he said.
I'm thankful for that. The 1989 ban on program trading was recently lifted, the Fed is panicing and the market is doomed to drop at least 20% (far more if measured in non-dollar currency.) The last thing we need is latency in the upcoming crash. Let's get it over with in nanoseconds. Actually, if he is so concerned about latency, why isn't he using BSD? BSD, Solaris and opensolaris have excellent observability tools(dtrace) for discovering system wide latency and performance problem. All three have more stable, documented interfaces than those in popular commercial Linux distributions. Bookmark this, in 2 years NYSE will rediscover the benefits of QA, documentation, API/ABI stability and observability. I already learned this lesson by trying to support a large organization on a popular commercial GNU/linux distribution.
"I'll provide the infinite number of monkeys, you edit.--Anonymous but sometimes attributed to Marlow or Shakespeare."
I can't believe this is a legitimate Nokia position paper. The document is full of typos and misinformation. Not only does it claim that ogg is proprietary, it suggests that MPEG2 or Flash would be more acceptable to Nokia. I hope someone from Nokia publishes a correction otherwise they'll lose some respect in open source communities and within the w3c.
Almost zero power isn't zero power. I've seen traditional sailboats exceed their predicted hull speed under bare poles (just mast, no sails) on Lake Michigan. Scale that up to the north Atlantic or southern ocean and you'd better be concerned about the wind cross section the kite cable presents. Kites have another significant advantage over traditional sailboats when it comes to reducing power, you could always cut it loose and configure the kite and rigging to either be recoverable or sink to the bottom so whales don't try to eat it.
A promising idea if they've done their deep engineering homework. The biggest problems I forsee are the possibility of large gradients across the kite, slack and tortion from monster waves, lightning and how to dump excess power.
I found the device, it was called nucleostop and it filtered Nuclear generated electrons based on Tachyon signature ;-) Here is a Sun blogger's English translation of this beautiful snake-oil product for the anti nuke industry.
Horse sense is what a horse has that keeps him from betting on people. -- WC Fields
I can't find the link to this device now, but I'd appreciate if other slashers can find it. I think someone on blogs.sun.com pointed out this ridiculous device. Plug the device into the wall and plug your appliances into it. It's supposed to remove "nuclear generated power." That's right, all of those electrons which were pushed to your house from turbines spun by steam generated from nuclear reactor heat are shunted away and the clean wind and coal generated electrons run your device. Classic!
I'd venture to guess that U.S. congress's change of the end of DST to be out of sync with Europe caused far more "y2k" type bugs than these occasional leap seconds ever did. You should have seen how confused the Sky+ box (European Tivo-like satellite service) became during that week when the schedule information for U.S. based programs was an hour off what it should have been.
I suggested that everyone on the ITU committee should be asked to read David Ewing Duncan's book "Calendar - Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year." Ponder the fact that it has taken thousands of years of struggles, scientific advancement and setbacks to get human time synchronized with astronomical time. Great rifts developed in societies and wars were fought over the accurate calculation of time. (Check out the Irish/Roman/Orthodox rift over the calculation of Easter). Now with a single vote, the ITU can undo thousands of years of human progress just to avoid mini "y2k errors." Why not fix the code?
What can NetApp's patent do that Digital Equipment Corporation's AdvFS couldn't do in the 1990s?
Software patent thugs, a pox on all your houses!
Well, Since Hydrogen has but one newtron, Oxygen has 8 and Carbon has 6, you could do it a number of ways with a cyclotron:
Since D/R is fiscally (ir)responsible duopoly of parties, first the R's will spend $2 Billion of taxpayer money building of a SuperConducting Supercollider in Texas to help offset the economic ruin caused by a oil and housing bust, then D will promptly cancel it when it is 90% complete. Then D will occasionally send money to Switzerland to collaborate on their SuperCollider. R will try to destroy funding for that off chance the Swiss come up with fusion or something else that could ruin revenue for R's friends in the oil industry. Once the collider is more than 200% funded (i.e. ~ 50% built), you should have enough science or magnets or whatever it takes to smack a Hydrogen into the Oxygens at energy sufficient to occasionally cause a Helium 2 to fall off, leaving a few Carbon 6 atoms and a hell of a lot of radioactive waste which you send to Nevada and bury for a couple of million years.
Next question????
But some people do like vinyl better. Audio tastes are funny. People become habituated to certain types of distortion and other artifacts in the sound.
Excellent point, which reminds me of an excellent article I read in a 1970 issue of Popular Electronics, The Experiment That Saved HiFi People accustomed to listening to big band music on the 5000Hz frequency response of pre 1960s audio equipment and radio transmitters grew to prefer that sound. When the FCC was allocating bandwidth FM radio stations, this experiment which simulated poor audio frequency response by putting an acoustic filter (baffles) in front of a live band demonstrated that ignoring all of the distortion caused by the audio equipment, 10,000-20,000 Hz top end gives a much better sound.
While it's a baby step in the right direction, Watts alone as a "benchmark" is meaningless as is Watts/CPU. The VIC-20 likely beat the Z9 back in 1980.
If IBM is serious about server energy consumption, they should publish statistics using the SWaP (Space Watts and Performance) benchmark Sun has been promoting for several years or even "MFLOPS/Watt" or "Page serves/second/Watt" If the Z9 can handle a typical highly threaded webserver load with fewer watts than something like Sun's T2000 Niagara while providing identical performance, IBM shouldn't be afraid to prove it.
Until then, I'll assume it's just another useless benchmark configured specifically to make IBM's products look better than its competitors.
Yeah it might be cool to put a data center in an abandoned missile silo, salt mine, catacomb or crypt. But the practical site administrator should look for low real estate costs, reliable low-cost green electricity. Companies no longer have to put their IT centers where their employees are. If you put data centers in places such as Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing where real estate and electricity demand are so high that you're paying 2-10x per square foot 2-10X per watt what you'd be paying elsewhere. If the datacenter is designed properly, it doesn't need a huge staff of on-site sysadmins and to be honest, if you can't find a good site sysadmin willing to work in Costa Rica, Tunisia, Norway or wherever electricity/real estate equation works out best, pay me enough and I'll be the site admin practically anywhere.
I agree with alien88 and so does the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ, FBI and other U.S. and British government agencies. This page has a nice summary of the studies including:
Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising -- A Report to the U.S. Congress http://www.ncjrs.org/works/index.htm This lengthy report has several references to lighting and crime which indicate that lighting's effect on crime is inconclusive. See chapter seven. These statements are contained in its conclusions: "We can have very little confidence that improved lighting prevents crime, particularly since we do not know if offenders use lighting to their advantage. In the absence of better theories about when and where lighting can be effective, and rigorous evaluations of plausible lighting interventions, we cannot make any scientific assertions regarding the effectiveness of lighting. In short, the effectiveness of lighting is unknown."
Having been the victim of a couple of car break-ins because we didn't have the outside lights on While I'm on the topic of Post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, could it be also that less light pollution would lead to more people out at night enjoying the milky way (and other wonders) and therefore less crime? I force criminals in my back garden to either use a flashlight or risk tripping over all the junk I have back there. Why give them a convenience light?