when you could have just run a 12VDC line and powered them all on a central transformer like garden lights.
I had to chuckle a bit... the 5-year-old kitchen in the house we built has an under-counter DC system installed. I think they are quite common. In my case there are a couple of transformers in the basement. No backup battery, though:)
By the way, here's the cheap ECC/4-drive bay box that I was talking about. For my setup, I would need to buy an external SATA dock to do my drive shuffle, but it's still an awesome looking box.
Of course, a lot of it probably went overseas for the computer equipment - but you are largely correct... people are very sensitive to the "j" word right now.
I find that, in any profession, there are very excellent people who do the job because they love it and there are other excellent people who do it because it pays well. I feel like you need both kinds of people.
Incidentally, there are also really bad people who do it because they love it, and there are plenty of mediocre people who do it for the money. Those people give both groups negative associations.
As for money, it is true that one can be very happy in life with the basics covered. It is also true that more money insulates you from disruptive events... if a new roof only costs a month of take-home pay, you are in much better shape than someone who has to scrimp for a few years to pay off the loan they took out for the new roof. I wouldn't want to give up too much time for money, but I also won't discount the value of more money. Even marriages are statistically more stable if money is not a recurring problem.
Lol, even adobe couldn't pull that off with their flash plugin. Better to let the individual vendors write their own bugfixes. Maybe google will get some traction with their sandboxes native code in the browser idea.
There are plenty of documented, "Well, I'm buggered, the cancer is gone and we don't know why" incidents. So to say there are no observed "miracles" is bollocks.
If you want to label them as "miracles" and not as "unexplained remission" or whatnot, go for it. As I said, you can't prove or disprove meddling of a supernatural actor, so even discussing their possible existence as an explanation means abandonment of the scientific method. Praying to cure sick people has gone on for at least tens of thousands of years, and yet the track record vs. the scientific method is very poor.
But in science the story does not end there. You learn that your sample size is insufficient, and if you are lucky you learn something about genetics.
But yes, science does make one assumption - that everything in existence can be explained through natural phenomena. A supernatural actor completely destroys this ability, and the scientific method is useless in the context of a supernatural actor. If cancer can be cured by "miracle", then there is no sense in running rigorous scientific studies because God could come in and screw up the results. Fortunately for science, supernatural actors have not yet been observed screwing with nature. To paraphrase one of my college professors, God may exist but he largely leaves us alone.
Cool. I'm still on FreeBSD 8, just because I'm redoing rooms in the house and don't have time to experiment:)
Like most home users crazy enough to run their own basement server, I use it for several jobs. It's a time machine target, it's a music server, it's a pictures repository, it's a CrashPlan target (thanks to Linux emulation), it's a web server, and probably things I'm forgetting. For me, the main appeal of ZFS is the data integrity. A few years ago, my backup scheme involved Unison, and it caught a bunch of corrupted pictures on my main drive trying to overwrite the good backups. So I learned - almost the hard way - never to blindly backup, to always do some kind of checksum. ZFS is even better, checking the data integrity all the time. I also happen to love the ease with which I can swap in larger drives, but that's secondary since I've always managed using other methods. Snapshots have proven to be just awesome debugging tools - but again, this is not really anything new (shadow copy, time machine, etc). I also like that I can move the drives all over to another machine and import. Actually tried this between an old Mac and FreeBSD and it works as advertised.
To deal with the ECC issue, I bought a used HP workstation from eBay. Then I stuffed a 5-disk cage in it and it hasn't had a hiccup yet. Of course, right after I did this, a coworker pointed me to an AMD-based server with bulit-in 5-disk cage on Newegg for the same price, but my timing is always awful. The OS runs off a USB stick, and every once in a while I clone the USB stick.
This is my first experience with FreeBSD, and I must say it is a very nice OS to work with. Haven't tried freebsd-upgrade yet, though:)
At 50GB/disk, you can still get 40 movies on a single 2TB drive. Even with the hard disk shortage, this is an affordable solution. In reality, you can delete all the extras when you rip and get far more movies on the drive, or you can even re-encode. Though I use FreeBSD with ZFS to add disks in pairs for redundancy, a Windows Media box can also work well, as it has a way to add capacity... a co-worker of mine goes this route, though I think ZFS has him intrigued.
True. For my next laptop - and maybe even my next desktop - SSD is the way to go for the main drive. But for my basement server that doesn't need to go very fast, or for my pictures/home movies on my desktop, or for external backup drives... I don't need fast access times so spinning drives will rule for a long time.
Just to kind of echo what you said, I like to have 3:
A DSLR for the serious hobby stuff - being the obnoxious camera guy that everyone hates but later keeps pestering for photos:) This camera is purely optional, and there is no way you should get one unless it is your hobby.
One of those rare pocket cameras with a big sensor - currently my favorite is the Cannon S95. Remarkably good photos for this form factor - hardly ever need the flash. Even does decent video.
A cell phone. I'm serious...:) When my daughter first put her foot in her mouth as an infant, she was on the changing table and I had my cell phone in my pocket. Without the cell phone, I would have missed the moment. Sometimes the greatest camera in the world is the one you have with you!
I think I "get it". I'll use the iPad 6 as an example. You are worried that a terrorist will be the first one to a machine with a modified iPad 6 so that they can throw off the calibration.
I find that to be almost preposterous, and even if feasible, it would be equally preposterous to expect a government agency to keep a calibration model current for every rev of every device on the market.
for odd unique tools and things visual inspection and bomb swabbing is the right way to do it - for a common mas produced device they should not be calibrating it with a sample of questionable origin..
Why not? Swab the thing of "questionable origin" and call it a day. The chances of a bombmaker getting to an airport machine before the first "real" iPad2 are so infinitesimally small that I doubt it could be worth worrying about. What vector are you worried about? Personally, I find the idea of a government organization trying to get a sample of every single device on the market sampled for the airport machines to be almost Quotidian.
I'd bet that many of the components in a Kindle have air pockets, even if only in the molded ICs. Not that I'm suggesting that is the likely culprit, but not many other scenarios have you changing atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity so abruptly as an airline flight.
is it really too much trouble to have an actual chain of custody for calibrating the one and only check point for it?
It may or may not be worth the extra trouble, if it weren't so simple to just swab the thing and sniff it for explosives and then teach the machine it's signature. Since I travel on business with a toolkit and spare parts for some specialized equipment, I've seen them react to weird stuff... they always just examine it visually and rub it with the sniffer thing. If there were explosives, presumably the sniffer would catch them. Then again, I don't actually know much about chemistry and it may be possible to hermetically seal the explosives somehow and then clean the device. But presumably this would be yet another circle to add to the Venn diagram that i was referring to before.
I don't think we need to get to a point where there is a zero percent chance of bringing down an airplane. To do that, you'd need all this "theater" along with Israeli-style interrogations of every single passenger. It would be phenomenally slow and invasive... Americans would not tolerate the Israeli methods and I doubt they'd scale well to the traffic in a large airport.
Why, how large a population of people are there who know how to make a dangerous device that looks exactly like something that would come out of Cupertino? Now how many people from that population are unstable enough to bomb an airliner - and go down with it? Now make a Venn diagram, and combine it with Venn diagrams for the people who have also managed to stay away from any list of bad actors. The "theater" seriously diminished the pool of people with the capability and motivation to bring down an airliner.
Slashdot Mirror
when you could have just run a 12VDC line and powered them all on a central transformer like garden lights.
I had to chuckle a bit... the 5-year-old kitchen in the house we built has an under-counter DC system installed. I think they are quite common. In my case there are a couple of transformers in the basement. No backup battery, though :)
By the way, here's the cheap ECC/4-drive bay box that I was talking about. For my setup, I would need to buy an external SATA dock to do my drive shuffle, but it's still an awesome looking box.
Are you my 8th grade English teacher??? LOL, fine: "I would have missed the opportunity to photograph the moment."
That's how barter works. Presumably at least some value was added in the process and thus some wealth was generated.
Of course, a lot of it probably went overseas for the computer equipment - but you are largely correct... people are very sensitive to the "j" word right now.
I find that, in any profession, there are very excellent people who do the job because they love it and there are other excellent people who do it because it pays well. I feel like you need both kinds of people.
Incidentally, there are also really bad people who do it because they love it, and there are plenty of mediocre people who do it for the money. Those people give both groups negative associations.
As for money, it is true that one can be very happy in life with the basics covered. It is also true that more money insulates you from disruptive events... if a new roof only costs a month of take-home pay, you are in much better shape than someone who has to scrimp for a few years to pay off the loan they took out for the new roof. I wouldn't want to give up too much time for money, but I also won't discount the value of more money. Even marriages are statistically more stable if money is not a recurring problem.
Lol, even adobe couldn't pull that off with their flash plugin. Better to let the individual vendors write their own bugfixes. Maybe google will get some traction with their sandboxes native code in the browser idea.
HTML did okay until you started playing with tables. And many content-only sites would do well to return to simpler layouts.
But applications-in-the-browser that use tons of javascript can't really fall back to plain HTML.
There are plenty of documented, "Well, I'm buggered, the cancer is gone and we don't know why" incidents. So to say there are no observed "miracles" is bollocks.
If you want to label them as "miracles" and not as "unexplained remission" or whatnot, go for it. As I said, you can't prove or disprove meddling of a supernatural actor, so even discussing their possible existence as an explanation means abandonment of the scientific method. Praying to cure sick people has gone on for at least tens of thousands of years, and yet the track record vs. the scientific method is very poor.
Ah, I misunderstood. I mostly ignore anyone without a model or without a critique of a given model, though it is hard when the politics get involved.
But black swans do exist.
But in science the story does not end there. You learn that your sample size is insufficient, and if you are lucky you learn something about genetics.
But yes, science does make one assumption - that everything in existence can be explained through natural phenomena. A supernatural actor completely destroys this ability, and the scientific method is useless in the context of a supernatural actor. If cancer can be cured by "miracle", then there is no sense in running rigorous scientific studies because God could come in and screw up the results. Fortunately for science, supernatural actors have not yet been observed screwing with nature. To paraphrase one of my college professors, God may exist but he largely leaves us alone.
If only the same argument was understood by those engaged in the climate debate...
What else would motivate someone to build their own model?
Cool. I'm still on FreeBSD 8, just because I'm redoing rooms in the house and don't have time to experiment :)
Like most home users crazy enough to run their own basement server, I use it for several jobs. It's a time machine target, it's a music server, it's a pictures repository, it's a CrashPlan target (thanks to Linux emulation), it's a web server, and probably things I'm forgetting. For me, the main appeal of ZFS is the data integrity. A few years ago, my backup scheme involved Unison, and it caught a bunch of corrupted pictures on my main drive trying to overwrite the good backups. So I learned - almost the hard way - never to blindly backup, to always do some kind of checksum. ZFS is even better, checking the data integrity all the time. I also happen to love the ease with which I can swap in larger drives, but that's secondary since I've always managed using other methods. Snapshots have proven to be just awesome debugging tools - but again, this is not really anything new (shadow copy, time machine, etc). I also like that I can move the drives all over to another machine and import. Actually tried this between an old Mac and FreeBSD and it works as advertised.
To deal with the ECC issue, I bought a used HP workstation from eBay. Then I stuffed a 5-disk cage in it and it hasn't had a hiccup yet. Of course, right after I did this, a coworker pointed me to an AMD-based server with bulit-in 5-disk cage on Newegg for the same price, but my timing is always awful. The OS runs off a USB stick, and every once in a while I clone the USB stick.
This is my first experience with FreeBSD, and I must say it is a very nice OS to work with. Haven't tried freebsd-upgrade yet, though :)
with only two manufacturers of 3.5in form factor hard drives (seagate, wdc)
Samsung?
Unjust laws with no repercussions don't bother me. Or rather, they bother me and so I don't obey them.
At 50GB/disk, you can still get 40 movies on a single 2TB drive. Even with the hard disk shortage, this is an affordable solution. In reality, you can delete all the extras when you rip and get far more movies on the drive, or you can even re-encode. Though I use FreeBSD with ZFS to add disks in pairs for redundancy, a Windows Media box can also work well, as it has a way to add capacity... a co-worker of mine goes this route, though I think ZFS has him intrigued.
True. For my next laptop - and maybe even my next desktop - SSD is the way to go for the main drive. But for my basement server that doesn't need to go very fast, or for my pictures/home movies on my desktop, or for external backup drives... I don't need fast access times so spinning drives will rule for a long time.
LOL, I always do that. Google always corrects me, why can't Slashdot! :)
Well obviously I remember it, or I wouldn't be able to relay the story. But I like photographs - it's OK if you don't.
Just to kind of echo what you said, I like to have 3:
I think I "get it". I'll use the iPad 6 as an example. You are worried that a terrorist will be the first one to a machine with a modified iPad 6 so that they can throw off the calibration.
I find that to be almost preposterous, and even if feasible, it would be equally preposterous to expect a government agency to keep a calibration model current for every rev of every device on the market.
for odd unique tools and things visual inspection and bomb swabbing is the right way to do it - for a common mas produced device they should not be calibrating it with a sample of questionable origin..
Why not? Swab the thing of "questionable origin" and call it a day. The chances of a bombmaker getting to an airport machine before the first "real" iPad2 are so infinitesimally small that I doubt it could be worth worrying about. What vector are you worried about? Personally, I find the idea of a government organization trying to get a sample of every single device on the market sampled for the airport machines to be almost Quotidian.
I'd bet that many of the components in a Kindle have air pockets, even if only in the molded ICs. Not that I'm suggesting that is the likely culprit, but not many other scenarios have you changing atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity so abruptly as an airline flight.
is it really too much trouble to have an actual chain of custody for calibrating the one and only check point for it?
It may or may not be worth the extra trouble, if it weren't so simple to just swab the thing and sniff it for explosives and then teach the machine it's signature. Since I travel on business with a toolkit and spare parts for some specialized equipment, I've seen them react to weird stuff... they always just examine it visually and rub it with the sniffer thing. If there were explosives, presumably the sniffer would catch them. Then again, I don't actually know much about chemistry and it may be possible to hermetically seal the explosives somehow and then clean the device. But presumably this would be yet another circle to add to the Venn diagram that i was referring to before.
I don't think we need to get to a point where there is a zero percent chance of bringing down an airplane. To do that, you'd need all this "theater" along with Israeli-style interrogations of every single passenger. It would be phenomenally slow and invasive... Americans would not tolerate the Israeli methods and I doubt they'd scale well to the traffic in a large airport.
Why, how large a population of people are there who know how to make a dangerous device that looks exactly like something that would come out of Cupertino? Now how many people from that population are unstable enough to bomb an airliner - and go down with it? Now make a Venn diagram, and combine it with Venn diagrams for the people who have also managed to stay away from any list of bad actors. The "theater" seriously diminished the pool of people with the capability and motivation to bring down an airliner.