"Hamas, I guess, has done so much for the freedom and stability of Gaza?"
Not that I am supporting the actions of Hamas, nor the Israelies for that matter, but Hamas were elected by the Palestinian people in what was judged by international observers from the democratic world as a "free and fair" election. Hamas won 70% of the popular vote, obstensibly because of their habit of providing material aid to their own people and their refusal to "bow their knee" to Israel.
One major reason Hamas are ineffective for their people (of course there are other reasons of their own making), is that the rest of the so called democratic world deliberately ignored thier landslide victory and their (one sided) year long cease-fire against Israel that immediately followed the election.
The democratic world effectively side-lined Hamas in favour of their PLO sock-puppet to the detriment of all those now living in Gazza. Not to mention the US giving the nod to a massive arms shipment to Abbas in the hope of inciting (and winning) a Palestinian civil war while the rest of the world was watching the fireworks in Lebannon. (To Abbas' credit he did not comply).
Now maybe you can argue that because Abbas won the position of president in the same election and is therfore entitled to control arms in Palestine. And it's all well and good for the democratic world to argue that position as they have done for a good number of years. However if that is the democratic world's rationale then why did the same democratic world push the exact opposite argument when Arrafat was the (elected) president, Abbas was the (elected) PM, and both were members of the PLO?
"Making them [governments] accountable to the people is a prerequisite to "fixing your government".
Indeed, but the weak are no match for the machevellian actions of the democratic world or any other large power block for that matter. So therefore another (and I would argue more fundemental), prerequisite to "fixing your government" is to insure that it's free from hostile interferance by external powers./rant
"Once again the survey compared apples and oranges. It compared little tiny states (france, britain, netherlands) versus a 3000-mile wide union of states. That makes no sense. A survey should compare apples to apples. The 50-member United States v. the 30-member European Union v. the 13-member Canadian Confederation v. the 6-member Australian Federation."
I'm an Aussie and I will point out your theory to our fedral government. Since our government hates to be at the bottom of the list we will soon have 100,000+ states in our federation. Sure most of them will contain nothing but sand and a very sweaty local representative, but if we are going toss out the "one man one vote" ideal in favour of state based tribalisim I for one want to be on the winning side. So be warned: if I was an American neo-con I would be flat out like a lizard drinking learning the Aussie lingo./sarcasm
Hairyfeet claims to work in a repair shop and I have no reason to doubt that, he also said it was a drive he bought recently so it's quite possible that it's a recent thing. Perhaps you could look him up with the link I provided and look at the conversation.;)
My own experience over some 20 odd years has been base 10 all the way, thus my original challenge for someone to come up with a base 2 example. The fact that he came up with the example in a reply to a different post of mine tends to add weight to his claim. Anyone else got a shinny new maxtor?
Hah, I like the term. I live in Australia I've and used this myself to stop a cpu from complaining about the heat and shutting down, that was after I bumped up the temprature setting in the bios. And yeah, if you work in a repair shop your going to the one who sees dead drives daily and cops all the "where's my missing 73meg" agro.
No problem, I wasn't offended in the least. I've been a software developer for 20yrs and a hobbyist since the Apple II days but I can't say I can single out any particular brand of HDD that has caused me more greif than any other. I do however recall discovering (and being a bit miffed by) the base ten thing with the first HDD I bought, but nowadays I just assume it's base 10.
BTW: That first HDD was a 20MB western digital I purchased second hand for $200 - roughly half the price of a new one!
Not to put too fine a point on it but I understand the system and read/. more or less daily (currently 3525 commets). I'm damm sure both the "You have 10 points, use 'em or lose 'em" didn't last more than a day.
"And I don't know why they..."
Beats the shit out of me too, but there you have it. I've also noticed that over the past month the pages are sometimes slow to load, and I mean really slow like prehistoric 9600 dial up.
Until about a decade ago Australia was like the US, each state had a dart board to see how much sales tax was due on a purchase depending what it was that you were purchasing and random interstate companies were often dragged into court for "avoiding sales tax". This was eliminated in a deal between the states and the federal government and was replaced by an across the board 10% GST on all sales regardless of wether they are wholesale or retail.
Companies get charged GST for all purchases and in turn are required to collect GST on all sales, service sales and purchases are also included. At the end of the quarter/year you fill out a "one page form"(*) to both collect a rebate for GST on inputs and pay the GST on sales, theoretically it all balances for companies and the consumer ends up paying the GST because they can't claim the input credit.
The scheme is simple for companies and easy for consumers to work out how much tax they are paying. There are a few exeptions on certain classes of goods where the tax is either higher or lower, but the list of exemptions is tiny. The most contraversial exemption over here is the 38% excise on petrol that has been with us since the oil crisis in the 70's. No GST is collected on rent or real estate.
Any goods sold over the net or via catalogs by an Australian company can escape the GST. Goods sold over the net from companies outside Oz (eg: Amazon) are not subject to GST, rather the goods attract an import duty that is collected at the warf or airport that theoretically compensates for any advantage gained by not paying the GST. Goods exported from the country do not attract GST and are thus still competitive on the international market and bring money into the country.
"This is also why it's going to be darn difficult to solve."
Regardless of ones view on sales tax and state rights the only real difficulty here is political. If Amazon is forced to start jumping through hoops by various governments around the globe it will be to the benifit of Aussie book stores, which by the way are still very popular over here despite all the gloom and doom predicted when the GST was being debated.
(*) The "one page form" comes with a 150 page instruction book, after all said a done it's still run by bureaucrats.
Oh I dunno. Anyone remeber Daffy Duck in Golden Yeggs? Daffy eventually did lay a gold egg and was heard to say "It's amazing what one can do with a gun pointed at his head". Of course Rocky then pointed him in the direction of a room full of egg-cartons and said "fill 'em up".
Seriously though, trainning sales reps with tourture simply validates using the same techniques on their customers. Most 'hard sell' companies are that way because they have nothing else to offer. I hope the young rep pushes this bunch of clowns into bankruptcy.
"The only major obstacle being the materials used in building one."
I was under the impression that the main impediment to large refractors is the "halo" effect (coloured rings around the edge of the image), this was the problem Newton solved with the reflector and it is why Newtonian telescopes are the norm. The halo is unoticable with a small high-quality refractor (eg: binoculars) but the effect rapidly deteriorates the usefullness of refractors as the size increases.
No mention of wether this design suffers from the halo effect but radically new scope designs are rare and I like their thinking!
Of course with such a long focal length a large scope of this design would have to be space based but I don't see any insurmountable problems lanching and deploying such a beast in two parts, except of course the usual cost/benifit arguments. As for the objections elsewhere in this thread that a two part scope would drift out of sync, precisely syncronised space flight been already been done with a pair of gravity probes. Besides we also have something called adaptive optics.
Dunno, I've had two instance of "you have 10 mod points" in the last month or so but they vanished before I could use 'em. Kinda surprising since previously they were always in lots of 5 and not so close together.
Bad form to answer ones own post, ect, but hairyfeet has pointed out in a reply to another post of mine that Maxtor use base2. Kudos to Maxtor, any others?
Ditto! However since the base10 thing has been standard industry practice for eons I think that in this case that type of 'winning' is entirely appropriate.
I'm waiting for the spam headline - "Disk prices double, get a 50% discount by signing up now!"
Your right, it hasn't happened already so it probably won't. Instead of a bunch of legal ink they could simply write out the whole thing.
Eg: Instead of 250GiB they could write something like : 2.0^E13 useable magnetic toggles : and let the consumer translate it into what they see in the O/S.
Misrepresented? - I thought this had all been settled in the early 90's and the entire industry knew it was base 10. To emphasise this point can you (or anyone else) find a HDD manafacturer who still advertises in base 2?
I don't think anyone is lying and I'm not sure who's 'stupid' here, is it the courts, the plantifs, or the manafactures? In any case uninformed is a much better word to describe leagal pedants who complained.
This is the same guy who crashed his (beacon equiped) ballon near Australia and although I can't find mention of it in the WP link he also capsised his (beaconless) boat in the southern ocean before that.
I've been to the southern ocean in a 60 foot fishing trawler. Talk about a 'rough and remote area', I can't tell you how lucky this guy was to be have been found by the Navy. When he was found the divers had to coax Steve out of his air buuble in the upturned boat because he thought the divers and the noises he was hearing were an hallucination.
IIRC from the media reports over here at the time, on both occasions he was more than happy to pay the bill.
IANACD or from the US. I had to scroll past pages and pages of nationalistic and economic drivel before finding someone who knew what the hell they were talking about.
I'm not going to argue electronics with you but conceptually I see a transistor as a switch and a memristor as a tap (yes, the plumbing kind, but with electrons rather than water).
I suppose it all depend on what job and what job/qualifications we are taking about. The post I responded to talked about LEVEL 1 telephone grunts (the kind of job that reads questions from a script and jots down the answer), so I scanned ads on seek.com.au for LEVEL 1 help desk jobs, not level 2, level 3, or sysadmins.
My own life story is a bit longer than yours...
Although I dropped out of high school in what is now called year 11, I am degree qualified BSc, majors in CS and OR, and 20yrs experience as a developer under my belt. I have worked for the 'big three' and also some 3 man outfits, before that I spent 15yrs in shit jobs outside the IT industry. I say 'shit jobs' because some of those jobs literally involved shit.
My first IT job fresh out of uni was a code monkey position at ~$27K, within 5yrs I was up to $70K as a developer, 10yrs ago I was pulling ~$140K as a lead developer on a $600M 5yr project and had to incorporate myself to reduce the tax bill, today ~$90K as a developer but 35hrs/wk rather than the 60hrs/wk as a lead. I've been told by my current boss: "If you want more money you have to get a promotion, to get a promotion you have to work more hours", my reply was "I've seen your job and been there myself, not interested thank-you very much".
I don't begrudge the 15yrs of shit jobs. Sure, it was hard work with long hours, and debt collectors were a part of life but some of the jobs such as fishing in the mountainous seas of Bass Straight and working at an old growth sawmill in the middle of a temprate rainforest which is now (thankfully) a national park were experiences that I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China.
Yes, I remeber core memory and the poor buggers who made it by hand.
Do you remeber what the John Von Neumann / Vannevar Bush debate was about?
"TFA is content free."
Guess you missed the reference to the fact that Nature has published HP's claim of being first to demonstrate such a device. Maybe you could have beat them to it with nothing more than a sewing kit.
Indeed, this IS the holy grail of analog computing. I remember first reading about memristors eons ago in SciAm and since (as TFA states) Nature has published their claims of demonstrating such a device I very much doubt it's "just marketing hype".
Slashdot Mirror
"Hamas, I guess, has done so much for the freedom and stability of Gaza?"
/rant
Not that I am supporting the actions of Hamas, nor the Israelies for that matter, but Hamas were elected by the Palestinian people in what was judged by international observers from the democratic world as a "free and fair" election. Hamas won 70% of the popular vote, obstensibly because of their habit of providing material aid to their own people and their refusal to "bow their knee" to Israel.
One major reason Hamas are ineffective for their people (of course there are other reasons of their own making), is that the rest of the so called democratic world deliberately ignored thier landslide victory and their (one sided) year long cease-fire against Israel that immediately followed the election.
The democratic world effectively side-lined Hamas in favour of their PLO sock-puppet to the detriment of all those now living in Gazza. Not to mention the US giving the nod to a massive arms shipment to Abbas in the hope of inciting (and winning) a Palestinian civil war while the rest of the world was watching the fireworks in Lebannon. (To Abbas' credit he did not comply).
Now maybe you can argue that because Abbas won the position of president in the same election and is therfore entitled to control arms in Palestine. And it's all well and good for the democratic world to argue that position as they have done for a good number of years. However if that is the democratic world's rationale then why did the same democratic world push the exact opposite argument when Arrafat was the (elected) president, Abbas was the (elected) PM, and both were members of the PLO?
"Making them [governments] accountable to the people is a prerequisite to "fixing your government".
Indeed, but the weak are no match for the machevellian actions of the democratic world or any other large power block for that matter. So therefore another (and I would argue more fundemental), prerequisite to "fixing your government" is to insure that it's free from hostile interferance by external powers.
"Once again the survey compared apples and oranges. It compared little tiny states (france, britain, netherlands) versus a 3000-mile wide union of states. That makes no sense. A survey should compare apples to apples. The 50-member United States v. the 30-member European Union v. the 13-member Canadian Confederation v. the 6-member Australian Federation."
/sarcasm
I'm an Aussie and I will point out your theory to our fedral government. Since our government hates to be at the bottom of the list we will soon have 100,000+ states in our federation. Sure most of them will contain nothing but sand and a very sweaty local representative, but if we are going toss out the "one man one vote" ideal in favour of state based tribalisim I for one want to be on the winning side. So be warned: if I was an American neo-con I would be flat out like a lizard drinking learning the Aussie lingo.
Hairyfeet claims to work in a repair shop and I have no reason to doubt that, he also said it was a drive he bought recently so it's quite possible that it's a recent thing. Perhaps you could look him up with the link I provided and look at the conversation. ;)
My own experience over some 20 odd years has been base 10 all the way, thus my original challenge for someone to come up with a base 2 example. The fact that he came up with the example in a reply to a different post of mine tends to add weight to his claim. Anyone else got a shinny new maxtor?
"I just got fifteen mod points!
:)
Now I'm jealous!
And this 'new feature' is pissing me off..."Slowdown cowboy. It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment".
"white trash cooling special"
Hah, I like the term. I live in Australia I've and used this myself to stop a cpu from complaining about the heat and shutting down, that was after I bumped up the temprature setting in the bios. And yeah, if you work in a repair shop your going to the one who sees dead drives daily and cops all the "where's my missing 73meg" agro.
Well, I have to say I've learnt a lot from that post. Kudos to you and the other replies for politely setting me straight. :)
"I apologize if I came off as snarky"
No problem, I wasn't offended in the least. I've been a software developer for 20yrs and a hobbyist since the Apple II days but I can't say I can single out any particular brand of HDD that has caused me more greif than any other. I do however recall discovering (and being a bit miffed by) the base ten thing with the first HDD I bought, but nowadays I just assume it's base 10.
BTW: That first HDD was a 20MB western digital I purchased second hand for $200 - roughly half the price of a new one!
Not to put too fine a point on it but I understand the system and read /. more or less daily (currently 3525 commets). I'm damm sure both the "You have 10 points, use 'em or lose 'em" didn't last more than a day.
"And I don't know why they..."
Beats the shit out of me too, but there you have it. I've also noticed that over the past month the pages are sometimes slow to load, and I mean really slow like prehistoric 9600 dial up.
Any goods sold over the net or via catalogs by an Australian company can not escape the GST.
"Australian buyers"
Until about a decade ago Australia was like the US, each state had a dart board to see how much sales tax was due on a purchase depending what it was that you were purchasing and random interstate companies were often dragged into court for "avoiding sales tax". This was eliminated in a deal between the states and the federal government and was replaced by an across the board 10% GST on all sales regardless of wether they are wholesale or retail.
Companies get charged GST for all purchases and in turn are required to collect GST on all sales, service sales and purchases are also included. At the end of the quarter/year you fill out a "one page form"(*) to both collect a rebate for GST on inputs and pay the GST on sales, theoretically it all balances for companies and the consumer ends up paying the GST because they can't claim the input credit.
The scheme is simple for companies and easy for consumers to work out how much tax they are paying. There are a few exeptions on certain classes of goods where the tax is either higher or lower, but the list of exemptions is tiny. The most contraversial exemption over here is the 38% excise on petrol that has been with us since the oil crisis in the 70's. No GST is collected on rent or real estate.
Any goods sold over the net or via catalogs by an Australian company can escape the GST. Goods sold over the net from companies outside Oz (eg: Amazon) are not subject to GST, rather the goods attract an import duty that is collected at the warf or airport that theoretically compensates for any advantage gained by not paying the GST. Goods exported from the country do not attract GST and are thus still competitive on the international market and bring money into the country.
"This is also why it's going to be darn difficult to solve."
Regardless of ones view on sales tax and state rights the only real difficulty here is political. If Amazon is forced to start jumping through hoops by various governments around the globe it will be to the benifit of Aussie book stores, which by the way are still very popular over here despite all the gloom and doom predicted when the GST was being debated.
(*) The "one page form" comes with a 150 page instruction book, after all said a done it's still run by bureaucrats.
Oh I dunno. Anyone remeber Daffy Duck in Golden Yeggs? Daffy eventually did lay a gold egg and was heard to say "It's amazing what one can do with a gun pointed at his head". Of course Rocky then pointed him in the direction of a room full of egg-cartons and said "fill 'em up".
Seriously though, trainning sales reps with tourture simply validates using the same techniques on their customers. Most 'hard sell' companies are that way because they have nothing else to offer. I hope the young rep pushes this bunch of clowns into bankruptcy.
"The only major obstacle being the materials used in building one."
I was under the impression that the main impediment to large refractors is the "halo" effect (coloured rings around the edge of the image), this was the problem Newton solved with the reflector and it is why Newtonian telescopes are the norm. The halo is unoticable with a small high-quality refractor (eg: binoculars) but the effect rapidly deteriorates the usefullness of refractors as the size increases.
No mention of wether this design suffers from the halo effect but radically new scope designs are rare and I like their thinking!
Of course with such a long focal length a large scope of this design would have to be space based but I don't see any insurmountable problems lanching and deploying such a beast in two parts, except of course the usual cost/benifit arguments. As for the objections elsewhere in this thread that a two part scope would drift out of sync, precisely syncronised space flight been already been done with a pair of gravity probes. Besides we also have something called adaptive optics.
Dunno, I've had two instance of "you have 10 mod points" in the last month or so but they vanished before I could use 'em. Kinda surprising since previously they were always in lots of 5 and not so close together.
Bad form to answer ones own post, ect, but hairyfeet has pointed out in a reply to another post of mine that Maxtor use base2. Kudos to Maxtor, any others?
I agree that a few cents on each HDD sale is worth far less than a happy customer and tip my hat to Maxtor. The post was intended as sarcasm.
You also answered a question I put in another post ie: Is there any manafacturer who still advertises in base 2?
"I really hate this trend."
Ditto! However since the base10 thing has been standard industry practice for eons I think that in this case that type of 'winning' is entirely appropriate.
I'm waiting for the spam headline - "Disk prices double, get a 50% discount by signing up now!"
Your right, it hasn't happened already so it probably won't. Instead of a bunch of legal ink they could simply write out the whole thing.
Eg: Instead of 250GiB they could write something like : 2.0^E13 useable magnetic toggles : and let the consumer translate it into what they see in the O/S.
Misrepresented? - I thought this had all been settled in the early 90's and the entire industry knew it was base 10. To emphasise this point can you (or anyone else) find a HDD manafacturer who still advertises in base 2?
I don't think anyone is lying and I'm not sure who's 'stupid' here, is it the courts, the plantifs, or the manafactures? In any case uninformed is a much better word to describe leagal pedants who complained.
This is the same guy who crashed his (beacon equiped) ballon near Australia and although I can't find mention of it in the WP link he also capsised his (beaconless) boat in the southern ocean before that.
I've been to the southern ocean in a 60 foot fishing trawler. Talk about a 'rough and remote area', I can't tell you how lucky this guy was to be have been found by the Navy. When he was found the divers had to coax Steve out of his air buuble in the upturned boat because he thought the divers and the noises he was hearing were an hallucination.
IIRC from the media reports over here at the time, on both occasions he was more than happy to pay the bill.
IANACD or from the US. I had to scroll past pages and pages of nationalistic and economic drivel before finding someone who knew what the hell they were talking about.
I'm not going to argue electronics with you but conceptually I see a transistor as a switch and a memristor as a tap (yes, the plumbing kind, but with electrons rather than water).
I suppose it all depend on what job and what job/qualifications we are taking about. The post I responded to talked about LEVEL 1 telephone grunts (the kind of job that reads questions from a script and jots down the answer), so I scanned ads on seek.com.au for LEVEL 1 help desk jobs, not level 2, level 3, or sysadmins.
My own life story is a bit longer than yours...
Although I dropped out of high school in what is now called year 11, I am degree qualified BSc, majors in CS and OR, and 20yrs experience as a developer under my belt. I have worked for the 'big three' and also some 3 man outfits, before that I spent 15yrs in shit jobs outside the IT industry. I say 'shit jobs' because some of those jobs literally involved shit.
My first IT job fresh out of uni was a code monkey position at ~$27K, within 5yrs I was up to $70K as a developer, 10yrs ago I was pulling ~$140K as a lead developer on a $600M 5yr project and had to incorporate myself to reduce the tax bill, today ~$90K as a developer but 35hrs/wk rather than the 60hrs/wk as a lead. I've been told by my current boss: "If you want more money you have to get a promotion, to get a promotion you have to work more hours", my reply was "I've seen your job and been there myself, not interested thank-you very much".
I don't begrudge the 15yrs of shit jobs. Sure, it was hard work with long hours, and debt collectors were a part of life but some of the jobs such as fishing in the mountainous seas of Bass Straight and working at an old growth sawmill in the middle of a temprate rainforest which is now (thankfully) a national park were experiences that I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China.
I don't disagree, nor do I know why I'm responding to an AC.
Yes, I remeber core memory and the poor buggers who made it by hand.
Do you remeber what the John Von Neumann / Vannevar Bush debate was about?
"TFA is content free."
Guess you missed the reference to the fact that Nature has published HP's claim of being first to demonstrate such a device. Maybe you could have beat them to it with nothing more than a sewing kit.
"This really is neat stuff."
Indeed, this IS the holy grail of analog computing. I remember first reading about memristors eons ago in SciAm and since (as TFA states) Nature has published their claims of demonstrating such a device I very much doubt it's "just marketing hype".