Interesting, but do the pumps actually measure the mass of the fuel directly when filling? My guess is that they measure volume since that is the easiest thing to measure directly, then use a density to calculate the mass of fuel. Unless you are using different densities to account for temperature, you're not going to be any more accurate than by specifying volume. Same thing for airplanes. It's hard to directly measure the mass of the fuel currently in the airplane's tanks. So they basically use a ruler to measure how deep the fuel is in the tank, and by knowing the shape of tank, they know the volume which can then be converted into a mass via density.
It still doesn't make much sense in many situations. In your DMV example, they have to have more staff members and maintain more and/or larger government buildings because people don't want to pay the "convience" fee. If the cost of having the additional employees plus the money they spend on leasing the space costs them more than they are making on the convience fee, they should scrap the convience fee because it's costing them money. Employees and floor space are expensive, I doubt they are making money on the convience fee.
Same thing goes for the cell phone companies. Infastructure is expensive, and in many areas it's strained to the limit. You would think that the cell phone companies would want to reduce the burden on their network, and they could easily do it by reducing or eliminating the fees on services like text messaging and this new wi-fi service*. Is the money they make on fees really more than the money they would save if they had to build less cell phone towers and maintain them?
*What they should do is still use the cheaper (for them) Wi-fi signal when available even if you don't pay for the wi-fi service, but still deduct the minutes from your plan. The $10 would buy "all you can eat" wi-fi service.
Core 2 is smoking AMD and they are panicking. Do they even have a real next gen architecture, aside from bizarre (albeit intriguing) CPU/GPU hybrids?
Why would they be panicking? For years, they were a very strong #2, completely dominating the budget CPU segment. The reason they were #1 for a while has more to do with how weak the P4 line was more than anything else. They still have the budget market, and unlike years past they now have OEMs like Dell on board and a pretty decent server CPU. AMD seems to be in a pretty good position overall.
Do you have any idea how many small businesses - not big corporations that routinely swap out machines every three years because they've amortized them out - are running on four, five, six, seven year old machines that are perfectly fine for office workers with XP? Or that almost all office machines not used for video editing are probably running with 512MB of RAM - which is more than adequate for ninety percent of office workers?
I think his point is that businesses aren't going to have to spend any extra money on new computers to make them run Vista. Pretty much any computer that comes with XP now can run Vista, unless they are still buying 256MB Celerons or something. Those businesses that keep around older 4 to 7 year old machines are the types to phase things in, and Vista will be phased in with the new machines while the older ones continue to run XP/2000 until they die or are finally obsoleted. The only place where I can see a problem is somewhere that wants everyone to run Vista, and has a bunch of PCs that are older than 3 years or so.
Well, if they are smart, they'll look at the file name and realize that they are trailers and not nail you for them. Given the RIAA's tactics, I wouldn't even expect that much from them. If they are clever, they'll keep a hash of trailers they have distributed and automatically ignore them. If they are real bastards, they'll claim that the trailer is copyrighted work (true), and that you have no license to redistribute them (debatable) and go after you.
I think the better question is why you felt the need to carry 100 CDs around all the time?! I think the most I ever carried was 10, and that was for long trips.
Nowadays, a lot of people seem to feel the need to carry an order of magnitude or more of music around at once. I don't see it that unusual, though certainly a bit cumbersome back in the days when the Discman was king.
It could be the same thing that's happened to CD's over the years, the newer DVDs are mixed hotter, killing the dynamic range, adding tons of clipping, and generally making them sound worse. A quick test might be to look at the volume knob when you play a DVD and a Laserdisc. If you find that you have to have the volume knob turned up a bit more with the Laserdisc compared to the DVD to get the same percieved volume, that would be a good indication that the sound on the DVDs has been compressed. Otherwise, if you can get the audio into your PC, open the files in a program like Audacity and look for the clipped waveforms.
In this case it is the MPAA doing the spying. Most of the MPAA's content content is distributed on DVDs encrypted with CSS. So unlike CDs where you can legally rip CDs you own to your harddrive, you can't do this for most movies without violating the DMCA by cracking the encryption. So they probably feel pretty safe that if they find any MPAA content on your harddrive (DVD rips), that you've committed some kind of crime.
I have run that same version of Visicalc, in DOSBox, on a PowerPC Mac. Actually, I've run a few programs in that environment that don't run on Windows without the aid of DOSBox. To me, this says that third parties are better than Microsoft themselves for backwards compatibility with Microsoft programs.
That's not backwards compatibility, that's just emulation. I can run C64 programs on Windows too using emulation, but it would be wrong to say Windows is backwards compatible with the C64. Windows is pretty good at backwards compatibility, and a surprisenly large amount of old DOS/Windows stuff will run on it. Though Windows would likely be better off if Microsoft decided to forget about all that legacy stuff, and instead had a compatibility layer like "Classic" in OSX to run that stuff.
Well, Windows Solitiare should be pretty high up on the list too, as I'm sure it's one of the few computer games that more people have played than Super Mario Brothers. Heck, it's one of the few games from the 486-era that I still play on a somewhat regular basis myself.
You're confusing morals and legality. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right morally (likewise, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong). What Bush did was legal, I don't see people refuting that. That doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
Well, with Congress's current approval rating, I seriously doubt that they are going to be making big gains in 2008. Quite the opposite, they could end up handing the presidency and congress over to the Republicans again in 2008 just like they did in 2004.
I say get the ball rolling on the impeachment hearings. Getting the country talking about the corruption in the Whitehouse is a good thing. Showing the world that the US is serious about undoing some of the damage inflicted in the past few years would be a good thing. Forcing Republicans in Congress to either stand by the man they are currently trying to distance themselves from or vote against him would be a good thing. Showing America that the Democrats actually have testicles would be a good thing. Actually convicting Bush (or Cheney) would not nessecerly be needed for the move to be a political success. However, so long as they don't attempt to do what America voted them in for in 2006 (stop the madness), they can continue to enjoy their low approval ratings. Seriously, the Whitehouse must be laughing their asses off from all this talk of non-binding resolutions that seem to going around nowadays.
While I'm sure there are high throughput servers that absolutely need the fastest disks possible, there are other servers just seem to sit around mostly idle. The FTP server really doesn't need a 10K scsi drive, but it seems to have one anyway. Same with the license server and the alarm server. I could probably replace half the drives in a typical datacenter with 5400RPM drives and have no impact on performance as far as the users are concerned. Though admittedly, the best thing would be to just virtualize all of those relatively low demand servers onto one physical box rather than building a half dozen lower power boxes.
Any previous advanced civilization on earth would have depleted its mineral resources in its rise to high technology, just as we have. That we have (or had, anyway) oil, coal and natural gas in abundance indicates that we are indeed the first civilization to arise on this planet. These resources take hundreds of millions of years to form, and complex life hasn't been around long enough for that to have happened twice.
Perhaps the previous civilization was a whole lot smarter than us, and upon realizing that actually burning through all those fossil fuels would end up in ecological disaster weened themselves off of them before going through an appreciable amount of them? (though all indications are that we are indeed the first advanced civilization here on earth)
So basically at that point, to get a main sequence star, you're betting on some _incredibly_ low odds of getting a freak fluctuation where you had a big pocket of hydrogen that somehow didn't accrete into a star earlier. We're talking odds akin to winning every single lottery on Earth on the same day. Repeatedly. There won't be many of them around.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that the lightest main sequence stars burn through their fuel at the slowest rate, and some of them could have lifetimes in the main sequence for up to a trillion years. Which means that there stars burning right now that will still be around 100 billion years from now. On the other hand, stars like our sun would likely be pretty rare.
So pharmaceutical companies charge well in excess of manufacturing and research costs. This covers the marketing. Why, then, are they wasting all this money on marketing? I know! So they can make more money. Why? Because that's the point. they're out to make money. Private investors are not going to pay billions for research if they don't think they're going to get a return on their investment. That's why people are investing their money: not for the good of humanity or a noble cause like that, but for profit. There is incidental good to humanity, mind you, in the form of new knowledge which will make it into the public domain in 20ish years. But if you take away all the marketing, you take away a good chunk of the profits, and then suddenly biotech isn't so hot anymore, and people will put their money elsewhere. There's no incidental good of humanity served.
I've always thought that marketing drugs was pretty strange. When it comes to drugs, either you need the drug in which case you'll seek it out (or most likely you'll seek out your doctor who will use his expertise to choose the appropiate drug(s) for you), or you don't need it at all. However, we have big Pharma pushing drugs directly to consumers like they are iPods or something. What's the deal with that? Why try to market drugs to an audience of people who either don't need the drug at all, or are going to already be using it? The answer is that they are pretty much trying to push drugs onto people who don't need them, and even go so far as to make shit up to do it (restless leg syndrome anyone?). All in the name of making more money.
While I don't really have a problem with for-profit drug companies, big pharma is taking it too far. They are evil, and desperately need to be reeled in.
If cost/GB were more important than performance, the 5400rpm IDE hard drive would be king of the data center.
If they were still available in high capacities, I would be using them a lot. Cooler, quieter, use less energy, cheaper, and generally more reliable. Many mass storage applications do not need a lot of speed, 90% of the data on my computer (music, videos) could be moved to a 5400RPM or even a 3600RPM drive with no noticable impact on performance.
I have never seen a person who connects a computer to the internet, this being the first thing they do with it once they get it.
In college, there were a couple of idiots that got busted for stealing lab computers, because they were dumb enough hooked up the computers up to the LAN in their dorm room. Since the school tracks access to the network through MAC addresses, and knows the physical location of each port in the dorms, they busted the theives within minutes of them hooking up the computers. You can never overestimatet the stupidity of some people.
How is it FUD? The battery is soldered into the iPhone. That's a fact, sorry.
While a significant number of people do not care about that kind of thing, there are some that do care. And yes, they are going to complain about it. So just deal with it.
Personally, I find the best anti-theft method is simply to drive a car from the 1980s.
Cars from the 1980's are actually pretty popular targets to steal, as they generally don't have any kind of fancy anti-theft devices and are pretty easy to hotwire.
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Which are larger and heavier than simply swapping a spare battery. Not elegant.
Interesting, but do the pumps actually measure the mass of the fuel directly when filling? My guess is that they measure volume since that is the easiest thing to measure directly, then use a density to calculate the mass of fuel. Unless you are using different densities to account for temperature, you're not going to be any more accurate than by specifying volume. Same thing for airplanes. It's hard to directly measure the mass of the fuel currently in the airplane's tanks. So they basically use a ruler to measure how deep the fuel is in the tank, and by knowing the shape of tank, they know the volume which can then be converted into a mass via density.
It still doesn't make much sense in many situations. In your DMV example, they have to have more staff members and maintain more and/or larger government buildings because people don't want to pay the "convience" fee. If the cost of having the additional employees plus the money they spend on leasing the space costs them more than they are making on the convience fee, they should scrap the convience fee because it's costing them money. Employees and floor space are expensive, I doubt they are making money on the convience fee.
Same thing goes for the cell phone companies. Infastructure is expensive, and in many areas it's strained to the limit. You would think that the cell phone companies would want to reduce the burden on their network, and they could easily do it by reducing or eliminating the fees on services like text messaging and this new wi-fi service*. Is the money they make on fees really more than the money they would save if they had to build less cell phone towers and maintain them?
*What they should do is still use the cheaper (for them) Wi-fi signal when available even if you don't pay for the wi-fi service, but still deduct the minutes from your plan. The $10 would buy "all you can eat" wi-fi service.
Core 2 is smoking AMD and they are panicking. Do they even have a real next gen architecture, aside from bizarre (albeit intriguing) CPU/GPU hybrids?
Why would they be panicking? For years, they were a very strong #2, completely dominating the budget CPU segment. The reason they were #1 for a while has more to do with how weak the P4 line was more than anything else. They still have the budget market, and unlike years past they now have OEMs like Dell on board and a pretty decent server CPU. AMD seems to be in a pretty good position overall.
Do you have any idea how many small businesses - not big corporations that routinely swap out machines every three years because they've amortized them out - are running on four, five, six, seven year old machines that are perfectly fine for office workers with XP? Or that almost all office machines not used for video editing are probably running with 512MB of RAM - which is more than adequate for ninety percent of office workers?
I think his point is that businesses aren't going to have to spend any extra money on new computers to make them run Vista. Pretty much any computer that comes with XP now can run Vista, unless they are still buying 256MB Celerons or something. Those businesses that keep around older 4 to 7 year old machines are the types to phase things in, and Vista will be phased in with the new machines while the older ones continue to run XP/2000 until they die or are finally obsoleted. The only place where I can see a problem is somewhere that wants everyone to run Vista, and has a bunch of PCs that are older than 3 years or so.
Well, if they are smart, they'll look at the file name and realize that they are trailers and not nail you for them. Given the RIAA's tactics, I wouldn't even expect that much from them. If they are clever, they'll keep a hash of trailers they have distributed and automatically ignore them. If they are real bastards, they'll claim that the trailer is copyrighted work (true), and that you have no license to redistribute them (debatable) and go after you.
I think the better question is why you felt the need to carry 100 CDs around all the time?! I think the most I ever carried was 10, and that was for long trips.
Nowadays, a lot of people seem to feel the need to carry an order of magnitude or more of music around at once. I don't see it that unusual, though certainly a bit cumbersome back in the days when the Discman was king.
It could be the same thing that's happened to CD's over the years, the newer DVDs are mixed hotter, killing the dynamic range, adding tons of clipping, and generally making them sound worse. A quick test might be to look at the volume knob when you play a DVD and a Laserdisc. If you find that you have to have the volume knob turned up a bit more with the Laserdisc compared to the DVD to get the same percieved volume, that would be a good indication that the sound on the DVDs has been compressed. Otherwise, if you can get the audio into your PC, open the files in a program like Audacity and look for the clipped waveforms.
Either that, or they still have old stock to clear out.
In this case it is the MPAA doing the spying. Most of the MPAA's content content is distributed on DVDs encrypted with CSS. So unlike CDs where you can legally rip CDs you own to your harddrive, you can't do this for most movies without violating the DMCA by cracking the encryption. So they probably feel pretty safe that if they find any MPAA content on your harddrive (DVD rips), that you've committed some kind of crime.
I have run that same version of Visicalc, in DOSBox, on a PowerPC Mac. Actually, I've run a few programs in that environment that don't run on Windows without the aid of DOSBox. To me, this says that third parties are better than Microsoft themselves for backwards compatibility with Microsoft programs.
That's not backwards compatibility, that's just emulation. I can run C64 programs on Windows too using emulation, but it would be wrong to say Windows is backwards compatible with the C64. Windows is pretty good at backwards compatibility, and a surprisenly large amount of old DOS/Windows stuff will run on it. Though Windows would likely be better off if Microsoft decided to forget about all that legacy stuff, and instead had a compatibility layer like "Classic" in OSX to run that stuff.
Well, Windows Solitiare should be pretty high up on the list too, as I'm sure it's one of the few computer games that more people have played than Super Mario Brothers. Heck, it's one of the few games from the 486-era that I still play on a somewhat regular basis myself.
You're confusing morals and legality. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right morally (likewise, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong). What Bush did was legal, I don't see people refuting that. That doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
Well, with Congress's current approval rating, I seriously doubt that they are going to be making big gains in 2008. Quite the opposite, they could end up handing the presidency and congress over to the Republicans again in 2008 just like they did in 2004.
I say get the ball rolling on the impeachment hearings. Getting the country talking about the corruption in the Whitehouse is a good thing. Showing the world that the US is serious about undoing some of the damage inflicted in the past few years would be a good thing. Forcing Republicans in Congress to either stand by the man they are currently trying to distance themselves from or vote against him would be a good thing. Showing America that the Democrats actually have testicles would be a good thing. Actually convicting Bush (or Cheney) would not nessecerly be needed for the move to be a political success. However, so long as they don't attempt to do what America voted them in for in 2006 (stop the madness), they can continue to enjoy their low approval ratings. Seriously, the Whitehouse must be laughing their asses off from all this talk of non-binding resolutions that seem to going around nowadays.
While I'm sure there are high throughput servers that absolutely need the fastest disks possible, there are other servers just seem to sit around mostly idle. The FTP server really doesn't need a 10K scsi drive, but it seems to have one anyway. Same with the license server and the alarm server. I could probably replace half the drives in a typical datacenter with 5400RPM drives and have no impact on performance as far as the users are concerned. Though admittedly, the best thing would be to just virtualize all of those relatively low demand servers onto one physical box rather than building a half dozen lower power boxes.
Isn't a euro the same value basically anywhere?
:)
Yes, it's worth a euro everywhere.
Any previous advanced civilization on earth would have depleted its mineral resources in its rise to high technology, just as we have. That we have (or had, anyway) oil, coal and natural gas in abundance indicates that we are indeed the first civilization to arise on this planet. These resources take hundreds of millions of years to form, and complex life hasn't been around long enough for that to have happened twice.
Perhaps the previous civilization was a whole lot smarter than us, and upon realizing that actually burning through all those fossil fuels would end up in ecological disaster weened themselves off of them before going through an appreciable amount of them? (though all indications are that we are indeed the first advanced civilization here on earth)
So basically at that point, to get a main sequence star, you're betting on some _incredibly_ low odds of getting a freak fluctuation where you had a big pocket of hydrogen that somehow didn't accrete into a star earlier. We're talking odds akin to winning every single lottery on Earth on the same day. Repeatedly. There won't be many of them around.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that the lightest main sequence stars burn through their fuel at the slowest rate, and some of them could have lifetimes in the main sequence for up to a trillion years. Which means that there stars burning right now that will still be around 100 billion years from now. On the other hand, stars like our sun would likely be pretty rare.
So pharmaceutical companies charge well in excess of manufacturing and research costs. This covers the marketing. Why, then, are they wasting all this money on marketing? I know! So they can make more money. Why? Because that's the point. they're out to make money. Private investors are not going to pay billions for research if they don't think they're going to get a return on their investment. That's why people are investing their money: not for the good of humanity or a noble cause like that, but for profit. There is incidental good to humanity, mind you, in the form of new knowledge which will make it into the public domain in 20ish years. But if you take away all the marketing, you take away a good chunk of the profits, and then suddenly biotech isn't so hot anymore, and people will put their money elsewhere. There's no incidental good of humanity served.
I've always thought that marketing drugs was pretty strange. When it comes to drugs, either you need the drug in which case you'll seek it out (or most likely you'll seek out your doctor who will use his expertise to choose the appropiate drug(s) for you), or you don't need it at all. However, we have big Pharma pushing drugs directly to consumers like they are iPods or something. What's the deal with that? Why try to market drugs to an audience of people who either don't need the drug at all, or are going to already be using it? The answer is that they are pretty much trying to push drugs onto people who don't need them, and even go so far as to make shit up to do it (restless leg syndrome anyone?). All in the name of making more money.
While I don't really have a problem with for-profit drug companies, big pharma is taking it too far. They are evil, and desperately need to be reeled in.
If cost/GB were more important than performance, the 5400rpm IDE hard drive would be king of the data center.
If they were still available in high capacities, I would be using them a lot. Cooler, quieter, use less energy, cheaper, and generally more reliable. Many mass storage applications do not need a lot of speed, 90% of the data on my computer (music, videos) could be moved to a 5400RPM or even a 3600RPM drive with no noticable impact on performance.
Seriously, I can't think of an otherwise plausible tech that's been vaporware longer than light- or holography-based data storage.
Storage that uses light to read the data has been around for over 20 years. It's called a CD, maybe you've heard of them?
I have never seen a person who connects a computer to the internet, this being the first thing they do with it once they get it.
In college, there were a couple of idiots that got busted for stealing lab computers, because they were dumb enough hooked up the computers up to the LAN in their dorm room. Since the school tracks access to the network through MAC addresses, and knows the physical location of each port in the dorms, they busted the theives within minutes of them hooking up the computers. You can never overestimatet the stupidity of some people.
Nothing at all. While the software is a pretty good idea, it's only going to work so long as theives aren't aware of its existance.
How is it FUD? The battery is soldered into the iPhone. That's a fact, sorry.
While a significant number of people do not care about that kind of thing, there are some that do care. And yes, they are going to complain about it. So just deal with it.
Personally, I find the best anti-theft method is simply to drive a car from the 1980s.
Cars from the 1980's are actually pretty popular targets to steal, as they generally don't have any kind of fancy anti-theft devices and are pretty easy to hotwire.