Hell, remember when you could get a word processor that fit on a 140k floppy, and flamed game designers for requiring 6 140k floppies for their kick-ass game?
While you are correct that the speed of hard-drives hasn't improved at anywhere near a Moore's law rate, the seek time is only one part of the equation. If I'm not mistaken, the overall transfer rate has improved quite a bit over the last ten years.
The seek time is the amount of time it takes the head to get to the right spot on the disk. If the filesystem is designed appropriately, most reads will be of many consecutive sectors, so that the seek time is only the time to start reading. After that, it is the transfer rate that is important.
That's where the spin rate comes in. That's why a 7200 RPM drive performs better than a 5400 RPM drive. (This 80 gb drive is a 5400 RPM, by the way.) Unfortunately, we are talking about mechanics here, and not silicon. The faster you spin something, the harder it is going to be to control.
(And yes, there's a lot of other factors, between IDE and SCSI.)
Yes, it is worse than SCSI, if speed it your prime concern. Yes, server administrators shouldn't be buying this.
But it certainly isn't useless. Lots of people (read: "home users") have a desire to store lots of data (read: "mp3s") but don't want to spend a lot of cash. Those users will rarely use the full throughput of the drives. (Probably only installing.) The biggest slowdown will be in virtual memory, but there, they'd be better off buying more memory than a SCSI drive. These cheap IDE drives are far better than SCSI drives for those purposes. For most home users, IDE drives are simply a better buy.
Just because you have no use for it does not mean that it is useless.
Be careful when buying these large drives. BIOSes often don't support them. I got a motherboard less than a year ago and discovered that it doesn't directly support the 40 gig I just bought. Yes, you can get around it with software like their EZ-BIOS, but that itself has some problems, especially when you are trying to recover. I'm not saying avoid it. Just be aware that it isn't always as foolproof as you'd like. If your motherboard only supports a 40, you might be better off buying to 40s rather than an 80. (Not to mention that you'll get better performance out of two 40s.)
Note to BIOS designers: Would it kill you to design your BIOSes so that they lasted more than a month? I mean, if you're designing a BIOS now, why not allow all sorts of "unreasonable" values, like 4 billion cyclinders, tracks, sectors, etc? Then perhaps we wouldn't have to go through so many gyrations when the terabyte drives arrive.
Honda's always are more expensive. But you get what you pay for. I bought a Honda in 1988, and have paid around $400 in unscheduled maintenance, after 150,000 miles. I suspect you won't get that sort of performance out of a Neon or a Kia.
$20,000 isn't so bad when you consider that a Camry costs around $30,000 and those SUVs are often even more.
It depends a lot on what sort of vegetarian you are. You are right for vegans. If you are an ovo-lacto vegetarian, and eat diary, it is pretty easy to eat a balanced diet.
Eating animals involves killing animals. Now you can either say that killing animals is ok, or that it is not. The problem is that our society tries to pretend it doesn't happen. To show a cow getting slaughtered on TV would cause switchboards to be flooded with complaints. Whether you're a vegetarian or not, it should be pretty obvious that this is hypocritical behavior.
Yes, eating animals is violence against animals. To say it is not involves serious denial. Now, many say that violence against animals is ok. Personally, I have no problem with it. But to pretend we live in a nice, sanitary world, where cows just sort of magically turn into hamburger is to be in serious denial.
It's a bloody world out there in nature. In order for a lion to live, an antelope must die in pain. In order for you to eat a hamburger, a cow must die in pain. That's fact. It is not deniable. It is logical to say "that's the order of things" and go ahead an eat meat. It is not logical to pretend it isn't true, that we're not really hurting anything. That the kindly old cow doesn't really feel a thing. What utter bullshit.
People had a much better understanding of things when eating meat meant personally killing animals. When eating a chicken meant going and getting a live one, and wringing its neck on your own. But now we're so removed from that, we want to pretend that the meat just magically appears, in a factory some where.
Personally, I think that every child ought to be required to behead a chicken with his own hands to graduate high school. The fact that many nonvegetarians would find such a suggestion abhorrant says a lot about how screwed up and in denial this society is.
It is just like all the nonvegetarians who call hunting "barbaric" (something very fashionable these days). I mean, it is one thing to say that people shouldn't eat meat, and therefore shouldn't kill a deer. It is quite another to say that to kill a deer with a rifle is bad, but to slit a cow's throat in a slaughterhouse is perfectly ok. Can anyone not see how utterly hypocritical and illogical that is? </rant>
You are missing the whole point of the essay. He's saying that it is silly to complain about fake violence against animals when society permits real violence against animals.
It is important to understand that the original intent of "Fair Use" was completely pragmatic. In a very real sense, if it is "good for society", it is reasonable to be "Fair Use". That's why teachers can Xerox books for their students (because it promotes education) and that's why you can tape TV shows (because it makes everyone's life easier and promotes the electronics (VCR) industry.) In theory, societal good is supposed to outweigh property rights as long as the authors are fairly compensated.
The danger in Napster is that it does not provide a way to fairly compensate the original authors. What Hatch is pissed off about (from what I understand) is that the recording industry, rather than providing a method for getting authors compensated, want congress to preserve their little fiefdom so that they don't have to change. That is not society's duty.
You're right, we do overanalyze things. I think we learn this in high school, where we are taught to analyze the "classics" as a way to understand them. It misses the point that most of these classics were originally meant primarily to entertain.
However, I also think you'll find that things are more entertaining when they do have some sort of deeper meaning. This doesn't mean you have to overtly look for it. And, in fact, it is often better if you don't. Fiction is aimed at intuition, not intellect, and should be appreciated as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Troll!?!?!?
Moderator points are way too easy to get these days.
Hell, remember when you could get a word processor that fit on a 140k floppy, and flamed game designers for requiring 6 140k floppies for their kick-ass game?
I remember in college, working on a room-sized computer that had a removable hard drive. It came with 10 Meg disks the size of a pizza box.
You're right, it was RAM, and it was an urban legend.
But us old farts remember a time when DOS had trouble dealing with disks larger than 32 Meg. (The first of many limits. 512 Meg. 2 Gig. What next?)
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply it is impossible. It is quite possible. It is just a pain in the ass.
While you are correct that the speed of hard-drives hasn't improved at anywhere near a Moore's law rate, the seek time is only one part of the equation. If I'm not mistaken, the overall transfer rate has improved quite a bit over the last ten years.
The seek time is the amount of time it takes the head to get to the right spot on the disk. If the filesystem is designed appropriately, most reads will be of many consecutive sectors, so that the seek time is only the time to start reading. After that, it is the transfer rate that is important.
That's where the spin rate comes in. That's why a 7200 RPM drive performs better than a 5400 RPM drive. (This 80 gb drive is a 5400 RPM, by the way.) Unfortunately, we are talking about mechanics here, and not silicon. The faster you spin something, the harder it is going to be to control.
(And yes, there's a lot of other factors, between IDE and SCSI.)
An "everyone wants what I want" post.
Yes, it is worse than SCSI, if speed it your prime concern. Yes, server administrators shouldn't be buying this.
But it certainly isn't useless. Lots of people (read: "home users") have a desire to store lots of data (read: "mp3s") but don't want to spend a lot of cash. Those users will rarely use the full throughput of the drives. (Probably only installing.) The biggest slowdown will be in virtual memory, but there, they'd be better off buying more memory than a SCSI drive. These cheap IDE drives are far better than SCSI drives for those purposes. For most home users, IDE drives are simply a better buy.
Just because you have no use for it does not mean that it is useless.
Be careful when buying these large drives. BIOSes often don't support them. I got a motherboard less than a year ago and discovered that it doesn't directly support the 40 gig I just bought. Yes, you can get around it with software like their EZ-BIOS, but that itself has some problems, especially when you are trying to recover. I'm not saying avoid it. Just be aware that it isn't always as foolproof as you'd like. If your motherboard only supports a 40, you might be better off buying to 40s rather than an 80. (Not to mention that you'll get better performance out of two 40s.)
Note to BIOS designers: Would it kill you to design your BIOSes so that they lasted more than a month? I mean, if you're designing a BIOS now, why not allow all sorts of "unreasonable" values, like 4 billion cyclinders, tracks, sectors, etc? Then perhaps we wouldn't have to go through so many gyrations when the terabyte drives arrive.
You put the windmill on top when the car is stopped, for overnight charging.
Honda's always are more expensive. But you get what you pay for. I bought a Honda in 1988, and have paid around $400 in unscheduled maintenance, after 150,000 miles. I suspect you won't get that sort of performance out of a Neon or a Kia.
$20,000 isn't so bad when you consider that a Camry costs around $30,000 and those SUVs are often even more.
I just tried it. Under Windows 2000, the order seems to be .exe then .bat.
Oops, that was sarcasm, wasn't it....
Moderate me down -1, Idiot.
You do realize that all those things have, indeed, happened.
Especially the middle one. It is called "Malpractice".
Good for you.
(I'm serious. My rant wasn't about vegetarianism, but hypocracy.)
Killing food may be natural, ok, normal,etc. But to say it is not violence is to be in serious denial.
Making animals into food involves killing them, often painfully. Either accept that, or become a vegetarian.
It depends a lot on what sort of vegetarian you are. You are right for vegans. If you are an ovo-lacto vegetarian, and eat diary, it is pretty easy to eat a balanced diet.
Eating animals involves killing animals. Now you can either say that killing animals is ok, or that it is not. The problem is that our society tries to pretend it doesn't happen. To show a cow getting slaughtered on TV would cause switchboards to be flooded with complaints. Whether you're a vegetarian or not, it should be pretty obvious that this is hypocritical behavior.
Yes, eating animals is violence against animals. To say it is not involves serious denial. Now, many say that violence against animals is ok. Personally, I have no problem with it. But to pretend we live in a nice, sanitary world, where cows just sort of magically turn into hamburger is to be in serious denial.
It's a bloody world out there in nature. In order for a lion to live, an antelope must die in pain. In order for you to eat a hamburger, a cow must die in pain. That's fact. It is not deniable. It is logical to say "that's the order of things" and go ahead an eat meat. It is not logical to pretend it isn't true, that we're not really hurting anything. That the kindly old cow doesn't really feel a thing. What utter bullshit.
People had a much better understanding of things when eating meat meant personally killing animals. When eating a chicken meant going and getting a live one, and wringing its neck on your own. But now we're so removed from that, we want to pretend that the meat just magically appears, in a factory some where.
Personally, I think that every child ought to be required to behead a chicken with his own hands to graduate high school. The fact that many nonvegetarians would find such a suggestion abhorrant says a lot about how screwed up and in denial this society is.
It is just like all the nonvegetarians who call hunting "barbaric" (something very fashionable these days). I mean, it is one thing to say that people shouldn't eat meat, and therefore shouldn't kill a deer. It is quite another to say that to kill a deer with a rifle is bad, but to slit a cow's throat in a slaughterhouse is perfectly ok. Can anyone not see how utterly hypocritical and illogical that is?
</rant>
You are missing the whole point of the essay. He's saying that it is silly to complain about fake violence against animals when society permits real violence against animals.
And silly it is.
Shit, I wish I hadn't just posted a comment. I'd have moderated this up in a second.
(And it was a lame comment. Mine, that is.)
As to publishing books online: A book is a serious investment. It deserves some form of return - yet the internet can hardly give this
So is a song.
I personally can't take Katz's comments on Napster seriously because he's not willing to put his "art" out there for free.
Exerpts are legal under fair use.
It is important to understand that the original intent of "Fair Use" was completely pragmatic. In a very real sense, if it is "good for society", it is reasonable to be "Fair Use". That's why teachers can Xerox books for their students (because it promotes education) and that's why you can tape TV shows (because it makes everyone's life easier and promotes the electronics (VCR) industry.) In theory, societal good is supposed to outweigh property rights as long as the authors are fairly compensated.
The danger in Napster is that it does not provide a way to fairly compensate the original authors. What Hatch is pissed off about (from what I understand) is that the recording industry, rather than providing a method for getting authors compensated, want congress to preserve their little fiefdom so that they don't have to change. That is not society's duty.
You're right, we do overanalyze things. I think we learn this in high school, where we are taught to analyze the "classics" as a way to understand them. It misses the point that most of these classics were originally meant primarily to entertain.
However, I also think you'll find that things are more entertaining when they do have some sort of deeper meaning. This doesn't mean you have to overtly look for it. And, in fact, it is often better if you don't. Fiction is aimed at intuition, not intellect, and should be appreciated as such.
My god, I'd like to meet the man who could read a Katz article with those rules and make it through without passing out.
It's a good theme, but it certainly isn't a new theme. One of the earliest (and best) is Van Vogt's Slan.