Don't look at what they make or how long they work. That doesn't matter one bit. If that worker over there working such long hours for so little, and then paying part of that back for lodging, didn't think the job was worth it they would quit. For a bunch of idiotic Americans to force companies to close up shop just so they can feel good about that company is just irresponsible. Believe it or not, folks, conditions suck in a lot of places in this world, and sometimes that job, and that offer of clean housing, is the only thing standing between a life of misery in a rice paddy, or starvation, or sex slavery, or you name it. Before you go poo-pooing a company like Apple or Nike for having "sweatshops" you should really google around for results of actual studies about what happens to people when the "do goody" American idiots get them kicked back out on the street. Not pretty. The only people it helps is the (usually very liberal and comparatively rich) Americans, because it makes them feel good. That's it.
Currently I have a RAID 5 (software, gentoo) setup with 6 200g drives. 4 are maxtors, 2 are seagates. I'm in the midst of a rebuild right now due to the failure of *both* only-a-few-months-old seagates. I avoided seagates for almost 10 years after the ST3290A debacle (they all died, much worse than the "deathstar" failures of the last few years IMO), but got sucked in due to price and quietness. Bad move. My array is probably lost, luckily I back up the most important stuff even off raid5. Maybe if seagates start physically resembling maxtors soon (as in, shut down the old seagate assembly lines and rebadge the maxtors) I'll buy another. Probably not. WD hasn't done me wrong, and I've *still* got 2 60g deathstars running happily, so there are at least other options for me.
Can I credit Linux with the long life of my deathstars? Maybe (that's all they've known). But that's also all the seagates ever knew. I keep them all cool and continuously running, some drives are just going to die and that's that. For my money, it's WD or Hitachi from here on out.
...and to extend my last thought, there's no telling what other things a system like this might open up for google. Imagine they have their own usenet-like groups system and it pretty much usurps usenet. Since they will have total, high-speed access to all of it all the time, so they could conceivably eventually make an ask-jeeves type query system for it. It could grep questions and answers and make probably really supply useful information on just about any subject in which there had been a lot of discussion.
I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off. Rumors have abounded for years that usenet was going to just fade away (of course it hasn't) because people didn't like the old-school ways of accessing it.
Plus, there's always the fact that since it's google, you can bet everything in it will be very quickly searchable...
I have three 80GB IDE drives running RAID-5 on a server in a colo that is pounded 24x7. It's been in operation for more than two full years and hasn't failed.
Of course it hasn't failed. See, there is some sort of weird universal law that applies in these situations. If you take the time to put in some redundancy (raid 5, or just mirroring) then none of your hard discs will ever fail. However, if you had used the exact same physical drives in a non-redundant fashion, you can bet your buttons they would have failed. It's just one of those things... like the drives know your situation or something. If they know that their failure won't really cause you major headaches, they figure it's just not worth their time to fail. They only strike when they know they're going to hurt you.
It's called a free market economy, folks, and it's the best thing we (humans) ever invented. They can charge whatever they want for their software, and with profit being the ultimate goal of the company, whatever increases profit is ultimately justifiable. The question they have to ask themselves is, how far is too far? If they push it too far, then isn't that the best thing for their competitors? Isn't it in the interest of not only the open source alternatives, but also the other proprietary ones, for them to "go too far" in their user abuse?
Just had to point that out... this probably isn't a bad thing for anybody except those users who have already decided to only use their products no matter the cost.
I think people are getting upset at the fact that life is being lost NEEDLESSLY when people shoot at burglar. I couldn't agree more. But to place the burden of guilt on the VICTIM seems insane. Easiest way to eliminate the needless deaths: don't go breaking into people's houses. We have to quit implying in court decisions that people who commit tangible crimes against one another have specific and far-reaching rights during commission of those crimes; the next logical arguable (from a lawyer point of view anyway, I'll bet) extension to that will be the "right" to wholly commit a crime without interference. ARgH.
One drawback to the voltage curves of the lithium cell would be that devices which use a meter-type battery level indicator (which of course would have been tuned to track the power left in an alkaline) will report that you have an almost full charge up until that crash. Minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
I don't own any lithium cells, other than the ones in cellphones, but based on my cellphone experience I'd say they probably charge quickly too. If you go with NiMH you can get 1 hour fast chargers for them, which is certainly good enough for my needs right now. Those chargers won't charge NiCads tho, so be careful.
Also, can't help but note... if you've got a AA battery that's putting out 3.6 volts, I'd say you've got quite a defective battery. An AA battery is supposed to put out 1.5 volts, plus or minus a small fudge factor. You'll likely blow LED's in an LED flashlight if you double the voltage like that... imagine what it can do to other stuff.
Don't forget... there's another 'way out' for the accuser in these cases... if I go to your neighbors' doors and say "I think TheCarp is a soulless child molesting felon" there's nothing they can do because of the "I think" part. If DirecTV published a list of names and said they are of the opinion that these people are criminals, I don't think there's much you could do. Of course, I could be wrong, and of course, I actually *pay* for my DirecTV (though may switch to Dish after this, as a matter of principle, since I own a card programmer myself--- one that I don't THINK can forge DTV cards, but probably could have forged their older obsoleted ones (but didn't)).
Sure, it will work IF the airplane is so equipped. What's to stop me from loading up my old Cessna 182 with 1000 pounds of explosives and absolutely ignoring that soft wall? (ok, aside from the fact that 1000lbs will pretty much wreck a 182) What facility is there in the avg general aviation airplane that will ALLOW something to take control like that? Nothing.
It's just yet more knee-jerk reaction by people who get a warm fuzzy feeling from pretending they're doing something useful, when in reality they are just wasting time money and effort.
Ahh yes, you make a good point... they get FM on those tuner cards. FM = Frequency Modulation... the only way to get clicks and pops to be audible is for those to occur at a frequency range that varies slightly but is centered around the currently-tuned frequency. AM on the other hand, is just all about amplitude, so any time any timed computer parts hit a frequency (or one of many harmonics) similar to the one you are tuned to, you get massive noise. Just get a little poratble AM radio and move it around (and spin it around, etc) all around your computer. When you get a good "noise" that sounds artificial, start typing or something. Bet you hear it. The old (heavily shielded, btw, much more than today's pc's) Apple//e was GREAT for making controllable noise since so much of it ran at slower speeds.
Question for you (and not a troll, I assure you)... what about the performance of.jsp and the like on non-massive hardware? I have used php for quite a while and I truly love it, but I code things like CS clan websites, stuff that, although complex, isn't commercial and never sees huge traffic. If my webserver 10 megabits of internet connection, and used it, my php would still be way capable on my single Athlon 1.33Ghz server of connection saturation. I've never done objective tests, but a running joke around the office is that whenever I'm browsing to a site that's got very sluggish response, it's a.jsp site. I understand php does not scale well, and gets really slow under heavy (i.e. carrier class) load. But to me,.jsp is slow always. Maybe it doesn't slow down more with heavier load, but it just seems always to be so slow. I could KILL my bank (Bank of America) for using it, as it makes their online banking apps feel downright cheesy.
What they're talking about is some scientific journals declining to blindly publish practical details on methods/observations that they perceive would be dangerous in the wrong hands. At no time is anyone attempting to restrict what any individual is able to know. Nobody stepped in and stopped the researcher whose article may be declined from gathering the knowledge necessary to come up with the sketchy idea in the first place, and nobody's stopping the next genius from exercising their creative abilities, either. The liberty/security complaint is just a non-issue.
Firewire is 400mbit, USB 2 is over 400mbit... but SCSI-160 is 160 mBYTE, which is considerably faster. The PCI bus is capable of 133ish mBYTEs per second throughput, significantly (8x) faster than 133mBIT. Of course, if you're going to be using SCSI-160 with any real intent for performance, you're going to be using a 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus/device (try finding quality cards that work in 32bit 33Mhz pci slots at 160). That is considerably faster, capable of transfering up to 512 mBYTES per second. That's not too bad, really, for such a general purpose I/O bus. Compare that to the cpu-ram interconnect speed of an Athlon, which is FAST at 2.1 gBYTE per second per cpu.
Firewire and USB are neat, and darned quick (quicker than most drives can go... by themselves) but 400 mBIT is really only about 40 megabytes (ok little more) per second max. Not even in the same league.
But... first, I think the provision of clean drinking water, sewer, and civil support systems should be a priority. Ask yourself this... you live in a mud house (recently constructed after the last monsoon killed half your neighborhood and left you homeless) and rarely have enough to eat. You've yet to experience television, telephone, tele-anything. Nor have you ever seen a real doctor in a somewhat clean setting. Or dentist. You don't think much about your childrens' college funds, because--- if they survive infancy--- there are no schools to attend except possibly some local religious school (which may be terroristic in idealogy... but who's counting if it's all you have?). Is a cellphone really near the top of your list of priorities? You can't even READ!
Granted, there are millions and millions and millions of Indians for whom this will be a boon. They are highly intelligent, hard working and motivated people. But priorities... priorities... please...
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Don't look at what they make or how long they work. That doesn't matter one bit. If that worker over there working such long hours for so little, and then paying part of that back for lodging, didn't think the job was worth it they would quit. For a bunch of idiotic Americans to force companies to close up shop just so they can feel good about that company is just irresponsible. Believe it or not, folks, conditions suck in a lot of places in this world, and sometimes that job, and that offer of clean housing, is the only thing standing between a life of misery in a rice paddy, or starvation, or sex slavery, or you name it. Before you go poo-pooing a company like Apple or Nike for having "sweatshops" you should really google around for results of actual studies about what happens to people when the "do goody" American idiots get them kicked back out on the street. Not pretty. The only people it helps is the (usually very liberal and comparatively rich) Americans, because it makes them feel good. That's it.
somehow I doubt OS choice makes a difference.
Currently I have a RAID 5 (software, gentoo) setup with 6 200g drives. 4 are maxtors, 2 are seagates. I'm in the midst of a rebuild right now due to the failure of *both* only-a-few-months-old seagates. I avoided seagates for almost 10 years after the ST3290A debacle (they all died, much worse than the "deathstar" failures of the last few years IMO), but got sucked in due to price and quietness. Bad move. My array is probably lost, luckily I back up the most important stuff even off raid5. Maybe if seagates start physically resembling maxtors soon (as in, shut down the old seagate assembly lines and rebadge the maxtors) I'll buy another. Probably not. WD hasn't done me wrong, and I've *still* got 2 60g deathstars running happily, so there are at least other options for me.
Can I credit Linux with the long life of my deathstars? Maybe (that's all they've known). But that's also all the seagates ever knew. I keep them all cool and continuously running, some drives are just going to die and that's that. For my money, it's WD or Hitachi from here on out.
I bought the game, used my key, and it works great. Don't bitch if you didn't buy the game. Simple as that.
...and to extend my last thought, there's no telling what other things a system like this might open up for google. Imagine they have their own usenet-like groups system and it pretty much usurps usenet. Since they will have total, high-speed access to all of it all the time, so they could conceivably eventually make an ask-jeeves type query system for it. It could grep questions and answers and make probably really supply useful information on just about any subject in which there had been a lot of discussion.
I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off. Rumors have abounded for years that usenet was going to just fade away (of course it hasn't) because people didn't like the old-school ways of accessing it.
Plus, there's always the fact that since it's google, you can bet everything in it will be very quickly searchable...
Of course it hasn't failed. See, there is some sort of weird universal law that applies in these situations. If you take the time to put in some redundancy (raid 5, or just mirroring) then none of your hard discs will ever fail. However, if you had used the exact same physical drives in a non-redundant fashion, you can bet your buttons they would have failed. It's just one of those things... like the drives know your situation or something. If they know that their failure won't really cause you major headaches, they figure it's just not worth their time to fail. They only strike when they know they're going to hurt you.
It's called a free market economy, folks, and it's the best thing we (humans) ever invented. They can charge whatever they want for their software, and with profit being the ultimate goal of the company, whatever increases profit is ultimately justifiable. The question they have to ask themselves is, how far is too far? If they push it too far, then isn't that the best thing for their competitors? Isn't it in the interest of not only the open source alternatives, but also the other proprietary ones, for them to "go too far" in their user abuse?
Just had to point that out... this probably isn't a bad thing for anybody except those users who have already decided to only use their products no matter the cost.
I think people are getting upset at the fact that life is being lost NEEDLESSLY when people shoot at burglar. I couldn't agree more. But to place the burden of guilt on the VICTIM seems insane. Easiest way to eliminate the needless deaths: don't go breaking into people's houses. We have to quit implying in court decisions that people who commit tangible crimes against one another have specific and far-reaching rights during commission of those crimes; the next logical arguable (from a lawyer point of view anyway, I'll bet) extension to that will be the "right" to wholly commit a crime without interference. ARgH.
One drawback to the voltage curves of the lithium cell would be that devices which use a meter-type battery level indicator (which of course would have been tuned to track the power left in an alkaline) will report that you have an almost full charge up until that crash. Minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
I don't own any lithium cells, other than the ones in cellphones, but based on my cellphone experience I'd say they probably charge quickly too. If you go with NiMH you can get 1 hour fast chargers for them, which is certainly good enough for my needs right now. Those chargers won't charge NiCads tho, so be careful.
Also, can't help but note... if you've got a AA battery that's putting out 3.6 volts, I'd say you've got quite a defective battery. An AA battery is supposed to put out 1.5 volts, plus or minus a small fudge factor. You'll likely blow LED's in an LED flashlight if you double the voltage like that... imagine what it can do to other stuff.
Don't forget... there's another 'way out' for the accuser in these cases... if I go to your neighbors' doors and say "I think TheCarp is a soulless child molesting felon" there's nothing they can do because of the "I think" part. If DirecTV published a list of names and said they are of the opinion that these people are criminals, I don't think there's much you could do. Of course, I could be wrong, and of course, I actually *pay* for my DirecTV (though may switch to Dish after this, as a matter of principle, since I own a card programmer myself--- one that I don't THINK can forge DTV cards, but probably could have forged their older obsoleted ones (but didn't)).
It's just yet more knee-jerk reaction by people who get a warm fuzzy feeling from pretending they're doing something useful, when in reality they are just wasting time money and effort.
No, no, dude... pitchforks and torches are the ONLY way to arm a REAL mob. 10,000 Transylvanians can't be wrong.
At around 5% CO2 in the atmosphere, we begin to die. Lovely flowers, though.
Is it just the pr0n you're suggesting he needs the magnifier for or... um... nevermind.
If I were the type of person that liked to have a .sig, I think *everything* is Orwellian to cats would be one of the better ones.
Ahh yes, you make a good point... they get FM on those tuner cards. FM = Frequency Modulation... the only way to get clicks and pops to be audible is for those to occur at a frequency range that varies slightly but is centered around the currently-tuned frequency. AM on the other hand, is just all about amplitude, so any time any timed computer parts hit a frequency (or one of many harmonics) similar to the one you are tuned to, you get massive noise. Just get a little poratble AM radio and move it around (and spin it around, etc) all around your computer. When you get a good "noise" that sounds artificial, start typing or something. Bet you hear it. The old (heavily shielded, btw, much more than today's pc's) Apple //e was GREAT for making controllable noise since so much of it ran at slower speeds.
You really don't want to try to get AM inside a computer. It's so full of nasty EMI you'll just get a head full of static and pops and buzzes.
Brilliant solution that could REALLY cut down on illegal spam: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rmx_records/
Question for you (and not a troll, I assure you)... what about the performance of .jsp and the like on non-massive hardware? I have used php for quite a while and I truly love it, but I code things like CS clan websites, stuff that, although complex, isn't commercial and never sees huge traffic. If my webserver 10 megabits of internet connection, and used it, my php would still be way capable on my single Athlon 1.33Ghz server of connection saturation. I've never done objective tests, but a running joke around the office is that whenever I'm browsing to a site that's got very sluggish response, it's a .jsp site. I understand php does not scale well, and gets really slow under heavy (i.e. carrier class) load. But to me, .jsp is slow always. Maybe it doesn't slow down more with heavier load, but it just seems always to be so slow. I could KILL my bank (Bank of America) for using it, as it makes their online banking apps feel downright cheesy.
Oh yeah...
Reminds me of H.R. Giger stuff, oh the possibilities!
What they're talking about is some scientific journals declining to blindly publish practical details on methods/observations that they perceive would be dangerous in the wrong hands. At no time is anyone attempting to restrict what any individual is able to know. Nobody stepped in and stopped the researcher whose article may be declined from gathering the knowledge necessary to come up with the sketchy idea in the first place, and nobody's stopping the next genius from exercising their creative abilities, either. The liberty/security complaint is just a non-issue.
you sicko... it's FREECELL that counts.
Firewire is 400mbit, USB 2 is over 400mbit... but SCSI-160 is 160 mBYTE, which is considerably faster. The PCI bus is capable of 133ish mBYTEs per second throughput, significantly (8x) faster than 133mBIT. Of course, if you're going to be using SCSI-160 with any real intent for performance, you're going to be using a 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus/device (try finding quality cards that work in 32bit 33Mhz pci slots at 160). That is considerably faster, capable of transfering up to 512 mBYTES per second. That's not too bad, really, for such a general purpose I/O bus. Compare that to the cpu-ram interconnect speed of an Athlon, which is FAST at 2.1 gBYTE per second per cpu.
Firewire and USB are neat, and darned quick (quicker than most drives can go... by themselves) but 400 mBIT is really only about 40 megabytes (ok little more) per second max. Not even in the same league.
But... first, I think the provision of clean drinking water, sewer, and civil support systems should be a priority. Ask yourself this... you live in a mud house (recently constructed after the last monsoon killed half your neighborhood and left you homeless) and rarely have enough to eat. You've yet to experience television, telephone, tele-anything. Nor have you ever seen a real doctor in a somewhat clean setting. Or dentist. You don't think much about your childrens' college funds, because--- if they survive infancy--- there are no schools to attend except possibly some local religious school (which may be terroristic in idealogy... but who's counting if it's all you have?). Is a cellphone really near the top of your list of priorities? You can't even READ!
Granted, there are millions and millions and millions of Indians for whom this will be a boon. They are highly intelligent, hard working and motivated people. But priorities... priorities... please...