* Mass communications subordinate to the government
It's no secret that the media is increasingly controlled by a few dominant business interests. Neither is it a secret that government is increasingly controlled by business interests.
* Television the major means of thought control
This has been true for as long as I can remember - television is for now, the most powerful mass-populace informational tool. In those areas where the media is controlled by business interests, television is the media they want to control the most. This could be why they hate internet radio so much.
* Population controlled by perpetual war and its attending material shortages
Raised oil prices have a knock-on effect on every aspect of the world economy. There's also outsourcing and automation, which could be viewed as a domestic kind of war against the workers of the Western nations. The beauty of these approaches versus full-scale conventional war is that it has all the advantages (creation of a new poor working class to repress, nice exploitation opportunities for companies) and few of the disadvantages (full-scale war disrupting the market for consumer products, risk of nuclear strike, etc).
* The war ends when the government says it does (i.e. - never)
Not only is "terrorism" a nebulous concept rather than a nation state, or a particular ethnic group, engaging in a war against it has the happy side effect that for each terrorist you squash, you are helping "them" to recruit more. It could last forever, and I suspect that could be the intent.
Now, is all this a conspiracy, or just emergent behaviour which is a natural outcome of capitalism? I think the latter. But whichever it is, the social system we have sucks for allowing it to happen.
He doesn't say that. Selling binaries compiled from GPL code is fine - but you must distribute the license with the binaries, and provide the user the means to obtain that code.
If you changed the code to create a derivative work, you must provide your changes. LGPL is a little easier about this - if you merely link LGPL libraries, this is not classed as a derivative work.
Work that links GPL libraries counts though. And wrapping entire GPL executables in Windows DLLs? The only thing you've changed is the interface. It smacks of deliberate license evasion*, especially when there are freely available Win32 builds of these programs.
* There are valid technical reasons for doing this with programs that use or emit a lot of stream based output. The architecture of Windows is not too friendly to them, chiefly because starting a new process on Win32 is much more costly than a POSIX fork(). I wrote a program in the *nix style for Powershell once - it was dog-slow. 70% of the CPU time was spent creating and tearing down lots of little processes, meaning it could have been at least 3 times faster as a Powershell add-in (DLL) rather than an executable.
The *IAA get steamed when you permit other people to share. While copying music doesn't deprive the originator of the music, it can be argued that you may be less likely to pay revenues to the artist concerned.
The FSF gets steamed when you deny others their right to share as specified in the GPL. Those who license and distribute software under the GPL specifically want people to be able to use and modify their software.
In the first case, if the person copying the music was genuinely not going to pay for a legit copy of the media (they could just be too dirt poor to afford it*), then the media cartel have lost nothing.
No one is being hurt and no one is loosing anything. In the second case, people HAVE lost something. The GPL violator has gained some advantage from reusing GPLed code - they don't have to start from scratch. But they are not living up to the bargain and giving back their changes.
*ok, they can afford a high bandwidth connection and a computer and a big hard drive. Possibly stretching things a bit. Perhaps they could just buy a pirate copy in the local market?
But if the Euro was particularly more desirable than the dollar, why wouldn't Saudi Arabia just switch to Euro? Iraq tried that, look where it took them.
Iran wants to try it too. It's not surprising that the Bush administration has also been rumbling about Iran being a suitable candidate for annexation.
Even at broadcast bitrates, you're talking about 87 hours of video. The downloader would have to be spending one day a week doing nothing but watching it (assuming he slept for just over four hours). If you're talking about 75KB/s, that's 600 KBit/s, a fairly respectable video bitrate. So if you're downloading that, you're talking about watching video 24/7.
Now, P2P will bloat those figures up because of the upload and overhead. But how can anyone realistically consume all that content? My lifetime downloaded "pink media" collection currently stands at around 100GB which has taken me at least 6 years to accumulate at a pace where I view what I download. I have under 40GB of music, and around 768GB of captured broadcast TV on my MythTV box (which realistically speaking I will probably never watch all of).
Now, I work, and have a family, and a long commute, so my time to enjoy media is limited.
300GB at 500MB per hour (about 2.7MBit/s, what I get from DVB-T). == 600 hours 1 month == 672 hours
So these guys are either not watching everything, or they are spending a mere 2.5 hours a day on eating, sleeping, etc. Or most of their bandwidth is being wasted.
Their storage costs must be awesome as well. Since they can't possibly be watching it all, they must be storing it, right?
I agree with you. There is presently a problem with this though.
Capital loves automation. I used to have a CEO that opined that all his coders would be out of a job in 5 years because "it will all just be configuration!". Aside from being worthy of placement on a demotivator poster, this little soundbite turned out to be false, but I think it's probably true in the long run.
In the job I do presently, I'm using more and more open-source code. When I can't find something that suits my needs, typically I end up patching something open-source, rather than implementing it from scratch. The only stuff I touch that's fully bespoke is churned out by a standards organization with a thriving consultancy culture that works very hard to keep itself in employment.
I love open source, to me, it's great that people are essentially contributing to the intellectual wealth of humanity in a way that can spread amongst the entire (computer-using) population.
But this isn't the way that capitalism works. Because capitalists want paying for goods and services, and the only way to gain exchange medium is to work.
Now, if you automate a process that previously took 10 men, so that it now only takes one (and all he has to do is learn to push the button right), you are creating the same amount of "wealth" (product). But the wealth is less evenly spread. Your button pusher will get minimum wage, and your 9 engineers are out of a job. But wait, the expansion of the economy will see that they are employed, right?
Wrong - the myth that there is unlimited potential growth in an economy just isn't true. And besides, all the other companies are also automating their processes. And when they automate process automation design, even the automation engineers are out of a job.
So who BUYS the products? No-one! They can't afford it, because capitalism requires them earn money by working jobs that it no longer provides.
The increase in technological sophistication since the industrial revolution has improved the human condition immensely. And by and large, the hiccups in the employment market have historically been absorbed into other industries.
But realistically, we are reaching the limit. We are automating more and more, and producing more with less people. The engineer side of me loves efficiency - the real-world person worries about employment.
The only way out of this trap is a way out of capitalism. We can no longer attach the ability of a person to purchase to his ability to do useful work - because capital no longer want the work of men, and are gaining the means to eliminate their need, the work of men will become worthless.
This can go three ways -
* A global disaster (slow or fast) renders humans extinct
'nuff said.
* We all regress to an agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyle
Without the means to support your technological lifestyle, the only place to turn to is to the land.
* Society moves forward with its technology
We change to a different way of keeping score. An equal allotment of resources for each person on earth would seem to be fair. This is obviously a form of socialism. Socialism historically doesn't work because people want more than their allotted share. The only hope is that when the technology advances far enough to give people pretty much anything they want, they stop wanting more than the next guy has. Fully immersive VR technologies are probably the only way to give everyone everything they want. So it boils down to - can we provide a full VR rig to every person on earth without destroying the planet?
Absolutely. In my experience, Vista caches so much that if you wind back in a playlist hosted on an external USB drive, it has time to go into power-saving mode before the song finishes, which paradoxically leads to a huge interruption in playback as the drive has to spin back up again.
The problem is ..
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This consolidates power in the hands of government. Right now, the UK government can be offensive, inappropriate, incompetent, all the traditional sins of government, but they do stop short of being outright openly evil. Alas, government is not a static reliable thing. Many of the functions of government are being gleefully handed over to corporations, either by market-worshipping dingbats who genuinely believe that the market can regulate itself, or by corrupt arseholes who just want the stock options.
Now, imagine the same systems in the hands of a major corporation. Now imagine that the corporation has very few legal restrictions on what it does. Now imagine you have pissed them off.
If that didn't scare you, you have a serious lack of imagination.
This appears to be a product of the thinking that the "market can regulate anything". Everywhere there is congestion, plans seeking to regulate it through differential charging are springing up all over the place. The revenues typically more than cover the cost of implementation in their first year. My opinion is that these schemes just take yet more money from the average Joe who works, because he typically doesn't have any choice as to where and when he drives when commuting to work - traffic pressure on its own is more than sufficient incentive to stop driving in rush hour if it's at all possible.
Of course, you do get the highly desirable (for the intelligence community) side-effect of being able to track all vehicles present in such a schema.
Those worried for the privacy of New Yorkers should spare a thought for those of us in Europe, as our governments are presently colluding on a system that will mandate the fitting of a GPS tracker with a cellular modem to each and every motor vehicle that will log all movement. We already have number plate cameras on most major motorways (ostensibly to check to see if untaxed vehicles are moving), and a congestion charging scheme in London that has been so successful in terms of revenue that other metropolitan areas are queuing up to see who can be next.
Password protection is not the same as a cryptographic signature. It certainly is trivial to crack the password ; producing a replacement document that both i) makes sense and ii) has the same crypto hash as the first one is most certainly not trivial.
This kind of signature is better than a pen-and-ink signature on a notarized document - not only does it assure the receiver that it was the holder of the certificate that signed, it also assures them that the document so signed has not been changed since signing.
Such weapons are illegal under the Geneva Convention, as is any other weapon expressly designed only to maim. Laser weapons also have further clarification in the form of The UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.
Weapons that do maim are undeniably effective, since it not only deprives your enemy of the soldier, but also the resources required to provide him with medical attention, and to support him when he is no longer able to be productive. Anti-personnel land mines are the chief example of weapons which fall into a grey area here - most of them are potentially lethal, but most often fall short and leave their targets maimed.
There have been various plans to produce merely incapacitating light-weapons, but in practice, it is difficult to produce a device than can dazzle your opponent without at least some chance of permanent damage.
Worse than a.22 pistol - you would have to be seriously unlucky to be hit by a ricochet from a.22 and do yourself any permanent damage. Whereas with a 245mW laser, dangerously bright reflections will bounce all over the place. The eye is naturally drawn to bright shiny moving things (which is why diode laser pointers are such a successful product and have totally eclipsed masked flashlights for the purpose of presentation pointers).
So you have a much better chance of doing permanent eye damage to yourself and anyone else around.
The engineer in me loves how cool this is. The part of me that treasures my eyesight is morbidly afraid and I would treat this device with more respect than a loaded firearm, simply because the ricochet is so unpredictable. Alas, many people are used to messing about with 1 and 5mW laser pointers with relative impunity, and in the hands of someone with that pre-built attitude, it's only a matter of time before someone is permanently maimed.
... it's true. Harrison Ford was tired, pissed off, and suffering from infirm bowels. He was in no mood to shoot a fight scene and suggested to Spielberg that he "just shoot the sucker."
Regardless of what you call them, a non volatile RAM drive is made of NAND flash, be that a thumb, or an SSD. The only differences are the form factor and controller boards.
The GPP is forgetting that thumbdrives are much smaller than hard disks. You're talking about a product which has a volume (off the top of my head) about 1/20th of a 3.5" disk. Temperature is a measure of heat concentration, not power output. The power consumption for any given data volume is always going to be lower for a solid state device.
The operating tolerances are also a great deal different ; mechanical disks are far more sensitive to temperature changes than solid state hardware.
In short, make sure you put a heat spreader in and you can have a silent drive which holds more than a mechanical disk and eats less power at a lower temperature.
I have an '86 Model M, and the only other keyboard that holds a candle to it is the Cherry G80-3000.
It's not as beat-your-PHB-to-death-and-keep-on-trucking robust as the IBM, but the key switches are just as positive and consistent, if a little lighter on the touch. I have the Cherry at work, the IBM at home.
I bought my dear old Mom, a legal secretary, one of these to replace the revolting membrane keyboard provided as standard by her office. The arthritis in her index finger improved markedly in a few weeks.
You just gave me a great idea for a lyric to sing at atheist meetings.... (heck, atheists need to take a leaf out of the fundies book and get some inspiring hymns...)
Here we come, a'climbin up the tree, We've got opposable thumbs now, They help us grasp and eat....
We're 98% Monkeys, Our ancestors came from the ground, We follow the path of best fitness, 'Cause it's the best game in town.
We're just trying to get laid, Because we're programmed to, And with each generation, The women grow bigger boobs.
So don't tell us we're special, Made by a hand in the sky, We're shaped by the forces of nature, And here's the guy to tell you why....
His name is Charles Darwin, A science dude with a beard, His theory changed our understandin' We know you find that kinda weird.
If you're kinda religious, It don't fit with your worldview. 'Cause it's all about sex, babe, And what you do to get some too.
What the hell were you smoking in physics 101? If you absorb kinetic energy from a car, it slows down. This will decrease braking distances.
The energy isn't free, the motorist is paying for it in the form of fuel. But since he was just going to piss it away as heat on his brake pads, why not grab a little of it to run the road infrastructure?
Not as a motorway scheme, but at junctions, to power traffic lights and signals. Since the car is braking anyway, absorbing some of its kinetic energy to power lighting isn't such a bad thing.
Plus of course, it can't defend you against the server actually sending garbage - doesn't matter how good your connection is if the server is sending random monkey output instead of Shakespeare.
You can download the MSDN documentation gratis. Since I don't pay for a subscription, this is the only legal avenue open for me to get it. The online documentation just isn't as slick in terms of search, and of course, if the server or my network connection have any problems I can still refer to the material.
Access to a full MSDN media set is indeed very useful. Or at least, it was in the past. Since I now avoid most of Microsofts infrastructure products (database servers, that sort of thing), I have no need to pay for it. You can get an acceptable IDE for free (either Express or SharpDevelop), and you don't have to pay for the compiler (it comes with the base install of the.NET Framework). If you wanted, you could develop.NET code with notepad and a command line. The only thing the paid-for editions of Visual Studio add are shortcuts - all the stuff that used to be obfuscated behind cryptic formats (like VB6 forms) is now produced by the IDE auto-authoring source code, which means it's nothing you can't do by hand (if you're mad enough). If I was writing for a major enterprise? Sure, the $1800 would be worth it if it saved me a little time.
.. if you want a license to run Office at home, they'll sell you one, plus media, for a nominal fee that is supposed to cover media and administration. All you need is a hyperlink from your company IT department, and you can get it for £17 in the UK (probably $17 in the US).
They don't want people taking their work home and discovering that those nasty, smelly hippy, open source office programs can do most of what they need anyway. Especially not anyone in charge of purchasing software.
Downloaded it onto three different drives (one of them a flash drive) mounted in two different machines, all of which are showing no signs of disk wear. Also downloaded it across two networks, one belonging to a national government infrastructure, one of them being my ISP at home.
Each file showed corruption throughout the file, each file had a different, incorrect, MD5 hash - I actually went so far as to write a "chunkhash" util to hash chunks of the file to see if I could construct a single "good" file from the 9 corrupt ones. After reviewing the output I decided it was hopeless - there just weren't enough blocks where the hashes matched on more than one copy of the file to stick it together.
Plus the actual confirmation that there was a problem through a mutual friend at MS kinda gave it away.
Slashdot Mirror
* Mass communications subordinate to the government
It's no secret that the media is increasingly controlled by a few dominant business interests. Neither is it a secret that government is increasingly controlled by business interests.
* Television the major means of thought control
This has been true for as long as I can remember - television is for now, the most powerful mass-populace informational tool. In those areas where the media is controlled by business interests, television is the media they want to control the most. This could be why they hate internet radio so much.
* Population controlled by perpetual war and its attending material shortages
Raised oil prices have a knock-on effect on every aspect of the world economy. There's also outsourcing and automation, which could be viewed as a domestic kind of war against the workers of the Western nations. The beauty of these approaches versus full-scale conventional war is that it has all the advantages (creation of a new poor working class to repress, nice exploitation opportunities for companies) and few of the disadvantages (full-scale war disrupting the market for consumer products, risk of nuclear strike, etc).
* The war ends when the government says it does (i.e. - never)
Not only is "terrorism" a nebulous concept rather than a nation state, or a particular ethnic group, engaging in a war against it has the happy side effect that for each terrorist you squash, you are helping "them" to recruit more. It could last forever, and I suspect that could be the intent.
Now, is all this a conspiracy, or just emergent behaviour which is a natural outcome of capitalism? I think the latter. But whichever it is, the social system we have sucks for allowing it to happen.
He doesn't say that. Selling binaries compiled from GPL code is fine - but you must distribute the license with the binaries, and provide the user the means to obtain that code.
If you changed the code to create a derivative work, you must provide your changes. LGPL is a little easier about this - if you merely link LGPL libraries, this is not classed as a derivative work.
Work that links GPL libraries counts though. And wrapping entire GPL executables in Windows DLLs? The only thing you've changed is the interface. It smacks of deliberate license evasion*, especially when there are freely available Win32 builds of these programs.
* There are valid technical reasons for doing this with programs that use or emit a lot of stream based output. The architecture of Windows is not too friendly to them, chiefly because starting a new process on Win32 is much more costly than a POSIX fork(). I wrote a program in the *nix style for Powershell once - it was dog-slow. 70% of the CPU time was spent creating and tearing down lots of little processes, meaning it could have been at least 3 times faster as a Powershell add-in (DLL) rather than an executable.
The *IAA get steamed when you permit other people to share. While copying music doesn't deprive the originator of the music, it can be argued that you may be less likely to pay revenues to the artist concerned.
The FSF gets steamed when you deny others their right to share as specified in the GPL. Those who license and distribute software under the GPL specifically want people to be able to use and modify their software.
In the first case, if the person copying the music was genuinely not going to pay for a legit copy of the media (they could just be too dirt poor to afford it*), then the media cartel have lost nothing. No one is being hurt and no one is loosing anything. In the second case, people HAVE lost something. The GPL violator has gained some advantage from reusing GPLed code - they don't have to start from scratch. But they are not living up to the bargain and giving back their changes.
*ok, they can afford a high bandwidth connection and a computer and a big hard drive. Possibly stretching things a bit. Perhaps they could just buy a pirate copy in the local market?
Using an arbitrary numeric encoding, I used to write rude messages to the accounting dept. in mine.
Iran wants to try it too. It's not surprising that the Bush administration has also been rumbling about Iran being a suitable candidate for annexation.
Yes, but what would you DO with it all?
Even at broadcast bitrates, you're talking about 87 hours of video. The downloader would have to be spending one day a week doing nothing but watching it (assuming he slept for just over four hours). If you're talking about 75KB/s, that's 600 KBit/s, a fairly respectable video bitrate. So if you're downloading that, you're talking about watching video 24/7.
Now, P2P will bloat those figures up because of the upload and overhead. But how can anyone realistically consume all that content? My lifetime downloaded "pink media" collection currently stands at around 100GB which has taken me at least 6 years to accumulate at a pace where I view what I download. I have under 40GB of music, and around 768GB of captured broadcast TV on my MythTV box (which realistically speaking I will probably never watch all of).
Now, I work, and have a family, and a long commute, so my time to enjoy media is limited.
300GB at 500MB per hour (about 2.7MBit/s, what I get from DVB-T). == 600 hours
1 month == 672 hours
So these guys are either not watching everything, or they are spending a mere 2.5 hours a day on eating, sleeping, etc. Or most of their bandwidth is being wasted.
Their storage costs must be awesome as well. Since they can't possibly be watching it all, they must be storing it, right?
I agree with you. There is presently a problem with this though.
Capital loves automation. I used to have a CEO that opined that all his coders would be out of a job in 5 years because "it will all just be configuration!". Aside from being worthy of placement on a demotivator poster, this little soundbite turned out to be false, but I think it's probably true in the long run.
In the job I do presently, I'm using more and more open-source code. When I can't find something that suits my needs, typically I end up patching something open-source, rather than implementing it from scratch. The only stuff I touch that's fully bespoke is churned out by a standards organization with a thriving consultancy culture that works very hard to keep itself in employment.
I love open source, to me, it's great that people are essentially contributing to the intellectual wealth of humanity in a way that can spread amongst the entire (computer-using) population.
But this isn't the way that capitalism works. Because capitalists want paying for goods and services, and the only way to gain exchange medium is to work.
Now, if you automate a process that previously took 10 men, so that it now only takes one (and all he has to do is learn to push the button right), you are creating the same amount of "wealth" (product). But the wealth is less evenly spread. Your button pusher will get minimum wage, and your 9 engineers are out of a job. But wait, the expansion of the economy will see that they are employed, right?
Wrong - the myth that there is unlimited potential growth in an economy just isn't true. And besides, all the other companies are also automating their processes. And when they automate process automation design, even the automation engineers are out of a job.
So who BUYS the products? No-one! They can't afford it, because capitalism requires them earn money by working jobs that it no longer provides.
The increase in technological sophistication since the industrial revolution has improved the human condition immensely. And by and large, the hiccups in the employment market have historically been absorbed into other industries.
But realistically, we are reaching the limit. We are automating more and more, and producing more with less people. The engineer side of me loves efficiency - the real-world person worries about employment.
The only way out of this trap is a way out of capitalism. We can no longer attach the ability of a person to purchase to his ability to do useful work - because capital no longer want the work of men, and are gaining the means to eliminate their need, the work of men will become worthless.
This can go three ways -
* A global disaster (slow or fast) renders humans extinct
'nuff said.
* We all regress to an agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyle
Without the means to support your technological lifestyle, the only place to turn to is to the land.
* Society moves forward with its technology
We change to a different way of keeping score. An equal allotment of resources for each person on earth would seem to be fair. This is obviously a form of socialism. Socialism historically doesn't work because people want more than their allotted share. The only hope is that when the technology advances far enough to give people pretty much anything they want, they stop wanting more than the next guy has. Fully immersive VR technologies are probably the only way to give everyone everything they want. So it boils down to - can we provide a full VR rig to every person on earth without destroying the planet?
Maybe those Matrix AIs had it right....
Absolutely. In my experience, Vista caches so much that if you wind back in a playlist hosted on an external USB drive, it has time to go into power-saving mode before the song finishes, which paradoxically leads to a huge interruption in playback as the drive has to spin back up again.
This consolidates power in the hands of government. Right now, the UK government can be offensive, inappropriate, incompetent, all the traditional sins of government, but they do stop short of being outright openly evil. Alas, government is not a static reliable thing. Many of the functions of government are being gleefully handed over to corporations, either by market-worshipping dingbats who genuinely believe that the market can regulate itself, or by corrupt arseholes who just want the stock options.
Now, imagine the same systems in the hands of a major corporation. Now imagine that the corporation has very few legal restrictions on what it does. Now imagine you have pissed them off.
If that didn't scare you, you have a serious lack of imagination.
Or possibly both.
This appears to be a product of the thinking that the "market can regulate anything". Everywhere there is congestion, plans seeking to regulate it through differential charging are springing up all over the place. The revenues typically more than cover the cost of implementation in their first year. My opinion is that these schemes just take yet more money from the average Joe who works, because he typically doesn't have any choice as to where and when he drives when commuting to work - traffic pressure on its own is more than sufficient incentive to stop driving in rush hour if it's at all possible.
Of course, you do get the highly desirable (for the intelligence community) side-effect of being able to track all vehicles present in such a schema.
Those worried for the privacy of New Yorkers should spare a thought for those of us in Europe, as our governments are presently colluding on a system that will mandate the fitting of a GPS tracker with a cellular modem to each and every motor vehicle that will log all movement. We already have number plate cameras on most major motorways (ostensibly to check to see if untaxed vehicles are moving), and a congestion charging scheme in London that has been so successful in terms of revenue that other metropolitan areas are queuing up to see who can be next.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/roadpricing/
Password protection is not the same as a cryptographic signature. It certainly is trivial to crack the password ; producing a replacement document that both i) makes sense and ii) has the same crypto hash as the first one is most certainly not trivial.
This kind of signature is better than a pen-and-ink signature on a notarized document - not only does it assure the receiver that it was the holder of the certificate that signed, it also assures them that the document so signed has not been changed since signing.
Such weapons are illegal under the Geneva Convention, as is any other weapon expressly designed only to maim. Laser weapons also have further clarification in the form of The UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.
Weapons that do maim are undeniably effective, since it not only deprives your enemy of the soldier, but also the resources required to provide him with medical attention, and to support him when he is no longer able to be productive. Anti-personnel land mines are the chief example of weapons which fall into a grey area here - most of them are potentially lethal, but most often fall short and leave their targets maimed.
There have been various plans to produce merely incapacitating light-weapons, but in practice, it is difficult to produce a device than can dazzle your opponent without at least some chance of permanent damage.
Worse than a .22 pistol - you would have to be seriously unlucky to be hit by a ricochet from a .22 and do yourself any permanent damage. Whereas with a 245mW laser, dangerously bright reflections will bounce all over the place. The eye is naturally drawn to bright shiny moving things (which is why diode laser pointers are such a successful product and have totally eclipsed masked flashlights for the purpose of presentation pointers).
So you have a much better chance of doing permanent eye damage to yourself and anyone else around.
The engineer in me loves how cool this is. The part of me that treasures my eyesight is morbidly afraid and I would treat this device with more respect than a loaded firearm, simply because the ricochet is so unpredictable. Alas, many people are used to messing about with 1 and 5mW laser pointers with relative impunity, and in the hands of someone with that pre-built attitude, it's only a matter of time before someone is permanently maimed.
Yes, the rising price of metals has made certain coinage worth more than its face value.
Of course, governments are quick to place restrictions on the export of these coins, and ban their meltdown for metal.
... it's true. Harrison Ford was tired, pissed off, and suffering from infirm bowels. He was in no mood to shoot a fight scene and suggested to Spielberg that he "just shoot the sucker."
Regardless of what you call them, a non volatile RAM drive is made of NAND flash, be that a thumb, or an SSD. The only differences are the form factor and controller boards.
The GPP is forgetting that thumbdrives are much smaller than hard disks. You're talking about a product which has a volume (off the top of my head) about 1/20th of a 3.5" disk. Temperature is a measure of heat concentration, not power output. The power consumption for any given data volume is always going to be lower for a solid state device.
The operating tolerances are also a great deal different ; mechanical disks are far more sensitive to temperature changes than solid state hardware.
In short, make sure you put a heat spreader in and you can have a silent drive which holds more than a mechanical disk and eats less power at a lower temperature.
I have an '86 Model M, and the only other keyboard that holds a candle to it is the Cherry G80-3000.
It's not as beat-your-PHB-to-death-and-keep-on-trucking robust as the IBM, but the key switches are just as positive and consistent, if a little lighter on the touch. I have the Cherry at work, the IBM at home.
I bought my dear old Mom, a legal secretary, one of these to replace the revolting membrane keyboard provided as standard by her office. The arthritis in her index finger improved markedly in a few weeks.
Or there's "UBENTO", which has the user interface designed after a small Japanese lunch in a lacquered box.
You just gave me a great idea for a lyric to sing at atheist meetings.... (heck, atheists need to take a leaf out of the fundies book and get some inspiring hymns...)
Here we come, a'climbin up the tree,
We've got opposable thumbs now,
They help us grasp and eat....
We're 98% Monkeys,
Our ancestors came from the ground,
We follow the path of best fitness,
'Cause it's the best game in town.
We're just trying to get laid,
Because we're programmed to,
And with each generation,
The women grow bigger boobs.
So don't tell us we're special,
Made by a hand in the sky,
We're shaped by the forces of nature,
And here's the guy to tell you why....
His name is Charles Darwin,
A science dude with a beard,
His theory changed our understandin'
We know you find that kinda weird.
If you're kinda religious,
It don't fit with your worldview.
'Cause it's all about sex, babe,
And what you do to get some too.
What the hell were you smoking in physics 101? If you absorb kinetic energy from a car, it slows down. This will decrease braking distances.
The energy isn't free, the motorist is paying for it in the form of fuel. But since he was just going to piss it away as heat on his brake pads, why not grab a little of it to run the road infrastructure?
Not as a motorway scheme, but at junctions, to power traffic lights and signals. Since the car is braking anyway, absorbing some of its kinetic energy to power lighting isn't such a bad thing.
It was waaay more corrupt than that.
Plus of course, it can't defend you against the server actually sending garbage - doesn't matter how good your connection is if the server is sending random monkey output instead of Shakespeare.
You can download the MSDN documentation gratis. Since I don't pay for a subscription, this is the only legal avenue open for me to get it. The online documentation just isn't as slick in terms of search, and of course, if the server or my network connection have any problems I can still refer to the material.
.NET Framework). If you wanted, you could develop .NET code with notepad and a command line. The only thing the paid-for editions of Visual Studio add are shortcuts - all the stuff that used to be obfuscated behind cryptic formats (like VB6 forms) is now produced by the IDE auto-authoring source code, which means it's nothing you can't do by hand (if you're mad enough). If I was writing for a major enterprise? Sure, the $1800 would be worth it if it saved me a little time.
Access to a full MSDN media set is indeed very useful. Or at least, it was in the past. Since I now avoid most of Microsofts infrastructure products (database servers, that sort of thing), I have no need to pay for it. You can get an acceptable IDE for free (either Express or SharpDevelop), and you don't have to pay for the compiler (it comes with the base install of the
.. if you want a license to run Office at home, they'll sell you one, plus media, for a nominal fee that is supposed to cover media and administration. All you need is a hyperlink from your company IT department, and you can get it for £17 in the UK (probably $17 in the US).
They don't want people taking their work home and discovering that those nasty, smelly hippy, open source office programs can do most of what they need anyway. Especially not anyone in charge of purchasing software.
Downloaded it onto three different drives (one of them a flash drive) mounted in two different machines, all of which are showing no signs of disk wear. Also downloaded it across two networks, one belonging to a national government infrastructure, one of them being my ISP at home.
Each file showed corruption throughout the file, each file had a different, incorrect, MD5 hash - I actually went so far as to write a "chunkhash" util to hash chunks of the file to see if I could construct a single "good" file from the 9 corrupt ones. After reviewing the output I decided it was hopeless - there just weren't enough blocks where the hashes matched on more than one copy of the file to stick it together.
Plus the actual confirmation that there was a problem through a mutual friend at MS kinda gave it away.