Back when I was in college one of the 'cool' old Comp Sci professors had a tale he liked to share with his classes on the first day. I had him in a couple of classes, so I heard it over and over again. His presentation made it an amusing story if you could get over the fact that he smelt as if he lived in an ashtray.
It seems that back in the mainframe days, the standard way of increasing storage size on your hard drives was to make a bigger platter. Seems rather simple, right? The storage size grows exponentially with its radius. So adding an inch each time can lead to some fairly nice results, and with some platters topping out at 24 inches, that's some space.
Except....
One day, the university ordered the 'latest' hard drive for one of their mainframes. I'm sure it was a behemoth, it probably held around 50 meg. The vendor came by and installed it, and everything seemed fine till a few months later when the drive seemed to start failing, at about 30% capacity, writes stopped working and anything written to seemed to have been corrupted. They were puzzled, but this is why such things service contracts. The vendor came out, replaced the drive, and everyone went on with life.
Till it happened again, at about the same capacity. Another replacement was made and vendor was quite red-faced and explained that they seemed to have run into a batch of dud drives. All was forgiven and life went on.
Till, it happened the third time. At this point, it was starting to embarrass everyone: The vendor, the people who ordered the hard drive in the first place, etc. So this time, instead of just allowing the vendor to take the drive back, the dean of the department demanded they diagnose the issue there on the spot.
Now, this wasn't the age of the sealed drive cases, certainly drives were still kept 'clean' but we weren't to the point yet where a single grain of dust could wipe out megabytes of info (heck, even the 24 inch platters needed to be in arrays of 50+ just dream of hitting 100 meg) so cracking open the drive wasn't that big of a deal.
So the vendor's tech, hoping to appease a clearly angry customer in the day and age when parts cost tens of thousands of dollars, popped open the drive.
Want to guess what they found?
Larger disks do indeed result in more surface area, but they also result in a higher centrifugal force on the edges. An increased force which the vendor apparently hadn't accounted for. Once the disks began to spin up, the glue holding the magnetic dust to the platter gave way, resulting in the platters being stripped clean after a certain radial length from the center. The disks themselves were fine up to that point, the dust was plastered to the case itself and when the platters came up to speed any dust that had fallen back onto them was once again flung up against the case.
The reason why the disks didn't seem to fail till they reached a certain capacity was simply because they weren't being used in a RAM fashion but were being written to in a sequential manner. The outer portions of the platters were only being hit once the inner portions were written to.
Perhaps the reason spindle speeds haven't gone up lately could be part of the same issue. Or perhaps I'm simply indulging in a bit of pointless nostalgia as I wait for this report I'm running to finish. Who knows...?
Never lived in a small town, have you? Where it's still possible to refer to someone as "one of the Salem Samples" or "one of the Doss daughters", it's entirely possible for the actions of 'one bad seed'(or conversely of 'one noble hero') to cast a shadow over the entire family.
Move into one of these towns and you will suddenly realize the level of blissful ignorance most suburban and urban folk live in when it comes to how heavily public opinion can impact your life.
Yes she posted it to the 'internets' and six days later pulled it. She went to the effort of tracking down the editor of the newspaper in question and asked they NOT publish it, to which they responsed they wouldn't. And then they turned around and did it anyway.
I also have a limited amount of sympathy for people who do stupid shit in public, but I also zero love for assholes who know someone is regretting what they said, and go out of their way not just to publish it but to do so all the while telling the person that they won't.
Not presented in the summary, but still relevant, is the fact that the editor in question knew both that the letter was not submitted by it's author (because the editor and the principal were pals) and knew that the actual author did not want the letter printed (because the girl contacted the editor once she learned it had been passed along and requested they not print it).
As such, regardless of whether I agree or not with your statements, they are moot. This was a deliberate act by the editor and not a simple mistake.
Reading elsewhere, the girl pulled the post from MySpace a few days after posting it, found out the principal had already passed it along to the editor, and asked them not to publish it. At that point, the publisher said they wouldn't, and then turned around and did it anyway.
But on the other hand, the editor in question was fired over the incident. Not much else the paper could have done at that point, one of the things about being an editor is that you don't have many people looking over your shoulder to see what you are doing.
Ok, I get the idea that you need ads on your site. And I fully understand that those ads are probably going to be served from an outside source who you don't have control over.
That being said, WHY, WHY, did you design your layout in such a way that a slow ad could slow down the page load? Aren't their about a hundred and one ways to slip ads into a page that ensure that the actual page loads and the ad just gets there when it gets there?
Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea, lets launch again with the most critical, third, panel of the windshield, the one that is actually responsible for handling the pressure, in potential danger of being cracked. I'm sure that wouldn't lead to anything potentially disasterous.
No, wait. Lets just say FUCK IT and try to burn the knob out, I'm sure that wouldn't cause any sort of potential for collaterial damage that wouldn't have to be evaluated by taking the whole damn thing apart.
Yeah, lets talk shit about the folk who actually are responsible for maintaining these things as if we had a fucking clue. I'm sure that proves our superiority over those damn eggheads.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
I agree with little of her vision of the world, but for some reason I have trouble mounting a reasonable argument against this one.
I think the point of the poster wasn't "a policy would make this OK" as much as "if they had had a policy then at least this idiot could have hidden behind that as a liability limiter".
Interestingly enough the reason why they did get 'a pass' was:
But, by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court held that the individual officials in the case should not be held liable, because "clearly established law" at the time of the search did not show that it violated the Fourth Amendment.
Which is more likely, bad guys targetting the captcha for Gmail, thus allowing them to register 1,000s of spam boxes, or the bad guys targetting the captcha for a single contact me/email address on a lone site?
And if the argument for the javascript crap was "it's proven the spambot scrapers don't do even that much work", why is the arugment against the captcha "well, if they poor effort into it, they might break it"?
Capatcha's, even the most simple of them, are what people should have been using in the first place.
Again, in places where trees work, they work. But Atlanta has a far differnt climate then say, Phoneix, Las Vegas, LA, or even NYC. Places where space or water are premiums are going to not be the best environments, nor are places that are too hot or too cold. Yes, different climates call for different types of trees, and in theory you could get something 'green' growing almost everywhere. But at that point, aren't you putting in as much effort just to go 'green' than you would if you just plopped a couple of these deals down in the middle of a park or under an interchange?
I'm not saying trees can't be part of the answer, but they are not a universally 'easy' solution even if they were capable of dealing the same level of reductions per square foot.
Unfortunately, what they are talking about there are greenhouses that are so heavy in vegetation that you could qualify them as artificial rain forests/jungle.
While it might be possible to grow normal crops in a greenhouse saturated with CO2 to enhance growing (the agri equivalent of bovine growth hormone I imagine), doing this outside of a greenhouse would necessitate having absolute control over the weather as well. As another commenter mentioned, it's not just the CO2 that is involved. You also need water, which is highly dependent on the air currents, which get really fucked up when you start messing with global temperature.
It's both a local and global problem. And a good solution would address both sides. Regardless, you still fail to account for the fact that this is the better solution purely on the suitability of trees to the task at hand. Find a tree that can pull down a ton of CO2 in a day, then come talk shit about the tech. Till then you are just bitching to hear the sound of your fingers hitting the keyboard.
Trees work in places trees work. Trees don't work in many places, such as the urban areas where cars are more likely to be concentrated at.
Trees are not a fire and forget tech, they require a good bit of maintence if you are attempting to use them for a purpose they require water, protection from pests and diseases, and room.
If you check the article, the device is the size of a small trailer, and pulls out a ton of CO2 a day. Compare that with trees packed into the equivalent amount of space (even assuming infinite vertical room) and trees suddenly become a laugh.
Additionally, while trees do actually convert the CO2 into something else, liquid CO2 is actually a in and of itself.
I think it's less to do with this one case as it is to do with the fact that the ASCAP's litigation history makes the RIAA look like the EFF.
Their legal theories often sound as if they were created by a Bizzaro version of Jack Thompson, one who doesn't have a hard on about video games but instead simply wants to ensure anyone who makes noise in any way pays the ASCAP for it.
As the summary mentioned (but linked a horrible site for backup), these ARE the people who went after summer camps to force them to pay an annual fee under the assumption that the campers would be singing around campfires or while on hikes. They are also the folk who went after open mic nights, even when the event organizers indicated that only orginal songs would be sung.
I'm mad, regardless of who they targeted, because the ASCAP seems to play the "throw as much shit at the wall as possible and see what sticks" game. That's not how the legal system should work.
So when I get home today, I have a 'recharging' station where everything from my Wiimotes to my iPod get set so they can be plugged in and recharged. Each item has its own charger, with accompanying wall wart, and its own cord. I've attempted, in the past, to come up with 'stylist' ways over hiding this mess. LifeHacker had has many articles on building 'pretty' recharging stations, but nothing I've tried comes close to looking like anything more than a high tech tentacle monster attempting to rape my desk.
Cue this setup, which in the far future when everyone stops screwing around with proprietary recharging schemes, where I could have the coils hidden in a compartment in the desk and simply have to place all the devices requiring recharging on top of it. No more playing musical outlets to manage all the wall warts, no more tentacle monster.
Just a desk with a bunch of devices tossed on top.
Now that's just the first thing I can think of off the top of my head. But there are all sorts of uses for a cordless method of supplying power within a yard radius. Any wireless device out there that is meant to be used in a fairly stationary location could benefit from this tech. Instead of batteries, outfit a house with strategically placed coils within the walls, the same way we do with outlets today. Now, anywhere you go inside the house is automatically powered. Of course, in that instance, you probably want to make sure you have the circuitry in place to 'cut' the power to the coils till there is a device to pull a load from, but these are things that are fairly easy to work out these days.
Do I see this as something that will actually happen in the near future? No. This new twist on the tech is an interesting one, but we've known in theory about this sort of thing for a long time now and people just don't trust 'power in the air'. Just think how paranoid the "don't live near high voltage lines" people would be over this sort of thing. But that doesn't negate what is being done, it just means that I imagine the tech will be matured far far earlier than the society it is meant for.
If the South still had slavery, would you have been one of the folk saying we just let the South get around to freeing the slaves on their own time?
Sometimes, the folk in power have enough power to ensure the folk who don't (that constitute 99% of the country) won't ever get a chance to change things.
I remember Tiananmen Square, and how very very sad I was that the only thing we seemed to be willing to do was watch.
I'm not saying Iran is in that spot, but I'm sure as hell not going to avoid lending a hand to the ones who want to get the truth out, just because that might cause the world to label us "busibodies".
PS. People hate the US for all sorts of reasons, but the primary still in this day and age isn't because we were busibodies but because we spent 50 years playing puppet masters who were willing to prop up even the most reprehensible leader of a country if that meant that it wasn't friends with the Soviets.
The second ammendment has more than enough supporters and lobbyists, to a fault, to need the ACLU's help. Let them concentrate on the issues that don't happen to have a group consisting of over four million people (which the 2nd ammendement most certainly does in the form of the NRA) playing watchdog over them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certain I can not help you. -^
A bigot? I don't think that means what you think it means.
Back when I was in college one of the 'cool' old Comp Sci professors had a tale he liked to share with his classes on the first day. I had him in a couple of classes, so I heard it over and over again. His presentation made it an amusing story if you could get over the fact that he smelt as if he lived in an ashtray.
It seems that back in the mainframe days, the standard way of increasing storage size on your hard drives was to make a bigger platter. Seems rather simple, right? The storage size grows exponentially with its radius. So adding an inch each time can lead to some fairly nice results, and with some platters topping out at 24 inches, that's some space.
Except....
One day, the university ordered the 'latest' hard drive for one of their mainframes. I'm sure it was a behemoth, it probably held around 50 meg. The vendor came by and installed it, and everything seemed fine till a few months later when the drive seemed to start failing, at about 30% capacity, writes stopped working and anything written to seemed to have been corrupted. They were puzzled, but this is why such things service contracts. The vendor came out, replaced the drive, and everyone went on with life.
Till it happened again, at about the same capacity. Another replacement was made and vendor was quite red-faced and explained that they seemed to have run into a batch of dud drives. All was forgiven and life went on.
Till, it happened the third time. At this point, it was starting to embarrass everyone: The vendor, the people who ordered the hard drive in the first place, etc. So this time, instead of just allowing the vendor to take the drive back, the dean of the department demanded they diagnose the issue there on the spot.
Now, this wasn't the age of the sealed drive cases, certainly drives were still kept 'clean' but we weren't to the point yet where a single grain of dust could wipe out megabytes of info (heck, even the 24 inch platters needed to be in arrays of 50+ just dream of hitting 100 meg) so cracking open the drive wasn't that big of a deal.
So the vendor's tech, hoping to appease a clearly angry customer in the day and age when parts cost tens of thousands of dollars, popped open the drive.
Want to guess what they found?
Larger disks do indeed result in more surface area, but they also result in a higher centrifugal force on the edges. An increased force which the vendor apparently hadn't accounted for. Once the disks began to spin up, the glue holding the magnetic dust to the platter gave way, resulting in the platters being stripped clean after a certain radial length from the center. The disks themselves were fine up to that point, the dust was plastered to the case itself and when the platters came up to speed any dust that had fallen back onto them was once again flung up against the case.
The reason why the disks didn't seem to fail till they reached a certain capacity was simply because they weren't being used in a RAM fashion but were being written to in a sequential manner. The outer portions of the platters were only being hit once the inner portions were written to.
Perhaps the reason spindle speeds haven't gone up lately could be part of the same issue. Or perhaps I'm simply indulging in a bit of pointless nostalgia as I wait for this report I'm running to finish. Who knows...?
Never lived in a small town, have you? Where it's still possible to refer to someone as "one of the Salem Samples" or "one of the Doss daughters", it's entirely possible for the actions of 'one bad seed'(or conversely of 'one noble hero') to cast a shadow over the entire family.
Move into one of these towns and you will suddenly realize the level of blissful ignorance most suburban and urban folk live in when it comes to how heavily public opinion can impact your life.
Yes she posted it to the 'internets' and six days later pulled it. She went to the effort of tracking down the editor of the newspaper in question and asked they NOT publish it, to which they responsed they wouldn't. And then they turned around and did it anyway.
I also have a limited amount of sympathy for people who do stupid shit in public, but I also zero love for assholes who know someone is regretting what they said, and go out of their way not just to publish it but to do so all the while telling the person that they won't.
Don't hate on the paper, the editor in question was already fired a while back.
Not presented in the summary, but still relevant, is the fact that the editor in question knew both that the letter was not submitted by it's author (because the editor and the principal were pals) and knew that the actual author did not want the letter printed (because the girl contacted the editor once she learned it had been passed along and requested they not print it).
As such, regardless of whether I agree or not with your statements, they are moot. This was a deliberate act by the editor and not a simple mistake.
Reading elsewhere, the girl pulled the post from MySpace a few days after posting it, found out the principal had already passed it along to the editor, and asked them not to publish it. At that point, the publisher said they wouldn't, and then turned around and did it anyway.
But on the other hand, the editor in question was fired over the incident. Not much else the paper could have done at that point, one of the things about being an editor is that you don't have many people looking over your shoulder to see what you are doing.
Ok, I get the idea that you need ads on your site. And I fully understand that those ads are probably going to be served from an outside source who you don't have control over.
That being said, WHY, WHY, did you design your layout in such a way that a slow ad could slow down the page load? Aren't their about a hundred and one ways to slip ads into a page that ensure that the actual page loads and the ad just gets there when it gets there?
Six months.
Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea, lets launch again with the most critical, third, panel of the windshield, the one that is actually responsible for handling the pressure, in potential danger of being cracked. I'm sure that wouldn't lead to anything potentially disasterous.
No, wait. Lets just say FUCK IT and try to burn the knob out, I'm sure that wouldn't cause any sort of potential for collaterial damage that wouldn't have to be evaluated by taking the whole damn thing apart.
Yeah, lets talk shit about the folk who actually are responsible for maintaining these things as if we had a fucking clue. I'm sure that proves our superiority over those damn eggheads.
Do you think MediaSentry would need a PI license to investigate that?
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
I agree with little of her vision of the world, but for some reason I have trouble mounting a reasonable argument against this one.
I think the point of the poster wasn't "a policy would make this OK" as much as "if they had had a policy then at least this idiot could have hidden behind that as a liability limiter".
Interestingly enough the reason why they did get 'a pass' was:
Yes, it is. Point?
Which is more likely, bad guys targetting the captcha for Gmail, thus allowing them to register 1,000s of spam boxes, or the bad guys targetting the captcha for a single contact me/email address on a lone site?
And if the argument for the javascript crap was "it's proven the spambot scrapers don't do even that much work", why is the arugment against the captcha "well, if they poor effort into it, they might break it"?
Capatcha's, even the most simple of them, are what people should have been using in the first place.
Again, in places where trees work, they work. But Atlanta has a far differnt climate then say, Phoneix, Las Vegas, LA, or even NYC. Places where space or water are premiums are going to not be the best environments, nor are places that are too hot or too cold. Yes, different climates call for different types of trees, and in theory you could get something 'green' growing almost everywhere. But at that point, aren't you putting in as much effort just to go 'green' than you would if you just plopped a couple of these deals down in the middle of a park or under an interchange?
I'm not saying trees can't be part of the answer, but they are not a universally 'easy' solution even if they were capable of dealing the same level of reductions per square foot.
Unfortunately, what they are talking about there are greenhouses that are so heavy in vegetation that you could qualify them as artificial rain forests/jungle.
While it might be possible to grow normal crops in a greenhouse saturated with CO2 to enhance growing (the agri equivalent of bovine growth hormone I imagine), doing this outside of a greenhouse would necessitate having absolute control over the weather as well. As another commenter mentioned, it's not just the CO2 that is involved. You also need water, which is highly dependent on the air currents, which get really fucked up when you start messing with global temperature.
It's both a local and global problem. And a good solution would address both sides. Regardless, you still fail to account for the fact that this is the better solution purely on the suitability of trees to the task at hand. Find a tree that can pull down a ton of CO2 in a day, then come talk shit about the tech. Till then you are just bitching to hear the sound of your fingers hitting the keyboard.
Trees work in places trees work. Trees don't work in many places, such as the urban areas where cars are more likely to be concentrated at.
Trees are not a fire and forget tech, they require a good bit of maintence if you are attempting to use them for a purpose they require water, protection from pests and diseases, and room.
If you check the article, the device is the size of a small trailer, and pulls out a ton of CO2 a day. Compare that with trees packed into the equivalent amount of space (even assuming infinite vertical room) and trees suddenly become a laugh.
Additionally, while trees do actually convert the CO2 into something else, liquid CO2 is actually a in and of itself.
I think it's less to do with this one case as it is to do with the fact that the ASCAP's litigation history makes the RIAA look like the EFF.
Their legal theories often sound as if they were created by a Bizzaro version of Jack Thompson, one who doesn't have a hard on about video games but instead simply wants to ensure anyone who makes noise in any way pays the ASCAP for it.
As the summary mentioned (but linked a horrible site for backup), these ARE the people who went after summer camps to force them to pay an annual fee under the assumption that the campers would be singing around campfires or while on hikes. They are also the folk who went after open mic nights, even when the event organizers indicated that only orginal songs would be sung.
I'm mad, regardless of who they targeted, because the ASCAP seems to play the "throw as much shit at the wall as possible and see what sticks" game. That's not how the legal system should work.
SAMPLE APPLICATION:
Now that's just the first thing I can think of off the top of my head. But there are all sorts of uses for a cordless method of supplying power within a yard radius. Any wireless device out there that is meant to be used in a fairly stationary location could benefit from this tech. Instead of batteries, outfit a house with strategically placed coils within the walls, the same way we do with outlets today. Now, anywhere you go inside the house is automatically powered. Of course, in that instance, you probably want to make sure you have the circuitry in place to 'cut' the power to the coils till there is a device to pull a load from, but these are things that are fairly easy to work out these days.
Do I see this as something that will actually happen in the near future? No. This new twist on the tech is an interesting one, but we've known in theory about this sort of thing for a long time now and people just don't trust 'power in the air'. Just think how paranoid the "don't live near high voltage lines" people would be over this sort of thing. But that doesn't negate what is being done, it just means that I imagine the tech will be matured far far earlier than the society it is meant for.
If the South still had slavery, would you have been one of the folk saying we just let the South get around to freeing the slaves on their own time?
Sometimes, the folk in power have enough power to ensure the folk who don't (that constitute 99% of the country) won't ever get a chance to change things.
I remember Tiananmen Square, and how very very sad I was that the only thing we seemed to be willing to do was watch.
I'm not saying Iran is in that spot, but I'm sure as hell not going to avoid lending a hand to the ones who want to get the truth out, just because that might cause the world to label us "busibodies".
PS. People hate the US for all sorts of reasons, but the primary still in this day and age isn't because we were busibodies but because we spent 50 years playing puppet masters who were willing to prop up even the most reprehensible leader of a country if that meant that it wasn't friends with the Soviets.
Last I checked, freedom from illegal searches, regardless of the pretext for the search, was.
The second ammendment has more than enough supporters and lobbyists, to a fault, to need the ACLU's help. Let them concentrate on the issues that don't happen to have a group consisting of over four million people (which the 2nd ammendement most certainly does in the form of the NRA) playing watchdog over them.