I don't care who you work for, I have a 10 m/bit connection with telewest, no traffic shaping, no filtering, no contention, nothing in any way less than exactly what is advertised.
Telewest / blueyonder have enough bandwith for hundreds of television channels, and as HDTV comes in they will have bandwidth for hundreds of those too.
I can suck DVD ISO's off usenet all day and all night and nobody gives a shit.
The difference is YOUR customers will eventually be joining me, or a company like the one I'm with, while your company folds, or gets a clue.
BT is the nigger in the woodpile here, they artificially screw the pitch for all their resellers, such as the ISP you work for.
It is an utter waste of time to study scenarios where customer orders product and pays for it, vendor ships product, customer receives product, end of story.
The _important_ metric is always the worst case scenario where the customer ends up falling in between the cracks in between different departments within a large organisation, nobody the customer contacts has responsobility, nobody has authority, nobody has motivation, nobody has their ass on the line if it escalates.
Anyone can sell acreage on the moon, you judge a company or business by how badly its worst mistakes fuck customers over, and you place the responsobility for that exactly where it belongs, on the directors conference table, and let it run down right through the company.
The reality is the bigger the company the more likely its reaction to a fuck-up being escalated through inaction is to undulge in ever more psychopathic behaviour.
I worked for a man who was incredibly rich and extremely well connected, there might have been things he couldn't buy, like some countries, due to lack of money, and there was one thing he could not buy in reality, which was sight for his blind daughter...
However he did tell me very matter of factly that when you were a millionaire it was a simple matter of going to miami where jewish doctors (I'm repeating what I was told, so I'm not going to alter it to remove any racial / religious references in a bid to make it more credible etc) would sell you any transplantable organ or tissue you liked, at a price, harvested from medically screened live donors, said donors being sourced in south america.
A healthy 20 year old heart, chosen to match your tissue etc etc etc
He was as matter of facts about things that were just there and available to the super rich as we would be about a 1U web server, it's there if you want it.
I doubt the actual true non politically correct market value of a single average human life has increased any in the intervening 19 years.
I would be most grateful if you could e-mail me, re a common interest in the field of PDP-11 and power generation... davenull AT blueyonder DOT co DOT uk
Audio cassette was lower quality than anything else at the time, but it was convenient and durable and most important of all offered longer playtime than anything else.
I currently have 100+ gigs of mp3's.
Yes, theoretically the sound quality isn't all it could be, no matter, perhaps as many as 0.1% of music listeners have both the equipment (eg amp stage and speakers) and enviornment (eg anechoic audio only "music" room) to spot the difference with any degree or reliability or repeatability, and they won't be touching digital anyway...
mp3 is not going anywhere, and probably won't for several more years...
imagine, a new codec that offers DOUBLE the file size compression with no extra degradation, ooh wow, I'll save a whole 50 bucks worth of hard disk space, and I still won't use it unless everyone and everything I can touch supports it, just like mp3 today.
Why do people still use jpeg, there are "better" ways out there, provided you exclude universal transparency and platform independence from your definition of "better"
I went/lived through reel to reel, LP vinyl, 8 track, audio cassette and red book CD, and mp3 blows everything else away.
What with the ever increasing storage density of hard disk (solid state or otherwise) media, I really cannot see or concieve of ANYTHING on the horizon that is about to dent mp3.
To all intents and purposes mp3 is free, is open, is universal, and is good enough, prtability is an issue for people like me with 0.1 TB of mp3's, but that is coming, I can fit it all on a new 2.5" laptop hard disk
The ONLY POSSIBLE reason I can see for mp3 being supplanted for audio is people wanting 24/7 indexable and searchable records of their lives as an audio stream, a new codec and file format optimised for that purpose would beat mp3, for that purpose.
Sorry, that's a lot of business plans, planned obsolescence and pet projects dead in the uterus, tough.
I'm typing this on a 3 Ghz Dell Inspiron 5160 that I bought new for 490 Uk Pounds Sterling, it's coming up on a year old now, but I could go out today and buy a similar performance / spec dell for the same money.
Or I could go out and buy 50, or 100.
Oh yes, this box dual boots windows xp and debian, I wiped it when I got it and did my own virgin installs.
Tell me where I can go and buy a new Mac laptop at a similar performance / spec point for anywhere near similar money.....
Nah, I'll have to pay double the money at least, and then I STILL WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DUAL BOOT to any OS I choose.
Laptops are a commodity tool, the mobile computer, Dell, much as I detest them, have the economies of scale to make them a serious contender for anyone looking to buy a commodity device. (no way in hell I'd buy a dell desktop or server)
CNC is really starting to take off, a CNC robot is the modern equivalent of the black plantation slave, at the moment the CNC market is dominated by proprietary non standards compliant hardware and software attached to each machine, but this is changing.
If you want more (interesting) work than you can shake a stick at then get into CNC now, and this doesn't mean just learn G-code programming, it means learning things like "real time" linux extensions, feedback and closed loop systems from hardware, etc etc etc.
trust me on this, or don't, go get an MSCE and stay poor and unemployable...
it's bloody obvious that nothing can spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously.
this is an experiment in heisenbergs closed box, it's not factual, it's not real world, it's a thought experiment in the realms where we have a whole bunch of other thought experiments that attempt to explain the real world.
cold cathode just like domestic flourescents have a "half life", which means a light quoted as having a 10,000 hour lamp life will be half as bright in lumens at 10,000 hours, it will also be emitting different spectrum of light as it ages.
The tech stuff was nice, like the "living" gardens that were bio-engineered permieter security systems.
The lead actress was worth looking at.
The over all look and feel was nice and clean, it looked fresh and sharp.
Bad points -
The plot could be summed up as pandemic hits the world, a few are immunised just in time to save humanity and congregate in a single "utopian" city (movie starts here) the cure has a side effect, infertility, so they started cloning each other, 7th generation clone leader/dictator searches for a cure only to discover nature has spontaneously fixed the problem somehow, clone leaders clone sibling tries to supress this to maintain the status quo, cue lots of fighting scenes.
The action was cartooney, eg not credible, blade runner did it right, one "soldier", no matter how well trained, cannot take on and defeat hordes of other soldiers with at least equal access to military tech
The acting was two dimensional, but then that's all this film ever called for.
The ending was of course utterly predictable.
Was it worth watching? -
Seeing as I downloaded it for free from usenet it was worth the expense and the 90 minutes of my time to watch it, I've seen a __LOT__ worse films.... eg compared to the dukes of hazzard this was a masterpiece, but compared to blade runner it was trite, it was on a par with a trekkie type movie mebbe
If I'd paid ten UK pounds for a cinema ticket I'd have been well pissed.
The 1918 Flu started in the USA, in army camps, it was related to the present bird flue genetically we now know, it killed more US citizens that ALL the wars this century combined, amazing things happened, coffins were so short supply undertakers had armed guards for them.
The 1918 flu mainly killed those between 20 and 29 years of age, we do not know if this is because their immune systems cooked them or if it was because the older people had been exposed to similar flu strains 30+ years before.
The UK reckons it will have enough doses of "Tamiflu" (which might not work anyway) for half the population by September 2006, a year away, heigh ho.
If you want drugs you could do worse than stocking up on "Nurofen", it's got a pretty powerful anti inflammatory which may protect your lungs long enough for you to develop resistance, or it may not.
1918 Flu killed an ___estimated___ 40 million people, nobody knows the true numbers, there was a world war and much of the world didn't have a census.
The 1918 Flu had widely varying mortality rates, in some indonesian islands fatality rates were as high as 98%
World population today is FAR higher than in 1918, if the next one has the same 3% mortality rate 194 million people will die.
World population mobility is far higher today that in 1918, people will circle the planet before the incubation period is over and symptoms start to show, so WHEN it comes you WILL be exposed to it.
___IF___ mortality rate is 15%, which is between a third and a quarter of what it has been so far, a BILLION people will die.
Survivability is likely to have more to do with your genetic heritage and exposure than where you live, what you do, or what treatment you have available.
It's too big to freak out about, it is coming, sooner or later, and either your number is up or it isn't, by the time you know you'll probably have literally a few hours from feeling unwell to being bedridden.
I am writing this from Exeter in the south west UK, 300 yards away from me is Exeter St Davids railway station, which links us to Falmouth in the west, and London in the East.
Before this railway line was built (by I K Brunel, to link the deep water port of falmouth to london so his passengers could get his trains between london and cornwall and then his ships between cornwall and the USA, which saved ship travel time up the english channel, around the corner and then up the thames) we here in Exeter had our clocks set to a different time zone, by a matter of minutes, than London.
This played hell with train timetables (in those days they could run trains to a tighter schedule than we can 100 years later.. go figure) so one of the DIRECT results of the Great Wester Railway was the UK having a single unified time zone.
(they did other shit too, crappy seaside towns like Weston were renamed Weston Super Mare, a name it still carries to this day, because it sounded classier for the new rail tourism)
I guess you will find similar reasons for the US time zones
You expect moderators to read anything except the subject????
If anyone asks you to explain why slashdot is now a steaming pile of crap instead of the hugely interesting site that it used to be, just point them at the moderators....
same as wikipedia territory stamping where a determined clueless loon will drive off a world reknowned expert in any given field, which, hypocritically, slashdotters will bemoan...
I think the goat story is brilliant for exactly the reasons you mention, you can apply it to so much of modern life, and the fact is mere substitution of "goats" for "entropia" or "stock market" should not be sufficient to make something eminently sensible suddenly seem eminently stupid, if it does then you need to seriously question the validity of the eminently sensible rationale.
Jan 01 2003 The snow had stopped. The world lay paralysed beneath it. We would be here for some time.
By Julian Gough
"Ibrahim Bihi," he said, extending his right hand. "Dr. Ibrahim Bihi. I am Somali. Oh, it is a long story."
"Jude O'Reilly," I said, extending mine. We shook. "Please, tell the story. I like stories."
"Very well, if you are sure... "
He cleared his throat, and began.
"I eked a meagre living, exploiting a fundamental structural discrepancy in the price of Goats." He looked me in the eye.
I nodded. "You've lost me," I said.
"I must apologise," he said. "My degree is in economics, and it has had an unfortunate effect on my conversational English. Allow me to begin again..." He composed himself. "My story is a sorry tale, of the Dismal Science, in the heart of the Dark Continent..."
"Lost me," I said, nodding.
"A story. Of Economics. In Africa."
"Ah, grand. I have you now," I said, entirely gratified by this excellent clarification. I'd known he had it in him, if he simply made the effort. "Now we're sucking diesel! Sound man. On you go."
He recomposed himself and, after a pause, continued.
"After the final collapse of the Somali state, the confiscation of my property, the destruction of my possessions and my repeated relocation due to the toing and froing of multiple overlapping civil wars, I eventually found myself in Hargeisa, owning only a goat."
"What was she called?"
"Who?"
"The Goat."
"She was a goat. She didn't have a name."
"I find it hard to follow a story without a name," I said. "It is a weakness in me."
"Call her anything you like."
"Can I call her Ethel?" I said, for I had a fondness for the name, it being the name of the unmarried sister of the Orphanage Cook. Ethel gave us all a bag of Emerald sweets to share every Christmas. Thus, every third year I got one and, by rationing my consumption of it to a judicious lick at bedtime, could usually make it last till the taking down of the decorations on January 6th, or a little later. The sweet wrapper itself, stored under my pillow, often maintained a trace of coconutty, chocolatey fragrance till March.
"Feel free to think of the goat as Ethel."
"Thank you." I closed my eyes. Ethel the Goat shimmered and came into hard focus, replacing the faint, nebulous, nameless goat Ibrahim Bihi had originally introduced. Ethel chewed meditatively, and tilted her head to one side, looking at me unblinking.
Opening my eyes again, I urged him to continue.
He continued. "The forced sale of a goat in wartime is unlikely to realise the full value of the goat."
I mentally substituted the word "Ethel" for the terms "a goat" and "the goat", and the meaning became entirely clear. I closed my eyes and smiled fondly at Ethel, as he continued.
"Alternatively, the slaughter and personal consumption of the goat, while keeping one alive in the short term, would lead in the medium term to having no goat, and no money. In the long term, with neither assets nor capital nor cashflow, death would inevitably ensue. Luckily, my PhD had been devoted to aspects of arbitrage; the exploitation of price discrepancies in imperfect markets. I thus resolved to apply my knowledge of temporary market inefficiencies to my Goat."
He thus resolved to apply his knowledge of temporary market inefficiencies to Ethel, I said under my breath.
"This final, or ultimate, goat, on which all my hopes rested, had only three legs, due to shrapnel from a mine stepped on some weeks previously by my second-last, or penultimate, goat, on the trek to Hargeisa."
Hastily naming the penultimate goat Charles, I exploded it immediately before I could bond with it, and removed Ethel's rear le
Rumour has it that USAF pilots in afghanistan and other places where conventional aircraft munitions were pretty useless found that a low pass with the "attack" radar set on maximum power did quite a good job of causing cataracts in whoever you flew over, thus blinding them, thus achieving the same stated end "non fatal incapacitation" in typical mealymouth doublespeak.
"it has been impossible to get a true white display on TFT"
bullshit
I was buying Sharp industrial grade TFT back in 1999 which had the original backlights removed and replaced with high intensity 1500 candela jobs by a company called Landmark in the states, to this day at native resolution it blows away EVERYTHING else, even my 21 inch Sony G520's, people just go "WOW!" when they see it...
know what the secret was?
not the backlight, that just gives you paper white when you want it.
the true secret was a 300 dollar RGB to TFT board buried in the back of the screen, in preferenve to the cheap consumer grade crap ALL these TFT's have to do this job.
Tom's should stick to talking about selling ad space, it's the one thing they know about.
The first thing that occurred to me was the "only in america" things we hear.
like "only in america can an ordinary man go apeshit and kill his entire family, and then say GOD TOLD ME TO DO IT"
have to say from a non USA viewpoint you gotta question which is better? a/ raghead crazed islamic fundamentalist b/ redneck crazed xtian fundamentalist
I have a feeling the crazed islamic fundamentalist of probably slightly more honest and open about his beliefs 12 months before he makes the 6 o clock news.
There was an article about various sorts of exoskeleton, including actual photohraphs of one with a human being inside it, and it was doing heavy cargo lifting... the article said they were developed for the US Army.
I was only a kid at the time, and soon forgot all about it.
Then I saw Alien 2 or 3 whichever it was, and Ripley gets into this big yellow exoskeleton, and I was instantly zapped back to being a small boy reading pop mechanics and seeing pictures of a human being in a damn near identical construct.***
"Aaaah" I thought, "the special effects guys are my age and read PM too"
I really cannot be any more accurate about the date, but I can recall other articles in the same time period, the flying car, the PM 38 speedboat (which my dad built), which might be enough for a PM buff to trace it.
So really this is not news, or even new, it's 40+ years old and predates the Apollo program.
*** I grew up to be an engineer, like my dad, and now I understand that compared to a cargo lifter of wheels, eg a fork lift, all these exoskeleton designs will be horribly inefficient mechanically and far more expensive to make and maintain, so no conspiracy theory needed to explain why they are hidden away in area 51 and on the sekret moon base
I was on one of the very first ADSL exchanges in the UK, 512 kbit down / 128 up, can't remember what it cost but it wasn't "cheap", except compared with the old days of 1.5 p (UK pounds 0.015) per minute 56k slodem.
(As a "funny" aside some years before when 28k was the norm and I had some cash burning a hole in my pocket, I met a guy named mark who had just started an ISP, him, one part time secretary, one SG box and one half empty rack cabinet, I can remember considering the idea of offering to match his capital investment for a 45% share, and rejecting it because of the 1.5 pennies per minute phone costs, "it will never fly" was my percieved wisdom.... he is still around today, one of the biggest independent ISP's in the UK, Eclipse.......)
ADSL was based upon the necessity of a BT land line, no matter who you bought the ADSL service from, about a year in I wanted to change the billing name on the phone bill, BT said no problem, we'll just cancel your ADSL and set you up a new account, should only be off line for a day or two and that will be 60 UK pounds....
I told them to take a hike and joined Eurobell / Telewest cable, for free.
Initially the same speeds, in theory, no setup fee, also no contention ratio, so whatever speed was advertised, you got.
When we moved house a year later our cable came with us, internet and telephone connections and numbers, simply moved with us, instantly.
In the interim we've ramped up from the initial 512, though 1 mbit, 2 mbit, to 4 mbit today.
No contention, no caps, no throttling, no "transparent" (but not) proxies, no IP changes, no downtime. 50 Uk pounds a month.
Just had a letter from them yesterday, they're upping me from 4 mbit to 10 mbit, not merely no charge, but they are reducing the monthly cost from 50 UK pounds to 35 Uk pounds.
OK, not as good as Japan and Korea, but they are getting there, and this is my prediction.
BT have infrastructure problems, whereas the cable companies have bandwidth coming out of their asses.
What will happen is the cable companies will be first to upgrade by making their services symetrical, up/down the same speed... at that point "if you build it they will come" world + dog on cable will start running their own servers...
Sure, you will have people hosting porn dvd iso's and people hosting photoshop 8, but you will also have people hosting their existing websites, static engine websites, steam engine websites, devon river websites, dartmoor websites, river fishing websites, custom car websites, etc etc etc, and on those websites they'll have high quality video clips, mebbe 500 megabyte, hopefully divx, or maybe just customised debian live cd's, and then, my friends, it will take off...
Just the cable company itself will have enough customers to drive this internally within their own network.....
BT users on ADSL3plusplusplus will be able to access this data, but not serve it, so they will be voting with their feet and wallets...
now is the time to start stockpiling all those run cold, run silent, run cheap cobalt RAQ pizza boxes that are coming out of farms... lost of home users are going to find them ideal in a year or two.
I'm glad someone else over there sees the hitler parallels.....
we have a polotician or two here in the UK who, were goebbels resurrected, would gain a nod of recognition from him.
the thing is in the USA there are more of these people, and they are backed up by other with an agenda.
the hitler parallels aren't the half of, the real problem is the religious bullshit, basically everything the american machine is accusing "axis of evil" countries of, just substitute "(american flavour) christianity" for "islam" and "USA" for "current shitlist country with resources to be stolen" and you get a perfect match.
The person saying this is white, mature, educated, well travelled, and not american.
I deliberately said "not american" as opposed to "european" or "english", because that is fast becoming the only distinction required.
the USA, that is the people, need a wake up message, perhaps a wake up message in the form of your entire congress including the president chimp being nuked.
the WTC obviously wasn't a clear enough message.
"9/11" was ___NOT___ an attack on the american people or way of life or anything else, it was an attack on USA foreign policy as driven by USA monetary policy, hence hitting two buildings full of financial institutions.
If I wanted to slap the face of the USA ___PEOPLE___ I'd fly a jet into the Statue of Liberty, the one true global symbol of all that is american.....
if this has been done it would have killed maybe a hundred people, but rocked every citizen in the USA back on their heels as a personal insult.
no way lady liberty was "Overlooked" as a possible target, no chance in hell, ergo the perpetrators werem't after slapping you all personally across the face.
3 jetliners could have been crashed into three electricity stations around new york and thrown the city into anarchy, same as new orleans, but it wasn't done.
bottom line is it is really hard to think of targets that are more clearly and obviously specifically USA financial / foreign policy related than those that were hit
and yet you lot still do not get it
bush is still there, getting worse every day.
we don't care too much if he ruins america, we're sorry for you as citizens, but then you keep voting him in and who are we to interfere?
we do care if he ruins our countries.
bush is the village psychopath, as time passes and his behaviour worstens, more and more of the villagers are going to turn against him
sure, in the ensuing fight much of the village may be razed to the ground, but some of it will survive, if we don't do something about the village psychopath he will desroy ALL of the village.
USA citizens need to wake up and ask themselves is living in a destroyed US economy, like post katrina new orleans or a kurt russell vision of new york, is the future they really want, if not, it's time to cut loose, very publicly, from the insane chimp and his money men backers.
I guess we'll tell how blinkered you all are from how quickly this message is modded as "troll", if slashdot had regional modding you'd find non USAians modding it differently....
it looks like all the "splash" is created by the outward spread of the liquid from ground zero, it rushes outwards, but appears to "catch air" presumably because the surface tension / minimum stable raduis has been exceeded, and from that point on it becomes chaotic mixture of small droplets going every which way.
Slashdot Mirror
so the riddle when solved will be a latin saying, not english.
I favour something along the lines of
Ceasar si viveret, ad remum dareris
I don't care who you work for, I have a 10 m/bit connection with telewest, no traffic shaping, no filtering, no contention, nothing in any way less than exactly what is advertised.
Telewest / blueyonder have enough bandwith for hundreds of television channels, and as HDTV comes in they will have bandwidth for hundreds of those too.
I can suck DVD ISO's off usenet all day and all night and nobody gives a shit.
The difference is YOUR customers will eventually be joining me, or a company like the one I'm with, while your company folds, or gets a clue.
BT is the nigger in the woodpile here, they artificially screw the pitch for all their resellers, such as the ISP you work for.
This is the thing nobody apparently gets.
It is an utter waste of time to study scenarios where customer orders product and pays for it, vendor ships product, customer receives product, end of story.
The _important_ metric is always the worst case scenario where the customer ends up falling in between the cracks in between different departments within a large organisation, nobody the customer contacts has responsobility, nobody has authority, nobody has motivation, nobody has their ass on the line if it escalates.
Anyone can sell acreage on the moon, you judge a company or business by how badly its worst mistakes fuck customers over, and you place the responsobility for that exactly where it belongs, on the directors conference table, and let it run down right through the company.
The reality is the bigger the company the more likely its reaction to a fuck-up being escalated through inaction is to undulge in ever more psychopathic behaviour.
No names and no pack drill.
I worked for a man who was incredibly rich and extremely well connected, there might have been things he couldn't buy, like some countries, due to lack of money, and there was one thing he could not buy in reality, which was sight for his blind daughter...
However he did tell me very matter of factly that when you were a millionaire it was a simple matter of going to miami where jewish doctors (I'm repeating what I was told, so I'm not going to alter it to remove any racial / religious references in a bid to make it more credible etc) would sell you any transplantable organ or tissue you liked, at a price, harvested from medically screened live donors, said donors being sourced in south america.
A healthy 20 year old heart, chosen to match your tissue etc etc etc
He was as matter of facts about things that were just there and available to the super rich as we would be about a 1U web server, it's there if you want it.
I doubt the actual true non politically correct market value of a single average human life has increased any in the intervening 19 years.
I would be most grateful if you could e-mail me, re a common interest in the field of PDP-11 and power generation... davenull AT blueyonder DOT co DOT uk
The market dictates what rules.
Audio cassette was lower quality than anything else at the time, but it was convenient and durable and most important of all offered longer playtime than anything else.
I currently have 100+ gigs of mp3's.
Yes, theoretically the sound quality isn't all it could be, no matter, perhaps as many as 0.1% of music listeners have both the equipment (eg amp stage and speakers) and enviornment (eg anechoic audio only "music" room) to spot the difference with any degree or reliability or repeatability, and they won't be touching digital anyway...
mp3 is not going anywhere, and probably won't for several more years...
imagine, a new codec that offers DOUBLE the file size compression with no extra degradation, ooh wow, I'll save a whole 50 bucks worth of hard disk space, and I still won't use it unless everyone and everything I can touch supports it, just like mp3 today.
Why do people still use jpeg, there are "better" ways out there, provided you exclude universal transparency and platform independence from your definition of "better"
I went/lived through reel to reel, LP vinyl, 8 track, audio cassette and red book CD, and mp3 blows everything else away.
What with the ever increasing storage density of hard disk (solid state or otherwise) media, I really cannot see or concieve of ANYTHING on the horizon that is about to dent mp3.
To all intents and purposes mp3 is free, is open, is universal, and is good enough, prtability is an issue for people like me with 0.1 TB of mp3's, but that is coming, I can fit it all on a new 2.5" laptop hard disk
The ONLY POSSIBLE reason I can see for mp3 being supplanted for audio is people wanting 24/7 indexable and searchable records of their lives as an audio stream, a new codec and file format optimised for that purpose would beat mp3, for that purpose.
Sorry, that's a lot of business plans, planned obsolescence and pet projects dead in the uterus, tough.
I'm typing this on a 3 Ghz Dell Inspiron 5160 that I bought new for 490 Uk Pounds Sterling, it's coming up on a year old now, but I could go out today and buy a similar performance / spec dell for the same money.
Or I could go out and buy 50, or 100.
Oh yes, this box dual boots windows xp and debian, I wiped it when I got it and did my own virgin installs.
Tell me where I can go and buy a new Mac laptop at a similar performance / spec point for anywhere near similar money.....
Nah, I'll have to pay double the money at least, and then I STILL WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DUAL BOOT to any OS I choose.
Laptops are a commodity tool, the mobile computer, Dell, much as I detest them, have the economies of scale to make them a serious contender for anyone looking to buy a commodity device.
(no way in hell I'd buy a dell desktop or server)
Computers are ___useless__ without I/O
CNC is really starting to take off, a CNC robot is the modern equivalent of the black plantation slave, at the moment the CNC market is dominated by proprietary non standards compliant hardware and software attached to each machine, but this is changing.
If you want more (interesting) work than you can shake a stick at then get into CNC now, and this doesn't mean just learn G-code programming, it means learning things like "real time" linux extensions, feedback and closed loop systems from hardware, etc etc etc.
trust me on this, or don't, go get an MSCE and stay poor and unemployable...
it's bloody obvious that nothing can spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously.
this is an experiment in heisenbergs closed box, it's not factual, it's not real world, it's a thought experiment in the realms where we have a whole bunch of other thought experiments that attempt to explain the real world.
cold cathode just like domestic flourescents have a "half life", which means a light quoted as having a 10,000 hour lamp life will be half as bright in lumens at 10,000 hours, it will also be emitting different spectrum of light as it ages.
Good points -
The tech stuff was nice, like the "living" gardens that were bio-engineered permieter security systems.
The lead actress was worth looking at.
The over all look and feel was nice and clean, it looked fresh and sharp.
Bad points -
The plot could be summed up as pandemic hits the world, a few are immunised just in time to save humanity and congregate in a single "utopian" city (movie starts here) the cure has a side effect, infertility, so they started cloning each other, 7th generation clone leader/dictator searches for a cure only to discover nature has spontaneously fixed the problem somehow, clone leaders clone sibling tries to supress this to maintain the status quo, cue lots of fighting scenes.
The action was cartooney, eg not credible, blade runner did it right, one "soldier", no matter how well trained, cannot take on and defeat hordes of other soldiers with at least equal access to military tech
The acting was two dimensional, but then that's all this film ever called for.
The ending was of course utterly predictable.
Was it worth watching? -
Seeing as I downloaded it for free from usenet it was worth the expense and the 90 minutes of my time to watch it, I've seen a __LOT__ worse films.... eg compared to the dukes of hazzard this was a masterpiece, but compared to blade runner it was trite, it was on a par with a trekkie type movie mebbe
If I'd paid ten UK pounds for a cinema ticket I'd have been well pissed.
HTH
can't say any more as yet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant and others
The 1918 Flu started in the USA, in army camps, it was related to the present bird flue genetically we now know, it killed more US citizens that ALL the wars this century combined, amazing things happened, coffins were so short supply undertakers had armed guards for them.
The 1918 flu mainly killed those between 20 and 29 years of age, we do not know if this is because their immune systems cooked them or if it was because the older people had been exposed to similar flu strains 30+ years before.
The UK reckons it will have enough doses of "Tamiflu" (which might not work anyway) for half the population by September 2006, a year away, heigh ho.
If you want drugs you could do worse than stocking up on "Nurofen", it's got a pretty powerful anti inflammatory which may protect your lungs long enough for you to develop resistance, or it may not.
1918 Flu killed an ___estimated___ 40 million people, nobody knows the true numbers, there was a world war and much of the world didn't have a census.
The 1918 Flu had widely varying mortality rates, in some indonesian islands fatality rates were as high as 98%
World population today is FAR higher than in 1918, if the next one has the same 3% mortality rate 194 million people will die.
World population mobility is far higher today that in 1918, people will circle the planet before the incubation period is over and symptoms start to show, so WHEN it comes you WILL be exposed to it.
___IF___ mortality rate is 15%, which is between a third and a quarter of what it has been so far, a BILLION people will die.
Survivability is likely to have more to do with your genetic heritage and exposure than where you live, what you do, or what treatment you have available.
It's too big to freak out about, it is coming, sooner or later, and either your number is up or it isn't, by the time you know you'll probably have literally a few hours from feeling unwell to being bedridden.
I am writing this from Exeter in the south west UK, 300 yards away from me is Exeter St Davids railway station, which links us to Falmouth in the west, and London in the East.
Before this railway line was built (by I K Brunel, to link the deep water port of falmouth to london so his passengers could get his trains between london and cornwall and then his ships between cornwall and the USA, which saved ship travel time up the english channel, around the corner and then up the thames) we here in Exeter had our clocks set to a different time zone, by a matter of minutes, than London.
This played hell with train timetables (in those days they could run trains to a tighter schedule than we can 100 years later.. go figure) so one of the DIRECT results of the Great Wester Railway was the UK having a single unified time zone.
(they did other shit too, crappy seaside towns like Weston were renamed Weston Super Mare, a name it still carries to this day, because it sounded classier for the new rail tourism)
I guess you will find similar reasons for the US time zones
You expect moderators to read anything except the subject????
If anyone asks you to explain why slashdot is now a steaming pile of crap instead of the hugely interesting site that it used to be, just point them at the moderators....
same as wikipedia territory stamping where a determined clueless loon will drive off a world reknowned expert in any given field, which, hypocritically, slashdotters will bemoan...
I think the goat story is brilliant for exactly the reasons you mention, you can apply it to so much of modern life, and the fact is mere substitution of "goats" for "entropia" or "stock market" should not be sufficient to make something eminently sensible suddenly seem eminently stupid, if it does then you need to seriously question the validity of the eminently sensible rationale.
lifted from http://www.somalilandnet.com/somaliland_voice/arti cles/11592.shtml
The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble
Jan 01 2003 The snow had stopped. The world lay paralysed beneath it. We would be here for some time.
By Julian Gough
"Ibrahim Bihi," he said, extending his right hand. "Dr. Ibrahim Bihi. I am Somali. Oh, it is a long story."
"Jude O'Reilly," I said, extending mine. We shook. "Please, tell the story. I like stories."
"Very well, if you are sure... "
He cleared his throat, and began.
"I eked a meagre living, exploiting a fundamental structural discrepancy in the price of Goats." He looked me in the eye.
I nodded. "You've lost me," I said.
"I must apologise," he said. "My degree is in economics, and it has had an unfortunate effect on my conversational English. Allow me to begin again..." He composed himself. "My story is a sorry tale, of the Dismal Science, in the heart of the Dark Continent..."
"Lost me," I said, nodding.
"A story. Of Economics. In Africa."
"Ah, grand. I have you now," I said, entirely gratified by this excellent clarification. I'd known he had it in him, if he simply made the effort. "Now we're sucking diesel! Sound man. On you go."
He recomposed himself and, after a pause, continued.
"After the final collapse of the Somali state, the confiscation of my property, the destruction of my possessions and my repeated relocation due to the toing and froing of multiple overlapping civil wars, I eventually found myself in Hargeisa, owning only a goat."
"What was she called?"
"Who?"
"The Goat."
"She was a goat. She didn't have a name."
"I find it hard to follow a story without a name," I said. "It is a weakness in me."
"Call her anything you like."
"Can I call her Ethel?" I said, for I had a fondness for the name, it being the name of the unmarried sister of the Orphanage Cook. Ethel gave us all a bag of Emerald sweets to share every Christmas. Thus, every third year I got one and, by rationing my consumption of it to a judicious lick at bedtime, could usually make it last till the taking down of the decorations on January 6th, or a little later. The sweet wrapper itself, stored under my pillow, often maintained a trace of coconutty, chocolatey fragrance till March.
"Feel free to think of the goat as Ethel."
"Thank you." I closed my eyes. Ethel the Goat shimmered and came into hard focus, replacing the faint, nebulous, nameless goat Ibrahim Bihi had originally introduced. Ethel chewed meditatively, and tilted her head to one side, looking at me unblinking.
Opening my eyes again, I urged him to continue.
He continued. "The forced sale of a goat in wartime is unlikely to realise the full value of the goat."
I mentally substituted the word "Ethel" for the terms "a goat" and "the goat", and the meaning became entirely clear. I closed my eyes and smiled fondly at Ethel, as he continued.
"Alternatively, the slaughter and personal consumption of the goat, while keeping one alive in the short term, would lead in the medium term to having no goat, and no money. In the long term, with neither assets nor capital nor cashflow, death would inevitably ensue. Luckily, my PhD had been devoted to aspects of arbitrage; the exploitation of price discrepancies in imperfect markets. I thus resolved to apply my knowledge of temporary market inefficiencies to my Goat."
He thus resolved to apply his knowledge of temporary market inefficiencies to Ethel, I said under my breath.
"This final, or ultimate, goat, on which all my hopes rested, had only three legs, due to shrapnel from a mine stepped on some weeks previously by my second-last, or penultimate, goat, on the trek to Hargeisa."
Hastily naming the penultimate goat Charles, I exploded it immediately before I could bond with it, and removed Ethel's rear le
Rumour has it that USAF pilots in afghanistan and other places where conventional aircraft munitions were pretty useless found that a low pass with the "attack" radar set on maximum power did quite a good job of causing cataracts in whoever you flew over, thus blinding them, thus achieving the same stated end "non fatal incapacitation" in typical mealymouth doublespeak.
"it has been impossible to get a true white display on TFT"
bullshit
I was buying Sharp industrial grade TFT back in 1999 which had the original backlights removed and replaced with high intensity 1500 candela jobs by a company called Landmark in the states, to this day at native resolution it blows away EVERYTHING else, even my 21 inch Sony G520's, people just go "WOW!" when they see it...
know what the secret was?
not the backlight, that just gives you paper white when you want it.
the true secret was a 300 dollar RGB to TFT board buried in the back of the screen, in preferenve to the cheap consumer grade crap ALL these TFT's have to do this job.
Tom's should stick to talking about selling ad space, it's the one thing they know about.
The first thing that occurred to me was the "only in america" things we hear.
like "only in america can an ordinary man go apeshit and kill his entire family, and then say GOD TOLD ME TO DO IT"
have to say from a non USA viewpoint you gotta question which is better?
a/ raghead crazed islamic fundamentalist
b/ redneck crazed xtian fundamentalist
I have a feeling the crazed islamic fundamentalist of probably slightly more honest and open about his beliefs 12 months before he makes the 6 o clock news.
There was an article about various sorts of exoskeleton, including actual photohraphs of one with a human being inside it, and it was doing heavy cargo lifting... the article said they were developed for the US Army.
I was only a kid at the time, and soon forgot all about it.
Then I saw Alien 2 or 3 whichever it was, and Ripley gets into this big yellow exoskeleton, and I was instantly zapped back to being a small boy reading pop mechanics and seeing pictures of a human being in a damn near identical construct.***
"Aaaah" I thought, "the special effects guys are my age and read PM too"
I really cannot be any more accurate about the date, but I can recall other articles in the same time period, the flying car, the PM 38 speedboat (which my dad built), which might be enough for a PM buff to trace it.
So really this is not news, or even new, it's 40+ years old and predates the Apollo program.
*** I grew up to be an engineer, like my dad, and now I understand that compared to a cargo lifter of wheels, eg a fork lift, all these exoskeleton designs will be horribly inefficient mechanically and far more expensive to make and maintain, so no conspiracy theory needed to explain why they are hidden away in area 51 and on the sekret moon base
I was on one of the very first ADSL exchanges in the UK, 512 kbit down / 128 up, can't remember what it cost but it wasn't "cheap", except compared with the old days of 1.5 p (UK pounds 0.015) per minute 56k slodem.
(As a "funny" aside some years before when 28k was the norm and I had some cash burning a hole in my pocket, I met a guy named mark who had just started an ISP, him, one part time secretary, one SG box and one half empty rack cabinet, I can remember considering the idea of offering to match his capital investment for a 45% share, and rejecting it because of the 1.5 pennies per minute phone costs, "it will never fly" was my percieved wisdom.... he is still around today, one of the biggest independent ISP's in the UK, Eclipse.......)
ADSL was based upon the necessity of a BT land line, no matter who you bought the ADSL service from, about a year in I wanted to change the billing name on the phone bill, BT said no problem, we'll just cancel your ADSL and set you up a new account, should only be off line for a day or two and that will be 60 UK pounds....
I told them to take a hike and joined Eurobell / Telewest cable, for free.
Initially the same speeds, in theory, no setup fee, also no contention ratio, so whatever speed was advertised, you got.
When we moved house a year later our cable came with us, internet and telephone connections and numbers, simply moved with us, instantly.
In the interim we've ramped up from the initial 512, though 1 mbit, 2 mbit, to 4 mbit today.
No contention, no caps, no throttling, no "transparent" (but not) proxies, no IP changes, no downtime. 50 Uk pounds a month.
Just had a letter from them yesterday, they're upping me from 4 mbit to 10 mbit, not merely no charge, but they are reducing the monthly cost from 50 UK pounds to 35 Uk pounds.
OK, not as good as Japan and Korea, but they are getting there, and this is my prediction.
BT have infrastructure problems, whereas the cable companies have bandwidth coming out of their asses.
What will happen is the cable companies will be first to upgrade by making their services symetrical, up/down the same speed... at that point "if you build it they will come" world + dog on cable will start running their own servers...
Sure, you will have people hosting porn dvd iso's and people hosting photoshop 8, but you will also have people hosting their existing websites, static engine websites, steam engine websites, devon river websites, dartmoor websites, river fishing websites, custom car websites, etc etc etc, and on those websites they'll have high quality video clips, mebbe 500 megabyte, hopefully divx, or maybe just customised debian live cd's, and then, my friends, it will take off...
Just the cable company itself will have enough customers to drive this internally within their own network.....
BT users on ADSL3plusplusplus will be able to access this data, but not serve it, so they will be voting with their feet and wallets...
now is the time to start stockpiling all those run cold, run silent, run cheap cobalt RAQ pizza boxes that are coming out of farms... lost of home users are going to find them ideal in a year or two.
I'm glad someone else over there sees the hitler parallels.....
we have a polotician or two here in the UK who, were goebbels resurrected, would gain a nod of recognition from him.
the thing is in the USA there are more of these people, and they are backed up by other with an agenda.
the hitler parallels aren't the half of, the real problem is the religious bullshit, basically everything the american machine is accusing "axis of evil" countries of, just substitute "(american flavour) christianity" for "islam" and "USA" for "current shitlist country with resources to be stolen" and you get a perfect match.
The person saying this is white, mature, educated, well travelled, and not american.
I deliberately said "not american" as opposed to "european" or "english", because that is fast becoming the only distinction required.
the USA, that is the people, need a wake up message, perhaps a wake up message in the form of your entire congress including the president chimp being nuked.
the WTC obviously wasn't a clear enough message.
"9/11" was ___NOT___ an attack on the american people or way of life or anything else, it was an attack on USA foreign policy as driven by USA monetary policy, hence hitting two buildings full of financial institutions.
If I wanted to slap the face of the USA ___PEOPLE___ I'd fly a jet into the Statue of Liberty, the one true global symbol of all that is american.....
if this has been done it would have killed maybe a hundred people, but rocked every citizen in the USA back on their heels as a personal insult.
no way lady liberty was "Overlooked" as a possible target, no chance in hell, ergo the perpetrators werem't after slapping you all personally across the face.
3 jetliners could have been crashed into three electricity stations around new york and thrown the city into anarchy, same as new orleans, but it wasn't done.
bottom line is it is really hard to think of targets that are more clearly and obviously specifically USA financial / foreign policy related than those that were hit
and yet you lot still do not get it
bush is still there, getting worse every day.
we don't care too much if he ruins america, we're sorry for you as citizens, but then you keep voting him in and who are we to interfere?
we do care if he ruins our countries.
bush is the village psychopath, as time passes and his behaviour worstens, more and more of the villagers are going to turn against him
sure, in the ensuing fight much of the village may be razed to the ground, but some of it will survive, if we don't do something about the village psychopath he will desroy ALL of the village.
USA citizens need to wake up and ask themselves is living in a destroyed US economy, like post katrina new orleans or a kurt russell vision of new york, is the future they really want, if not, it's time to cut loose, very publicly, from the insane chimp and his money men backers.
I guess we'll tell how blinkered you all are from how quickly this message is modded as "troll", if slashdot had regional modding you'd find non USAians modding it differently....
it looks like all the "splash" is created by the outward spread of the liquid from ground zero, it rushes outwards, but appears to "catch air" presumably because the surface tension / minimum stable raduis has been exceeded, and from that point on it becomes chaotic mixture of small droplets going every which way.