I can see one having loyalty to GNU/Linux, after all, being community based, people can take and receive from it directly at a personal level. But Google? They actually did you a favour? As in, they did something that they otherwise would not have done for your personal benefit? Or even the benefit of a group of people that you are a part of? I would sincerely love to know what this is.
Brand loyalty can often be because a customer believes in a philosophy of a company's activities. A prime example would be me buying carpet from Interface. I would buy carpet from them even were it twice the price of the nearest competitor. I would do this because I am loyal to their ideals. I would change brand only if their fundamental philosophy changed. There is a balance, and if their products became absolutely abominable, then I would review this position, but I am making the point that brand loyalty is often not just immature, misplaced "fanboyism", and does factor rationally into a purcahse decision.
Brand loyalty could also be a statement of complaint against a competitor's actions. We're always told that in the free world we can vote with our dollar. Fat lot of worth that has, when bone heads like you can be bought for a 1% price difference. If a company is engaging in pollution, unfair trading, selling substandard or harmful products, the economic theory states that consumers will shun this by avoiding their products, hence, the market will adjust these externalities out. Bollocks I say, and you've just proved me right. Most consumers are too ignorant and apathetic, reduced to simple counters of dollars and cents, with zero insight into the wider ramifications of a particular company's actions. I wrote about this very topic, feel free to read it here.
I loved that your rant against brand loyalty was baed on the idea that it was immature, when in the next breath you cite Google as a do-gooder, which is just tomorrow's hegemonic corporation in wait for the current ones to get out of the way. If you're naieve enough to think that by not charging you to use their search engine / webmail / mapping features they are doing you a favour, then you have no business starting rants with "Now that I've matured".
I've been running a dual opteron server for around a year now, doing web, database and middleware stuff. All components were bought and assembled in house, running a Tyan Thunder motherboard. Not so much as a hiccup.
Not exactly a grid, I know, but just thought I'd throw in my 2c.
The tactic could not work. Period. It is a violation of physics, and any implication that it could is nonsense.
The only way would be for the fan's output to have a vertical component (pointed upwards, best effect would be vertically upwards), which would then be translated by the sail (which would have to be on a non-vertical plane) into horizontal motion. Depending on the angles, some fraction of the fan's downforce (or upforce, they are equal) would be translated into lateral motion.
The best arrangement would be a sail on a 45 degree angle to the surface of the water, and a fan blowing directly up into it.
This is *not* the bugs bunny scenario, where the sail is vertical. Such a scenario would result in the lateral force forwards on the sail being equal to the lateral force backwards from the fan (in fact, in reality this would cause the ship to go backwards, as the lossy transfer of energy from the fan to the sail would mean not all of the kinetic energy of the air thrust from the fan would be transferred to the sail). Translation of vertical force into lateral force occurs only when the sail is not raised perfectly vertically.
Wow. Seriously, wow. That MUST be deliberately misleading.
The BSD licence means that the authors can't, even if they wanted to, withhold security patches from you and nobody else. You can just get the patch from someone else who has it.
Furthermore, OpenBSD asking for donations is no difference from Mozilla getting donation, OpenOffice getting corporate support or MySQL having a corporate company employing its development team. In fact OpenBSD's model is probably less influenced by profit agenda than all of the abovementioned projects.
What's more, they manage to keep up with OpenBSD's reputation of begin perhaps the most secure operating system available to consumers, bar none. And all this in their spare time, putting up with FUD like what you've just spouted, and not getting half the recognition they deserve. If you ask me, they are the knights of the open source world. Or something.
Re:Nope, still not of any use...
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
Nope. Get normal 2500NiMH batteries and one of these:
P.S., I doubt you'd get much usable life out of your Kodak on these USB battery trinkets. It's not just current capacity, but current delivery capacity over the discharge cycle, and I highly doubt a high drain device would be able to pull jiuce out of this fast enough to go anywhere near using up the battery capacity.
No glass fiber will be able to divert a laser in the space of a chip, or even on a motherboard. Take a tosslink cable from your hifi, and see how tightly you can bend it before you lose signal. Then have a look at your average microchip, work out the angles, and see just how many degrees off a glass fiber that is 2mm in length could divert a laser if it can only be bent with that as a minimum radius of curvature.
They'd need to be using a different material than glass, with an index of refraction orders of magnitude greater than glass. Materials that have a higher refractive index (glass is 1.5) are diamond (2.4) silicon (4.0) and germanium (4.0). Crystas such as these however cannot be bent like glass fibers, and I think that machining them into curves will result in surface issues in the formation of total internal reflection when tiny lasers are used. Remember, on the tiny scale of CPUs, microscopic effects become significant.
Finally, even with a RI of 4.0, it is doubtful you'll be able to move light around inside a chip like you can move streams of electrons. I'd be guessing you could bend it slightly to guide it to a detector, but I don't see them ever getting a laser beam to go around that there cache bank, between that logic unit and the math processor and to a detector on the other side of the chip facing away.
I see this more useful as an inter chip signal rather than an intra chip signal, perhaps augmenting multi-core die designs.
The best bet for intra chip frikkin' lasers would be to use micromirrors, but there's a whole other batch of problems with that approach too.
Bob's sweating brow arched over the red buttons. Intensely aware of the large calibre handgun just behind his ear and the maniac holding it who was now forcing him to choose which button to press, he was unable to decide whether to remove email or web access from his life. His pleadings to the madman had been to no avail, it had come down to choosing. His hand strained, hovering over the fateful buttons, veins bulging under the skin as his blood pressure rose and his body temperature boiled his brain. The pain of impending loss was too great, made all the more horrible by the knowledge that it would be done by his own hand.
"Hurry up!" Snapped the crazed madman from between rotten teeth and foul breath. "I ain't got all day!" As he prodded the gun forward, digging the heavy barrel into Bob's temple, Bob quivered in fear. He knew from watching Dirty Harry movies that a handgun like that would blow his head clean off, the brain matter he was so proud of scattered over the ground like so much wet, red confetti.
Our geeky hero let out a strained whimper, a silent pleading for someone, anyone, to intervene and save him from this horrible choice. Simultaneous images of mailing lists and blogs swirled in his tortured mind. Finally, a decision took form. It took form with the certainty of the iceberg in front of the Titanic, and just like then, he came to the bitter conclusion that his fate was unavoidable.
Slowly, he turned to the madman. The fear had given way to a stony resignation and determination. He looked the madman straight in the eye and said "Shoot me, asshole."
Banks bear the cost of fraud across teh board due to their size. The policy reason behind this is that the financial sector as a whole is in a greater position to absorb losses due to fraud then the average citizen. What would otherwise be catastrophic losses to Aunty Beth are but a fraction of a percent from the bottom line profit of a bank.
It is the same policy decision underlying mandatrory insurance. Furthermore, that the banks are ultimately responsible for the security of the financial sector is another policy decision on the part of the global fincnance community. As banks are the chief profiteers from the finance sector, security and credibility in that sector are, and properly so, their responsibility. To change that would be to undermine the very foundations of the global financial system.
Passing the costs on for breaches of security, no matter how careless their actions may have been, is as ridiculous as passing costs to them for bank robberies. If a potential bank robber asks me what I know of a bank's security, and I naievely tell him everything that I know, the bank is still not able to charge me if there is a successful robbery carried out using my information.
No, no no. Banks have historically been considered the gatekeepers of the financial system, with ultimate custodianship over it, and to charge customers for breaches of security would dangerously undermine their responsibilities and set a grave precendent for those who deal with financial institutions.
once you buy a plus domain with no-ip.com you can have as many subdomains as you like, just set up the client to use the one you give to that customer...
I keep getting calls from TrendWest. I have told them a billion times to take me off the list. Many times I have signed up for whatever seminar they invited me to, gave them the names of 5 false people that will be attending and put them on speaker phone while I asked them heaps of questions while working at my desk, just to tie them up for hours.
I am still on their list. I got a call not an hour ago.
TeleMarketers are a very small notch above spammers. In the pond food chain, they're somewhere between the dead algae slime on the bottom (spammers) and the amoebas that feed on it (spyware vendors).
Every so often some guy breaks into a school and starts shooting and then kills himself. If you've already decided to go ballistic because your wife/girlfriend/donkey left you, why not do it at TrendWest and earn some brownie points while you're at it?
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I think you'd have made more sense if you'd encrypted that with a one time pad and then thrown out both copies of the pad.
I can see one having loyalty to GNU/Linux, after all, being community based, people can take and receive from it directly at a personal level. But Google? They actually did you a favour? As in, they did something that they otherwise would not have done for your personal benefit? Or even the benefit of a group of people that you are a part of? I would sincerely love to know what this is.
Brand loyalty can often be because a customer believes in a philosophy of a company's activities. A prime example would be me buying carpet from Interface. I would buy carpet from them even were it twice the price of the nearest competitor. I would do this because I am loyal to their ideals. I would change brand only if their fundamental philosophy changed. There is a balance, and if their products became absolutely abominable, then I would review this position, but I am making the point that brand loyalty is often not just immature, misplaced "fanboyism", and does factor rationally into a purcahse decision.
Brand loyalty could also be a statement of complaint against a competitor's actions. We're always told that in the free world we can vote with our dollar. Fat lot of worth that has, when bone heads like you can be bought for a 1% price difference. If a company is engaging in pollution, unfair trading, selling substandard or harmful products, the economic theory states that consumers will shun this by avoiding their products, hence, the market will adjust these externalities out. Bollocks I say, and you've just proved me right. Most consumers are too ignorant and apathetic, reduced to simple counters of dollars and cents, with zero insight into the wider ramifications of a particular company's actions. I wrote about this very topic, feel free to read it here.
I loved that your rant against brand loyalty was baed on the idea that it was immature, when in the next breath you cite Google as a do-gooder, which is just tomorrow's hegemonic corporation in wait for the current ones to get out of the way. If you're naieve enough to think that by not charging you to use their search engine / webmail / mapping features they are doing you a favour, then you have no business starting rants with "Now that I've matured".
I've been running a dual opteron server for around a year now, doing web, database and middleware stuff. All components were bought and assembled in house, running a Tyan Thunder motherboard. Not so much as a hiccup. Not exactly a grid, I know, but just thought I'd throw in my 2c.
I see that jokes are lost on you. If you don't possess the required grains of salt, what on Earth are you doing reading Slashdot?
Holy crap! Dude, I'm usually against the use of Vallium, but you really need some.
Wow, a religous nut with NRA in his name. Who'd have thunk it?
What do you expect from a guy with NRA in his name?
Dan Quayle? Is that you?
The tactic could not work. Period. It is a violation of physics, and any implication that it could is nonsense.
The only way would be for the fan's output to have a vertical component (pointed upwards, best effect would be vertically upwards), which would then be translated by the sail (which would have to be on a non-vertical plane) into horizontal motion. Depending on the angles, some fraction of the fan's downforce (or upforce, they are equal) would be translated into lateral motion.
The best arrangement would be a sail on a 45 degree angle to the surface of the water, and a fan blowing directly up into it.
This is *not* the bugs bunny scenario, where the sail is vertical. Such a scenario would result in the lateral force forwards on the sail being equal to the lateral force backwards from the fan (in fact, in reality this would cause the ship to go backwards, as the lossy transfer of energy from the fan to the sail would mean not all of the kinetic energy of the air thrust from the fan would be transferred to the sail). Translation of vertical force into lateral force occurs only when the sail is not raised perfectly vertically.
Apologies for not explaining this earlier.
No. (F) for you. See you next semester.
You commie pig! How dare you badmouth competition like that?! You'll hang for this!
Printed Circuit Boards? Wow you guys not only have robotic fish, but you catch and eat them too?
*mumbles something about preferring sharks with frikkin' laser beams*
Wow. Seriously, wow. That MUST be deliberately misleading.
The BSD licence means that the authors can't, even if they wanted to, withhold security patches from you and nobody else. You can just get the patch from someone else who has it.
Furthermore, OpenBSD asking for donations is no difference from Mozilla getting donation, OpenOffice getting corporate support or MySQL having a corporate company employing its development team. In fact OpenBSD's model is probably less influenced by profit agenda than all of the abovementioned projects.
What's more, they manage to keep up with OpenBSD's reputation of begin perhaps the most secure operating system available to consumers, bar none. And all this in their spare time, putting up with FUD like what you've just spouted, and not getting half the recognition they deserve. If you ask me, they are the knights of the open source world. Or something.
Nope. Get normal 2500NiMH batteries and one of these:
l s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2145307&Sku=T105-5380
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtoo
P.S., I doubt you'd get much usable life out of your Kodak on these USB battery trinkets. It's not just current capacity, but current delivery capacity over the discharge cycle, and I highly doubt a high drain device would be able to pull jiuce out of this fast enough to go anywhere near using up the battery capacity.
No glass fiber will be able to divert a laser in the space of a chip, or even on a motherboard. Take a tosslink cable from your hifi, and see how tightly you can bend it before you lose signal. Then have a look at your average microchip, work out the angles, and see just how many degrees off a glass fiber that is 2mm in length could divert a laser if it can only be bent with that as a minimum radius of curvature.
They'd need to be using a different material than glass, with an index of refraction orders of magnitude greater than glass. Materials that have a higher refractive index (glass is 1.5) are diamond (2.4) silicon (4.0) and germanium (4.0). Crystas such as these however cannot be bent like glass fibers, and I think that machining them into curves will result in surface issues in the formation of total internal reflection when tiny lasers are used. Remember, on the tiny scale of CPUs, microscopic effects become significant.
Finally, even with a RI of 4.0, it is doubtful you'll be able to move light around inside a chip like you can move streams of electrons. I'd be guessing you could bend it slightly to guide it to a detector, but I don't see them ever getting a laser beam to go around that there cache bank, between that logic unit and the math processor and to a detector on the other side of the chip facing away.
I see this more useful as an inter chip signal rather than an intra chip signal, perhaps augmenting multi-core die designs.
The best bet for intra chip frikkin' lasers would be to use micromirrors, but there's a whole other batch of problems with that approach too.
A TV and a PC in your room as a kid in the 80s? Wow you really did get the jump on the consumerist fetish of the 90s!
Bob's sweating brow arched over the red buttons. Intensely aware of the large calibre handgun just behind his ear and the maniac holding it who was now forcing him to choose which button to press, he was unable to decide whether to remove email or web access from his life. His pleadings to the madman had been to no avail, it had come down to choosing. His hand strained, hovering over the fateful buttons, veins bulging under the skin as his blood pressure rose and his body temperature boiled his brain. The pain of impending loss was too great, made all the more horrible by the knowledge that it would be done by his own hand.
"Hurry up!" Snapped the crazed madman from between rotten teeth and foul breath. "I ain't got all day!" As he prodded the gun forward, digging the heavy barrel into Bob's temple, Bob quivered in fear. He knew from watching Dirty Harry movies that a handgun like that would blow his head clean off, the brain matter he was so proud of scattered over the ground like so much wet, red confetti.
Our geeky hero let out a strained whimper, a silent pleading for someone, anyone, to intervene and save him from this horrible choice. Simultaneous images of mailing lists and blogs swirled in his tortured mind. Finally, a decision took form. It took form with the certainty of the iceberg in front of the Titanic, and just like then, he came to the bitter conclusion that his fate was unavoidable.
Slowly, he turned to the madman. The fear had given way to a stony resignation and determination. He looked the madman straight in the eye and said "Shoot me, asshole."
Banks bear the cost of fraud across teh board due to their size. The policy reason behind this is that the financial sector as a whole is in a greater position to absorb losses due to fraud then the average citizen. What would otherwise be catastrophic losses to Aunty Beth are but a fraction of a percent from the bottom line profit of a bank.
It is the same policy decision underlying mandatrory insurance. Furthermore, that the banks are ultimately responsible for the security of the financial sector is another policy decision on the part of the global fincnance community. As banks are the chief profiteers from the finance sector, security and credibility in that sector are, and properly so, their responsibility. To change that would be to undermine the very foundations of the global financial system.
Passing the costs on for breaches of security, no matter how careless their actions may have been, is as ridiculous as passing costs to them for bank robberies. If a potential bank robber asks me what I know of a bank's security, and I naievely tell him everything that I know, the bank is still not able to charge me if there is a successful robbery carried out using my information.
No, no no. Banks have historically been considered the gatekeepers of the financial system, with ultimate custodianship over it, and to charge customers for breaches of security would dangerously undermine their responsibilities and set a grave precendent for those who deal with financial institutions.
It blinks at 1 watt-hour?
Over how long?
I'm getting sick of people confusing watts and watt-hours.
Someone write up a once-and-for-all explanation for all the idiots here who have no idea watt the difference is.
I bet they'll cost an arm and a leg though.
Insightful? Wow hey...
once you buy a plus domain with no-ip.com you can have as many subdomains as you like, just set up the client to use the one you give to that customer...
z .com
:P)
i have things like:
cust325.mrnaz.com
johnsmith.mrnaz.com
farmporn.mrnaz.com^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfamilypics.mrna
etc etc (not on that domain for those of you about to try them
$25/year for as many vhosts/subdomains as you want is good value.
I keep getting calls from TrendWest. I have told them a billion times to take me off the list. Many times I have signed up for whatever seminar they invited me to, gave them the names of 5 false people that will be attending and put them on speaker phone while I asked them heaps of questions while working at my desk, just to tie them up for hours.
I am still on their list. I got a call not an hour ago.
TeleMarketers are a very small notch above spammers. In the pond food chain, they're somewhere between the dead algae slime on the bottom (spammers) and the amoebas that feed on it (spyware vendors).
Every so often some guy breaks into a school and starts shooting and then kills himself. If you've already decided to go ballistic because your wife/girlfriend/donkey left you, why not do it at TrendWest and earn some brownie points while you're at it?