Hmm. For some reason I always thought that rotational delay was folded into the seek time numbers. Probably because I never actually bothered to do the calculation. Although my math puts the period of both drives at 11ms and 8.3 ms, which is pretty close to the seek time numbers on most drives (and would have an expectation value of 5.5 ms and 4.2 ms....). I would expect, for instance, a drive with a max head travel time of 8ms and a max rotational delay of 8ms to have an average total of 8ms, with a gaussian distribution.
Still, I think you're bolstering my main point, which is that if you're looking for performance, you go with the SSD, and if you're looking for battery live, you go with the 5400, which should "perform" quite a bit better than the 7200rpm drive if it spends most of it's time idle - assuming low friction, the 5400 rpm drive takes just over half the energy to spin up as the 7200 rpm drive.
Since 7200 rpm drives are more expensive than 5400 rpm drives, there shouldn't really be much of a market for this "middle" ground.
Half of what was happening in Gattaca. Not even the interesting half.
Messing with genes was the logical response to the first half, though, which was gene discrimination. Or did you not notice that the main character was smart enough and driven enough to become a rocket engineer, but because of a chance of a flaw in other areas was relegated to menial labor.
It's not just that they wouldn't let him be an astronaut, either. They wouldn't even hire him as an engineer at all, as a "bad risk." And his love-life was implied to have suffered as well, with the matchmaking sequencers on every street corner....
The movie was about the horrors of discrimination, and the virtue of overcoming them, not gene manipulation, which is not a necessary precondition to gene discrimination. Regardless, I think it was probably supposed to be an allegory to present-day race discrimination, but with a narrative trick to make the character white, so white people wouldn't have any preconceived notions getting in the way of the message, rather than a direct prediction of the future, however prescient it may appear to have been.
Example from a childcare business who had problems with parents being late to pick up their children after work. They tried charging for overtime, and found that the problem went up, not down: people reckoned it was OK to be late if they were paying for it. (from Freaconomics, I think).
Well, that's a bad example. They should've charged enough to cover the additional staffing during the overtime period. Then everybody wins - parents get the extra time they need, staff gets overtime pay opportunities, and the business gets more profit!
No, it's because "service" jobs don't really produce anything. Sure, a new casino might look good on paper, but although money changes hands, it's not because of wealth being created. The only thing of any real value is the building itself.....
If you make more stuff, it doesn't matter if wages go up. More stuff chasing same dollars means cheaper stuff - real wages go up.
The problem with the economy is that everyone wants to be a salesman or money mover, making a living off a cut of someone else's real-wealth producing effort.
There were two stories in that video. The first was for a United flight that landed due to smoke. Or.. some other problem that also caused smoke. They weren't really clear on that. he southwest segment goes off on a weird tangent that looks like an abortive attempt to advertise the dreamliner....
"If it ain't Boeing I ain't going" -> So, is Gulf-stream out? Cessna? I could go on
You could, but the small aircraft makers' numbers are much, much worse than Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc.
Commercial Aviation beats General Aviation on safety by a significant margin. Even when you add in the tumor machines they make you go through on the way in....
Why would you want a noisy, hot 7200 rpm drive in a laptop?? The seek time improvement over the 5400rpm is modest and linear, but the energy use is quadratic. For something that runs off a battery, this doesn't really sound like the wisest of design choices.
There is no such thing as gouging. There is only "price rises or falls to market-clearing levels."
First of all, if supply drops to 75%, the market price will of course be affected. And it will affect everybody selling whether they were specifically affected by the floods or not. It's a market price on a commodity product.
The effect is to shift the supply curve (on a P-S plot) temporarily to the right - at current prices, the supply is 75% of what it previously. This curve might be pretty flat in the short term, too. The demand curve is unchanged, of course, but the market price absent price controls (which would only result in shortage anyhow), moves to a new position - it is the intersection of the demand curve and supply curves.
You may be making the mistake I have seen many make in comments about this event that the price should rise 33%, making the total revenue the same as it was previously. This would only be the case in the event that the demand curve is linear and has an elasticity (slope) of -1. The linear assumption is ok for small perturbations (and, indeed, is what I used in the above paragraphs) and first year economics courses, but even with that assumption demand elasticity depends on many factors. It is folly to assume that it will be any specific value without actually doing research into the particular industry.
A brief rise in price isn't gouging. It's the market finding the new price, and is justified by the conditions. There are two things you might have been buying in the aftermath of the flooding - 1) a hard drive and 2) a hard drive right now. If you need #2, then you'll certainly be willing to pay more than someone who just needs #1 and can afford to wait for the price to spike and drop.
Well most of the public is against these scanners an don't expect to have to strip or the electronic equivalent to board an airplane.
Would that this were true. But I think people are so afraid of "terrorism," and watch too many spy movies and want to pretend they're secret agents when they're on vacation, that they accept the current situation without reservation.
In conversations with family members and peers, a constant question comes up, "Well, what do you want to do, you have to have a search."
They don't care that once we get to the steady state, the scanners will kill more people every year than terrorists have killed in the last ten. They don't care about the person-years wasted waiting in line for, and going through the procedures.
Err.. other way around, actually. The airport security procedures were perfectly constitutional back when they were conducted by private security agencies as a condition of sale of a ticket - private security isn't bound by the fourth amendment, and as long as everything involved is a voluntary activity, two consenting parties have pretty wide ability to from whatever contracts they want.
But if they're using federal authority, they are bound by the constitution. A constitution which includes the fourth amendment, which no reasonable common-sense reading could possibly be construed to include the activity of TSA at airport gates or otherwise. Unfortunately, reason goes out the window when all three branches conspire against a willing population to usurp rights. Rights that aren't even just "natural rights" that we're supposed to assume everyone has. Rights that are literally spelled out in the founding documents.
But the willing population is the greatest problem. Just try talking about TSA with any of your family members at your next get together.
I think the point is that a straight gas tax would unfairly hit the drivers of cars disproportionately to their impact on the infrastructure, if the goal really is to simply pay for that infrastructure. If the goal is some other thing, like carbon reduction, then it leans more towards the straight tax.
Others on/. have mentioned that the impact to infrastructure goes like the cube of the vehicle weight, or the vehicle weight per axel, or something like that, so a "fair" gas tax would have to take that into account as well, and charge transport companies much more than cars, to the point that cars might be paying practically nothing....
No, I'm saying that they should subsidize farmers' internet access through higher prices at the grocery store, not through a market-distorting tax. The real effect of which would not be to encourage more people to take up farming, but to encourage more people to build bigger homes on cheaper land a greater commute from their place of work, ironically locking up arable land that could have been used for farming....
Doesn't the cinema version use polarisers on the projectors? Not easy to do with a TV.
Most new TVs are LCD. Polarizers is how they show every pixel in the frame. I tested this with my sunglasses and regular screen, and it looked pretty uniformly linearly polarized. As in, there was an angle I could rotate my sunglasses where I could not tell the difference between "lots of attenuation" and 100% attenuation across the whole screen.
I see no reason why they couldn't put a third layer and polarize in two directions. It might not be quite as forgiving of eye pitch as circular, though.
Are they bifocals? I bet the head-tilt focusing people learn when using multi focals might cause discomfort that a single focal length lens might avoid.
Well, also, the makers are playing a lot of games trying to phase in the technologies. We know that glasses-free screens are possible, and passive glasses screens should be almost trivial due to the way LCD screens work, but they want us to go through the expensive active-glasses stage first, and then buy yet another screen later on....
That's why I don't even bother with talkies. They're just a gimmick, and as you said, It's the story that matters, and if it's a good enough story, you don't even need a screen. A line display is plenty, and detracts much less from the story than a whole matrix of blinking lights.
Hell, even that's too much. I prefer to just listen to novels dictated to me using morse code. I'm a little handicapped - I can't directly perceive the electrical pulses or radio waves, so I did splurge on a tone generator, but even that is distracting from the story.
It's not that farmers out in the boondocks "don't deserve" internet access. It's just that, as a group, they've decided that they do not require it as an incentive to go out and do the farming that we all need, or they've been able to obtain it already.
If internet access was required to entice people to enter farming, then the price of farm goods would rise to accommodate the extra cost, either of running cables, launching satellites, or moving the farms themselves closer to the infrastructure. There is still a lot of urban land that could be used for farming, if the price of goods was right, although certainly not nearly enough to replace all the farmland far from population centers.
Odd. I find my self changing the user agent TO iPod on my desktop, just to get the comments to flow better.
Dear slashdot,
I want to control how wide my browser window is. Please stop using shitty css rules that you apparently tested in full-screen mode on 3 different monitor sizes. You're breaking the resizable window metaphor, and forcing my browser window to put up text that is WAY too wide for readability.
Ugh, copyright extensions are preventing us from wresting the original star wars film from the greasy mitts of its content oppressor. I like the remastered editions, but I feel that something substantial is lost if we can never again appreciate the originals except for a badly digitized copy of the laser disk.
The next time we get another copyright exemption we should demand a rider attached that declares the original star wars films to be public domain by act of congress, all original masters to be turned over to the librarian of congress immediately, and further barring George Lucas from participation in the film industry except as a consultant.
I think star wars fans are have the right combination of obsessiveness, and sheer total numbers, that this could potentially be accomplished....
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. For some reason I always thought that rotational delay was folded into the seek time numbers. Probably because I never actually bothered to do the calculation. Although my math puts the period of both drives at 11ms and 8.3 ms, which is pretty close to the seek time numbers on most drives (and would have an expectation value of 5.5 ms and 4.2 ms....). I would expect, for instance, a drive with a max head travel time of 8ms and a max rotational delay of 8ms to have an average total of 8ms, with a gaussian distribution.
Still, I think you're bolstering my main point, which is that if you're looking for performance, you go with the SSD, and if you're looking for battery live, you go with the 5400, which should "perform" quite a bit better than the 7200rpm drive if it spends most of it's time idle - assuming low friction, the 5400 rpm drive takes just over half the energy to spin up as the 7200 rpm drive.
Since 7200 rpm drives are more expensive than 5400 rpm drives, there shouldn't really be much of a market for this "middle" ground.
Half of what was happening in Gattaca. Not even the interesting half.
Messing with genes was the logical response to the first half, though, which was gene discrimination. Or did you not notice that the main character was smart enough and driven enough to become a rocket engineer, but because of a chance of a flaw in other areas was relegated to menial labor.
It's not just that they wouldn't let him be an astronaut, either. They wouldn't even hire him as an engineer at all, as a "bad risk." And his love-life was implied to have suffered as well, with the matchmaking sequencers on every street corner....
The movie was about the horrors of discrimination, and the virtue of overcoming them, not gene manipulation, which is not a necessary precondition to gene discrimination. Regardless, I think it was probably supposed to be an allegory to present-day race discrimination, but with a narrative trick to make the character white, so white people wouldn't have any preconceived notions getting in the way of the message, rather than a direct prediction of the future, however prescient it may appear to have been.
Example from a childcare business who had problems with parents being late to pick up their children after work. They tried charging for overtime, and found that the problem went up, not down: people reckoned it was OK to be late if they were paying for it. (from Freaconomics, I think).
Well, that's a bad example. They should've charged enough to cover the additional staffing during the overtime period. Then everybody wins - parents get the extra time they need, staff gets overtime pay opportunities, and the business gets more profit!
The problem is that then the "group" doing the action has too much power compared to the employee....
No, it's because "service" jobs don't really produce anything. Sure, a new casino might look good on paper, but although money changes hands, it's not because of wealth being created. The only thing of any real value is the building itself.....
If you make more stuff, it doesn't matter if wages go up. More stuff chasing same dollars means cheaper stuff - real wages go up.
The problem with the economy is that everyone wants to be a salesman or money mover, making a living off a cut of someone else's real-wealth producing effort.
Neither is "Duct" tape...
There were two stories in that video. The first was for a United flight that landed due to smoke. Or.. some other problem that also caused smoke. They weren't really clear on that. he southwest segment goes off on a weird tangent that looks like an abortive attempt to advertise the dreamliner....
"If it ain't Boeing I ain't going" -> So, is Gulf-stream out? Cessna? I could go on
You could, but the small aircraft makers' numbers are much, much worse than Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc.
Commercial Aviation beats General Aviation on safety by a significant margin. Even when you add in the tumor machines they make you go through on the way in....
Why would you want a noisy, hot 7200 rpm drive in a laptop?? The seek time improvement over the 5400rpm is modest and linear, but the energy use is quadratic. For something that runs off a battery, this doesn't really sound like the wisest of design choices.
There is no such thing as gouging. There is only "price rises or falls to market-clearing levels."
First of all, if supply drops to 75%, the market price will of course be affected. And it will affect everybody selling whether they were specifically affected by the floods or not. It's a market price on a commodity product.
The effect is to shift the supply curve (on a P-S plot) temporarily to the right - at current prices, the supply is 75% of what it previously. This curve might be pretty flat in the short term, too. The demand curve is unchanged, of course, but the market price absent price controls (which would only result in shortage anyhow), moves to a new position - it is the intersection of the demand curve and supply curves.
You may be making the mistake I have seen many make in comments about this event that the price should rise 33%, making the total revenue the same as it was previously. This would only be the case in the event that the demand curve is linear and has an elasticity (slope) of -1. The linear assumption is ok for small perturbations (and, indeed, is what I used in the above paragraphs) and first year economics courses, but even with that assumption demand elasticity depends on many factors. It is folly to assume that it will be any specific value without actually doing research into the particular industry.
A brief rise in price isn't gouging. It's the market finding the new price, and is justified by the conditions. There are two things you might have been buying in the aftermath of the flooding - 1) a hard drive and 2) a hard drive right now. If you need #2, then you'll certainly be willing to pay more than someone who just needs #1 and can afford to wait for the price to spike and drop.
So.. as few as 10 trucks can blow away an entire day's worth of car traffic? Wow.
Some highway use information in the pages here:
http://www.bostonroads.com/roads/
Well most of the public is against these scanners an don't expect to have to strip or the electronic equivalent to board an airplane.
Would that this were true. But I think people are so afraid of "terrorism," and watch too many spy movies and want to pretend they're secret agents when they're on vacation, that they accept the current situation without reservation.
In conversations with family members and peers, a constant question comes up, "Well, what do you want to do, you have to have a search."
They don't care that once we get to the steady state, the scanners will kill more people every year than terrorists have killed in the last ten. They don't care about the person-years wasted waiting in line for, and going through the procedures.
Err.. other way around, actually. The airport security procedures were perfectly constitutional back when they were conducted by private security agencies as a condition of sale of a ticket - private security isn't bound by the fourth amendment, and as long as everything involved is a voluntary activity, two consenting parties have pretty wide ability to from whatever contracts they want.
But if they're using federal authority, they are bound by the constitution. A constitution which includes the fourth amendment, which no reasonable common-sense reading could possibly be construed to include the activity of TSA at airport gates or otherwise. Unfortunately, reason goes out the window when all three branches conspire against a willing population to usurp rights. Rights that aren't even just "natural rights" that we're supposed to assume everyone has. Rights that are literally spelled out in the founding documents.
But the willing population is the greatest problem. Just try talking about TSA with any of your family members at your next get together.
I think the point is that a straight gas tax would unfairly hit the drivers of cars disproportionately to their impact on the infrastructure, if the goal really is to simply pay for that infrastructure. If the goal is some other thing, like carbon reduction, then it leans more towards the straight tax.
Others on /. have mentioned that the impact to infrastructure goes like the cube of the vehicle weight, or the vehicle weight per axel, or something like that, so a "fair" gas tax would have to take that into account as well, and charge transport companies much more than cars, to the point that cars might be paying practically nothing....
No, I'm saying that they should subsidize farmers' internet access through higher prices at the grocery store, not through a market-distorting tax. The real effect of which would not be to encourage more people to take up farming, but to encourage more people to build bigger homes on cheaper land a greater commute from their place of work, ironically locking up arable land that could have been used for farming....
Fair enough, but don't think your disability gives you 2%-ers the right to punish those of us in the 98% who can enjoy it.
Doesn't the cinema version use polarisers on the projectors? Not easy to do with a TV.
Most new TVs are LCD. Polarizers is how they show every pixel in the frame. I tested this with my sunglasses and regular screen, and it looked pretty uniformly linearly polarized. As in, there was an angle I could rotate my sunglasses where I could not tell the difference between "lots of attenuation" and 100% attenuation across the whole screen.
I see no reason why they couldn't put a third layer and polarize in two directions. It might not be quite as forgiving of eye pitch as circular, though.
Maybe the problem is the prescription glasses...
Are they bifocals? I bet the head-tilt focusing people learn when using multi focals might cause discomfort that a single focal length lens might avoid.
Well, also, the makers are playing a lot of games trying to phase in the technologies. We know that glasses-free screens are possible, and passive glasses screens should be almost trivial due to the way LCD screens work, but they want us to go through the expensive active-glasses stage first, and then buy yet another screen later on....
That's why I don't even bother with talkies. They're just a gimmick, and as you said, It's the story that matters, and if it's a good enough story, you don't even need a screen. A line display is plenty, and detracts much less from the story than a whole matrix of blinking lights.
Hell, even that's too much. I prefer to just listen to novels dictated to me using morse code. I'm a little handicapped - I can't directly perceive the electrical pulses or radio waves, so I did splurge on a tone generator, but even that is distracting from the story.
It's not that farmers out in the boondocks "don't deserve" internet access. It's just that, as a group, they've decided that they do not require it as an incentive to go out and do the farming that we all need, or they've been able to obtain it already.
If internet access was required to entice people to enter farming, then the price of farm goods would rise to accommodate the extra cost, either of running cables, launching satellites, or moving the farms themselves closer to the infrastructure. There is still a lot of urban land that could be used for farming, if the price of goods was right, although certainly not nearly enough to replace all the farmland far from population centers.
The real reason is right there in the summary:
Analysts say Iran's increasingly strident rhetoric, which has pushed oil prices higher, is aimed at sending a message to the West that it
wants more money for its oil...
All other goals are secondary.
Odd. I find my self changing the user agent TO iPod on my desktop, just to get the comments to flow better.
Dear slashdot,
I want to control how wide my browser window is. Please stop using shitty css rules that you apparently tested in full-screen mode on 3 different monitor sizes. You're breaking the resizable window metaphor, and forcing my browser window to put up text that is WAY too wide for readability.
The HP48 Emulator running on my iPod suggests otherwise.
Ugh, copyright extensions are preventing us from wresting the original star wars film from the greasy mitts of its content oppressor. I like the remastered editions, but I feel that something substantial is lost if we can never again appreciate the originals except for a badly digitized copy of the laser disk.
The next time we get another copyright exemption we should demand a rider attached that declares the original star wars films to be public domain by act of congress, all original masters to be turned over to the librarian of congress immediately, and further barring George Lucas from participation in the film industry except as a consultant.
I think star wars fans are have the right combination of obsessiveness, and sheer total numbers, that this could potentially be accomplished....