As a side note I would say that it is quite shocking that they have voted out the social democratic party, especially when their conventional wisdom says that the two track tax burden (high personal tax but low corporate tax) was working and the welfare state was doing them the world of good.
It's worth noting that the Centre-Right coalition (for the first time ever campaigning together as a single ticket under the name Alliance for Sweden) did very much announce that they are not going to lower taxes or radically reform the tax system, which is nowadays fairly simple, although the rates are high. They have promised to radically lower or abolish real estate property taxes, however.
What they have announced is to try to get more people into work, using both stick and carrot. Sweden has a highly educated population (it's university system is world class), but due to a hyper-regulated employment market, it's virtually impossible for young people to get jobs, even with advanced university degrees. Thus, a liberalization of the employment market is expected. The trade unions, which are extremely strong in Sweden (and have extremely close ties with the Social Democratic Party), have predictably been overreacting against this, to the point that they have distributed cartoons portraying the Alliance as murders and necrophiles.
This is a pretty cool concept - a self-contained VM in hardware to handle your whole networking stack.
This is not a new concept; it's called TOE (TCP Offload Engine) and is a standard feature of high-end networking cards (especially 10GigE cards.) The problem with TOE is that it completely screws up a *properly written* OS TCP stack, which is why the Linux networking people have pushed back strongly on it (the Windows ones might have as well, I don't know.)
Intel is now pushing something called IOAT (I/O Acceleration Technology) which is less aggressive than TOE, and can be properly integrated with the network stack.
Oh, yes, and it's well-known in the cluster community that TOE is bad for network latency.
One thing to consider is whether or not you're using tmpfs for/tmp. For performance, I recommend using tmpfs for/tmp, and basically treat the swap partition as your/tmp partition. It may seem counterintuitive, "why would it be faster than a filesystem when it's backed to disk anyway, and my filesystems caches just file if need be?" The answer is that tmpfs never needs to worry about consistency. On the kernel.org machines, we have seen/tmp-intensive tasks run 10-100 times faster with tmpfs than with a plain filesystem. The downside, of course, is that on a reboot, tmpfs is gone.
Back in the 1950's and 1960's, there was a project to develop a nuclear spaceship named Orion. The basic principle was to operate it by detonating nuclear weapons some 60 m behind the spaceship... over and over and over again. Probably the closest you could ever be to multiple nuclear blasts and expect to live.
The flipside, however, would have been payload and velocities that would otherwise be way beyond human technology -- we're talking manned mission to Pluto without the crew missing Christmas at home.
The main advantage of AoE is that it's simple enough that you could build it in hardwired silicon if you wanted to, or use small microcontrollers way smaller than what you'd need to run a fullblown TCP stack (this is what Coraid does, I believe.)
The main disadvantage with AoE is that it's hideously sensitive to network latency, due to the limited payload size.
So, it looks like the protocol has been officially registered and was granted approval by the IEEE--so that makes it an industry standard. It may not be adopted yet, but it's certainly not something like 802.11 pre-n or anything; there's an official and approved protocol.
Anyone can register a protocol number with IEEE by paying a $1000 fee. It doesn't mean it's a protocol endorsed by IEEE in any shape, way or form.
In Finland, if you're a member of the State Church (which you are by birth, but you can withdraw), they get to add a fixed percentage to your income tax bill. Sweden had the same system until 2000 when they abolished the State Church (the Church itself still exists, of course, but it's no longer a Government institution.) There, the system has been modified so that any religious organization which a defined membership that meets certain criteria can apply to tax their members. I think the rate is still set by the Government, though.
I had an Efax account for about two years, which originally started when buying a house; a bunch of paperwork got faxed to me constantly and I really wanted it in electronic form. Besides, it was cheaper than a phone line, especially since we were about to move. However, eventually I had no need for it anymore; the only thing I ever got on it anymore was fax spam.
I went through absolute hell trying to cancel my Efax account. Not only do they have crap like sending you to a non-800 number for cancellation (voice only, of course, nothing online), but they kept trying to dodge the issue with stuff like "I'll waive the charges for the next three months" and then try to hang up. The only way I got them to actually process the cancellation was by stating, repeatedly and firmly: If you don't close my account NOW, my next call will be to my bank telling them to reject any credit card charges from your company. This didn't take five minutes; this was more like 15.
Bastards. The service wasn't bad, at least not until the fax spammers found my fax number, but I will never use them again after that experience.
Depends on if you define a chicken egg as "and egg from which a chicken hatches" or "an egg which is laid by a chicken". The former is an egg first situation, whereas the latter is a chicken first.
A chicken egg is the same individual as the chick that hatches from the egg.
A chicken is not the same individual as the egg it lays; it is rather the egg's parent.
The individual that came from the first chicken hatched from the first (viable) chicken egg. Q.E.D.
There are many funny problems that relate to boundary-drawing conditions, but this one isn't one of them; the answer is independent of the boundary.
After a month the machine started acting up and when she contacted Dell they said she had installed crap onto her system and that was causing the blue screens of death and even though she'd purchased the extended warranty it wouldn't be honored by Dell. When I began working on it she'd lived with it that way for over a year.
In my personal experience, I have never seen a company as creative when it comes to finding excuses not to honour their warranties as Dell. Since this pattern has gone on for at least a decade, this is clearly part of their training.
The British advances have become public knowledge over time. For example, the fact that they invented public key cryptography before anyone else was exposed in 1997.
Clifford Cocks of GCHQ did indeed invent public-key cryptography in 1973. However, as far as we know it never was actually used.
Unfortunately Diffie and Hellman came up with their own in 1976, only a few years after Cocks. Then the Cocks method was reinvented in 1977 by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, and it's known today as the RSA cipher.
So they were only a few years ahead of the civilian cryptographic community, and failed to capitalize on that advantage. Of course, maybe 30 years from now we'll know more, but that's as far as we can tell today.
The main advantage of AC though -was- the ease of transforming ac voltages. This is still largely true today. We know much more about how to transform DC but to do it on the scales required by a nationwide grid? i dont think so, at least not yet.
High voltage DC has been used for power transmission for decades now. It's not cost-effective for short distances or runs with many taps, but it's very cost-effective for things like transoceanic cables.
In addition to capacitive losses, there is also the fact that you have to dimension your transmission lines to handle up to Vp (peak), not just Vrms which is what controls the amount of power that actually travels through your system. In effect, by going to DC, you can run the whole system at 1.4 times the voltage, and run more power through the same wires with no additional losses (other than conversion.)
Most of them aren't optimized for efficiency; if they're more expensive it's because they are hotswappable, high reliability, or just because they can take your money.
"DC with pulse with modulation" -- sounds like an alternating current to me. Yes, it's typically a very messed up square wave (due to all kinds of filtering) rather than a sinusoid pure sinusoid, but spectrally, it's just noisy AC.
It's simply not possible to make a DC power transformer because only alternating current provides the changing magnetic field that makes them work. Power transformers are required for stepping up the voltage before transmitting the power over long distances in order to reduce the power losses.
DC-DC converters work by chopping the input power into high frequency AC, which require smaller magnetics than typical line frequencies, which were selected for the benefit of early rotating machinery. If you don't care about isolation, you can also get away with less than a full transformer core, or even substitute capacitors and switches.
It's true that DC-DC power converters are more efficient than AC-DC converters, only if you consider than the typical DC-DC converter has a much lower voltage ratio than the typical AC-DC converter. DC power distribution is usually done in the 12-48 V range, depending on application, whereas AC is 100-240 V. It's also only a win in if you don't end up losing that power in the wiring.
How come there is no real difference? Because both modern AC and modern DC supplies start out by converting the power to high frequency AC (on the order of several kHz), and operate on that. That's what you actually want as input, if anything.
The article states:
By distributing redundant direct current power to each server--and replacing the standard AC power supply with a far more reliable and efficient DC power supply...server reliability is increased by as much as 27 percent, and monthly power costs are reduced by up to 30 percent.
In other words, the DC supplies they use are more efficient than standard AC supplies, which are the cheap crap and notoriously inefficient.
But even that has a 160x100 mm limit. There is no non-profit license allowing larger boards than that, and getting the full version costs $1,200 for all three modules.
You have misunderstood the New Republican definition of crime: Until the jury returns a guilty verdict, and all appeals have been exhausted, it simply can't be considered a crime.
Assuming, of course, that the accused was Republican; otherwise we'll throw them in Guantanamo or Abu Ghahib.
Now for the mind bender- according to the laws of conservation, all the energy in the universe - spinning planets, energy stored in elements, whatever - had to come from somewhere. You can start with our solar system and our sun and move outwards through the universe, but eventually, if you trace the energy back from every object- it has to come from somewhere.
Bullshit. All the various Laws of Conservation (of Energy, of Charge, of Lepton Number, of Quark Number...) state is that the total number cannot change. In the case of some of these, e.g. Lepton and Quark Number, it's believed that there is a slight assymetry in particule physics which we have not yet discovered; this is bolstered by the fact that the Universe does not seem to contain any significant amount of antimatter. On the other hand, when it comes to Energy, it's a distinct possibility that when you add up all the terms, the total is zero. The reason this is possible is that some forms of energy have a value which is negative vis-a-vis the immediately-after-Big-Bang state; Stephen Hawking is one of the leading scientists looking at what he calls the "South Pole" concept -- that the beginning of the universe is governed by the same laws of physics that the rest of the universe is.
There are a number of Open Source Acrobat replacements; GhostScript can be used instead of Acrobat Distiller to generate PDF (including with PDF-specific contents), and xpdf for display.
Slashdot Mirror
As a side note I would say that it is quite shocking that they have voted out the social democratic party, especially when their conventional wisdom says that the two track tax burden (high personal tax but low corporate tax) was working and the welfare state was doing them the world of good.
It's worth noting that the Centre-Right coalition (for the first time ever campaigning together as a single ticket under the name Alliance for Sweden) did very much announce that they are not going to lower taxes or radically reform the tax system, which is nowadays fairly simple, although the rates are high. They have promised to radically lower or abolish real estate property taxes, however.
What they have announced is to try to get more people into work, using both stick and carrot. Sweden has a highly educated population (it's university system is world class), but due to a hyper-regulated employment market, it's virtually impossible for young people to get jobs, even with advanced university degrees. Thus, a liberalization of the employment market is expected. The trade unions, which are extremely strong in Sweden (and have extremely close ties with the Social Democratic Party), have predictably been overreacting against this, to the point that they have distributed cartoons portraying the Alliance as murders and necrophiles.
This is a pretty cool concept - a self-contained VM in hardware to handle your whole networking stack.
This is not a new concept; it's called TOE (TCP Offload Engine) and is a standard feature of high-end networking cards (especially 10GigE cards.) The problem with TOE is that it completely screws up a *properly written* OS TCP stack, which is why the Linux networking people have pushed back strongly on it (the Windows ones might have as well, I don't know.)
Intel is now pushing something called IOAT (I/O Acceleration Technology) which is less aggressive than TOE, and can be properly integrated with the network stack.
Oh, yes, and it's well-known in the cluster community that TOE is bad for network latency.
One thing to consider is whether or not you're using tmpfs for /tmp. For performance, I recommend using tmpfs for /tmp, and basically treat the swap partition as your /tmp partition. It may seem counterintuitive, "why would it be faster than a filesystem when it's backed to disk anyway, and my filesystems caches just file if need be?" The answer is that tmpfs never needs to worry about consistency. On the kernel.org machines, we have seen /tmp-intensive tasks run 10-100 times faster with tmpfs than with a plain filesystem. The downside, of course, is that on a reboot, tmpfs is gone.
Back in the 1950's and 1960's, there was a project to develop a nuclear spaceship named Orion. The basic principle was to operate it by detonating nuclear weapons some 60 m behind the spaceship... over and over and over again. Probably the closest you could ever be to multiple nuclear blasts and expect to live.
The flipside, however, would have been payload and velocities that would otherwise be way beyond human technology -- we're talking manned mission to Pluto without the crew missing Christmas at home.
As usual, Wikipedia has an excellent article on the whole thing...
The main disadvantage with AoE is that it's hideously sensitive to network latency, due to the limited payload size.
Anyone can register a protocol number with IEEE by paying a $1000 fee. It doesn't mean it's a protocol endorsed by IEEE in any shape, way or form.
In Finland, if you're a member of the State Church (which you are by birth, but you can withdraw), they get to add a fixed percentage to your income tax bill. Sweden had the same system until 2000 when they abolished the State Church (the Church itself still exists, of course, but it's no longer a Government institution.) There, the system has been modified so that any religious organization which a defined membership that meets certain criteria can apply to tax their members. I think the rate is still set by the Government, though.
I had an Efax account for about two years, which originally started when buying a house; a bunch of paperwork got faxed to me constantly and I really wanted it in electronic form. Besides, it was cheaper than a phone line, especially since we were about to move. However, eventually I had no need for it anymore; the only thing I ever got on it anymore was fax spam.
I went through absolute hell trying to cancel my Efax account. Not only do they have crap like sending you to a non-800 number for cancellation (voice only, of course, nothing online), but they kept trying to dodge the issue with stuff like "I'll waive the charges for the next three months" and then try to hang up. The only way I got them to actually process the cancellation was by stating, repeatedly and firmly: If you don't close my account NOW, my next call will be to my bank telling them to reject any credit card charges from your company. This didn't take five minutes; this was more like 15.
Bastards. The service wasn't bad, at least not until the fax spammers found my fax number, but I will never use them again after that experience.
A chicken egg is the same individual as the chick that hatches from the egg.
A chicken is not the same individual as the egg it lays; it is rather the egg's parent.
The individual that came from the first chicken hatched from the first (viable) chicken egg. Q.E.D.
There are many funny problems that relate to boundary-drawing conditions, but this one isn't one of them; the answer is independent of the boundary.
That applies to States, not to the Federal government.
Baloney. When it first appeared, Netscape search was the default.
Bingo. Doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not.
The U.S. gov't will start issuing RFID-equipped passports this fall. How long until we see the first U.S.-citizen-triggered bomb?
In my personal experience, I have never seen a company as creative when it comes to finding excuses not to honour their warranties as Dell. Since this pattern has gone on for at least a decade, this is clearly part of their training.
I obviously never buy Dell if I can avoid it.
Clifford Cocks of GCHQ did indeed invent public-key cryptography in 1973. However, as far as we know it never was actually used.
Unfortunately Diffie and Hellman came up with their own in 1976, only a few years after Cocks. Then the Cocks method was reinvented in 1977 by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, and it's known today as the RSA cipher.
So they were only a few years ahead of the civilian cryptographic community, and failed to capitalize on that advantage. Of course, maybe 30 years from now we'll know more, but that's as far as we can tell today.
High voltage DC has been used for power transmission for decades now. It's not cost-effective for short distances or runs with many taps, but it's very cost-effective for things like transoceanic cables.
In addition to capacitive losses, there is also the fact that you have to dimension your transmission lines to handle up to Vp (peak), not just Vrms which is what controls the amount of power that actually travels through your system. In effect, by going to DC, you can run the whole system at 1.4 times the voltage, and run more power through the same wires with no additional losses (other than conversion.)
Most of them aren't optimized for efficiency; if they're more expensive it's because they are hotswappable, high reliability, or just because they can take your money.
"DC with pulse with modulation" -- sounds like an alternating current to me. Yes, it's typically a very messed up square wave (due to all kinds of filtering) rather than a sinusoid pure sinusoid, but spectrally, it's just noisy AC.
DC-DC converters work by chopping the input power into high frequency AC, which require smaller magnetics than typical line frequencies, which were selected for the benefit of early rotating machinery. If you don't care about isolation, you can also get away with less than a full transformer core, or even substitute capacitors and switches.
AC/DC, it's okay by me...
How come there is no real difference? Because both modern AC and modern DC supplies start out by converting the power to high frequency AC (on the order of several kHz), and operate on that. That's what you actually want as input, if anything.
The article states:
In other words, the DC supplies they use are more efficient than standard AC supplies, which are the cheap crap and notoriously inefficient.
But even that has a 160x100 mm limit. There is no non-profit license allowing larger boards than that, and getting the full version costs $1,200 for all three modules.
Assuming, of course, that the accused was Republican; otherwise we'll throw them in Guantanamo or Abu Ghahib.
Bullshit. All the various Laws of Conservation (of Energy, of Charge, of Lepton Number, of Quark Number...) state is that the total number cannot change. In the case of some of these, e.g. Lepton and Quark Number, it's believed that there is a slight assymetry in particule physics which we have not yet discovered; this is bolstered by the fact that the Universe does not seem to contain any significant amount of antimatter. On the other hand, when it comes to Energy, it's a distinct possibility that when you add up all the terms, the total is zero. The reason this is possible is that some forms of energy have a value which is negative vis-a-vis the immediately-after-Big-Bang state; Stephen Hawking is one of the leading scientists looking at what he calls the "South Pole" concept -- that the beginning of the universe is governed by the same laws of physics that the rest of the universe is.
There are a number of Open Source Acrobat replacements; GhostScript can be used instead of Acrobat Distiller to generate PDF (including with PDF-specific contents), and xpdf for display.