To "do no evil" (censorship) in China means to do no business in China - I would find it far more evil (and foolish) for Google to let themselves be banned, rather than trying to work with the local laws to the extent they can.
They are still (for the moment) standing up to the US government request for tracebacks to the searchers on selected search terms.
As I progressed in my carreer, there was less and less time in that 40 hour week for learning the new stuff, so I gradually got out of it into all the other things.
I still dive in once in a while, just to try to stay a little fresh, but the field is becoming so broad that you can't really know it all the way you could in 1982.
For what it's worth, the closest I came to "knowing it all" (which was, in my estimation, having an 80% grasp on about 30% of the computer-tech world), was around 1993. Technology started growing faster than my learning curve after that.
I still feel that it's better to know 99% of a small thing, than 1% of a very large thing - unless you're in management, in which case knowing less than nothing about most things will surely lead to a promotion.
Does $5M strike anyone else as cheap?
I mean, 60 miles of roads - that's only 15.80 per foot of road, even if the road is only 8' wide, less than 2 pounds per square foot for any constructed item is cheap, and amazingly so for an underground bunker.
The place might be a maintenance nightmare, otherwise, it's the cheapest bat-cave per square foot I've ever heard of.
So, you just keep your passport in a conductive bag when you don't want it to be read wirelessly - should get you some evil stares from the Customs officials when they see it - same as a radar using cop looks at a radar detector - but if the RFID tag bothers you, just bag it.
Man, I'm 7 years over 30 - and I actually think I'm a little hip to NFS, Doom, Diablo, WarCraft III, Vice City, et al, considering the thousands hours I've spent with video games through my life.
The video games are only 'kids entertainment' in my mind because only kids have the time to play them. Now that I have kids of my own, I don't have time to sit down for 3 hours and frag up the aliens. I'm hoping when they grow up a bit, we can play the games together - if I'm not too uncool to be in the same room with by then.
I run a Citrix thin client at work (on an XP laptop) and at home (on a Gentoo box).
It's pretty cool when it works, but IT can't seem to manage to keep the network humming more than 95% of the time - 2 hours per work-week of network based frustration isn't the ideal way to get things done.
This is all great theory.
In practice, when our internal network went VPN for all wireless access, all service went downhill fast - more logins to enter, more things to crash, and more applications that suddenly don't work any more. Of course, we're on Win2000/XP, but unfortunately, that's life in the "real world."
I agree that graphics in scientific presentation should convey meaningful information, but development of aesthetically pleasing presentation for its own sake can lead to better representations with scientific significance.
It would be a shame if journal article authors never looked past the default MS Excel graphs for their presentation.
Wacom tablets (and others) have been doing this forever, just not using the "RFID standard" inductive coupling - but their own inductive coupling which predates the RFID standard by many years.
O.K. - and I suppose it will be a simple matter to filter out all the little creatures that live at the bottom of the sea, and they won't mind this giant hose sucking up their habitat?
I did this research project about 3 months ago, and my results agree with J.Baker's post - only the HP systems support a full 8 sticks per processor.
AMD specs a limit of 8 sticks per processor, but all motherboards except the HP limit to 4 sticks. It seems a waste to buy extra processors just to use them as memory controllers, but for your application (large RAM drive), in essence, that is what you will be doing. I suspect going to 8 sticks per processor will drastically limit your memory speed, not as slow as a SATA (hard drive) bus, but considerably down from 400. Loaded with a full 4 sticks of 1GB each, my AMD64 motherboard drops from 400 to 333 because of the bus loading.
I'd look at TYAN for motherboards, and possibly an IBM box as suggested above. If you want the RAM to be fast, be prepared to pay for extra processors to get that speed.
Well, for starters, if a poor village of 100 people can afford just one of these Simputers and a couple of info-CDs, they can have the equivalent of a small library, with reference material on construction, farming, basic medical care, etc.
If this village can manage to sustain the cost of a 'net connection, they are now connected to the "World Brain" where they can access current information to address their needs - not a bad return for a $2.50 initial + $0.50/month per person investment.
Maybe it's not as compelling as a diesel pump to bring up the well water, but it's about the same cost.
It has been a long time since Napster took a dirt nap at the hands of the establishment.
There's more than the "we don't run a central server" defense keeping P2P alive, I think the courts actually see the legitimate side like home video recording, which "we all knew" was only for porn and pirating....
I tried, and failed, to interest some Angel V/C groups in starting a P2P venture just around the time that Gnutella was surfacing (and the.com bubble hadn't quite burst yet.) They had a hard time getting their heads around the legit moneymaking side of it all and passed on the deal - and apparently making legitimate money is still the hard nut to crack. Showing ads to pirates isn't very lucrative, or particularly safe from lawsuits.
I spent my life savings ($700) for a 4MHz computer with 16K of RAM.
You're saying that $36 is about 5% of monthly income in working class Brazil - in the US, I'd call poor working class about $24,000 a year - $2000 per month, 5% of that is $100 - which is just about exactly what I see copies of XP home for sale on the shelves of Office Depot. If you make more money, well, then, sir, you really want to upgrade to XP professional, then, don't you?
Remember, also, the OEM system builder resellers get software for something like 10% of list price, so $36 becomes $3.60 in those machines - who wouldn't pay an extra $3.60 to have a "legit" copy of Windows in the box they're selling?
Can Dell do spec AMD systems today?
on
Dell Might do AMD
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· Score: 1
I went to our IT manager and discussed getting a Quad-Opteron system with 32GB of RAM - we're a Dell shop, and he acted like Dell could supply this if we would spec it - wonder if that is something Dell does on spec, or if they were just thinking of trying to bait and switch me to an Itanium system?
Personally, my TV plays 99% DVDs and 1% analog over the air TV. If analog over the air goes away, I won't be missing it much.
Of course, news, weather, sports, and all that other stuff has come over the 'net since about
'97, on demand, with commercials that don't force me to wait them out.
I think I'll be renting Battlestar Galactica, the series, when it comes out on DVD.
NASA is sponsoring a space elevator engineering contest at a low tech (hobbyist accessible) level - if you've got tons of time to kill and a few thousand $$$ to burn, you too can participate:
How many miles per dollar do you get on those batteries before they need replacing?
Wasn't the GM EV1 recalled at the end of its 3 year lease program and discontinued? Something to do with practical, cost effective battery technology not materializing?
How fast does a Prius accelerate to 60 when it's batteries resemble a 4 year old notebook computer's?
Yes, but if we didn't burn gasoline in our cars, what would we use it for?
Crude oil is refined into many products, ranging from roofing tar, through plastics, to diesel, heating oil, kerosene (jet fuel), gasoline, WD-40, etc.
If all cars ran on nuclear power from a wall socket, big oil would lose a major consumer group for one of its products.
We'll have gasoline burning cars, in proportion to diesel burning trucks and kerosene burning jets, as long as there's crude being pumped from the ground.
Electric vehicles are going to be a test-bed curiosity until the North slope runs dry.
A significant chunk of "wall plug" electricity comes from coal fired power plants. Those same coal fired power plants that just got an extension on cleaning up their mercury emissions until someone who cares gets put in charge of the white house.
It has been shown that Ivan the Terrible, contemporary of Vlad the Impaler, was so likely so terrible because of mercury poisioning (found significant quantities of it in his remains.) So, maybe the rest of the world has a point when they call us crazy, stupid Americans?
LoJack only tracks when activated - if all LoJacks were activated at once, there would be no way of telling one from the other - the unique id (based on VIN number) comes during activation. I have to get my LoJack checked periodically (every few years) to make sure it will activate if I ever need it.
OBD-II has been in vehicles since 1996. OBD-III has been on the drawing boards since about that time, and it includes on-road telemetry of VIN numbers and "current operating parameters" including emissions equipment and, uh, oh yeah, speed. The technology can read 10 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic doing 80mph and not miss a single vehicle. This would only apply to new vehicles equiped with OBD-III, and so far, it seems that manufacturers are reluctant to take the plunge, and Congress isn't pushing for it.
Houston already has cameras on the freeways, some good enough to read plates if they wanted to. They also have some new intersection cams, and an RFID-like "FastPay" system on the toll roads. They have shown remarkable restraint at not issuing speeding, red light, or other citations based on this technology so far - though there is talk of mailing tickets for red light violations. They do have a new, annoying, corrupt program of enforced towing of broken down vehicles from the freeways that seems to have reduced congestion slightly.
Ticket-cams have abounded in Europe for decades, leading to gorilla-mask wearing drivers, "invention" of putting a slave flash on your visor to blind the driver picture, and other cute tricks that generally do not amuse the establishment. In Europe, those tickets stick. Only a very few ticket-cams are in operation in the United States, and the ones I have heard of are being run as a bluff - if the ticket is taken to court, the state rolls over without a challenge. However, you have to consider that you have won a hollow victory if you have to take 4 hours off from work to drive to the courthouse to fight a $165 ticket, have you really won anything? Even when you "win", that goes on your record too. Traffic court Judges take a dim view of drivers who "win" too often, and they will check your record before sentancing. Better to avoid "the system" in the first place.
So, would I like to live in a state where you have to have a functioning transponder in your vehicle or risk being pulled over as if you were not displaying a license plate? HECK NO! If this passes, will it have a major impact on my daily life? not really. It will take years to roll out, reader stations will be few and far between, and before reader stations are abundant enough to be annoying, they'll have OCR cameras reading your license plate and real-time cross-referencing a dozen databases anyway. OCR cameras are likely to be more effective than any RFID type system, the lawmakers are just focusing on how well the toll road ez-pay system works and thinking that they're being innovative by spreading that technology.
If I lived on a high-traffic street, I'd be tempted to hack up an app that videoed the street and recorded everything it saw 24/7 in ASCII, with a few snapshots of the accompanying vehicle. It's more than doable today for $1000 or less, total installed cost buying new equipment at full retail prices. You could quickly build a log of your daily commuters and how predictable they are. After a month of monitoring, you could probably screen 98% of traffic as "routine" and sound an alarm when a "suspicious" vehicle passes by. Retired folks have organized neighborhood watch programs to do this for decades - no technology required.
If you look at relative freedoms of cultures compared to the age of the culture, you'll find that the largest, oldest, in-tact cultures, such as China, have the most restrictions on free speech, free thought, etc.
Revolution / invasion can reset the clock somewhat, such as in India.
America is getting old - erosion of freedom will continue until the next big uprising (e.g. French Revolution).
Slashdot Mirror
They are still (for the moment) standing up to the US government request for tracebacks to the searchers on selected search terms.
As I progressed in my carreer, there was less and less time in that 40 hour week for learning the new stuff, so I gradually got out of it into all the other things.
I still dive in once in a while, just to try to stay a little fresh, but the field is becoming so broad that you can't really know it all the way you could in 1982.
For what it's worth, the closest I came to "knowing it all" (which was, in my estimation, having an 80% grasp on about 30% of the computer-tech world), was around 1993. Technology started growing faster than my learning curve after that.
I still feel that it's better to know 99% of a small thing, than 1% of a very large thing - unless you're in management, in which case knowing less than nothing about most things will surely lead to a promotion.
Does $5M strike anyone else as cheap? I mean, 60 miles of roads - that's only 15.80 per foot of road, even if the road is only 8' wide, less than 2 pounds per square foot for any constructed item is cheap, and amazingly so for an underground bunker. The place might be a maintenance nightmare, otherwise, it's the cheapest bat-cave per square foot I've ever heard of.
So, you just keep your passport in a conductive bag when you don't want it to be read wirelessly - should get you some evil stares from the Customs officials when they see it - same as a radar using cop looks at a radar detector - but if the RFID tag bothers you, just bag it.
The video games are only 'kids entertainment' in my mind because only kids have the time to play them. Now that I have kids of my own, I don't have time to sit down for 3 hours and frag up the aliens. I'm hoping when they grow up a bit, we can play the games together - if I'm not too uncool to be in the same room with by then.
Coral Gables, Florida - it is illegal to walk the streets with burglar tools, including just a screwdriver. They arrest for it on a regular basis.
I run a Citrix thin client at work (on an XP laptop) and at home (on a Gentoo box). It's pretty cool when it works, but IT can't seem to manage to keep the network humming more than 95% of the time - 2 hours per work-week of network based frustration isn't the ideal way to get things done.
Microsoft's point exactly - please turn on automatic updates so your computer doesn't become somebody else's zombie...
This is all great theory. In practice, when our internal network went VPN for all wireless access, all service went downhill fast - more logins to enter, more things to crash, and more applications that suddenly don't work any more. Of course, we're on Win2000/XP, but unfortunately, that's life in the "real world."
It would be a shame if journal article authors never looked past the default MS Excel graphs for their presentation.
Wacom tablets (and others) have been doing this forever, just not using the "RFID standard" inductive coupling - but their own inductive coupling which predates the RFID standard by many years.
O.K. - and I suppose it will be a simple matter to filter out all the little creatures that live at the bottom of the sea, and they won't mind this giant hose sucking up their habitat?
AMD specs a limit of 8 sticks per processor, but all motherboards except the HP limit to 4 sticks. It seems a waste to buy extra processors just to use them as memory controllers, but for your application (large RAM drive), in essence, that is what you will be doing. I suspect going to 8 sticks per processor will drastically limit your memory speed, not as slow as a SATA (hard drive) bus, but considerably down from 400. Loaded with a full 4 sticks of 1GB each, my AMD64 motherboard drops from 400 to 333 because of the bus loading.
I'd look at TYAN for motherboards, and possibly an IBM box as suggested above. If you want the RAM to be fast, be prepared to pay for extra processors to get that speed.
If this village can manage to sustain the cost of a 'net connection, they are now connected to the "World Brain" where they can access current information to address their needs - not a bad return for a $2.50 initial + $0.50/month per person investment.
Maybe it's not as compelling as a diesel pump to bring up the well water, but it's about the same cost.
There's more than the "we don't run a central server" defense keeping P2P alive, I think the courts actually see the legitimate side like home video recording, which "we all knew" was only for porn and pirating....
I tried, and failed, to interest some Angel V/C groups in starting a P2P venture just around the time that Gnutella was surfacing (and the .com bubble hadn't quite burst yet.) They had a hard time getting their heads around the legit moneymaking side of it all and passed on the deal - and apparently making legitimate money is still the hard nut to crack. Showing ads to pirates isn't very lucrative, or particularly safe from lawsuits.
--------------
Wealth, Fame, Strength and Intelligence await in iCLOD city.
I spent my life savings ($700) for a 4MHz computer with 16K of RAM.
You're saying that $36 is about 5% of monthly income in working class Brazil - in the US, I'd call poor working class about $24,000 a year - $2000 per month, 5% of that is $100 - which is just about exactly what I see copies of XP home for sale on the shelves of Office Depot. If you make more money, well, then, sir, you really want to upgrade to XP professional, then, don't you?
Remember, also, the OEM system builder resellers get software for something like 10% of list price, so $36 becomes $3.60 in those machines - who wouldn't pay an extra $3.60 to have a "legit" copy of Windows in the box they're selling?
-----------
Wealth, Fame, Intelligence and Strength await in iCLOD city.
It lowers the chance that users will look into Linux as an alternative, and brings in a little revenue stream.
------------
76% don't return after their first day - can you make it in iCLOD city?
----------
ICLOD, a better way to waste your real life....
Of course, news, weather, sports, and all that other stuff has come over the 'net since about '97, on demand, with commercials that don't force me to wait them out.
I think I'll be renting Battlestar Galactica, the series, when it comes out on DVD.
---------------
Have you tried life in ICLOD?
http://spaceward.org/
----------------
Have you tried the ICLOD life?
How many miles per dollar do you get on those batteries before they need replacing?
Wasn't the GM EV1 recalled at the end of its 3 year lease program and discontinued? Something to do with practical, cost effective battery technology not materializing?
How fast does a Prius accelerate to 60 when it's batteries resemble a 4 year old notebook computer's?
Crude oil is refined into many products, ranging from roofing tar, through plastics, to diesel, heating oil, kerosene (jet fuel), gasoline, WD-40, etc.
If all cars ran on nuclear power from a wall socket, big oil would lose a major consumer group for one of its products.
We'll have gasoline burning cars, in proportion to diesel burning trucks and kerosene burning jets, as long as there's crude being pumped from the ground.
Electric vehicles are going to be a test-bed curiosity until the North slope runs dry.
It has been shown that Ivan the Terrible, contemporary of Vlad the Impaler, was so likely so terrible because of mercury poisioning (found significant quantities of it in his remains.) So, maybe the rest of the world has a point when they call us crazy, stupid Americans?
LoJack only tracks when activated - if all LoJacks were activated at once, there would be no way of telling one from the other - the unique id (based on VIN number) comes during activation. I have to get my LoJack checked periodically (every few years) to make sure it will activate if I ever need it.
OBD-II has been in vehicles since 1996. OBD-III has been on the drawing boards since about that time, and it includes on-road telemetry of VIN numbers and "current operating parameters" including emissions equipment and, uh, oh yeah, speed. The technology can read 10 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic doing 80mph and not miss a single vehicle. This would only apply to new vehicles equiped with OBD-III, and so far, it seems that manufacturers are reluctant to take the plunge, and Congress isn't pushing for it.
Houston already has cameras on the freeways, some good enough to read plates if they wanted to. They also have some new intersection cams, and an RFID-like "FastPay" system on the toll roads. They have shown remarkable restraint at not issuing speeding, red light, or other citations based on this technology so far - though there is talk of mailing tickets for red light violations. They do have a new, annoying, corrupt program of enforced towing of broken down vehicles from the freeways that seems to have reduced congestion slightly.
Ticket-cams have abounded in Europe for decades, leading to gorilla-mask wearing drivers, "invention" of putting a slave flash on your visor to blind the driver picture, and other cute tricks that generally do not amuse the establishment. In Europe, those tickets stick. Only a very few ticket-cams are in operation in the United States, and the ones I have heard of are being run as a bluff - if the ticket is taken to court, the state rolls over without a challenge. However, you have to consider that you have won a hollow victory if you have to take 4 hours off from work to drive to the courthouse to fight a $165 ticket, have you really won anything? Even when you "win", that goes on your record too. Traffic court Judges take a dim view of drivers who "win" too often, and they will check your record before sentancing. Better to avoid "the system" in the first place.
So, would I like to live in a state where you have to have a functioning transponder in your vehicle or risk being pulled over as if you were not displaying a license plate? HECK NO! If this passes, will it have a major impact on my daily life? not really. It will take years to roll out, reader stations will be few and far between, and before reader stations are abundant enough to be annoying, they'll have OCR cameras reading your license plate and real-time cross-referencing a dozen databases anyway. OCR cameras are likely to be more effective than any RFID type system, the lawmakers are just focusing on how well the toll road ez-pay system works and thinking that they're being innovative by spreading that technology.
If I lived on a high-traffic street, I'd be tempted to hack up an app that videoed the street and recorded everything it saw 24/7 in ASCII, with a few snapshots of the accompanying vehicle. It's more than doable today for $1000 or less, total installed cost buying new equipment at full retail prices. You could quickly build a log of your daily commuters and how predictable they are. After a month of monitoring, you could probably screen 98% of traffic as "routine" and sound an alarm when a "suspicious" vehicle passes by. Retired folks have organized neighborhood watch programs to do this for decades - no technology required.
Revolution / invasion can reset the clock somewhat, such as in India.
America is getting old - erosion of freedom will continue until the next big uprising (e.g. French Revolution).
You don't get freedom in little pieces.