I guess about 5 years ago already my university switched to outlook web access. A very horrible interface and it was not possible to weave it in a useful way to the existing portal. I got the impression that microsoft is very good at offering one standard solution, not so much at even a slightest bit of customization.
Well, the UK seems to be doing just fine with their high CCTV coverage: last year they had 4.2 million cameras, and the number is increasing. The effectiveness of all this is of minor importance, as long as now they can be used to catch some child murderer every now and then, so the population is pleased. When the huge infrastructure is there, the rest will be done by currently still to be developed technology to do complete tracking of people. I don't think we are very far off, though.
The German ADAC did a test about this. They had one group not exceed the maximum speed, one group try to keep the maximum speed, even if it meant regular overtaking, and one group speed like idiots. The idiotic speeding had considerable lower mileage, but not much time gain compared to the group that was keeping max speed withovertaking. The mileage for the two groups at or below maximum speed was about the same, but the ones not overtaking had lost a lot of time.
Reason behind this is that regularly you will drive behind people that are at least 10 km/h below the limit, or that drive irregular speeds, making it impossible for you to keep your desired speed.
Ah, of course! Then the more important question: Would a new firmware brick my north/south faced iPod? Would I still be able to synchronize with iTunes? Will it maybe be a standard feature on the new iPods? Oh my, so many choices. Maybe I better wait until the next Keynote
In Germany, on a day with low traffic, 130 kilometers per hour puts you on the slow lane. Seriously. Sometimes even in busy traffic. Overtaking a truck would be dangerous and irritating with such a limiter. Italy has expressway speed limits within 120-150, similar story. I also drove a lot in holland, with its strict speeding policies, and I must say that I feel safer with the more broad speed limits. In Holland you can spend several minutes overtaking a 119 km/h car while you are driving 121 km/h, half of the time the other car is on your dead corner, and you are staring at your speedometer to make sure you won't get a ticket. The more flexible limits in Germany and Italy allow me to spend all my concentration on traffic, react faster on traffic behind me, and have an overall more relaxed journey.
BTW I do wonder why BMW made their sporty versions so difficult to operate that you have to be almost an 11-year old to understand the car manual to activate its extra power. Seems like the other way around:)
please tell me, where can I buy these North-facing and South-facing iPods? I didn't hear anything about it on Job's Keynote? Are they on preorder yet? Do they come in different colors?
The naming is exactly what the eeepc xandros has changed: smplayer is called "movie player", firefox is called "web", amarok is called "music player". etc. Maybe not those exact names, I don't have my eee here at the moment. Then again, you DO know that Photoshop is not a place where you buy photos, and that Powerpoint is not a fitness studio, and Acrobat Reader is not a circus act involving a guy with a book.
The start menu in Gnome at least gives me a submenu that seems to contain desktop tools (scissors and ruler as an icon), under which I find my calculator. No big deal. It's all a matter of getting used to, and if you stop using windows for a while, you will find out how many tasks in windows will get immensely illogical and painful when you are not used to them anymore. Try copying an old outlook mailbox into a new account.
A nuclear plant gets about 20x10^9 kWh in a year, a windmill about 2-3 x10^6 kWh (a local windmill with >30m wings on has a real-time display of its performance over its lifetime). You will need about 7000 windmills to get the power of one nuclear plant. Where to put them? This is unfortunately not an easily avoidable environmental problem. You cannot put them too close, because that will decrease the efficiency (and change the influence of wind on local climates, be a danger to birds etc). You can not put them on all mountain hills because it kills the scenery (I personally don't mind, they are beautiful displays of engineering).
Solar cells are maybe less of a problem to hide in the countryside, but their current efficiency is still way below power demanding applications.
Geothermal is bad in so many ways, that I'd rather see it left unused. The chances on groundwater and even lower water depots contamination are too high (never underestimate the importance of safe drinking water), geologically risky (ground may move, with a very costly destabilizing effect on houses). And you can't have many per surface area.
BTW based on the numbers from Tesla for the power need per kilometer including the loss at the loading station, a country like the Netherlands with 7 million cars averaging 15000 km/year, could have its electric need for car mobility completely covered by just one 20x10^9 kWh/year power plant.
I never changed the default xandros. It comes without swap. Using openoffice, firefox with plenty of tabs, and then another application might actually bring the thing to a halt. The disk-access light starts flickering and won't stop for a good while. I wonder what it is trying to do, as it is certainly not writing to swap:)
I thought of this problem myself for a while, when playing around with the idea to try out the "cloud". You could use pound, a lot of its use for cloud computing has been discussed in the interwebs already. Biggest point of concern will be if the load balancer keeps your ssl data encrypted.
The way I see it, Transmeta was like Via's Cyrix (I own one a Cyrix machine). They were aiming at an interesting market at a time that that market wasn't interesting yet. Their work towards low power, low performance machines was important to get the idea rolling that it was possible.
However, low performance back then was really too low (you still want to watch a dvd or use flash on your cheapass laptop), and it took a few years of Moore's curve to make the concept feasible. By then, Intel could throw immense expenses on development to make the superior Atom architecture. I find it a bit sad, but it all makes logical sense.
I dunno, if you would try to make the same argument about health care, the cost of health care per individual would immensely exceed the cost of creating health care for the group.
And yes, I agree that my government "steals" 300 Euro from my gross monthly income to pay for health care. Especially since just spending one night in a hospital already would cost me a multiple of my monthly contribution. Many systems thrive on the economics of doing stuff in bulk, not only Wal Mart, also your local hospital.
Rethorics is partly about making bad analogies, just ask BadAnalogyGuy;), and partly about trying to avoid discussing parts of the problem. Many Americans have no health insurance and need a month's wage or more to pay for simple dental treatment, let alone expensive treatments for chronic diseases. Enabling every citizen access to a humane health care treatment via a "flat rate" cost about the prize of getting a second hand car every year, is STILL the best option if you compare it to the costs of individual healthcare.
Not just buying the thing, also the cost of maintaining it (standard hardware is most likely easier to maintain), and the power it and its cooling system uses, check green500 for that one. Actually, as a user, I have often found that most supercomputing clusters are inefficient for at least the first year-and-a-half due to imperfect queuing systems or network/filesystem incompatibilities. "Yeah, your run will likely crash every now and then but we don't know yet why". I do not blame the administrators,
I blame the suppliers for not working on solutions to make it easier to successfully operate a cluster, e.g. via standardized methods .
As for top500: really, quit with this political joke benchmark. E.g. In molecular simulations alone you will spend on a computer which has either broad memory access for matrix inversions in quantum calculations. Or on a high clock speed, low bandwidth one for MD, which basically does nothing but floating point operations. The score in the top500 will give you 0 information about what machine to choose.
Indeed! It is a sad sign that closed source software firms apparently have to learn from the bottom up that they actually should make a product people want to use, and will keep to want to use. And that this requires an effort. Geez, poor closed software firms.
Indeed, if anything, this kind of research show that either the server rooms AND/OR the server hardware is over-engineered. You could save money by simplifying the engineering on either of them, but doing both will bring your system down to a halt in no-time.
In fact there were a number of emails of a political nature which would be flat out illegal to do over her official email system.
Ah you mean the kind of e-mails she would otherwise be subpoenaed over. And exactly that is the reason why she should be using the official system for political correspondence only.
As a student I worked at the reception desk of a retirement home. The senior transit system expects you to be waiting in front of the door at least 15 minutes before it arrives, and normally arrived up to half an hour late. Not very nice in winter:) Probably, a good computer algorithm and use of mobile phones could streamline this. But as it is now (or was 5 years ago when I had to deal with them), I understand the point of view of your grandmother against having to use that inconvenient system. It was pretty cheap though!
As you are say, they are not fit to drive, so the only way for them to preserve their freedom of mobility would be with robotically steered cars. I am not seeing that happen just yet:)
Slashdot Mirror
I guess about 5 years ago already my university switched to outlook web access. A very horrible interface and it was not possible to weave it in a useful way to the existing portal. I got the impression that microsoft is very good at offering one standard solution, not so much at even a slightest bit of customization.
Modders, please remod the parent to something sensible. It's a perfectly valid argument.
Well, the UK seems to be doing just fine with their high CCTV coverage: last year they had 4.2 million cameras, and the number is increasing. The effectiveness of all this is of minor importance, as long as now they can be used to catch some child murderer every now and then, so the population is pleased. When the huge infrastructure is there, the rest will be done by currently still to be developed technology to do complete tracking of people. I don't think we are very far off, though.
Doesn't this require an additional output device on your belly?
indeed. If anything, the GP proves the uselessness of patent for computational methods
The German ADAC did a test about this. They had one group not exceed the maximum speed, one group try to keep the maximum speed, even if it meant regular overtaking, and one group speed like idiots. The idiotic speeding had considerable lower mileage, but not much time gain compared to the group that was keeping max speed withovertaking. The mileage for the two groups at or below maximum speed was about the same, but the ones not overtaking had lost a lot of time.
Reason behind this is that regularly you will drive behind people that are at least 10 km/h below the limit, or that drive irregular speeds, making it impossible for you to keep your desired speed.
They tried it with questions about cricket at first, but for some reason all outgoing e-mail traffic stopped after that.
Ah, of course! Then the more important question: Would a new firmware brick my north/south faced iPod? Would I still be able to synchronize with iTunes? Will it maybe be a standard feature on the new iPods? Oh my, so many choices. Maybe I better wait until the next Keynote
In Germany, on a day with low traffic, 130 kilometers per hour puts you on the slow lane. Seriously. Sometimes even in busy traffic. Overtaking a truck would be dangerous and irritating with such a limiter. Italy has expressway speed limits within 120-150, similar story. I also drove a lot in holland, with its strict speeding policies, and I must say that I feel safer with the more broad speed limits. In Holland you can spend several minutes overtaking a 119 km/h car while you are driving 121 km/h, half of the time the other car is on your dead corner, and you are staring at your speedometer to make sure you won't get a ticket. The more flexible limits in Germany and Italy allow me to spend all my concentration on traffic, react faster on traffic behind me, and have an overall more relaxed journey.
BTW I do wonder why BMW made their sporty versions so difficult to operate that you have to be almost an 11-year old to understand the car manual to activate its extra power. Seems like the other way around :)
Was hoping the same, but I won't put my bet on it. More likely will we just wait for netbooks to get a boost in computing power and RAM.
please tell me, where can I buy these North-facing and South-facing iPods? I didn't hear anything about it on Job's Keynote? Are they on preorder yet? Do they come in different colors?
The start menu in Gnome at least gives me a submenu that seems to contain desktop tools (scissors and ruler as an icon), under which I find my calculator. No big deal. It's all a matter of getting used to, and if you stop using windows for a while, you will find out how many tasks in windows will get immensely illogical and painful when you are not used to them anymore. Try copying an old outlook mailbox into a new account.
A nuclear plant gets about 20x10^9 kWh in a year, a windmill about 2-3 x10^6 kWh (a local windmill with >30m wings on has a real-time display of its performance over its lifetime). You will need about 7000 windmills to get the power of one nuclear plant. Where to put them? This is unfortunately not an easily avoidable environmental problem. You cannot put them too close, because that will decrease the efficiency (and change the influence of wind on local climates, be a danger to birds etc). You can not put them on all mountain hills because it kills the scenery (I personally don't mind, they are beautiful displays of engineering).
Solar cells are maybe less of a problem to hide in the countryside, but their current efficiency is still way below power demanding applications.
Geothermal is bad in so many ways, that I'd rather see it left unused. The chances on groundwater and even lower water depots contamination are too high (never underestimate the importance of safe drinking water), geologically risky (ground may move, with a very costly destabilizing effect on houses). And you can't have many per surface area.
BTW based on the numbers from Tesla for the power need per kilometer including the loss at the loading station, a country like the Netherlands with 7 million cars averaging 15000 km/year, could have its electric need for car mobility completely covered by just one 20x10^9 kWh/year power plant.
I never changed the default xandros. It comes without swap. Using openoffice, firefox with plenty of tabs, and then another application might actually bring the thing to a halt. The disk-access light starts flickering and won't stop for a good while. I wonder what it is trying to do, as it is certainly not writing to swap :)
I thought of this problem myself for a while, when playing around with the idea to try out the "cloud". You could use pound, a lot of its use for cloud computing has been discussed in the interwebs already. Biggest point of concern will be if the load balancer keeps your ssl data encrypted.
The way I see it, Transmeta was like Via's Cyrix (I own one a Cyrix machine). They were aiming at an interesting market at a time that that market wasn't interesting yet. Their work towards low power, low performance machines was important to get the idea rolling that it was possible. However, low performance back then was really too low (you still want to watch a dvd or use flash on your cheapass laptop), and it took a few years of Moore's curve to make the concept feasible. By then, Intel could throw immense expenses on development to make the superior Atom architecture. I find it a bit sad, but it all makes logical sense.
Are you assuming it was open at some point?
I dunno, if you would try to make the same argument about health care, the cost of health care per individual would immensely exceed the cost of creating health care for the group.
And yes, I agree that my government "steals" 300 Euro from my gross monthly income to pay for health care. Especially since just spending one night in a hospital already would cost me a multiple of my monthly contribution. Many systems thrive on the economics of doing stuff in bulk, not only Wal Mart, also your local hospital.
Rethorics is partly about making bad analogies, just ask BadAnalogyGuy ;), and partly about trying to avoid discussing parts of the problem. Many Americans have no health insurance and need a month's wage or more to pay for simple dental treatment, let alone expensive treatments for chronic diseases. Enabling every citizen access to a humane health care treatment via a "flat rate" cost about the prize of getting a second hand car every year, is STILL the best option if you compare it to the costs of individual healthcare.
As for top500: really, quit with this political joke benchmark. E.g. In molecular simulations alone you will spend on a computer which has either broad memory access for matrix inversions in quantum calculations. Or on a high clock speed, low bandwidth one for MD, which basically does nothing but floating point operations. The score in the top500 will give you 0 information about what machine to choose.
Indeed! It is a sad sign that closed source software firms apparently have to learn from the bottom up that they actually should make a product people want to use, and will keep to want to use. And that this requires an effort. Geez, poor closed software firms.
Indeed, if anything, this kind of research show that either the server rooms AND/OR the server hardware is over-engineered. You could save money by simplifying the engineering on either of them, but doing both will bring your system down to a halt in no-time.
if you want to discontinue something, doesn't that mean you have to have been offering it at some point in time? ;)
some photos forgotten in the original post
Ah you mean the kind of e-mails she would otherwise be subpoenaed over. And exactly that is the reason why she should be using the official system for political correspondence only.
As you are say, they are not fit to drive, so the only way for them to preserve their freedom of mobility would be with robotically steered cars. I am not seeing that happen just yet :)