You can use a client that can pre allocate files, like BitTornado. I can leave it running with half a dozen sessions active and I can't hear the drive seeking.
I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that running drives warm and constantly seeking reduces their life. You can check the drive temp by reading the SMART attributes. One of these is typically temperature. Make sure that it's comfortably below the max temp in the datasheet. If it isn't, cool the drive with a fan.
Actually, if you want less heat/noise a 2.5" disk isn't a bad choice.
Flash, as everyone else points out has some serious issues - the price per GB is sky high, it has a lower life than hard disks even with wear levelling, and the write speeds are still much slower than a typical hard disk.
My guess will be that flash will never take over from hard disks - hard disk capacity is growing faster than IC capacity, so the price per GB comparison will get worse with time rather than better.
As to the technocracy argument, I can't see how you can have a centrally planned economy without that. In fact it reminds me of the "Road to Serfdom" - one of the themes of that is that planning is essentially poisonous to free societies. I'm not sure I'd go that far - none of the democratic socialist countries ended up as tyrannies, but they all seemed to have fairly lacklustre economic performance compared to the US and its imitators.
I can accept they shirking argument though - one trip on British Rail is enough to convince you of that its a real danger.
That's kind of like asking the readership of slashdot to vote on what the RIAA should be allowed to charge for CDs.
You're wrong too btw, the best existing version of a communist democracy would be India just after independance in the 1950's. The economy was centrally planned - the Congress party was elected, but the planning was done by experts they appointed. No one voted on the price of anything, or even on the experts that would set prices.
It's interesting actually - the UK tried to build a similar system to India - the Labour Party and Congress were very close intellectually. In the UK, the Labour party was able to keep wartime central planning, and extend it somewhat by nationalising the commanding heights of economy. Neither country got to the point of nationalising snow cone manufacture though, and that's probably impossible in a democracy.
It's also worth pointing out that much of the UK's economic decline post war coincided with these sort of policies. They were gradually abandoned in the 1980s, and by the time the Bank of England became independant the economy started to grow again.
And India only really started to grow after these sorts of controls were abandoned.
I think it's a bandwidth problem myself - there is no way that a distant, unelected official can set the price of anything more efficiently than the free market, which has access to all sorts of information. Look at the subtlety of futures markets for example - the price of something can fluctuate chaotically depending on all sorts of inputs.
Lead mechanical engineer. As in the engineer who designs the mechanical bits, like fans, heat pipes and so on. He doesn't do the electrical bits, that would be someone else. He also doesn't do the software bits.
He... just... does... the... mechanical... bits.
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know how to make text bigger and more noticable on/.? Or better, have one word swing out of the screen and twat a particular user across the face.
If you get IE it work, it's most likely locked down so that all Internet sites run with ActiveX disabled, often up to the point where it pops up that damn dialog when you go to a flash site. It gets patched regularly, especially recently, so it's pretty tough. Also, most of the dodgy sites get blocked by some intranet content filter, as to phishing emails by a spam filter. All this is assuming a competent network admin of course.
It's the people running it at home, with all sites in the lowest security zone, no patches and no filtering that tend to get screwed.
It sounds like they fscked it up if they spent time on this sort of thing.
But the original idea was a good one, they just messed up the implementation - the problem with nuclear waste disposal is a public relations one. If you could get people to sign off one one more of the current 'bleeding obvious' ways of getting rid of waste, then you'd be able to use more nuclear power. Not that they are bleeding obvious BTW, unless you come from a technical background - most people would think that the bleeding obvious solutions are not as safe as they are, and would thus not accept them unless you spend some time on the consultation job.
Mind you
In April the committee announced a shortlist of four options, after narrowing down the choices from fifteen during eighteen months of consultations. All involve either burying waste deep underground or storing it in specialised facilities on the surface. Many independent experts, however, have been dismayed that it took the panel so long to rule out many options that have already been examined and rejected by scientists all over the world.
So it's done the job, it just took a bit longer than expected. Admittedly the sign off concept doesn't seem to have worked as far as I can see, which was the reason for it taking so long.
Hasn't it occured to you that a government consultation excercise might be just be a PC way to describe giving people a description of the problem and a list of all the technically feasible solutions with their pros and cons. That way they realise that none of the options are ideal, and yet one of them must be picked. If you describe it properly, they'll usually pick the best one. It's not like the men from the ministry arrive and listen to a bunch of women describing half arsed schemes for shooting waste into space.
The fatal problem with the kind of elitist solution you're describing is that all the non engineers and scientists feel that things are being done behind their backs and start to complain about it afterwards. This is exactly what happened with GM food - their was a wide spread, and as far as I can tell completely baseless, belief that the technology was inherently unsafe. The Guardian was one of the cheer leaders for this oddly enough - look at any of the columns by George Monbiot on GM, or anything technical. Lots of other people grumbled about a lack of consultation. So after that the Labour government has realised that you need to keep non technical people in the loop for this stuff, hence this sort of thing.
Oddly enough, in consultancy jobs, this is a very good technique - before you make a big change, you need to give the people that own the company a reason for the change, and a list of options and get them to pick one. In fact, it's almost exactly the same situation, since the people that you're trying to get in loop aren't particularly technical - and you're trying to avoid a situation where something breaks because of a change to their code which they haven't agreed on, which tends to be expensive for everyone.
"The act, based on the constitutional power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, declared illegal every contract, combination (in the form of trust or otherwise), or conspiracy in restraint of interstate and foreign trade"
So if I sell my software and get a 95% market share, that is not in itself illegal, but tying agreements are if you are declared a monopoly. The interesting thing is, they are not illegal as far as I can see until then. So I can offer my customers the most restrictive contracts possible and get a massive market share, but then once I'm declared an abusive monopoly, they become illegal. Which is the situation Microsoft is in.
Take PC games, for example. The cheapest CPU available may have the best frame rate per dollar ratio. But you still need an adequate frame rate for an optimum gaming experience, and the cheapest CPU may not deliver that. On the other hand, office applications are generally not as sensitive to raw performance, and the lower cost processor may be better. It's all in what you do.
So the Athlon 3000 being the lowest priced AMD chip wil give the best fps/$, but might not deliver enough fps for you to outrun the zombies in Doom3. Oh noes!
They try to make this point again in the summary
There's no clear-cut price/performance leader, unless you simply believe that the lowest-cost CPU will offer the most bang for the buck. We were impressed with how the Athlon 64 3800+ placed, generally offering a slightly better position on the overall curve than most other CPUs. On the other hand, the Athlon 64 3700+, one notch below the 3700+ in price, looks to be the odd duck, and we'd recommend you avoid this one if possible.
But if you just look at the graphs, I can see how its easy to get the impression that the Athalon 3000 is the best chip.
If you want to know the difference between Free and free, just look them up in a thesaurus
By the way by thesaurus, I mean dictionary and vice versa.
Hmm, all this reminds me of Alice in Wonderland
'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS to be done right -- though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now -- and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -- '
'Certainly,' said Alice.
'And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - - that's all.'
I prefer it too, seems quicker and more stable than FF. Probably at 0.32% market share it should be a non tempting target too for exploits too. And it's free now, the Google ads in the old versions have been disabled.
Incidentally, even when its told to identify as IE, it still mentions Opera at the end of the user agent string. It's kind of cool really, the old Mozilla would identify as Mozilla. Internet Explorer would identify as
Mozilla X.XX ( compatible; MSIE X.XX; Windows NT X.XX; YY)
where YY is a language code, e.g. en for English
So now Opera identifies as
Mozilla X.XX ( compatible; MSIE X.XX; Windows NT X.XX; YY) Opera X.XX
i.e. Opera pretending to be IE pretending to be Netscape.
If you use netcat nc -l -p 80 and go to 127.0.0.1 in Opera, you see these headers -
GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; en) Opera 8.50 Host: 127.0.0.1 Accept: text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*; q=0.1 Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: windows-1252, utf-8, utf-16, iso-8859-1;q=0.6, *;q=0.1 Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, x-gzip, identity, *;q=0 Connection: Keep-Alive
Slashdot Mirror
True, and Microsoft seem to be siding with people who rip and stream content as a way to compete with Sony.
5 .html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051017-544
Perhaps it may depend to some extent on the capabilities of the CD drive being used. Mine is, amusingly, made by Sony...
Maybe the ripped copy contains a rootkit for your brain that just makes you think you've copied it.
You mean BitTorrent?
You can use a client that can pre allocate files, like BitTornado. I can leave it running with half a dozen sessions active and I can't hear the drive seeking.
I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that running drives warm and constantly seeking reduces their life. You can check the drive temp by reading the SMART attributes. One of these is typically temperature. Make sure that it's comfortably below the max temp in the datasheet. If it isn't, cool the drive with a fan.
Ticking harddrives are about to quit on you.
I'd say it's about to quit on you because it's jealous. You shouldn't oggle other younger drives when your old drive is watching.
Actually, if you want less heat/noise a 2.5" disk isn't a bad choice.
Flash, as everyone else points out has some serious issues - the price per GB is sky high, it has a lower life than hard disks even with wear levelling, and the write speeds are still much slower than a typical hard disk.
My guess will be that flash will never take over from hard disks - hard disk capacity is growing faster than IC capacity, so the price per GB comparison will get worse with time rather than better.
quid is English slang for pound sterling.
I'll license Windows XP cracked^H^H^H^Hpreactivated international edition for $0.
Oh wait, that's what they're already running.
OMG Zerg rush!!111 Kekekekek!11!!
America Fuck Yeah!
Finally you say something I agree with.
Have you seen this
m initextlo/tr_show01.html#10
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/
?
As to the technocracy argument, I can't see how you can have a centrally planned economy without that. In fact it reminds me of the "Road to Serfdom" - one of the themes of that is that planning is essentially poisonous to free societies. I'm not sure I'd go that far - none of the democratic socialist countries ended up as tyrannies, but they all seemed to have fairly lacklustre economic performance compared to the US and its imitators.
I can accept they shirking argument though - one trip on British Rail is enough to convince you of that its a real danger.
That's kind of like asking the readership of slashdot to vote on what the RIAA should be allowed to charge for CDs.
You're wrong too btw, the best existing version of a communist democracy would be India just after independance in the 1950's. The economy was centrally planned - the Congress party was elected, but the planning was done by experts they appointed. No one voted on the price of anything, or even on the experts that would set prices.
It's interesting actually - the UK tried to build a similar system to India - the Labour Party and Congress were very close intellectually. In the UK, the Labour party was able to keep wartime central planning, and extend it somewhat by nationalising the commanding heights of economy. Neither country got to the point of nationalising snow cone manufacture though, and that's probably impossible in a democracy.
It's also worth pointing out that much of the UK's economic decline post war coincided with these sort of policies. They were gradually abandoned in the 1980s, and by the time the Bank of England became independant the economy started to grow again.
And India only really started to grow after these sorts of controls were abandoned.
I think it's a bandwidth problem myself - there is no way that a distant, unelected official can set the price of anything more efficiently than the free market, which has access to all sorts of information. Look at the subtlety of futures markets for example - the price of something can fluctuate chaotically depending on all sorts of inputs.
Lead mechanical engineer. As in the engineer who designs the mechanical bits, like fans, heat pipes and so on. He doesn't do the electrical bits, that would be someone else. He also doesn't do the software bits.
... just ... does ... the ... mechanical ... bits.
/.? Or better, have one word swing out of the screen and twat a particular user across the face.
He
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know how to make text bigger and more noticable on
You should try to sell him a bridge at this point, or make him drink Kool Aid or something. You have The Power, abuse it.
"Steve Ballmer 'fucking killed' the Limbergh baby"?
If you get IE it work, it's most likely locked down so that all Internet sites run with ActiveX disabled, often up to the point where it pops up that damn dialog when you go to a flash site. It gets patched regularly, especially recently, so it's pretty tough. Also, most of the dodgy sites get blocked by some intranet content filter, as to phishing emails by a spam filter. All this is assuming a competent network admin of course.
It's the people running it at home, with all sites in the lowest security zone, no patches and no filtering that tend to get screwed.
Hmm, I notice you still don't post your email address publically though.
But the original idea was a good one, they just messed up the implementation - the problem with nuclear waste disposal is a public relations one. If you could get people to sign off one one more of the current 'bleeding obvious' ways of getting rid of waste, then you'd be able to use more nuclear power. Not that they are bleeding obvious BTW, unless you come from a technical background - most people would think that the bleeding obvious solutions are not as safe as they are, and would thus not accept them unless you spend some time on the consultation job.
Mind you
So it's done the job, it just took a bit longer than expected. Admittedly the sign off concept doesn't seem to have worked as far as I can see, which was the reason for it taking so long.
Hasn't it occured to you that a government consultation excercise might be just be a PC way to describe giving people a description of the problem and a list of all the technically feasible solutions with their pros and cons. That way they realise that none of the options are ideal, and yet one of them must be picked. If you describe it properly, they'll usually pick the best one. It's not like the men from the ministry arrive and listen to a bunch of women describing half arsed schemes for shooting waste into space.
The fatal problem with the kind of elitist solution you're describing is that all the non engineers and scientists feel that things are being done behind their backs and start to complain about it afterwards. This is exactly what happened with GM food - their was a wide spread, and as far as I can tell completely baseless, belief that the technology was inherently unsafe. The Guardian was one of the cheer leaders for this oddly enough - look at any of the columns by George Monbiot on GM, or anything technical. Lots of other people grumbled about a lack of consultation. So after that the Labour government has realised that you need to keep non technical people in the loop for this stuff, hence this sort of thing.
Oddly enough, in consultancy jobs, this is a very good technique - before you make a big change, you need to give the people that own the company a reason for the change, and a list of options and get them to pick one. In fact, it's almost exactly the same situation, since the people that you're trying to get in loop aren't particularly technical - and you're trying to avoid a situation where something breaks because of a change to their code which they haven't agreed on, which tends to be expensive for everyone.
I did e.g.
m l
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0844878.ht
"The act, based on the constitutional power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, declared illegal every contract, combination (in the form of trust or otherwise), or conspiracy in restraint of interstate and foreign trade"
So if I sell my software and get a 95% market share, that is not in itself illegal, but tying agreements are if you are declared a monopoly. The interesting thing is, they are not illegal as far as I can see until then. So I can offer my customers the most restrictive contracts possible and get a massive market share, but then once I'm declared an abusive monopoly, they become illegal. Which is the situation Microsoft is in.
That link should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_Defense
RTFA they said he was a 'chink in the compliance process'. Though they should probably say Asian American these days, racist bastards.
So we're all gonna get drafted and mod chipped and sent to invade Syria for Haliburton.
So the Athlon 3000 being the lowest priced AMD chip wil give the best fps/$, but might not deliver enough fps for you to outrun the zombies in Doom3. Oh noes!
They try to make this point again in the summary
But if you just look at the graphs, I can see how its easy to get the impression that the Athalon 3000 is the best chip.
If you want to know the difference between Free and free, just look them up in a thesaurus
By the way by thesaurus, I mean dictionary and vice versa.
Hmm, all this reminds me of Alice in Wonderland
'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS to be done right -- though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now -- and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -- '
'Certainly,' said Alice.
'And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - - that's all.'
Opera 0.32%
from here
http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/4.ph
I prefer it too, seems quicker and more stable than FF. Probably at 0.32% market share it should be a non tempting target too for exploits too. And it's free now, the Google ads in the old versions have been disabled.
Incidentally, even when its told to identify as IE, it still mentions Opera at the end of the user agent string. It's kind of cool really, the old Mozilla would identify as Mozilla. Internet Explorer would identify as
Mozilla X.XX ( compatible; MSIE X.XX; Windows NT X.XX; YY)
where YY is a language code, e.g. en for English
So now Opera identifies as
Mozilla X.XX ( compatible; MSIE X.XX; Windows NT X.XX; YY) Opera X.XX
i.e. Opera pretending to be IE pretending to be Netscape.
If you use netcat nc -l -p 80 and go to 127.0.0.1 in Opera, you see these headers -