Perhaps you tuned in late. Or, perhaps you just were not paying attention. Maybe you shouldn't be commenting about things that you have no clue about.
Microsoft came to dominance by sabotaging the API so that its competitors did not have a good API to use, and its internal divisions for Excel and Word had a secret API that worked well. This is monopolistic behavior.
Part of the judgement agreed to by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is that Microsoft will open its API to all.
Perhaps you haven't been following the Microsoft/DoJ saga. Microsoft has gained its dominance on the desktop by spiking its competitors software via the API. The gummint is just trying to be the police that makes sure that the API is fully open and available to developers just as it would be for Microsoft's internal developers.
How's about my brother for starters. PhD Biometrics. He is both a skeptic and someone who clings to false truths.
Cuts both ways. People will then be afraid to come up with their own ideas for fear that their ideas will be seen as silly and bring them shame and embarrassment.
Quite the contrary, once a meme has been disseminated through the scientific community, it is rather hard to change the thinking of the so-called 'scientific' community. History is full of examples and it surprises me that you would attempt to say otherwise. Galileo, Columbus, Einstein, all had doubters and skeptics. Some were threatened for their beliefs.
Here's a rather old saying;
The problem with ignorance isn't so much what we don't know, but rather that so much of what we hold to be true just isn't so.
And that sums up my personal skepticism.
The biological sciences are the most ripe for examples. False truth; the genetic tree of life branches and does not recombine. Holding that as truth has held up a lot of understanding of genetics.
I was a little amazed by the premise that there's not enough skepticism because I have learned to try to tune out the doubters and skeptics. Far too many people think they are clever if they can find a hypothetical problem with an idea. It's as if they think that being critical is the same as being discerning.
I think it's the whole bikeshed thing; they won't approve until they change the color.
But the point is well taken that people drink the Kool-Aid far too often without even considering what they're swallowing. Often, it's a reflection of their personal bias. They are willing to believe what their church/political party/government says because it conforms to their previously internalized beliefs. And belief usually translates to identity; people become what they believe. So when their leader tells them, for example, that global warming is not real, they believe what they're told despite evidence to the contrary. To not believe is a threat.
But this goes well beyond the obvious examples of politics and religion. Scientists are the worst examples of group-think. They are taught something and repeat it and hold it to be fact even when confronted with good alternative explanations.
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined. As we all now know, they were, in fact, once joined.
Personally, I think that shaming and embarrassing mistaken beliefs should come back into fashion. When people feel embarrassed about silly beliefs, they will start to question what they're told.
But Microsoft has to be watching this very, very closely. If the post-Bush FTC is willing to go after Intel, you have to think they're going to get after Microsoft, too.
Use profiling for starters. Look for white males between the ages of 18 and 60, then watch their behavior. I guess a real pro won't get nervous, but the amateurs will look nervous. If they get to vote behind a curtain, well, you're out of luck. Just check the seals before and after. Also, make sure the chain of custody is verified. Enlist the help of your Democratic counterpart.
PCs used to be a rather diverse collection of hardware. I'll bet most of the older techie's can remember the horrible variations on IBM's original PC. Even IBM made horrible variations.
My point is that standardization is possible, even probable. So, I think that, yes, there can be some effort to enable the technology for gaming; memory management, graphics buss technology, cell processor technology, etc.
It seems like the processor divergence works against this. The various 'Intel' compatible processors all have a requirement of specialized Northbridge/Southbridge type glue silicon and that works against standardization.
XP SP3 is Microsoft's move to get the masses to move to Vista. They have done this before; sabotage software to induce their customers to move to a Microsoft product. This is not the first time that I know of where they sabotage their own product to force an upgrade. The data formats of previous versions of Excel and Word were made incompatible with newer versions of the same products.
Your best bet, turn off the 'Automatic Updates'.
Use a 'fan center' to isolate when grid power down
on
Hobbyist Renewable Energy?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Off the top of my head, a $100 fan center could shut the power connection when the feed from the power company goes down. Attach a 24V AC transformer to the power company line and wire it to the fan center's controller. Power goes down, circuit opens.
I can probably fabricate a circuit with an oscillator that syncs up to the 60Hz of power. After that, it's a matter of how to convert from DC to AC. It doesn't seem hard to me.
12 years ago I was on a team that developed a RAID system that managed itself in this same way. I don't know why Slashdot would bother to post an article about a disk system and not provide any sort of details about what is new. Automatic rebuilding? Active spares? Management of a heterogeneous set of drives (mixing drive capacities, for example)?
In fact, when I left that company seven years ago, they had on-the-fly volume 'snapshot' capabilities for backup, journaling, and other uses. Built in diagnostics were included.
Where's the beef?
I am looking at this same question. I investigated using a WRT54G or similar device for network attached storage, but eventually concluded that I could buy equipment on Newegg and build a low-power, high speed server for cheap, using an old case. The expensive part will be buying a new, efficient and quiet power supply.
I am looking at a 65w dual core processor on a mobo with a GB LAN interface built in. Lots of cheap memory. If you stay off the power curve, you can get processors, motherboards, system memory, and disk memory for cheap. Sometimes, you can use left-over stuff. I have a 1Gb memory stick that came out of a MAC. It's only worth about $25, but it's plenty for a good OS like Linux.
I could use an old HP Pavilion mobo, but it's power supply is noisy and I'd have to buy a GB NIC.
I'd recommend browsing the 'net for a cheap, low power mobo/processor that's using relatively current technology like SATA, GB LAN, and supports dual core processors. You can outfit it with a single core processor to save $40 and pick up a peppy multicore processor in the future. An AMD AM2 board with SATA and GB LAN can be found for $50, 45w processor for $40, 512 memory for $10, 160GB HDD for $50, and scrounge a case and power supply. That's $150 for a headless server that can be upgraded as component prices drop.
Yup. I thought that there might be a problem with trying to implement stupidity filters. I thought that if it actually worked at all, its first victim would be the stupidity filter itself.
I know I'm being paranoid, but did anybody else think that this is a way for the gummint to get a look at the various methods people are using to secure their data? What better way to get the methods than to have a 'competition', something that will stroke the egos of crackers?
This garage in your condo idea is fantastic. There are some obvious technical issues, but there should be some technological solutions.
Seems like this would encourage people to drive a Smart Car or other small, lightweight vehicle. The teaser said Bently, but in reality, this idea works best with something like the Mini Cooper and a hybrid. I would think that a H3 or an Expedition would be left to the parking garages.
You could drive your EV or pluggable hybrid up to your flat and charge it up overnight. Driving it off an onto the lift won't create nasty exhaust fumes.
That's the idea. I was thinking that the very small drives that they use in iPods and the like will someday have enough capacity to bundle two into a single form factor and have 'transparent RAID'. Two of the 1.7" (or whatever they are) would fit nicely inside the 3.5" form factor, especially if you shape the mechanisms to spoon each other like a yin-yang.
I suppose a designer would provide one SATA interface, have the mirroring electronics on a board, perhaps with some flash memory like a hybrid drive, and make the 1.7" drives plug-able. If one fails, you pull that failed drive off and plug a freshie in there.
The plug-ability would also provide a migration path for upgrading to larger drives; pull out one of the mirrored 1TB drives and replace it with your new, zippy 8TB drive, let the system re-mirror, then replace the remaining 1TB drive and remirror.
Another poster has described the evolution of GPU devices to GPGPU and the need for symmetrical bus speeds. The concept of having the video subsystem server as a swap device is brilliant. The RAM speeds are high, and the GPU can mediate the operation. I'm going to assume that this becomes the norm in the near future.
I know that HTPCs usually have some nice graphics hardware, and that some people are already using two high-end video cards in their systems for gaming/CAD. Seems like a smart board designer will pick up on the idea and integrate a swap device on the video subsystem.
Drug companies are in the business of making money for their stockholders. If they have a billion dollars to invest in research and they have to choose between a treatment for a disease that will make them ten billion dollars, and a cure for a disease that will make them 2 billion dollars, they have a moral obligation to their stockholders not to cure disease, but to treat disease.
The "lawsuit taxes" are an direct result of the constant development of treatments instead of cures. When you cure a disease, there might be risk during the course of the therapy, but the therapy will end when the disease is cured and the risk of side-effect also ends. When, instead, you are simply treating the symptoms of the disease, the risk of side-effect does not end; as long as you are undergoing therapy, you are exposed to its side effect. In fact, the risk of side-effect can be shown to increase with the longevity of the therapy.
So, your implication that lawsuits related to the effects of drugs are some sort of random externality being exploited by cynical lawyers is stupid. If they actually cured a disease, their risk to lawsuits would be much lower. Since the motivation is to produce therapies that don't cure, they're going to be making treatments, not cures. If they're in business to make money for their stockholders, they're going to be exposed to risk. Attempting to protect business from risk is never a good idea. Ask Adam Smith.
And, you ought to try doing your own thinking instead of repeating the ideas of the radical right wing. They'll be the first ones to clamor for 'open markets', 'free trade', yet they'll also ask for government regulation to help them with their supposedly 'free markets'.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you tuned in late. Or, perhaps you just were not paying attention. Maybe you shouldn't be commenting about things that you have no clue about.
Microsoft came to dominance by sabotaging the API so that its competitors did not have a good API to use, and its internal divisions for Excel and Word had a secret API that worked well. This is monopolistic behavior.
Part of the judgement agreed to by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is that Microsoft will open its API to all.
Perhaps you haven't been following the Microsoft/DoJ saga. Microsoft has gained its dominance on the desktop by spiking its competitors software via the API. The gummint is just trying to be the police that makes sure that the API is fully open and available to developers just as it would be for Microsoft's internal developers.
Where have you been?
Finally, X-ray glasses that actually work.
As a kid, I sent in my money for the x-ray glasses on the back of the comic in my bubble gum. What a rip-off. Maybe I'll finally get a pair that work.
The maturity of the management and its ability to insulate the coders from the noise from corporate is important to good code development.
Having an experienced architect is vital. Enforcement of the values of the team, especially with respect to interface specifications, is important.
Isn't Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly the same bonehead that overturned the Microsoft ruling?
And, can we expect this ruling to be appealed?
Wow, that must have been ages ago. How old are you?
I'm 55. I went to elementary school in NYC and its northern suburbs.
You obviously don't know too many scientists
How's about my brother for starters. PhD Biometrics. He is both a skeptic and someone who clings to false truths.
Cuts both ways. People will then be afraid to come up with their own ideas for fear that their ideas will be seen as silly and bring them shame and embarrassment.
Quite the contrary, once a meme has been disseminated through the scientific community, it is rather hard to change the thinking of the so-called 'scientific' community. History is full of examples and it surprises me that you would attempt to say otherwise. Galileo, Columbus, Einstein, all had doubters and skeptics. Some were threatened for their beliefs.
Here's a rather old saying;
The problem with ignorance isn't so much what we don't know, but rather that so much of what we hold to be true just isn't so.
And that sums up my personal skepticism.
The biological sciences are the most ripe for examples. False truth; the genetic tree of life branches and does not recombine. Holding that as truth has held up a lot of understanding of genetics.
I was a little amazed by the premise that there's not enough skepticism because I have learned to try to tune out the doubters and skeptics. Far too many people think they are clever if they can find a hypothetical problem with an idea. It's as if they think that being critical is the same as being discerning.
I think it's the whole bikeshed thing; they won't approve until they change the color.
But the point is well taken that people drink the Kool-Aid far too often without even considering what they're swallowing. Often, it's a reflection of their personal bias. They are willing to believe what their church/political party/government says because it conforms to their previously internalized beliefs. And belief usually translates to identity; people become what they believe. So when their leader tells them, for example, that global warming is not real, they believe what they're told despite evidence to the contrary. To not believe is a threat.
But this goes well beyond the obvious examples of politics and religion. Scientists are the worst examples of group-think. They are taught something and repeat it and hold it to be fact even when confronted with good alternative explanations.
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined. As we all now know, they were, in fact, once joined.
Personally, I think that shaming and embarrassing mistaken beliefs should come back into fashion. When people feel embarrassed about silly beliefs, they will start to question what they're told.
Intel, shmintel. Who cares about Intel?
But Microsoft has to be watching this very, very closely. If the post-Bush FTC is willing to go after Intel, you have to think they're going to get after Microsoft, too.
Use profiling for starters. Look for white males between the ages of 18 and 60, then watch their behavior. I guess a real pro won't get nervous, but the amateurs will look nervous. If they get to vote behind a curtain, well, you're out of luck. Just check the seals before and after. Also, make sure the chain of custody is verified. Enlist the help of your Democratic counterpart.
PCs used to be a rather diverse collection of hardware. I'll bet most of the older techie's can remember the horrible variations on IBM's original PC. Even IBM made horrible variations.
My point is that standardization is possible, even probable. So, I think that, yes, there can be some effort to enable the technology for gaming; memory management, graphics buss technology, cell processor technology, etc.
It seems like the processor divergence works against this. The various 'Intel' compatible processors all have a requirement of specialized Northbridge/Southbridge type glue silicon and that works against standardization.
XP SP3 is Microsoft's move to get the masses to move to Vista. They have done this before; sabotage software to induce their customers to move to a Microsoft product. This is not the first time that I know of where they sabotage their own product to force an upgrade. The data formats of previous versions of Excel and Word were made incompatible with newer versions of the same products.
Your best bet, turn off the 'Automatic Updates'.
Off the top of my head, a $100 fan center could shut the power connection when the feed from the power company goes down. Attach a 24V AC transformer to the power company line and wire it to the fan center's controller. Power goes down, circuit opens.
I can probably fabricate a circuit with an oscillator that syncs up to the 60Hz of power. After that, it's a matter of how to convert from DC to AC. It doesn't seem hard to me.
12 years ago I was on a team that developed a RAID system that managed itself in this same way. I don't know why Slashdot would bother to post an article about a disk system and not provide any sort of details about what is new. Automatic rebuilding? Active spares? Management of a heterogeneous set of drives (mixing drive capacities, for example)? In fact, when I left that company seven years ago, they had on-the-fly volume 'snapshot' capabilities for backup, journaling, and other uses. Built in diagnostics were included. Where's the beef?
I am looking at this same question. I investigated using a WRT54G or similar device for network attached storage, but eventually concluded that I could buy equipment on Newegg and build a low-power, high speed server for cheap, using an old case. The expensive part will be buying a new, efficient and quiet power supply.
I am looking at a 65w dual core processor on a mobo with a GB LAN interface built in. Lots of cheap memory. If you stay off the power curve, you can get processors, motherboards, system memory, and disk memory for cheap. Sometimes, you can use left-over stuff. I have a 1Gb memory stick that came out of a MAC. It's only worth about $25, but it's plenty for a good OS like Linux.
I could use an old HP Pavilion mobo, but it's power supply is noisy and I'd have to buy a GB NIC.
I'd recommend browsing the 'net for a cheap, low power mobo/processor that's using relatively current technology like SATA, GB LAN, and supports dual core processors. You can outfit it with a single core processor to save $40 and pick up a peppy multicore processor in the future. An AMD AM2 board with SATA and GB LAN can be found for $50, 45w processor for $40, 512 memory for $10, 160GB HDD for $50, and scrounge a case and power supply. That's $150 for a headless server that can be upgraded as component prices drop.
Yup. I thought that there might be a problem with trying to implement stupidity filters. I thought that if it actually worked at all, its first victim would be the stupidity filter itself.
'We have met the enemy...'
I know I'm being paranoid, but did anybody else think that this is a way for the gummint to get a look at the various methods people are using to secure their data? What better way to get the methods than to have a 'competition', something that will stroke the egos of crackers?
Interviewer to Will Rogers; "Sir, are you a member of an organized political party?"
Will Rogers; "No. I'm a Democrat."
This garage in your condo idea is fantastic. There are some obvious technical issues, but there should be some technological solutions.
Seems like this would encourage people to drive a Smart Car or other small, lightweight vehicle. The teaser said Bently, but in reality, this idea works best with something like the Mini Cooper and a hybrid. I would think that a H3 or an Expedition would be left to the parking garages.
You could drive your EV or pluggable hybrid up to your flat and charge it up overnight. Driving it off an onto the lift won't create nasty exhaust fumes.
That's the idea. I was thinking that the very small drives that they use in iPods and the like will someday have enough capacity to bundle two into a single form factor and have 'transparent RAID'. Two of the 1.7" (or whatever they are) would fit nicely inside the 3.5" form factor, especially if you shape the mechanisms to spoon each other like a yin-yang.
I suppose a designer would provide one SATA interface, have the mirroring electronics on a board, perhaps with some flash memory like a hybrid drive, and make the 1.7" drives plug-able. If one fails, you pull that failed drive off and plug a freshie in there.
The plug-ability would also provide a migration path for upgrading to larger drives; pull out one of the mirrored 1TB drives and replace it with your new, zippy 8TB drive, let the system re-mirror, then replace the remaining 1TB drive and remirror.
When I see headlines about 1TB drives, I immediately think of losing 1TB of data.
How about they put a RAID 1 array in a 3.5" form factor? Two separate platters, two head/arm assemblies, two SATA connectors.
As my pappy says,
Profanity is the linguistic crutch of a fucking ignoramus.
Damn right!
Another poster has described the evolution of GPU devices to GPGPU and the need for symmetrical bus speeds. The concept of having the video subsystem server as a swap device is brilliant. The RAM speeds are high, and the GPU can mediate the operation. I'm going to assume that this becomes the norm in the near future. I know that HTPCs usually have some nice graphics hardware, and that some people are already using two high-end video cards in their systems for gaming/CAD. Seems like a smart board designer will pick up on the idea and integrate a swap device on the video subsystem.
Headline: Burning Man Festival, Atlanta GA
Drug companies are in the business of making money for their stockholders. If they have a billion dollars to invest in research and they have to choose between a treatment for a disease that will make them ten billion dollars, and a cure for a disease that will make them 2 billion dollars, they have a moral obligation to their stockholders not to cure disease, but to treat disease.
The "lawsuit taxes" are an direct result of the constant development of treatments instead of cures. When you cure a disease, there might be risk during the course of the therapy, but the therapy will end when the disease is cured and the risk of side-effect also ends. When, instead, you are simply treating the symptoms of the disease, the risk of side-effect does not end; as long as you are undergoing therapy, you are exposed to its side effect. In fact, the risk of side-effect can be shown to increase with the longevity of the therapy.
So, your implication that lawsuits related to the effects of drugs are some sort of random externality being exploited by cynical lawyers is stupid. If they actually cured a disease, their risk to lawsuits would be much lower. Since the motivation is to produce therapies that don't cure, they're going to be making treatments, not cures. If they're in business to make money for their stockholders, they're going to be exposed to risk. Attempting to protect business from risk is never a good idea. Ask Adam Smith.
And, you ought to try doing your own thinking instead of repeating the ideas of the radical right wing. They'll be the first ones to clamor for 'open markets', 'free trade', yet they'll also ask for government regulation to help them with their supposedly 'free markets'.