could we please stick to serious measures of information within the field of IT instead of silly printer paper units, how many station wagons full of 9 track tape is that?
Just imagine 250 million pigeons with attached 4 GB memory sticks flying around South Africa, and that should give you an idea of how big this is.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations for pigeon guano suggest that many pigeons would produce 2,500 metric tons of pigeon sh*t a day.
Uh.. those perks have been available in England for years.
Not exactly. Those perks are available for a fee - at O2, for example, free weekends is an extra GBP 5 a month. Another GBP 5 for unlimited O2 to O2 calls. Free nights isn't even available at O2. With Verizon in the US, I had free nights, weekends, and Verizon to Verizon calls standard. If O2 offered all of those as options, it would be GBP 15, or about $25 extra a month.
If you are going to claim that Dell is cheaper than Apple, here's an opportunity to make some money. I'll paypal $100 to the first person who can find a Dell laptop that is cheaper than Apple and matches it's features.
While this could be construed as trolling, I write this in good faith to demonstrate that Mac's have features no other manufacturer can touch.
Don't forget to include
* Obviously, screen size, HD, Memory, CPU, etc.
* Booting as a Firewire Hard Drive in Targeted Disk Mode
* Optical Audio In and Out
* Honest to god 7 hour battery life (or even 5 hours if 7 hours is too hard to find at Dell)
* Gigabit Ethernet
* A power cord that safely comes out when a 3-year old child runs into the cord
* LED Backlit display
* Sudden Motion Sensor reducing Hard-Drive damage if you do ever drop it
* Preinstalled with a Malware/Viruse free OS (Linux certainly qualifies)
Sure, you could argue that YOU don't value these features. I never said you did. But I do (some of them, anyway), others do, and we're willing pay for them.
Can anyone explain to me why Linux has so many filesystems? Windows has had NTFS for years (admittedly, several versions, but never any compatibility issues that I've come across), and Linux has, what, 73 or something?! Is it really that hard to get it right?
Well, I've had 73 girlfriends over the years, so I think I have gotten it right. Much like file systems, each of my ex's offers something uniquely special.
.
Of course, it's a lot easier to bring a filesystem back to my mother's basement where I live . . . sigh
Ditto on the work of art. I met a French woman in Corsica who had chosen Polaroids as her preferred medium for art. The colors had that cooky, dated hue right away. It inspired me to buy a Polaroid, though I rarely use it. Her website, with said Polaroid pics: http://clotildefotopassion.free.fr/
The answer is not the more obvious $200,400, but is, in fact, the minimum she will spend at MIT over 4 years. I don't care if she is the smartest person to ever take the ACT, this is a lot of potential debt to burdening her with.
And yes, I know that MIT has great financial aid, but much of that aid is in the form of Loans, which I don't really consider aid at all, nor will you if you read a popular (if disreputable) website.
Hah! Have you SEEN Chinese cars in crash tests? This youtube video compares a Lexus and Fiat with two Chinese Cars. It's worth the 2 minutes. Which one would you rather be in?
I've driven a MazdaSpeed3 (Turbo Gasoline) and owned a TDI Golf (Turbo Diesel). They feel very similar and the torque might favor the Mazda, BUT . . . the mazda is ~ 30 mpg gas, the TDI is ~45 mpg Diesel.
The only reason I don't own the TDI anymore is VW's constant electrical problems. The day Toyota makes a Corolla with a VW TDI engine, I'm buying it.
This cartoon was prominently displayed on my Economics Professor's door. I think it accurately integrates Adam Smith's metaphor with our current situation.
While I agree with you that a few random passes will completely delete everything it touches, there is one tiny exception. As far as I remember, hard drives are built to be slightly larger than their advertised size, with firmware that recognizes and simply avoids bad sectors (given the size of modern hard drives, a bad sector or two is nothing). Occasionally, the HD Firmware will recognize an area going bad during daily use of the HD, copy the data to a good sector, and simply avoid the bad sector from then on, mapping it right out.
Performing a few random passes (or 35, for that matter) will never touch data in sectors that went bad during the use of the hard drive. The chance of that data being important and being recoverable is far less likely than you being struck by lighting twice (yes, I pulled that statistic out of my ass), so no one worries about it. But this is slashdot, so I felt a need to add to the conversation.
The question no-one is asking is, how many of these newly hired 'Canadians' will have American PhD's, but because they are foreign born, they are unable to stay in the U.S. after finishing their PhD? Keep in mind that it is a LOT easier to enter America as a graduate student and obtain a PhD then it is to stay here after and find employment. When newly minted PhD's are unable to legally work here, they have to choose between their home country, near-certain employment in Canada, or starting over again in England/Australia/etc.
I have foreign-born friends with PhD's in Economics from Rutgers University (NJ) who are struggling to find jobs teaching Economics at rinky-dink community colleges that pay wages comparable to starting salaries for high school teachers. Those who set United States immigration policy somehow think it is a good idea to have foreigners educated in America but is not a good idea to employ them in America.
Airbus: Care for some metal wings?
Boeing Client: No, thank you, I take them flexible, like my women.
I'd guess that the European women are more flexible then American women. At least outside of Utah.
Of course, if I had a statistically significant sample of European and American 'flexible' women from which I could select dates, you can bet I wouldn't be reading slashdot right now.
While I agree with this, I would like to suggest an alternate approach.
As well as providing a noob-friendly distro, Dell could make available an open source suite of hardware testing tools. They probably have something already in house. Uber-geeks, when confronted with a hardware error that couldn't be detected by the existing tests would improve the test (and hopefully receive a Dell bonus, think snowballs in hell) in order to have their hardware issue resolved. Dell's policy could be a fairly hands off policy (slightly less frustrating than their current windows one), requiring that:
the issue is present upon a clean install of the supplied noob-friendly distro, or
the issue is present when booting from the Hardware Test CD.
Once the process began, Dell would have the best written hardware testing tools, a dedicated community, and the beginning of trust.
This is so f'ing easy, I'm surprised Gateway hasn't done this to pull themselves out of their death spiral.
I've grown tired of unfounded comments like this one:
The article tries to make it sound like Apple is making more because they arent paying license fees to MS, but in reality they are charging a HUGE premium for their operating system. Compare the price differential of a mac with an equivalent hardware dell, its quite large.
I'll put my money where my mouth is and offer $25 dollars via paypal to the person who can get me a quote for a dell, compaq, hp, ibm/lenova, or toshiba laptop that can beat both the specs of Apple's mid-level MacBook and the no-sales-tax and free-shipping price of $1300 to your door you can get every day of the year in the US from Amazon. (Amazon also offers a $75 mail in rebate, but I won't even include that to give you a fighting chance).
So let's begin. Find a laptop from the above manufacturers that is cheaper than $1300 and matches or exceeds all of the following, and you'll get $25 to your paypal account. Winner to be picked by mod points and the general slashdot discussion, and contested answers will be settled by Senior Slashdot Editors.
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 4MB shared L2 cache
1 GB Ram
80 GB HardDrive
Double-Layer DVD Burner
Easy, huh? Now it gets a bit harder.
Gigabit Ethernet
Firewire (6 pin is nice, but 4 pin is acceptable)
Integrated Video Camera
Remote Control
Optical Audio in/Optical Audio Out
over 5 hours ACTUAL battery life, not theoretical battery life
Bluetooth and Wifi
One year hardware warranty
So you don't think I'm purposefully being difficult, the following items are NOT needed to win the money, but are here to remind you to keep your trap shut next time you yap on about mac's being overpriced.
Magnetically attached power cord that won't kill your laptop if you trip over the cord
Near silent to totally silent computer that doesn't sound like a jet engine
Magnetic Closure system that doesn't have plastic hooks sticking out of the top of your screen
he presumably means people will download porn accidentally, when meaning to download something else. How exactly would this work? Nefarious people might rename porn clips to something like a song title, which is then innocently downloaded (and redistributed) by people looking for music files. Mr. Jacobson may be suggesting that the songs in question at this trial are actually porn clips that have found the defendant. This is about as illegal as selling oregano to an undercover cop.
I've used IPCop, both a couple years ago and for a while earlier this year. I was impressed by it both times, but was unhappy about the noise/heat/electricity of a box running 24/7. Granted, it had great features, but I really didn't use them, so I just replaced it with a WRT54G running DD-WRT (I stopped using sveasoft after I felt they weren't honoring the spirit, if not the letter, of GPL).
IPCop will permenantly dominate if someone manages to port it to the WRT54G. If I could have the amazing power of IPCop in a $50 silent box, that used little electricity, then I think IPCop would be on the edge of being a killer appliance.
(If you were hoping I was going to say one was better than the other, it's like asking which is better - a sandwich or a glass of water - it depends if you're hungry or thirsty)
Given the state of the US Healthcare system, where politicians suggest that 'the market' should determine whether granny gets her operation or not, I think we should have a How-To series of books on medical treatment. Is your appendix flaring up? That would be no. 17. Tonsils? Tricky, but do-able. That gets lumped in with Tracheotomies (no. 26). A few in the series would be devoted to cancer, such as no. 82: Using Home Cleaning Products as Chemotherapy Agents (includes coupon for Drano) or no. 156B, Power Tools Helpful for Removing Non-Invasive Tumors (coupon for Home Depot included).
Politics would inevitably creep in, unfortunately, renaming Preventing Unwanted Pregnancies to Dammit, Abstinence till Marriage, you slut! and replacing Avoiding High-Calorie Low-Nutrition Foods to Happy Meals Forever!
My only concern is that I originally read about this on a website largely visited by wierdos, miscreants, the usual riff-raff. Original Post. (the original post's links are dead, use the one above).
If you'd like to educate yourself on what actually happened, I would suggest reading Harper's excellent and insightful None Dare Call it Stolen, which delves heavily into Representative John Conyers of Michigan's Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.
I strongly second this. I've traveled fairly heavily, and the country I've seen the most internet cafes is Turkey. I was in Van, Turkey, and needed the internet, and stumbled upon an entire floor of a mall devoted to internet gaming and playstation gaming (complete with big screen TV's). There were 20 - 30 stores, each offering use of 10-20 computers/consoles. The competition must have been intense, but most were busy. I think this was the result of a country whose average teenager and young adult male could in no way afford a $2000 gaming system, but could easily afford to drop a few dollars with friends. For reference, Turkey is ranked 75th out of 179 countries for per capita GDP, placing it firmly in the middle, according to our friends at. In chicago, you must either cater to those unable to afford computers but still interested in paying for gaming, or those who have them at home but want the convenience of playing alongside friends. While possible, I feel this will be very difficuly.
Richard Feynman's Paper on the Challenger Disaster
on
Shuttle Launch Success
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For those who haven't read it, Richard Feynman's Personal observations on
the reliability of the Shuttle is a fascinating look at some of NASA's inner workings, and the problems that led to the challenger disaster. What is suprising (or perhaps totally expected) is that once again we hear managers and engineers differ on what is acceptable levels of risk.
For those who don't know Richard Feynman, he won the Nobel prize, helped develop the atom bomb, and suggested ways for geeks to pick up women.
The page rendered perfectly using Firefox on my Powerbook. Obviously, microsoft has made tremendous efforts so this will work on all platforms. Now, if someone would kindly help me install this "MS-Dos Executable Install_Messenger.exe" on my apple, I'd be most grateful.
Slashdot Mirror
could we please stick to serious measures of information within the field of IT instead of silly printer paper units, how many station wagons full of 9 track tape is that?
Just imagine 250 million pigeons with attached 4 GB memory sticks flying around South Africa, and that should give you an idea of how big this is.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations for pigeon guano suggest that many pigeons would produce 2,500 metric tons of pigeon sh*t a day.
Uh.. those perks have been available in England for years.
Not exactly. Those perks are available for a fee - at O2, for example, free weekends is an extra GBP 5 a month. Another GBP 5 for unlimited O2 to O2 calls. Free nights isn't even available at O2. With Verizon in the US, I had free nights, weekends, and Verizon to Verizon calls standard. If O2 offered all of those as options, it would be GBP 15, or about $25 extra a month.
If you are going to claim that Dell is cheaper than Apple, here's an opportunity to make some money. I'll paypal $100 to the first person who can find a Dell laptop that is cheaper than Apple and matches it's features.
While this could be construed as trolling, I write this in good faith to demonstrate that Mac's have features no other manufacturer can touch.
Don't forget to include
* Obviously, screen size, HD, Memory, CPU, etc.
* Booting as a Firewire Hard Drive in Targeted Disk Mode
* Optical Audio In and Out
* Honest to god 7 hour battery life (or even 5 hours if 7 hours is too hard to find at Dell)
* Gigabit Ethernet
* A power cord that safely comes out when a 3-year old child runs into the cord
* LED Backlit display
* Sudden Motion Sensor reducing Hard-Drive damage if you do ever drop it
* Preinstalled with a Malware/Viruse free OS (Linux certainly qualifies)
Sure, you could argue that YOU don't value these features. I never said you did. But I do (some of them, anyway), others do, and we're willing pay for them.
Most people are the ones I see littering, driving like idiots, buying stupid junk, getting drunk and vomiting in my sunroof, etc.
Do you own a Black IROC Z? If so, sorry, I was the one who vomited in your sunroof last week. My bad :(
Can anyone explain to me why Linux has so many filesystems? Windows has had NTFS for years (admittedly, several versions, but never any compatibility issues that I've come across), and Linux has, what, 73 or something?! Is it really that hard to get it right?
Well, I've had 73 girlfriends over the years, so I think I have gotten it right. Much like file systems, each of my ex's offers something uniquely special.
Of course, it's a lot easier to bring a filesystem back to my mother's basement where I live . . . sigh
.
--
http://myhovercraftisfullofeels.com/
different DRM. this isn't 'rights mgmt' drm.
sometimes, 3 letters can mean different things.
well, FU. errrr, STFU? Damn, I can't think of any 3 letter curse acronyms.
--
myhovercraftisfullofeels.com
Ditto on the work of art. I met a French woman in Corsica who had chosen Polaroids as her preferred medium for art. The colors had that cooky, dated hue right away. It inspired me to buy a Polaroid, though I rarely use it. Her website, with said Polaroid pics: http://clotildefotopassion.free.fr/
What is $50,100 x 4?
The answer is not the more obvious $200,400, but is, in fact, the minimum she will spend at MIT over 4 years. I don't care if she is the smartest person to ever take the ACT, this is a lot of potential debt to burdening her with.
And yes, I know that MIT has great financial aid, but much of that aid is in the form of Loans, which I don't really consider aid at all, nor will you if you read a popular (if disreputable) website.
Hah! Have you SEEN Chinese cars in crash tests? This youtube video compares a Lexus and Fiat with two Chinese Cars. It's worth the 2 minutes. Which one would you rather be in?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dimg2n2Azwg
I've driven a MazdaSpeed3 (Turbo Gasoline) and owned a TDI Golf (Turbo Diesel). They feel very similar and the torque might favor the Mazda, BUT . . . the mazda is ~ 30 mpg gas, the TDI is ~45 mpg Diesel.
The only reason I don't own the TDI anymore is VW's constant electrical problems. The day Toyota makes a Corolla with a VW TDI engine, I'm buying it.
This cartoon was prominently displayed on my Economics Professor's door. I think it accurately integrates Adam Smith's metaphor with our current situation.
Image from cartoonbank.com
While I agree with you that a few random passes will completely delete everything it touches, there is one tiny exception. As far as I remember, hard drives are built to be slightly larger than their advertised size, with firmware that recognizes and simply avoids bad sectors (given the size of modern hard drives, a bad sector or two is nothing). Occasionally, the HD Firmware will recognize an area going bad during daily use of the HD, copy the data to a good sector, and simply avoid the bad sector from then on, mapping it right out.
Performing a few random passes (or 35, for that matter) will never touch data in sectors that went bad during the use of the hard drive. The chance of that data being important and being recoverable is far less likely than you being struck by lighting twice (yes, I pulled that statistic out of my ass), so no one worries about it. But this is slashdot, so I felt a need to add to the conversation.
--
whereisstony.blogspot.com
The question no-one is asking is, how many of these newly hired 'Canadians' will have American PhD's, but because they are foreign born, they are unable to stay in the U.S. after finishing their PhD? Keep in mind that it is a LOT easier to enter America as a graduate student and obtain a PhD then it is to stay here after and find employment. When newly minted PhD's are unable to legally work here, they have to choose between their home country, near-certain employment in Canada, or starting over again in England/Australia/etc.
I have foreign-born friends with PhD's in Economics from Rutgers University (NJ) who are struggling to find jobs teaching Economics at rinky-dink community colleges that pay wages comparable to starting salaries for high school teachers. Those who set United States immigration policy somehow think it is a good idea to have foreigners educated in America but is not a good idea to employ them in America.
Airbus: Care for some metal wings?
Boeing Client: No, thank you, I take them flexible, like my women.
I'd guess that the European women are more flexible then American women. At least outside of Utah.
Of course, if I had a statistically significant sample of European and American 'flexible' women from which I could select dates, you can bet I wouldn't be reading slashdot right now.
Seeing them plug ahead is one thing, donating to help them plug ahead is another. http://www.reactos.org/en/fundraising_campaign_don ate.html
As well as providing a noob-friendly distro, Dell could make available an open source suite of hardware testing tools. They probably have something already in house. Uber-geeks, when confronted with a hardware error that couldn't be detected by the existing tests would improve the test (and hopefully receive a Dell bonus, think snowballs in hell) in order to have their hardware issue resolved. Dell's policy could be a fairly hands off policy (slightly less frustrating than their current windows one), requiring that:
- the issue is present upon a clean install of the supplied noob-friendly distro, or
- the issue is present when booting from the Hardware Test CD.
Once the process began, Dell would have the best written hardware testing tools, a dedicated community, and the beginning of trust.This is so f'ing easy, I'm surprised Gateway hasn't done this to pull themselves out of their death spiral.
So let's begin. Find a laptop from the above manufacturers that is cheaper than $1300 and matches or exceeds all of the following, and you'll get $25 to your paypal account. Winner to be picked by mod points and the general slashdot discussion, and contested answers will be settled by Senior Slashdot Editors.
- 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 4MB shared L2 cache
- 1 GB Ram
- 80 GB HardDrive
- Double-Layer DVD Burner
Easy, huh? Now it gets a bit harder.- Gigabit Ethernet
- Firewire (6 pin is nice, but 4 pin is acceptable)
- Integrated Video Camera
- Remote Control
- Optical Audio in/Optical Audio Out
- over 5 hours ACTUAL battery life, not theoretical battery life
- Bluetooth and Wifi
- One year hardware warranty
So you don't think I'm purposefully being difficult, the following items are NOT needed to win the money, but are here to remind you to keep your trap shut next time you yap on about mac's being overpriced.There is your answer. When he writes
[pornography] will find you.
he presumably means people will download porn accidentally, when meaning to download something else. How exactly would this work? Nefarious people might rename porn clips to something like a song title, which is then innocently downloaded (and redistributed) by people looking for music files. Mr. Jacobson may be suggesting that the songs in question at this trial are actually porn clips that have found the defendant. This is about as illegal as selling oregano to an undercover cop.
I've used IPCop, both a couple years ago and for a while earlier this year. I was impressed by it both times, but was unhappy about the noise/heat/electricity of a box running 24/7. Granted, it had great features, but I really didn't use them, so I just replaced it with a WRT54G running DD-WRT (I stopped using sveasoft after I felt they weren't honoring the spirit, if not the letter, of GPL).
IPCop will permenantly dominate if someone manages to port it to the WRT54G. If I could have the amazing power of IPCop in a $50 silent box, that used little electricity, then I think IPCop would be on the edge of being a killer appliance.
(If you were hoping I was going to say one was better than the other, it's like asking which is better - a sandwich or a glass of water - it depends if you're hungry or thirsty)
Given the state of the US Healthcare system, where politicians suggest that 'the market' should determine whether granny gets her operation or not, I think we should have a How-To series of books on medical treatment. Is your appendix flaring up? That would be no. 17. Tonsils? Tricky, but do-able. That gets lumped in with Tracheotomies (no. 26). A few in the series would be devoted to cancer, such as no. 82: Using Home Cleaning Products as Chemotherapy Agents (includes coupon for Drano) or no. 156B, Power Tools Helpful for Removing Non-Invasive Tumors (coupon for Home Depot included).
Politics would inevitably creep in, unfortunately, renaming Preventing Unwanted Pregnancies to Dammit, Abstinence till Marriage, you slut! and replacing Avoiding High-Calorie Low-Nutrition Foods to Happy Meals Forever!
For those who want a better understanding of the FCC's approach, this is a must read: The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy (pdf).
My only concern is that I originally read about this on a website largely visited by wierdos, miscreants, the usual riff-raff. Original Post. (the original post's links are dead, use the one above).
If you'd like to educate yourself on what actually happened, I would suggest reading Harper's excellent and insightful None Dare Call it Stolen, which delves heavily into Representative John Conyers of Michigan's Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.
I strongly second this. I've traveled fairly heavily, and the country I've seen the most internet cafes is Turkey. I was in Van, Turkey, and needed the internet, and stumbled upon an entire floor of a mall devoted to internet gaming and playstation gaming (complete with big screen TV's). There were 20 - 30 stores, each offering use of 10-20 computers/consoles. The competition must have been intense, but most were busy. I think this was the result of a country whose average teenager and young adult male could in no way afford a $2000 gaming system, but could easily afford to drop a few dollars with friends. For reference, Turkey is ranked 75th out of 179 countries for per capita GDP, placing it firmly in the middle, according to our friends at. In chicago, you must either cater to those unable to afford computers but still interested in paying for gaming, or those who have them at home but want the convenience of playing alongside friends. While possible, I feel this will be very difficuly.
For those who haven't read it, Richard Feynman's Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle is a fascinating look at some of NASA's inner workings, and the problems that led to the challenger disaster. What is suprising (or perhaps totally expected) is that once again we hear managers and engineers differ on what is acceptable levels of risk.
For those who don't know Richard Feynman, he won the Nobel prize, helped develop the atom bomb, and suggested ways for geeks to pick up women.
The page rendered perfectly using Firefox on my Powerbook. Obviously, microsoft has made tremendous efforts so this will work on all platforms. Now, if someone would kindly help me install this "MS-Dos Executable Install_Messenger.exe" on my apple, I'd be most grateful.