You gotta remmeber that, when a blackout hits a huge swath of area, it also brings down the *client machines* in that area as well, so your backup centre doesn't necessairily have to handle your entire peak load.
Google only needs one of two redundant data centers (one in the East, one in the West, one Mid-Central) to basically ensure they can whether any power loss scenario. If they had 3 such separate centers (which I have no doubt they already have), the only way they're going to be totally off line is if the whole national grid goes down - in which case Google should be the least of your worries if you're a lawmaker.
Is it just me or is this article describing abilities Linux + IPTables has had for years upon years?
Hell my Linksys WRT54G with modded firmware at home does application-based traffic shaping (no way I would be able to use Vonage reliably while downloading huge ISOS if it didn't).
It doesn't matter if your game is capable outputting 90 fps or 120fps of 300 fps. Unless you're connecting it via DVI or VGA, and your TV supports refresh rates outside the HDTV standard, you are ONLY GOING TO SEE either 1080i@60/1080p@30/720p@30,480i@60,480p@30. That is all the HDTV standard specs for, and it's all that 90+% of the TV's on the market display.
And IF you have an LCD or Plasma TV (again, 90_% of HDTV owners), then it *ALWAYS* displays content progressively. Before it gets to the panel, it's going to stitch those 1080i@60 frames together to show you 1080p@30.
You're never going to see > 30fps with your HDTV, unless you have a 1080p TV, and your console supports 1080p@60.
Hydrogen conversion has its own inefficiency, so that's out.
Err..... I don't think so!
Of course Electricity -> Hydrogen is not 100% efficient. if it was it would violate the laws of thermodynamics! According to Wikipedia, the efficiency of electrolysis is around 40-50%. Assuming 50%, that means the overall efficiency of this solar panel system, when used to turn the energy into hydrogen for storage purposes, is 20%. That's MUCH MORE than 8%, so it's still a huge leap forward.
And frankly, it doesn't even matter if it would be as low as 15% or 12%. Why? It's free clean energy, that energy would be 100% waste energy radiated off the surface of the earth if it was not harnessed by us. It is much better for the earth to use a 20% efficient energy chain that starts at the sun than an 80% efficient energy chain that starts with oil.
Of course this assumes these panels can be made large-scale without using toxic compounds.
An RFID chip will fry in seconds in a microwave. It takes much longer than that to affect the plastic. And the magnetic stripe will not be affected at all, until the plastic starts to melt.
Putting the card in the microwave for 3-5 seconds should do the trick. The worst that can happen is you ruin your bank card, so just go to the bank and get another. They don't cost anything.
A 1080p TV doesn't have to do any conversion though. A 1080p TV displays 1080i/60 transmitted content at it's native 1080p/30 resolution with 0 loss.
You need to remember that video games only use 1080i as a transmission mechanism. It's not encoded at 1080i (it's not encoded at anything - it's generated progressive content).
Laws against "uttering threats" and such are also very stupid and should be struck down.
If I, in a mad fit, say I'm going to kill you, does that mean I am going to follow through with it? Likely not.
Such things should b valid grounds to get a warrant to pursue and investigation to see *IF* I plan to go through with it, in which case, a charge of conspiracy to commit murder is higher anyway.
The whole reason charges like "uttering threats" exist is because law enforcement is under-staffed, lazy, or both. It's just shortcuts they should not be allowed to take. The same is true of "hate speech" laws in some countries.
Libel is a different matter because it causes direct harm - but you have to remember, libel is a civil offense - you can easily argue against damage claims if they're baseless. It's a big difference from stupid laws like "uttering threats".
Umm, hello McFly? A ban on use. Not on possession. Obviously a private company can't tell me what I can and can not have on my person.
Er... sure they can. Every heard of camera bans in casinos and nightclubs?
A private entity can ban you from doing pretty much anything while on their property. You do not have an implicit right to be there... it's their property. If you don't agree to their terms of being on that property, they are legally justified to force you to leave the property. If you refuse, they are within their rights to call the police and have you forceably removed or arrested for trespassing.
That said, there is no reason a movie theater could not jam cell phones inside the theater, so long as there are prominent signs that such jamming will be taking place. If you go in there, the honous is totally on you.You know there are no cell phones in there. If you have a heart attack, that's your problem.
How are they even supposed to know? Unless you're one of the tools who doesn't run Windows behind a stateful firewall with egress filtering so you know exactly who it is talking to.
Seriously - I stopped trusting Microsoft years ago. The idea that I would let Windows just sit there and phone home is assenine.
As far as updates goes - www.autopatcher.com for me.
You already register your car every year with the state I assume? Not sure if this is true in all states but it is in most.
Anyway, it's not too difficult. Every year when you register your car, they check the odometer reading, compared to last years reading you pay some amount.
Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?"
Umm... the price. Google Answers was a bounty-style format for answers- you ask a question, post a sum you're willing to pay for the answer. Someone finds the answer, you pay them.
Yahoo! answers is totally different. It's bascially a glorified message board with some rating controls - anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer a question. It's totally free.
Because of this, you see two things if you spend some time looking at Google Answers vs. Yahoo! Answers:
Google Answers has more interesting and difficult questions that need some research, whereas Yahoo! Answers has some really lame questions. This is because you don't have to pay a bounty on Yahoo!
Google Answers has far less questions being asked, again likely because you have to pay for your answers
The Google Answers interface is not as polished.
I think it's pretty easy to deduce from this what's happened. Google came out with this Answers idea first. BUt like so many projects in the Google incubator, not many people know about it. Combine this with the fact that it is a pay-for service, and you get something that's very underutilized. Normally, Google wouldn't care much about this, since they have oodles of horsepower (look at all the obscure projects going on at Google Labs all the time). But they had to process payments for this thing, that means overhead. And it likely wasn't making any money.
"Do either of you guys know the phone number of VMWare's CEO?
Seriously... who even thinks anyone but VMWare for enterprise virtualization. Xen is cool, but it is nowhere near VMWare infrastructure's capabilities. And Microsoft's offerings are about 4-5 years behind the curve.
The problem with this whole scheme, and many similar ones, is this list is not available to the general public. I can't find the list of sites being blocked anywhere on Cybertip.ca or anywhere else. So how am I supposed to know if what is being blocked is actually a child porn site? Take their word for it? I think not.
I mean, how do I know they haven't blocked some whole site when only one hidden sub-page has child porn?
This whole scheme is ripe for abuse. Too bad you can't come down against it in mainstream media without being labeled a pedophile.
In a few weeks, when people start noticing the self-checkouts, they will quickly become one of **THE SLOWEST** lines in the store. This is because
You have Joe struggling to find the barcode on the box
You have Joe scanning and buying 15 things even though the limit is only 1-5 items
You have the stupid machine pausing after every scan saying "Please place the item into the bag" or somesuch
You have items recorded with incorrect weights so even when you do put it promptly in the bag the system complains and asks you to wait for a cashier
All this headache - and do they give you any kind of a discount for doing a cashier's work? No. So the store is saving the cashier salary, and not passing it onto you.
I gave up on self-checkouts long ago. Maybe in a technology generation or two they will be better (I really like the IBM commercial where the RFID scanner scans all the items instantly and presents the total - hopefully it will zap the tag too).
But for now they suck ass and are a waste of time. If you have more than two items, or have to wait even behind *ONE MORE* person than the normal checkout line, the normal checkout line will be faster.
If the submitter and editor had bothered to RTFP (read the f*cking patent), they would see it is covering avery specific implementation of a linked list. The patent covers the idea of having a linked list of pointers with *two ancillary linkakges*. What this allows essentially, is for you to have a list sorted in two totally different orders at the same time... if you traverse linkage A, you get one order, if you traverse linkage B, you get the other.
Now, I don't know if there's prior art on this, and the idea seems pretty obvious to me, but it is certainly *NOT* a simple doubly-linked-list.
Re:Real geeks only please
on
Top Ten Geek Girls
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you think "geek" is a slanderous term, then you have either come here via a time-warp from 1970, are not a geek yourself, have never been to this site before, or various combinations of all three.
Geek is very chic nowadays, lots of people who are not geeks *wish they were*. Geek is in.
That's exactly why I got a 1080p TV even though I have no plans to get BluRay or HD-DVD until the format war is settled (either by settling on one format, or dual-use players). A 1080p native TV lets me see all 1080 lines in a 1080i encoded broadcast, making 1080i *actually better* than 720p, which it rarely is.
Unlike salamanders and lizards, most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs...,p>This isn't really newsworthy at all. Virii have always been able to propagate via flashing BIOSes and whatnot - doing the same to a PCI card is no different.
The only reason you don't see much of it is because it actually requires a bit more skill to perform this type of attack, instead of your average script-kiddie virus.
You guys are confusing encoding with transmission. 720p is only the same quality as 1080i if you were working from a 720p or less source. If your source material is encoded at 1080p than broadcasting it at 1080p or 1080i is the only way to get all 1080 lines. And if you're using a Plasma, DLP or LCD HDTV (read: 95+% of HDTV owners), than your TV *is progressive anyway* - your TV is de-interlacing that 1080i/60 into a XXXp/30 signal before it is displayed. That "XXX" is the native resolution of your display.
Conclusion is, if your source material is 1080p (as in film-based content or computer-generated content, AKA video games), then using 1080i for transmission has the potential for *much more* information than 720p to be displayed. Whether or not it actually *is* all displayed depends on the native resolution of the set.
This is where a 1080p capable set gives you bonus: a 1080p native set (that is, 1920x1200 resolution) will display a 1080i signal the *exact same* as a 1080p signal because it will de-interlace it perfectly.
Where this gets a bit more hairy is when you have non-progressive content, like sports and other television that is actually encoded interlaced. When showing *that* content, 720p is essentially the same as 1080i since you're losing half of the 1080i signal lines before it even gets to your TV set.
Changing just two settings on the average office PC will cut it's useage by over 50% on a daily average, yet hardly any office ever mandates that they be enabled
- Screen saver totally disabled in favor of DPMS suspend after 10 minutes of inactivity and monitor shut off after 15 minutes
- Set hard drives to spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity.
See how easy that was? It didn't affect your backup plan or anything else. The hard drive setting ALONE can save you 15% or more, especially if your office runs lots of applications over the network.
Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:
... Quake3...
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Er... is this post from 4 years ago when Quake 3 was actually released, or..?
I recently watched4 people in my office convert to Ubuntu from Windows as their primary desktop. They've been running for months and love it. They haven't hardly TOUCHED a command line ot do anything, especially not install or update software. You get a nice "Updates Available" icon in your tray and you just click it to update - and guess what, no rebooting required!
Slashdot Mirror
You gotta remmeber that, when a blackout hits a huge swath of area, it also brings down the *client machines* in that area as well, so your backup centre doesn't necessairily have to handle your entire peak load.
Google only needs one of two redundant data centers (one in the East, one in the West, one Mid-Central) to basically ensure they can whether any power loss scenario. If they had 3 such separate centers (which I have no doubt they already have), the only way they're going to be totally off line is if the whole national grid goes down - in which case Google should be the least of your worries if you're a lawmaker.
Is it just me or is this article describing abilities Linux + IPTables has had for years upon years?
Hell my Linksys WRT54G with modded firmware at home does application-based traffic shaping (no way I would be able to use Vonage reliably while downloading huge ISOS if it didn't).
How is this next generation?
It doesn't matter if your game is capable outputting 90 fps or 120fps of 300 fps. Unless you're connecting it via DVI or VGA, and your TV supports refresh rates outside the HDTV standard, you are ONLY GOING TO SEE either 1080i@60/1080p@30/720p@30,480i@60,480p@30. That is all the HDTV standard specs for, and it's all that 90+% of the TV's on the market display.
And IF you have an LCD or Plasma TV (again, 90_% of HDTV owners), then it *ALWAYS* displays content progressively. Before it gets to the panel, it's going to stitch those 1080i@60 frames together to show you 1080p@30.
You're never going to see > 30fps with your HDTV, unless you have a 1080p TV, and your console supports 1080p@60.
Yeah.
And what about all the buggy whip makers!
Who is thinking of THEM!
Hydrogen conversion has its own inefficiency, so that's out.
Err..... I don't think so!
Of course Electricity -> Hydrogen is not 100% efficient. if it was it would violate the laws of thermodynamics! According to Wikipedia, the efficiency of electrolysis is around 40-50%. Assuming 50%, that means the overall efficiency of this solar panel system, when used to turn the energy into hydrogen for storage purposes, is 20%. That's MUCH MORE than 8%, so it's still a huge leap forward.
And frankly, it doesn't even matter if it would be as low as 15% or 12%. Why? It's free clean energy, that energy would be 100% waste energy radiated off the surface of the earth if it was not harnessed by us. It is much better for the earth to use a 20% efficient energy chain that starts at the sun than an 80% efficient energy chain that starts with oil.
Of course this assumes these panels can be made large-scale without using toxic compounds.
An RFID chip will fry in seconds in a microwave. It takes much longer than that to affect the plastic. And the magnetic stripe will not be affected at all, until the plastic starts to melt.
Putting the card in the microwave for 3-5 seconds should do the trick. The worst that can happen is you ruin your bank card, so just go to the bank and get another. They don't cost anything.
A 1080p TV doesn't have to do any conversion though. A 1080p TV displays 1080i/60 transmitted content at it's native 1080p/30 resolution with 0 loss.
You need to remember that video games only use 1080i as a transmission mechanism. It's not encoded at 1080i (it's not encoded at anything - it's generated progressive content).
Laws against "uttering threats" and such are also very stupid and should be struck down.
If I, in a mad fit, say I'm going to kill you, does that mean I am going to follow through with it? Likely not.
Such things should b valid grounds to get a warrant to pursue and investigation to see *IF* I plan to go through with it, in which case, a charge of conspiracy to commit murder is higher anyway.
The whole reason charges like "uttering threats" exist is because law enforcement is under-staffed, lazy, or both. It's just shortcuts they should not be allowed to take. The same is true of "hate speech" laws in some countries.
Libel is a different matter because it causes direct harm - but you have to remember, libel is a civil offense - you can easily argue against damage claims if they're baseless. It's a big difference from stupid laws like "uttering threats".
Umm, hello McFly? A ban on use. Not on possession. Obviously a private company can't tell me what I can and can not have on my person.
Er... sure they can. Every heard of camera bans in casinos and nightclubs?
A private entity can ban you from doing pretty much anything while on their property. You do not have an implicit right to be there... it's their property. If you don't agree to their terms of being on that property, they are legally justified to force you to leave the property. If you refuse, they are within their rights to call the police and have you forceably removed or arrested for trespassing.
That said, there is no reason a movie theater could not jam cell phones inside the theater, so long as there are prominent signs that such jamming will be taking place. If you go in there, the honous is totally on you .You know there are no cell phones in there. If you have a heart attack, that's your problem.
How are they even supposed to know? Unless you're one of the tools who doesn't run Windows behind a stateful firewall with egress filtering so you know exactly who it is talking to.
Seriously - I stopped trusting Microsoft years ago. The idea that I would let Windows just sit there and phone home is assenine.
As far as updates goes - www.autopatcher.com for me.
You already register your car every year with the state I assume? Not sure if this is true in all states but it is in most.
Anyway, it's not too difficult. Every year when you register your car, they check the odometer reading, compared to last years reading you pay some amount.
It's not rocket science.
Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?"
Umm... the price. Google Answers was a bounty-style format for answers- you ask a question, post a sum you're willing to pay for the answer. Someone finds the answer, you pay them.
Yahoo! answers is totally different. It's bascially a glorified message board with some rating controls - anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer a question. It's totally free.
Because of this, you see two things if you spend some time looking at Google Answers vs. Yahoo! Answers:
I think it's pretty easy to deduce from this what's happened. Google came out with this Answers idea first. BUt like so many projects in the Google incubator, not many people know about it. Combine this with the fact that it is a pay-for service, and you get something that's very underutilized. Normally, Google wouldn't care much about this, since they have oodles of horsepower (look at all the obscure projects going on at Google Labs all the time). But they had to process payments for this thing, that means overhead. And it likely wasn't making any money.
"Do either of you guys know the phone number of VMWare's CEO?
Seriously... who even thinks anyone but VMWare for enterprise virtualization. Xen is cool, but it is nowhere near VMWare infrastructure's capabilities. And Microsoft's offerings are about 4-5 years behind the curve.
The problem with this whole scheme, and many similar ones, is this list is not available to the general public. I can't find the list of sites being blocked anywhere on Cybertip.ca or anywhere else. So how am I supposed to know if what is being blocked is actually a child porn site? Take their word for it? I think not.
I mean, how do I know they haven't blocked some whole site when only one hidden sub-page has child porn?
This whole scheme is ripe for abuse. Too bad you can't come down against it in mainstream media without being labeled a pedophile.
All this headache - and do they give you any kind of a discount for doing a cashier's work? No. So the store is saving the cashier salary, and not passing it onto you.
I gave up on self-checkouts long ago. Maybe in a technology generation or two they will be better (I really like the IBM commercial where the RFID scanner scans all the items instantly and presents the total - hopefully it will zap the tag too).
But for now they suck ass and are a waste of time. If you have more than two items, or have to wait even behind *ONE MORE* person than the normal checkout line, the normal checkout line will be faster.
If the submitter and editor had bothered to RTFP (read the f*cking patent), they would see it is covering avery specific implementation of a linked list. The patent covers the idea of having a linked list of pointers with *two ancillary linkakges*. What this allows essentially, is for you to have a list sorted in two totally different orders at the same time... if you traverse linkage A, you get one order, if you traverse linkage B, you get the other.
Now, I don't know if there's prior art on this, and the idea seems pretty obvious to me, but it is certainly *NOT* a simple doubly-linked-list.
If you think "geek" is a slanderous term, then you have either come here via a time-warp from 1970, are not a geek yourself, have never been to this site before, or various combinations of all three.
Geek is very chic nowadays, lots of people who are not geeks *wish they were*. Geek is in.
'The internet is like a fifteen story building, and with international domain names what we're trying to do is change the bricks in the basement.
Who ever heard of building a fifteen story building out of tubes?!?!
Doesn't that old han end up swallowing A GOAT before then end of that song?
I fo rone welcome our goat-eating wonder-esophagus overloads.
That's exactly why I got a 1080p TV even though I have no plans to get BluRay or HD-DVD until the format war is settled (either by settling on one format, or dual-use players). A 1080p native TV lets me see all 1080 lines in a 1080i encoded broadcast, making 1080i *actually better* than 720p, which it rarely is.
Unlike salamanders and lizards, most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs...,p>This isn't really newsworthy at all. Virii have always been able to propagate via flashing BIOSes and whatnot - doing the same to a PCI card is no different.
The only reason you don't see much of it is because it actually requires a bit more skill to perform this type of attack, instead of your average script-kiddie virus.
Unlike salamanders and lizards, most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs.
So salamanders and lizards are not animals now? What are they then? Bacteria? People? Aliens?
U think the submitter meant some reptiles and amphibians here.
You guys are confusing encoding with transmission.
720p is only the same quality as 1080i if you were working from a 720p or less source. If your source material is encoded at 1080p than broadcasting it at 1080p or 1080i is the only way to get all 1080 lines. And if you're using a Plasma, DLP or LCD HDTV (read: 95+% of HDTV owners), than your TV *is progressive anyway* - your TV is de-interlacing that 1080i/60 into a XXXp/30 signal before it is displayed. That "XXX" is the native resolution of your display.
Conclusion is, if your source material is 1080p (as in film-based content or computer-generated content, AKA video games), then using 1080i for transmission has the potential for *much more* information than 720p to be displayed. Whether or not it actually *is* all displayed depends on the native resolution of the set.
This is where a 1080p capable set gives you bonus: a 1080p native set (that is, 1920x1200 resolution) will display a 1080i signal the *exact same* as a 1080p signal because it will de-interlace it perfectly.
Where this gets a bit more hairy is when you have non-progressive content, like sports and other television that is actually encoded interlaced. When showing *that* content, 720p is essentially the same as 1080i since you're losing half of the 1080i signal lines before it even gets to your TV set.
Changing just two settings on the average office PC will cut it's useage by over 50% on a daily average, yet hardly any office ever mandates that they be enabled
- Screen saver totally disabled in favor of DPMS suspend after 10 minutes of inactivity and monitor shut off after 15 minutes
- Set hard drives to spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity.
See how easy that was? It didn't affect your backup plan or anything else. The hard drive setting ALONE can save you 15% or more, especially if your office runs lots of applications over the network.
Er... is this post from 4 years ago when Quake 3 was actually released, or..?
I recently watched4 people in my office convert to Ubuntu from Windows as their primary desktop. They've been running for months and love it. They haven't hardly TOUCHED a command line ot do anything, especially not install or update software. You get a nice "Updates Available" icon in your tray and you just click it to update - and guess what, no rebooting required!