I seem to remember a while ago that google published stats on their hard disk failures and that SMART wasn't particularly useful in predicting failure times of drives.
I've read that study. The trouble with it is that it doesn't distinguish types of failure. As far as that study is concerned a drive that died completely, a drive that developed the odd unreadable sector and a drive that dropped out of a raid despite testing out fine as an individual disk are all "failures".
The thing is if a phone manufacturer breaks away from google they lose the andriod market. Theese days a good app market is one of the most important features for a sucessful smartphone platform. The loss of andriod branding would probablly be pretty painful too.
The likes of cyanogenmod can get away with suggesting the users install the google apps themselves but i'm not sure if those app packages are strictly legal and even if they were manufacturers can't really ask users to do that.
I know the mythbusters did something on the matter some time ago, and I don't recall what they found.
They found that straight up wasn't too bad because the bullet would tumble down (with a relatively low terminal velocity) but firing up at an angle was much nastier because it allowed the bullet to form a smooth arc and therefore come down point first (with a much higher terminal velocity).
Most of them aren't going to hit people simply because most places on the ground don't have a person standing in them but there are still a lot of reported deaths and injuries from them.
There is a book value equal to what it would cost a miner to mine it for you.
Even assuming that is true (things are sometimes worth less than they cost to make if not enough people want them) the cost of making a bitcoin is not static. It depends on how hard other people are trying to make them.
Yes i've taken a look at the international exchange rates and at least among major currencies they do change a bit but not by anything like the ammount bitcoin does. When a currency does change rapidly relative to the other currencies it's usually indicative that the shit has hit the fan in the country that owns that currency.
Afaict bitcoin's real problem has been that the vast majority of it's users are people looking to make a quick buck through either mining or speculation. Not people who were actually looking to use it as a trading medium and even those using it as a trading medium were only using it for a tiny fraction of their transactions.
Though VAT isn't really a tax on "value added". As a VAT registered buisness you claim back VAT on stuff you buy and charge it on stuff you sell.
Yes if you only buy and sell in country and don't buy or sell any goods with special VAT rates it is equivilent to paying tax on the value you added but as soon as you import and export that no longer applies.
The reason would be that for 99% of the use cases of typing and sharing URL's, the HTTP is implied and unnecessary. The http:// is nessacery when writing html (otherwise the link will be treated as relative)
Further without the http:// it's not always obvious (either to humans or to software that autolinks urls) that something is a url rather than say a local file path.
I'd say that is more than 1% of usecases right there.
BINGO, active war between the US and EU seems rather unlikely but strained relationships seem far more reasonable and actively destroying or disabling another nations satellites is a FAR higher escalation than merely disabling a service you give the world for free.
The EU has become FAR too reliant on GPS service, a service that is only available due to the altruism of the US government.
For those needing bulk storage it would take a MASSIVE rise in the cost of HDDs to make SSDs price competitive.
More interesting is the cost comparison between a basic SSD and a basic HDD. IMO the smallest drive you can reasonablly put in a new computer is arround 60GB, go much lower than that and a lot of users will be running out of disk space but at 60GB most people other than gamers, video hoarders and a few other special classes will be quite happy. That will set you back $69 at current prices. A basic HDD will currently set you back $41 (prices from newegg and rounded to nearest dollar).
So the price of a basic HDD would only have to double for it to become attractive for those who don't have futures contracts (e.g. small whitebox builders) to put SSDs into low end boxes (assuming the SSD vendors have the extra capacity to cope without raising the price too much).
What mostly got me about RCT3 was the fact it seemed to be able to slow systems (that were far in excess of it's specified requirements) to a crawl in larger parks. The UI glitches didn't help either of course.
Despite theese issues though it's probablly one of the games i've spent the most time on over the years.
Time zones have nothing to do with how long a day is.
The "TZ database" definition of a time zone is different from the definition of time zone used in many other contexts. It is defined as "any national region where local clocks have all agreed since 1970".
The relationship between local time in a given region and universal time can change for a number of reasons including regular daylight savings changes*, DST rule changes, changes depending on the governments view of the relative important of consistencey with local time vs consistency with neighbouring jurisdictions. Changes in who has jurisdiction over a given area and so on. Tracking these historical changes is nessacery if you want to accurately convert historic local time into universal time or universal time into historic local time.
* And these rules are NOT a simple case of "on day x of month y". In particular it is common to fix the change to a particular day of the week. For example the european rule is last sundays in march and october. The north american rule is second sunday in march and first sunday in november. Some places like israel have even more complex rules revolving around religious events.
sure, in base-10... I wonder if there are in other bases.
In any integer base any ratio of integers can be converted to a terminating or recurring pattern of digits (with a point seperating the integer and fractional part if relavent) and conversely any terminating or reccuring pattern of digits (with a point seperating the integer and fractional part if relavent) can be converted to a ratio of integers. The procedures taught at school for converting ratios to recurring decimals (long division along with the principle that their are a finite number of possible remainders for a given divider and so the pattern produced must eventually repeat) and converting recurring decimals to fractions (multiplying both sides of the equation and subtracting) work just as well in any integer base.
I'm not convinced that non-integer bases make any sense as a concept. The whole point of a positional numbering system is to represent a number as a series of small integers but IANAM.
AIUI while electric vehicles/hybrids with regenerative breaking are much better in stop and go traffic than vehicles that use an ICE directly the energy used per mile is still highly dependent on driving style and conditions. So even with a GPS it's very difficult to accurately predict whether you will get there or not.
well free for a year, after that you have to pay both for the instance itself and for the elastic block store (micro instances have no local storage).
Assuming you use a reserved instance in the US east region (seems to be the cheapest region) and assuming your data usage is less than a gigabyte per month and your storage uses are less than a gigbyte of storage with less than a million requests per month a continuously running micro instance will cost you
$54 for a years reservation (you can reduce this by paying three years at a time) $0.007 per hour = $61.355 for a years per-hour fees $0.20 per month = $2.40 for ec2 storage (not sure if you can buy partial units in a given month or not, if so this may be lower, either way it's a small part of the total cost)
Total arround $120 per year, if you just want a shell account that you can bounce ssh off you can probablly find a cheaper option than that.
How long will it be before MP4, etc., are no longer used?
My bet would be a long time. The computer industry has been stabilising and a small handful of formats has been settled on for each type of data and then stuck with. The file formats for images, audio and finalised documents in use today are much the same as those in use 10 years ago.
Video has taken longer to settle due to the combination of it's sheer bulk and the rise of software patents but I think MPEG formats are a safe bet for longevity as they are both very common in the PC world AND baked into standards like DVD, DVB and blu-ray. So even if the dominant format for files actually stored on the PC changes support for older MPEG standards will still be needed in video handling applications.
Life (both physical life and availability of reading hardware) of physical media is an issue but is one somewhat mitigated by the fact that each generation has stored far more than the last. So by the time migration is needed it can often be accompanied by a huge reduction in the bulk of the archive. You do need to keep on top of it though to a far greater extent than was needed with film. On the other hand anyone who wants to can keep a private archive of thousands of hours of video without breaking the bank.
The bad: Film has established reliable procedures for archiving. Data's still iffy.
Afaict with a few golden rules you can make a very safe digital archive
1: keep lots of copies (remember unlike with analog medium there is no quality penalty for making a copy) at geographically diverse locations 2: keep block checksums and check them frequently. Use other copies to restore corrupt blocks. 3: Give network sharing read permission only. 4: don't let the same people have admin privilages on all your locations. 5: keep some copies completely offline
A terminal is a peice of hardware with a keyboard and a screen or printer that you use to access a computer.
A terminal emulator is a software program that runs on a general purpose computer that has a local keyboard and mouse and emulates a terminal. Usually a fairly advanced terminal.
A ssh client is a peice of software used to log into a remote computer over ssh and connect your terminal to it.
On *nix terminal emulators and ssh clients are usually seperate but ones designed for use in other environments are often integrated together.
It would, the thing is it would require cooperation between police forces in multiple countries and afaict unless it is a REALLY serious crime the police are reluctant to put effort into crimes where the victims are half way arround the world.
Just to clarify for those reading along there is still a drum and technically it's still a consumable. Just a rather long life consumable (the one in my fs3900dn is rated at 300000 pages).
Granted, it's just light home use - we've probably only put a few reams of paper through it total - but that's still pretty impressive
Afaict for a decent laser printer that is nothing unusual. Unlike inkets laser printers seem fine with periods of non-use and even the low end ones have pretty big cartridges.
According to it's specs your printer should do 3500 pages (that's 7 reams single sided or 3.5 reams duplex) on the included "standard yeild" cartridge. I'm sure other printers I have looked at in a similar size/price range had were pretty similar specs.
Anyone have any thoughts on how kyocera printers compare? I've got one (a fs3900dn bought used on ebay) but since it's the first decent printer i've owned I don't have anything to compare it to. Their biggest advantage seems to be the long drum life.
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I seem to remember a while ago that google published stats on their hard disk failures and that SMART wasn't particularly useful in predicting failure times of drives.
I've read that study. The trouble with it is that it doesn't distinguish types of failure. As far as that study is concerned a drive that died completely, a drive that developed the odd unreadable sector and a drive that dropped out of a raid despite testing out fine as an individual disk are all "failures".
The thing is if a phone manufacturer breaks away from google they lose the andriod market. Theese days a good app market is one of the most important features for a sucessful smartphone platform. The loss of andriod branding would probablly be pretty painful too.
The likes of cyanogenmod can get away with suggesting the users install the google apps themselves but i'm not sure if those app packages are strictly legal and even if they were manufacturers can't really ask users to do that.
I know the mythbusters did something on the matter some time ago, and I don't recall what they found.
They found that straight up wasn't too bad because the bullet would tumble down (with a relatively low terminal velocity) but firing up at an angle was much nastier because it allowed the bullet to form a smooth arc and therefore come down point first (with a much higher terminal velocity).
Most of them aren't going to hit people simply because most places on the ground don't have a person standing in them but there are still a lot of reported deaths and injuries from them.
There is a book value equal to what it would cost a miner to mine it for you.
Even assuming that is true (things are sometimes worth less than they cost to make if not enough people want them) the cost of making a bitcoin is not static. It depends on how hard other people are trying to make them.
Yes i've taken a look at the international exchange rates and at least among major currencies they do change a bit but not by anything like the ammount bitcoin does. When a currency does change rapidly relative to the other currencies it's usually indicative that the shit has hit the fan in the country that owns that currency.
http://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=qkchart&symbol=FX%5EUSDEUR
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgMzm1g10zm2g25
Afaict bitcoin's real problem has been that the vast majority of it's users are people looking to make a quick buck through either mining or speculation. Not people who were actually looking to use it as a trading medium and even those using it as a trading medium were only using it for a tiny fraction of their transactions.
Though VAT isn't really a tax on "value added". As a VAT registered buisness you claim back VAT on stuff you buy and charge it on stuff you sell.
Yes if you only buy and sell in country and don't buy or sell any goods with special VAT rates it is equivilent to paying tax on the value you added but as soon as you import and export that no longer applies.
The reason would be that for 99% of the use cases of typing and sharing URL's, the HTTP is implied and unnecessary.
The http:// is nessacery when writing html (otherwise the link will be treated as relative)
Further without the http:// it's not always obvious (either to humans or to software that autolinks urls) that something is a url rather than say a local file path.
I'd say that is more than 1% of usecases right there.
BINGO, active war between the US and EU seems rather unlikely but strained relationships seem far more reasonable and actively destroying or disabling another nations satellites is a FAR higher escalation than merely disabling a service you give the world for free.
The EU has become FAR too reliant on GPS service, a service that is only available due to the altruism of the US government.
Pretty sure linux software raid allows it. You don't really need a raid controller for raid 1.
For those needing bulk storage it would take a MASSIVE rise in the cost of HDDs to make SSDs price competitive.
More interesting is the cost comparison between a basic SSD and a basic HDD. IMO the smallest drive you can reasonablly put in a new computer is arround 60GB, go much lower than that and a lot of users will be running out of disk space but at 60GB most people other than gamers, video hoarders and a few other special classes will be quite happy. That will set you back $69 at current prices. A basic HDD will currently set you back $41 (prices from newegg and rounded to nearest dollar).
So the price of a basic HDD would only have to double for it to become attractive for those who don't have futures contracts (e.g. small whitebox builders) to put SSDs into low end boxes (assuming the SSD vendors have the extra capacity to cope without raising the price too much).
What mostly got me about RCT3 was the fact it seemed to be able to slow systems (that were far in excess of it's specified requirements) to a crawl in larger parks. The UI glitches didn't help either of course.
Despite theese issues though it's probablly one of the games i've spent the most time on over the years.
Time zones have nothing to do with how long a day is.
The "TZ database" definition of a time zone is different from the definition of time zone used in many other contexts. It is defined as "any national region where local clocks have all agreed since 1970".
The relationship between local time in a given region and universal time can change for a number of reasons including regular daylight savings changes*, DST rule changes, changes depending on the governments view of the relative important of consistencey with local time vs consistency with neighbouring jurisdictions. Changes in who has jurisdiction over a given area and so on. Tracking these historical changes is nessacery if you want to accurately convert historic local time into universal time or universal time into historic local time.
* And these rules are NOT a simple case of "on day x of month y". In particular it is common to fix the change to a particular day of the week. For example the european rule is last sundays in march and october. The north american rule is second sunday in march and first sunday in november. Some places like israel have even more complex rules revolving around religious events.
There are literally thousands of companies who have created time-zone databases in order to deal with the complexities that exists with all of this.
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?
sure, in base-10... I wonder if there are in other bases.
In any integer base any ratio of integers can be converted to a terminating or recurring pattern of digits (with a point seperating the integer and fractional part if relavent) and conversely any terminating or reccuring pattern of digits (with a point seperating the integer and fractional part if relavent) can be converted to a ratio of integers. The procedures taught at school for converting ratios to recurring decimals (long division along with the principle that their are a finite number of possible remainders for a given divider and so the pattern produced must eventually repeat) and converting recurring decimals to fractions (multiplying both sides of the equation and subtracting) work just as well in any integer base.
I'm not convinced that non-integer bases make any sense as a concept. The whole point of a positional numbering system is to represent a number as a series of small integers but IANAM.
AIUI while electric vehicles/hybrids with regenerative breaking are much better in stop and go traffic than vehicles that use an ICE directly the energy used per mile is still highly dependent on driving style and conditions. So even with a GPS it's very difficult to accurately predict whether you will get there or not.
well free for a year, after that you have to pay both for the instance itself and for the elastic block store (micro instances have no local storage).
Assuming you use a reserved instance in the US east region (seems to be the cheapest region) and assuming your data usage is less than a gigabyte per month and your storage uses are less than a gigbyte of storage with less than a million requests per month a continuously running micro instance will cost you
$54 for a years reservation (you can reduce this by paying three years at a time)
$0.007 per hour = $61.355 for a years per-hour fees
$0.20 per month = $2.40 for ec2 storage (not sure if you can buy partial units in a given month or not, if so this may be lower, either way it's a small part of the total cost)
Total arround $120 per year, if you just want a shell account that you can bounce ssh off you can probablly find a cheaper option than that.
How long will it be before MP4, etc., are no longer used?
My bet would be a long time. The computer industry has been stabilising and a small handful of formats has been settled on for each type of data and then stuck with. The file formats for images, audio and finalised documents in use today are much the same as those in use 10 years ago.
Video has taken longer to settle due to the combination of it's sheer bulk and the rise of software patents but I think MPEG formats are a safe bet for longevity as they are both very common in the PC world AND baked into standards like DVD, DVB and blu-ray. So even if the dominant format for files actually stored on the PC changes support for older MPEG standards will still be needed in video handling applications.
Life (both physical life and availability of reading hardware) of physical media is an issue but is one somewhat mitigated by the fact that each generation has stored far more than the last. So by the time migration is needed it can often be accompanied by a huge reduction in the bulk of the archive. You do need to keep on top of it though to a far greater extent than was needed with film. On the other hand anyone who wants to can keep a private archive of thousands of hours of video without breaking the bank.
The bad: Film has established reliable procedures for archiving. Data's still iffy.
Afaict with a few golden rules you can make a very safe digital archive
1: keep lots of copies (remember unlike with analog medium there is no quality penalty for making a copy) at geographically diverse locations
2: keep block checksums and check them frequently. Use other copies to restore corrupt blocks.
3: Give network sharing read permission only.
4: don't let the same people have admin privilages on all your locations.
5: keep some copies completely offline
A terminal is a peice of hardware with a keyboard and a screen or printer that you use to access a computer.
A terminal emulator is a software program that runs on a general purpose computer that has a local keyboard and mouse and emulates a terminal. Usually a fairly advanced terminal.
A ssh client is a peice of software used to log into a remote computer over ssh and connect your terminal to it.
On *nix terminal emulators and ssh clients are usually seperate but ones designed for use in other environments are often integrated together.
It would, the thing is it would require cooperation between police forces in multiple countries and afaict unless it is a REALLY serious crime the police are reluctant to put effort into crimes where the victims are half way arround the world.
no image drum to replace
Just to clarify for those reading along there is still a drum and technically it's still a consumable. Just a rather long life consumable (the one in my fs3900dn is rated at 300000 pages).
How do you know if the records in the zone you transfer are the complete set of records in the live zone?
Granted, it's just light home use - we've probably only put a few reams of paper through it total - but that's still pretty impressive
Afaict for a decent laser printer that is nothing unusual. Unlike inkets laser printers seem fine with periods of non-use and even the low end ones have pretty big cartridges.
According to it's specs your printer should do 3500 pages (that's 7 reams single sided or 3.5 reams duplex) on the included "standard yeild" cartridge. I'm sure other printers I have looked at in a similar size/price range had were pretty similar specs.
Anyone have any thoughts on how kyocera printers compare? I've got one (a fs3900dn bought used on ebay) but since it's the first decent printer i've owned I don't have anything to compare it to. Their biggest advantage seems to be the long drum life.
How do you determine the worth of the goods?
I say take the replacement cost or the amount the thief sold it for, whichever is greater.