If you build a petabyte stack using 1.5TB disks you need about 800 drives including RAID overhead. With an MTBF for consumer drives of 500,000 hours, a drive will fail roughly every 10-15 days, if your design is good and you create no hotspots/vibration issues.
Rebuild times on large RAID sets are such that it is only a matter of time before they run a double drive failure and lose their customers data. The money they saved by going cheap will be spent on lawyers when they get the liability claims in.
If you RTFA, you will see that they are using RAID6 with 2 parity drives per raid, so a double drive failure can be handled, and it is only the less likely triple drive failure that will ruin them.
It seems weak that they don't have hot-swappable drives in this configuration, but they have software that is managing the data across disk sets, and presumably they have redundant copies of data that keep the data accessible when one of their servers is taken down to replace a drive (if they don't, the downtimes due to replacing drives will make the service useless). This redundancy may also save them in the case that they actually lose a RAID set.
And here's the part I don't understand and maybe someone can help me out here. The whole idea of fusion as a power source is that puts off an extremely large amount of energy for very little fuel. We could take this energy, in the form of heat and use it expand another substance (boil water) to turn turbines.
And there's the rub... if cold fusion is "COLD", then how do we utilize the energy? For that matter, what kind of energy is there?
There's still energy given off that you can use in the ways you think. The "cold" part of cold fusion is that it occurs at low temperatures. "Hot" fusion requires heating the whole mess up to insanely high temperatures, so there's a huge energy expenditure to get the thing started, and it's hoped that it gives off enough energy to make up for it. (This is the problem with hot fusion right now; they can do it but they cannot make more energy than it costs to maintain the system. Whereas with cold fusion nobody has convinced the scientific community that it is actually occurring.)
Re:Why "96" in particular?
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Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
Well, 1996 was probably chosen because TFA was written for Slate which started in that year. More generally, though, this is when there were enough recognizable sites on the web to write the article about. Though I had a web browser in 1994, if the article was about the internet in 1993-1994 it would have had to cover gopher and archie and veronica and all those other pre-web technologies that, given the absence of coverage of IRC and Usenet in the article, it appears the author was trying to avoid. Not to mention all the private-network content within AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and the other systems that were essentially large-scale BBSes (the author mentions AOL, but only as an *Internet* service, which was not the case in 1993-1994).
For the drivers question, Harald responds (my bold added, and ignoring the validity issues for the patents involved):
The problem with hardware accelerated video playback is that the company creating a 'consumer product' sold to an 'end user' has to pay the royalties to the MPEG-LA.
So any chip maker like VIA is not required to pay the patent licensing royalties since they just produce an 'intermediate product' which somebody else can turn into a 'consumer product'.
This works fine in an environment where VIA makes chips and provides reference driver code under NDA to a system integrator, who then sells a bundle of software and hardware to an end user. In that case the system integrator either pays the royalties and can sell that product, or doesn't pay the royalties and can just sell the hardware without the proprietary software drivers and programs to actually make use of those hardware features.
Now imagine the open source situation for this. If VIA was suddenly selling chips as intermediate products, but also disclosing free player software to make use of that acceleration features? Would that then be a 'consumer product'? Who knows. But it would definitely be distributed to an 'end user' since it's available to anyone who wants to download it.
This question was about making drivers for acceleration features available, but somewhere in this long response, but somewhere along the way, Harald turned it into a response about making player software available.
There is no reason making publically available a driver for hardware acceleration that is performed by and contained within some chip should be considered a violation of a patent on said acceleration. The driver code does not actually perform the acceleration, it is the hardware that does so.
It's a different question entirely to consider player software which will go ahead and do the algorithm in software if it cannot find hardware to do it - then the player violates the patent. But Via is not being asked to make a free player, only drivers to enable the use of their hardware.
Likewise, the other highlighted part is ludicrous. If Via's only way of avoiding paying the patent royalties themselves is because they are selling an intermediate product only to system integrators, then how can the system integrator who turns it into a consumer product choose not to pay royalties on a physical device that performs patented techniques just because it is not then configured to do so? These things can and do get reverse-engineered, so any hardware capable of breaking the patent should always be considered capable of doing so.
If these people properly pay patent royalties, there is clearly no cause of action against releasing drivers since the drivers only work with hardware for which the patent royalties have been paid.
Most of the time it is this easy to vote in the USA. The exception is when unexpectedly high turnout causes lines at the polls and people have to wait.
And lets assume that a person drinks 8 of those glasses in a day. That adds up to about 2e-4 milligrams or 0.2 micrograms per day of a drug present in 1 part per billion concentration. By comparison, usual dosage when drugs such as the ones mentioned in the article are administered is in the tens or hundreds of milligrams per day. So what the study is trying to say is the people are getting around 1/100000 of the typical dosage of these drugs through the water supply. Not enough to have serious immediate effects, but perhaps enough to have small effects over the span of a person's lifetime. If you estimate that lifetime at 100 years or 36500 days, it means they are getting about 7 milligrams of a 1 PPB drug in that time, less than 1 daily dose of a typical drug. Can this level of a drug lead to any real effect? Maybe, but it's not immediately obvious.
I'm sure there will be follow-up studies to try to determine any effect, or rather that the studies are already taking place; this kind of thing necessarily needs long-term studies. It's also worth investigating whether there is a build-up of these drugs in the food supply, which could mean people's total intake could be significantly higher.
100 hours a month less driving is a tremendous amount, over 3 hours a day. Assuming they are driving mostly in the city with lots of stop lights and averaging 15 MPH, that is 1500 miles/month or 18000 miles/year. If they are driving a lot on the highway, it is even more miles. I know that some people drive that much, but to say that they reduced their driving by this much is a really amazing statistic that is hard to believe. Some of the people with tech jobs might be able to telecommute with the broadband, but the fraction of people who can do this can't really be all that high, and even that does not seem to account for the amount of driving saved.
And I suppose I am expected to believe that they all started using grocery delivery services, Amazon and other online shopping, Netflix, and started downloading all their music instead of driving to local stores to do these things? Well, I can believe this about the music. But if the people aren't shopping their local stores, isn't that going to destroy a lot of jobs rather than creating them? I suppose it creates jobs for the delivery services, which makes the reduction in driving by the broadband users a rather pointless statistic.
This election, and the other ones in other states recently and in the near future, are not elections for any office. These are actually party elections within the major parties to determine which candidates the major parties will place on the ballot in the actual presidential election, which is this November just as you thought. Each election actually chooses delegates who are pledged to the various candidates, and this summer will attend a party convention where they actually choose their candidate.
Wikipedia provides a more detailed explanation. In particular, many states have moved their primaries to earlier dates this year in an attempt to have a greater perceived impact. The parties don't like this, and, since these are party events after all, they have reacted by stripping some or all of the delegates to be awarded in these early elections.
And that's what this story is all about, paying for game features. Sure, you cannot man the guns without paying. But you also cannot man the guns without permission from an officer (either through being promoted to Pirate or being ordered to the station). It's part of the way the game works (in this case mainly beause guns are an important station -- you don't want to be in battle with no guns loaded because some slacker is not managing to load the guns properly). And you can't be an officer without paying, either. The officers pay, and the masses who don't pay work stations on ships for them. You can't do puzzles or play games on shore without paying, either, though they give you some free days to try them.
The pirate badge allows you to gun, and it costs 1 (one) doubloon, approximately 25 US cents, to gun for a whole month, and they don't count days you don't log in. The badges for officers, crafting puzzles, and parlor games cost more, but you can have the top badges to enable all game features for about 30 doubloons a month.
Yohoho Puzzle Pirates has been running this doubloon-based micropayment system for over 2 years now, and it has proven far more successful than the original subscription-based system.
The reason "most" high school computer classes these days are about using Word, Excel, etc. is because there are a LOT more computer classes these days. And this is good. Unlike 20 years ago, today's youngsters are going to face a world where many, many jobs are going to require basic computer skills like using email and other programs, and it is good that the public schools are teaching these skills.
But programming is, always has been, always will be, NOT for everybody. As a result, it is difficult if not impossible to make a general programming class in public school. At best, you're going to have an elective class in high school which a rather small portion of the students are going to take.
I am glad you learned how to program when you were in grade six! I learned even earlier, having gone to school a few years later than you (basically in the 80s), during the age of the various micros that followed the PET. And yes, one of the big things to do on computers in those days was to write programs. Why? Because the number of useful programs available for these computers was rather small.
By the time I graduated high school, a computer class had been made a requirement for the entering students, and yes, a lot of those classes were not programming classes, but "learning to use computer software" classes. There was still a class that involved programming, and there was talk of adding a more advanced programming class, which didn't happen while I was there. Personally, I postponed taking the class until my senior year in hopes of being able to take the more advanced class, and when it didn't happen, I enrolled in the existing class. The teacher of this class was also the organizer of the school programming team which took part in two annual programming competitions, and from her experience with me she knew I already knew everything significant from her class. So she loaned me her college Pascal book and had me work at learning this language on a computer in the library that was set up for Pascal while she taught her ordinary curriculum to her other students. I pretty much never used Pascal again after leaving her class, but the experience with a language with some real structure to it (as opposed to BASIC) was useful to me when I later learned other languages.
Now I ask you, how many times during your school days did you write programs that essentially just crunched some numbers for you to solve some sort of mathematical problem? Guess what: The kid taking the Excel class in high school today -- at least, any of the ones doing well in the class -- probably learns how to do equally or more sophisticated number crunching in Excel than you wrote BASIC programs to do in your day. Sure, he may miss out on some of the other programming you learned, but he has learned a useful skill that will help him in real-life situations in the future.
And as far as hard science majors not knowing programming? Guess what, the kind of programming these types would have done in the past is primarily of the number-crunching variety. In the real world, today, scientists and engineers very often use Excel to do these tasks. Or they use software specific to their field, much too specialized to have learned so early on, but their early-on use of other programs has taught them the basic skills they need to learn these programs as needed.
Today I work for a company that makes a wide range of software used by not only engineers and scientists but also people like gas station managers. The products I work with are more targeted toward the engineers, with a lot of custom modeling capabilities to handle whatever we didn't think of. These custom model capabilities are quite widely used, and in earlier versions they required you to write a program (or a function, at least) in some language. But in more recent versions, due to customer demand, we have added the ability to use Excel instead of a programming language for many of these types of customizations.
Why would the customers want this? Because these model
Well, there's an idea here that might hold some truth. Note that they are marketing it to data centers, people with LOTS and LOTS of files. Because people tend to have multiple copies of the same files, they can achieve great compression by eliminating the duplicate copies in the archive -- or likewise, any files with large sections that are the same among various files.
20 email accounts subscribed to the same mailing list? Store the bodies of those e-mails only once, and you save a big chunk of disk space. A bunch of people downloaded the same MP3 file? We only need one copy in the archive. As long as there are multiple copies of the same data, it can compress any type of data.
The difference here is that they are taking advantage of the redundancy of files across an entire filesystem (and a HUGE one), rather than the redundancies within an individual file. (I would assume they also do the latter type of compression with a conventional algorithm.) 25x compression seems extreme, but I am sure they can achieve some extra compression here.
The problem with Orangutang (besides its questionable spelling) is that it is not really an example of the type of word the story is referring to. Tautonyms are words that are composed of the same group of letters repeated more than once, like Walla Walla. If you can come up with two more words of this pattern starting with A and L, with the appropriate crossings, you could make a 10x10 square that uses only these three words, repeatedly. If of course you don't already object to the place name with a space in it being used in your square, but this illustrates the idea.
Orangutang is somewhat related to the tautonyms due to the repeated "ang", and it could lead to a square made of words with just this repeated part, and three words crossing the "ang" repeated within the square. A purer form of this challenge expects that all the words will be different, except where the same word appears once reading across and once reading down.
The press release must be a PDF inside a Flash applet. (Don't know, since it still hasn't loaded while I had gotten down this far on the/. comments...)
You misunderstand. The point of the practice test is for participants to ensure that they have the correct technology in place to play: A working Acrobat reader which can handle the encryption method used, and which can print the puzzles.
Also, the point of the password protection is so that participants can download the actual puzzle file up to 1 day in advance of the test, but not read it until the test officially begins and the password for the real file is posted. (And it will be more complex than "world".) This avoids (you guessed it) the server getting slashdotted when the test begins Saturday.
The reason why you see the specialized kits more is because Lego makes more money on them, and the licensed names (Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.) sell more kits to people who might not otherwise buy them. They sell these kits for somewhere around 10-15 cents (US) per brick, and many of the pieces are very small.
On the other hand, there are still big tubs, like this one which may be what you were remembering. These kits sell for more like 2 cents a brick. However they replaced this a couple years ago with the "creator" 1000 piece tub, which apparently has a far inferior selection of pieces (see review). And still, there are only a few tubs like this but dozens of those specialized sets, so you need to look in a store with a good selection of Lego and hunt for it! Or do like other responders already suggest and buy in bulk on ebay.
And note that even Microsoft recognizes this. Windows already has a vector graphics format, the Windows meta file (WMF). The only point to them making a new format at this point is to make something somehow better. And of course, in typical Microsoft style, they can't use actual SVGs, because they have to squeeze in their own extensions to the format.
Now, clearly, Longhorn will natively display WVGs. What are the chances that it will also display SVGs natively out-of-the-box?
And reading the other threads that have developed makes me realize that in fact, my oldest hardware is not my 8 year old monitor, but my 10 year old keyboard. Newer keyboards just don't compare, so with my little adapter I keep using this old one.
My monitor, purchased new in fall 1995, still looks great. Today, if I needed to replace it, I can buy a 17" or maybe a 19" LCD for less than I originally paid for this monitor.
What I'm most confused about is how come eBay didn't get the patent on "Buy It Now" invalidated. There is plenty of prior art available in Google Groups, and it was exactly this sort of thing that inspired eBay. Here's one from 1993 which shows the "Buy It Now" feature. December 24, 1993 M:tG auction It's easy to find others which show the proxy bidding feature and there may well be other features with prior art.
I really enjoyed this game too, back in its day. It's been years since I've seen one. Come to think of it, I might have only ever played one of these, but it rocked. Certainly most of my GnR play was on one single machine.
"Ain't goin' down, ain't goin' down, ain't goin' down no more!" Loved how they played this song when you had a long ball.
I bought my used laptop on ebay a little less than a year ago. It was tough; I dropped out of a dozen or more auctions, and passed on many that were already too high or lacked features, but that's what the ebay game is all about.
Eventually I got a 233 MHz box for $280 including shipping and all I needed to add to it (for what I wanted to do with it) was an ethernet card to make getting stuff onto and off of the thing easier. I picked that up in a separate auction and completed my system for $300. (I did consider upgrading the ram/HD but I tried it first and decided I didn't need to.)
It seems to be a pretty rugged box. I took it to the Mystery Hunt this year, and on my way into MIT the shoulder strap on the bag I was carrying it in (along with some books and stuff) broke and the thing went down maybe 3 feet to the street. It ran fine afterwards, though, and didn't give me any problems at all.
Yeah, I ran into this one already a month or two ago.
I have a Passport account which has only ever been used to report one bug to Microsoft (for an annoying problem that was hindering the work of myself and my cow-orkers.
The thing is, among the US candidates, there is rarely more than 1 very bright contestant on the show, so the geometric progression bit never gets above about $10,000, and the players grow to expect this and bank at $5000 or $2500 and as a result they're lucky to get $80,000 by the end of the game most times.
By the time there are just 3 contestants left, when there is 1 obviously strongest link among them, there is little reason to do anything but vote that person off -- it's a matter of playing a relative equal, say 50% chance, to win $70,000 vs. a poor chance of winning maybe $80,000 you might get up to playing together with the stronger link in the last money round.
Last night's show was the first time in the history of the US show that I have seen 3 strong contestants on the show who all survived the voting out of the weaker links. They realized they were doing well and let the banks build up in the last 3 rounds, resulting in them making more than any other group yet on the US show and about twice the typical total.
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If you build a petabyte stack using 1.5TB disks you need about 800 drives including RAID overhead. With an MTBF for consumer drives of 500,000 hours, a drive will fail roughly every 10-15 days, if your design is good and you create no hotspots/vibration issues.
Rebuild times on large RAID sets are such that it is only a matter of time before they run a double drive failure and lose their customers data. The money they saved by going cheap will be spent on lawyers when they get the liability claims in.
If you RTFA, you will see that they are using RAID6 with 2 parity drives per raid, so a double drive failure can be handled, and it is only the less likely triple drive failure that will ruin them. It seems weak that they don't have hot-swappable drives in this configuration, but they have software that is managing the data across disk sets, and presumably they have redundant copies of data that keep the data accessible when one of their servers is taken down to replace a drive (if they don't, the downtimes due to replacing drives will make the service useless). This redundancy may also save them in the case that they actually lose a RAID set.
And here's the part I don't understand and maybe someone can help me out here. The whole idea of fusion as a power source is that puts off an extremely large amount of energy for very little fuel. We could take this energy, in the form of heat and use it expand another substance (boil water) to turn turbines.
And there's the rub... if cold fusion is "COLD", then how do we utilize the energy? For that matter, what kind of energy is there?
There's still energy given off that you can use in the ways you think. The "cold" part of cold fusion is that it occurs at low temperatures. "Hot" fusion requires heating the whole mess up to insanely high temperatures, so there's a huge energy expenditure to get the thing started, and it's hoped that it gives off enough energy to make up for it. (This is the problem with hot fusion right now; they can do it but they cannot make more energy than it costs to maintain the system. Whereas with cold fusion nobody has convinced the scientific community that it is actually occurring.)
Well, 1996 was probably chosen because TFA was written for Slate which started in that year. More generally, though, this is when there were enough recognizable sites on the web to write the article about. Though I had a web browser in 1994, if the article was about the internet in 1993-1994 it would have had to cover gopher and archie and veronica and all those other pre-web technologies that, given the absence of coverage of IRC and Usenet in the article, it appears the author was trying to avoid. Not to mention all the private-network content within AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and the other systems that were essentially large-scale BBSes (the author mentions AOL, but only as an *Internet* service, which was not the case in 1993-1994).
This question was about making drivers for acceleration features available, but somewhere in this long response, but somewhere along the way, Harald turned it into a response about making player software available.
There is no reason making publically available a driver for hardware acceleration that is performed by and contained within some chip should be considered a violation of a patent on said acceleration. The driver code does not actually perform the acceleration, it is the hardware that does so.
It's a different question entirely to consider player software which will go ahead and do the algorithm in software if it cannot find hardware to do it - then the player violates the patent. But Via is not being asked to make a free player, only drivers to enable the use of their hardware.
Likewise, the other highlighted part is ludicrous. If Via's only way of avoiding paying the patent royalties themselves is because they are selling an intermediate product only to system integrators, then how can the system integrator who turns it into a consumer product choose not to pay royalties on a physical device that performs patented techniques just because it is not then configured to do so? These things can and do get reverse-engineered, so any hardware capable of breaking the patent should always be considered capable of doing so.
If these people properly pay patent royalties, there is clearly no cause of action against releasing drivers since the drivers only work with hardware for which the patent royalties have been paid.
Most of the time it is this easy to vote in the USA. The exception is when unexpectedly high turnout causes lines at the polls and people have to wait.
And lets assume that a person drinks 8 of those glasses in a day. That adds up to about 2e-4 milligrams or 0.2 micrograms per day of a drug present in 1 part per billion concentration. By comparison, usual dosage when drugs such as the ones mentioned in the article are administered is in the tens or hundreds of milligrams per day. So what the study is trying to say is the people are getting around 1/100000 of the typical dosage of these drugs through the water supply. Not enough to have serious immediate effects, but perhaps enough to have small effects over the span of a person's lifetime. If you estimate that lifetime at 100 years or 36500 days, it means they are getting about 7 milligrams of a 1 PPB drug in that time, less than 1 daily dose of a typical drug. Can this level of a drug lead to any real effect? Maybe, but it's not immediately obvious.
I'm sure there will be follow-up studies to try to determine any effect, or rather that the studies are already taking place; this kind of thing necessarily needs long-term studies. It's also worth investigating whether there is a build-up of these drugs in the food supply, which could mean people's total intake could be significantly higher.
100 hours a month less driving is a tremendous amount, over 3 hours a day. Assuming they are driving mostly in the city with lots of stop lights and averaging 15 MPH, that is 1500 miles/month or 18000 miles/year. If they are driving a lot on the highway, it is even more miles. I know that some people drive that much, but to say that they reduced their driving by this much is a really amazing statistic that is hard to believe. Some of the people with tech jobs might be able to telecommute with the broadband, but the fraction of people who can do this can't really be all that high, and even that does not seem to account for the amount of driving saved.
And I suppose I am expected to believe that they all started using grocery delivery services, Amazon and other online shopping, Netflix, and started downloading all their music instead of driving to local stores to do these things? Well, I can believe this about the music. But if the people aren't shopping their local stores, isn't that going to destroy a lot of jobs rather than creating them? I suppose it creates jobs for the delivery services, which makes the reduction in driving by the broadband users a rather pointless statistic.
Wikipedia provides a more detailed explanation. In particular, many states have moved their primaries to earlier dates this year in an attempt to have a greater perceived impact. The parties don't like this, and, since these are party events after all, they have reacted by stripping some or all of the delegates to be awarded in these early elections.
And that's what this story is all about, paying for game features. Sure, you cannot man the guns without paying. But you also cannot man the guns without permission from an officer (either through being promoted to Pirate or being ordered to the station). It's part of the way the game works (in this case mainly beause guns are an important station -- you don't want to be in battle with no guns loaded because some slacker is not managing to load the guns properly). And you can't be an officer without paying, either. The officers pay, and the masses who don't pay work stations on ships for them. You can't do puzzles or play games on shore without paying, either, though they give you some free days to try them.
The pirate badge allows you to gun, and it costs 1 (one) doubloon, approximately 25 US cents, to gun for a whole month, and they don't count days you don't log in. The badges for officers, crafting puzzles, and parlor games cost more, but you can have the top badges to enable all game features for about 30 doubloons a month.
Yohoho Puzzle Pirates has been running this doubloon-based micropayment system for over 2 years now, and it has proven far more successful than the original subscription-based system.
Oh wait, that's Windows Live OneCare. Seriously, though, if they call all their products "Live", who's going to be able to tell what's what?
That's second base.
The reason "most" high school computer classes these days are about using Word, Excel, etc. is because there are a LOT more computer classes these days. And this is good. Unlike 20 years ago, today's youngsters are going to face a world where many, many jobs are going to require basic computer skills like using email and other programs, and it is good that the public schools are teaching these skills.
But programming is, always has been, always will be, NOT for everybody. As a result, it is difficult if not impossible to make a general programming class in public school. At best, you're going to have an elective class in high school which a rather small portion of the students are going to take.
I am glad you learned how to program when you were in grade six! I learned even earlier, having gone to school a few years later than you (basically in the 80s), during the age of the various micros that followed the PET. And yes, one of the big things to do on computers in those days was to write programs. Why? Because the number of useful programs available for these computers was rather small.
By the time I graduated high school, a computer class had been made a requirement for the entering students, and yes, a lot of those classes were not programming classes, but "learning to use computer software" classes. There was still a class that involved programming, and there was talk of adding a more advanced programming class, which didn't happen while I was there. Personally, I postponed taking the class until my senior year in hopes of being able to take the more advanced class, and when it didn't happen, I enrolled in the existing class. The teacher of this class was also the organizer of the school programming team which took part in two annual programming competitions, and from her experience with me she knew I already knew everything significant from her class. So she loaned me her college Pascal book and had me work at learning this language on a computer in the library that was set up for Pascal while she taught her ordinary curriculum to her other students. I pretty much never used Pascal again after leaving her class, but the experience with a language with some real structure to it (as opposed to BASIC) was useful to me when I later learned other languages.
Now I ask you, how many times during your school days did you write programs that essentially just crunched some numbers for you to solve some sort of mathematical problem? Guess what: The kid taking the Excel class in high school today -- at least, any of the ones doing well in the class -- probably learns how to do equally or more sophisticated number crunching in Excel than you wrote BASIC programs to do in your day. Sure, he may miss out on some of the other programming you learned, but he has learned a useful skill that will help him in real-life situations in the future.
And as far as hard science majors not knowing programming? Guess what, the kind of programming these types would have done in the past is primarily of the number-crunching variety. In the real world, today, scientists and engineers very often use Excel to do these tasks. Or they use software specific to their field, much too specialized to have learned so early on, but their early-on use of other programs has taught them the basic skills they need to learn these programs as needed.
Today I work for a company that makes a wide range of software used by not only engineers and scientists but also people like gas station managers. The products I work with are more targeted toward the engineers, with a lot of custom modeling capabilities to handle whatever we didn't think of. These custom model capabilities are quite widely used, and in earlier versions they required you to write a program (or a function, at least) in some language. But in more recent versions, due to customer demand, we have added the ability to use Excel instead of a programming language for many of these types of customizations.
Why would the customers want this? Because these model
Well, there's an idea here that might hold some truth. Note that they are marketing it to data centers, people with LOTS and LOTS of files. Because people tend to have multiple copies of the same files, they can achieve great compression by eliminating the duplicate copies in the archive -- or likewise, any files with large sections that are the same among various files.
20 email accounts subscribed to the same mailing list? Store the bodies of those e-mails only once, and you save a big chunk of disk space. A bunch of people downloaded the same MP3 file? We only need one copy in the archive. As long as there are multiple copies of the same data, it can compress any type of data.
The difference here is that they are taking advantage of the redundancy of files across an entire filesystem (and a HUGE one), rather than the redundancies within an individual file. (I would assume they also do the latter type of compression with a conventional algorithm.) 25x compression seems extreme, but I am sure they can achieve some extra compression here.
The problem with Orangutang (besides its questionable spelling) is that it is not really an example of the type of word the story is referring to. Tautonyms are words that are composed of the same group of letters repeated more than once, like Walla Walla. If you can come up with two more words of this pattern starting with A and L, with the appropriate crossings, you could make a 10x10 square that uses only these three words, repeatedly. If of course you don't already object to the place name with a space in it being used in your square, but this illustrates the idea.
Orangutang is somewhat related to the tautonyms due to the repeated "ang", and it could lead to a square made of words with just this repeated part, and three words crossing the "ang" repeated within the square. A purer form of this challenge expects that all the words will be different, except where the same word appears once reading across and once reading down.
The press release must be a PDF inside a Flash applet. (Don't know, since it still hasn't loaded while I had gotten down this far on the /. comments...)
You misunderstand. The point of the practice test is for participants to ensure that they have the correct technology in place to play: A working Acrobat reader which can handle the encryption method used, and which can print the puzzles.
Also, the point of the password protection is so that participants can download the actual puzzle file up to 1 day in advance of the test, but not read it until the test officially begins and the password for the real file is posted. (And it will be more complex than "world".) This avoids (you guessed it) the server getting slashdotted when the test begins Saturday.
The reason why you see the specialized kits more is because Lego makes more money on them, and the licensed names (Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.) sell more kits to people who might not otherwise buy them. They sell these kits for somewhere around 10-15 cents (US) per brick, and many of the pieces are very small.
On the other hand, there are still big tubs, like this one which may be what you were remembering.
These kits sell for more like 2 cents a brick. However they replaced this a couple years ago with the "creator" 1000 piece tub, which apparently has a far inferior selection of pieces (see review).
And still, there are only a few tubs like this but dozens of those specialized sets, so you need to look in a store with a good selection of Lego and hunt for it! Or do like other responders already suggest and buy in bulk on ebay.
And note that even Microsoft recognizes this. Windows already has a vector graphics format, the Windows meta file (WMF). The only point to them making a new format at this point is to make something somehow better. And of course, in typical Microsoft style, they can't use actual SVGs, because they have to squeeze in their own extensions to the format.
Now, clearly, Longhorn will natively display WVGs. What are the chances that it will also display SVGs natively out-of-the-box?
And reading the other threads that have developed makes me realize that in fact, my oldest hardware is not my 8 year old monitor, but my 10 year old keyboard. Newer keyboards just don't compare, so with my little adapter I keep using this old one.
My monitor, purchased new in fall 1995, still looks great. Today, if I needed to replace it, I can buy a 17" or maybe a 19" LCD for less than I originally paid for this monitor.
What I'm most confused about is how come eBay didn't get the patent on "Buy It Now" invalidated. There is plenty of prior art available in Google Groups, and it was exactly this sort of thing that inspired eBay. Here's one from 1993 which shows the "Buy It Now" feature.
December 24, 1993 M:tG auction
It's easy to find others which show the proxy bidding feature and there may well be other features with prior art.
I really enjoyed this game too, back in its day. It's been years since I've seen one. Come to think of it, I might have only ever played one of these, but it rocked. Certainly most of my GnR play was on one single machine.
"Ain't goin' down, ain't goin' down, ain't goin' down no more!" Loved how they played this song when you had a long ball.
Eventually I got a 233 MHz box for $280 including shipping and all I needed to add to it (for what I wanted to do with it) was an ethernet card to make getting stuff onto and off of the thing easier. I picked that up in a separate auction and completed my system for $300. (I did consider upgrading the ram/HD but I tried it first and decided I didn't need to.)
It seems to be a pretty rugged box. I took it to the Mystery Hunt this year, and on my way into MIT the shoulder strap on the bag I was carrying it in (along with some books and stuff) broke and the thing went down maybe 3 feet to the street. It ran fine afterwards, though, and didn't give me any problems at all.
Yeah, I ran into this one already a month or two ago.
I have a Passport account which has only ever been used to report one bug to Microsoft (for an annoying problem that was hindering the work of myself and my cow-orkers.
The thing is, among the US candidates, there is rarely more than 1 very bright contestant on the show, so the geometric progression bit never gets above about $10,000, and the players grow to expect this and bank at $5000 or $2500 and as a result they're lucky to get $80,000 by the end of the game most times.
By the time there are just 3 contestants left, when there is 1 obviously strongest link among them, there is little reason to do anything but vote that person off -- it's a matter of playing a relative equal, say 50% chance, to win $70,000 vs. a poor chance of winning maybe $80,000 you might get up to playing together with the stronger link in the last money round.
Last night's show was the first time in the history of the US show that I have seen 3 strong contestants on the show who all survived the voting out of the weaker links. They realized they were doing well and let the banks build up in the last 3 rounds, resulting in them making more than any other group yet on the US show and about twice the typical total.