People love to massage numbers to make whatever statistics line up with their goals sound sensationalist in order to garner support. This is nothing new.
What if 16% of all HIV patients died from excessive dihydrogen monoxide ingestion? Does this mean dihydrogen monoxide use should be banned for everyone? The statistics demand that ought to be the case! Ban dihydrogen monoxide use for everyone!
The new LED strobes on police cars are extremely distracting - they are far more dazzling than Xenon strobes ever were and create visibility problems and yet at every traffic stop and construction site they are sitting there with those traffic-facing strobes, creating far worse distractions than anything else on the road.
I agree that distracted drivers is a BIG problem. However, the response to it is idiotic:
Many safety groups have urged a nationwide ban on texting and on using handheld mobile devices while behind the wheel."
Why is it idiotic?
There are laws already covering it. If you're driving >10mph under the limit, you're guilty of a reverse "speeding" infraction, AND hindering the flow of traffic. Two lucrative finable offenses.
If you are weaving in and out of your lane you are guilty of two or three offenses: failure to maintain control of your vehicle, improper lane changes (one offense per time you cross the line without using turn indicators), and reckless driving,
If you sail right through a stop or yield sign, or if you change lanes cutting someone off (aside from anyone exceeding the speed limit or anyone using the breakdown lane - here in MA the breakdown lane MUST yield to ALL other traffic where breakdown lane travel is allowed, but unfortunately the massholes who use it use it as a passing lane and will not yield to anyone) you're guilty of reckless driving and ignoring rights of way, yield, and traffic signal laws.
Either way you look at it, there are laws in place which can be used to solve this problem once and for all. However, thanks to assholes who don't think logically, but think with their hearts "Oh someone think of the children" my using my GPS could be outlawed. That's okay though because I will go back to using a compass and street directories. That way, I can become a distracted driver who is paging through a thick book and staring at a map to figure out where I am but that will be perfectly legal, and presumably safer than using my handheld gps/phone with its realtime traffic updates.. Right? Of course the printed street directory will be safer. Gotcha.
See the problem is the massholes causing the problem are going unpunished because revenue officers are too busy pulling people over who are "speeding" on the interstate (although those evil speeders are traveling at speeds of at least 60mph slower than the interstates were originally designed for - based on 1960s automotive suspension technologies) so they can meet their quotas rather than enforcing actual safety issues covered by law. No, instead it's just easier to punish everyone because of the irresponsible few. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't you dare pick up that cellphone if you're a doctor or an EMT on call. Don't you dare pick up that phone and call for directions when you're lost (instead, drive around erractically as you figure out where you are). Don't you dare check your GPS or click "reroute."
Instead, much like the drinking age, using cellphones without headsets, and trans fats and sodas, let's throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let's punish EVERYONE for the irresponsibility of the few.
Jens Meggers, Symantec's vice president of engineering, dismissed MFE as a "poor product" that will "never be up to snuff." [CC] [GC] Meggers added, "Microsoft has a really bad track record in security."
Symantec's products aren't exactly admired for security and effectiveness in recent years. Pot, meet Kettle,
So why don't they just say "bits per second" without any distance spec? That just introduces a new rating that no one anywhere ever uses. I mean, I've dealt with 4 km optical fiber links, but the speed was just a mbits/second rating. Not "x megabits per y km" rating. That only confuses the issue, causing people to say "wtf does that mean?"
Isn't it just easier to say that "the medium supports 100 Petabits per second over a 1 km link?"
I don't see why porn addicts would want to watch porn at 1080i. I mean, do you really want herpes blisters and gonorrhea drips to plague your fantasies? Seriously now!
I don't see what you get out of porn anyway. You don't get the girl, so what's the point? Why not put that money into a decent wardrobe and haircut, and you know, actually socialize and get a girlfriend or boyfriend?
I know, I know. This is slashdot, who am I kidding? Some slashdotters have downed a few too many bags of Cheetos and 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew during their two-month World of Warcraft or Evercrack binges, but exercise and diet can unload a lot of that weight pretty quickly.
In all seriousness - really, what is the point? You have a bottom-of-the-barrel industry that isn't known for its ethics and is known for airbrushing photos and videos, and you want what - high resolution airbrushed blurs? For what? And I do stand by my statement that the money typically spent on porn is better spent on hygiene and wardrobe.
A weapon like that which can induce migraines will only piss some people off enough to beat the asshole wielding the thing into a bloody pulp - and the great thing is a weapon like that is assault so a physical response inducing pain or even maiming the asshole shining that thing in your eyes would only be self defense - and it would help the victim's migraine go away thanks to the adrenaline and endorphine rush.:) Violent responses shouldn't be limited to meth addicts because normal people occasionally want to take pleasure in hurting jackasses who deserve it.
At $700 I expect 11 fans, triple-redundant power supplies, a hot-swap SATA or SAS backplane, an air shroud, intrusion detection, optional rack mount kit, and something which is at least somewhat attractive. That chassis looks like a cheap Star Wars prop.
such as the long settling time when a new device is plugged in,
That seems to be a Windows-only issue. Both OS X and Linux enumerate USB devices almost immediately.
and the loss of continuity when a device is unplugged and quickly plugged back in.
IMHO this is a feature, not a defect; if a device freezes, unplugging it and plugging it back in will often clear up problems.
Another pet issue is that there should be a means to address a device specifically by which port it is plugged into, as well as by the device's unique ID regardless of which port it is plugged in to.
This used to be a major problem on Windows - i.e., in the early days of USB (be it XP, Win2K, or WinMe or 98SE) plugging a device (such as a printer) into a different port would force it to be redetected, search for and install a driver, etc. then you'd end up with multiple devices installed. It was downright brain-dead in how it handled USB, whereas on Mac OS and OS X It Just Worked(TM), and when Linux gained USB functionality, there It Just Worked(TM).
I'd rather the device be addressed by the device's unique identifier, not by port. Which port a USB device is plugged into should be transparent.
re: Why apple wouldn't choose to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet instead?
Because, as mentioned in another thread the other day, the reason a lot of devices don't have gigabit or 10gigabit connections is that those interfaces take 6 watts rather than the 1 watt or less for 100mbit or 10mbit. Optical is a good choice for the faster speeds because it will require less power than a high-bandwidth copper connection.
They want you to forget that document because the same document suggests that keeping and bearing arms to make it possible to revolt and overturn the government when tyranny reigns.
It would be really nice if even server boards could boot this quickly. Now, there is no getting around staggered drive spinups and RAID enumeration at bootup but there is a lot of unnecessary delay that make servers boot really slow.
Add in workstation boards to the mix (which are basically server-class boards with no on-board video, but with on-board audio and graphics adapter slots) and there is an even more compelling reason to make "server" boards boot more quickly.
It's about time! There isn't a single reason BIOS should take so long to boostrap nowadays. Even the slowest of PCs have the processing power to detect whether or not there have been any hardware changes. The only reasons to wait are a) for a memory test b) for the user to enter setup and c) to stagger hard drive spinup (and RAID enumeration when required). Otherwise, just go with the previous hardware configuration and hand things over to the boot device.
You're not going to get that kind of uptime from a Windows box even without problems, thanks to patch tuesdays. Of course, it depends on how downtime is defined. If you use Microsoft's definition, "scheduled maintenance windows" are not classified as down time, but the rest of the world defines such things as down time. This is how they skewed the numbers to get such high uptime statistics for their "get the FUD" campaign.
without redefining down time like Microsoft does, you will never achieve that kind of uptime on Windows unless a) the box NEVER get infected b) you NEVER install the Windows updates and c) you NEVER change the configuration or change/update any software.
the goal is to harness fusion energy in a controllable and sustainable fashion; not just blow something up in a quick blast. The level of knowledge and technology required is vastly different between the two concepts.
Rockets are more efficient in a less dense atmosphere. There is less ambient pressure working against the exhaust, and there is less against the vehicle vehicle itself.
Glad to see that 3.0 is coming out, but with hard drive speeds the way they are I fear that it's like overclocking a CPU used by an office worker.
Nope. Wrong. It's like widening a one-lane highway to a 4-5 lane superhighway. When you add a hub and several USB devices to the mix, they're sharing the available bandwidth. It's not as though each individual hard drive on that hub will have (480Mbit/sec theoretical - overhead) bandwidth available. Available bandwidth varies depending on driver efficiency (what's the CPU utilization), chipset design (does it do DMA?), and bandwidth other devices on that bus are sucking up. Also, don't forget to factor in error correction for your crappy-but-expensive "Monster Cable" brand USB cables.
Some computers (mostly whiteboxes and some of the cheaper big names) used USB hubs mounted in a drive bay (before whitebox chassis with integral USB ports went mainstream) and those were often limited to USB 1.1 spec.
the Atari 400 sucked because it had a membrane keyboard with little-to-no tactile feedback. Typing on those things SUCKED; touch typing was a near-impossibility, and those "keys" were slightly raised. Even many laptop keyboards suck ass for touch typing. Are you seriously suggesting that keyboards become totally flat, Star Trek:TNG style?
Hey Dell! Update the M6400 with this and the i7 please! Oh, and be sure Linux fully supports it; preferably OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. OpenSolaris support would be a nice bonus as well.
Seriously though this would be an excellent feature in mainstream workstation replacements. How about firing up an IDE with a dedicated screen for the debugger, one for resource monitoring, and of course, one for watching hulu while you work?
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People love to massage numbers to make whatever statistics line up with their goals sound sensationalist in order to garner support. This is nothing new.
What if 16% of all HIV patients died from excessive dihydrogen monoxide ingestion? Does this mean dihydrogen monoxide use should be banned for everyone? The statistics demand that ought to be the case! Ban dihydrogen monoxide use for everyone!
The new LED strobes on police cars are extremely distracting - they are far more dazzling than Xenon strobes ever were and create visibility problems and yet at every traffic stop and construction site they are sitting there with those traffic-facing strobes, creating far worse distractions than anything else on the road.
I agree that distracted drivers is a BIG problem. However, the response to it is idiotic:
Why is it idiotic?
There are laws already covering it. If you're driving >10mph under the limit, you're guilty of a reverse "speeding" infraction, AND hindering the flow of traffic. Two lucrative finable offenses.
If you are weaving in and out of your lane you are guilty of two or three offenses: failure to maintain control of your vehicle, improper lane changes (one offense per time you cross the line without using turn indicators), and reckless driving,
If you sail right through a stop or yield sign, or if you change lanes cutting someone off (aside from anyone exceeding the speed limit or anyone using the breakdown lane - here in MA the breakdown lane MUST yield to ALL other traffic where breakdown lane travel is allowed, but unfortunately the massholes who use it use it as a passing lane and will not yield to anyone) you're guilty of reckless driving and ignoring rights of way, yield, and traffic signal laws.
Either way you look at it, there are laws in place which can be used to solve this problem once and for all. However, thanks to assholes who don't think logically, but think with their hearts "Oh someone think of the children" my using my GPS could be outlawed. That's okay though because I will go back to using a compass and street directories. That way, I can become a distracted driver who is paging through a thick book and staring at a map to figure out where I am but that will be perfectly legal, and presumably safer than using my handheld gps/phone with its realtime traffic updates.. Right? Of course the printed street directory will be safer. Gotcha.
See the problem is the massholes causing the problem are going unpunished because revenue officers are too busy pulling people over who are "speeding" on the interstate (although those evil speeders are traveling at speeds of at least 60mph slower than the interstates were originally designed for - based on 1960s automotive suspension technologies) so they can meet their quotas rather than enforcing actual safety issues covered by law. No, instead it's just easier to punish everyone because of the irresponsible few. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't you dare pick up that cellphone if you're a doctor or an EMT on call. Don't you dare pick up that phone and call for directions when you're lost (instead, drive around erractically as you figure out where you are). Don't you dare check your GPS or click "reroute."
Instead, much like the drinking age, using cellphones without headsets, and trans fats and sodas, let's throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let's punish EVERYONE for the irresponsibility of the few.
Symantec's products aren't exactly admired for security and effectiveness in recent years. Pot, meet Kettle,
but. . . but. . . security is one of the claimed reasons for sandboxing applications on the iPhone. Apple is lying? Tell me it ain't so!
Your numbers appear to be perfectly cromulent.
So why don't they just say "bits per second" without any distance spec? That just introduces a new rating that no one anywhere ever uses. I mean, I've dealt with 4 km optical fiber links, but the speed was just a mbits/second rating. Not "x megabits per y km" rating. That only confuses the issue, causing people to say "wtf does that mean?"
Isn't it just easier to say that "the medium supports 100 Petabits per second over a 1 km link?"
I don't see why porn addicts would want to watch porn at 1080i. I mean, do you really want herpes blisters and gonorrhea drips to plague your fantasies? Seriously now!
I don't see what you get out of porn anyway. You don't get the girl, so what's the point? Why not put that money into a decent wardrobe and haircut, and you know, actually socialize and get a girlfriend or boyfriend?
I know, I know. This is slashdot, who am I kidding? Some slashdotters have downed a few too many bags of Cheetos and 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew during their two-month World of Warcraft or Evercrack binges, but exercise and diet can unload a lot of that weight pretty quickly.
In all seriousness - really, what is the point? You have a bottom-of-the-barrel industry that isn't known for its ethics and is known for airbrushing photos and videos, and you want what - high resolution airbrushed blurs? For what? And I do stand by my statement that the money typically spent on porn is better spent on hygiene and wardrobe.
A weapon like that which can induce migraines will only piss some people off enough to beat the asshole wielding the thing into a bloody pulp - and the great thing is a weapon like that is assault so a physical response inducing pain or even maiming the asshole shining that thing in your eyes would only be self defense - and it would help the victim's migraine go away thanks to the adrenaline and endorphine rush. :) Violent responses shouldn't be limited to meth addicts because normal people occasionally want to take pleasure in hurting jackasses who deserve it.
At $700 I expect 11 fans, triple-redundant power supplies, a hot-swap SATA or SAS backplane, an air shroud, intrusion detection, optional rack mount kit, and something which is at least somewhat attractive. That chassis looks like a cheap Star Wars prop.
That seems to be a Windows-only issue. Both OS X and Linux enumerate USB devices almost immediately.
IMHO this is a feature, not a defect; if a device freezes, unplugging it and plugging it back in will often clear up problems.
This used to be a major problem on Windows - i.e., in the early days of USB (be it XP, Win2K, or WinMe or 98SE) plugging a device (such as a printer) into a different port would force it to be redetected, search for and install a driver, etc. then you'd end up with multiple devices installed. It was downright brain-dead in how it handled USB, whereas on Mac OS and OS X It Just Worked(TM), and when Linux gained USB functionality, there It Just Worked(TM).
I'd rather the device be addressed by the device's unique identifier, not by port. Which port a USB device is plugged into should be transparent.
re: Why apple wouldn't choose to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet instead?
Because, as mentioned in another thread the other day, the reason a lot of devices don't have gigabit or 10gigabit connections is that those interfaces take 6 watts rather than the 1 watt or less for 100mbit or 10mbit. Optical is a good choice for the faster speeds because it will require less power than a high-bandwidth copper connection.
They want you to forget that document because the same document suggests that keeping and bearing arms to make it possible to revolt and overturn the government when tyranny reigns.
It would be really nice if even server boards could boot this quickly. Now, there is no getting around staggered drive spinups and RAID enumeration at bootup but there is a lot of unnecessary delay that make servers boot really slow.
Add in workstation boards to the mix (which are basically server-class boards with no on-board video, but with on-board audio and graphics adapter slots) and there is an even more compelling reason to make "server" boards boot more quickly.
It's about time! There isn't a single reason BIOS should take so long to boostrap nowadays. Even the slowest of PCs have the processing power to detect whether or not there have been any hardware changes. The only reasons to wait are a) for a memory test b) for the user to enter setup and c) to stagger hard drive spinup (and RAID enumeration when required). Otherwise, just go with the previous hardware configuration and hand things over to the boot device.
You're not going to get that kind of uptime from a Windows box even without problems, thanks to patch tuesdays. Of course, it depends on how downtime is defined. If you use Microsoft's definition, "scheduled maintenance windows" are not classified as down time, but the rest of the world defines such things as down time. This is how they skewed the numbers to get such high uptime statistics for their "get the FUD" campaign.
without redefining down time like Microsoft does, you will never achieve that kind of uptime on Windows unless a) the box NEVER get infected b) you NEVER install the Windows updates and c) you NEVER change the configuration or change/update any software.
I thought it was first observed many millennia ago? What IS that bright yellow thing in the sky? ;)
the goal is to harness fusion energy in a controllable and sustainable fashion; not just blow something up in a quick blast. The level of knowledge and technology required is vastly different between the two concepts.
Rockets are more efficient in a less dense atmosphere. There is less ambient pressure working against the exhaust, and there is less against the vehicle vehicle itself.
with an Nvidia chipset and drivers, setting up a second monitor is as easy as it is on Windows or a Mac.
When will USB go plaid?
Nope. Wrong. It's like widening a one-lane highway to a 4-5 lane superhighway. When you add a hub and several USB devices to the mix, they're sharing the available bandwidth. It's not as though each individual hard drive on that hub will have (480Mbit/sec theoretical - overhead) bandwidth available. Available bandwidth varies depending on driver efficiency (what's the CPU utilization), chipset design (does it do DMA?), and bandwidth other devices on that bus are sucking up. Also, don't forget to factor in error correction for your crappy-but-expensive "Monster Cable" brand USB cables.
Some computers (mostly whiteboxes and some of the cheaper big names) used USB hubs mounted in a drive bay (before whitebox chassis with integral USB ports went mainstream) and those were often limited to USB 1.1 spec.
the Atari 400 sucked because it had a membrane keyboard with little-to-no tactile feedback. Typing on those things SUCKED; touch typing was a near-impossibility, and those "keys" were slightly raised. Even many laptop keyboards suck ass for touch typing. Are you seriously suggesting that keyboards become totally flat, Star Trek:TNG style?
Hey Dell! Update the M6400 with this and the i7 please! Oh, and be sure Linux fully supports it; preferably OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. OpenSolaris support would be a nice bonus as well.
Seriously though this would be an excellent feature in mainstream workstation replacements. How about firing up an IDE with a dedicated screen for the debugger, one for resource monitoring, and of course, one for watching hulu while you work?
Re: What do you do with your computer that makes CPU/RAM meters something you look at often?
Easy: if you're in a development environment, developers, QA, and release engineering types would all find that useful.