I use software RAID for just this reason. I use hdparm to make the drives spin down and it works perfectly. Just make sure you don't have anything on the RAID that the OS needs (/usr/etc/var) or it will spin the drives up again and again.
Also, isn't there a problem with flash memory to where you can't write and erase that many times before the memory stops working? This seems like the kind of thing that would not be a problem in, say, an IPod, but would be a killer in a computer. Imagine if your swap drive were on flash. That thing gets written tens of thousands of times each day. Am I wrong here?
Is it just me, or is anyone else weirded out by the notion of carrying around a tin full of methanol to power up your gadgets? Can you really imagine being, say, on a plane or in a subway and whipping out a can of this stuff to "top off" your gadgets?
Realistically, I think they'll have to develop some kind of disposable delivery system, maybe something that looks like batteries, that you jam into your gadget and throw away when it's out of fuel (or maybe it could be refillable). Question would be, how much fuel do you need to give you, say, 15 hours of play time? Would it fit in one or two double-A size batteries, or would you need to carry around a jug of the stuff?
I always love getting the link to the company's Yahoo Finance information, so I can quickly call my broker and get an order all queued up for the next trading day. I'm buying a few thousand shares!
Off-topic question, but has anyone had some random bugs after upgrading to Firefox 1.5? Like, the Bank of America website doesn't work properly anymore. Same with a couple other companies' sites.
I avoid this problem altogether by encrypting my phone conversations with AES-256 grade encryption. It took a few months for me and all of my friends to learn to do the encryption on our voices in real-time, but now it works great and we have no fear of the FBI whatsoever!
Research like this often does more harm than good, in my opinion. Not only does it give people an excuse for their situation, it knocks off part of the drive they might have had to go ahead and change things. Though we admittedly do share many characteristics with the animals studied here, we also have the ability to override many of those with conscious decisionmaking.
So.... You sit on the glass and it breaks. I doubt the glass in copy machines is safety glass like in your car windshield.
So now you have a bloody gash running down your backside... seems to me that the medical bills and cleaning all the blood out of the copier would be the expensive parts of this little situation.
Re:You don't understand Google's ad ranking
on
Who's Afraid of Google?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
True, but the fact of the matter is, the ones who pay the most move to the top. And 100% of the aforementioned paying is going to Google, with 0% going to the consumer. Wouldn't it make more sense for the consumer to participate in some way in his/her willingness to click an advertisement and make a purchase?
Now, certainly you could say "no, that's the price of Google giving you such a great service." My response would be that, while that's nice and all, eventually some competitor will arise (MSN, maybe) that will offer some of that money back to consumers. And when that happens it may go hard on Google. After all, I love Google, but getting discounts would probably make me more inclined to shop elsewhere, thus draining Google's most profitable searches.
It's simple economics really. Any time a company generates outsized profits with a business model that is not based on some kind of a monopoly (think M$ or eBay), those profits will be competed away.
I'd like to run an idea/theory by people about Google since we're on the topic.
It seems to me that Google hurts consumers. The reason lies with how they do their ad ranking. Basically, the ad that generates the most revenue for Google gets ranked first -- in a lot of cases this is the ad that pays the most per click. In all cases, it's the ad that's writing the biggest check to Google.
This methodology leaves no room for providing discounts to customers. There's literally no money left over once the advertiser pays Google. Think about a simple example of an industry with average operating margins (excluding cost of customer acquisition) of 20%. In such an industry, companies have an incentive to pay anything up to 19.9% to acquire customers. Google is such an efficient marketplace that companies wind up paying that 19.9% or even more (some companies will overpay because of the value of the brand exposure).
It has surprised me for some time that no competitor to Google has arisen that somehow provides some of this money back to the customers. A simple (and completely unworkable due to fraud) example would be a search engine that gives 50% of the click revenue back to the user who clicks the ad. I'm relatively certain that something will arise someday that returns some of the revenue from search-engine ads to consumers. A clever version was the iWon portal -- they let you win cash prizes, with each link clicked counting as an entry into the drawing.
A search engine might be very successful and actually help consumers if it worked on a bounty basis. Advertisers would offer the search engine a certain dollar amount or percentage of each transaction as a rebate if customers buy stuff after clicking the ad. The search engine could then return, say, 50% of the bounty to the user. Obviously this would require more bookkeeping, but it would make the search engine much friendlier to consumers.
Until then, I still do my searching on Google but my buying on PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, etc. I still for the life of me can't understand why people click Google ads and make purchases. You're just not getting a good deal.
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Please come out with a larger, slower drive for those masses of us who want to store very large quantities of data but don't care so much about 7,200 RPM or large cache sizes and whatnot.
When will the 1TB hard drive come out? When oh when?
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
This sounds like it would work great for golf courses and country clubs (one of the sites mentioned in the article).
However... they tout this as being great for third-world countries where malaria is prevalent. I'm sure this is the angle they'll use to get major media, since people ultimately aren't that drawn to devices that make live even easier for the country-club set.
According to the article, you need both a 20-pound tank of propane and access to a nearby power outlet to make the machine work, not to mention wifi for the fancier parts of it. Seems like this could be a bit of a stretch in places like Central America and Africa where they're lucky to have running water and decent sanitation facilities. Maybe a better version of device could use the propane to power the unit, so that you don't need that power cord?
I was under the impression that Gentoo had gotten a lot of the users who want the level of deep control and configurability that this article is associating with Slackware.
I don't think most people would agree with the following: "So, does Slackware matter? Simply put, YES. Slackware matters because Slackware IS Linux." The reality is that many people who are experimenting with Linux for the first time now use Fedora or Ubuntu.
I will say this though. I definitely harbor fond memories of using Slackware from 1995. I remember vividly those Boot and Root 1.44MB floppies and trying to install from their extremely early packaging system. Ah the memories...
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Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Nope. I don't have any specific reason to doubt it. It's just that the article makes it sound like they just came up with the formulation recently, and already kids are playing with the stuff.
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Yes I know this article is a dupe. But I didn't comment last time around and had a thought...
I noticed from the article that the dye they're using is a new/unusual organic compound. They're talking about people using the compound in their mouths (to know how long to brush their teeth), and the company's website shows pictures of kids playing with the bubbles.
But... is this product even safe? I'm not an organic chemist by any means, but it seems to me that you'd want to do a significant amount of testing on any new compound to make sure that it's not going to have any long-term negative effects.
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The problem with quantum computing, as I understand it, is there are very very few applications.
Essentially, it's only useful in a situation where you need to repeatedly run the same computation over and over again with different input values to see which of those values produces a valid output.
I have a friend who has suggested repeatedly that eventually computers will contain some sort of quantum processor that helps with such tasks as gaming. I don't think this is realistic because of the serialness of the tasks that quantum computing tackles. In particular, something like rendering an environment in real-time won't be helped because there's an unpredictable input (the human).
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It turns out that configuration is a difficult task and so there's no way to obfuscate that from the DBA.
Also, there exist plenty of situations where there are absolute tradeoffs. Making something fast in one case makes it slow in another. While it would be nice for the DB to be able to figure all that out beforehand, in practice it's impossible.
Take a case where a bunch of precomputation is required to make an operation fast (a particular kind of indexing, for example). You have to instruct the DB to do that precomputation. It can't know in advance that you'll be doing a lot of queries that require it.
Bottom line is that, though the goal of SQL is to make the "how" hidden from the user, in practice this is impossible and not even desirable.
I think this battle between Oracle and MySql is kind of silly. The two databases serve different purposes:
MySql is excellent for anything ranging from the casual user (a few tables, 1000 rows in each) up to fairly complex transactional work (a small or medium-sized company).
Oracle has a bunch of extra features, like an excellent fuzzy text search engine and certain optimizers for complex queries that MySql doesn't (and IMHO shouldn't) have. Oracle is the DB of choice for non-M$ medium-to-large databases.
There are other differences. Setup and configuration of MySql is much simpler, and you don't have to go as crazy creating complex partition schemes on your hard disks to get decent performance. But again, that's as it should be -- for simpler projects you want the free alternative.
I can't stand it when they reuse acronyms. As every coder knows, SSE stands for Intel's follow-on to MMX ("streaming simd instruction set"), not "simple sharing extensions". Agh.
Personally I think this is an example of a good technology (RSS) that Microsoft is trying to co-opt by coming out with something marginally "better" -- mostly just more complex -- so they can attain some elements of control over it.
Oh and one other thing - they're basing it on the ideas underlying Exchange and Lotus Notes? I can't wait to see this one.
Slashdot Mirror
So, hopefully sometime soon Bill will hire those 10 programmers and start deluging us with great software. We've been wating a long time.
I use software RAID for just this reason. I use hdparm to make the drives spin down and it works perfectly. Just make sure you don't have anything on the RAID that the OS needs (/usr /etc /var) or it will spin the drives up again and again.
Also, isn't there a problem with flash memory to where you can't write and erase that many times before the memory stops working? This seems like the kind of thing that would not be a problem in, say, an IPod, but would be a killer in a computer. Imagine if your swap drive were on flash. That thing gets written tens of thousands of times each day. Am I wrong here?
Realistically, I think they'll have to develop some kind of disposable delivery system, maybe something that looks like batteries, that you jam into your gadget and throw away when it's out of fuel (or maybe it could be refillable). Question would be, how much fuel do you need to give you, say, 15 hours of play time? Would it fit in one or two double-A size batteries, or would you need to carry around a jug of the stuff?
I always love getting the link to the company's Yahoo Finance information, so I can quickly call my broker and get an order all queued up for the next trading day. I'm buying a few thousand shares!
Except that Ingenio launched this idea like 2 years before Google. Google is the new Micro$oft. They "innovate" by copying.
Off-topic question, but has anyone had some random bugs after upgrading to Firefox 1.5? Like, the Bank of America website doesn't work properly anymore. Same with a couple other companies' sites.
I avoid this problem altogether by encrypting my phone conversations with AES-256 grade encryption. It took a few months for me and all of my friends to learn to do the encryption on our voices in real-time, but now it works great and we have no fear of the FBI whatsoever!
What? No Limp Bizkit? No Britney Spears? No Kanye West?
No way man. It's the lack of the barking doggie when you do a search.
Research like this often does more harm than good, in my opinion. Not only does it give people an excuse for their situation, it knocks off part of the drive they might have had to go ahead and change things. Though we admittedly do share many characteristics with the animals studied here, we also have the ability to override many of those with conscious decisionmaking.
Microwaves kill various germs too, don't they? They should market this as both a water heater and a sanitizer.
Right. That's why you have to make the business only pay people that actually buy something.
So now you have a bloody gash running down your backside... seems to me that the medical bills and cleaning all the blood out of the copier would be the expensive parts of this little situation.
Now, certainly you could say "no, that's the price of Google giving you such a great service." My response would be that, while that's nice and all, eventually some competitor will arise (MSN, maybe) that will offer some of that money back to consumers. And when that happens it may go hard on Google. After all, I love Google, but getting discounts would probably make me more inclined to shop elsewhere, thus draining Google's most profitable searches.
It's simple economics really. Any time a company generates outsized profits with a business model that is not based on some kind of a monopoly (think M$ or eBay), those profits will be competed away.
It seems to me that Google hurts consumers. The reason lies with how they do their ad ranking. Basically, the ad that generates the most revenue for Google gets ranked first -- in a lot of cases this is the ad that pays the most per click. In all cases, it's the ad that's writing the biggest check to Google.
This methodology leaves no room for providing discounts to customers. There's literally no money left over once the advertiser pays Google. Think about a simple example of an industry with average operating margins (excluding cost of customer acquisition) of 20%. In such an industry, companies have an incentive to pay anything up to 19.9% to acquire customers. Google is such an efficient marketplace that companies wind up paying that 19.9% or even more (some companies will overpay because of the value of the brand exposure).
It has surprised me for some time that no competitor to Google has arisen that somehow provides some of this money back to the customers. A simple (and completely unworkable due to fraud) example would be a search engine that gives 50% of the click revenue back to the user who clicks the ad. I'm relatively certain that something will arise someday that returns some of the revenue from search-engine ads to consumers. A clever version was the iWon portal -- they let you win cash prizes, with each link clicked counting as an entry into the drawing.
A search engine might be very successful and actually help consumers if it worked on a bounty basis. Advertisers would offer the search engine a certain dollar amount or percentage of each transaction as a rebate if customers buy stuff after clicking the ad. The search engine could then return, say, 50% of the bounty to the user. Obviously this would require more bookkeeping, but it would make the search engine much friendlier to consumers.
Until then, I still do my searching on Google but my buying on PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, etc. I still for the life of me can't understand why people click Google ads and make purchases. You're just not getting a good deal.
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Please come out with a larger, slower drive for those masses of us who want to store very large quantities of data but don't care so much about 7,200 RPM or large cache sizes and whatnot.
When will the 1TB hard drive come out? When oh when?
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
However... they tout this as being great for third-world countries where malaria is prevalent. I'm sure this is the angle they'll use to get major media, since people ultimately aren't that drawn to devices that make live even easier for the country-club set.
According to the article, you need both a 20-pound tank of propane and access to a nearby power outlet to make the machine work, not to mention wifi for the fancier parts of it. Seems like this could be a bit of a stretch in places like Central America and Africa where they're lucky to have running water and decent sanitation facilities. Maybe a better version of device could use the propane to power the unit, so that you don't need that power cord?
Or else, I suppose they could just use the equivalent of the "Mexican National Extension Cord" to run the things.
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
I don't think most people would agree with the following: "So, does Slackware matter? Simply put, YES. Slackware matters because Slackware IS Linux." The reality is that many people who are experimenting with Linux for the first time now use Fedora or Ubuntu.
I will say this though. I definitely harbor fond memories of using Slackware from 1995. I remember vividly those Boot and Root 1.44MB floppies and trying to install from their extremely early packaging system. Ah the memories...
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Nope. I don't have any specific reason to doubt it. It's just that the article makes it sound like they just came up with the formulation recently, and already kids are playing with the stuff.
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
I noticed from the article that the dye they're using is a new/unusual organic compound. They're talking about people using the compound in their mouths (to know how long to brush their teeth), and the company's website shows pictures of kids playing with the bubbles.
But... is this product even safe? I'm not an organic chemist by any means, but it seems to me that you'd want to do a significant amount of testing on any new compound to make sure that it's not going to have any long-term negative effects.
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Essentially, it's only useful in a situation where you need to repeatedly run the same computation over and over again with different input values to see which of those values produces a valid output.
I have a friend who has suggested repeatedly that eventually computers will contain some sort of quantum processor that helps with such tasks as gaming. I don't think this is realistic because of the serialness of the tasks that quantum computing tackles. In particular, something like rendering an environment in real-time won't be helped because there's an unpredictable input (the human).
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Also, there exist plenty of situations where there are absolute tradeoffs. Making something fast in one case makes it slow in another. While it would be nice for the DB to be able to figure all that out beforehand, in practice it's impossible.
Take a case where a bunch of precomputation is required to make an operation fast (a particular kind of indexing, for example). You have to instruct the DB to do that precomputation. It can't know in advance that you'll be doing a lot of queries that require it.
Bottom line is that, though the goal of SQL is to make the "how" hidden from the user, in practice this is impossible and not even desirable.
There are other differences. Setup and configuration of MySql is much simpler, and you don't have to go as crazy creating complex partition schemes on your hard disks to get decent performance. But again, that's as it should be -- for simpler projects you want the free alternative.
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE
Personally I think this is an example of a good technology (RSS) that Microsoft is trying to co-opt by coming out with something marginally "better" -- mostly just more complex -- so they can attain some elements of control over it.
Oh and one other thing - they're basing it on the ideas underlying Exchange and Lotus Notes? I can't wait to see this one.