Nah, the Kenwood? TrueX 52x is a little faster. Moreover, it's better because instead of spinning much faster it reads multiple tracks(?) in parallel, so the drive isn't as noisy as many other fast drives. Combine the multi-read tech with faster rates and 100-200x shouldn't be out of reach.
Note that with a smaller disk, higher RPMs should be practical, with current CDs rotational imbalances are a problem with going faster. I just hope that if they do an incompatible size, they finally put them in cases a la 3 1/2" floppies so we can write on them, put stickers on them, avoid scratching them, etc.
Any user that has found a bug and gotten rapid response from developers will never want to go back to the dreaded tech support line to wait an hour to get to the person that knows enough to tell you that it is a known bug and _may_ be fixed in the next release.
...and then the developers get so bogged down in handling bug reports, many of which turn out not to be bugs. I speak from (proprietary software development) experience.
Open source projects do have the advantage of an open bug list, which reduces some of the volume. But just reading Slashdot for a little bit will show you how people, even with the most powerful research engine in history at their fingertips (the web), will still ask someone else what "Echelon" is.
Actually this kind of sueing makes a lot of sense. A company can effectively lose a trademark if it becomes "common vocabulary" that in normal speech has a general meaning.
You can maintain trademark without suing, just make a contractual agreement with the other people using the name, specifying how they need to identify the trademark, that they need to identify themselves as clearly not part of the Lego corporation, etc. More companies need to think about doing this rather than throwing lawyers at people, since it can potentially help profits to do so.
It seems to me it should be possible for someone to arrange an encrypted transaction via computer, where given some sort of info about your account (as in a public key), I connect with my bank, generate an encoding indicating the amount, my account, and the target account, and then I could send you the encoding and you give that to your bank for receipt. This could then be an electronic check, and with long enough keys should be safe at least for the short run.
There have been a number of occasions recently where co-workers have come to me ("Mr. C++") with a variety of questions that they have been wrestling with for a while, typically hours. In almost every case, I've been able to solve the problem in less than a minute up to a few minutes. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
At least for the U.S. debt, I believe the vast majority is T-bills, Treasury Bonds, and U.S. Savings Bonds. Individuals finance the debt because they make a decent, stable return on their capital, which is represented in the Federal budget as the interest payment on the national debt.
I pose the question: What changes need to take place to improve system/network administrators' working conditions.
Two things: sys admins need to refuse to take such conditions, and they need to persuade their fellows to do likewise. Just like you did. As long as there are people who will put up with ridiculous hours, there are plenty of employers who are willing to take advantage of them.
Don't feel loyalty to a company -- they sure won't feel it back.
Yeah, check out my post in one of the earlier amiga stories (the Amiga-uses-Linux one, I think). And several other people reached the same conclusion.
I know I had a post with that guess, but I'm sure I got the idea from a previous post. However, a possible bit of evidence (and quite possibly just scurrilous rumor) is that I understand Linus himself is doing work on the USB drivers, which would be something one would need for a new architecture that relies on USB-only input devices.
Huh? Couldn't such a sicko just go sit in the park to watch kids?
A webcam might make planning an abduction easier. Extremely unlikely, but one incident could ruin all involved.
Depending on the day care, though, I'd bet you would get a whole lot more viewers viewing the young women providing the daycare. You may want to password-protect just to keep the traffic down.
Gotta wonder, though, about how the day care providers feel about it. I mentioned the idea of this to the guy who runs my kids' daycare, and he felt the employees wouldn't like feeling watched all the time. Frankly I didn't care about watching the employees, I just wanted the ability to vicariously participate in what my kids do.
Okay, but what would make this distinctively Amiga? Why couldn't I go out, get the same pieces of equipment, and build the bloody thing myself?
How many home-built Macs do you see? Only x86 stuff is easy to buy and build by parts.
Let's make a few guesses about what it has and then see what that implies. Assume a Transmeta or similar chip, fast but also capable of x86 emulation. Assume ATI Rage 128 with all the All-In-Wonder capabilities, 3-D sound, IDE and USB for standard device plug-in ability, Linux kernel with special Amiga GUI.
You have a baseline machine that is capable of quite nice 3-D and sound, so every game written for Linux can take advantage of them. All systems are capable of MPEG-2 capture (ATI's stuff does this) and display, so it's easy to do video editing. You can run Linux apps and Windows apps at good speed, so there's plenty of applications. All the dev tools are pretty much free to both the Amiga folks and the users, so becoming a developer is cheap. And you can cross-compile on this same machine, using the x86 emulation.
You could do most of this on a Mac, but it would be quite expensive and you would still (until OS X) have a fine GUI on top of a lousy kernel (and no Linux apps.) You could do most of this on a PC, but you would have to set it up yourself (do any PCs come with the All-In-Wonder), which novices aren't willing to do.
>They released about 12 million shares to the public..
Yes, but they don't sell the whole company -- just a fraction, actually. That's how Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Yahoo boys became billionaires overnight; each of them owns a significant fraction of their company's stock. Microsoft stock is the vast majority of Bill Gates fortune. If they sold off all the shares in the IPO, they'd also lose control of the company.
Most stock sources will give you the market capitalization, which is the total number of shares times the current stock price. I think I got my numbers via excite.com.
It's a weird system. People generally buy stock not for the dividends (with a few exceptions, like utilities, that have pretty consistent earnings), but for the expectation that someone else will want to pay more for it later, and that later person is buying it for that same reason. Generally the only time stock valuation really has direct meaning is when one company buys another.
Call me a cynic... but honestly... how can they (Amiga) deny it's not just another UNIX distribution now?
You could say that, but then couldn't you say just about the same thing about Mac OS X? Having a Linux source compatibility layer could give you a lot of apps quickly, not to mention dev tools and the like. Then have good but non-x86 hardware (say the Transmeta chip), good 3-D graphics and audio, no legacy hardware, built-in 56k modem and fast ethernet (simplifying the interface even further), and just USB and Firewire peripherals. Bingo, you have a Linux compatible system with no installation hassles, no hardware worries, and you haven't really invested that much to get it.
In case you're wondering, the only way you could have made money off of this is if you were one of the original IPO share purchasers, not buying the stock on the open market. (It does say they set aside shares for bands that have songs on their site.) The rest of us would have just lost money on it.
W[h]ich raises the question, without directX, what do linux game dev[e]lopers use? I know DX works in WINE, but that can't be used.
Why not? Even if you don't want to require the program be set up, there's the WineLib library, and I believe it's BSD licensed. Apparently Corel is putting resources into getting Wine/WineLib improved from pre-Alpha quality. Still, it's not a perfect emulation yet by any means.
>Of course, all the Huia-specific parasites and diseases died out with the bird, so they'll now run rampant and take over the biosphere
Umm, we're not cloning the parasites and diseases. If they went extinct, they'll still be dead upon the recloning of the bird.
Now, maybe the Huia bird was only prevented from "world domination" because a disease or parasite kept it in check, and that species died with the Huia. In that case, we're in big trouble... but somehow I doubt it.
Look it up yourself at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary, variation 2:
Main Entry: dependent Variant(s): also dependant/-d&nt/ Function: noun Date: 1523 1 archaic : DEPENDENCY 2 : one that is dependent; especially : a person who relies on another for support
Now, I'm a maroon for not checking on dependant (although "independant" is not a word), but I still wasn't wrong to use dependent as a noun originally. Note that the IRS 1040A form uses dependent, not dependant.
Well for one, "dependants" isn't a word (or at least not any longer, see the Etymology below.) From Merriam-Webster online:
Main Entry: dependent Pronunciation: di-'pen-d&nt Function: adjective Etymology: Middle English dependant, from Middle French, present participle of dependre [...]
I used the quotes to differentiate from dependents in the U.S. legal sense, which mainly refers to children.
You may be thinking of "defendant," which apparently stayed closer to its Middle English roots.
Slashdot Mirror
Seagoon: Another two days to the fort. I can just see the look on Major Ffolkes's face now.
Bloodnok: My, you've got damned good eyesight!
Seagoon: Are we all here then?
Eccles: I'm not all here...
(Thus my nom-de-plume...)
>Oh, and baked beans.
"Baked beans are off!"
Well, can I have 'er spam instead of the baked beans, then?"
"You mean spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam and spam? Euugh!"
Relevant? Where do you think Python got its name from?
>If toast was that small to start with.....
:-)
Matzoh, maybe?
Nah, the Kenwood? TrueX 52x is a little faster. Moreover, it's better because instead of spinning much faster it reads multiple tracks(?) in parallel, so the drive isn't as noisy as many other fast drives. Combine the multi-read tech with faster rates and 100-200x shouldn't be out of reach.
Note that with a smaller disk, higher RPMs should be practical, with current CDs rotational imbalances are a problem with going faster. I just hope that if they do an incompatible size, they finally put them in cases a la 3 1/2" floppies so we can write on them, put stickers on them, avoid scratching them, etc.
That's why slot-loading CD/DVD drives are your friend. Of course, then someone will think it's a toaster slot...
Any user that has found a bug and gotten rapid response from developers will never want to go back to the dreaded tech support line to wait an hour to get to the person that knows enough to tell you that it is a known bug and _may_ be fixed in the next release.
...and then the developers get so bogged down in handling bug reports, many of which turn out not to be bugs. I speak from (proprietary software development) experience.
Open source projects do have the advantage of an open bug list, which reduces some of the volume. But just reading Slashdot for a little bit will show you how people, even with the most powerful research engine in history at their fingertips (the web), will still ask someone else what "Echelon" is.
Actually this kind of sueing makes a lot of sense. A company can effectively lose a trademark if it becomes "common vocabulary" that in normal speech has a general meaning.
You can maintain trademark without suing, just make a contractual agreement with the other people using the name, specifying how they need to identify the trademark, that they need to identify themselves as clearly not part of the Lego corporation, etc. More companies need to think about doing this rather than throwing lawyers at people, since it can potentially help profits to do so.
It seems to me it should be possible for someone to arrange an encrypted transaction via computer, where given some sort of info about your account (as in a public key), I connect with my bank, generate an encoding indicating the amount, my account, and the target account, and then I could send you the encoding and you give that to your bank for receipt. This could then be an electronic check, and with long enough keys should be safe at least for the short run.
At 34, I'm a near-geezer. (8 months to go!)
There have been a number of occasions recently where co-workers have come to me ("Mr. C++") with a variety of questions that they have been wrestling with for a while, typically hours. In almost every case, I've been able to solve the problem in less than a minute up to a few minutes. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
>WHERE THE F-- IS ALL THE MONEY????
At least for the U.S. debt, I believe the vast majority is T-bills, Treasury Bonds, and U.S. Savings Bonds. Individuals finance the debt because they make a decent, stable return on their capital, which is represented in the Federal budget as the interest payment on the national debt.
Do these guys know the meaning of diplomacy?
"We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis." (Spock - A taste of Armageddon)
I pose the question: What changes need to take place to improve system/network administrators' working conditions.
Two things: sys admins need to refuse to take such conditions, and they need to persuade their fellows to do likewise. Just like you did. As long as there are people who will put up with ridiculous hours, there are plenty of employers who are willing to take advantage of them.
Don't feel loyalty to a company -- they sure won't feel it back.
Yeah, check out my post in one of the earlier amiga stories (the Amiga-uses-Linux one, I think). And several other people reached the same conclusion.
I know I had a post with that guess, but I'm sure I got the idea from a previous post. However, a possible bit of evidence (and quite possibly just scurrilous rumor) is that I understand Linus himself is doing work on the USB drivers, which would be something one would need for a new architecture that relies on USB-only input devices.
Who is Number One?!
You are, Number Siz.
Huh? Couldn't such a sicko just go sit in the park to watch kids?
A webcam might make planning an abduction easier. Extremely unlikely, but one incident could ruin all involved.
Depending on the day care, though, I'd bet you would get a whole lot more viewers viewing the young women providing the daycare. You may want to password-protect just to keep the traffic down.
Gotta wonder, though, about how the day care providers feel about it. I mentioned the idea of this to the guy who runs my kids' daycare, and he felt the employees wouldn't like feeling watched all the time. Frankly I didn't care about watching the employees, I just wanted the ability to vicariously participate in what my kids do.
Okay, but what would make this distinctively Amiga? Why couldn't I go out, get the same pieces of equipment, and build the bloody thing myself?
How many home-built Macs do you see? Only x86 stuff is easy to buy and build by parts.
Let's make a few guesses about what it has and then see what that implies. Assume a Transmeta or similar chip, fast but also capable of x86 emulation. Assume ATI Rage 128 with all the All-In-Wonder capabilities, 3-D sound, IDE and USB for standard device plug-in ability, Linux kernel with special Amiga GUI.
You have a baseline machine that is capable of quite nice 3-D and sound, so every game written for Linux can take advantage of them. All systems are capable of MPEG-2 capture (ATI's stuff does this) and display, so it's easy to do video editing. You can run Linux apps and Windows apps at good speed, so there's plenty of applications. All the dev tools are pretty much free to both the Amiga folks and the users, so becoming a developer is cheap. And you can cross-compile on this same machine, using the x86 emulation.
You could do most of this on a Mac, but it would be quite expensive and you would still (until OS X) have a fine GUI on top of a lousy kernel (and no Linux apps.) You could do most of this on a PC, but you would have to set it up yourself (do any PCs come with the All-In-Wonder), which novices aren't willing to do.
>They released about 12 million shares to the public..
Yes, but they don't sell the whole company -- just a fraction, actually. That's how Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Yahoo boys became billionaires overnight; each of them owns a significant fraction of their company's stock. Microsoft stock is the vast majority of Bill Gates fortune. If they sold off all the shares in the IPO, they'd also lose control of the company.
Most stock sources will give you the market capitalization, which is the total number of shares times the current stock price. I think I got my numbers via excite.com.
It's a weird system. People generally buy stock not for the dividends (with a few exceptions, like utilities, that have pretty consistent earnings), but for the expectation that someone else will want to pay more for it later, and that later person is buying it for that same reason. Generally the only time stock valuation really has direct meaning is when one company buys another.
Call me a cynic... but honestly... how can they (Amiga) deny it's not just another UNIX distribution now?
You could say that, but then couldn't you say just about the same thing about Mac OS X? Having a Linux source compatibility layer could give you a lot of apps quickly, not to mention dev tools and the like. Then have good but non-x86 hardware (say the Transmeta chip), good 3-D graphics and audio, no legacy hardware, built-in 56k modem and fast ethernet (simplifying the interface even further), and just USB and Firewire peripherals. Bingo, you have a Linux compatible system with no installation hassles, no hardware worries, and you haven't really invested that much to get it.
In case you're wondering, the only way you could have made money off of this is if you were one of the original IPO share purchasers, not buying the stock on the open market. (It does say they set aside shares for bands that have songs on their site.) The rest of us would have just lost money on it.
Sheesh, ~$4 billion market-cap for that company.
W[h]ich raises the question, without directX, what do linux game dev[e]lopers use? I know DX works in WINE, but that can't be used.
Why not? Even if you don't want to require the program be set up, there's the WineLib library, and I believe it's BSD licensed. Apparently Corel is putting resources into getting Wine/WineLib improved from pre-Alpha quality. Still, it's not a perfect emulation yet by any means.
>Don't complain, women know what big hands mean.
Yeah, it means you wear big gloves. (As for that other thing, given the size of my shoes, I *wish* big feet meant that...)
It's also been suggested that parts could be
grown on their own in cultures
Or that they can be grown inside the body of the person who needs the spare.
>Of course, all the Huia-specific parasites and diseases died out with the bird, so they'll now run rampant and take over the biosphere
Umm, we're not cloning the parasites and diseases. If they went extinct, they'll still be dead upon the recloning of the bird.
Now, maybe the Huia bird was only prevented from "world domination" because a disease or parasite kept it in check, and that species died with the Huia. In that case, we're in big trouble... but somehow I doubt it.
Look it up yourself at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary, variation 2:
/-d&nt/
Main Entry: dependent
Variant(s): also dependant
Function: noun
Date: 1523
1 archaic : DEPENDENCY
2 : one that is dependent; especially : a person who relies on another for support
Now, I'm a maroon for not checking on dependant (although "independant" is not a word), but I still wasn't wrong to use dependent as a noun originally. Note that the IRS 1040A form uses dependent, not dependant.
How do "dependents" differ from "dependants"?
:-)
Well for one, "dependants" isn't a word (or at least not any longer, see the Etymology below.) From Merriam-Webster online:
Main Entry: dependent
Pronunciation: di-'pen-d&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English dependant, from Middle French, present participle of dependre
[...]
I used the quotes to differentiate from dependents in the U.S. legal sense, which mainly refers to children.
You may be thinking of "defendant," which apparently stayed closer to its Middle English roots.
P.S. PHHBBBTTT!!!