Or.... buy a monitor that rotates. Careful of your display type selection though, otherwise you'll get color artifacts from a rotated 24" (like the BenQ I have at work). They're harder to find and somewhat pricier, but do exist.
I've bought the only 2 LCD desktop displays (and one LCD TV) I ever owned at Sam's Club. Why? The return policy is "do you have the receipt?" No dead-pixel-this or anything else. "Do you have the receipt and is the contents back in the box? Yes? Returned!"
I was using a very nice Samsung 213T (I think, I'd have to check it's on my wife's desk) for a long time, followed by a Visio 720p LCD TV, follwed by a Visio 25" LCD monitor at 1920x1200. Not that any had dead or stuck pixels (unlike a crappy dell Inspiron 300m I got around the same time as the Samsung. Thanks Dell! Got shafted with the dead pixel policy there... and haven't bought a Dell laptop since.) But reasonably competitive prices plus a dead-easy return policy are hard to beat.
Finding a good selection at Sams can be hard, but I believe they have the same "receipt?" return policy through their online store, and you can get a better selection there online.
Too bad except the Xen they shipped in RHEL5 has been nothing but a headache for me. VMs set to auto-start don't. Sometimes. Rarely they hang on the way down and have to be killed. Trying to put a different version of RHEL or Fedora on often results in failure (conflicting paravirt support from the kvm switch = no dice).
They'd be better off getting a pseudo-memory standard like Sun is -- reusing the laptop dimm formfactor for a ssd. Or even just using a regular old ddr1 slot with fairly few of the contacts actually live. The size of a dimm is a lot closer to the size of a current-gen 2.5 inch SSD than PCI or PCI-E cards (usually) are.
But so what? There is going to be a limit on the # of bits you need to store. Text is already simply noise even on a "small" 32 Gbyte SSD -- heck it is only noise even on the tiny 4 gig primary SSD on the Eee901 I have. Audio, particularly on a laptop isn't going to get any bigger than a mp3 -- or worse case flac -- file is now. 5 megs for a mp3 is starting to be noise to a 32 gig SSD.
So how are we going to keep consuming more and more space? I suspect we'll see another computer capability-stable-price-decrease event like happened a little while ago. The idea of getting a decent laptop brand new for $500, say, 10 years ago was crazytalk. The idea you could even get something substandard new for $300 was just a pipedream. But these days with CULV and netbooks those price points are reality for a pretty nice machine. Sure, the netbook isn't much faster than my 6 year old Pentium-M, but it beats the pants off it in battery life (even when the 'M had a new battery) and is dirt-cheap.
Put another way: I'm not convinced I'll really ever want to keep over 2 terabytes of data. In somewhere around 5 years of casually taking digital pictures I've only shot about 6 gigs of photos -- with over half of them not being keeper types (pics for ebay/craigslist, etc). My and my wife's whole ripped music collection is a whopping 29 Gbyte (small enough I could fit Linux and the.oggs on one of said SSDs). Even turing that into.flacs with a re-rip that is likely to sit at what, 150 Gbyte give or take? Add to that another 50 years of photos (at twice the size they are now) and some music collection growth I'm looking at maybe 300-500 Gbyte of storage.
So why do I even need the 2 Tbyte drive? If the SSD hits 1 Tbyte and is affordable (and fast), why would I consider paying similar pricing for space I'll never use on a 100 Tbyte HDD?
There's more re-use than you might expect. Battle droid-arm balconies have become a standard building tool in both what the community does and what Lego themselves do.
If you think the specialized parts aren't useful that's your own limitations, not a problem with the sets. Go peruse brothers-brick.com and you just can't say with a straight face, "well this part is only good for (use in original set)." In particular the blue dragon a ways down right now (cement mixer truck nostrils!), or the classic ford pickup's mudflaps (robin hood capes!).
Both of those parts are pretty old (mid to late 80s for both, I think). Still, if folks are still finding new uses for old parts, don't complain too much. You may just show that you aren't as creative as other folks.
Turning to swap is only a problem if the system starts thrashing. My linux box with 4 gigs of memory, 4 gigs of swap is telling me I've got about 75 megs used in swap right now (600 meg file cache, 60 megs free main memory). It has probably had that stuff in swap for a week or more. If it isn't actually needed, no harm in it being off in swap. All the text console gettys I never see, for instance -- safe to swap out.
Rent a room of his house and setup a point-to-point wireless link. Heck rent a closet. Nothing says you have to have the cable itself reach you -- you just want the tcp/ip link to reach you.
1) Conveniently ignoring the external costs (read: pollution) that traditional fossil fuel plants have. Further their units looks highly questionable: $88 bucks per Mwh isn't far off 8 cents per kwh. That isn't far off the national average over here in the US. That they try to disguise it with strange units makes me suspicious.
2) You don't have to store it, but we would have to man up about the nukes problem. Waste = fuel to a breeder, but that means plutonium.
3) Limited liability can be a good thing. Given that (practically) everyone in the country benefits from having electric power, using the taxpayers as insurance isn't strictly a bad thing. Note that they'd be paying it anyway either in increased pollution from fossil fuels (if no nukes) or in their electric rate (with nukes but no limited liability) then you're paying it anyway.
4) See 2. Also see oil. Really wind and solar too. You may be depending on the Sun, but it isn't truely renewable. It'll go out in a few billion years.
Funny enough every time I have service problems and call they offer me the voice add-on. "We're unreliable but would you like to pay us more money so that you can't even call when there's a problem?" Gee sure, thanks guys!
I had a couple students cheating in an intro to C class I was teaching. How did I know? Let me give you a hint: neither I nor the book were teaching the K&R C style their program was in. I searched the net but couldn't find any chunks of it. So I pulled them aside when I handed it back and said, "Look, I know you cheated on this. You don't know K&R style C. But I can't find a copy of this code on the net so I can't prove you cheated. You have full marks for this assignment. However, next assignment will have as a requirement the code to be written in ANSI C style, just like the book and I use."
And yes, the next assignment had as a ANSI C style as a requirement with a note that failing this failed the assignment. Said students also were no longer in the class after it came out.
Pretty sad when you can't even do minor formatting editing to cheat.
You're ready to deliver a fully competent human-level AI to NASA then right? Otherwise you need to read up on all the delays and similar problems with Spirit and Opportunity before you talk about robots being the clearly superior advantage. Until the robot can take some brains with it, it is vastly inferior to a human. Sure, Spirit and Opportunity have done a fantastic job. But stop and ask when they measure movement in a few meters per day, max, how much more could have been done if there was an iss-alike orbiting Mars where the human controllers had near-instant responsiveness to the robots?
Unless you have FTL communication or true AIs, us meatbags still have a point in space. Maybe not in near-earth orbit where the speed of light is good enough. Though without doing some technology development with ourselves up in a nearby orbit we aren't going to be ready to be orbiting Mars driving a rover anyway.
Re:How to play MULE, for newbies.
on
M.U.L.E. Is Back
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· Score: 1
In particular it needs to be pointed out that "play to win" often means "play to make the colony a success." In the old 8-bit versions where it kept a consistent high score, you would always get a better personal score by being (mostly) a team player than being a selfish twit. That isn't to say you can't be selfish sometimes and do better but if selling energy to Mr. Smithore computer player nets the colony more MULEs it needs it can be worth it even at a loss.
... or if you do and have a 10-minute power blip, expect to get throttled. Well, assuming Comcast's equipment actually stays up during the power blip. I've seen it go both ways depending on exactly where and how the power drop hits.
They do have the convenient habit of only coming in "flat surface mount" variety though, so the cord is already against the wall. Or at least, the cord sticks no further from the wall than the plug itself does. Most US plus for some reason think it is a great idea to stick far further out from the wall than even the huge British plug due to plugging in perpendicular. You can get the smaller "flush mount" plugs for some things in the US (usually extension cords, sometimes computer power cables) but they're then next to impossible to remove because they become so flat (a bonus for the larger British plug).
I also don't recall the British plugs having the "plug falls out of the wall due to the weight of the cord" problem that FAR TOO MANY US sockets do. It could just be the house we lived in when we were in England had new enough sockets that wasn't a problem -- I don't know for sure. I do know I've experienced the plug-falls-out problem in many, many houses and apartments in the US.
This is very similar to the way Asheron's Call used to handle things. One single land-mass with servers that split the load between them *and* could re-balance (within limits) on the fly. Unfortunately I think the way they split things was rather primitive, a 1-d split that was mostly north-south gridlines (with some variation around impassable obstacles).
This works well until you try to concentrate the whole server population in a single instance due to an event. Then it falls apart.
It also falls apart when you have people hacking at the servers. It used to be popular to crash the server in order to dupe items. That was great for the exploiters, but not so great for the rest of us when your travel from point A to point B took you through the crashed world-slice.
It'd be much more accurate to say City of Heroes launched with that (true). Champions just got it as a second-generation CoH, though that may imply Champions is a lot more advanced than CoH which really isn't true.
DDO also uses the same functionality but makes it mostly painless. If you're in a group, the group zones to the same zone. If you are split as you group up there's a nice little pull-down that will let you co-zone. CoH you used to have to find a tram or other doorway to pick a new one, and if someone was in Atlas Park 1 and that was full you couldn't join them. DDO seems to spawn new instances extra early to reserve a buffer for people joining their group.
Believe what you like about google's engineers, but speaking as someone who runs a rather large cluster with a rather large number of ECC DDR sticks I can tell you that yes you'll see a lot of soft errors. Not only will you see them, but you can detect them in ways other than looking at the reports to the OS. ECC error correction kicking in has a higher latency, so you can see differences in gflops between machines with problems and machines that are clean.
Our terminal hard error rate was way below the soft error rate.
Hey, their time-till-apology is currently much better than the Vatican's. Sure, the Vatican didn't drive Galileo to suicide, but still they were a bit rude about it all.
If you don't understand the difference, you're probably part of the problem in why we aren't doing it.
The transistor is probably the best example, but there's plenty of others. It didn't make AT&T the richest company or most powerful company on the planet, but it changed our world. And that change was mostly led by American companies, so even though AT&T didn't reap huge rewards (though they have done quite nicely for themselves up until the dot com bubble burst -- or should I say till they gutted Bell Labs which was pre-bubble) we as a society did.
Basic science research leads to product R&D, but it does so way down the road. Corporate America (and the public at large, since the public at large is science-stupid) has lost the will to go there because of wall street and the public demand for "more profits now!" Does all basic science pay out? Heck no. Will it pay out in 10 years? Maybe. When it does pay out it can be huge. Figure the impact 50 to 60 years down the line by counting the household brands tied to the transistor: Microsoft and Dell come quickly to mind as huge companies built off that research. I'd put IBM, HP, Google, Yahoo and lots of others in the same boat, but nobody says huge and wouldn't exist without the transistor like MS and Dell.
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Or.... buy a monitor that rotates. Careful of your display type selection though, otherwise you'll get color artifacts from a rotated 24" (like the BenQ I have at work). They're harder to find and somewhat pricier, but do exist.
I've bought the only 2 LCD desktop displays (and one LCD TV) I ever owned at Sam's Club. Why? The return policy is "do you have the receipt?" No dead-pixel-this or anything else. "Do you have the receipt and is the contents back in the box? Yes? Returned!"
I was using a very nice Samsung 213T (I think, I'd have to check it's on my wife's desk) for a long time, followed by a Visio 720p LCD TV, follwed by a Visio 25" LCD monitor at 1920x1200. Not that any had dead or stuck pixels (unlike a crappy dell Inspiron 300m I got around the same time as the Samsung. Thanks Dell! Got shafted with the dead pixel policy there... and haven't bought a Dell laptop since.) But reasonably competitive prices plus a dead-easy return policy are hard to beat.
Finding a good selection at Sams can be hard, but I believe they have the same "receipt?" return policy through their online store, and you can get a better selection there online.
Too bad except the Xen they shipped in RHEL5 has been nothing but a headache for me. VMs set to auto-start don't. Sometimes. Rarely they hang on the way down and have to be killed. Trying to put a different version of RHEL or Fedora on often results in failure (conflicting paravirt support from the kvm switch = no dice).
I'm not 100% convinced by the apology.
And the "Come back to Asheron's Call" mail that arrived shortly afterward was ... poor timing.
Concrete dome sports arena... you mean like the UofI Assembly Hall? Just sayin'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_Assembly_Hall_(Champaign)
You mean like the Eee 701 did?
They'd be better off getting a pseudo-memory standard like Sun is -- reusing the laptop dimm formfactor for a ssd. Or even just using a regular old ddr1 slot with fairly few of the contacts actually live. The size of a dimm is a lot closer to the size of a current-gen 2.5 inch SSD than PCI or PCI-E cards (usually) are.
But so what? There is going to be a limit on the # of bits you need to store. Text is already simply noise even on a "small" 32 Gbyte SSD -- heck it is only noise even on the tiny 4 gig primary SSD on the Eee901 I have. Audio, particularly on a laptop isn't going to get any bigger than a mp3 -- or worse case flac -- file is now. 5 megs for a mp3 is starting to be noise to a 32 gig SSD.
So how are we going to keep consuming more and more space? I suspect we'll see another computer capability-stable-price-decrease event like happened a little while ago. The idea of getting a decent laptop brand new for $500, say, 10 years ago was crazytalk. The idea you could even get something substandard new for $300 was just a pipedream. But these days with CULV and netbooks those price points are reality for a pretty nice machine. Sure, the netbook isn't much faster than my 6 year old Pentium-M, but it beats the pants off it in battery life (even when the 'M had a new battery) and is dirt-cheap.
Put another way: I'm not convinced I'll really ever want to keep over 2 terabytes of data. In somewhere around 5 years of casually taking digital pictures I've only shot about 6 gigs of photos -- with over half of them not being keeper types (pics for ebay/craigslist, etc). My and my wife's whole ripped music collection is a whopping 29 Gbyte (small enough I could fit Linux and the .oggs on one of said SSDs). Even turing that into .flacs with a re-rip that is likely to sit at what, 150 Gbyte give or take? Add to that another 50 years of photos (at twice the size they are now) and some music collection growth I'm looking at maybe 300-500 Gbyte of storage.
So why do I even need the 2 Tbyte drive? If the SSD hits 1 Tbyte and is affordable (and fast), why would I consider paying similar pricing for space I'll never use on a 100 Tbyte HDD?
There's more re-use than you might expect. Battle droid-arm balconies have become a standard building tool in both what the community does and what Lego themselves do.
If you think the specialized parts aren't useful that's your own limitations, not a problem with the sets. Go peruse brothers-brick.com and you just can't say with a straight face, "well this part is only good for (use in original set)." In particular the blue dragon a ways down right now (cement mixer truck nostrils!), or the classic ford pickup's mudflaps (robin hood capes!).
Both of those parts are pretty old (mid to late 80s for both, I think). Still, if folks are still finding new uses for old parts, don't complain too much. You may just show that you aren't as creative as other folks.
Turning to swap is only a problem if the system starts thrashing. My linux box with 4 gigs of memory, 4 gigs of swap is telling me I've got about 75 megs used in swap right now (600 meg file cache, 60 megs free main memory). It has probably had that stuff in swap for a week or more. If it isn't actually needed, no harm in it being off in swap. All the text console gettys I never see, for instance -- safe to swap out.
Rent a room of his house and setup a point-to-point wireless link. Heck rent a closet. Nothing says you have to have the cable itself reach you -- you just want the tcp/ip link to reach you.
1) Conveniently ignoring the external costs (read: pollution) that traditional fossil fuel plants have. Further their units looks highly questionable: $88 bucks per Mwh isn't far off 8 cents per kwh. That isn't far off the national average over here in the US. That they try to disguise it with strange units makes me suspicious.
2) You don't have to store it, but we would have to man up about the nukes problem. Waste = fuel to a breeder, but that means plutonium.
3) Limited liability can be a good thing. Given that (practically) everyone in the country benefits from having electric power, using the taxpayers as insurance isn't strictly a bad thing. Note that they'd be paying it anyway either in increased pollution from fossil fuels (if no nukes) or in their electric rate (with nukes but no limited liability) then you're paying it anyway.
4) See 2. Also see oil. Really wind and solar too. You may be depending on the Sun, but it isn't truely renewable. It'll go out in a few billion years.
Funny enough every time I have service problems and call they offer me the voice add-on. "We're unreliable but would you like to pay us more money so that you can't even call when there's a problem?" Gee sure, thanks guys!
I had a couple students cheating in an intro to C class I was teaching. How did I know? Let me give you a hint: neither I nor the book were teaching the K&R C style their program was in. I searched the net but couldn't find any chunks of it. So I pulled them aside when I handed it back and said, "Look, I know you cheated on this. You don't know K&R style C. But I can't find a copy of this code on the net so I can't prove you cheated. You have full marks for this assignment. However, next assignment will have as a requirement the code to be written in ANSI C style, just like the book and I use."
And yes, the next assignment had as a ANSI C style as a requirement with a note that failing this failed the assignment. Said students also were no longer in the class after it came out.
Pretty sad when you can't even do minor formatting editing to cheat.
You're ready to deliver a fully competent human-level AI to NASA then right? Otherwise you need to read up on all the delays and similar problems with Spirit and Opportunity before you talk about robots being the clearly superior advantage. Until the robot can take some brains with it, it is vastly inferior to a human. Sure, Spirit and Opportunity have done a fantastic job. But stop and ask when they measure movement in a few meters per day, max, how much more could have been done if there was an iss-alike orbiting Mars where the human controllers had near-instant responsiveness to the robots?
Unless you have FTL communication or true AIs, us meatbags still have a point in space. Maybe not in near-earth orbit where the speed of light is good enough. Though without doing some technology development with ourselves up in a nearby orbit we aren't going to be ready to be orbiting Mars driving a rover anyway.
In particular it needs to be pointed out that "play to win" often means "play to make the colony a success." In the old 8-bit versions where it kept a consistent high score, you would always get a better personal score by being (mostly) a team player than being a selfish twit. That isn't to say you can't be selfish sometimes and do better but if selling energy to Mr. Smithore computer player nets the colony more MULEs it needs it can be worth it even at a loss.
... or if you do and have a 10-minute power blip, expect to get throttled. Well, assuming Comcast's equipment actually stays up during the power blip. I've seen it go both ways depending on exactly where and how the power drop hits.
They do have the convenient habit of only coming in "flat surface mount" variety though, so the cord is already against the wall. Or at least, the cord sticks no further from the wall than the plug itself does. Most US plus for some reason think it is a great idea to stick far further out from the wall than even the huge British plug due to plugging in perpendicular. You can get the smaller "flush mount" plugs for some things in the US (usually extension cords, sometimes computer power cables) but they're then next to impossible to remove because they become so flat (a bonus for the larger British plug).
I also don't recall the British plugs having the "plug falls out of the wall due to the weight of the cord" problem that FAR TOO MANY US sockets do. It could just be the house we lived in when we were in England had new enough sockets that wasn't a problem -- I don't know for sure. I do know I've experienced the plug-falls-out problem in many, many houses and apartments in the US.
"Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this." -Koster
If anyone was stupid enough to try it, your ability to invalidate their patent would be far and away the least of their concerns.
This is very similar to the way Asheron's Call used to handle things. One single land-mass with servers that split the load between them *and* could re-balance (within limits) on the fly. Unfortunately I think the way they split things was rather primitive, a 1-d split that was mostly north-south gridlines (with some variation around impassable obstacles).
This works well until you try to concentrate the whole server population in a single instance due to an event. Then it falls apart.
It also falls apart when you have people hacking at the servers. It used to be popular to crash the server in order to dupe items. That was great for the exploiters, but not so great for the rest of us when your travel from point A to point B took you through the crashed world-slice.
It'd be much more accurate to say City of Heroes launched with that (true). Champions just got it as a second-generation CoH, though that may imply Champions is a lot more advanced than CoH which really isn't true.
DDO also uses the same functionality but makes it mostly painless. If you're in a group, the group zones to the same zone. If you are split as you group up there's a nice little pull-down that will let you co-zone. CoH you used to have to find a tram or other doorway to pick a new one, and if someone was in Atlas Park 1 and that was full you couldn't join them. DDO seems to spawn new instances extra early to reserve a buffer for people joining their group.
Believe what you like about google's engineers, but speaking as someone who runs a rather large cluster with a rather large number of ECC DDR sticks I can tell you that yes you'll see a lot of soft errors. Not only will you see them, but you can detect them in ways other than looking at the reports to the OS. ECC error correction kicking in has a higher latency, so you can see differences in gflops between machines with problems and machines that are clean.
Our terminal hard error rate was way below the soft error rate.
How is this different than corn and the megafarms now?
Great, now they don't know where you are till you shut off the ignition!
Hey, their time-till-apology is currently much better than the Vatican's. Sure, the Vatican didn't drive Galileo to suicide, but still they were a bit rude about it all.
Basic science research != product R&D.
If you don't understand the difference, you're probably part of the problem in why we aren't doing it.
The transistor is probably the best example, but there's plenty of others. It didn't make AT&T the richest company or most powerful company on the planet, but it changed our world. And that change was mostly led by American companies, so even though AT&T didn't reap huge rewards (though they have done quite nicely for themselves up until the dot com bubble burst -- or should I say till they gutted Bell Labs which was pre-bubble) we as a society did.
Basic science research leads to product R&D, but it does so way down the road. Corporate America (and the public at large, since the public at large is science-stupid) has lost the will to go there because of wall street and the public demand for "more profits now!" Does all basic science pay out? Heck no. Will it pay out in 10 years? Maybe. When it does pay out it can be huge. Figure the impact 50 to 60 years down the line by counting the household brands tied to the transistor: Microsoft and Dell come quickly to mind as huge companies built off that research. I'd put IBM, HP, Google, Yahoo and lots of others in the same boat, but nobody says huge and wouldn't exist without the transistor like MS and Dell.