If Cisco builds servers the way it builds network gear:
...You will get a 1GHz P4 single core server for only $9,990. Unless, of course, you want the OS pack, antivirus pack, and browser pack, which pushes the prices to $23,486. Plus support contract. The software on it, however, will be quite nice, if a bit simple.
The margins Cisco gets on HW is obscene (over 90%). I don't know what value they can add to blade servers to get anything like the margin they are used to.
Yet, that won't stop some clueless VP of Engineering from saying "get the Cisco ones, they'll be more reliable".
instead of mind numbing violence and graphic eye candy, maybe it is a better idea to switch gears and provide something that actually cultivate the mind?
I think you're probably overstating the developmental capacity of checkers.
...and chess. I play chess well yet I'm functionally retarded when it comes to talking to women. My excellent slashdot karma doesn't seem to help either. I don't know where I went wrong in life but I couldn't get laid underwater with the only SCUBA tank in swimming distance.
Do the kids a favor and install an instant messenger, Skype, and help them sign up for Myspace and FB accounts so that they develop some social skills before they die alone in an apartment with too many cats, a great chess ranking, a lot of slashdot posts, and too many high scores.
Seriously, why does anyone's checkout SW need realtime synchronous connection to the shipper? Why can't it be asynchronous with a local cache of the relevant data?
Synchronous is just dumb. Most other Internet applications don't work that way. DNS is a great example of data being cached everywhere, yet still centrally update-able. E-mail is another great example of quick communication w/o requiring a synchronous connection.
I can't believe that a small shipping application couldn't be left locally with each partner that provides cached rate information and handles the API whether or not USPS/UPS/whomever is up to manage it.
The infrastructure for this network will be powered by Hawaiian Electric Companies, with MUCH of the electricity coming from renewable energy sources, such as "solar, wind, wave and geothermal."
(emphasis added)
So, how much is "much"? 10%? 40%? It didn't say "most", so I'll bet it's under 50%.
I know this is a nice and positive use of the word "hacker" but aren't they really "developers"?
"Linux Hackers", at least of the Black Hat veriety, conjures up images of people who change the Linux Kernel to include features like key-logging and undetectable remote login...
I guess we could call them Linux Hackers of the White Hat variety, but then the "hacker" part still implies that they are outsideres who are making changes to someone else's code. It sounds like these guys are the original developers, and not hackers... or am I being too pedantic?
I play a lot of very violent first person shooter games (ET, Quake, Doom, ET4QW, etc.) All I know for sure is that the more people I kill online, the fewer people I have to kill in real life.
In a vacuum? They tend to get too bloaty and cold for my liking, but if you're into that sort of thing then be my guest.
It's not as easy as you think: "I can't cum unless you pretend to be dead... wait, where are you going? Damnit, that's the third one this week! What am I supposed to do with THIS?..."
And then it's back to match.com to find another one.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
This might be the scariest thing I've ever read. You wouldn't tell the customer that someone showed up with a court order to see the drive and you had no choice but to comply? Did the FBI or SS at least show up with a court order? Did your legal department always review it first, how long did they have to do that? In what way were you bound to not tell the customer?
It makes me itch in a very major way that the customer's legal department never got engaged. I can't imagine that you guys would defend their rights to privacy as zealously as they might. It's also creepy as hell that the customer didn't know that they were being snooped upon while their trusted service provider inflicts them with downtime and lies about the reason for it.
Do other/.'ers have experience with being forced to turn over 3rd party private data?
When you steal a book, and keep it permanently without compensation, that makes you no better than the Plantation Masters.
Really? Stealing a $5 item is akin to kidnapping entire families, beating them into submission and keeping them as slaves? Are you smoking crack or just a lawyer for the RIAA or the MPAA?
How about if I just make an unauthorized copy of an item, in violation of a term to which I never agreed? Am I now just a person who kidnaps people, beats them for a few weeks and then lets them go?
If your hydrazine rocket can expel mass at, say, 1000 mph (making numbers up here) then the top speed of your rocket is 1000mph for reasons I hope are obvious
Not true. If I'm expelling gas at ANY speed, then I'm generating thrust. Thrust means acceleration. If I can keep the acceleration going indefinitely then I can accelerate to any speed (short of c).
Can I please have my paper only passport back, please?
Just put the one you have now in your microwave for a few seconds, that'll fry anything in there and you'll effectively have a paper-only one again. If they ever try to engage the RFID portion and it doesn't work just say "huh, wierd". Yours won't be the only one to ever fail.
IF SSH user = "billgates" AND password = "linuxsux" THEN login with user = root.
I'm no expert, but it looks like that around line 3,098,200 there's some stuff after that to cause video drivers to randomly fail and something that e-mails all keystrokes to a POP box in Redmond...
VC's don't have a mixed pool of assets from which to operate, nor do they operate on loans in any traditional sense. If you're at a Venture backed company right now, like Tesla, it may be useful to know how the Venture Capital system works:
First, the people we call "VC's" are really the "General Partners" (GP's). They're the people the companies meet with and the ones who ultimately decide how much to invest in which companies. They'll have a variety of "Associates" or "Venture Partners" around helping out, but the "General Partners" are the ones who decide where the money goes.
The money itself doesn't come from loans, per say, nor is the money sitting around in some kind of mixed asset class. VC's don't have money laying around in a bank somewhere, at least not a lot of it. The money comes from "Limited Partners" (LP's). The LP's could be very high net worth individuals, they could be pension funds, they could be insurance groups, they could even be "funds of funds" (funds created just to figure out which VC's to put money into). A typical VC will have a mix of all of the above in their LP pool.
So, if a VC has a "$250 million dollar fund" that doesn't mean that everyone wired over a total of $250MM when the fund was created and that the VC's draw he money down. What it means is that the VC's have $250MM to call on when they make an investment. So, VC-Guys decide "hey let's put $10MM in this startup", they make a "capital call". That's when they tell their LP's to put in their pro-rata share of the $10MM they decided to invest. The LP's move the money into a single account, that account makes the investment on behalf of the Venture Capital group. When they've spent the whole $250MM (or whatever) they have hopefully already raised another fund to start investing from.
It's that last part that should be scary to any of us dependent upon the Venture Capital market doing its thing. Guess what all those pension fund and insurance groups are doing right now? I'll tell you what they're NOT doing, they're NOT showering VC's with new commitments for new funds. Even worse, some of them are so upside down that some LP's can't make their capital calls. This mean that the VC calls and says "your pro-rata share of the $10MM is $$684k" and the LP says "...er, I don't got it. Sorry". So the VC's suddenly have less money to invest than they thought.
This results in a lot of VC's sitting on their hands and not investing in big rounds of later stage companies like Tesla (or maybe the company you're at now). This isn't a bad idea for them either, the latter stage financing that they counted on their companies getting (debt based instead of equity based) is largely gone too. So they build a company up to the stage they used to build it up to and there's no one there to take it to the next level. The right thing to do is to get a company to cash-flow positive ASAP, and then worry about growth later when there is outside money available to help you do that. TFA says "the company's goal is to become cash-flow positive in six to nine months", presumably (hopefully?) they have access to enough cash to pull that off.
No doubt, but I'll be a lot better off than in a "smart" car (which doesn't even have side impact airbags). Note that the trunk area is a "crumple zone" and was probably designed to deform like that on the DTS to give the occupants the most deceleration.
The BMW's also have pretty strong passenger cages, I might get bounced around but my seating area won't likely change much, and the thing weighs over 4,000lbs gas'd up with me in it... I'm trying to walk a line between efficiency and safety (and fun), there's no perfect answer.
I actually took an upper division Physics course called "Physics of Energy Conversion and Usage". About half the class was on fuel economy in cars. Here's what it all comes down to:
City Mileage:
What matters most is how light the car is. You're stopping and starting all the time, so you're re-accelerating all that mass each time you start and then dissipating it as heat in the brakes when you stop (unless you have regenerative braking, which still isn't all the efficient). The second most important thing is how much energy you waste while idling. A big displacement engine needs more gas just to sit there at idle than a small one does (of course, this doesn't matter if the engine shuts off automatically at a stop like in a hybrid). Aerodynamics don't matter around town as wind drag is small compared to rolling resistance and overcoming the inertia each time you leave a light. So, a light car with a small engine gets good mileage around town.
Highway Mileage:
Here what matters most is aerodynamics, wind drag goes as about the square of the speed and rolling resistance only scales up pretty much linearly. Once you're up to cruise speed, it doesn't matter if you weigh 1,000lbs or 10,000lbs -- you already have the car up to speed so weight no longer matters. The most efficient speed will depend on the aerodynamics of the car. A brick shaped car will have its aerodynamic drag dominate the rest of the equation at a much lower speed than a slick shaped one will. The factors that go into wind resistance are:
1) cross sectional area, this scales linearly. Double the cross sectional are and you double the wind drag.
2) drag coefficient, this is basically how slick the car is (spoilers in the right places etc.) Note that you can tune this to work best at a certain speed, if you want. That is, you can make the car most "slick" at 55 or 65 or 75 by design.
3) speed -- for the speeds we're talking about, the drag goes pretty much as the square of the speed (it goes way up as you approach the speed of sound, for example), but basically as you double the speed you quadruple the wind drag.
So, a small car (cross sectional area) with good aerodynamics gets good mileage on the highway.
One more thing that matters to both city and highway mileage is what % of the time your car can run at wide open throttle (WOT). Engines are most efficient at converting fuel to energy at WOT, any throttle setting lower than wide open causes the engine to suffer a lot of inefficiencies, mostly in the intake manifold -- the car is sucking air/fuel in through a straw and putting a lot of energy into doing so. It's like a backwards turbo charger. So, what you want is a weak engine that can run at wide open throttle at your highway cruise speed and off the line around town (and then shut it off when you stop). This means, however, that your car is going to suck performance wise and why econo-boxes suck to drive -- the engine has to be *just* strong enough to get the car off the line w/o holding up traffic and able to get it to highway speed but no faster (no passing, unless you're going downhill).
So, what is the most efficient speed for highway mileage? IT DEPENDS ON THE CAR. Of all the variables above, the only ones that vary as speed does are:
1) the aerodynamics of the car: for what speed did the car designers optimize the aerodynamics?
2) the size of the engine: the more powerful the engine the more likely it is to have its efficiency peak at a higher speed because you're closer to running it at WOT (will still get worse mileage at any speed than a less powerful engine, mind you).
I've done enough physics homework to not give a crap about how light my car is. I want a heavy car so when the Ford F250 running late to a job site blows the light and comes through my passenger door I have something to contribute to my half of the momentum-transfer equation, and enough body rigidity and safety features to keep me intact (both of which add to the weight).
The entirety of the wealth generated by the Internet, all Software ever written, and every piece of adult content ever generated, will pale in comparison to the wealth generated when you can download into your brain a sexual fantasy that seems completely real. In fact, this may be man kind's last invention.
"No time to work on that, I just finished my custom simulation of Planet Bigboner, which is populated exclusively by 19-year-old-Claudia-Schiffer-Nymphomaniac-Clones who all worship me as their Great Deity. Sometimes I am a just and fair God, sometimes an angry one. I will be playing this until I die or they turn off my power, now go away and don't interrupt my simulation or I will kill you."
When I bought my radio I didn't sign anything saying I wouldn't record what I hear on it and then share those recordings with others.
I feel no moral obligation to not record what I hear on the radio and share it. When the Internet makes the sharing easy, I think that's great. When the Internet makes recording the songs easy, I think that's great.
Slashdot Mirror
If Cisco builds servers the way it builds network gear:
...You will get a 1GHz P4 single core server for only $9,990. Unless, of course, you want the OS pack, antivirus pack, and browser pack, which pushes the prices to $23,486. Plus support contract. The software on it, however, will be quite nice, if a bit simple.
The margins Cisco gets on HW is obscene (over 90%). I don't know what value they can add to blade servers to get anything like the margin they are used to.
Yet, that won't stop some clueless VP of Engineering from saying "get the Cisco ones, they'll be more reliable".
Reversi/othello Checkers Chess Go
instead of mind numbing violence and graphic eye candy, maybe it is a better idea to switch gears and provide something that actually cultivate the mind?
I think you're probably overstating the developmental capacity of checkers.
...and chess. I play chess well yet I'm functionally retarded when it comes to talking to women. My excellent slashdot karma doesn't seem to help either. I don't know where I went wrong in life but I couldn't get laid underwater with the only SCUBA tank in swimming distance.
Do the kids a favor and install an instant messenger, Skype, and help them sign up for Myspace and FB accounts so that they develop some social skills before they die alone in an apartment with too many cats, a great chess ranking, a lot of slashdot posts, and too many high scores.
Seriously, why does anyone's checkout SW need realtime synchronous connection to the shipper? Why can't it be asynchronous with a local cache of the relevant data?
Synchronous is just dumb. Most other Internet applications don't work that way. DNS is a great example of data being cached everywhere, yet still centrally update-able. E-mail is another great example of quick communication w/o requiring a synchronous connection.
I can't believe that a small shipping application couldn't be left locally with each partner that provides cached rate information and handles the API whether or not USPS/UPS/whomever is up to manage it.
The infrastructure for this network will be powered by Hawaiian Electric Companies, with MUCH of the electricity coming from renewable energy sources, such as "solar, wind, wave and geothermal."
(emphasis added)
So, how much is "much"? 10%? 40%? It didn't say "most", so I'll bet it's under 50%.
They have alienated there sellers...
Their sellers are there?
I know this is a nice and positive use of the word "hacker" but aren't they really "developers"?
... or am I being too pedantic?
"Linux Hackers", at least of the Black Hat veriety, conjures up images of people who change the Linux Kernel to include features like key-logging and undetectable remote login...
I guess we could call them Linux Hackers of the White Hat variety, but then the "hacker" part still implies that they are outsideres who are making changes to someone else's code. It sounds like these guys are the original developers, and not hackers
Chinkies broked the web. :(
Okay, now that there is a black president you realized that being racist against blacks would be unpatriotic ... so now you go after Chinese instead?
I for one (don't) welcome our new sino-phobic first-posting anonymous-coward overlords...
connecting the robots to Skynet, oops, I mean the "Internet", should be just around the corner...
He must be lonely in prison.
Maybe we can arrange for him to get a new friend...
Now everybody in Australia is guilty until proven innocent!
You mean, Australia is one big prison colony?!
I play a lot of very violent first person shooter games (ET, Quake, Doom, ET4QW, etc.) All I know for sure is that the more people I kill online, the fewer people I have to kill in real life.
In a vacuum? They tend to get too bloaty and cold for my liking, but if you're into that sort of thing then be my guest.
It's not as easy as you think: "I can't cum unless you pretend to be dead... wait, where are you going? Damnit, that's the third one this week! What am I supposed to do with THIS?..."
And then it's back to match.com to find another one.
We did have people from the FBI or Secret Service come in every once in a while and ask for a hard drive out of a server. We'd tell the customer he had hardware problems as we mirrored the drive.
This might be the scariest thing I've ever read. You wouldn't tell the customer that someone showed up with a court order to see the drive and you had no choice but to comply? Did the FBI or SS at least show up with a court order? Did your legal department always review it first, how long did they have to do that? In what way were you bound to not tell the customer?
/.'ers have experience with being forced to turn over 3rd party private data?
It makes me itch in a very major way that the customer's legal department never got engaged. I can't imagine that you guys would defend their rights to privacy as zealously as they might. It's also creepy as hell that the customer didn't know that they were being snooped upon while their trusted service provider inflicts them with downtime and lies about the reason for it.
Do other
When you steal a book, and keep it permanently without compensation, that makes you no better than the Plantation Masters.
Really? Stealing a $5 item is akin to kidnapping entire families, beating them into submission and keeping them as slaves? Are you smoking crack or just a lawyer for the RIAA or the MPAA?
How about if I just make an unauthorized copy of an item, in violation of a term to which I never agreed? Am I now just a person who kidnaps people, beats them for a few weeks and then lets them go?
Congress is a series of tools. Each one 2-4 years long. I guess this one was older and rustier than most.
In fact, the equation for top speed is:
top speed = v * ln(M/m) + v0
where:
v = exhaust gas speed
M = starting mass of rocket + fuel
m = ending/empty mass of rocket
v0 = initial velocity
so the exhaust gas might be only 1000mph but you can go pretty much up to the speed of light if you can get ending mass to 0...
If your hydrazine rocket can expel mass at, say, 1000 mph (making numbers up here) then the top speed of your rocket is 1000mph for reasons I hope are obvious
Not true. If I'm expelling gas at ANY speed, then I'm generating thrust. Thrust means acceleration. If I can keep the acceleration going indefinitely then I can accelerate to any speed (short of c).
Can I please have my paper only passport back, please?
Just put the one you have now in your microwave for a few seconds, that'll fry anything in there and you'll effectively have a paper-only one again. If they ever try to engage the RFID portion and it doesn't work just say "huh, wierd". Yours won't be the only one to ever fail.
Has anyone noticed this in the SSH section?
IF SSH user = "billgates" AND password = "linuxsux" THEN login with user = root.
I'm no expert, but it looks like that around line 3,098,200 there's some stuff after that to cause video drivers to randomly fail and something that e-mails all keystrokes to a POP box in Redmond...
Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
...
No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
VC's don't have a mixed pool of assets from which to operate, nor do they operate on loans in any traditional sense. If you're at a Venture backed company right now, like Tesla, it may be useful to know how the Venture Capital system works:
First, the people we call "VC's" are really the "General Partners" (GP's). They're the people the companies meet with and the ones who ultimately decide how much to invest in which companies. They'll have a variety of "Associates" or "Venture Partners" around helping out, but the "General Partners" are the ones who decide where the money goes.
The money itself doesn't come from loans, per say, nor is the money sitting around in some kind of mixed asset class. VC's don't have money laying around in a bank somewhere, at least not a lot of it. The money comes from "Limited Partners" (LP's). The LP's could be very high net worth individuals, they could be pension funds, they could be insurance groups, they could even be "funds of funds" (funds created just to figure out which VC's to put money into). A typical VC will have a mix of all of the above in their LP pool.
So, if a VC has a "$250 million dollar fund" that doesn't mean that everyone wired over a total of $250MM when the fund was created and that the VC's draw he money down. What it means is that the VC's have $250MM to call on when they make an investment. So, VC-Guys decide "hey let's put $10MM in this startup", they make a "capital call". That's when they tell their LP's to put in their pro-rata share of the $10MM they decided to invest. The LP's move the money into a single account, that account makes the investment on behalf of the Venture Capital group. When they've spent the whole $250MM (or whatever) they have hopefully already raised another fund to start investing from.
It's that last part that should be scary to any of us dependent upon the Venture Capital market doing its thing. Guess what all those pension fund and insurance groups are doing right now? I'll tell you what they're NOT doing, they're NOT showering VC's with new commitments for new funds. Even worse, some of them are so upside down that some LP's can't make their capital calls. This mean that the VC calls and says "your pro-rata share of the $10MM is $$684k" and the LP says "...er, I don't got it. Sorry". So the VC's suddenly have less money to invest than they thought.
This results in a lot of VC's sitting on their hands and not investing in big rounds of later stage companies like Tesla (or maybe the company you're at now). This isn't a bad idea for them either, the latter stage financing that they counted on their companies getting (debt based instead of equity based) is largely gone too. So they build a company up to the stage they used to build it up to and there's no one there to take it to the next level. The right thing to do is to get a company to cash-flow positive ASAP, and then worry about growth later when there is outside money available to help you do that. TFA says "the company's goal is to become cash-flow positive in six to nine months", presumably (hopefully?) they have access to enough cash to pull that off.
No doubt, but I'll be a lot better off than in a "smart" car (which doesn't even have side impact airbags). Note that the trunk area is a "crumple zone" and was probably designed to deform like that on the DTS to give the occupants the most deceleration.
... I'm trying to walk a line between efficiency and safety (and fun), there's no perfect answer.
The BMW's also have pretty strong passenger cages, I might get bounced around but my seating area won't likely change much, and the thing weighs over 4,000lbs gas'd up with me in it
I actually took an upper division Physics course called "Physics of Energy Conversion and Usage". About half the class was on fuel economy in cars. Here's what it all comes down to:
City Mileage:
What matters most is how light the car is. You're stopping and starting all the time, so you're re-accelerating all that mass each time you start and then dissipating it as heat in the brakes when you stop (unless you have regenerative braking, which still isn't all the efficient). The second most important thing is how much energy you waste while idling. A big displacement engine needs more gas just to sit there at idle than a small one does (of course, this doesn't matter if the engine shuts off automatically at a stop like in a hybrid). Aerodynamics don't matter around town as wind drag is small compared to rolling resistance and overcoming the inertia each time you leave a light.
So, a light car with a small engine gets good mileage around town.
Highway Mileage:
Here what matters most is aerodynamics, wind drag goes as about the square of the speed and rolling resistance only scales up pretty much linearly. Once you're up to cruise speed, it doesn't matter if you weigh 1,000lbs or 10,000lbs -- you already have the car up to speed so weight no longer matters. The most efficient speed will depend on the aerodynamics of the car. A brick shaped car will have its aerodynamic drag dominate the rest of the equation at a much lower speed than a slick shaped one will.
The factors that go into wind resistance are:
1) cross sectional area, this scales linearly. Double the cross sectional are and you double the wind drag.
2) drag coefficient, this is basically how slick the car is (spoilers in the right places etc.) Note that you can tune this to work best at a certain speed, if you want. That is, you can make the car most "slick" at 55 or 65 or 75 by design.
3) speed -- for the speeds we're talking about, the drag goes pretty much as the square of the speed (it goes way up as you approach the speed of sound, for example), but basically as you double the speed you quadruple the wind drag.
So, a small car (cross sectional area) with good aerodynamics gets good mileage on the highway.
One more thing that matters to both city and highway mileage is what % of the time your car can run at wide open throttle (WOT). Engines are most efficient at converting fuel to energy at WOT, any throttle setting lower than wide open causes the engine to suffer a lot of inefficiencies, mostly in the intake manifold -- the car is sucking air/fuel in through a straw and putting a lot of energy into doing so. It's like a backwards turbo charger. So, what you want is a weak engine that can run at wide open throttle at your highway cruise speed and off the line around town (and then shut it off when you stop). This means, however, that your car is going to suck performance wise and why econo-boxes suck to drive -- the engine has to be *just* strong enough to get the car off the line w/o holding up traffic and able to get it to highway speed but no faster (no passing, unless you're going downhill).
So, what is the most efficient speed for highway mileage? IT DEPENDS ON THE CAR. Of all the variables above, the only ones that vary as speed does are:
1) the aerodynamics of the car: for what speed did the car designers optimize the aerodynamics?
2) the size of the engine: the more powerful the engine the more likely it is to have its efficiency peak at a higher speed because you're closer to running it at WOT (will still get worse mileage at any speed than a less powerful engine, mind you).
I've done enough physics homework to not give a crap about how light my car is. I want a heavy car so when the Ford F250 running late to a job site blows the light and comes through my passenger door I have something to contribute to my half of the momentum-transfer equation, and enough body rigidity and safety features to keep me intact (both of which add to the weight).
The entirety of the wealth generated by the Internet, all Software ever written, and every piece of adult content ever generated, will pale in comparison to the wealth generated when you can download into your brain a sexual fantasy that seems completely real. In fact, this may be man kind's last invention.
"No time to work on that, I just finished my custom simulation of Planet Bigboner, which is populated exclusively by 19-year-old-Claudia-Schiffer-Nymphomaniac-Clones who all worship me as their Great Deity. Sometimes I am a just and fair God, sometimes an angry one. I will be playing this until I die or they turn off my power, now go away and don't interrupt my simulation or I will kill you."
When I bought my radio I didn't sign anything saying I wouldn't record what I hear on it and then share those recordings with others.
I feel no moral obligation to not record what I hear on the radio and share it. When the Internet makes the sharing easy, I think that's great. When the Internet makes recording the songs easy, I think that's great.