Posts by toughluck 420 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
And I recall that Oracle used to offer the F5100 flash array which was a complete clean slate approach to flash storage (and in my opinion, quite impressive), but it apparently didn't sell well enough to warrant a successor (FS1 is a specific configuration of ZFS unified storage and can be configured as AFA or as mixed storage).
@vgrig_us: Hey, look. Your post still hasn't been taken down. I don't know what you wrote in your last 5 comments, but I very rarely see comments deleted by moderators that didn't merit taking down.
Ignoring your comment about Wales, which is completely beside the point here, let me offer a different angle: If ten thousand programmers leave Google to work in the government (or vice versa), it doesn't matter at all. They were never in a position to obtain significant benefits from the other party, such as a job offer for services rendered while working for their then current employer.
However, if an executive, lobbyist, high level legal counsel, etc., goes to work in the other party, this is suspect precisely because that job offer may have been an illegal deal. There may be no supporting evidence, it may even be a false accusation, but there are laws against this because the suspicions alone are enough to question true motives. Smaller companies ran into trouble only on the basis of unconfirmed suspicion, whereas Google is free to do as they please.
If the combined damage was ~400 thousand dollars, why would the authors regularly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on buying exploits?
I mean, "regularly" implies having done this at least twice, and "hundreds" implies more than one hundred. So basically, they could have spent several million dollars on a toolkit that caused a few hundred thousand damage?
I mean, I would very happily run a company to sell zero-day exploits to my software for much more than the damage they would have cost me.
One thing that has apparently caused East Germany to join the Federation* immediately was television, commercials in particular. When you saw how happy you could be in a new Mercedes, while looking out the window and seeing one or two Trabants or the occasional Wartburg, it has served as a constant reminder.
There's the obvious caveat that East Germans had television sets (Norks don't have them except for the privileged few) and communist materialist ideology (whereas North Korea, with its Juche and deification of state leaders, makes their citizens wary of all possessions).
*) Well, other than the vastly better economy, but they needed to be aware of it as well. Apparently at least one Nork was shocked on her first visit to a supermarket and thought it was a ruse.
It's like every article on any future technology (self-driving cars being a particularly hot one), where every second comment starts with "I wonder if they've considered..." or "Did they think of..." Yes. Yes they did.
And then the hotly anticipated technology arrives and it turns out that they have not considered something obvious which a 7 year old would have pointed out to them, but was shouted down by those "who know better".
It wasn't this year, it was years ago on a Tuesday. IT actually brushed off those calls asking if they checked for everything since it was April fools and most of these problems were pranks. It took a whole five minutes for everybody affected (three people) to fix this which discouraged me from trying to prank an office of IT hobbyists...
And not by sellotaping over their sensors, that would be pedestrian (plus it fails most of the time). I used that invisible tape over the middle two connectors in the USB port.
The mice lit up, appeared to be functional, but they did not transmit any data to the PC. It resulted in several people calling IT because they needed to replace their faulty mice.
It doesn't exist in most incandescent lights I know of. The light is blackbody emission of the hot metal filament and it doesn't cool down rapidly enough to become black between cycles.
You might be confusing it with fluorescent bulbs which used to carry warnings that they must be installed in threes to three-phase power if providing light for a workplace with exposed running motors, saws, etc. Incandescent bulbs never carried those warnings.
Strobing RGB projectors are horrible. And LED rear lights on cars drive me nuts the way they flicker. My kids see it too, but most people I mention it to don't know what I'm talking about. I wonder if it's a genetic thing?
Oh yeah, rear LED lights. Makes me wonder how you can screw that up if you have a frigging 12 V direct current power supply that you can just connect to those LEDs directly. To make matters worse, some models have it, some don't, and sometimes it's within the same make.
Most people I know don't complain about this in LEDs, but I can clearly see it if anything moves. Even the more expensive LEDs fitted with a rectifier still annoy me. And don't even get me started on the cheap ones where the LEDs themselves are arranged in two series (opposite directions) in parallel, which flicker like crazy.
Then again, I also notice RGB ghosting in DLP projectors and it's another thing that annoys me, whereas most people can't see the phenomenon even when it's pointed out to them.
The only reason to replace sodium lamps with LEDs is significantly better color rendition and slightly more longevity.
The luminous efficacy of a white LED ranges from 1 to 20% (typically about 12% for street lamps).
Contrast with low pressure sodium lamps (orange), the efficacy of which ranges from 15 to 29%. High pressure sodium lamps (white-ish) is 12-22%, so still potentially better than LEDs.
There are some advantages, however. LEDs are directed down and slightly outwards and don't require reflectors. It's somewhat easier to shape the light cone of LEDs, and you need to do it to avoid glare. Omnidirectional sodium lamps need reflectors, but due to their orange monochromatic light, they don't cause nearly as much glare and shaping the light cone isn't as critical.
Yeah, but water is deflected with an uncharged rod, too. It's been a while, but as I understand it, this is because the water column pulls air along with it and a rod acts like an airfoil, deflecting air as it moves down and causing low pressure below/downstream from the rod that pulls in air and water towards it, not because of any electric charge present in the rod.
Even though molecules will be reoriented, the effect on the water column would be negligible, the attractive force is just too low. Otherwise, you could use a suitably large plate to suck up water from a container, or charge a container and cause water inside it to stick.
Some physicists don't understand it, either. My wife attended a lecture a couple of years ago where the lecturer demonstrated how a water column is attracted by a rod and explained that this is due to an electrostatic effect.
Unfortunately, nobody in the audience asked him to charge it oppositely and demonstrate how water is repelled or to neutralize the charge and show how water is unaffected.
(...) the AI is not just 'searching a database for solutions', it is taking it's knowledge, gleaned from what it has already infered from that database, and applying it to a novel situation, one that isn't in its database (...)
The problem here is that it was programmed to take its knowledge, programmed to glean, programmed to apply.
It was not programmed with rules of Go and told to start from scratch and build its neural network. It did not infer that it needs to take its knowledge, it did not infer it needs to glean, and it did not infer to apply.
It's still a program. A very advanced program, but a program nonetheless. It's not AI in the sense that it was not programmed to do X, but decided to reprogram itself to do Y in order to be more effective at X.
On the rare occasion that I was in a hot tub and it was running, it was a roar, to the point that any conversation required raised voices. If you're listening to music, I imagine it has to be quite loud already, so to do any voice control, you would need to be shouting.
If you can afford a Sonos speaker system and a hot tub, you could really look into getting a water-resistant phone, too.
@inmypjs: I don't know why you were downvoted. You're totally correct, but indeed, also about the target customer base -- 24 bit audio is extremely important to measurebators.
For the rest of us, well, just see the ratio of upvotes to downvotes under your (and mine) posts.
I mean, 144 dB SNR. While noise is at the absolute threshold of hearing (ATH), the music is booming at 144 dB (sound of a jet plane 50 m away). I don't thing you'd be able to hear the noise. I don't even think the speakers would be able to reproduce sound at 144 dB (or would be allowed to, since threshold of pain is 130 dB, and eardrum rupture happens at 150 dB).
96 dB SNR at 16 bits is already way above any requirement -- a vacuum cleaner at a distance of 1 m is 70 dB. That would mean your music would have to be 8 times louder than that vacuum cleaner while noise would be at ATH.
"Turn off sound"
"Did you mean turn up sound? Volume up to 9."
"No, Turn OFF"
"Oh, you want it even louder. Volume to 10."
"NO, YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT. TURN! OFF! NOW!"
"What? I can't hear you very well. You want it even louder? Ok. Volume to 11!"
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Why the fuck would anyone want a voice-controlled loudspeaker system? It makes as much sense as TV for the blind. Or bicycles for fish.
Lovely:
Yahoo Games is being axed. The site goes away as of Friday, May 13th, 2016. Yahoo! says it's trying to figure out a “transition plan” so that users who've made in-game purchases aren't left adrift after that date.
Bit too late for that, isn't it? Announce your plans to world+dog and negotiate after that? Everybody knows you have no choice now and will accept any scrap thrown at you. You don't tip your own hand like that. Sigh. And people wonder why Yahoo is having issues.
Maybe they wanted to suck up to Uber.
On a more serious note, a lot of names and terms were coined when education included basic Greek and Latin. There wouldn't be television today, we'd have something like Remoteviewingandlisteningset, much like Germans have their Fernsehers.
In this way, Kubernetes at least carries some of this tradition.
If your browser in Linux takes up 4+GB of RAM, you're doing something wrong, or just purposefully making it use so much RAM.
I'm not sure, perhaps you'll be able to tell me -- just what exactly am I doing wrong? And why would I want it to use so much RAM?
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To me it appears that neither Opera nor Firefox do good garbage collection under Linux and apparently both do much better under Windows.
$·free·············total·······used·······free·····shared····buffers·····cached
Mem:·······2064280····1863740·····200540······13328······75868·····432020
-/+·buffers/cache:····1355852·····708428
Swap:······1637372······76488····1560884
(Sigh, oh well, that's as good as it gets, since the form here doesn't allow non-backing spaces in pre tags, and line spacing is all wrong.)
That's in a VM with 2 GB of RAM I'm currently using on a work laptop. Opening a couple of tabs to read news expectedly ups memory usage. Closing these tabs makes no difference. Opening new tabs should then reuse memory already allocated to the browser? No. It starts swapping like crazy.
This gets obvious with flash videos. They get slower and start stuttering, and flash eventually crashes (I can kill it and let it restart itself, but it doesn't help in the long run).
Worse still is that simply restarting the browser isn't enough. If flash crashed, it's not going to work for videos on restarting the browser. For some reason, a lot of memory is assigned to X. Restarting X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace helps with regards to X memory usage, but it still swaps like crazy. Flushing the buffers doesn't do anything. In the end, restarting the VM fixes the problem, but restarting anything is not a fix if Windows, of all things, doesn't need it -- one of the cited advantages of Linux was supposed to be that you don't need to restart your computer if you run into problems, you were supposed to be able to fix almost everything without rebooting except kernel panics and hardware failures. So what happened?
It's different under Windows. For some reason, memory usage goes up as expected. When closing tabs, it doesn't go down, but opening new tabs then doesn't result in memory usage constantly increasing. As though the browser tends to make better use of memory allocated to it.
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I stood against a lot of pressure to go to a corporate Windows install on my work laptop. I installed and maintained Linux (Mint 13 with MATE) according to all good practices. And I still had to restart Firefox at least three times a day to free up memory that it just didn't want to let go.
Begrudgingly, I had to install Windows (on the same hardware). My biggest gripe is that I don't have anything serious to complain about, so I can't make a compelling case to go back to Linux.
Serious question: What was I doing wrong? This is a bog-standard Sandy Bridge laptop with 8 GB of memory. I use a lot more extensions now, and yet memory usage is down and I no longer have to restart Firefox (or watch it crash) just because it's running out of memory.
Power usage is down, as are temperatures. I hardly ever hear the fan running these days.
And it's Windows 7, I don't know if Windows 8+ with its optimizations would help or hinder (I can't try it, since my laptop is too old and doesn't qualify). Some colleagues with new laptops are running Windows 8.1 on them after trying 7 and finding it's worse.
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Disclaimer: FWIW, I am (was?) a Unix/Linux fan. I never saw a reason to buy Windows for my home PC and I run it on Mint 17. Under Windows I vastly prefer Cygwin with bash to Powershell, which I haven't installed or ever intend to learn. And yet after being forced to use Windows, I'm finding it's better in some regards than Linux. There are certainly some things which drive me up the wall, but there's less of them than I have brought up in the past to stay with Linux on the corporate laptop, after using it for three years, going through a lot of trouble for using it instead of what everybody else used.
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Oh yes, and thanks a lot for using cloudflare and forcing us to go through CAPTCHA after doing several previews in a row (I was trying to get that pre to work). Oh yeah, and seriously? A layered drink is juice?
Oh yes, because your usage pattern is exactly the same as mine!
I use Opera (12.16) or Firefox. I have about 20 tabs open. Opera takes 3.7 GB. Firefox takes 4.2 GB with the same tabs.
Note that several of those tabs have flash open, of course that takes its toll. However, flash only takes up about 600 MB, and less CPU cycles*.
Distribution is Mint 17 upgraded to the current version with Cinnamon.
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*) Of course, embedded flash is also a big problem with the browser and tends to cause the browser to use up cycles. I also use Windows from time to time, and with the same or similar set of tabs, it's much more responsive. However, even with a fairly recent GPU (Radeon 5850) and GPU acceleration enabled, HTML5 video is excruciatingly slow. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but there's nothing in the manuals about it.
So, it will take 144 MB, and require 1.6 GB memory with 2 GHz single-core CPU? Sounds about par for the course in terms of what a regular switch OS incorporates today. Running just a single browser in Linux tends to eat up 4+ GB of memory, plus whatever services, X and the window manager all use.
Why would they build Windows on a Linux kernel? What would be the benefit? Windows 8 was a major rewrite, some libraries were written from scratch, and as a result, Windows 8 beyond is faster, more stable and more responsive than 7 was, to the point that I'm considering buying Windows 10 and a full rebuild of my desktop (the one thing holding me back is a rather large RAID setup that I have no good way of backing up, although I realize I could replicate my Linux install including mdadm in Virtualbox with access to raw disks).
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What I would appreciate a lot more is a GNOME (or rather MATE)-like desktop metaphor to replace explorer in Windows. Unless if it would involve Xorg as a display server ;-)
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Nevertheless, I do expect at some point Microsoft will come up with Office for Linux and with a better implementation of Wine -- donating certain binary libraries to wine while acknowledging copyright, much like MS core fonts, but with full Microsoft backing.
That goes oddly well with the "I've been married too..."-post - a lot of people are looking for a partner that is just like themselves and (in the long run) can't deal with someone that is not.
I'm afraid it's even harder to deal with someone that is, in fact, just like you.
I'll see your Nokia 8310 and raise you an Ericsson T66.
Or, apparently, anything on This list of very small phones.
The study found better returns for the men and I doubt that the men were selling car parts, and women pastries, otherwise this is totally not a controlled study.
Assuming the study was controlled and the inventory of goods was the same, time to put up auctions was the same, and sellers only got to control the prices and buyitnow options, my earlier comment about competence still stands -- in case of eBay, men get better money than women simply because they appear to understand it better and their willingness to risk pays off much better on eBay.
So then it appears that eBay tends to punish risk adversity. Shall I rephrase my proposal? Should eBay provide incentives that promote and reward risk adversity just because women sellers are getting lower returns on their sales because of it?
Let's make the final connection, shall we? So the children of workers currently being laid off will get jobs as doctors, etc. (assuming Watson doesn't automate doctors away first), but what about the worker that loses his job at the age of 40 or 50? Not an enviable position. It's not about his children, it's about that man -- what should he do? Lie down and die?
Ah yes, the evolution of the job market. So what you're basically saying is that when farm workers lost their jobs to mechanization got jobs as doctors, correct?
Nobody is asking what will happen to humanity or the civilization, but what will happen to the particular workers that lose their jobs.
That's already been solved and assuming it's not covered by patents, LG could very well be using it -- using sensors to monitor if the phone is being removed from the pocket (light level increase), if there are sudden movements, etc. -- all that is an indication that the owner is going to be looking at the screen in a moment.
If Microsoft is able to do it in their phones, why not LG?
The FBI wants to unlock an iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Farook, who with his wife Tashfeen Malik shot and killed 14 coworkers in December in San Bernardino, California.
Um, I recently found out that they only allegedly shot and killed 14 coworkers. So don't go around slinging accusations like that.
People don't get it that it's no longer 2010 and it's no longer Windows Phone 7 that we're talking about.
I also fully expect Surface phones to pack Atom CPUs and to allow Win32 software with Continuum and Lumia could continue as Continuum-capable ARM CPU-based phones, but without x86-64 app compatibility, but it's an open question if it makes any sense (it all depends on the price of Snapdragons vs. Atoms).
I bought a Lumia 640 for myself and my wife. We're both very happy with them (it's her first smartphone).
I have to admit some apps are missing. Namely, games. I can sympathize with people who treat their phone as a mobile games console, since they are left out in the cold and Windows Phone definitely isn't going to work out for them.
Some apps are paid for while they are "free" on Android (I also have a cheap Android tablet). The problem with "free" apps/games is that they are either extremely limited or ads make them unusable. Then you have to pay money to disable ads or enable full functionality. This usually costs 2-3 times more than buying the full version on Windows Phone in the first place.
End of the day, I have found and installed all apps that I use or need. Neither phone crashed as of yet. And user experience is just perfect -- I have noticed absolutely no lag at all and all functionality is implemented well -- no need for five different keyboards for varied functionality and swype is much better at predicting text than it ever was on Android or Bada (my previous smartphone of last four years was the original Samsung Wave).
I have read that article! It was very interesting! Overused certain punctuation signs, but otherwise a good read!
However, it omitted one important detail! It explained how it happened that the tax year ends on April the 5th, but has not even begun to address why it used to end on March 24th before 1752! I'd be grateful for an explanation!
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