We had a chance to be great, but we elected John Howard and it's been all down hill since then.

Thankfully I have multiple citizenships, but NZ or the UK aren't much better. At least the latter gives me an avenue into the EU and Switzerland, though.

There is little I can do in that regard.

Because they couldn't overcharge. I'm sure they researched the industry and discovered that it is highly price competitive and that just putting an aluminium frame on it would justify a doubling or tripling in price. So they weren't interested. Apple only likes markets where they can overcharge to a massive degree. They don't want to just make money, they want to make stupid amounts of money.

I know, only because where I work is using them. Idea is it is a general two factor token. Can be programmed by the end user or their org. Also in theory a lot of companies could all use their platform and you have one two factor device for everything but in reality you use it for whatever your company does and nothing else.

Once programmed it acts like a HID class keyboard. You push the button, it spits out a string of characters, that being the two factor code for your account at the time.

I had never seen a black rectangle with rounded edges before the iPhone! ... ...well unless you count the TV I had as a child. And the TV I have now. And probably half the electronics in my house.

The whole "trade dress" concept seems a bit silly to me in the first place but ti is beyond stupid when they can claim something as simple as their rounded rectangular design as being "trade dress".

Nothing rigorous that I've found. I've seen some things like a Mac user posting on a forum asking why Cubase was hitting harder on OS-X than Windows along with screenshots of the overall load meters that it has, but little in the way of details on methodology.

While I haven't done extensive looking, I haven't come across anything and it is something I'm interested in.

Sadly, there seems to be little interest in testing. People who own PCs can't really test it, outside of building a hackintosh, and Mac users are not very interested in testing particularly since many of them have a real need to believe their money was well spend and do not wish to do something which might challenge that idea.

If someone gave me the hardware and software I'd love to try it, but I own only a PC, and the DAW I use (Sonar) is Windows only.

The only thing I can point to with some newer data is a Sonar benchmark, conducted by their lead programmer, showing improvements in Windows 8 vs Windows 7. They found basically an across the board improvement, with no code recompile http://blog.cakewalk.com/windo... . Now that says nothing of cross platform (as I noted, Sonar is Windows only anyhow) but does indicate that MS continues to improve Windows' performance with regards to intensive time critical tasks like audio.

True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.

Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.

None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.

Or Malaysia or Thailand and so on.

Be careful when you get on the American hate high horse, you overgeneralize and you risk looking racist. ...

or maybe admit it is a bit more nuanced than "not a civilized country."

It manifests differently, but it is sexism all the same. Many of the "defender of women" types really do see women as weaker, inferior. These poor little flowers just can't, CAN'T stand up for themselves. They need guys to help them out so that things can be fair! So don't worry, fair lady, they'll protect you from the evil men... unless of course you disagree with them in which case they'll attack your fiercely for having "internalized misogyny" or some such. After all, you can't be strong enough to have your own opinions!

They don't believe they are sexist, but then people who are sexist/racist/etc rarely believe they are. Make no mistake though, that's what it is. While it might manifest as seemingly good intentions, it is actually a view of gender inferiority. I mean after all, if you truly believe that women are equal to men, just as capable, then you aren't going to think they need special champions. They can, and will, handle it themselves. It is only people who view them as weaker in some way that would think they can't handle themselves. It is pretty insidious.

I think people need to start calling them out on their bullshit. Sexism under the cloak of "equality" or "justice" is little better than sexism in the form of harassment.

There is no founder of atheism to make the same comparison.

Sure there is. Everyone is a "founder of atheism" because that's how we're born.

In particular with regards to gender roles.

So, time was women were for making babies and raising said babies. Men were for protecting and providing for the women. That was the roles society prescribed and there wasn't a lot of deviation from it. You did see outliers that didn't conform, but by and large that's how things were basically due to necessity. You notice many animals follow a similar structure. It is what is needed for the survival of the species.

Well that all changed, of course. We now have the problem of too many humans, not too few. Also many of the household tasks that used to take a ton of time are now automated (try washing clothes by hand, it is a full time job almost). So society changed. Women didn't need to place their worth in their offspring anymore. They could choose to be what the wanted, do what they wanted, and still be valuable. It wasn't about popping out babies.

Well, this is the other side of that: Men's value now no longer needs to be in providing for a family. They can have a family, or not, they work, they can stay at home, etc, etc. For some men, that means staying single.

However, some people, like this dude, have a problem with that. They think that men should be required to be providers to be considered "real men", should be required to fill a particular role in society.

RAID controllers do not launch reads on all involved drives. That would be stupid.

?

For a RAID1, most RAID controllers (and software RAID implementations) will absolutely read from all devices so as to service the read ASAP.

For distributed parity forms of RAID, you inherently have to read from all devices.

For dedicated parity disk forms of RAID, you have to read from all devices except the parity device.

I've never tried a mixed RAID1 of SSD and magnetic disk, but with a large enough write cache the theory seems reasonable. Most controllers [with a BBU] acknowledge the write as soon as it hits cache.

Mike Rowe has given some good talks about the shortage of skilled labour in the US and what a problem it is. This kind of thing can't be outsourced since, well, the labour is needed in the US. I suppose it could be replaced with H1Bs but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Most of it is stuff like plumbing that isn't glamorous, and even can be dirty, but it is necessary and will continue to be necessary. Eventually robotics may advance to the point of replacing it, but not in the foreseeable future.

Here manslaughter is a Class 2 Felony. That means 4 years minimum sentence (or 3 years minimum if there are mitigating circumstances), 10 year maximum (12.5 if there are aggravating circumstances). This is presuming first time offence, and only one count. A repeat offence can bring it up to as much as 35 years.

So no, doesn't look higher to me. Remember there's a difference between maximum and minimum. When a sentence is "up to" that means "the absolute maximum a court may sentence for a given offence." Usually, there's a fair bit of range in a sentence since the idea is a judge will consider the factors of the individual case.

I mean when someone breaks in to your house, you should go to jail right? After all, your home security sucks. I don't care if you think it is good, it sucks. Virtually nobody bothers with good home security.

So you should go to jail if someone breaks in... ...or maybe you should reexamine this "blame the victim" attitude so many geeks have with regards to hacking.