Comment Re:nail in W3C coffin (Score 3, Informative) 94
Not to spoil your rant, but the picture tag is defined here: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/draf...
Notice the hostname.
Comment Re:Cut the Russians Off (Score 3, Insightful) 848
And for good measure, Ukraine should "sell" its ownership in the Ukrainian section of the gas pipeline to a Nato country and then shut off the flow of gas.
Cutting off the flow of gas would hurt Europe a lot more than it would hurt Russia at this point. Entering the winter with your largest gas supplier no longer providing you with the gas that you use for heating would suck. And as gas is fungible, it doesn't matter to Russia if we stop buying it from them, unless everyone else stops buying it from them - if China doesn't join in with the boycott then it just means that they'll be buying more has from Russia because the price of everyone else's gas will go up.
No Russian economy depends on this income, it make up a significant part of their entire national GDP, meanwhile Europe has been finding other alternative sources of energy in case Russia would cut of the supply again as they did after the sanction put on them for the invasion of Georgia. And the gas is not fungible, it would take over a year to build new pipelines to other countries, especially China is a long long way away from the gas going to Europe. Russia would be completely and utterly fucked without the gas, in Europe it would just hurt the home owner who has invested in natural gas heating to save money, they would not be saving money anymore.
Comment Re:1 Billion Mobile Users? (Score 1) 83
You don't seem to be talking from experience and seem to be simply conjecturing. I am in India. I have never heard of any village sharing just one cell phone. It is not even plausible.
It isnt? I know several towns in Western Europe that used to share a single cell tower. There are different types of towers, and the big ones used in rural areas have much longer range (in km) than those used in cities (100m). The main limit is how many concurrent connections the tower can handle.
Comment Re:Switched double speed half capacity, realistic? (Score 1) 316
As you mention, 15k SAS drives are going to be rapidly undercut by SSDs. The price difference is no longer 10x or 20x when looking at cost/gigabyte, the price difference is now only 2-3x.
Pay 2x-3x the amount for a SSD of the same size as the 15k SAS, and you gain 50x improvement in your IOPS. For workloads where that matters, it's an easy choice to make now. As soon as you say something like "we'll short-stroke some 15k RPM SAS drives" - you should be considering enterprise level SSD instead. Less spindles needed, less power needed, and huge performance gains.
The only downside of SSDs is that write-endurance. A 600GB SSD can only handle about 120TB of writes over its lifespan (give or take 20-50% depending on the controller, technology, etc). The question is - are you really writing more then 60GB/day to the drive (in which case it will wear out in 5 years).
And more importantly... will you care if it wears out in 4-5 years? That you could handle the same workload using fewer spindles and less power likely pays for itself, including replacing the drives every 4-5 years.
I don't know what you're talking about. You can definitely write more than 120TB/600GB=240 times to the same bits.
Yes, but to all bits? Remember the drive will move around physical where a logical data cell is stored. Each time you write you are almost guaranteed it will be written to a new place and the old just marked free until all cells have been as used as that one.
Comment Re:"Computing's Narrow Focus"? (Score 1) 329
European master degrees and PhDs. Note though that biology was the largest science subject at my university (Cph) almost twice as many students as CS.
Comment Re:"Computing's Narrow Focus"? (Score 1) 329
"Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.
The last has probably nothing to do with her choice of subject. Most biology students end up as unskilled workers. I have several friends who have studied biology, and the job market for them while big is way too small for the sheer number of biologists educated.
Comment Re:Waaah. (Score 1) 338
In the rest of the world we use twice the voltage. In the EU 200 to 250V is standard.
I just checked my vacuum cleaner. It is 2300W. Jesus, no wonder I never turn it up to max. That thing sucks. Hard.
"MythBusters" Drops Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci 364
rbrandis (735555) writes In a video announcement Thursday on Discovery Channel, MythBusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman revealed that longtime co-hosts and fan favorites Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci are no longer on the show. "This next season we're going back to our origins with just Adam and me," Hyneman said in the video, which explained that the change took hold as of the season's last episode on August 21. (Our interview with the original-and-remaining Mythbusters is one of my favorites.)
Comment Re:Change.org is just another bulletin board (Score 5, Funny) 239
A petition with 13 signatures is not worth mentioning. Any idiot can set one up.
You mean any idiot with 12 idiot friends.
You make it sound like the new testamant.
Comment Re:From the wikipedia (Score 1) 303
Industry is much better than individuals at handling chemicals safely.
Can be, especially if it is economically beneficial for them or they are forced to do so by the government. If not, they are naturally inclined to do much worse.
Comment Re:I'd love to be in his class (Score 1) 179
Your analysis is only partly correct; you've missed out on all the other business software they make tons of money on. MS is only highly profitable because of their business software, and the usage of their software in offices: Windows, Office, Sharepoint, Windows Server, SQL Server, etc etc. The place where they're failing abysmally is with consumers: they still sell (desktop) Windows of course, but they probably don't make much money with the home versions, and people aren't buying new PCs that much any more, and instead are buying smartphones and tablets (iOS and Android). MS's consumer offerings are ignored or laughed at: Surface, Windows Phone, etc. haven't done well. Xbox doesn't look like it's doing all that well any more either.
Basically, if MS cut out most of the consumer ventures, they'd be far more profitable. But there's definitely a tie-in there: people like to use software at work that they're familiar with, so if MS abandons the consumer space altogether, it wouldn't be long before companies shift to something else for their desktops, and then the rest of the MS infrastructure would crumble too.
So they are slowly becoming the IBM of the software industry?
So, when will they sell the consumer parts to a Chinese company?
Professor Steve Ballmer Will Teach At Two Universities This Year 179
redletterdave (2493036) writes "When Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down from Microsoft's board of directors, he cited a fall schedule that would "be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season." It turns out Ballmer will teach an MBA class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business in the fall, and a class at USC's Marshall School of Business in the spring. Helen Chang, assistant director of communications at Stanford's Business School, told Business Insider that Ballmer will be working with faculty member Susan Athey for a strategic management course called "TRAMGT588: Leading organizations." As for the spring semester, Ballmer will head to Los Angeles — closer to where his Clippers will be playing — and teach a course at University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. We reached out to the Marshall School, which declined to offer more details about Ballmer's class.
Comment Re:Stone (Score 1) 193
Really Carewolf? Really?
That was not me. I don't troll.
Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead 521
Elledan writes: Federal investigators in California have requested that BrightSource — owner of thermal solar plants — halt the construction of more (and bigger) plants until their impact on wildlife has been further investigated. "Unlike many other solar plants, the Ivanpah plant does not generate energy using photovoltaic solar panels. Instead, it has more than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door. Together, they cover 1,416 hectares. Each mirror collects and reflects solar rays, focusing and concentrating solar energy from their entire surfaces upward onto three boiler towers, each looming up to 40 stories high. The solar energy heats the water inside the towers to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes." The concentrated solar energy chars and incinerates the feathers of passing birds. BrightSource estimates about a thousand bird die this way every year, but an environmental group claims the real number is much higher.
Comment Re:Still... (Score 2) 193
...using c. Although I do like to comment thusly, and so prefer a compiler that understands at least basic c++:
// comment I like to stay as close to the metal as I can get. I'd use assembler, but many of my projects are cross platform, so c it is.
End of Line terminated comments ("//") actually are in the C spec as part of C99. And while it did take GCC a little while for that to be accepted in C mode...
What on Earth are you talking about?? Using C++ comments in C was a GCC extension that made it into C99.
