Posts by RobHib 675 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2013
Much of the world's gone mad!
Addiction to Twitter, Facebook, etc. has spread with such contagion that heroin/cocaine dealers must be reviewing their marketing strategies and wondering what they've done wrong!
I like many others abandoned these cesspits over three years ago, regulators and do-gooders should do the same.
First, I've no intention of debating the granularity Brian Beach’s (Backblaze's) statistics; whilst it's vitally important I found stats to be the driest and most boring of my academic subjects. However, putting numbers into perspective, one should remember that election opinion polls with typically as few as a 1000 samples yield an accuracy of a few percent—which ought to be sufficient samples to deduce a trend in HD failures (that's if one is not comparing apples with oranges and Brian Beach is doing a bit of that). ...And things get iffy with only 300/400 samples.
Nevertheless, Beach's stats reflect my own experience; his failure figures almost mirror mine except his percentage of failures is typically about half mine as I'd expect (I have far fewer drives and they're not in a controlled environment of a data centre).
1. I have boat-anchor boxes full of dead Seagate HDDs, they by far top the unreliability stakes and have not been reliable as expected since the 7200.11 BIOS fiasco of some years back. I now actively avoid Seagate drives whenever possible. (BTW, I've been using Seagate products from days way back when the company was called Shugart and made the 5MB ST-506 HDD.)
As with Beach, I also found the Seagate drives to be initially OK then 'soft'-fail later on—not so much infant mortality but rather in the middle of the bathtub curve. I also found a peculiar fault with many large Seagate drives of 500GB and over. Pull drives which have failed or are failing out of service then clean/reformat them with DBAN or similar utilities then stress-test continually for a week or more with high I/O and often it was impossible to get them to fail! However, put them back in service, especially in environments where they were likely to encounter a half million or more files and they'd fail within a day! (I've only ever seen this strange phenomenon on Seagate drives—where the number of stored files is more indicative of failure than sustained I/O etc.—with huge numbers of files they'd fail even if only at 50-60% storage capacity).
2. Next is WD, I found the red drives to be very reliable, but as Beach states WD's green eco drives were an unmitigated disaster (I wouldn't even put them in a hand-me-down kid's PC—same with the Seagate equivalents). Generally, on a per capita basis, in our environment, Seagate failures would outstrip the WDs by 3:1.
3. Although the sample is small, Samsung proved to be reliable; we've had almost no infant mortality or bathtub-bottom failures although some have failed without warning after 3 to 4 years.
4. Hitachi HDDs are the clear winners by far. Although we have not that many per capita (~25%), they've been by far the most reliable. In fact, there's no Hitachi's in our boat-anchor boxes.
5. I'd also agree with Brian Beach’s assessment over SMART, I've seen many a 'dead' Seagate drive with essentially perfect SMART figures. Except for initial testing and bench maintenance, SMART is essentially worthless (as the mechanisms that are causing the failures are (seemingly) not monitored by SMART).
Irrespective of his method of assessment, Brian Beach’s (Backblaze's) statistics are in keeping with what I've found. The key issue is what is the most reliable drives, and for once Brian Beach’s figures have given us more than just hearsay.
In the past, we've had documents such as Google's Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population but they're only of academic interest when essential facts such as brands/manufacturers and HDD types have been obfuscated or redacted from the documents. This is why Brian Beach's data, albeit having shortcomings, is so important.
...And we punch-carders were the first hackers too.
I remember that for Computing 1.001 student batch runs were limited to 6 sec machine time (on an IBM 360). Progs would often time out if coding wasn't tight or a 'good' algorithm used. Soln: examine the fanfold printouts in the dumpsters outside the computing department then figure out the time limit could be overridden by adding a time switch to the $JOB card. Voilà, extra time!
Of course, eventually the word got out and the plug pulled when some idiot—there's always one—added a few too many seconds. Those were the days when one could actually watch the card batches being processed, an operator noticed that a batch of cards had seemingly stopped 'flowing' for some reason. ;-)
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's pretty hard to say that Fortran 90 is the same language that Backus and team wrote in the early 1950s.
(However, I was more affronted by the fact that the referrer, after only taking time to look at the cover, used that manual to prove his point. Sometimes it helps delve deeper. BTW, I've had a copy of that manual for ages.)
In all my years of FORTRAN coding for HPC, I really, really, really got to loathe that language.
Many would agree with you including Kemeny and Kurtz who transmogrified the original FORTRAN versions into BASIC thus saving the sanity of many a student. However, think yourself lucky. From a reading of your post it seems you only had to contend with F77 and later, reckon you'd have a bit of extra nail biting with FORTRAN IV/66 or earlier. (It would be interesting to know what type of programs you wrote in FORTRAN, for often I've seen it used where say PL/I would have been a better choice. In such circumstances, I've seen programmers curse and swear constantly and I don't blame them.)
My baptism of fire was FORTRAN IV but even so that didn't stop me hogging the KP26 (026) / KP29 (029) punch card room of an evening until the univ's grey men threw me out. (Evenings were best as there was easier access to the much-fought-over IBM KP-29s, which were then the latest generation card punches and easier to use than the older 026s.)
For me, the Achilles' heel of the early FORTRANs was their horrible I/O, those bloody format statements had me constantly swearing and ripping up punch cards.
Nevertheless, I don't care what anybody says, if you're doing science/maths then wheel in FORTRAN as it's still the best tool for the job. Moreover, you can call on the many well-tested and well-authenticated subroutine libraries, ISML etc. (I have a few scientific and engineering programs that I still use which I originally wrote in FORTRAN IV and punched out on Hollerith cards decades ago. With a few I/O tweaks and such they still compile perfectly in modern environments. The reason why there's still much FORTRAN IV around is that it is so portable.)
I'm not suggesting for a moment that FORTRAN is the be-all and end-all of programming, it isn't (so C programmers, don't have apoplexy, I'm not suggesting you write Windows or OS X in FORTRAN). Over the years I've had to use many different languages, COBOL, PL/I, LISP (a favorite of mine), C and its variants, etc., but I've always compared them with FORTRAN. FORTRAN—far from being dead—is a fine language and still the reference by which others are compared. However, like all others, it's best confined to environments in which it was deigned to work.
——
BTW, whilst the original FORTRAN 0 (1954/56) has limitations, I reckon there's nothing like it for the ease of examining code, look at a printout and the algorithms almost have a clarity as if their equations were written on a blackboard.
P.S.: I'd have to agree with Phil O'Sophical re Pascal, as I'd reckon most FORTRAN, C, PL/I, BASIC programmer probably would, it's irritating and restrictive. We programmers who've had the freedom and flexibility of say C don't like being constrained in the way Pascal does. Then again, perhaps Niklaus Wirth was trying to bring us programmers down to earth in the way other engineering professions are constrained by the real world and have to structure jobs accordingly—after all, a bridge designer has to set up his complete design, engineering environment etc. before he starts building whereas the C programmer can begin in the middle of the 'river' if he so desires. ...And, of course, that can have many undesirable consequences, bugs and such! ;-)
Please, the capitalisation ... It's Fortran. It's been officially Fortran for almost 25 years now. And if you look at the original Fortran manual
Heaven forbid, what on earth are you talking about?
Even your link proves the point that FORTRAN is an acronym and thus uppercase. The 1956 IBM manual to which you refer uses uppercase FORTRAN throughout! The cover is artistic/stylistic licence but dropped-capitals are used for FORTRAN throughout the manual in its body text and full capitals are used in titles.
In case you're unaware, dropped capitals are UPPERCASE words where the first character is somewhat larger than the others—a practice used by good typographers for clarity since the renaissance—something that's been lost in this cretinous age of internet typography (where everyone* seems to think they're experts on typefaces and layouts). If you look at that manual carefully you may eventually appreciate (a) how well it is written, and (b) the clarity of its layout. Moreover, the careful use of different fonts for the examples etc. makes the manual particularly easy to read.
It's a damn pity that writers of today don't copy this style—for until the rough-and-ready internet age, that's how most good technical manuals were written!
BTW, I learned FORTRAN not Fortran—even as I write this, Firefox-26's speller is underlining the lower case word as a spelling error! All my FORTRAN text books use the word FORTRAN and the university's maths department forbade both 'Fortran' or 'fortran'.
Make sure you get your nomenclature right, I initially learned FORTRAN, not 'Fortran-77'. For many of us, they're two separate languages. The rot set in with FORTRAN 77 when books like FORTRAN 77 Principles of PROGRAMMING by Jerrold L. Wagener (pub. 1980) used 'Fortran' in the text but not on the book's cover (the title of which I've just copied verbatim from my copy). [No, I'm not contradicting myself, Wagener's book is a text on FORTRAN 77, not FORTRAN.]
——
* Chucking away time-tested practices because they've not been learned or understood is unfortunately commonplace nowadays. Even El Reg forcibly (and unnecessarily) removes double spaces between sentences on posts. Double-spaces are a longstanding typographical practice to increase reading clarity, especially where mono-spaced fonts are used.
Right. Similarly, I have some postcards and photos from my great uncle who sent them from Gallipoli and the Western Front. They also include a photo of him and a group of mates in hospital after being injured on the Western Front along with a letter to his sister (my grandmother) explaining what happened to him.
I have no intention of giving the photos etc. to these museums until there's a resolution of this nonsense. Both the Imperial War Museum and the Australian War Memorial should be interested as he originally enlisted in the Australian Army and then, somewhat unusually, transferred to the British Army during the move from Gallipoli to the Western Front (upon which he was also promoted).
These type of WWI records are especially important for the British Army, as the major repository of personal records from WWI was bombed during WWII and thus lost.
Having seen museums fail to resolve these issues over quite some years, my next intention is to scan the documents at a very low resolution but with small sections in high resolution and then send them copies. The high resolution sections will provide authenticity (indicate what they are) but the majority of the image will be blurred and unintelligible. Essentially, I will be doing in reverse what the IWM and AWM are now doing to us the public!
If everyone—or even just a reasonable number of people—did the same then I'd reckon things would change pretty quickly.
When asked, these war museums keep coming up with the same old mantra that many documents are still in copyright even 100 years after the War and they don't know who to contact for approval to publish (as all participants are now dead—the orphan works copyright problem surfaces yet again!!). Perhaps so, but this is essentially legal bullshit.
First, the 'works' of the many soldiers who were killed during WWI—even with the outrageously long copyright laws—are now out of copyright. Second, many photos taken during WWI were done so officially by the military, thus were subject of Crown Copyright in the UK and Australia (but not US) and have thus expired long ago. Third, photos taken by organizations such as newspapers etc. are also out of copyright (even given the new 70-year rule). Forth, the vast majority of soldiers, next of kin, relatives etc. donated these documents so they would be put in the public record for all to see. Fifth, even if there's some special exceptions (and it's hard to think of any), this doesn't preclude the vast majority of photographs and documents being available to public in the highest resolution possible, both at the museums as well as being made available on-line.
If these photographs and documents are to reach the greatest number of people, then it is imperative that they be made available at the highest possible resolution (i.e.: at least equivalent to the native resolution of the original images, and if necessary they should be corrected, sharpened and or otherwise enhanced). Today, with high resolution colour imaging commonplace, it is very difficult to capture the imagination of many people (especially the young) with poor grainy, low-resolution B&W images that are full of horrible JPG artifacts.
If these museum public servants are so scared of their shadows and must have every 'I' dotted and 'T' crossed before making documents available on-line, then a simple amendment of the Copyright Act would suffice. After all, even the most ardent copyright zealot would have a hard time criticizing such a non-controversial issue, especially one that was so clearly in the public interest.
Of course, the real issue lies elsewhere. If published on the Web, then most documents of this kind would be no longer under the control of the IWM/AWM etc., thus the curators' jobs etc. would come under scrutiny. Whilst there's some truth to this, there's still the need for expert war researchers and such at the IWM/AWM to put documents, images, maps and such into context/perspective. Again, the reasons for not doing so are essentially money-making, bloody-mindedness and that curators do not want to relinquish even a single iota of control over them. Even if funding were an issue (and there's some reason to believe that in the short term there is), it should not stop many of the iconic images (such as those of that great photographer Frank Hurley) from being placed on the Web:
http://www.greatwar.nl/hurley/hurley1.html
(The original negative plates of these images are of much higher resolution than shown here but they're not available as the museums won't release them.
Moreover, the best presentations of these photos on the Web ought to come from the IWM, AWM etc.—government museum sites that are officially charged with the responsibility—but they do not, not by a long shot! Even more surprising is that some of the best sites come from counties other than the UK, NZ, Canada, Australia etc.—countries where the museums are located. For instance, the link above points to Dutchman Rob Ruggenberg's truly wonderful site! One really has to question what goes on in these government museums when we see their paltry efforts compared to the excellent work of just one individual. Clearly, these museums are in desperate need of reform)
If I were you, I'd begin asking very awkward policy questions of the IWM etc. such as what would be the public availability of my images, and I'd be asking for a guarantee not to charge the public for access to them etc. I'd then publish my images on the Web and advise the IWM of the Web link together with the fact that I hold the copyright and that for now the IWM cannot use or even store the images as a direct consequence of their unacceptable access policies. Essentially, these bastards have to be put under pressure and the more people that do so the better.
Ultimately however, what we really want is for the problem to be fixed properly so that everyone can have access. But first it has to become a significant issue with us the public, thence with the pollies, for if these public service gnomes are told to solve the problem, they will.
Whether it's Bletchley Park's spat over the German cipher machine/Enigma or the IWM's hold on war photographs etc., the underlying problems ultimately stem from the same fundamental cause—inadequate legislation guaranteeing citizens reasonable access to their county's heritage.
Resolution begins with complains, hopefully, we're started here.
Having seen and had personal experience with the way museum trusts work on past occasions, I'm inclined to believe engineer Craig Sawyers' account of events at Bletchley Park. Museum and gallery trusts don't often have technical people or experts on them, rather they've lawyers and accountants who've little or any expertise of the subject matter/collections. Thus, these people often have a tangential view of the collections and it's invariably based on money—not on the history of collections or the way visitors interact with them.
We're now seeing new problems emerging with museums everywhere. Here's just one example of many: museums and galleries have historical photographs whose copyright ran out say a hundred years ago, yet these institutions have deliberately set out to renew copyright by scanning the photographs WHILST simultaneously stopping others from having access to copy them on the grounds that they might be damaged. Thus, the ONLY access to the photographs is via these new scans, which of course are copyrighted, and the museums charge like wounded bulls for access to them (that's if there's a scan available—often there's not).
Moreover, this has the effect of taking the images out of the public domain and placing them back in copyright (as available images (if they exist outside the museums) are usually old, faded, low-resolution copies in books etc. and thus unacceptable by modern standards. (By necessity you'll often seen such low quality images on Wiki, as the authors do not have access to the high resolution ones held by the museums/galleries—or that the high resolution ones cannot be posted as they're subject to copyright and the museums have withheld copyright permission to publish on Wiki).
Essentially, this quirk of copyright acts/Berne convention is allowed but it's an abuse--nothing but a scam which keeps the nation's treasures and cultural heritage under a form of perpetual copyright (and thus always under curators' control). Museums etc. also engage in similar forms of control over physical access to collections, thus the average citizen has no idea of what's held in repositories as the museums are not obliged to publish what they have or even provide access to them.
This is highly unsatisfactory in the modern internet age and the laws must be changed to allow everyone better access. Clearly, objects have to be properly protected from damage etc., but the excuse that museums have to charge for access to public-owned assets is also totally unsatisfactory.
Remember, state-owned museums and galleries almost universally used to be free on the grounds of education and the universal betterment of everyone—an Enlightenment concept—but now that idea has changed. As I see it, the State STILL has that responsibility as passed down from the Enlightenment, and we citizens need to demand our legislators STILL honour it.
——
BTW, I consider this a particularly irksome practice when war museums partake of it—the Imperial War Museum and the Australian War Memorial being two very blatant perpetrators. After all, their whole raison d'être is to ensure we—especially the younger generation—remember the fallen and the horrors of war, yet they're past masters at making access to their collections difficult and or expensive. If you don't believe me, then do an internet search and see if you can find any on-line high resolution images from these institutions and I'll bet you'll find absolutely nothing! Now compare this with the enlightened attitude of LOC's (Library of Congress), for example check its Civil War photographs (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/) and you'll find that (a) they're freely accessible and (b) the resolution of the scans has been taken to ultimate heights—almost to the Nyquist limit—most of these 150-year old images are available in TIF format with 7500px resolution and file sizes between 50/200MB. That's how it should be!
As for age...I'm 31.
Well you're one of a rare breed. It gives me hope there's still some of the younger generation who are prepared to carry the flag. I usually find those of your age who've such perception and passion have returned from Afghanistan etc. and/or have had mates killed there.
Again, I wrote another long reply which I was going to use here but I've self-censored and not posted it (and it had nothing to do with IT). Like you, I feel very strongly about such matters but I'm at a loss how one does anything about it these days other than to bitch online. One warming consolation however is the number of El Reg readers who essentially agree that NSA/GCHQ etc. surveillance stinks, even if they don't agree with Snowden's approach. Well, that's a good start I suppose.
After reading this I deleted my post, it wasn't off topic but it was off-thread, heated as it is.
I agree with just about everything you've said, especially that this argument is about authoritarianism versus liberalism, and those today who hardly care (or the sponges who just suck up the State's mantra without question).
I simply despair at the lack of interest average citizens have about their loss of freedoms, they're behaving as if most of the 20th C. never happened—they've seemed to have learned nothing from WWI, WWII, the Cold War etc. It's tragic really, Orwell must be spinning is his grave.
Trouble is that mealy-mouth pusillanimous attitude espoused by Titus Technophobe is effectively the prevailing zeitgeist. Despise it as we few may, sufficient numbers are not rioting in the streets or otherwise threatening the establishment to significantly change things; even the momentum has gone out of the issue as it's hardly made the popular news in recent days. From those I spoken to, my observations are that today there's a general resignation that nothing significant can be done about most government these days, thus it's easier to accept what's given.
You can see this attitude in Charles Manning's post, even my deleted reply suggested a subversive-workaround to surveillance rather than take the issue head on. Why? Well, democracy isn't working as it should and people have either given up or they're otherwise distracted.
It would be informative to know Titus Technophobe's age bracket, I'll bet he's not your age or even mine. If he were then his views would almost certainly be different. He simply hasn't live through the times such as Vietnam, Civil Rights, Kent State etc. which would make him wary of government. I'm a boomer and I lived through '68; in fact, I was a student and out on the streets with most of them back then. Whether we were right or wrong isn't the key issue, it's that we had sufficient commitment to make governments take notice and even act. Ever since that time many of us citizens have had a sense that we have never had as much power to change things as we did back then.
Over the years, I've visited many of those WWI and WWII battlefields and there's one thing it certainly teaches which is that there's many who fought and died for freedom and principles of what is right, it's something of which I've never lost sight. What is so depressing about today's attitude is how little commitment the average person has compared to those back then. "Lest we forget", "never again" and "eternal vigilance" weren't just catchphrases, they were embedded in our psyche.
...solar panels a good going over with a feather duster
Absolutely! Has anyone any idea how adhesive Martian dust is or the mechanism that binds it? Is it just hanging about on those panels, or statically attracted, or held by Van der Waals forces and or some other form of (chemical) bonding or reaction?
Well, you're wrong. Really, truly wrong!
--
WARNING-LONG! Multiple paragraphs of reasoned argument—unsuitable for the 140-chr$-twitterati and those who're bored with anything longer than two phrases.
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/11/07/ie11_for_windows_7_final/#c_2019479
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/2/2013/12/02/windows_8_point_x_market_share/#c_2045808
amateur, secure, ptp network for your own needs (FCC might have issues though).
Nice idea but....
What do you think all those spy satellites do? They just don't take pretty close-ups of newspaper headlines people are reading. Ever since the Cold War those satellites have been forensically scanning the spectrum from DC to Daylight. Encrypting your signal just means you go from a plain line item to one with a red tick next to it (hence my smoke signal comment).
BTW, this idea of sweeping and recording the spectrum is so old that it goes back to the mid/late '50s when the first Ampex VRX-1000 2" video recorders were modified and put in planes as wide band spectrum recorders (of course, before that--back to day-one of wireless--it was done manually).
Bad move. Cheques are being phased out over the next 4 years...
Did not know that.
Ahh, but not here in the great godforsaken southern land—not yet anyway! (It usually takes us about 5 or 10 years to catch up to the UK but inevitably we do (we're so predictable at it that if you guys copyrighted your business and government practices/rules, I'd reckon the UK could live off the royalties we'd have to pay you).) ;-)
It's not news that the banks don't like cheques; they have to get off their arses and physically exchange bits of paper, which is a pain compared to line items on a computer screen. Despite the fact that they've had to do it for hundreds of years, those opportunistic, customer-service-shy pariahs won't miss a tick. (Note: bills of exchange go back to at least Roman times.)
In that article Auntie Beeb makes the point that cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, it doesn't say what they are. So what happens when someone (a) doesn't have a mobile or POTS telephone, (b) has no internet connection and or (c) no credit card? Not having one of these three is usually a reasonable indicator that the person may not have the others. Whilst the numbers are small, in a country the size of the UK, this still amounts to many hundreds of thousands of people.
Also in the article there's a mention that the cheque's predecessor was the bill of exchange. In the paperwork sense, there's bugger-all difference between a bill of exchange and a cheque. For all sorts of reasons I cannot see how the banks can kill off everything from bills of exchange to money orders etc., etc., especially if they originate from outside the UK. That would essentially presuppose that cash was gone and that every place/country had a totally cashless banking system.
Funny isn't it, that the banks are prepared to phase out cheques before there's a secure system to replace it—i.e.: before there's a secure internet (a la this article/my post etc.)
Jolly Roger icon ==> Banks' logo!
you're going to bed with the NSA...
Frankly, I can't think of much worse.
Now, I know I'm renowned for long sentences; so I'm letting you off with a reasonable excuse. According to MS word, this sentence has 107 words (its grammar checker peters out after 68).
Shakespeare it certainly ain't, but that sentence is entirely consistent in its punctuation. There's a comma before operating system and the next matching comma is after NSA etc. Between them there's a pair of opening and closing [em] dashes followed by a pair of opening and closing brackets, both of which have consistent parsing. Thus, after parsing, MS is the subject of the phrases within the two commas.
I know that if I converted the sentence into a True/False truth table (something I was forced to learn years ago in formal logic) then I could formally prove this. However, I do not intend to so do. As truth tables are fine in say Boolean electronic logic circuits but a real PIA when applied to grammar for detailed reasons too complex explain here. (And for me, doing grammar truth tables is effectively penance and thus to be avoided.)
A consequence of doing formal logic is that I usually get the punctuation correct. 'Tis unfortunate however that study made little or no improvement to my writing style.
Thank you for winding me up, that's one of the great joys of El Reg.
P.S.: In future, I'll endeavour (but not promise) to keep my sentences fewer than the MS-imposed limit.
;-)
It's little wonder I've stopped all but the most difficult on-line transactions and gone back to cheques.
With the NSA, CGHQ etc spying, unscrupulous suppliers divulging my email address and other personal data and their irresponsible employees losing customer data including passwords (or losing disks or the briefcases containing them on public transport), operating system manufactures—Microsoft—making O/S code that requires neverending security patches (i.e. inherently as holey as a Swiss cheese) not to mention going to bed with the NSA etc., virus writers and exploit experts threatening to devastate my data, and governments that don't give a damn about privacy etc., etc., I'm beginning to think the internet is pretty useless except for perhaps a bit of wild-west entertainment or comic relief.
Yes, it was too good to last.
—
...the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one meter apart,..
Well, perhaps we should put Maxwell's demon down amongst the electrons to count 'em. ;-)
Seriously, that definition of the Ampere always seemed to be messy to me. Seems that if the standard ampere is changed then there'll have to be some tinkering with the Volt definition too as it is also defined in terms of the same parallel wires in free space as well as a more practical/measurable (and precise) standard--that's now defined by the Josephson junction (which is some 4 orders of magnitude better than the old Weston cell standard of 1.434 volts).
If it can be done then it makes sense to count electrons this way as it does to measure frequency from a Josephson junction for the Volt standard (frequency [time] being the most precise measurement standard we have devised so far). Hopefully, come the change, this would put Ampere standard on par with that of the Volt.
Except for the Ampere measurement, I'd reckon there'd be no change to the related maths (as with the Volt, the parallel wires defn. would also remain).
Nuh, of course not. What happens when everyone demands SHDTV (4K), 3840x2160 and then FUHD (8K) 7680x4320? (After all, the pwn industry has always led tech innovation on the net.)
And heaven help the spectrum when QUHD (16K), 15360x8640 takes root (no pun intended).
Perhaps the spectrum will blush with embarrassment and that'll be the end of the matter.
>:-)
Pascal Lamy, former chief of the World Trade Organisation and European commissioner
So what would he know about spectrum management? Silly me, I forgot spectrum management doesn't count anymore, that's why the bean-counters and accountants.
—
P.S.: There was a time (and I can remember it) when such a person would be an RF/Spectrum Management engineer.
Really, the Bible has something for everyone.
Perhaps so. But even if one leaves aside or disbelieves its content, the King James Bible of 1611 is a wonderful read. Anyone with even the vaguest interest in prose and literature has to be mightily impressed.
That the King James edition of the Bible was actually produced by a committee and turned out so well is, to my mind, even more remarkable. [Duh, perhaps the Divine intervened.] ;-)
[BTW, those modern Bible incarnations--'The Good News Bible' etc.--translations in modern prose/idiom (if you can call that translation at all) are made especially for Americans who don't or can't understand words such as 'thy' or 'thou', really are ugly and horrible. ...And, they really do read as trite fairy stories!
Well, perhaps it's understandable knowing the intended target audience.]
I've read the BBC article and it's consistent with the copyright 70 year rule, that being for the State of Bavaria to hold the copyright on the German version until April 2015 but this does not apply the English versions (and presumably other translations).
The US government took over the copyright in 1941 and thus the copyright would be subject to US law since then (how copyright currently manifests as a consequence of the government's 1979 sale of rights to Houghton Mifflin I'm not sure).
The New York (English) edition of 1939 published by Reynal & Hitchcock is supposedly now out of copyright (or it's being treated as such by publishers).
[One issue that's often overlooked with respect to translations is that the copyright of the translation is held by the translator and thus even if the original text is out of copyright, the translation will not be. It's this sort of problem and the added 'notes/commentary' nonsense that allows publishers such as Oxford to get away with copyrighting the King James Bible of 1611. 401 years old--not counting the original Greek, Aramaic, Arabic sources of over a millennium of so earlier--and the Bible is still in copyright. That's pretty damn rich, methinks.]
I also recommend Jewish author Noam Chomsky for anyone interested in the subject...
It's not hard to determine what side of the political divide I'm on when I say I've very considerable time for Noam Chomsky.
However, owning a number of texts written by him including Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions, I have to say that Chomsky's writing can almost be unfathomable--one needs considerable perseverance and determination to get the most out of them.
Thus, I'd only recommend raw unadulterated Chomsky to diehards such as me.
;-)
question that should arise is "WHY" an increasing amount of people become interested.
On my NAS disk I have ebook versions of Mein Kampf including the 1939 translation by James Murphy published by Hurst and Blackett and the 1941 New York edition published by Reynal & Hitchcock [both commonly available on the Web] along with hundreds of other diverse political and philosophical texts including that well known work of the opposite persuasion Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie.
Well, why would I bother reading Mein Kampf. It's pretty simple really: one has to if one is to make any serious attempt to understand one of the most cataclysmic and tragic events in human history—the Second World War and the death of over 60 million people!
Tragically, Adolph Hitler has turned out one of the most influential people in history; like it or not, along with Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Stalin, Mohammed, Jesus Christ and Buddha, his name won't be erased from history anytime soon, if ever. Nor will his influence disappear for the foreseeable future either; for better or worse, he has changed the whole political reality of the world today. Let's look at some of these influences:
I'll start with Hitler's influence on my own generation, the baby boomers. The horrible and unpalatable fact is that if it were not for Hitler/WWII that many of us boomers wouldn't have been born at all. Alternatively, as in my case, if it had not been for WWII then I'd perhaps be 4-5 years older (as my parents were married in the early 1940s and deliberately did not have kids until well after the War when my father was demobbed and the world had supposedly settled back to normality).
Hitler probably caused more mass migration than anyone else in history. The world has hugely changed because of mass migration and the movement of refugees across the planet which in a sense were 'legitimised' on a grand scale in the wake of WWII.
Hitler was essentially responsible for the formation United Nations. Roosevelt et al (26 countries) coined the term in 1942 when pledging to fight the Axis Powers (ringleader of which was Hitler).
The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the direct consequence of the Second World War. It was the first time in history that there was a global expression of the inherent rights of all individuals. In the intervening time, the UDHR has had a huge effect on world politics.
Hitler and WWII have hugely altered political reality worldwide. Compared to previous history, globalisation and the concomitant 'erosion of sovereignty' of individual nations have made galloping progress as a direct consequence of WWII. Simply, recent history has seen huge political changes arising from the outcomes of WWII, from commonality of laws across the world, treaties etc., through to equal rights for women and rights for minorities. Even things I find detestable, such as political correctness, postmodernism and political doublespeak are direct overreactions to Nazism, totalitarianism and the horrors of WWII, albeit understandable ones.
With all its horrible connotations and past baggage, I wouldn't want to be seen reading Mein Kampf on public transport—not through embarrassment but rather because I'd not have the opportunity to properly explain why I was so doing. Thus, reading the work in private makes sense, but not reading it through the probability of being 'tainted' or because of political correctness or some sense of collective guilt etc. does not. Moreover, the vast majority of modern-day readers have a much more sophisticated and nuanced worldview than those back in 1924 when Mein Kampf was written not to see through the hatred and what today seems like mad irrational logic.
[IMHO, the paramount concerns for today's curious readers ought to be to ask why Mein Kampf was written at all as well as why both Hitler and his 'cellmate' Stalin—humanity's archenemies of all time—were actually able to come to power at all let alone both around the same time. What seems mad and irrational to us today was considerably less so in 1924 in the aftermath of WWI—the war to end all wars but a war in which nothing was essentially resolved. Thus, with a very bitter hard-done-by Germany and the prevailing zeitgeist (WWI irresolution) it is not surprising that Hitler came to power.
Hitler was directly responsible for triggering WWII and thus attributable for its terrible devastation but the reasons that provoked him into action were monumental: failure of Versailles to resolve anything around WWI except to leave Germany holding the can when in fact it was only partly responsible. Others being the underlying causes of WWI including the bad behaviour of empires: British, Hapsburg, Romanoff and Prussian as well as the irresponsible behaviour of their inbred heads of state, especially Kaiser Wilhelm II (Gavrilo Princip assassinating Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand was only a sideshow). Probably the best background primer for readers of Mein Kampf is the British historian A.J.P. Taylor's 1961 controversial and very readable masterpiece, 'The Origins of the Second World War'.]
Well it's still less-worse than Russia and China. Cold comfort, I know.
Perhaps so, but by what measure or comparison? It could be argued that with such horrendous historical pasts, that in the circumstances, both Russia and China are doing very well [catching up].
On the other hand, once the preacher, crusader and moralist has been caught red-handed and exposed as a dishonest and fraudulent charlatan, then suspicion will always linger and surround his future motives.
No matter how sincere his repentance and atonement may be, his reputation will probably never fully recover, as good, right, honesty and what is correct are perceived as simple notions, thus inviolate.
Once lost, it's nigh on impossible to regain the moral high ground.
(And I don't ever expect to see the US regain it within my lifetime.)
Whether there's specific racism here or not is not the main point. Like it or not, it's an unfortunate fact that throughout history in times or heightened tension or of war, that a resident ethnic minority population etc. belonging to a country with whom one is against/at war etc. will be discriminated against as a matter of course. (It's such a common phenomenon that it seems as if it's human instinct and or herd/group nature etc.)
There are many instances of this. Perhaps the best known is the US Government's rounding up and incarceration of American citizens/residents of Japanese ethnicity who were living in the US during WWII. Most of these poor unfortunates--many of whom were born in the US, owned businesses there etc., had never been to Japan and didn't even speak Japanese--were locked away for the duration of the War just because they had some Japanese heritage.
No doubt a very tiny percentage had sympathies with the then horrible authoritarian Japanese regime. Some might have even been traitors, but the fact remained that the vast majority of these people were unjustly victimized.
This old well-rehearsed scenario is now being played out once again against those who've Islamic and Chinese backgrounds etc. As in the past, the vast majority of those who've come to the attention of the host state as a consequence of their ethnicity and who are now under suspicion and thus suffering unjust discrimination, are completely innocent.
Shame. I understand the Usenet problem, had that problem myself.
The classic method for reducing disturbances is (essentially) to put a box in a box.
Agreed, and although not spec'd, I'm sure IBM is aware of the problem. The box within the box is the correct soln., it's what I employed (a calorimeter within a calorimeter). Still, I found to achieve consistent drift below 0.1C required considerable attention to detail.
I'm against all the spying on regular folks, but if we're going to have this invasive spying on everyone, why not use it in cases like this?
Exactly! The NSA's spying on the innocent stinks. So the argument is pretty simple: why aren't governments concentrating their spying efforts on the real crooks--crooks who are directly screwing innocent victims? No one in the media has raised this issue which I find very surprising. It really ought to become a political issue ASAP.
Agreed, that's a problem. But at the moment credit cards far exceed bitcoin in user penetration, thus the income would be restricted by the extra resistance to overcome investing in bitcoin.
Ultimately, we don't know what ingenious systems governments will implement to stop money transfers between normal bank accounts and bitcoin, but from the press reports they're trying hard to devise schemes.
At the height of this so called screwing of WikiLeaks my state owned Dutch bank had no problem whatsoever handling my humble contibution to WikiLeaks.
Correct. Before the WikiLeaks payment problem, the issue for banks has always been that the international transfer payment system was sacrosanct (in that payments had to be paid irrespective of the recipient or issue). Well, that's what they wanted us to believe but the WikiLeaks exception has now set a precedent which would be pretty hard to back out of if governments forced the issue.
All it requires is for just one government to issue an edict which would force the issue. In the current climate of bank-hating and NSA-bashing considerable pressure could be brought to bear to make the money path transparent.
I appreciate there's a lot at stake here. For instance, many states have outlawed on-line gambling within their own boarders but they've been unable to stop gamblers losing money to international syndicates. For the same reasons, if these states stopped banks transferring gambler's funds by making it unlawful the problem would be solved. Before the WikiLeaks precedent banks said it was not possible to block funds, now we know this is just B.S.
Judging from the way things are going here on Earth we may need some of those hydrocarbons to keep life sweet for future human generations.
From all the ballyhooing and whingeing from Greenies and the Climate mob, I'd gotten the impression earth should be exporting Element 6, not importing it.
Perhaps I've been reading the wrong newspapers.
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