07:56 – EU officials announced yesterday that they would make Britain suffer for vetoing their planned power grab. “Nice little financial services sector you have there. Be a shame to see anything happen to it…” Meanwhile, the markets are treating the results of that failed summit last week with the contempt they deserve, and the ratings agencies have said outright that nothing significant was decided at that summit, so they plan to go on with their review and likely ratings downgrades. And yields on Italian and Spanish bonds have again climbed into the unsustainable range after only a couple days in the sub-6% range. Merkozy must be getting very frustrated that nothing they do fools the market into doing what they want it to do.
Work continues on the biology book, and stuff for the kits is starting to arrive. I now have a good supply of carrot seeds for one lab session and of lima bean seeds and rhizobium innoculum for another, probably enough of each for 100 to 200 kits. That was the last of what I needed for the biology kits. Once I finish writing the book, I’ll put together the first batch of biology kits, probably only a dozen or two to start. That’ll let me work out packaging, subassemblies, assembly order, and so on. Then I’ll go to work on the forensics kit and manual.
11:28 – Now here’s an interesting site. It’s currently tracking about 53 million users, 113,000+ torrents, and about 2 million files totaling more than 106 TB. Alas, when I visited the site, the only thing it could tell me about my own torrent usage was: “Hi. We have no records on you.”
I love hearing the little tidbits about your upcoming biology lab book. He have been working through your chemistry kit and are definitely looking forward to your biology book and kit when they are complete.
I’m intrigued by the upcoming forensics kit. Don’t get me wrong, when the time is right, I’ll be going through the chemistry and biology kits with my daughter. But I’m inclined to get a forensics kit for me when it becomes available, and then either replenish the supplies in the kit for my daughter or buy a new kit when the time comes.
I won’t be getting the kits anytime soon, because while my daughter is quite inquisitive, her idea of inquisitive is look, touch and taste.
Here is something that might be interesting to some folks here. I have been using 5400rpm hard drives for a decade, because laptops have been my complete replacement for desktops during that length of time. I have never felt that my 2+ghz laptops with 5400 drives were anything less than essentially instantaneous — and I do a lot of audio and video work with that format. (My recent problems with Firefox locking up the system, are — I believe — due to the fact that newer versions of Firefox now assume you have much more than 2gb of RAM, and I don’t.)
The radio station at Tufts Uni has 2x 18tb servers for audio storage. They have been using 5400 RPM Hitachi Deskstar drives in a RAID6 software array on Ubuntu 11.10, which they say delivers “great performance, life, and power usage”.
They based their choice on info from this company in San Mateo
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
The Hitachi 5400 Deskstar drives are touted there as superior to all others in terms of reliability and longevity.
One problem says Tufts: the 3tb drives they purchased for US$110 6 months ago, are now $210, due to the floods in Thailand shutting down HD manufacturing plants. Hopefully that won’t last.
Intel, where one of my brothers works, down in MA, has been making noises about rising costs, missing shipments, etc, due to those floods.
Interesting info, Chuck, on the 11.10 Ubuntu, which I have on two of my machines here, and which IBM is expressing deep interest in right now, although where I am here in VT is almost all RH servers. More interesting nooz is that somebody, I forget who, now has 4TB desktop drives.
Chuck wrote a few days ago:
“One of the first things I was told when we arrived in Germany, was that no one over about 40 years of age, should ever use the word “geil”, which basically means “sexy”. Older people who use that word are immediately considered low-class, low-moraled, dirty old men and women. I have not been able to think of any English equivalent of words that are acceptable for young people to use, but completely inappropriate for older people to say.”
Do people who do use that word use it about themselves or others?
Well, since it is used only by young people, and I was generally around people more my own age, rather than those who were younger, — I really don’t know. I do know that big box store Saturn (similar to Best Buy in America) used “geil” in their ads. It was part of their slogan.
Hmm. I see they have changed their slogan. It used to be something like “Saturn: Geiz ist geil” (penny-pinching is sexy). Now it seems to be “Saturn: Soo! Muss Technik”.
I should point out that aside from meaning sexy or cool, “geil” can also mean horny, lewd, or lecherous. One advantage of having so many words in English, is we do not have many words that mean several different things, as German does.
Working late on a video project that is due on Friday. My recording session for Wednesday was cancelled, so I do not have to get up early, but I am fading out, anyway.