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Grosse Pointe Quickies
Nostradumbass told us about HandHeldCrime. This is cool for people that like to read on their Palm.
jleader shared a link to a revolutionary new airplane design
being built at the Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles.
As if you couldn't tell from his name, linuxsucks_dot_com thinks that Linux Sucks! Use it as a tool, not as flamebait.
SEWilco told us about a little cyber kid-leashing, and while you?re making sure the kids are where they need to be,
kawlyn told us about the x86 Still.
Beinoni shared a link to some interesting nonlinear emergent phenomena.
An Anonymous Coward sent in a link to an interesting Scientific American story about anti-aging.
dolanh sent in a cool question: What was your first computer? Okay, you caught me. My first real computer of note was an Apple //c. Still have the monitor.
Zeitgeist gave us a link to a tool for the paranoid, Mindguard.
Interesting site. I haven't thought about it to the depth he obviously has, but I do something similar when I'm driving (even short distances). Try to keep a constant pace and put on your brakes only if you MUST (and do it as late as possible). One effect he left out was the psychological one of seeing brake lights ahead of you. When people see brake lights, they put on their brakes (often causing the stop waves). So if you don't use your brakes unless you absolutely must, the people behind you are less likely to, leading to fewer traffic waves.
As soon as he mentioned his hypothetical friends helping him out, I thought of the state trooper idea that he mentions two paragraphs later. But I may have a twist on that: Don't get a "rolling barrier" of cops, just put one or two a few miles out from the slowdown/jam. Have them drive 5 miles below the speed limit. Everyone else will slow down to keep from passing the cop and the effect will be achieved. Experiments will be necessary to determine real distances and speeds for specific cases, of course.
Another idea is to have continuously updated speed limit signs. When there is a jam ahead, the previous 5 miles of signs can say "65 MPH" instead of "70 MPH".
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Hey, about that anti aging article... I recently e-mailed the about.com biology guide on this, and she responded with this extremely interesting response:
h tm
/Mattias
"Hello Mattias,
Death is a part of life. In fact one of the characteristics of living things is that all living things die. Sleep would not prevent death from occurring.
As scientists find out more and more about the body, they have discovered that our cells are genetically programmed to die. Cells have structures called telomeres that shorten as the cell ages.
Studies have been performed to see if researchers can prevent the telomeres from shortening and thus prolong the cell's life. See:
The Real Fountain of Youth http://biology.about.com/library/weekly/aa012298.
-- Regina"
The quickies seem the best place for something like this. =)
SMARTY MAN GAEM DESIGNEAR "SURVIROR"
(be sure not to miss John Carmack's profile!)
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
[BTW, Driver Psychology is a useful link for those who are interested in the other major component of traffic -- or simply have a friend they want to keep from killing themselves on the highway]
I used to take my friends to a cabin in Laconia, NH for Thanksgiving each year. One year, (early 80's) we brought several (Apple II) computers with us and attacked this problem, coding and discussing it as we conducted our usual festivities. The joke was that we'd win a Nobel Prize (The Peace Prize, we decided) and the undying gratitude of the Billions in the Next Millenium.
Alas, coding/modifying the digital automata took most of our time , and none of us had more than a couple of years driving experience. (Yikes, I can't believe it even ran in something like real time on a 64K machine with 191K floppies (this was before hard drives for personal computers) running on a 8/16 bit CPU at a true speed of 1/2 MHz) We never made our breakthrough -- and the hangovers on the last day of that trip made several of us repress the memory of the entire weekend.
Well, here we are, hard upon the next millenium, and I was wondering what software is out there that could implement a digital automata traffic simulator. We had notebooks full of elaborate scenarios - traffic light synchronization, types of accidents, ambulances, cars going in/out os various types of commercial parking lot entryways, etc. It was a low-res SimCity of traffic. -- much more fascinating than it sounds. (And hey, if a million late night hackers can't solve traffic, then we should go back to the single wheel and start over)
Can anyone suggest a program - perhaps Object Oriented - that would let me repeat and expand on my original experiments? I *still* drive differently because of what I learned (At last! Driver's Ed that means something!)
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Okay, this is pretty funny.
First off, Let me start off by saying that I'm a Win2K user. I used to run NT 4.0, but replaced it with an errant install of Redhat 6.2 (see some of my previous postings for that). So, I more or less tried to use Redhat 6.2 for about a month.
Now, why am I back to Win"blows"?
Simple:
1) The applications I use are here today, not tomorrow, not next year. I got tired of trying out really beta software for Linux for the stuff I use, and the stuff that wasn't beta was very unpolished, very cluttered, very unfocused. Think GNUCash vs. Quicken or even Money and you'll see what I mean.
2) X is slow and crappy and unresponsive. I run a dual CPU system and it annoys the hell out of me. X likes to crash, taking my whole system with it, usually. It just sucks balls. I stated before that the client-server architecture inherent in X is NOT NEEDED for typical home/end users. BeOS does the GUI right. You want to beat the GUI experience that Win2K gives? Ditch X and come up with something new.
3) I've not *touched* my registry since installing Win2k. I had to "touch" all kinds of config files weekly under Linux, just to install stuff.
4) Who cares about freedom to do with the software? Can't you see that RMS wants you to be paid MINIMUM WAGE for your work? How dare you code for money! nono, that was a rant, sorry. Rather, most users don't give a rat's ass about GPL or whatever. They want to install a software package and then use it. They don't want to have to search freshmeat.net for some obscure graphics lib or a specific version or whatever. Win2K at least halfway has this right. how many updates have I done to Win2K? Two or Three, the security update patch, couple drivers. And they installed *smoothly* with a double click. Every week I was scouring for the latest glibc or whatever to get whatever to work. Too much of a hassle.
4. Linux just felt too beta to do anything that I would want to do. The feel is not right on the OS. I don't care how smooth the architecture is or how stable it is (to an extent). Think of it this way: My Ti Graphing Calculator I had for engineering never crashed on me, but you don't hear me extolling it's stability virtues. Win2K didn't crash on me until I installed EverCrack.
5. i won't go into the games rant, because games are not important to me.
Does Linux suck? Hell fuck no. I've got two linux machines in my living room routing mail, etc. They are *great* for that. But for everyday using, Win2K provides me with the best experience, freedom be damned. BeOS has a better "experience" than linux, and I'd really like to see it take off. Will I ever use Linux as my everday OS again? If they can fix X so it doesn't run so slow and get some real apps that don't require 3 hours of searching to find that obscure library (hey, freedom has its price), then maybe. Until then, I'm sticking with something I know and somewhat trust. Fuck, guys, it's just a goddamned OS. Go outside and see the real world every once and awhile.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It has a lot of well reasoned, well documented complaints about the suckage of various Unix flavors. It is mostly pre-Linux, (and Linux and friends have fixed a lot of the problems) but many of their complaints are applicable.
Top Unix problems, IMHO:
But hey. For a lot of things, Unix is great! I run my home server with Mandrake 7.1, but my workstation usually runs Windows 2000. At work I use FreeBSD, and my firewall is OpenBSD.
And, free software is slowly but surely fixing most of those problems. Just don't forget: it isn't there yet. For some people, and some things, Linux still sucks.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
...but I have nothign to say about that.
/. crew for not giving this the big, bold, badass headline that it deserves. this is probably one of the most important things that you will ever read on /., and it's somethign that every human over 16 in the US sould be forced to read.
Instead, I thought I'd comment on the nonlinear emergent whatevers - if you did not take the time to read that because it looked like some wierd math thing you couldnt understand, I urge you to read it. In fact, shame on the
I suffered through weeks of drivers education classes and learned nothing. if driver's education taught you NOTHING other than the contents of this link, america would be reshaped permanently, forever.
Go read the link. now. seriously. do it.
99% of traffic problems in this country can be SOLVED by following one simple rule - LEAVE SOME FUCKING ROOM BETWEEN YOU AND THE GUY IN FRONT OF YOU. enough room for some jackass to jump in between without you getting all hot an bothered about it. traffic sucks in this country for the simple fact that people ride each others' asses everywhere they drive. well, that and retards driving slow in the fastlane, but tailgating is a far more terrible problem.
go read this link. learn to drive like this. spread the word; spread this link. let's use the slashdoteffect for the powers of good just once, mmkay?
I ran across this idea over 30 years ago. Some guys at IBM were working on simulating traffic flow thru city streets and came to the conclusion that the best description of the available data had the same mathematical form as that of fluid flow in pipes. From that key observation, many interesting analogies followed directly: standing waves, shock waves, the congestion resulting from an abrupt narrowing (lane closure or step down to a smaller diameter pipe), etc.
Fascinating to contemplate how often a new discovery could be found by going back and looking at some of those outdated materials in the dusty old dead tree libraries!
A couple of years back there was a flurry of excitement about a couple of high-school kids who used some math software to come up with a "new" geometric construction for dividing a line into an arbitrary number of equal divisions. Their teacher had them present a paper at a math teaching conference, and they were even written up in the Wall St. Journal. Meanwhile, I found exactly the same bit of geometry in an old book on typography and book design, and a newer one (but older than their "discovery") on Fontographer. Seems this same construction had simply been a well-known tool in the printing and book layout field even though the math teachers had forgotten it.
All of this raises the question... In our rush to assume that anything not on line (and easily found by a search engine) is no longer relevant, how much real information are we in danger of losing? (And the problem itself isn't new -- remember the Venetian stained glass that nobody knows how to make any more?)
Yes, that would be nice. Now that MySQL is GPL, it would be possible to do something like the Windows Registry, but properly.
/usr/local/etc/apache/apache.conf. But under Linux it's... um... /usr/etc/apache.conf. Or is it? Damn! time to run find again...
I like text config files too... sometimes... but it can be so damn confusing finding the file you need. Especially when you go back and forth between several flavors of Unix. On FreeBSD, the Apache config file is... um... I think
And where was that php3.ini again? ARRRGH!
Unfortunately, it's too late to change things. Although it would be possible to make a distribution of Linux with all the settings and configurations stored in a nice MySQL database, with a nice text mode tool for editing it (or just run mysql -u root -p config if you are the command-line type...)
it's too late. It would be incompatible with all the other stuff out there, and as soon as Apache, or PHP, or Bind, or ifconfig, or ANYTHING was revised, you would be in a race to keep up.
No, Unix is stuck with a zillion text mode files, all with incompatible syntax, different naming conventions, and poor documentation.
The only glimmer of light is the File System Standard. Maybe, eventually, all the Free Unixes of the world will agree on it, and at least I will know WHERE to find the file I want.
(not that NT is always an improvement... who can remember where the hosts file lives on an NT system? Somewhere under \system32\drivers, I think?)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox