Does anyone seriously believe that this nuclear waste will still be around in 10'000 years? Or even 1'000 years? It wouldn't even surprise me if that problem is gone already in 100 years or even less. If you look at the development of science in the past 100 years, I am really very confident that in 100 years, we will have tons of fancy uses for that nuclear waste; and if we don't, we'll have tons of fancy ways to make it harmless or to get rid of it.
It's also a mistake to believe that any human can make any useful thoughts about the future civilisation of in 10'000 years. Don't bother trying, you're not that smart, sorry. The future is more than capable of handling this.
Heh, you're laughing, but there are situations where a few hours of compiling are can be worth a quite small increase in runtime performance. And that's not only for when that gain is more than the time spent compiling, which might only happens when your program has to run for a loooooong time. Imagine a server that gets heavy traffic during the day and is idle during night. Spending 30 nights compiling the server software with a slightly better compiler or better compiler options is no loss, because the server would otherwise be idle anyway. But the performance gain can be noticable during the day and that's an improvement even if the cumulative time saved in execution will never grow larger than the cumulative time spent compiling.
Anyway, people like making fun of gentoo users trying to get maximum speed, which is totally fine. But speed has never been a reason why I use gentoo. It can't be, because I don't see it being any faster than other systems, in fact, I think some parts of it are slower than other distros (emerge --sync takes a long time, portage tree is stored inefficiently, resolving dependencies takes ages). For me, gentoo is about flexibility and configurability.
What disturbs me a bit is that one of the blogs doesn't mention the word 'linux' even once, while the other mentions it in almost every entry: "Hans Reiser -- the popular Linux programmer who is accused of killing [...]", "The trial of the Linux programmer, who is accused of killing his estranged wife", "Hans Reiser, the Linux developer accused of murdering his wife", "the 31-year-old estranged wife of the Linux programmer who authorities say murdered her"...
Of course, his work on the linux kernel might be what he's most known for and if you don't know him, then mentioning that is the right thing to do. But mentioning it so often creates an odd and disturbing link between 'murder' and 'linux'. Especially since as far as I know, his work on linux plays absolutely no role in the murder case.
A friend once put such a disk in his MacBook and then called me after he couldn't get it out. I tried several things, including opening the Mac, with no luck. After some searching I found a solution on the net: Reboot the MacBook holding it upside down... the disk properly ejected right on booting. I don't know why and I don't know if it's reproducable, as I didn't want to try to put it in again.
(btw, reading the disc while it was in worked fine.)
I wrote such a small program myself recently; it pings a server at regular intervals which then records the IP and some additional info into a database. It runs on linux or as a service on windows. It's only about 700+ lines of code and pretty simple. The commercial services that do this probably have much better software which is hard to remove, or even better, they use some hardware device to achieve this.
But the real problem is recovering the laptop after it's been stolen. If you use the commercial services, then those people will take care of that and will contact the ISP and the law enforcement, etc. What would interest me much more is: What can I do to recover my laptop if it gets stolen and I'm not using any of those services, but my tracker got me an IP? Is there any chance an ISP will listen to me if I claim one of their costumers is a thief? Would the police listen? How should I go about doing all that?
I always feel like I'm the only one that thinks this way, but I'm mostly happy with FF without any extensions. (And my past experiences have shown that this is the stablest combination to have.)
Hard to learn but worth it
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 5, Insightful
vi was a horror when I started using UNIX systems and I couldn't understand why anyone would want to use such a strange editor. So I went with emacs and was happy. But after a while (dunno how this happened) I went back to vi(m) and invested the necessary time to learn it. I took me about a year before I could say that I'm able to use it efficiently, so the learning curve is pretty heavy. But at the end I don't regret it at all, because I feel a lot more efficient with vi(m) than with any other editor. I couldn't live without it now.
I have been monitoring my system's loadavg using speaker beeps for many years. I wrote a small music player that uses a simple melody syntax and that emits sounds via the system speaker. If the loadavg changes significantly, it can emit different kind of beep sequences, so that I get notified about what's going on even when I'm not at my computer (but near it of course).
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone seriously believe that this nuclear waste will still be around in 10'000 years? Or even 1'000 years? It wouldn't even surprise me if that problem is gone already in 100 years or even less. If you look at the development of science in the past 100 years, I am really very confident that in 100 years, we will have tons of fancy uses for that nuclear waste; and if we don't, we'll have tons of fancy ways to make it harmless or to get rid of it. It's also a mistake to believe that any human can make any useful thoughts about the future civilisation of in 10'000 years. Don't bother trying, you're not that smart, sorry. The future is more than capable of handling this.
While true, the Qt logo understandably makes people think otherwise.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1819239
> Now we may have a moon of Saturn that is a miniature version of its even more elaborately decorated parent.
Cool, fractal astronomy! Does the moon's ring have rings itself?
Heh, you're laughing, but there are situations where a few hours of compiling are can be worth a quite small increase in runtime performance. And that's not only for when that gain is more than the time spent compiling, which might only happens when your program has to run for a loooooong time. Imagine a server that gets heavy traffic during the day and is idle during night. Spending 30 nights compiling the server software with a slightly better compiler or better compiler options is no loss, because the server would otherwise be idle anyway. But the performance gain can be noticable during the day and that's an improvement even if the cumulative time saved in execution will never grow larger than the cumulative time spent compiling.
Anyway, people like making fun of gentoo users trying to get maximum speed, which is totally fine. But speed has never been a reason why I use gentoo. It can't be, because I don't see it being any faster than other systems, in fact, I think some parts of it are slower than other distros (emerge --sync takes a long time, portage tree is stored inefficiently, resolving dependencies takes ages). For me, gentoo is about flexibility and configurability.
What disturbs me a bit is that one of the blogs doesn't mention the word 'linux' even once, while the other mentions it in almost every entry: "Hans Reiser -- the popular Linux programmer who is accused of killing [...]", "The trial of the Linux programmer, who is accused of killing his estranged wife", "Hans Reiser, the Linux developer accused of murdering his wife", "the 31-year-old estranged wife of the Linux programmer who authorities say murdered her"...
Of course, his work on the linux kernel might be what he's most known for and if you don't know him, then mentioning that is the right thing to do. But mentioning it so often creates an odd and disturbing link between 'murder' and 'linux'. Especially since as far as I know, his work on linux plays absolutely no role in the murder case.
A friend once put such a disk in his MacBook and then called me after he couldn't get it out. I tried several things, including opening the Mac, with no luck. After some searching I found a solution on the net: Reboot the MacBook holding it upside down... the disk properly ejected right on booting. I don't know why and I don't know if it's reproducable, as I didn't want to try to put it in again. (btw, reading the disc while it was in worked fine.)
I wrote such a small program myself recently; it pings a server at regular intervals which then records the IP and some additional info into a database. It runs on linux or as a service on windows. It's only about 700+ lines of code and pretty simple. The commercial services that do this probably have much better software which is hard to remove, or even better, they use some hardware device to achieve this.
But the real problem is recovering the laptop after it's been stolen. If you use the commercial services, then those people will take care of that and will contact the ISP and the law enforcement, etc. What would interest me much more is: What can I do to recover my laptop if it gets stolen and I'm not using any of those services, but my tracker got me an IP? Is there any chance an ISP will listen to me if I claim one of their costumers is a thief? Would the police listen? How should I go about doing all that?
I always feel like I'm the only one that thinks this way, but I'm mostly happy with FF without any extensions. (And my past experiences have shown that this is the stablest combination to have.)
vi was a horror when I started using UNIX systems and I couldn't understand why anyone would want to use such a strange editor. So I went with emacs and was happy. But after a while (dunno how this happened) I went back to vi(m) and invested the necessary time to learn it. I took me about a year before I could say that I'm able to use it efficiently, so the learning curve is pretty heavy. But at the end I don't regret it at all, because I feel a lot more efficient with vi(m) than with any other editor. I couldn't live without it now.
Good tools are hard to master.
I have been monitoring my system's loadavg using speaker beeps for many years. I wrote a small music player that uses a simple melody syntax and that emits sounds via the system speaker. If the loadavg changes significantly, it can emit different kind of beep sequences, so that I get notified about what's going on even when I'm not at my computer (but near it of course).