I agree with much of what you are saying, but have to respond to point 1.
Suppose you have a young daughter. Suppose that daughter likes Barbi dolls. Suppose that daughter then googles for barbi (or even worse, mispells and searches for barbii). Count how many age appropriate sites you'll find on the first page of a google search for barbi.
It is trivial for children to stumble on to porn.
It is the responsibility of parents to educate their children about this, and teach them to just move on.
I live in Canada and up until recently, I didn't have to speak loud to be heard. A softer than normal conversation voice was fine. Then my wife accidentally ran my cell phone through the washing machine after borrowing mine and forgetting it in her pocket. She now has her own phone. And I have a very clean Motorola phone that requires me to talk a bit above normal conversational volume.
I feel compelled to give a plug for Motorola at this point, given that the phone(a T720) came through a complete wash cycle undamaged (except for the battery). And no, it wsn't protected by the pocket. When we found it, it was free amongst the clothes.
I disagree. Think of the crappy quality consumers are prepared to put up with in computer software. I think that as things become more complicated (along with people being trained to expect the occaisional glitch in "computer" stuff). the average consumer will just accept it the same way they accept "Windows Update" (I'm not bashing Window's here (OK maybe I am), but the fact that people have been brainwashed to accept the sad state of the art)
Perhaps that fact people who are not technologically literate are willing to accept this is because they are afraid of revealing their illiteracy by complaining about something. Maybe all those flashing 12:00s are because someone doesn't want to ask their neighbour to fix it and therby show their own ignorance.
Exactly how do you get unplanned road work? Are there gangs of workers driving around who suddenly stop and decide to do some work on the road? "Oh look Bill, here's a nice patch of road! Let's put up a couple roadblocks and dig a hole."
At first I was going to dismiss your comment by saying that you can't change the license to non-GPL, and SCO has broken the GPL and thus could not distribute a GPLd piece of code.
Upon reflection, I think they may only be violating the GPL license of the kernel. If this is so, then you are correct. Until they violate the GPL license of dhowells-map, it could be distributed by them.
The more I think about this, the more complex I see the licensing issues of a typical Linux distribution are. There are probably hundreds(thousands?) of different copyright holders on those distribution's disks. Breaking the license of any one, would not break the license of all the others. A nasty company could pick their battles and only violate the licenses of a few pieces of the distribution where they feel they can get away with it.
I wonder if a clause could/should be added to the GPL stating that violating a clause of the GPL of any licensor, violates the GPL of all GPL'd code? So if you broke the license for any one piece, the whole pie would be taken away.
Yes, that is correct. Coming from a UNIX admin background, I could trivially find my way around a Slackware distribution. I assumed all Linux distributions were that simple. Then I installed Red Hat and was totally lost. I couldn't do anything without trying to find the right GUI tool to do it, trying to figure out how to use the GUI tool and then finding that the GUI tool was not capable enough for what I needed to do (this was in 96, things might be better now). Back to Slackware. Recently I tried Mandrake. Slick install, but again, I find myself doing a lot of "find... grep.. {} \; -print" mantras to figure out where things are set up.
The base problem is that the other distributions have to move stuff around to make GUI tools reasonably usefull, but for some tools, that means you are forced to use the GUI at all times.
A small piece of fact to add to this. The use or radar detectors in Canada is governed by Provincial legislation. In Alberta, for example, it is perfectly legal to use a radar detector, while it is illegal to use one in Ontario.
Comparing the POS calculator that comes with the Palm to an HP48 or better shows that you have never used such a calculator (or used it when you didn't need to). There are some pretty good software calculators you can get for the Palm, but none compare to a dedicated calculator when you really need that kind of power.
As others have said, here are the wins for a dedicated high-power calculator.
A Palm calculator has to share it's screen real estate between calculation and buttons (or the buttons are buried in deep nestings of menues). Thus you see more of your calculation on a dedicated calculator.
You can touch-type a dedicated calculator. Hitting soft-buttons on a Palm without looking is not very accurate.
Percieved features of a Palm.
You can save your work. Actually my HP48 saved all my work between uses, so no advantage.
One less thing to carry. True, and is sometimes a really usefull fact.
In the end, I've paid for a pretty good RPN calculator for my Palm, and I probably use it more often than I do my trusty old HP48, but when I need to do something complicated, out comes my HP.
Thanks for the info! I didn't realize that iTunes uses Quicktime. I did see the Ogg plugin for Quicktime, just didn't understand that it was what I was looking for.
I haven't paid attention to the bit rates of the MP3s I've heard, but I can physically tell when I'm listening to a low bit-raite encoding. My ears begin to hurt. I think it is because I'm straining to hear the high-end harmonics. I've been a pipe-organist for a long time and my ears have been trained to hear the full harmonic spectrum.
It also doesn't seem like a great feat to tell a B from a C. I'd say any musician who's been playing for any length of time can do it. The trick is telling if a C is slightly off when heard in isolation to other notes/instruments.
Not sure about the logic of why you are behind in broadband. Canada has the same local service plan style system and yet is 3rd in the world in terms of broadband deployment, behind Japan and I forget which European country. The best argument I've heard for why the US is behind in broadband is the infrastructure cost because the US population is spread out compared to Japan (or even Canada, given that the bulk of the population is in a relatively narrow strip along the south of Canada)
I do agree that the growth of internet usage was strongly helped by the "free" calling to the ISP as compared to internet popularity in Europe.
I just need to add a disclaimer that after reading more of the content on the link I provided above (to bel.150m.com), I'm not convinced of the reliability of that website. Interesting reading, but doesn't seem authoritative.
That's what I get for linking to something too quickly.
Yes, give an electron more energy and it jumps to a higher state, then, when the electron drops back to its original state it will release a photon. What's your point. We aren't talking about electrons flying away from the nucleus, but crashing into it.
Taking a snapshot in time of the atom, I can accept the idea that the kinetic energy equals the electrostitic potential and the electrons orbit. But doesn't entropy imply that this orbit must decay? I'm not sure where the kinetic energy would go, but it seems intuitive that an electron can't keep the same kinetic energy forever.
That's where viewing the electrons orbit as a probability distributions rather than a Newtonian orbit makes sense. The fact that the ground state of a hydrogen atom has spherical symmetry also argues against a Netwonian orbit.
Of course I've been away from physics for 10 years and could just be talking bullshit.
Just to whore some more Karma (and to show how little work I'm doing), here is another interesting quote
Many of us may have learnt about Bohr's atom model, with electrons orbiting around a central nucleus. Actually, this model has already been abandoned by conventional physics, which is a step in the right direction. In the current understanding of the atom, an orbital is not something like the orbit of a planet around the sun. It is a probability distribution in space. And, the electron cannot be said to be really "moving around", an orbital is a stucture of energy that has a shape.
There is a very good example for this. The ground state of a hydrogen atom is actually spherically symmetrical, and therefore it has zero total angular momentum. Which, if we try to interpret in classical terms, means that the electron only ever moves radially, in and out towards the nucleus but yet it covers the whole angular range. So in fact it defies "steel ball" or "classical" (incl. Bohr's) interpretations. So how could an electron ever produce an orbital path without orbiting around? The only way to visualise how this could be possible is to imagine a spherical balloon being periodically inflated and deflated. All these statements will sound strange to us until we get free from our 'hard particle' paradigm.
My glib answer was because they are orbiting, but then why doesn't the orbit decay?
So I did some Googleing. Here they say "The real reason electrons don't fall into the nucleus is that they are not electrically-charged bodies orbiting the nucleus but are electric charges that come from the nucleus, negative electric charges that have a small mass but are not actually matter. They spread out in various directions from the nucleus, forming the regular patterns that underly the crystal structure of all large-scale matter."
I don't know if I buy that, but maybe.
Doing more googleing, I see references to charge clouds and standing waves and..., so my best guess is that we're all still guessing.
I often ask the store employees for help at Best Buy. I don't do this for info, I do it for entertainment. Baiting those poor sales buddies is great fun!
You are right, they are not resolving MX records. However, many MTAs will try the A record if it can't find an MX record, so email is affected.
It breaks incorrectly configured email servers. If an MTA was configured to try multiple email servers, and the first one didn't exist, then in the old world, the second email server would be tried and the mail would probably get through. In the new world, the email will bounce because the second server is never tried. True, this only happens for misconfigured servers, but it is still a problem.
Another thing that will have broken are all the link-checker tools out there. If your website had a link to a domain that was no longer there, in the old world, the link checker would find the problem. In the new world, all URLs to non-existent domains are resolved, and the link checker will not find the problem.
There are other issues that the IAB pointed out in their report, but I don't recall then now.
That would be sweet! Many services could easily be started asynchronously. Now you've got me thinking (damn you)
I suppose that the old style init (that Slackware still uses), could be parallelized by starting each script as a background process. I don't know about the newer style init though.
True, in general I don't have X installed on a server, hence my parenthetical comment about not starting X at all. I do have one box that serves content and has X, but that was because the box got retasked after installation and I didn't get a chance to re-install/remove X.
Please suggest some search engines whose results are as generally relevant as Google's. I'm not saying those search engines don't exist, I'm just saying I don't know of any.
The primary place Google falls down is searching for reviews of a product. Too many links are to sellers of the product. But, in general, I haven't found a search engine with better top 5 results for all query types than Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with much of what you are saying, but have to respond to point 1.
Suppose you have a young daughter. Suppose that daughter likes Barbi dolls. Suppose that daughter then googles for barbi (or even worse, mispells and searches for barbii). Count how many age appropriate sites you'll find on the first page of a google search for barbi.
It is trivial for children to stumble on to porn.
It is the responsibility of parents to educate their children about this, and teach them to just move on.
I live in Canada and up until recently, I didn't have to speak loud to be heard. A softer than normal conversation voice was fine. Then my wife accidentally ran my cell phone through the washing machine after borrowing mine and forgetting it in her pocket. She now has her own phone. And I have a very clean Motorola phone that requires me to talk a bit above normal conversational volume.
I feel compelled to give a plug for Motorola at this point, given that the phone(a T720) came through a complete wash cycle undamaged (except for the battery). And no, it wsn't protected by the pocket. When we found it, it was free amongst the clothes.
I disagree. Think of the crappy quality consumers are prepared to put up with in computer software. I think that as things become more complicated (along with people being trained to expect the occaisional glitch in "computer" stuff). the average consumer will just accept it the same way they accept "Windows Update" (I'm not bashing Window's here (OK maybe I am), but the fact that people have been brainwashed to accept the sad state of the art)
Perhaps that fact people who are not technologically literate are willing to accept this is because they are afraid of revealing their illiteracy by complaining about something. Maybe all those flashing 12:00s are because someone doesn't want to ask their neighbour to fix it and therby show their own ignorance.
Exactly how do you get unplanned road work? Are there gangs of workers driving around who suddenly stop and decide to do some work on the road? "Oh look Bill, here's a nice patch of road! Let's put up a couple roadblocks and dig a hole."
At first I was going to dismiss your comment by saying that you can't change the license to non-GPL, and SCO has broken the GPL and thus could not distribute a GPLd piece of code.
Upon reflection, I think they may only be violating the GPL license of the kernel. If this is so, then you are correct. Until they violate the GPL license of dhowells-map, it could be distributed by them.
The more I think about this, the more complex I see the licensing issues of a typical Linux distribution are. There are probably hundreds(thousands?) of different copyright holders on those distribution's disks. Breaking the license of any one, would not break the license of all the others. A nasty company could pick their battles and only violate the licenses of a few pieces of the distribution where they feel they can get away with it.
I wonder if a clause could/should be added to the GPL stating that violating a clause of the GPL of any licensor, violates the GPL of all GPL'd code? So if you broke the license for any one piece, the whole pie would be taken away.
Scotty said it first as attributed. Data also said it in TNG (as a nod to the original I'd guess).
Water accelerates the growth of a plant, but it doesn't cause the plant to be. The seed did that.
Yes, that is correct. Coming from a UNIX admin background, I could trivially find my way around a Slackware distribution. I assumed all Linux distributions were that simple. Then I installed Red Hat and was totally lost. I couldn't do anything without trying to find the right GUI tool to do it, trying to figure out how to use the GUI tool and then finding that the GUI tool was not capable enough for what I needed to do (this was in 96, things might be better now). Back to Slackware. Recently I tried Mandrake. Slick install, but again, I find myself doing a lot of "find ... grep .. {} \; -print" mantras to figure out where things are set up.
The base problem is that the other distributions have to move stuff around to make GUI tools reasonably usefull, but for some tools, that means you are forced to use the GUI at all times.
A small piece of fact to add to this. The use or radar detectors in Canada is governed by Provincial legislation. In Alberta, for example, it is perfectly legal to use a radar detector, while it is illegal to use one in Ontario.
Comparing the POS calculator that comes with the Palm to an HP48 or better shows that you have never used such a calculator (or used it when you didn't need to). There are some pretty good software calculators you can get for the Palm, but none compare to a dedicated calculator when you really need that kind of power.
As others have said, here are the wins for a dedicated high-power calculator.
A Palm calculator has to share it's screen real estate between calculation and buttons (or the buttons are buried in deep nestings of menues). Thus you see more of your calculation on a dedicated calculator.
You can touch-type a dedicated calculator. Hitting soft-buttons on a Palm without looking is not very accurate.
Percieved features of a Palm.
You can save your work. Actually my HP48 saved all my work between uses, so no advantage.
One less thing to carry. True, and is sometimes a really usefull fact.
In the end, I've paid for a pretty good RPN calculator for my Palm, and I probably use it more often than I do my trusty old HP48, but when I need to do something complicated, out comes my HP.
I'm the same way, after using RPN throughout university, I just can't do anything complex with a standard calculator. It just confuses me to know end.
Thanks for the info! I didn't realize that iTunes uses Quicktime. I did see the Ogg plugin for Quicktime, just didn't understand that it was what I was looking for.
And me.
Download, install on Win 2000. Launch.
Looks pretty (sorta, but doesn't look any more functional than winamp). Now to play my Ogg Vorbis music colleciton.
oops, doesn't understand ogg. Quick search on Apple's site, and on the web. Looks like Ogg is supported on Mac, but that doesn't help me.
Oh. well. Uninstall iTunes and go back to something that does ogg.
I haven't paid attention to the bit rates of the MP3s I've heard, but I can physically tell when I'm listening to a low bit-raite encoding. My ears begin to hurt. I think it is because I'm straining to hear the high-end harmonics. I've been a pipe-organist for a long time and my ears have been trained to hear the full harmonic spectrum.
It also doesn't seem like a great feat to tell a B from a C. I'd say any musician who's been playing for any length of time can do it. The trick is telling if a C is slightly off when heard in isolation to other notes/instruments.
Not sure about the logic of why you are behind in broadband. Canada has the same local service plan style system and yet is 3rd in the world in terms of broadband deployment, behind Japan and I forget which European country. The best argument I've heard for why the US is behind in broadband is the infrastructure cost because the US population is spread out compared to Japan (or even Canada, given that the bulk of the population is in a relatively narrow strip along the south of Canada)
I do agree that the growth of internet usage was strongly helped by the "free" calling to the ISP as compared to internet popularity in Europe.
I seem to be talking to myself, oh well.
I just need to add a disclaimer that after reading more of the content on the link I provided above (to bel.150m.com), I'm not convinced of the reliability of that website. Interesting reading, but doesn't seem authoritative.
That's what I get for linking to something too quickly.
Yes, give an electron more energy and it jumps to a higher state, then, when the electron drops back to its original state it will release a photon. What's your point. We aren't talking about electrons flying away from the nucleus, but crashing into it.
Taking a snapshot in time of the atom, I can accept the idea that the kinetic energy equals the electrostitic potential and the electrons orbit. But doesn't entropy imply that this orbit must decay? I'm not sure where the kinetic energy would go, but it seems intuitive that an electron can't keep the same kinetic energy forever.
That's where viewing the electrons orbit as a probability distributions rather than a Newtonian orbit makes sense. The fact that the ground state of a hydrogen atom has spherical symmetry also argues against a Netwonian orbit.
Of course I've been away from physics for 10 years and could just be talking bullshit.
Found here.
My glib answer was because they are orbiting, but then why doesn't the orbit decay?
..., so my best guess is that we're all still guessing.
So I did some Googleing. Here they say "The real reason electrons don't fall into the nucleus is that they are not electrically-charged bodies orbiting the nucleus but are electric charges that come from the nucleus, negative electric charges that have a small mass but are not actually matter. They spread out in various directions from the nucleus, forming the regular patterns that underly the crystal structure of all large-scale matter."
I don't know if I buy that, but maybe.
Doing more googleing, I see references to charge clouds and standing waves and
Cool question though! There goes my afternoon.
Bzzzt, the people you know are pronouncing it wrong. It is pronounced guh-NEW (Comes from The New Hackers Dictionary)
I often ask the store employees for help at Best Buy. I don't do this for info, I do it for entertainment. Baiting those poor sales buddies is great fun!
You are right, they are not resolving MX records. However, many MTAs will try the A record if it can't find an MX record, so email is affected.
It breaks incorrectly configured email servers. If an MTA was configured to try multiple email servers, and the first one didn't exist, then in the old world, the second email server would be tried and the mail would probably get through. In the new world, the email will bounce because the second server is never tried. True, this only happens for misconfigured servers, but it is still a problem.
Another thing that will have broken are all the link-checker tools out there. If your website had a link to a domain that was no longer there, in the old world, the link checker would find the problem. In the new world, all URLs to non-existent domains are resolved, and the link checker will not find the problem.
There are other issues that the IAB pointed out in their report, but I don't recall then now.
That would be sweet! Many services could easily be started asynchronously. Now you've got me thinking (damn you)
I suppose that the old style init (that Slackware still uses), could be parallelized by starting each script as a background process. I don't know about the newer style init though.
True, in general I don't have X installed on a server, hence my parenthetical comment about not starting X at all. I do have one box that serves content and has X, but that was because the box got retasked after installation and I didn't get a chance to re-install/remove X.
Please suggest some search engines whose results are as generally relevant as Google's. I'm not saying those search engines don't exist, I'm just saying I don't know of any.
The primary place Google falls down is searching for reviews of a product. Too many links are to sellers of the product. But, in general, I haven't found a search engine with better top 5 results for all query types than Google.