Re:OS going away, or just "contractual support"?
on
The Future of OpenSolaris
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· Score: 1, Informative
"Hi boss, yeah I'd like to use OpenSolaris... No, we specifically can't get support for it from Sun, I mean Oracle... Yeah if it breaks we are totally on our own.... Ok so I guess we're not using OpenSolaris then."
That's not really any different from Fedora, yet businesses still use Redhat.
Re:Tip of the iceberg or just another wing nut?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 1
Is unemployment and the rest of it going to create more of these guys?
It depends on how bad it gets. The stability of most Western countries rests on two pillars: bread, and circuses. Man cannot live on circuses alone.
Are you sure? Just about every Asian I know can do it that quickly, and they make up about 30% of the world's population.
Interesting comment. East Asians have a higher visuospatial IQ. It would make sense that solving a Rubik's cube would play to their strengths - it's pure visuospatial ability. Your anecdote rings true with me - I remember being amazed at how quickly a group of average Japanese students could play Tetris on the Gameboy. They were able to play it indefinitely at the fastest level. The ability of their brains to rapidly process that sort of information - this block rotated this way, will fit there - was much more efficient than my own, even with practice. And it's not that I'm uncoordinated or bad at video games in general - far from it. In FPS or RTS games I'd easily be well within the top 10%. But with a game like tetris, I was not able to use reflexes, hand-eye coordination or intelligence in a strategic sense to make up for my slower visuospatial processing.
This sort of experience makes me suspect that there is a difference in mental "modules" between Europeans and East Asians, and if you don't have the right "module", it's like trying to play a modern FPS without a 3d graphics card. You might be able to do the same task in a "software emulation" type mode, but it will be at reduced speed. Or maybe if it is too hard, your brain just can't do it.
If you're using a computer just for game playing and email, that's fine. On the other hand, if you are doing anything which requires reliability -- both in terms of machine stability and the consistency of results and data -- ECC is a must. The premium that Intel charge for what should be a standard feature prices them out of the value computing market.
Yep. Basically if you want to do anything reliable and minimize cost, you need AMD. You also have to take care to get the right motherboard - I've only discovered the utility of ECC now and my Gigabyte motherboard doesn't support ECC. I think Asus generally support ECC. You wouldn't happen to know the sorts or reductions in errors running registered memory brings (compared to just ECC)? If you must run registered as well, it's a comparison between Opterons and Xeons.
If you are concerned about data integrity you might also want to look at an operating system that has ZFS - which means OpenSolaris or FreeBSD, and running mirrored or RAIDZ.
Who knows who will find these disks. They could be friend, or foe ( or both...). And don't give me the 'they are too far away to be a threat', if our disk got there, they can get here and we gave them a freaking map and way to much information about us and our weaknesses.
If Sagan had any sense he would have first encrypted the contents of those disks using state of the art DES.
He was pleased with it, even though the hammer he already owned was in approximate terms very similar to the one I gave him. In precise terms it wasn't anywhere near as nice.
Was it several hundred dollars nicer? Does it need to use a specific proprietary type of nail? And does the manufacturer of this hammer come out with a new version of hammer every 4 years or so that claims to be even nicer, along with a new proprietary kind of nail that your old hammer can't use, and soon every hardware store stops stocking the old proprietary nails so you know you have to buy the new hammer? And in order to use regular nails does this require a special attachment that you have to send away especially to get? And has the manufacturer attempted to bribe the nail standards bodies in order to get its own version of a standard nail approved?
This technology has to be applicable to all sorts of games - e.g. rushing in an RTS, build order decisions in an RTS, direction of serves in tennis. Though I suspect that good players will throw in enough variables to confound things.
As for Politicians... I think you are confused. The very job.. in fact, the entire reason politicians were created was to make decisions for their constituents. That's their only purpose. You act like them doing their job is horrific thing.
Opportunist's point was that when you (even tacitly) give someone else the unchecked power to make as many decisions as possible on your behalf, this power corrupts. In both operating systems and in government.
That's pretty cool - an excellent description on one of the major advantages of using Linux.
A variation on your theme:
Video begins like yours.
Both users in unison say "I need to do $task, maybe there is a program that does this?"
The user on the left opens up synaptic, types in $task, reads a few description, and clicks "Apply". He uses the new application, and goes on with what he is doing.
The user on the right opens up google and types in "$task software". He reads reviews on Cnet and decides which program he needs. He then either forks out $$$, or decides to google "$software serial OR crack". He eventually finds what he wants. Soon after, pop-ups break out all over his screen. After cursing, he reinstalls his OS.
Hack some face recognition software to recognize body shapes, allow the AI to be trained on the user's personal porn collection, integrate it with wget and a bittorrent client, and you will have the firefox add-on to end all firefox add-ons.
That's how I browse too - I just counted 40 tabs open, and I consider that moderate browsing. And run noscript (for extreme paranoia, as you put it). Maybe I should run "read it later", but what I currently do seems to work well enough. Used this way, firefox does seem to be unstable, but maybe that is a conflict with pulse audio.
That's what I use too. It does the job well enough. If only I could figure out how to get access to the numbers on the stack higher than 2 (swap). But so far I've found it more useful than any other RPN calculator in the ubuntu repos.
These days whenever I want to calculate anything remotely non-trivial I go to a spreadsheet or database, depending on the data. I might want to do a similar calculation again, and I might want to have the calculation properly debugged rather than double check my figures with a calculator. (Yeah I know, someday I will learn R. I promise.) But for fast, once only, back of the envelope type calculations (or exams), RPN calculators still can't be beat. Bound to your calculator button, and accessible from your cell phone.
And for the latter, you want Calc (Roar Lauritzsen's).
I first read "The quick and easy way to effective speaking" by Dale Carnegie over 10 years ago (probably through reading amazon reviews). It was excellent then. It is excellent now. It will still be great in a hundred years time. If you have to read one book, read that one.
As long as public speech is judged by an audience of humans, the principles of engaging and holding human interest will remain unchanged even with advances in technology. A riveting public speaker is riveting without the aid of graphs, powerpoint, and especially - powerpoint animations, and they have been for thousands of years. No magical powerpoint animations are going to help the public speaker who doesn't look the audience in the eye, who doesn't know his subject matter, who is not interested in his topic, who has not thought about how to find something in his topic that relates to the audience, who has not considered how to plan his speech so that the structure leads his audience to understanding, and who does not gauge audience understanding as he goes along to prevent "losing them".
Allegedly GWBush was has a fairly high IQ (well at least 120+) yet, outwardly at least, he may not seem it.
120 is top 9%, near enough to 1/10. That's not even 2 standard deviations. For a clerk, it's on the high end. For a president, it's low, unless you want a puppet. There are roughly 28 million people in the US with a higher IQ than 120.
I have to hand it to you. I can virtually see your business plan.
1. Go to slashdot, it has geeks who need to get laid. 2. Use John C Dvorak style trolling. It's a proven concept. Couple a strawman and being purposely obtuse. 3. The geeks most in need of getting laid will smell blood in the water. 4. They will read your comment and start hatching their replies. 5. They may even click on your advertisement for... wait for it... "geeks getting laid"! (I can see the VCs salivating now!) 6. Profit!!!
And if that doesn't work (hey, maybe those geeks may need to get laid, but they may enjoy replying to faux stupid comments even more), we'll change our destination: someoneiswrongontheinternet.com - a distributed computing effort to correct wrong opinion on the internet - WE NEED YOUR HELP!
Slashcode actually does a pretty good job of inferring intent when using plaintext mode (so two line-end characters in a row get interpreted as a paragraph), but if you really want to use html, why not use it correctly and just put in a <p>?
I used to do that, then it stopped working for some reason. So I tried the next one along in "Allowed HTML" figuring it would be a "break" with the aid of preview until I got the desired outcome. It appears to be working again, I'll go back to using <p>.;)
Maybe the original reason it stopped working is because I screwed up somehow, maybe not. The comments come out the same way, slashdot doesn't break, and hopefully no one is reading my comment in the original. I make no claims about knowing any more html than is necessary to output a roughly readable slashdot comment.
No bizarre subtlety was intended by my use of the <br> tags. Hopefully the other subtlety was not lost; that if you make the case that the end user is king, then in the case where you are programming to please the end user (e.g. writing html) you should strive for readability and elegance.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really any different from Fedora, yet businesses still use Redhat.
It depends on how bad it gets. The stability of most Western countries rests on two pillars: bread, and circuses. Man cannot live on circuses alone.
Interesting comment. East Asians have a higher visuospatial IQ. It would make sense that solving a Rubik's cube would play to their strengths - it's pure visuospatial ability. Your anecdote rings true with me - I remember being amazed at how quickly a group of average Japanese students could play Tetris on the Gameboy. They were able to play it indefinitely at the fastest level. The ability of their brains to rapidly process that sort of information - this block rotated this way, will fit there - was much more efficient than my own, even with practice. And it's not that I'm uncoordinated or bad at video games in general - far from it. In FPS or RTS games I'd easily be well within the top 10%. But with a game like tetris, I was not able to use reflexes, hand-eye coordination or intelligence in a strategic sense to make up for my slower visuospatial processing.
This sort of experience makes me suspect that there is a difference in mental "modules" between Europeans and East Asians, and if you don't have the right "module", it's like trying to play a modern FPS without a 3d graphics card. You might be able to do the same task in a "software emulation" type mode, but it will be at reduced speed. Or maybe if it is too hard, your brain just can't do it.
I think he was trying for the funny.
Yep. Basically if you want to do anything reliable and minimize cost, you need AMD. You also have to take care to get the right motherboard - I've only discovered the utility of ECC now and my Gigabyte motherboard doesn't support ECC. I think Asus generally support ECC. You wouldn't happen to know the sorts or reductions in errors running registered memory brings (compared to just ECC)? If you must run registered as well, it's a comparison between Opterons and Xeons.
If you are concerned about data integrity you might also want to look at an operating system that has ZFS - which means OpenSolaris or FreeBSD, and running mirrored or RAIDZ.
If Sagan had any sense he would have first encrypted the contents of those disks using state of the art DES.
It's not as good as it sounds.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/01/billion-dollar-raise-dilbert.html
Just think of what this technology could do in the hands of Ford!
Was it several hundred dollars nicer? Does it need to use a specific proprietary type of nail? And does the manufacturer of this hammer come out with a new version of hammer every 4 years or so that claims to be even nicer, along with a new proprietary kind of nail that your old hammer can't use, and soon every hardware store stops stocking the old proprietary nails so you know you have to buy the new hammer? And in order to use regular nails does this require a special attachment that you have to send away especially to get? And has the manufacturer attempted to bribe the nail standards bodies in order to get its own version of a standard nail approved?
I think you just posted a comment to it. But seriously, googling site:oooforums.org $TOPIC would work well also.
This technology has to be applicable to all sorts of games - e.g. rushing in an RTS, build order decisions in an RTS, direction of serves in tennis. Though I suspect that good players will throw in enough variables to confound things.
What graphics card(s) and drivers do you use, pray tell?
Opportunist's point was that when you (even tacitly) give someone else the unchecked power to make as many decisions as possible on your behalf, this power corrupts. In both operating systems and in government.
That's pretty cool - an excellent description on one of the major advantages of using Linux.
A variation on your theme:
Video begins like yours.
Both users in unison say "I need to do $task, maybe there is a program that does this?"
The user on the left opens up synaptic, types in $task, reads a few description, and clicks "Apply". He uses the new application, and goes on with what he is doing.
The user on the right opens up google and types in "$task software". He reads reviews on Cnet and decides which program he needs. He then either forks out $$$, or decides to google "$software serial OR crack". He eventually finds what he wants. Soon after, pop-ups break out all over his screen. After cursing, he reinstalls his OS.
Hack some face recognition software to recognize body shapes, allow the AI to be trained on the user's personal porn collection, integrate it with wget and a bittorrent client, and you will have the firefox add-on to end all firefox add-ons.
Sure it terminates. It's a trivial task, all he wanted to do was "find".
Why should they have to repair it if it's already fixed?
I think I'd prefer two strong oxen. Wait, what were we talking about?
That's how I browse too - I just counted 40 tabs open, and I consider that moderate browsing. And run noscript (for extreme paranoia, as you put it). Maybe I should run "read it later", but what I currently do seems to work well enough. Used this way, firefox does seem to be unstable, but maybe that is a conflict with pulse audio.
That's what I use too. It does the job well enough. If only I could figure out how to get access to the numbers on the stack higher than 2 (swap). But so far I've found it more useful than any other RPN calculator in the ubuntu repos.
These days whenever I want to calculate anything remotely non-trivial I go to a spreadsheet or database, depending on the data. I might want to do a similar calculation again, and I might want to have the calculation properly debugged rather than double check my figures with a calculator. (Yeah I know, someday I will learn R. I promise.) But for fast, once only, back of the envelope type calculations (or exams), RPN calculators still can't be beat. Bound to your calculator button, and accessible from your cell phone.
And for the latter, you want Calc (Roar Lauritzsen's).
http://midp-calc.sourceforge.net/Calc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollum_memo
I first read "The quick and easy way to effective speaking" by Dale Carnegie over 10 years ago (probably through reading amazon reviews). It was excellent then. It is excellent now. It will still be great in a hundred years time. If you have to read one book, read that one.
As long as public speech is judged by an audience of humans, the principles of engaging and holding human interest will remain unchanged even with advances in technology. A riveting public speaker is riveting without the aid of graphs, powerpoint, and especially - powerpoint animations, and they have been for thousands of years. No magical powerpoint animations are going to help the public speaker who doesn't look the audience in the eye, who doesn't know his subject matter, who is not interested in his topic, who has not thought about how to find something in his topic that relates to the audience, who has not considered how to plan his speech so that the structure leads his audience to understanding, and who does not gauge audience understanding as he goes along to prevent "losing them".
120 is top 9%, near enough to 1/10. That's not even 2 standard deviations. For a clerk, it's on the high end. For a president, it's low, unless you want a puppet. There are roughly 28 million people in the US with a higher IQ than 120.
I have to hand it to you. I can virtually see your business plan.
1. Go to slashdot, it has geeks who need to get laid.
2. Use John C Dvorak style trolling. It's a proven concept. Couple a strawman and being purposely obtuse.
3. The geeks most in need of getting laid will smell blood in the water.
4. They will read your comment and start hatching their replies.
5. They may even click on your advertisement for... wait for it... "geeks getting laid"! (I can see the VCs salivating now!)
6. Profit!!!
And if that doesn't work (hey, maybe those geeks may need to get laid, but they may enjoy replying to faux stupid comments even more), we'll change our destination:
someoneiswrongontheinternet.com - a distributed computing effort to correct wrong opinion on the internet - WE NEED YOUR HELP!
I used to do that, then it stopped working for some reason. So I tried the next one along in "Allowed HTML" figuring it would be a "break" with the aid of preview until I got the desired outcome. It appears to be working again, I'll go back to using <p>. ;)
Maybe the original reason it stopped working is because I screwed up somehow, maybe not. The comments come out the same way, slashdot doesn't break, and hopefully no one is reading my comment in the original. I make no claims about knowing any more html than is necessary to output a roughly readable slashdot comment.
No bizarre subtlety was intended by my use of the <br> tags. Hopefully the other subtlety was not lost; that if you make the case that the end user is king, then in the case where you are programming to please the end user (e.g. writing html) you should strive for readability and elegance.