Most window managers will let you move a window around if you press Alt and then click anywhere in the window.
Sure, I tried that. And the window hit the top of the Ubuntu desktop, and would not go up any further, so it did not help. If the top of the window could have gone out of the visible area, allowing me to see the "Okay" button, that would have been nice. Also nice would be if a scroll bar appeared to one side of the dialog and just let me scroll the dialog until the "Okay" button was visible.
I thought about trying to set up a virtual desktop size larger than the actual, but in the end I just hit the Tab key a few times and got on with life. Evolution is perfectly fine to use in 1024x600 resolution, just a pain when setting it up.
I read the whole article; I thought it was worth my time. But I'll summarize the most important points for you.
He liked the Gateway better. The Athlon64 uses more power and radiates more heat compared to the Atom in the Acer; but it delivers more performance, and the author thinks it's worth it. If you want maximum run time and don't care so much about performance, the Acer would be better for you. (The Atom does hyperthreading, and some video codecs are tuned to take advantage of that, so the Acer did slightly better than expected on some video playback; but even so, he felt the Athlon64 was better overall for video playback.)
Both netbooks come pre-loaded with Vista and piles of bloatware. He scrubbed off the bloatware and updated Vista to the latest service pack, and the machines were a bit faster. He then installed Windows 7 and they were a bit faster again, but not amazingly so. He didn't say anything about Linux, but I'll wager that if he put Ubuntu 9.04 on the netbooks, they would fly.
By the way, I'm running Ubuntu on a six-month-old 10.6" Acer Aspire One, with an Atom chip, and the performance is great. My biggest complaint is that there are dialog boxes that are just too big for the vertical resolution (600 pixels); the reviewed netbooks both have 1366x768 resolution, so the dialog boxes that annoy me would not be a problem. (I'm talking about the setup dialogs for Evolution. To set up Evolution, I had to judiciously use the Tab key to move the highlight to the "Okay" button, which was not visible because the dialogs were too tall; it worked but it was a huge pain, and not everyone would know you can even do that.) I've been meaning to try the special Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu... but with these new 11" netbooks, there would be no reason to bother; just run Ubuntu 9.04.
The Nostromo was ridiculously valuable; they might gamble it on it on an expedition where no real exceptional risks could be assessed, but it just doesn't make sense to gamble an expensive treasure ship
I agree with most of what you say, but I think the above point is easily handwaved. The Nostromo could have been mostly or fully depreciated, and heavily insured; thus they get to buy a new, more efficient refinery ship a few years ahead of schedule if they lose it. Profit if the ship brings back the alien, profit if the ship is lost; win/win.
It goes without saying that they didn't really care about the crew, but it's a plus if they lose fewer people, and maybe automated refinery ships have smaller crews than other sorts of ships.
And maybe the Nostromo was the only ship they had in the area. It might have been Hobson's choice.
Eh, I was guessing. I live in the suburbs near Seattle; my home doesn't even have an air conditioner. There are usually about a couple of weeks per year where I even wish I had one. The last time I even lived in a house that had air conditioning, I was a kid and didn't get to set the thermostat.
I should learn: don't make up numbers, just use hand-wavy phrases like "lukewarm instead of cool".
I kind of like the idea of peak rates. But the idea of "smart" appliances talking to the power company over the Internet is just dumb.
If you publish a schedule of prices, and I can save money by modifying my behavior, I'll do it. With the appliances I have.
Example: Puget Sound Energy experimented with giving us peak rates, so we began doing laundry later in the evening. We used the delay timer on our dishwasher to make it start itself at about 4am. At no point did we wish we had Internet 3.0 appliances.
By the way, PSE found that most people disliked the peak rates program. The discounts for modifying your behavior were not generous enough to make it worth the hassle for most people. I live in the suburbs near Seattle, so we have relatively cheap (mostly hydro) power anyway.
So, for success, make up a simple table of rates vs. times; make sure the discounts for off-peak power are sufficient to adequately reward the people who modify their behavior; done. You can do this now, and no one needs new appliances.
P.S. I did actually RTFA, and there is a bit more to their ideas than just Internet 3.0 appliances. One actually good idea is to have an energy manager in your home, and be able to tell your home that you are going on vacation. Your hot water heater can chill down and take a break, and your air conditioner can work less hard (keep the house at 76 degrees F, say, instead of 70 (24 Celsius instead of 21). But I really don't need my dishwasher to talk to the power company.
While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I'd like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn't stop iterating.
NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.
And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said "We don't need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done." NASA's unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that's a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.
It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today's dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960's dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn't it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn't need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.
It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960's, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980's? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.
The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.
Check out scitoys.com for some ideas. The section with a radio is pretty darn cool, and he does have a few simple projects like a 1-Watt amplifier and a laser audio transmitter. No soldering needed, which is a plus for a school setting with 9th graders.
He makes one interesting point: it would take a long time to build transmission lines that could carry large amounts of power all the way from the midwest to the northeast. In that time, technology could improve in a way that could make the project pointless.
On the other hand, improving the existing grid from 1940's tech to modern tech is guaranteed to be worth doing. (Is he correct that a major chunk of our existing grid is 1940's tech?)
On the subject of clean and decentralized power, how much longer before we get those solar roofing tiles that can contribute a useful amount of power? Even if we didn't wait for the improved tiles, would today's solar tiles provide a useful increment of electricity to feed into the current grid?
He quotes a price of $60 billion to build the new transmission lines. What would be the effect of using $60 billion to subsidize people to put solar tiles on top of existing buildings? How about $60 billion worth of pebble-bed or similarly safe small reactors, each one in a piece of the grid?
I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, but I'm inclined to agree that this project sounds like a way to put a whole bunch of eggs into a single basket. If we're going to do something big, let's try to make our electricity grid more decentralized, instead of adding one more frakking huge centralized source (however eco-clean).
What happened to you, man? You used to be cool! Where's all the in your face swearing and abrasiveness? You used to be hardcore!
So, you say this now. But I read your post that you "quoted the best part" from Zed's previous rant. You concluded:
I hate to say this but after reading this first part of the rant, I think Zed is just as big (if not half) of the problem of the community being in shambles as any of his targets are.
In short, you criticized him big-time for his abusive ranting. Now, he has toned the rhetoric way the frak down, and you are criticizing him for not being as entertaining?
And then you finish up with this gem:
You, are a great software developer. Much better than I in all probability. You are a complete and utter asshole in nearly every other respect (yes, even in your music) and it should come as no surprise that you cannot land a job on a team. I would not pay money for your projects since I don't use them but I will send you $20 to stay in a hole, write software and restrict yourself from communicating with the outside world. Really, the world would be a better place.
So now you are criticizing him just as much as before. So my takeaway from this is that you think he's a big jerk, only less entertaining than he used to be?
What do you know about Zed anyway? All I know of him is his rants. If I were considering hiring him, I'd talk to people he worked with previously; that's what counts. Maybe he rants on his blog, but when you work with him he's nice. I don't know either way; I'm just saying, don't be too quick to judge someone from a few rants.
I read through the whole rant, and there is little to argue here.
He used GPL for a Python project? Not that big a deal; his stuff won't ever be folded into the Python base distribution, but no one will seriously get upset.
He offers commercial licenses for companies that fear GPL? Very sensible; not even RMS would object.
I enjoy his vigorous and clear writing, too. "You guys are all giant pansies, even with a project like Lamson you're still all afwaid of big bad monsta SMTP." Heh.
O'Malley said in 2000 there were more people in system programming than there are today despite the workloads having quadrupled which is quite an anomaly.
This is an actual sentence from the story. I guess reporters don't need to learn how to use clauses, and editors don't edit.
If E. B. White were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.
I suspect that one of the reasons the Italian government did this was to make Venice a little bit more attractive as a place to live.
Venice is an amazing place, full of history. It's also an expensive place, as it is somewhat disconnected (no cars or trucks for hauling stuff, just boats and hand carts) and the glorious old houses are somewhat crumbling. I read that the Italian government is worried about a trend where wealthy foreigners buy apartments or houses in Venice; they don't want Venice to become primarily a theme park for the wealthy, they would rather have Italians living there. IIRC if you are Italian and you move to Venice, you can get a stipend from the Italian government to help defray your living expenses.
This is clever. Venice is small enough to be carpeted wall-to-wall with good wireless signal, and it shouldn't have cost too much. It's a simple thing that wasn't hard to do that will make Venice much more interesting as a place to live.
I haven't been in a situation quite as extreme as yours, but I was in a long-hours and high-stress job with a long commute last year. My only workout was bicycling long miles on weekends. I held my weight steady, until at the end the craziness hit its peak and I put on ten pounds in two months. (And I don't mean ten pounds of muscle.)
Like other posters, I urge you to change something if you can. Get a better job, move closer, something. What you are doing is crazy. If the pay is golden, do it for a while. If it is a stepping stone to something better, make sure you actually get there; don't burn yourself out forever waiting for an opportunity that isn't coming.
All that said, if you must do this, be sure to eat a healthy diet. It's a pain, but you probably need to bring your own food, so you know what you are eating. You need to eat lots of protein, and high-quality carbs (not white flour, white sugar, white rice...).
A book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is my bible for this stuff. It's sold as a PDF over the Internet; see the web site for details. Here's an old Slashdot posting where I summarize the ideas of the book.
That book tells you how to measure your body fat percentage, then use that information to calculate how many calories you should eat of what foods. One of his testimonials is from someone who said he is paralyzed and cannot exercise; by following the diet recommendations of the book, he was able to lose some body fat and improve his health.
By the way, I changed jobs and I now am in a lower-stress job. I still bicycle on weekends but now I'm working out at a gym two nights a week; and I've lost all the extra weight I put on in my previous job. I can tell you: it's easier to keep it off than to lose it again after you gain it. If your job is making you fat, that is a very good reason to get a different one.
All that he has done here is take a bunch of stuff that is known to work, but not economically, and tied it all together with a pretty diagram. Nothing new has happened here
I think you are being needlessly harsh here.
His key contribution was to think: "How many things can I chain together so that the waste from one thing feeds something else?" Thus, methane from the digester powers cooking stoves; carbon dioxide from the burned methane feeds algae. I've heard of methane digesters, I've heard of cooking stoves, and I've heard of algae; I haven't heard of an integrated system like this.
If you RTFA, he relates a story about how the gift of a fresh water system to a poor village had an unfortunate side effect: the extra water the village used caused their sewage system to be overloaded. Their "system" was to put their sewage in buckets and dump out the buckets; they ended up with raw sewage running in their streets. He consciously tried to design a system that has no negative effects. (And that's probably an inspiration for including the flush latrines in his design, latrines that feed the digester and/or the algae.)
Even if his design turns out to be flawed, the flaws might be fixable or at least the idea might inspire an experienced engineer to design something even better.
I didn't invent anything this clever when I was 15. How about you?
Except that when a normal person uses the term "downward pressure" when referring to the cost of something it does mean that the price goes down
Really! "Downward pressure" cannot slow the rate of rise? "Downward pressure" only exists when something is actually going down? This is fascinating; I had no idea. (Because I'm not a "normal person", you see. How could I be expected to know?)
How do you find out these things? Is there a society that decides what terms a "normal person" can use? I'd like to join!
Theora is just not as good as H.264; you can get better quality with the same bits in H.264, or similar quality in fewer bits.
Theora is, however, good enough for general use for Internet video. It's at least as good as H.263, which actually has been used for years. (Breathless claims that Theora would need twice as many bits as H.264 are just silly.)
Since Theora is free in all ways, browsers can just build it in, and sites like Wikipedia are going to use it. Since H.264 is better, sites with money will pay the H.264 fees to save money on bandwidth. And, if I had a web business, I'd hesitate to paint myself into a corner with H.264; the patent owners have the power to jack up the royalties if they decide to.
In short, both Theora and H.264 will be found on the Internet in the near future. And we can all just get along.
(Now watch Theora fanboys and H.264 fanboys team up to mod this post down through the floor...:-)
P.S. Ogg Vorbis never toppled MP3 from the throne. However, the existence of Vorbis may have exerted some downward pressure on the licensing fees for the paid codecs. In a similar way, the existence of Theora may cause the patent holders for the other video formats to not try to charge quite as much.
Are you interested in the liberties guaranteed by those amendments?
Yes, of course. I'm interested in all ten of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, and indeed the whole Constitution.
If so, I don't see a reason not to support the ACLU
They advertise themselves as an organization devoted to civil liberties. The reality is that they are only devoted to some of the liberties, the ones they approve. And they publicly and officially take the position that gun rights are not civil rights, and they argue against court decisions that support the Second Amendment. I dislike organizations that are opposed to Second Amendment rights, and the ACLU qualifies.
If the ACLU wants my donations, all they have to do is start defending the entire Bill of Rights with the same zeal with which they defend the bits they like. They can hold their collective nose and defend Nazis and dirtbags whose civil rights are being violated; why can't they hold their nose and defend the parts of the Bill of Rights they don't like?
The ACLU will attack with the ferocity of a pit bull if the First Amendment is under even a vague threat. They are equally fanatical about Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment. They don't just take the obvious cases: if a student is forbidden to wear a black armband, that's a "free speech" violation under the First Amendment.
The Second Amendment, however, will have to look after itself; they won't spend any time or effort to help anyone in a Second Amendment case. If you can find evidence that shows the ACLU helping anyone, anyone at all, with a gun rights issue, please post evidence. (I'd love to be wrong on this one.) A city (Washington, D.C. for example) could pass a law forbidding all ownership of all guns to everyone, and that's not a clear enough Second Amendment violation to prompt the ACLU to act.
That link you provided is a great example. Here's some text:
The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.
The Second Amendment is very clear: "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Many people, including the ACLU, take the intellectually dishonest position that the odd introductory clause ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,") relegates this right to some sort of state's right. There are ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights; apparently nine of them refer to individual rights of the people, and one of them, given a position of prominence (second from the top, right after freedom of speech!) is a mere state's right. Oh sure, and I am Queen Marie of Romania. (And We are not amused.)
Read some of the writings of the founding fathers, and there is no doubt at all what they meant in the Second Amendment. When the Second Amendment was written, "the Militia" was the whole of the people (or at least the adult male citizens, but we would reject this restrictive view today). At that time, "well regulated" meant "in good working order". So overall, this is approximately the same as "A well-educated Populace, being a good thing, the right of the people to own and read Books, shall not be infringed." Would anyone seriously try to argue that "the Populace" and "the people" are not the same thing?
Now, an organization like the ACLU is supposed to be a pit bull on rights issues. I want them to protect the rights of people I hate. And I'm here to tell you: they just don't do their job on the Second Amendment. Not for Nazis, not for skinheads, not for drug dealers, and not for ordinary citizens.
The Second Amendment does have its friends. The NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation are doing the sort of job the ACLU ought to be doing. They get vilified for this, of course. I believe that some of the state-level ACLUs actually do take the position that the Second Amendment means what it says; I am talking specifically about the national-level one.
P.S. Here's a picture of a poster made by the ACLU, an "Illustrated Guide to the Bill of Rights". The Second Amendment isn't on there. I saw an even more egregious poster made by the ACLU, which presented ten paragraphs that were not numbered; the ten paragraphs were the First Amendment, the Third Amendment, and so on, with one of the longer Amendments split into two paragraphs so there would be ten. I wish I had saved a link to that; I can't seem to find it now.
Something as simple as deleting the wrong partition becomes an irreversible operation if you do it using a tool that supports TRIM on TRIM-enabled hardware.
This seems needlessly verbose. Let me shorten it for you:
Deleting a partition should always be considered an irreversible operation.
Hmmm, even shorter:
Don't delete a partition unless you want it to go away forever.
Even if you restore the partition table from a backup, you will likely suffer silent file system corruption, which may even not be apparent until it's too late. If TRIM support is actually implemented on the device, the device is free to 'lose' data on TRIMmed blocks until they are written at least once.
If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that a disk partitioning tool will use TRIM to not only wipe the partition table itself, but also nuke the partition data from orbit. And you the point out that it would not be adequate to rewrite just the sectors of the partition table.
If so, then the answer is: you don't just restore the partition table, you restore the whole partition (including data) from backup.
I for one consider much-faster write speeds to be a bigger advantage than possibly being able to reverse a partition deletion.
If I punch a hole through space via a wormhole and travel at 45mph on a moped through the wormhole to travel a normal space distance of 600 light-years... I just traveled FTL. and THAT does not violate causality.
Except that I have been told repeatedly that it does violate causality. Here are some references:
Can anyone point me at a web site that explains why FTL travel violates causality? My understanding is that it doesn't matter what technique you posit for FTL travel ("warp drive", "hyperspace", teleportation, bloater drive, etc.), none of them are possible because FTL travel would allow causality paradoxes.
As I understand it, the basic problem is that there isn't a single frame of reference for the whole universe, and for observers in different frames of reference, FTL travel would look like traveling back in time. But I don't quite grok it.
I seem to recall that the physics permits a wormhole that connects two points in space and time, implying an instant travel from future to past; I think the handwavy explanation was that the math allows this but you would be destroyed by the wormhole if you tried to travel through it so there is no causality paradox.
I have also heard people point out that, if you stand on a rotating planet, it appears to you that distant galaxies are whirling around you at many times the speed of light, and given relativity, isn't it valid to say that from your frame of reference those galaxies are moving FTL? As little as I know about physics, I'm not touching this.
My issue with the graph is someone needs to take a class on "how to make a graph". 0% performance and $0 cpu.... why? Was there a $0 cpu? Did any of the cpus get a 0%?
Probably because the person who made that graph for The Tech Report wanted all the proportions to be honest.
When you chop out some of the "wasted space" in a graph, you distort the graph. Unless people are careful and check where your axes begin, and then mentally visualize where the axes go, they'll get a misleading idea of the data from the graph.
Suppose the bottom part of the graph was sliced off, at the 90% line, to make you happier. Imagine what it would look like. The AMD X2 6400+, sitting at the 100% line, would have very little white space under it; and the Intel i7-920, sitting a bit below the 200% line, would now appear to be ten times faster than the AMD X2 6400+. The numbers would be the same, but the visual impact would be that the Intel chip totally blows away the AMD chips.
The graph is good the way it is.
I'll meet you halfway, though: it wouldn't have hurt for them to have put in a second chart, zooming in on just the most crowded areas.
...when the Pre is in "Media Sync" mode it identifies itself as an Apple iPod. However, it's only the Mass Storage interface that identifies itself as an iPod. The root USB node (IOUSBDevice) still identifies the device as a Palm Pre (not visible in the image above). This means that Apple can very easily update iTunes to block the Pre.
Emphasis added by me.
I agree with him: all Apple has to do is add code to check the root USB node, see that the device is a Palm Pre, and refuse to accept the device as an iPod.
P.S. If Palm had just gone to Apple and said "we want to make the Palm Pre sync with iTunes", would Apple have been reasonable about it? I saw a comment on Slashdot mentioning that there are non-Apple devices that sync with iTunes, implying that Apple can be reasonable. But in this case, the Pre is competing with the iPhone! I imagine Apple would do anything they could to sandbag a competitor, including denying iTunes.
Apple won't sue Palm. But I won't be surprised if they do this check and lock the Pre out of iTunes.
When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc. IDEs like Netbeans or Eclipse have autocompletion functionality that make your life as a developer at lot easier.
And, years before there were any IDEs, I was using ctags with vi and managing large programs with ease. You're looking at a call to function foobar(), you put the cursor anywhere in the name of the function and hit Ctrl+], and bam, you are now looking at the function definition. Ctrl+T pops the tag stack and puts you back to the call.
These days, vim might have autocompletion, and Emacs doubtless has it somewhere in its gigabytes of code. I've never looked for it, because I just flip back and forth between the data structure definition and the code I'm writing; and I copy the member names instead of typing them. (Okay, I just did a Google search; looks like vim does have it.)
My current project is portable between Linux and Windows. I can work on it either on a Windows computer or on a Linux computer. On the Windows computer I use Visual Studio, and on the Linux computer I use vim and ctags. For intense debugging, the Visual Studio debugger is more convenient; someday I ought to get a visual debugger for Linux. But overall, I do most of my work in Linux. It's equally fast and I enjoy it more.
It helps that I have been using vi since before IDEs existed... if I were heavily trained on an IDE, and deeply grokked its inner mysteries, I might give the edge to the IDE.
A while ago I remember some guy was posting troll messages from an account with a name that implied he was someone famous. I looked up Slashdot's policy about impersonation and found that the policy was basically "let the moderation system handle it".
I just looked at the FAQ and I could not find the section I remembered. Did Slashdot change this policy?
As a for-instance... suppose the user name "esr" was not registered, and someone registered it and started posting troll messages that superficially looked like something Eric Raymond might write (let's say the troll cut-and-pastes actual things ESR wrote). But then URLs are actually links to goatse, and the troll edits comments to include insulting racial epithets, and other changes like that. If the real ESR complained, would Slashdot help shut down the trolling "esr" account name?
Slashdot Mirror
Most window managers will let you move a window around if you press Alt and then click anywhere in the window.
Sure, I tried that. And the window hit the top of the Ubuntu desktop, and would not go up any further, so it did not help. If the top of the window could have gone out of the visible area, allowing me to see the "Okay" button, that would have been nice. Also nice would be if a scroll bar appeared to one side of the dialog and just let me scroll the dialog until the "Okay" button was visible.
I thought about trying to set up a virtual desktop size larger than the actual, but in the end I just hit the Tab key a few times and got on with life. Evolution is perfectly fine to use in 1024x600 resolution, just a pain when setting it up.
steveha
I read the whole article; I thought it was worth my time. But I'll summarize the most important points for you.
He liked the Gateway better. The Athlon64 uses more power and radiates more heat compared to the Atom in the Acer; but it delivers more performance, and the author thinks it's worth it. If you want maximum run time and don't care so much about performance, the Acer would be better for you. (The Atom does hyperthreading, and some video codecs are tuned to take advantage of that, so the Acer did slightly better than expected on some video playback; but even so, he felt the Athlon64 was better overall for video playback.)
Both netbooks come pre-loaded with Vista and piles of bloatware. He scrubbed off the bloatware and updated Vista to the latest service pack, and the machines were a bit faster. He then installed Windows 7 and they were a bit faster again, but not amazingly so. He didn't say anything about Linux, but I'll wager that if he put Ubuntu 9.04 on the netbooks, they would fly.
By the way, I'm running Ubuntu on a six-month-old 10.6" Acer Aspire One, with an Atom chip, and the performance is great. My biggest complaint is that there are dialog boxes that are just too big for the vertical resolution (600 pixels); the reviewed netbooks both have 1366x768 resolution, so the dialog boxes that annoy me would not be a problem. (I'm talking about the setup dialogs for Evolution. To set up Evolution, I had to judiciously use the Tab key to move the highlight to the "Okay" button, which was not visible because the dialogs were too tall; it worked but it was a huge pain, and not everyone would know you can even do that.) I've been meaning to try the special Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu... but with these new 11" netbooks, there would be no reason to bother; just run Ubuntu 9.04.
steveha
The Nostromo was ridiculously valuable; they might gamble it on it on an expedition where no real exceptional risks could be assessed, but it just doesn't make sense to gamble an expensive treasure ship
I agree with most of what you say, but I think the above point is easily handwaved. The Nostromo could have been mostly or fully depreciated, and heavily insured; thus they get to buy a new, more efficient refinery ship a few years ahead of schedule if they lose it. Profit if the ship brings back the alien, profit if the ship is lost; win/win.
It goes without saying that they didn't really care about the crew, but it's a plus if they lose fewer people, and maybe automated refinery ships have smaller crews than other sorts of ships.
And maybe the Nostromo was the only ship they had in the area. It might have been Hobson's choice.
steveha
75F instead of 70?
Eh, I was guessing. I live in the suburbs near Seattle; my home doesn't even have an air conditioner. There are usually about a couple of weeks per year where I even wish I had one. The last time I even lived in a house that had air conditioning, I was a kid and didn't get to set the thermostat.
I should learn: don't make up numbers, just use hand-wavy phrases like "lukewarm instead of cool".
steveha
I kind of like the idea of peak rates. But the idea of "smart" appliances talking to the power company over the Internet is just dumb.
If you publish a schedule of prices, and I can save money by modifying my behavior, I'll do it. With the appliances I have.
Example: Puget Sound Energy experimented with giving us peak rates, so we began doing laundry later in the evening. We used the delay timer on our dishwasher to make it start itself at about 4am. At no point did we wish we had Internet 3.0 appliances.
By the way, PSE found that most people disliked the peak rates program. The discounts for modifying your behavior were not generous enough to make it worth the hassle for most people. I live in the suburbs near Seattle, so we have relatively cheap (mostly hydro) power anyway.
So, for success, make up a simple table of rates vs. times; make sure the discounts for off-peak power are sufficient to adequately reward the people who modify their behavior; done. You can do this now, and no one needs new appliances.
P.S. I did actually RTFA, and there is a bit more to their ideas than just Internet 3.0 appliances. One actually good idea is to have an energy manager in your home, and be able to tell your home that you are going on vacation. Your hot water heater can chill down and take a break, and your air conditioner can work less hard (keep the house at 76 degrees F, say, instead of 70 (24 Celsius instead of 21). But I really don't need my dishwasher to talk to the power company.
steveha
While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I'd like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn't stop iterating.
NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.
And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said "We don't need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done." NASA's unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that's a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.
It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today's dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960's dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn't it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn't need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.
It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960's, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980's? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.
The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.
steveha
Check out scitoys.com for some ideas. The section with a radio is pretty darn cool, and he does have a few simple projects like a 1-Watt amplifier and a laser audio transmitter. No soldering needed, which is a plus for a school setting with 9th graders.
steveha
He makes one interesting point: it would take a long time to build transmission lines that could carry large amounts of power all the way from the midwest to the northeast. In that time, technology could improve in a way that could make the project pointless.
On the other hand, improving the existing grid from 1940's tech to modern tech is guaranteed to be worth doing. (Is he correct that a major chunk of our existing grid is 1940's tech?)
On the subject of clean and decentralized power, how much longer before we get those solar roofing tiles that can contribute a useful amount of power? Even if we didn't wait for the improved tiles, would today's solar tiles provide a useful increment of electricity to feed into the current grid?
He quotes a price of $60 billion to build the new transmission lines. What would be the effect of using $60 billion to subsidize people to put solar tiles on top of existing buildings? How about $60 billion worth of pebble-bed or similarly safe small reactors, each one in a piece of the grid?
I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, but I'm inclined to agree that this project sounds like a way to put a whole bunch of eggs into a single basket. If we're going to do something big, let's try to make our electricity grid more decentralized, instead of adding one more frakking huge centralized source (however eco-clean).
steveha
What happened to you, man? You used to be cool! Where's all the in your face swearing and abrasiveness? You used to be hardcore!
So, you say this now. But I read your post that you "quoted the best part" from Zed's previous rant. You concluded:
In short, you criticized him big-time for his abusive ranting. Now, he has toned the rhetoric way the frak down, and you are criticizing him for not being as entertaining?
And then you finish up with this gem:
You, are a great software developer. Much better than I in all probability. You are a complete and utter asshole in nearly every other respect (yes, even in your music) and it should come as no surprise that you cannot land a job on a team. I would not pay money for your projects since I don't use them but I will send you $20 to stay in a hole, write software and restrict yourself from communicating with the outside world. Really, the world would be a better place.
So now you are criticizing him just as much as before. So my takeaway from this is that you think he's a big jerk, only less entertaining than he used to be?
What do you know about Zed anyway? All I know of him is his rants. If I were considering hiring him, I'd talk to people he worked with previously; that's what counts. Maybe he rants on his blog, but when you work with him he's nice. I don't know either way; I'm just saying, don't be too quick to judge someone from a few rants.
steveha
I read through the whole rant, and there is little to argue here.
He used GPL for a Python project? Not that big a deal; his stuff won't ever be folded into the Python base distribution, but no one will seriously get upset.
He offers commercial licenses for companies that fear GPL? Very sensible; not even RMS would object.
I enjoy his vigorous and clear writing, too. "You guys are all giant pansies, even with a project like Lamson you're still all afwaid of big bad monsta SMTP." Heh.
steveha
O'Malley said in 2000 there were more people in system programming than there are today despite the workloads having quadrupled which is quite an anomaly.
This is an actual sentence from the story. I guess reporters don't need to learn how to use clauses, and editors don't edit.
If E. B. White were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.
steveha
I suspect that one of the reasons the Italian government did this was to make Venice a little bit more attractive as a place to live.
Venice is an amazing place, full of history. It's also an expensive place, as it is somewhat disconnected (no cars or trucks for hauling stuff, just boats and hand carts) and the glorious old houses are somewhat crumbling. I read that the Italian government is worried about a trend where wealthy foreigners buy apartments or houses in Venice; they don't want Venice to become primarily a theme park for the wealthy, they would rather have Italians living there. IIRC if you are Italian and you move to Venice, you can get a stipend from the Italian government to help defray your living expenses.
This is clever. Venice is small enough to be carpeted wall-to-wall with good wireless signal, and it shouldn't have cost too much. It's a simple thing that wasn't hard to do that will make Venice much more interesting as a place to live.
steveha
I haven't been in a situation quite as extreme as yours, but I was in a long-hours and high-stress job with a long commute last year. My only workout was bicycling long miles on weekends. I held my weight steady, until at the end the craziness hit its peak and I put on ten pounds in two months. (And I don't mean ten pounds of muscle.)
Like other posters, I urge you to change something if you can. Get a better job, move closer, something. What you are doing is crazy. If the pay is golden, do it for a while. If it is a stepping stone to something better, make sure you actually get there; don't burn yourself out forever waiting for an opportunity that isn't coming.
All that said, if you must do this, be sure to eat a healthy diet. It's a pain, but you probably need to bring your own food, so you know what you are eating. You need to eat lots of protein, and high-quality carbs (not white flour, white sugar, white rice...).
A book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is my bible for this stuff. It's sold as a PDF over the Internet; see the web site for details. Here's an old Slashdot posting where I summarize the ideas of the book.
That book tells you how to measure your body fat percentage, then use that information to calculate how many calories you should eat of what foods. One of his testimonials is from someone who said he is paralyzed and cannot exercise; by following the diet recommendations of the book, he was able to lose some body fat and improve his health.
By the way, I changed jobs and I now am in a lower-stress job. I still bicycle on weekends but now I'm working out at a gym two nights a week; and I've lost all the extra weight I put on in my previous job. I can tell you: it's easier to keep it off than to lose it again after you gain it. If your job is making you fat, that is a very good reason to get a different one.
steveha
All that he has done here is take a bunch of stuff that is known to work, but not economically, and tied it all together with a pretty diagram. Nothing new has happened here
I think you are being needlessly harsh here.
His key contribution was to think: "How many things can I chain together so that the waste from one thing feeds something else?" Thus, methane from the digester powers cooking stoves; carbon dioxide from the burned methane feeds algae. I've heard of methane digesters, I've heard of cooking stoves, and I've heard of algae; I haven't heard of an integrated system like this.
If you RTFA, he relates a story about how the gift of a fresh water system to a poor village had an unfortunate side effect: the extra water the village used caused their sewage system to be overloaded. Their "system" was to put their sewage in buckets and dump out the buckets; they ended up with raw sewage running in their streets. He consciously tried to design a system that has no negative effects. (And that's probably an inspiration for including the flush latrines in his design, latrines that feed the digester and/or the algae.)
Even if his design turns out to be flawed, the flaws might be fixable or at least the idea might inspire an experienced engineer to design something even better.
I didn't invent anything this clever when I was 15. How about you?
steveha
Except that when a normal person uses the term "downward pressure" when referring to the cost of something it does mean that the price goes down
Really! "Downward pressure" cannot slow the rate of rise? "Downward pressure" only exists when something is actually going down? This is fascinating; I had no idea. (Because I'm not a "normal person", you see. How could I be expected to know?)
How do you find out these things? Is there a society that decides what terms a "normal person" can use? I'd like to join!
steveha
The situation seems pretty clear to me.
Theora is just not as good as H.264; you can get better quality with the same bits in H.264, or similar quality in fewer bits.
Theora is, however, good enough for general use for Internet video. It's at least as good as H.263, which actually has been used for years. (Breathless claims that Theora would need twice as many bits as H.264 are just silly.)
Since Theora is free in all ways, browsers can just build it in, and sites like Wikipedia are going to use it. Since H.264 is better, sites with money will pay the H.264 fees to save money on bandwidth. And, if I had a web business, I'd hesitate to paint myself into a corner with H.264; the patent owners have the power to jack up the royalties if they decide to.
In short, both Theora and H.264 will be found on the Internet in the near future. And we can all just get along.
(Now watch Theora fanboys and H.264 fanboys team up to mod this post down through the floor... :-)
P.S. Ogg Vorbis never toppled MP3 from the throne. However, the existence of Vorbis may have exerted some downward pressure on the licensing fees for the paid codecs. In a similar way, the existence of Theora may cause the patent holders for the other video formats to not try to charge quite as much.
steveha
Are you interested in the liberties guaranteed by those amendments?
Yes, of course. I'm interested in all ten of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, and indeed the whole Constitution.
If so, I don't see a reason not to support the ACLU
They advertise themselves as an organization devoted to civil liberties. The reality is that they are only devoted to some of the liberties, the ones they approve. And they publicly and officially take the position that gun rights are not civil rights, and they argue against court decisions that support the Second Amendment. I dislike organizations that are opposed to Second Amendment rights, and the ACLU qualifies.
If the ACLU wants my donations, all they have to do is start defending the entire Bill of Rights with the same zeal with which they defend the bits they like. They can hold their collective nose and defend Nazis and dirtbags whose civil rights are being violated; why can't they hold their nose and defend the parts of the Bill of Rights they don't like?
steveha
The ACLU will attack with the ferocity of a pit bull if the First Amendment is under even a vague threat. They are equally fanatical about Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment. They don't just take the obvious cases: if a student is forbidden to wear a black armband, that's a "free speech" violation under the First Amendment.
The Second Amendment, however, will have to look after itself; they won't spend any time or effort to help anyone in a Second Amendment case. If you can find evidence that shows the ACLU helping anyone, anyone at all, with a gun rights issue, please post evidence. (I'd love to be wrong on this one.) A city (Washington, D.C. for example) could pass a law forbidding all ownership of all guns to everyone, and that's not a clear enough Second Amendment violation to prompt the ACLU to act.
That link you provided is a great example. Here's some text:
The Second Amendment is very clear: "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Many people, including the ACLU, take the intellectually dishonest position that the odd introductory clause ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,") relegates this right to some sort of state's right. There are ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights; apparently nine of them refer to individual rights of the people, and one of them, given a position of prominence (second from the top, right after freedom of speech!) is a mere state's right. Oh sure, and I am Queen Marie of Romania. (And We are not amused.)
Read some of the writings of the founding fathers, and there is no doubt at all what they meant in the Second Amendment. When the Second Amendment was written, "the Militia" was the whole of the people (or at least the adult male citizens, but we would reject this restrictive view today). At that time, "well regulated" meant "in good working order". So overall, this is approximately the same as "A well-educated Populace, being a good thing, the right of the people to own and read Books, shall not be infringed." Would anyone seriously try to argue that "the Populace" and "the people" are not the same thing?
Now, an organization like the ACLU is supposed to be a pit bull on rights issues. I want them to protect the rights of people I hate. And I'm here to tell you: they just don't do their job on the Second Amendment. Not for Nazis, not for skinheads, not for drug dealers, and not for ordinary citizens.
The Second Amendment does have its friends. The NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation are doing the sort of job the ACLU ought to be doing. They get vilified for this, of course. I believe that some of the state-level ACLUs actually do take the position that the Second Amendment means what it says; I am talking specifically about the national-level one.
P.S. Here's a picture of a poster made by the ACLU, an "Illustrated Guide to the Bill of Rights". The Second Amendment isn't on there. I saw an even more egregious poster made by the ACLU, which presented ten paragraphs that were not numbered; the ten paragraphs were the First Amendment, the Third Amendment, and so on, with one of the longer Amendments split into two paragraphs so there would be ten. I wish I had saved a link to that; I can't seem to find it now.
http://www.nickschweitzer.net/2007/07/19/TheACLUProtectingYourAbridgedRightsSince1920.aspx
steveha
Something as simple as deleting the wrong partition becomes an irreversible operation if you do it using a tool that supports TRIM on TRIM-enabled hardware.
This seems needlessly verbose. Let me shorten it for you:
Deleting a partition should always be considered an irreversible operation.
Hmmm, even shorter:
Don't delete a partition unless you want it to go away forever.
Even if you restore the partition table from a backup, you will likely suffer silent file system corruption, which may even not be apparent until it's too late.
If TRIM support is actually implemented on the device, the device is free to 'lose' data on TRIMmed blocks until they are written at least once.
If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that a disk partitioning tool will use TRIM to not only wipe the partition table itself, but also nuke the partition data from orbit. And you the point out that it would not be adequate to rewrite just the sectors of the partition table.
If so, then the answer is: you don't just restore the partition table, you restore the whole partition (including data) from backup.
I for one consider much-faster write speeds to be a bigger advantage than possibly being able to reverse a partition deletion.
steveha
If I punch a hole through space via a wormhole and travel at 45mph on a moped through the wormhole to travel a normal space distance of 600 light-years... I just traveled FTL. and THAT does not violate causality.
Except that I have been told repeatedly that it does violate causality. Here are some references:
http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html
http://stason.org/TULARC/education-books/startrek-relativity-FTL/8-2-How-FTL-Travel-Implies-Violation-of-Causality.html
http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
But I still don't grok it. Probably a good thing I'm not a physicist.
steveha
Can anyone point me at a web site that explains why FTL travel violates causality? My understanding is that it doesn't matter what technique you posit for FTL travel ("warp drive", "hyperspace", teleportation, bloater drive, etc.), none of them are possible because FTL travel would allow causality paradoxes.
As I understand it, the basic problem is that there isn't a single frame of reference for the whole universe, and for observers in different frames of reference, FTL travel would look like traveling back in time. But I don't quite grok it.
I seem to recall that the physics permits a wormhole that connects two points in space and time, implying an instant travel from future to past; I think the handwavy explanation was that the math allows this but you would be destroyed by the wormhole if you tried to travel through it so there is no causality paradox.
I have also heard people point out that, if you stand on a rotating planet, it appears to you that distant galaxies are whirling around you at many times the speed of light, and given relativity, isn't it valid to say that from your frame of reference those galaxies are moving FTL? As little as I know about physics, I'm not touching this.
steveha
My issue with the graph is someone needs to take a class on "how to make a graph". 0% performance and $0 cpu.... why? Was there a $0 cpu? Did any of the cpus get a 0%?
Probably because the person who made that graph for The Tech Report wanted all the proportions to be honest.
Did you ever read the book How to Lie with Statistics? Or the book How to Lie with Charts? Or a nice, short blog post called Graphs That Lie?
When you chop out some of the "wasted space" in a graph, you distort the graph. Unless people are careful and check where your axes begin, and then mentally visualize where the axes go, they'll get a misleading idea of the data from the graph.
Suppose the bottom part of the graph was sliced off, at the 90% line, to make you happier. Imagine what it would look like. The AMD X2 6400+, sitting at the 100% line, would have very little white space under it; and the Intel i7-920, sitting a bit below the 200% line, would now appear to be ten times faster than the AMD X2 6400+. The numbers would be the same, but the visual impact would be that the Intel chip totally blows away the AMD chips.
The graph is good the way it is.
I'll meet you halfway, though: it wouldn't have hurt for them to have put in a second chart, zooming in on just the most crowded areas.
steveha
In TFA, DVD Jon says this:
Emphasis added by me.
I agree with him: all Apple has to do is add code to check the root USB node, see that the device is a Palm Pre, and refuse to accept the device as an iPod.
P.S. If Palm had just gone to Apple and said "we want to make the Palm Pre sync with iTunes", would Apple have been reasonable about it? I saw a comment on Slashdot mentioning that there are non-Apple devices that sync with iTunes, implying that Apple can be reasonable. But in this case, the Pre is competing with the iPhone! I imagine Apple would do anything they could to sandbag a competitor, including denying iTunes.
Apple won't sue Palm. But I won't be surprised if they do this check and lock the Pre out of iTunes.
steveha
When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc. IDEs like Netbeans or Eclipse have autocompletion functionality that make your life as a developer at lot easier.
And, years before there were any IDEs, I was using ctags with vi and managing large programs with ease. You're looking at a call to function foobar(), you put the cursor anywhere in the name of the function and hit Ctrl+], and bam, you are now looking at the function definition. Ctrl+T pops the tag stack and puts you back to the call.
http://ctags.sourceforge.net/
These days, vim might have autocompletion, and Emacs doubtless has it somewhere in its gigabytes of code. I've never looked for it, because I just flip back and forth between the data structure definition and the code I'm writing; and I copy the member names instead of typing them. (Okay, I just did a Google search; looks like vim does have it.)
My current project is portable between Linux and Windows. I can work on it either on a Windows computer or on a Linux computer. On the Windows computer I use Visual Studio, and on the Linux computer I use vim and ctags. For intense debugging, the Visual Studio debugger is more convenient; someday I ought to get a visual debugger for Linux. But overall, I do most of my work in Linux. It's equally fast and I enjoy it more.
It helps that I have been using vi since before IDEs existed... if I were heavily trained on an IDE, and deeply grokked its inner mysteries, I might give the edge to the IDE.
steveha
A while ago I remember some guy was posting troll messages from an account with a name that implied he was someone famous. I looked up Slashdot's policy about impersonation and found that the policy was basically "let the moderation system handle it".
I just looked at the FAQ and I could not find the section I remembered. Did Slashdot change this policy?
As a for-instance... suppose the user name "esr" was not registered, and someone registered it and started posting troll messages that superficially looked like something Eric Raymond might write (let's say the troll cut-and-pastes actual things ESR wrote). But then URLs are actually links to goatse, and the troll edits comments to include insulting racial epithets, and other changes like that. If the real ESR complained, would Slashdot help shut down the trolling "esr" account name?
steveha