If the box can run Win XP, it can run any contemporary Linux distro, and the original Win XP with the apps that are still needed can be run as a VM under that Linux. Performance will not be affected.
But this approach is probably not going to be widely adopted since the great majority of persons who provide Windows support for a living cannot be bothered to learn anything new. This upgrade path won't be utilized mostly because learning new stuff is hard and the value for the tech support person is not obvious.
There's a special name for a "story to attempt to be positive": "propaganda".
True enough. But how does that apply to TFA? Did you actually RTFA?
Anyone with ciritcal thinking skills will demand to examine both the negatives and the positives.
So are you offering this as a definition? Or merely as a tautology? In either case, it is so self-evident that the sentence is a waste of slashdot resources.
And thus we see more clearly the strong link between post classical physics and linguistics studies.
We cannot hypothesize about that which we cannot yet express in language, where language includes all that we can do in natural speech, mathematics, or computer simulations. That is an inherent limitation of science.
Since we have no way of framing the questions, we cannot talk about what was there before the big bang, what is on the other side of a black hole's event horizon, or what is going on in that part of the Universe that is on the far side of our part of the big bang. Those things might be interesting, but they are currently outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Even though our language skills continue to improve, some of those things might always be outside the realm of science. (The universe is that Big.)
Biochar is produced through pyrolysis, not incineration. That's a very different, and odorless, technology. (Basically, you burn the smells as an integral part of the process.)
As pointed out several times already, there would be no odor from biochar production: what would produce the odors is burned as part of the process.
Not emphasized, but of great importance, is that biochar sequesters carbon for thousands of years.
Also not emphasized, but also of great importance, biochar is a potent soil amendment. It can recover the health of soils depleted by monoculture farming practices, for instance.
Well, yes, but with this difference: incineration pumps all the carbon in the poop into the atmosphere. Biochar production uses the heat to run a pyrolytic, anaerobic reaction where a good portion of the carbon is turned to charcoal and sequestered away for several thousand years. Since the charcoal retains the microscopic physical structures of cell walls, etc, it also has some very good soil building qualities, such as retaining fertilizers for slow release and increasing the moisture holding capability of the soil.
Biochar production from garden debris burns the gasses it produces; I would expect the same of a biochar toilet. It just makes sense: you have a source of ignition and the burning adds more heat to the pyrolysis process.
In all fairness, though, traditional composting toilets can't handle the volume produced in urban settings. They may be great for homes, but not so much for apartment housing, dormitories, airport terminals, etc. Biochar toilets can be adapted to meet at least some of these needs.
Another point: biochar acts something like a catalyst to improve soil but is not consumed in the process. The carbon is effectively sequestered for thousands of years, but biocharred enriched soils are better at appropriate release of moisture and nutrients while also diluting many soil toxins.
This might seem like the magic cure-all to all post-modern ills, but it isn't all blue sky hype. Each gram of biochar adds the surface area of a tennis court to the soil; a little bit of it goes a long way.
One last point: composting toilets only work well if they are properly managed. I had the misfortune of having a country neighbor for several years who was learning how to manage her composting toilet, and there were definitely episodes of odor problems.
Just over 364 days to prepare for the big one!
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 2
Next year's Pi Day will make all other Pi Days any of us will experience pale in comparison. For it will be
3-14-15!!?!
Not only that, but it will contain TWO Pi minutes! The first at 9:26 in the morning, and the second at 9:26 in the evening.
.
So it is not yet too late to begin preparing for the momentous events. But do not delay! These precious minutes will never come around again!
Every once in a while an AC says something salient. Case in point:
the spying was on the committee who are supposed to oversee and authorize the spies. The committee can hardly effectively oversee the spying when they are turned into a target of spying themselves.
It seems like Feinstein has adequately demonstrated that she is incapable of doing her current Senate assignments. Is there a procedure to force her out of her chairmanship for cause, where cause is obvious incompetence?
The sensible thing to do would be to migrate to a Linux distro with good business support, and install WinXP on VMs within that Linux. That's as secure and future proof as you can get.
It is impossible to get any hard data on Linux usage. It is completely unpossible to get any hard data on the number of WinXP installations that are running along side or within a Linux distro. Anecdotal information is as good as it gets.
I bother to participate in these discussions because I'm an old curmudgeon who thinks the world would be a better place if all the marketeers were slapped upside the head until they barfed out their intrinsic idiocy where everyone could see it. I much prefer to live in a society where people are using good computer systems to build their neighborhood associations, clubs, church groups, and so on, than to see them waste all that time and money on a bunch of Microsoft or Apple crap that costs too much and often gets in the way of doing the actual work.
My anecdotal information is from my experiences setting up and using Windows systems since day one (I started installing and managing early DOS networks in the 1980s), and using Linux distros as soon as they became effective, around 2000 - 2003. I stay in touch with Windows developments, and I actively follow several forums, etc, in the Ubuntu universe.
You are focused on a dwindling minority of the market and not looking at the larger picture.
Try talking to Linux distro users. Most have either set up dual boot systems with some kind of Windows in one of the partitions, or are running virtual machines inside Linux, with one of them being a Windows version, or are thinking through which of these they should do. Mostly WinXP is used for these secondary OSs. It is stable, it is easily available, and when run as a secondary OS its vulnerabilities don't matter so much.
At this point, the numbers of Linux users who also have WinXP installed is comparable in size to the number of ancient WinXP only machines that are being used by little old grannies.
Upgrading an ancient version of Ubuntu to current status would be a serial process: you could not do it directly but if you wanted to, you could upgrade through the intermediate releases until you were current: 4.10 to 5.04 to 6.06 (1st LTS) to 8.04 (LTS) to 10.4 (LTS) to 12.04 (latest LTS). The next Long Term Support version is in beta now and will be released as 14.04 next month. I'd skip 13.10: either wait for 14.04 final or install 14.04 beta, which is pretty stable from what I hear.
However the easier way would be to back up/home where all user data should be, install 14.04 over the old version, copy all the non-hidden stuff from the backup into the new/home, then mine the/home/user/ hidden directories for customizations that will still work. Many of those user customizations will carry forward, too. All the old data files will.
The process is much easier than upgrading from any version of Windows to any newer version of Windows. I think Microsoft is still purposefully breaking upgrades. The only ones I have ever done that were mostly seamless was from Win3.0 to Win3.1 to Win3.11. Going from Win3.11 to Win98 was not too bad, either (I skipped the horrible Win95 crap).
I expect a lot of the machines that are still running WinXP are dual booting with one of the newer Linux distros. WinXP is still the greatest for legacy apps and good enough for many of the classic games. Everyday work can be done more easily and safely in a Linux distro.
RTFA. Bugatti hid the plane before the Germans invaded. If they had found it, and made use of the technology Bugatti had developed, the Germans would probably have succeeded in their attacks on London.
Closely held corporations are different, though, from publicly traded corporations, which is the context of this discussion. An IPO is arranged in such a way that first purchasers are essentially the same as later purchasers who use the stockmarket. I understand that there is a large body of law determining the way IPOs are handled, basically to assure that there is no room for fraud.
Investors-- stockholders-- own title only. They do not own any of the property. This is similar to the way the bank owns the mortgage on your home, but you still own your home.
The difference is the entire reason for corporations to exist. It allows a stockholder to buy into a corporation without taking on any of the responsibilities that would go along with a partnership or any other ownership arrangement.
In other terms, if you own something, you are responsible for it. If the thing injures somebody, then you are liable. Stockholders are by law irresponsible. They have no ownership in the thing, they only "own" the paper giving them partial rights as title holders.
An investor is not an owner. The money he paid for the stock did not go to Apple, it went to some other market player. In a very real sense, a corporation has no owners. Not in the sense that you own your car (assuming you've finished paying for it).
Corporate policies are made by the Board of Directors and the corporate officers. The Board directs the officers. The Board can be directed by the stockholders. Which happened in this case, with the stockholders telling the Board that ROI was less important than going green.
This has been the first thing Apple has done since the Apple ][ days that makes me think I might want to own one of their products. Maybe. Go Tim!
That's what keeps me coming back to Slashdot. Every once in while, somebody slaps me upside my head with some chunk of the Universe I was completely unaware of. Keeps a guy kind of humble.
Welcome, Strange Alien, and what planet do you hail from? Here on Earth, what any human can see from the deck of any boat on any ocean at almost any time is the most constantly changing visual in human experience. Never is any part of that surface not in motion.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so fast.
If the box can run Win XP, it can run any contemporary Linux distro, and the original Win XP with the apps that are still needed can be run as a VM under that Linux. Performance will not be affected.
But this approach is probably not going to be widely adopted since the great majority of persons who provide Windows support for a living cannot be bothered to learn anything new. This upgrade path won't be utilized mostly because learning new stuff is hard and the value for the tech support person is not obvious.
There's a special name for a "story to attempt to be positive": "propaganda".
True enough. But how does that apply to TFA? Did you actually RTFA?
Anyone with ciritcal thinking skills will demand to examine both the negatives and the positives.
So are you offering this as a definition? Or merely as a tautology? In either case, it is so self-evident that the sentence is a waste of slashdot resources.
And thus we see more clearly the strong link between post classical physics and linguistics studies.
We cannot hypothesize about that which we cannot yet express in language, where language includes all that we can do in natural speech, mathematics, or computer simulations. That is an inherent limitation of science.
Since we have no way of framing the questions, we cannot talk about what was there before the big bang, what is on the other side of a black hole's event horizon, or what is going on in that part of the Universe that is on the far side of our part of the big bang. Those things might be interesting, but they are currently outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Even though our language skills continue to improve, some of those things might always be outside the realm of science. (The universe is that Big.)
Please read up on biochar before spouting off on a subject you know nothing about.
Biochar is produced through pyrolysis, not incineration. That's a very different, and odorless, technology. (Basically, you burn the smells as an integral part of the process.)
As pointed out several times already, there would be no odor from biochar production: what would produce the odors is burned as part of the process.
Not emphasized, but of great importance, is that biochar sequesters carbon for thousands of years.
Also not emphasized, but also of great importance, biochar is a potent soil amendment. It can recover the health of soils depleted by monoculture farming practices, for instance.
Well, yes, but with this difference: incineration pumps all the carbon in the poop into the atmosphere. Biochar production uses the heat to run a pyrolytic, anaerobic reaction where a good portion of the carbon is turned to charcoal and sequestered away for several thousand years. Since the charcoal retains the microscopic physical structures of cell walls, etc, it also has some very good soil building qualities, such as retaining fertilizers for slow release and increasing the moisture holding capability of the soil.
Biochar production from garden debris burns the gasses it produces; I would expect the same of a biochar toilet. It just makes sense: you have a source of ignition and the burning adds more heat to the pyrolysis process.
In all fairness, though, traditional composting toilets can't handle the volume produced in urban settings. They may be great for homes, but not so much for apartment housing, dormitories, airport terminals, etc. Biochar toilets can be adapted to meet at least some of these needs.
Another point: biochar acts something like a catalyst to improve soil but is not consumed in the process. The carbon is effectively sequestered for thousands of years, but biocharred enriched soils are better at appropriate release of moisture and nutrients while also diluting many soil toxins.
This might seem like the magic cure-all to all post-modern ills, but it isn't all blue sky hype. Each gram of biochar adds the surface area of a tennis court to the soil; a little bit of it goes a long way.
One last point: composting toilets only work well if they are properly managed. I had the misfortune of having a country neighbor for several years who was learning how to manage her composting toilet, and there were definitely episodes of odor problems.
Next year's Pi Day will make all other Pi Days any of us will experience pale in comparison. For it will be
3-14-15!!?!
Not only that, but it will contain TWO Pi minutes! The first at 9:26 in the morning, and the second at 9:26 in the evening.
.
So it is not yet too late to begin preparing for the momentous events. But do not delay! These precious minutes will never come around again!
Every once in a while an AC says something salient. Case in point:
the spying was on the committee who are supposed to oversee and authorize the spies. The committee can hardly effectively oversee the spying when they are turned into a target of spying themselves.
It seems like Feinstein has adequately demonstrated that she is incapable of doing her current Senate assignments. Is there a procedure to force her out of her chairmanship for cause, where cause is obvious incompetence?
Can a Senator like Feinstein be impeached?
Some people cuss a lot. Others swear. Some use foul language.
But some are just potty-mouthed. Their attempts to sound tough are just so infantile.
I've always felt that "potty-mouthed, chair-throwing, murder-threatening, monkey dancer" was an adequate moniker.
The sensible thing to do would be to migrate to a Linux distro with good business support, and install WinXP on VMs within that Linux. That's as secure and future proof as you can get.
It is impossible to get any hard data on Linux usage. It is completely unpossible to get any hard data on the number of WinXP installations that are running along side or within a Linux distro. Anecdotal information is as good as it gets.
I bother to participate in these discussions because I'm an old curmudgeon who thinks the world would be a better place if all the marketeers were slapped upside the head until they barfed out their intrinsic idiocy where everyone could see it. I much prefer to live in a society where people are using good computer systems to build their neighborhood associations, clubs, church groups, and so on, than to see them waste all that time and money on a bunch of Microsoft or Apple crap that costs too much and often gets in the way of doing the actual work.
My anecdotal information is from my experiences setting up and using Windows systems since day one (I started installing and managing early DOS networks in the 1980s), and using Linux distros as soon as they became effective, around 2000 - 2003. I stay in touch with Windows developments, and I actively follow several forums, etc, in the Ubuntu universe.
You are focused on a dwindling minority of the market and not looking at the larger picture.
Try talking to Linux distro users. Most have either set up dual boot systems with some kind of Windows in one of the partitions, or are running virtual machines inside Linux, with one of them being a Windows version, or are thinking through which of these they should do. Mostly WinXP is used for these secondary OSs. It is stable, it is easily available, and when run as a secondary OS its vulnerabilities don't matter so much.
At this point, the numbers of Linux users who also have WinXP installed is comparable in size to the number of ancient WinXP only machines that are being used by little old grannies.
Upgrading an ancient version of Ubuntu to current status would be a serial process: you could not do it directly but if you wanted to, you could upgrade through the intermediate releases until you were current: 4.10 to 5.04 to 6.06 (1st LTS) to 8.04 (LTS) to 10.4 (LTS) to 12.04 (latest LTS). The next Long Term Support version is in beta now and will be released as 14.04 next month. I'd skip 13.10: either wait for 14.04 final or install 14.04 beta, which is pretty stable from what I hear.
However the easier way would be to back up /home where all user data should be, install 14.04 over the old version, copy all the non-hidden stuff from the backup into the new /home, then mine the /home/user/ hidden directories for customizations that will still work. Many of those user customizations will carry forward, too. All the old data files will.
The process is much easier than upgrading from any version of Windows to any newer version of Windows. I think Microsoft is still purposefully breaking upgrades. The only ones I have ever done that were mostly seamless was from Win3.0 to Win3.1 to Win3.11. Going from Win3.11 to Win98 was not too bad, either (I skipped the horrible Win95 crap).
I expect a lot of the machines that are still running WinXP are dual booting with one of the newer Linux distros. WinXP is still the greatest for legacy apps and good enough for many of the classic games. Everyday work can be done more easily and safely in a Linux distro.
RTFA. Bugatti hid the plane before the Germans invaded. If they had found it, and made use of the technology Bugatti had developed, the Germans would probably have succeeded in their attacks on London.
RTFA. It was a French plane. Buggati had moved to France, and the plane's development was paid for by the French.
Yes, that's the edge case.
Closely held corporations are different, though, from publicly traded corporations, which is the context of this discussion. An IPO is arranged in such a way that first purchasers are essentially the same as later purchasers who use the stockmarket. I understand that there is a large body of law determining the way IPOs are handled, basically to assure that there is no room for fraud.
Think again.
Investors-- stockholders-- own title only. They do not own any of the property. This is similar to the way the bank owns the mortgage on your home, but you still own your home.
The difference is the entire reason for corporations to exist. It allows a stockholder to buy into a corporation without taking on any of the responsibilities that would go along with a partnership or any other ownership arrangement.
In other terms, if you own something, you are responsible for it. If the thing injures somebody, then you are liable. Stockholders are by law irresponsible. They have no ownership in the thing, they only "own" the paper giving them partial rights as title holders.
An investor is not an owner. The money he paid for the stock did not go to Apple, it went to some other market player. In a very real sense, a corporation has no owners. Not in the sense that you own your car (assuming you've finished paying for it).
Corporate policies are made by the Board of Directors and the corporate officers. The Board directs the officers. The Board can be directed by the stockholders. Which happened in this case, with the stockholders telling the Board that ROI was less important than going green.
This has been the first thing Apple has done since the Apple ][ days that makes me think I might want to own one of their products. Maybe. Go Tim!
Thanks! You've given me something to study up on.
That's what keeps me coming back to Slashdot. Every once in while, somebody slaps me upside my head with some chunk of the Universe I was completely unaware of. Keeps a guy kind of humble.
since most of the sea isn't changing,
You must be stranger to these parts.
Welcome, Strange Alien, and what planet do you hail from? Here on Earth, what any human can see from the deck of any boat on any ocean at almost any time is the most constantly changing visual in human experience. Never is any part of that surface not in motion.