An easier way would be to install bootchart, boot a couple or three times plugged in, boot a couple or three times from battery, and then compare the charts to see what is taking longer to load (assuming that there is still a difference).
Besides incredibly trivial things like replacing our light bulbs with CFDs and turning off our power when we go outside, which is a *trivial* amount of savings, there's not much humans can do to save power.
Do you have a reference? I do not think that statement is true.
If it were true, then people in the 15th century would have used the same amount of energy as people living today, which is obviously false. Also obvious is the fact that nobody wants to live in a dark, cold world where long-distance transportation is near impossible, as humans in the 15th century did. So, what we need to do is find a way to reap the benefits of modern technology while using a lesser amount of energy. This is not impossible either, and the results are not trivial.
Germany, for example, gets by with a per capita energy consumption of around 40% of that of the United States without a significant loss in standard of living. How is this done? People habitually turn off lights in rooms that they are not in; smaller, more fuel efficient cars are the norm; waste products are heavily mined for reusable resources; every major city has a reliable, efficient, and widely utilized public transportation networks; people tend to choose bicycles or walking to nearby locations rather than driving; individuals reuse packaging (you bring your own bags to the grocery store); products are generally packed in less packaging material. Some of these things are done by individuals, some of them require government or corporate intervention. However, millions of people choosing to do the right thing creates significant, measurable results on that country's energy footprint.
So what can you do? Light bulbs are the single biggest user of energy in most western households. Turning off lights in rooms you are not in makes a small difference. Turning the heat down a couple degrees makes a small difference. Selecting a smaller car makes a small difference. Avoiding using that car when you don't need to makes a small difference. Sorting your waste materials for recycling makes a small difference. Taken together, these measures make a huge difference in the amount of energy you as an individual consume. If most of your fellow citizens do the same thing, together you will have a huge impact on the amount of energy your country consumes.
You are probably going to die of something other than an automobile accident. Does that mean that the auto industry should stop spending billions on crash tests and safety features (airbags, crumple zones, ABS, seatbelts, etc)? No.
True, there are other, more pressing issues in the world, and so the asteroid thing should be on the back burner, but that does not mean that we should turn the back burner off. People can multi task, so lets do it.
I found that Ubuntu booted initially in +/- 50 seconds, but then that as I installed software and services, it slowed to around 4 minutes. The reason for this is that Ubuntu uses readahead to read all of the required files into memory in one sweep as the machine boots, but as you install stuff, files move around and it doesn't know where files are physically located any more. So, the OS needs to ask the disk to read each individual file as the boot scripts ask for them. The solution to this is very easy:
That alone took my boot speed back down to 80 seconds. Then you can install the package bootchart to see what is taking so long to load and tweak those services to load faster or not at all, depending on what you need. For example, I saw that fsck was taking around 25 seconds on boot, and I gained back about 15 seconds by modifying/etc/fstab so that fsck would not check the FAT32 partition that I use to share files with XP. Bootchart will help you figure out why your box takes so much longer to boot when plugged in, as well.
Now I have a laptop that boots into a usable kde desktop in 47 seconds. I am sure you can do this too. If you need more help, go to the Ubuntuforums, they are full of people who want to help.
Amazon has admitted to experimenting with "targeted" pricing, that is they track their customers, and raise or lower the price to what they think that person will pay. Based on browsing history, you can make pretty good guesses as to what a person really wants and what their income is. When we loose our anonymity, this kind of scenario becomes possible. Thus, any service that helps maintain internet anonymity is a good thing (tm)
However, more fundamentally, the answer is: it does not matter. I am innocent until proven guilty.
OpenOffice came installed on the discount computer I bought from TigerDirect (advertised as having a complete MS-compatible office suite pre-installed), so did Firefox. They even offer PCLinuxOS on desktops. If this discount vendor can do it, I don't see why Dell can't.
You have no clue how the Ubuntu releases work, do you? What you proposing exists since 06/2006, it is called Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
About September last year, an xorg update in Dapper broke support for my (shitty) SavageS3 graphics card, causing a hard crash every 20 minutes or so. The only solution was to reinstall the old xorg and apt-pin it, but after a while that prevented other things from getting their upgrades. Switched to Etch, problem solved. As of mid-February, the problem was still there in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is great, but LTS ain't all it's cracked up to be.
How about the negative affects of having 7000 distros? I'm not against having having more than 1 distro, but it seems to me like a lot of people put out distros just for the sake of it.
While I will agree that all the distros can be confusing, it is ultimately good for the Linux ecosystem, I think. Sometimes Average Joes comes up with some really good stuff that the big guys would not have thought of, and it ends up getting incorporated in big name products. Just look at Knoppix, pioneer of the linux Live CD, or nowadays SLAX, pioneer of the modular easy to modify LiveCD. If you want one of the main distros, feel free to choose from RedHat, SuSE, Debian or (these days) Ubuntu. Software developers can make the same choice.
How about instead of Kubuntu, we just stuck with Unbuntu, and got someone to maintain some sort of system for installing KDE.
you mean like sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop?
Why do we need a new distro. How about instead of KnoppyMyth, MythDora, and probably a few others i'm missing, somebody works on an easier way to install (and setup properly) MythTV on other distros.
Because other distros contain 50 million packages that you probably don't want/need on a mythbox
I would love to run MythTV, but it sucks that the only way to get it working is to use a distro that doesn't let you do anything else.
I'm not sure if these are the five things, since the site is Slashdotted, but here's five more I've noticed you cannot discuss about Linux: 1. The negative effects of having multiple distros 2. The GIMP's interface 3. 3rd-Party games (though these days, there ARE a fair amount of good FOSS games) 4. BSD good, Gentoo for ricers 5. Fight Club
1. This is because the vast majority of the community believes having many distros (and the freedom to brew your own por yourself of between you and a couple of friends) is what makes linux strong.
2. That is because the vast majority of GIMP interface complaints have the words "not like in Photoshop" in them somewhere, which totally ignores the basic fact that GIMP is not intended to be a Photoshop replacement/clone.
3. Lots of people talk about that. Lots of people advocate Wine, Cedega and CXOffice for just that reason.
4. I am afraid I don't understand this one.
5. This is your last warning. Stop talking about Figh... dammit.
The downside to an explosion of Linux installations?
Linux Geeks getting called out when friends and neighbors can't get their Linux Desktops working.
Remember - this was all your idea.
I don't consider that a downside at all. I already spend a significant amount of time on the Ubuntu forums trying to help strangers get their linux installation working for no reward at all, and often without enough of a response to know if I ever actually helped anyone. If my friends family all had linux, I could be helpful to people I actually know, find out if I was right or way off the mark, and maybe even get a free beer.
I intended that post to be humorous, but as I re-read it I see that it does come off being pretty, well, trollish. That's why they say to tick the AC for jokes, I guess.
However, as some swiss friends of mine perpetually insist on reminding me, yes CERN did come up with a few of the many technologies behind the WWW, but that is not relevant to the question of locale here. The fact is, at the time of the data sample, the overwhelming majority of users of both of the search engines were in the United States.
What I find amusing is the fact that one of the most popular search terms in the AOL data set was "myspace," which he attributes to AOL targeting home users who desire to use the internet for social activities. To me, this indicates that people who use AOL to search do not know the difference between a search box and a URL bar.
Actually, according to the BBC, the actual quote was:
In the 50 years of European antitrust policy, it's the first time we've been confronted with a company that has failed to comply with an antitrust decision.
Gonna have to call bullshit on this one. The one thing that GIMP is missing is a CMYK implementation (which will be in 2.3, they say). Then, it will be ready for professional printing.
Granted, you will probably still need Photoshop to do glossy full color magazines, but the vast majority of professional printing is pamphlets, newspapers, and junk mail and other low quality bulk print jobs, for which the GIMP is just fine. In the future, Photoshop will have to target an ever-decreasing niche.
I love the way that people involved in DRM think it adds to the product.
DRM does add costumer value to the product, for Macromedia's customers. Macromedia's customers, however, are not you and me. Most of Macromedia's customers are members of an organization that ends in AA.
Best argument in the history of rhetoric: (And I took 5 years of philosophy)
I am sorry, but taking five years of philosophy alone does not make a person an authority on anything but the history of philosophy and maybe the structure of classic philosophical arguments. As another poster has already commented, your premise is fundamentally flawed. Philosophy is a worthy pursuit, but only when accompanied by academic pursuits that give you the basis to create informed and proper premises from which to reason.
Thus, if you want to argue about what effect evolution has on the state of being human, you need to have a strong grounding in science, the scientific process, and the theory of evolution. Similarly, if you wish to argue about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different political systems, you need to have studied those systems, understand how they came into existence, and understand how they really work in practice (as opposed to propaganda).
This is also why it is so important to teach science (or, more importantly, the scientific method) in schools. The vast majority of people who stand up against "The Church of Science" do so because they do not understand it and conclude that if they do not understand it, it must be a matter of faith, ergo no different than any other matter of faith.
It has been done. It was called Welchia. It didn't work out too well. From wikipedia:
While this worm did no apparent damage to individual systems -- indeed, it actually helped to secure certain systems -- it did create vast amounts of traffic by its transmission method, thereby slowing down the Internet and the Microsoft website. The worm also made some systems unstable by its workings, and, once the patches had been installed, it rebooted the system. Because of these effects, the worm was perceived as a threat, and a patch was released by all major anti-viral companies.
Slashdot Mirror
An easier way would be to install bootchart, boot a couple or three times plugged in, boot a couple or three times from battery, and then compare the charts to see what is taking longer to load (assuming that there is still a difference).
If it were true, then people in the 15th century would have used the same amount of energy as people living today, which is obviously false. Also obvious is the fact that nobody wants to live in a dark, cold world where long-distance transportation is near impossible, as humans in the 15th century did. So, what we need to do is find a way to reap the benefits of modern technology while using a lesser amount of energy. This is not impossible either, and the results are not trivial.
Germany, for example, gets by with a per capita energy consumption of around 40% of that of the United States without a significant loss in standard of living. How is this done? People habitually turn off lights in rooms that they are not in; smaller, more fuel efficient cars are the norm; waste products are heavily mined for reusable resources; every major city has a reliable, efficient, and widely utilized public transportation networks; people tend to choose bicycles or walking to nearby locations rather than driving; individuals reuse packaging (you bring your own bags to the grocery store); products are generally packed in less packaging material. Some of these things are done by individuals, some of them require government or corporate intervention. However, millions of people choosing to do the right thing creates significant, measurable results on that country's energy footprint.
So what can you do? Light bulbs are the single biggest user of energy in most western households. Turning off lights in rooms you are not in makes a small difference. Turning the heat down a couple degrees makes a small difference. Selecting a smaller car makes a small difference. Avoiding using that car when you don't need to makes a small difference. Sorting your waste materials for recycling makes a small difference. Taken together, these measures make a huge difference in the amount of energy you as an individual consume. If most of your fellow citizens do the same thing, together you will have a huge impact on the amount of energy your country consumes.
True, there are other, more pressing issues in the world, and so the asteroid thing should be on the back burner, but that does not mean that we should turn the back burner off. People can multi task, so lets do it.
They are working on it. I don't know if it will be in this release, but it is on the way. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/bull et-proof-x/
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25426 3&highlight=grub+profile+speed+boot
/etc/fstab so that fsck would not check the FAT32 partition that I use to share files with XP. Bootchart will help you figure out why your box takes so much longer to boot when plugged in, as well.
That alone took my boot speed back down to 80 seconds. Then you can install the package bootchart to see what is taking so long to load and tweak those services to load faster or not at all, depending on what you need. For example, I saw that fsck was taking around 25 seconds on boot, and I gained back about 15 seconds by modifying
Now I have a laptop that boots into a usable kde desktop in 47 seconds. I am sure you can do this too. If you need more help, go to the Ubuntuforums, they are full of people who want to help.
Take care
-mat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust _case/>
This includes some references to Europe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Micros oft#Government_anti-trust_suits/>
That help?
However, more fundamentally, the answer is: it does not matter. I am innocent until proven guilty.
OpenOffice came installed on the discount computer I bought from TigerDirect (advertised as having a complete MS-compatible office suite pre-installed), so did Firefox. They even offer PCLinuxOS on desktops. If this discount vendor can do it, I don't see why Dell can't.
Ubuntu is great, but LTS ain't all it's cracked up to be.
Well it looks like you are too far down the page to get modded funny, but I laughed my ass off at this post. Thanks.
2. That is because the vast majority of GIMP interface complaints have the words "not like in Photoshop" in them somewhere, which totally ignores the basic fact that GIMP is not intended to be a Photoshop replacement/clone.
3. Lots of people talk about that. Lots of people advocate Wine, Cedega and CXOffice for just that reason.
4. I am afraid I don't understand this one.
5. This is your last warning. Stop talking about Figh... dammit.
In fact, I think that would be a major plus.
Of course not, since 2007 if finally going to be the year of the Linux Desktop.
Seriously, all development in the world has stopped since WoW was released, even if we are slow to notice it. Just look at Vista.
However, as some swiss friends of mine perpetually insist on reminding me, yes CERN did come up with a few of the many technologies behind the WWW, but that is not relevant to the question of locale here. The fact is, at the time of the data sample, the overwhelming majority of users of both of the search engines were in the United States.
What I find amusing is the fact that one of the most popular search terms in the AOL data set was "myspace," which he attributes to AOL targeting home users who desire to use the internet for social activities. To me, this indicates that people who use AOL to search do not know the difference between a search box and a URL bar.
In the 50 years of European antitrust policy, it's the first time we've been confronted with a company that has failed to comply with an antitrust decision.
I find that statement rather significant. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6408391.stm
Granted, you will probably still need Photoshop to do glossy full color magazines, but the vast majority of professional printing is pamphlets, newspapers, and junk mail and other low quality bulk print jobs, for which the GIMP is just fine. In the future, Photoshop will have to target an ever-decreasing niche.
Take care
-mat
DRM does add costumer value to the product, for Macromedia's customers. Macromedia's customers, however, are not you and me. Most of Macromedia's customers are members of an organization that ends in AA.
Thus, if you want to argue about what effect evolution has on the state of being human, you need to have a strong grounding in science, the scientific process, and the theory of evolution. Similarly, if you wish to argue about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different political systems, you need to have studied those systems, understand how they came into existence, and understand how they really work in practice (as opposed to propaganda).
This is also why it is so important to teach science (or, more importantly, the scientific method) in schools. The vast majority of people who stand up against "The Church of Science" do so because they do not understand it and conclude that if they do not understand it, it must be a matter of faith, ergo no different than any other matter of faith.
Education is everything.