While I too think there is probably no way to see into the future, but I see some problems with your reasoning.
If you think about it the ability to see into the future would be such a massive evolutionary advantage that there is absolutely no way it would remain hidden in dreams or only vaguely available
This assumes that such a trait/skill can be acquired/sharpened through evolution. For this, this ability to see into the future must be able to get passed on with reproduction. There is no reason to assume this. It may be a randomly acquired ability by the individual, and maybe there is no way it can pass on to one's offspring genetically.
Secondly if some could see the future (even partially) then we would on average see more people who made such claims at the top of industries / careers as they have an advantage. Yet the people who make such claims are usually at the bottom
I wouldn't be so sure that this ability will lead someone to top of industries/careers. Maybe this ability comes with a significant disability. I.e., the physical difference between a person with this ability, and another person without this ability; has 2 effects. One effect grants this ability to see into the future, the other effect of the same factor grants a definite significant disability. Maybe this ability is a lack of ambition / tendency to work hard.
This ability could also have a significant downside if it is not perfect. And most people who claim to have it, admit that it is not perfect. Suppose 1% of the time, the person actually has a correct intuition. When the details of the intuition are taken into account, suppose it gets rigorously scientifically proven that statistically it could not have happened by mere chance. The person can get very excited on observing this, and spread this claim of his ability. But it may not be any advantage to him: the other 99% of time his "intuition" is quite wrong. There is no guarantee that the 1% of times it actually works, it will such that an advantage can be derived out of this ability. For example, someone might have a premonition of the MD5 checksum of this post before I posted it. Utterly useless for all practical purposes.
The person will not act with full certainty on his intuitions because it works only 1% of the time.
James Randi will also not likely give any money to this guy, because Randi will test his intuition a few times. Since it works only 1% of the times, Randi will kick him out.
I don't know anything about Windows kernel internals, but:
The zeroing can be done entirely in software, don't you think? I describe my thinking in below points. Points 1 and 2 apply irrespective of whether there is a zeroing requirement or not.
1. When a process asks for a page (say 4kb) in memory, tell the process that you've got address n to n+4k. Mark in a kernel data structure, that this piece of memory belongs to this process.
2. Now, this kernel data structure is required frequently: whenever any process asks for data in any address, kernel needs to check if the process has the authority to read this address. So this kernel data structure is likely to remain in cache (L1/L2/L3).
3. Let us add a single bit in this kernel data structure for every page in memory, to indicate that this page has been newly allocated to a process and hence any data read request must return zero. (Since granularity of RAM is in bytes rather than bits, this bit can hide in a byte used for some other purpose within the same kernel data structure, so it may or may not increase the size of this kernel data structure.)This has 2 advantages:
a. Reading of fresh memory is super-fast. RAM bandwidth is of the order of magnitude of 10GB/s, or less. But for fresh memory, once kernel data structure's "freshness" bit is true, this data can be read in multiple TB/s speeds because all it has to do is return zero. A kernel equivalent of `cat/dev/zero`, if you will.
b. Second advantage, of course, is that no explicit zeroing of RAM is required.
Oracle is a "Linux company" in more ways than one. Linux is the principal development platform for major Oracle products. Oracle (as in Oracle Enterprise Linux) does Linux support (similar to RHEL), though I am not sure whether Oracle's contract is cheaper/better than RedHat's. Oracle also sells hardware/software combination and sends a representative to install and configure it according to the buyer's preference. Before Sun acquisition, the only operating system for this used to be, you guessed it, Oracle Enterprise Linux (On HP hardware). After Sun acquisition, it is Sun hardware but most likely the OS will still be Linux. Most medium-end customers of Oracle are more comfortable with Linux. Extremely high-end customers, though, prefer Solaris. Oracle can view this situation in 2 ways:
1. Any value addition to Linux, is a good thing for Oracle. Since Oracle employs ZFS developers, the customers who want to use ZFS will be more comfortable buying the full Oracle solution hoping, not without reason, for a better support than RedHat, Novell etc.
2. On the other hand, Oracle can consider Linux to be a competitor to Solaris. If ZFS is not GPLed, medium-end customers who currently use Linux will be pushed to upgrade to Solaris if they want to use ZFS.
I see more sense in 1, but 2 is also not entirely without merit.
I agree driver support for OpenSolaris is not that great. While it has the disadvantage of lower driver availability over Linux, it also has a big advantage: kernel ABI stability. So a driver, once it is created for OpenSolaris, will keep working for a long time. Unlike the linux drivers which can break during any kernel update, and the driver needs to be actively maintained so that it keeps working on latest kernel versions.
One example that I see: Cisco VPN. On every new distro release, I have to find out the linux kernel version and figure out whether Cisco VPN will work with it or not. No such uncertainty with OpenSolaris, it just works.
I am ignorant in this field, and I have a few questions that have no been answered in this thread:
1. Why does speakup have to run in kernel mode? Is it because it has to run an external device, attached to the computer through, say, PCI/PCI-Express/PCMCIA etc.?
2. From another of your posts in this thread, I understand that Gnome is changing some of its programs and someone is needed to make the new programs accessible. But couldn't the blind use CDE? I don't like CDE because it is ugly, but that is one criterion blind people will never have. I am not sure how good CDE is for blind.
3. So Willie knows a lot about Accessibility & Gnome; and has clout with Linux distros. Gnome is the darling of corporate linux. Any linux company will employ Willie. Gnome being GPL, work Willie does for any distro will be available to OpenSolaris (unless CDDL prevents this somehow, not about licensing issues of GPL stuff shipped with OpenSolaris).
Rest is solaris kernel stuff such that the newly available accessibility features from Gnome work well with (Open)Solaris. Solaris kernel guys should be able to do this with some effort.
But that's not a constant state. Homeostatis is about keeping things the same when the external environment changes. That fire changes when the external environment changes suggests it doesn't do this one very well at all!
Homeostatis is a Greek word, taken 80 years ago in English to mean something in the context of "life as we know it". Now you want this word to mean something even for something that is not "life as we know it" for this life to be called life?
Keeping things the same when external environment changes? I won't do that very well if temperature exceeds 3000 kelvins and environment is full of strong oxidizing agents. So I don't satisfy homeostatis requirement for life?
This brings us to the point that external environment, if it changes, must still fulfil some conditions for a living thing to exhibit homeostatis. For a fire, these criteria are mainly: availability of fuel, oxidising agents and high temperature. Given these, fire exhibits homeostatis. Except the 80 year old prejudices that have come into use of this word in English.
Response to Stimuli - Is influenced by and reacts to stimuli such as wind and the movement of fuel sources
By that logic, a brick would satisfy this, because if I drop it, it "reacts" by falling. Anything would satisfy this criterion, making it redundant.
Yes.
Whilst I'm not sure exactly what the defining line is, I presume it's more than any passive movement caused by physical forces.
So you are not sure of the definition of "response to stimuli" but you expect others to come up with why/how something can/should be called "response to stimuli"? And then you expect to be able to understand them when they do come up with such a reasoning?
But a liger doesn't. That was the point. You can't break an item into its constituents bypass the statement on the whole item. If so, I can say that the atoms a liger's cells comprise of do not reproduce. This will also be as much missing of the point as your division of liger into its cells to determine whether it reproduces.
How would fire meet adaption?
adaption: the act of adapting. adapt: to make suitable to requirements or conditions; adjust or modify fittingly
A wood fire, when in contact with cotton, can start burning diesel. It has modified the chemical reaction, as per requirements. Requirement is of increasing its own size/intensity. Opportunity is the contact with diesel. Fire is opportunistic, and in that sense, adapts.
And how would it fit organisation
Fire organizes itself into different zones. Each zone has its own characteristics, and even responsibilities if you will.
or response to stimuli?
Taken in its most elemental form, this phrase just means reactions to actions applied to an object. These particular words have acquired the connotations such that they only apply to "life as we know it" - the Nucleic Acid based life. Since fire is most decidedly not "life as we know it", of course it does not apply to fire. But this is not because fire is not life, it is because fire is not "life as we know it".
Anything reacts to actions applied to it. Apply 1 newton force on a ball(stimuli), it will apply the 1 newton force back on you(response). Sit in a big fire(stimuli), it will burn you(response).
This just wrong. Animals that move a lot need to eat much more than animals that don't move much. This is because muscle movement is very inefficient.
Secondly, meat is not just muscle. Liver, brain, many other organs are all meat. Fat cells in animal's body would lead to an increase in "meat" production.
And while moving might promote muscle production, it does so at an enormous energy (food) cost. So for the same amount of food eaten, moving animal should generate far less meat than the perpetually tethered animal.
However, in mine, nobody says you have to try Ubuntu or FlavorX
Then, the users do not switch at all. Because they are presented with so much choice, they take no action at all. Do read and watch the links I have posted above. This is not a joke.
I also debate your assumption that somebody who tries several distros is not a "new user."
If you read my post more carefully, I had mentioned that "trying" is quite an involved activity when you want to figure out a good linux distribution for yourself. I.e., you have to "spend a few release cycles with it". Trying, in that sense, a single distribution takes about a year or more of complete usage, upgradation/migration to new version when it comes out, reconfiguring the new version to suit your own needs, testing new features of this version and taking advantage of them if possible. If trying be defined thus, I maintain that the user is no more a "new user" by the time he has tried more than one distribution. You have introduced the phrase "seasoned veteran" here, which I didn't use and I see this as an attempt to beat a strawman.
you can determine if you like or do not like a distro. When you have "Why won't it do XYZ with my monitor?" or "How come I can't use my 7th mouse button?"
No linux distribution tests its releases on all possible hardware. So these observations will vary release-by-release. Would you suggest them to switch distros every release?
A distro is a dynamic thing. When you choose a distro, you don't just choose a few working features over a few non-working features and work-out a compromise between them. You choose a philosophy, a work ethic the distro maintainers will stick to etc. One release which does not work well with some particular hardware of yours is not a good reason to switch distros: you always have the choice to not upgrade and wait for another release. Long support cycles, live CD/USB come handy in doing this.
When you say "we all", I take it that you mean slashdotters. That means geeks. And such blanket statements are typically used to describe a stereotype.
So, does this amount to saying: the stereotypical geek claims to hate the stereotypical geek, but not himself?
Use whatever YOU like, regardless of whatever others like
While I appreciate your point, this is quite cumbersome. To use whatever YOU like, you have to try everything. An then, especially in the context of linux distros, liking at first glance is a lot different from liking to live with. Some distros stay pretty consistent across releases. Some change things a lot, stay cutting edge, try fringe features. To really know whether you like a distro, you have to spend a few release cycles with it. For a new user, this is impossible because by the time he knows what he likes, he is no more a new user to the linux world.
Free range pasture for cattle also takes much more land as compared to storing the cattle as furniture, that currently happens. Then, cattle move about a lot, wasting valuable energy, that could have been converted to meat. This more land would need to be away from urban centres because of real estate prices, and hence more would be spent in transportation of the meat from farms to market.
You are right, and in a sense, I cobble together software pieces for efficiency too. Though I seldom write complete programs for my use (except scripts, of course)
But solutions to the I/O problem are not all hardware either. Tinkering with RAID (software), LVM, filesystems, intelligent caching, RAM filesystems etc. make a perceptible difference too.
What I would like to see is an easing of the GPL so that proprietary code can interface with GPL code. i.e. call or link to GPL libraries, shared objects etc.
Proprietary code can already do so with LGPL code. Most libraries essential to create programs that run well on linux, can already be used by proprietary code; one way or the other. What does a program need: 1. libc, libstd++ etc. 2. A UI toolkit, cross-platform preferable: Proprietary programs based on GTK as well as QT is available, so there is no problem there. 3. kernel interface: Unlike the ABI, application layer interfaces of linux kernel are quite stable.
Note that examples in the above 3 points are controlled by somewhat responsible people, and typically you don't expect drastic change overnight which breaks all dependent code.
Now maybe some specialized libraries are not available, but I don't see proprietary code using them anyway. That is because there is no reasonable expectation that they will not change their own code such that the proprietary code dependent upon them might break. This brings us to the suggestion where proprietary code depends on specific versions of GPL libraries. Most package managers available on linux support this. But this makes it difficult to fix security bugs in the libraries. So in general, one should only depend on a minimum version of a library and not range dependency / specific version dependency.
Proprietary programs could run on Linux and there would be more high quality apps available to run on it. Then more people would be apt to use Linux
There are are already proprietary programs available on linux (I develop one such a product). Whatever the problems with linux are, unavailability of GPL libraries for linking against is not one of these. Do you know of an example where proprietary code needed to link to GPL code to ease the work of the proprietor?
For example, to allow an printer driver to be able to have an open source plug-in created for an unsupported printer that someone may have. That would be a long shot I admit
I don't see a requirement for this. There is one generic linux (userspace) printer driver. Most printers work with it, with varying degrees of acceptability. You simply plug-in your printer: either it works to your satisfaction or not. If not, you install the proprietary printer driver. This one either improves the overall situation or not. If not, you throw away/RMA the printer. In fact, all this research could be done before buying the printer, there are resources on the internet for doing so. This is as convenient as it gets. Open source plugins to proprietary drivers do not make it more convenient for the user.
I also am not a fan of the GPL. I believe in the spirit of it, but it is too fanatical and viral. There should be ways to allow interfaces between GPL and proprietary code.
I too find problems with GPL, but I can't think of a solution. We have the BSD kind of licenses - *BSD systems are its chief mascots in my view. Then there is a GPL family (v2 & v3, LGPL) of licenses - GNU and Linux are its chief mascots. As far as I see, GNU and Linux are clear winners over *BSD systems. Not that there is any either-me-or-you kind of competition, but on popularity basis - homes, embedded systems, servers, you name it. Though *BSD has its own niches.
Are you advocating BSD style license, or a license somewhere between the 2 in terms of fanaticism?
Right, I have lost interest in it too. But I/O is the problem nowadays. An overwhelming majority of the lifetimes of my processors is spent waiting for data to come from network/hard disk/USB stuff etc. A long time is also spent waiting for data to come from RAM, I guess the processor goes through hundreds of cycles after requesting data from RAM until getting it.
So I have started to get more interested in I/O speed. I feel it is in general pointless for getting too much interested in software/user interface because I don't have time/expertise/energy to write all the software I use. You can choose/configure software to be efficient, but that's where it stops for me.
So in fact peak power draw for your proposed constant-4g trip would be about 10,000,000 times more than the power consumption of all of humanity today.
Today is the keyword.
Let's visit the year 100 AD for a while, so that today = year 100 AD. Energy required by a satellite launch vehicle in year 2010 can be compared to the power consumption of all of humanity today. (This is true since you are only counting fuel/electric energy consumption, and ignoring energy in humans/bulls/horses via food.) But still launching a satellite is possible. Your problem is lack of imagination.
Further, if you care to visit a 100 million years ago, energy consumption of all of humanity today is zero, since there are no humans today. Yet, here we are, launching satellites, running Google servers, and generally having fun.
The equations result in divide-by-zero when speed is c (speed of light in vacuum). This does not mean that the values are infinite at speed c. This just means that the value is undefined.
Though as far as limit is concerned, yes the values do approach infinite. That is to say, as far as speed is less than c, increases in speed results in increase in the value (whether it be mass, momentum etc.) without limit. But when the speed becomes c, these equations fail to give a proper answer.
You are right in saying that equations failing to give a proper answer could mean the situation is impossible. But, then, maybe some other laws take over once the speed of c is somehow attained.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about psychic power working at the same rate as random chance? My post explicitly mentioned a rate much higher than random chance.
Let me see you predict the MD5 sum of a future post on slashdot, with 1% or more success rate.
While I too think there is probably no way to see into the future, but I see some problems with your reasoning.
If you think about it the ability to see into the future would be such a massive evolutionary advantage that there is absolutely no way it would remain hidden in dreams or only vaguely available
This assumes that such a trait/skill can be acquired/sharpened through evolution. For this, this ability to see into the future must be able to get passed on with reproduction. There is no reason to assume this. It may be a randomly acquired ability by the individual, and maybe there is no way it can pass on to one's offspring genetically.
Secondly if some could see the future (even partially) then we would on average see more people who made such claims at the top of industries / careers as they have an advantage. Yet the people who make such claims are usually at the bottom
I wouldn't be so sure that this ability will lead someone to top of industries/careers. Maybe this ability comes with a significant disability. I.e., the physical difference between a person with this ability, and another person without this ability; has 2 effects. One effect grants this ability to see into the future, the other effect of the same factor grants a definite significant disability. Maybe this ability is a lack of ambition / tendency to work hard.
This ability could also have a significant downside if it is not perfect. And most people who claim to have it, admit that it is not perfect. Suppose 1% of the time, the person actually has a correct intuition. When the details of the intuition are taken into account, suppose it gets rigorously scientifically proven that statistically it could not have happened by mere chance. The person can get very excited on observing this, and spread this claim of his ability. But it may not be any advantage to him: the other 99% of time his "intuition" is quite wrong. There is no guarantee that the 1% of times it actually works, it will such that an advantage can be derived out of this ability. For example, someone might have a premonition of the MD5 checksum of this post before I posted it. Utterly useless for all practical purposes.
The person will not act with full certainty on his intuitions because it works only 1% of the time.
James Randi will also not likely give any money to this guy, because Randi will test his intuition a few times. Since it works only 1% of the times, Randi will kick him out.
Cool, you can kill half the stories on /. by just telling us when/whether there will be a year of Linux desktop.
I don't know anything about Windows kernel internals, but:
The zeroing can be done entirely in software, don't you think? I describe my thinking in below points. Points 1 and 2 apply irrespective of whether there is a zeroing requirement or not.
1. When a process asks for a page (say 4kb) in memory, tell the process that you've got address n to n+4k. Mark in a kernel data structure, that this piece of memory belongs to this process.
2. Now, this kernel data structure is required frequently: whenever any process asks for data in any address, kernel needs to check if the process has the authority to read this address. So this kernel data structure is likely to remain in cache (L1/L2/L3).
3. Let us add a single bit in this kernel data structure for every page in memory, to indicate that this page has been newly allocated to a process and hence any data read request must return zero. (Since granularity of RAM is in bytes rather than bits, this bit can hide in a byte used for some other purpose within the same kernel data structure, so it may or may not increase the size of this kernel data structure.)This has 2 advantages:
a. Reading of fresh memory is super-fast. RAM bandwidth is of the order of magnitude of 10GB/s, or less. But for fresh memory, once kernel data structure's "freshness" bit is true, this data can be read in multiple TB/s speeds because all it has to do is return zero. A kernel equivalent of `cat /dev/zero`, if you will.
b. Second advantage, of course, is that no explicit zeroing of RAM is required.
Please let me know what you think of this.
If you read the news carefully, there won't be any support even if you pay. Why, then, the eagerness to pay?
Not the GP poster, but...
Oracle is a "Linux company" in more ways than one. Linux is the principal development platform for major Oracle products. Oracle (as in Oracle Enterprise Linux) does Linux support (similar to RHEL), though I am not sure whether Oracle's contract is cheaper/better than RedHat's. Oracle also sells hardware/software combination and sends a representative to install and configure it according to the buyer's preference. Before Sun acquisition, the only operating system for this used to be, you guessed it, Oracle Enterprise Linux (On HP hardware). After Sun acquisition, it is Sun hardware but most likely the OS will still be Linux. Most medium-end customers of Oracle are more comfortable with Linux. Extremely high-end customers, though, prefer Solaris. Oracle can view this situation in 2 ways:
1. Any value addition to Linux, is a good thing for Oracle. Since Oracle employs ZFS developers, the customers who want to use ZFS will be more comfortable buying the full Oracle solution hoping, not without reason, for a better support than RedHat, Novell etc.
2. On the other hand, Oracle can consider Linux to be a competitor to Solaris. If ZFS is not GPLed, medium-end customers who currently use Linux will be pushed to upgrade to Solaris if they want to use ZFS.
I see more sense in 1, but 2 is also not entirely without merit.
I know some people in Oracle middle management, and possibly they can arrange to accept cash from you. Not sure why you are so eager to pay, though.
I agree driver support for OpenSolaris is not that great. While it has the disadvantage of lower driver availability over Linux, it also has a big advantage: kernel ABI stability. So a driver, once it is created for OpenSolaris, will keep working for a long time. Unlike the linux drivers which can break during any kernel update, and the driver needs to be actively maintained so that it keeps working on latest kernel versions.
One example that I see: Cisco VPN. On every new distro release, I have to find out the linux kernel version and figure out whether Cisco VPN will work with it or not. No such uncertainty with OpenSolaris, it just works.
But you can upgrade OpenSolaris for free. To upgrade XP to Vista/7, you need to pay money.
I am ignorant in this field, and I have a few questions that have no been answered in this thread:
1. Why does speakup have to run in kernel mode? Is it because it has to run an external device, attached to the computer through, say, PCI/PCI-Express/PCMCIA etc.?
2. From another of your posts in this thread, I understand that Gnome is changing some of its programs and someone is needed to make the new programs accessible. But couldn't the blind use CDE? I don't like CDE because it is ugly, but that is one criterion blind people will never have. I am not sure how good CDE is for blind.
3. So Willie knows a lot about Accessibility & Gnome; and has clout with Linux distros. Gnome is the darling of corporate linux. Any linux company will employ Willie. Gnome being GPL, work Willie does for any distro will be available to OpenSolaris (unless CDDL prevents this somehow, not about licensing issues of GPL stuff shipped with OpenSolaris).
Rest is solaris kernel stuff such that the newly available accessibility features from Gnome work well with (Open)Solaris. Solaris kernel guys should be able to do this with some effort.
thanks
But that's not a constant state. Homeostatis is about keeping things the same when the external environment changes. That fire changes when the external environment changes suggests it doesn't do this one very well at all!
Homeostatis is a Greek word, taken 80 years ago in English to mean something in the context of "life as we know it". Now you want this word to mean something even for something that is not "life as we know it" for this life to be called life?
Keeping things the same when external environment changes? I won't do that very well if temperature exceeds 3000 kelvins and environment is full of strong oxidizing agents. So I don't satisfy homeostatis requirement for life?
This brings us to the point that external environment, if it changes, must still fulfil some conditions for a living thing to exhibit homeostatis. For a fire, these criteria are mainly: availability of fuel, oxidising agents and high temperature. Given these, fire exhibits homeostatis. Except the 80 year old prejudices that have come into use of this word in English.
Response to Stimuli - Is influenced by and reacts to stimuli such as wind and the movement of fuel sources
By that logic, a brick would satisfy this, because if I drop it, it "reacts" by falling. Anything would satisfy this criterion, making it redundant.
Yes.
Whilst I'm not sure exactly what the defining line is, I presume it's more than any passive movement caused by physical forces.
So you are not sure of the definition of "response to stimuli" but you expect others to come up with why/how something can/should be called "response to stimuli"? And then you expect to be able to understand them when they do come up with such a reasoning?
A liger's cells reproduce.
But a liger doesn't. That was the point. You can't break an item into its constituents bypass the statement on the whole item. If so, I can say that the atoms a liger's cells comprise of do not reproduce. This will also be as much missing of the point as your division of liger into its cells to determine whether it reproduces.
How would fire meet adaption?
adaption: the act of adapting.
adapt: to make suitable to requirements or conditions; adjust or modify fittingly
A wood fire, when in contact with cotton, can start burning diesel. It has modified the chemical reaction, as per requirements. Requirement is of increasing its own size/intensity. Opportunity is the contact with diesel. Fire is opportunistic, and in that sense, adapts.
And how would it fit organisation
Fire organizes itself into different zones. Each zone has its
own characteristics, and even responsibilities if you will.
or response to stimuli?
Taken in its most elemental form, this phrase just means reactions to actions applied to an object. These particular words have acquired the connotations such that they only apply to "life as we know it" - the Nucleic Acid based life. Since fire is most decidedly not "life as we know it", of course it does not apply to fire. But this is not because fire is not life, it is because fire is not "life as we know it".
Anything reacts to actions applied to it. Apply 1 newton force on a ball(stimuli), it will apply the 1 newton force back on you(response). Sit in a big fire(stimuli), it will burn you(response).
This just wrong. Animals that move a lot need to eat much more than animals that don't move much. This is because muscle movement is very inefficient.
Secondly, meat is not just muscle. Liver, brain, many other organs are all meat. Fat cells in animal's body would lead to an increase in "meat" production.
And while moving might promote muscle production, it does so at an enormous energy (food) cost. So for the same amount of food eaten, moving animal should generate far less meat than the perpetually tethered animal.
Interesting experiment.
Read the article I posted
Yeah, I will, someday. Looks interesting, thanks.
Without reading the article, I don't see how animals' moving around does not decrease meat production.
I see this point, which is why I prefixed my post with "While I appreciate your point ... "
But when a new user asks for advice, I prefer to ask them a few questions and tell them about a single, specific distribution, even a specific version. When I don't know anything about the user except that he is a newbie, I advice to use the most popular. Telling them that use what YOU like, breeds confusion. And, perfect is the enemy of the good enough, paradox of choice:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/04/23/the-perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good/
http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/09/paradox_of_choi.html
However, in mine, nobody says you have to try Ubuntu or FlavorX
Then, the users do not switch at all. Because they are presented with so much choice, they take no action at all. Do read and watch the links I have posted above. This is not a joke.
I also debate your assumption that somebody who tries several distros is not a "new user."
If you read my post more carefully, I had mentioned that "trying" is quite an involved activity when you want to figure out a good linux distribution for yourself. I.e., you have to "spend a few release cycles with it". Trying, in that sense, a single distribution takes about a year or more of complete usage, upgradation/migration to new version when it comes out, reconfiguring the new version to suit your own needs, testing new features of this version and taking advantage of them if possible. If trying be defined thus, I maintain that the user is no more a "new user" by the time he has tried more than one distribution. You have introduced the phrase "seasoned veteran" here, which I didn't use and I see this as an attempt to beat a strawman.
you can determine if you like or do not like a distro. When you have "Why won't it do XYZ with my monitor?" or "How come I can't use my 7th mouse button?"
No linux distribution tests its releases on all possible hardware. So these observations will vary release-by-release. Would you suggest them to switch distros every release?
A distro is a dynamic thing. When you choose a distro, you don't just choose a few working features over a few non-working features and work-out a compromise between them. You choose a philosophy, a work ethic the distro maintainers will stick to etc. One release which does not work well with some particular hardware of yours is not a good reason to switch distros: you always have the choice to not upgrade and wait for another release. Long support cycles, live CD/USB come handy in doing this.
negative geek stereotypes we all claim to hate
When you say "we all", I take it that you mean slashdotters. That means geeks. And such blanket statements are typically used to describe a stereotype.
So, does this amount to saying: the stereotypical geek claims to hate the stereotypical geek, but not himself?
Use whatever YOU like, regardless of whatever others like
While I appreciate your point, this is quite cumbersome. To use whatever YOU like, you have to try everything. An then, especially in the context of linux distros, liking at first glance is a lot different from liking to live with. Some distros stay pretty consistent across releases. Some change things a lot, stay cutting edge, try fringe features. To really know whether you like a distro, you have to spend a few release cycles with it. For a new user, this is impossible because by the time he knows what he likes, he is no more a new user to the linux world.
Free range pasture for cattle also takes much more land as compared to storing the cattle as furniture, that currently happens. Then, cattle move about a lot, wasting valuable energy, that could have been converted to meat. This more land would need to be away from urban centres because of real estate prices, and hence more would be spent in transportation of the meat from farms to market.
You are right, and in a sense, I cobble together software pieces for efficiency too. Though I seldom write complete programs for my use (except scripts, of course)
But solutions to the I/O problem are not all hardware either. Tinkering with RAID (software), LVM, filesystems, intelligent caching, RAM filesystems etc. make a perceptible difference too.
What I would like to see is an easing of the GPL so that proprietary code can interface with GPL code. i.e. call or link to GPL libraries, shared objects etc.
Proprietary code can already do so with LGPL code. Most libraries essential to create programs that run well on linux, can already be used by proprietary code; one way or the other. What does a program need:
1. libc, libstd++ etc.
2. A UI toolkit, cross-platform preferable: Proprietary programs based on GTK as well as QT is available, so there is no problem there.
3. kernel interface: Unlike the ABI, application layer interfaces of linux kernel are quite stable.
Note that examples in the above 3 points are controlled by somewhat responsible people, and typically you don't expect drastic change overnight which breaks all dependent code.
Now maybe some specialized libraries are not available, but I don't see proprietary code using them anyway. That is because there is no reasonable expectation that they will not change their own code such that the proprietary code dependent upon them might break. This brings us to the suggestion where proprietary code depends on specific versions of GPL libraries. Most package managers available on linux support this. But this makes it difficult to fix security bugs in the libraries. So in general, one should only depend on a minimum version of a library and not range dependency / specific version dependency.
Proprietary programs could run on Linux and there would be more high quality apps available to run on it. Then more people would be apt to use Linux
There are are already proprietary programs available on linux (I develop one such a product). Whatever the problems with linux are, unavailability of GPL libraries for linking against is not one of these. Do you know of an example where proprietary code needed to link to GPL code to ease the work of the proprietor?
For example, to allow an printer driver to be able to have an open source plug-in created for an unsupported printer that someone may have. That would be a long shot I admit
I don't see a requirement for this. There is one generic linux (userspace) printer driver. Most printers work with it, with varying degrees of acceptability. You simply plug-in your printer: either it works to your satisfaction or not. If not, you install the proprietary printer driver. This one either improves the overall situation or not. If not, you throw away/RMA the printer. In fact, all this research could be done before buying the printer, there are resources on the internet for doing so. This is as convenient as it gets. Open source plugins to proprietary drivers do not make it more convenient for the user.
I also am not a fan of the GPL. I believe in the spirit of it, but it is too fanatical and viral. There should be ways to allow interfaces between GPL and proprietary code.
I too find problems with GPL, but I can't think of a solution. We have the BSD kind of licenses - *BSD systems are its chief mascots in my view. Then there is a GPL family (v2 & v3, LGPL) of licenses - GNU and Linux are its chief mascots. As far as I see, GNU and Linux are clear winners over *BSD systems. Not that there is any either-me-or-you kind of competition, but on popularity basis - homes, embedded systems, servers, you name it. Though *BSD has its own niches.
Are you advocating BSD style license, or a license somewhere between the 2 in terms of fanaticism?
Right, I have lost interest in it too. But I/O is the problem nowadays. An overwhelming majority of the lifetimes of my processors is spent waiting for data to come from network/hard disk/USB stuff etc. A long time is also spent waiting for data to come from RAM, I guess the processor goes through hundreds of cycles after requesting data from RAM until getting it.
So I have started to get more interested in I/O speed. I feel it is in general pointless for getting too much interested in software/user interface because I don't have time/expertise/energy to write all the software I use. You can choose/configure software to be efficient, but that's where it stops for me.
My Q6600 rig draws 120-140 watts for a good fraction of the day as measured by my kill-a-watt
Does this include the monitor? Could you post a list all the other components (other than the processor) that this 120-140 watts includes?
thanks
So in fact peak power draw for your proposed constant-4g trip would be about 10,000,000 times more than the power consumption of all of humanity today.
Today is the keyword.
Let's visit the year 100 AD for a while, so that today = year 100 AD. Energy required by a satellite launch vehicle in year 2010 can be compared to the power consumption of all of humanity today. (This is true since you are only counting fuel/electric energy consumption, and ignoring energy in humans/bulls/horses via food.) But still launching a satellite is possible. Your problem is lack of imagination.
Further, if you care to visit a 100 million years ago, energy consumption of all of humanity today is zero, since there are no humans today. Yet, here we are, launching satellites, running Google servers, and generally having fun.
The equations result in divide-by-zero when speed is c (speed of light in vacuum). This does not mean that the values are infinite at speed c. This just means that the value is undefined.
Though as far as limit is concerned, yes the values do approach infinite. That is to say, as far as speed is less than c, increases in speed results in increase in the value (whether it be mass, momentum etc.) without limit. But when the speed becomes c, these equations fail to give a proper answer.
You are right in saying that equations failing to give a proper answer could mean the situation is impossible. But, then, maybe some other laws take over once the speed of c is somehow attained.