As for the firearms thing, all the self loaders I know do it because they shoot a lot and save money. Some even cast their own slugs. It's cheaper to buy the parts, espically since you can reuse the brass. Not worth it if you shoot 100 routns once a year but if you shoot 1000 per week, it can save you a lot.
Sure, there are lots of legitimate reasons for using reloads. I've considered getting a press and mold for a while, but I don't mind paying for the 200-400 or so rounds I shoot per month (it's mostly a matter of time). There are reasons to make hot loads and reasons to cast your own bullets. The main point I was making was that some people thinking that doubling the powder will make their firearms shoot better. I absolutely hate shooting next to some novice gun owner who is obviously shooting with hot loads.
Plenty of legit gun modifications too. Guns don't always come just how you want them. Triggers are a big thing to modify. Like on Glocks, they come with a 5.5lb trigger pull from the factory. Ok, but maybe you want something heavier, so you can't accidentally pull the trigger as easy, or maybe you competition shoot, and want something lighter.
Yup, this is true. I owned a G36 once and would have increased the pull if I'd kept it. It was stock otherwise. However, these modifications are generally safe. There are others (non factory parts to shave off a few grams here are there, modified internals that can increase jams, etc..) that decrease the safety of the weapon. And I completely agree that you'd want to customize your firearms; my only problem is with those who really don't know what they are doing and end up jeopardizing not only their lives but those sharing the range. Though I'm not an expert, I've owned many firearms and have a healthy respect for them.
Way back attempts
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Years ago I owned a '77 Camaro with a small block 350. I didn't know a thing about cars then. One of my first projects was to try to replace the stock carburetor with a Holley 4 barrel from an SS Monte Carlo. It actually fitted and only required a couple bends in the control wires to get it to work. I cranked the engine and was greeted by this sweet purring sound. Oooh yeah. About thirty seconds later I noticed flames shooting from the engine. Crap. Thinking it was something with the carburetor, I tried to fix and re-install the stock unit using a carburetor rebuild kit. It seemed simple enough -- replace a few springs, a float, clean some parts. I got everything back together and bolted the rebuilt carburetor into place. Cranked the engine. Sputter. Cough. Then my whole engine caught on fire as gasoline was leaking everywhere. The flames died pretty quickly but it scorched a bunch of parts. So I had to put the Holley back in place. I did, but noticed that the gasket was torn. Hell, I thought, if I tighten the bolts up enough there's no way any gas could leak from the seal... Was I ever wrong.
What other stupid things have I done?
I once forget to re-attach the lawn mower blade before testing the engine I'd just rebuilt. The funniest thing happened. Apparently the mass of the lawnmower blade is enough to slow down the RPMs of the engine. If the blade is removed the lawnmover spins very, very, VERY quickly. And just as quickly wrecks the engine. Lots of little coat-hanger like wire just flies out. And there's no way to get them back inside. I was trying to tweak the damned thing to spin a little faster...
Re:i can understand
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Firearms. There are lots of self-loaders out there who think that adding more powder makes them shoot better. Or they modify their weapons because they read somewhere on the Internet that it would shave off a microsecond or two from the firing rate or lessen the trigger pull. Funny thing is that the people who have used the most bizarre rifles tend to shoot the worst.
Airplanes you say? I live about 100 yards from a small airfield in South Florida. I was driving to work one morning and noticed a bunch of fire trucks and police a few doors away. Heard on the news later that day that an experimental plane had crashed into a house. I've seen a couple of these accidents so far (well, not the actual crash, but the after effects).
Home wiring... I've visited lots of friends' houses that have really bad wiring jobs. I've seen lots of outlets that would fail inspection. At my last house the previous occupants had been running a small business from their converted garage. They had installed extra outlets to run the electrical equipment (heater, various electrical motors, etc..). Everything was connected to an extension cord with a bunch of daisy-chained power strips *behind the wall*.
I dunno, the latest BG actually seemed pretty good. I could tolerate the original BG also. But Buck Rogers has always made me think of something the local high school would put together. It always seemed cheesy.
Since BtVS has gone, there's not much science fiction/fantasy that I can watch. I've been getting by with some Sliders reruns and one or two Highlander episodes, but I'm dying here man.
Anyway, I thought I'd post a list of things I hate in SF shows:
1) Time travel -- Any episode where you can go back in time, either with a with a wish from a vengeance demon or from jumping into some wormhole makes me think of some deus ex machina copout.
2) Uniforms showing bare midriffs -- sure, I love when Willow shows some tummy, but it really destroys the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing and screams studio exec trying to pander to the teenage boy crowd he thinks is his only audience.
3) Alternate universe where the characters are just slightly different from the current.
4) Light speed travel at the push of a button. This is one reason why I enjoyed the new BG. At least it made an attempt to show that FTL is not something simple (yeah, or even possible).
5) Annoying casts that seem like ensemble boy-band ripoffs. I.e., they have a character for everyone: the rebel; the nerdy scientist; the hottie scientist; the loner. This is one reason Enterprise is so difficult for me to watch.
6) Pretty boy captains with perfect hair. This is another reason I enjoyed the new BG. Olmos is an actor and not some Jonathan Timberlake clone. (This may have something to do with the fact that I'm completely opposite on the the runway model scale. I can scare children with a smile. I relate the to Olmoses and Rhys-Davies of the world.)
7) Unnecessarily brooding characters. Marvin the paranoid Android was fun, but the humorless ice zombies in other series get boring after the first episode. "But they have issues, man!" No brother, stop whining.
A few years ago there was some nonsense "Hello, World!" code that would compile in several languages with the same source. It used a bunch of #defines and clever use of comment characters to allow c++, c, pascal, fortran and other compilers to create and executable from the same single text file. Anyone remember this?
Kid's life happier? Hell, I think almost every frame of "Finding Nemo" is a work of art. I've watched that movie maybe twenty times since I got it on DVD a couple months ago.
Knoppix and many of the others allow persistent data, either by saving to an existing partition or things like USB drives. Knoppix in particular allows you to mount FAT and NTFS, though I have not tried writing to NTFS.
MandrakeMove, another LiveCD, has support for USB drives so you could maintain your working environment (settings, documents, etc.) across any PC.
You can also configure some to automount an NFS home partition.
I followed these instructions on the Linux Journal site to create a Fedora and RedHat 9 based live CD: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7233
Only sticking point was the initial partition. I tried with a loopback mounted ISO but there were permission problems. Then went to a NFS mounted share. It worked but required a second machine. Finally just stuck another drive inside and created a bunch of 700M partitions.
There was a project a while back to take a snapshot of a boot state then load this snapshot directly into memory. Any modern harddrive can move the 40M or so in a few seconds. The sticking points were mainly due to hardware that needed initialization and some OS design issues (beyond my understanding, but had to do with how control is passed to the operating system). If not for these issues, the machine could boot completely in seconds.
Yes, that is true. Turned off debugging but still somewhat slower than before. No big deal, and if GCC 3.3 gives a decent increase (3%-5% or more) then it's worth it.
I got it running under VMWare 4 on a Linux host recently. Largely uneventful except that I needed to use the Safe Mode kernel and add the following entry to the.vmx file:
monitor_control.disable_apic="TRUE"
It took a few hours to run updates and rebuild the kernel but is functional now. It seemed to take a lot longer this time than normal, but this may be because of the new GCC. Not sure.
This indeed does work. Sleep is very useful for solving difficult problems. For example, suppose you were tasked with printing pi to 6 digits. The sleep-deprived program may do something inefficient, like using arctan formulas, or summing series, or using Pascal's method, or calling the Mathematica module.. etc. etc.. The sleep-enabled program would look something like this:
printf ("Beginning calculation. Please wait.\n");/* Look busy for a while */ sleep(20) printf ("3.141592\n");
Prices range from $29 for DSL Lite (capped, dynamic IP) to about $79 at the top end of the home offering (multiple users, static IP, better downloads, multiple emails). I use the $59 offering which is the cheapest one with static IP that I found at the time. Nothing prevents the $29 offering from being shared, but this service seems to be targeted at mostly non-technical folks.
From The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) Here.
The Expression of Fatal flaw: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Rushdie Hans Q. Dahmus Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 1. Consensuses of failure
"Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of truth," says Derrida. But an abundance of dematerialisms concerning the textual paradigm of consensus may be discovered.
"Society is intrinsically elitist," says Lyotard; however, according to Hanfkopf[1] , it is not so much society that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the dialectic of society. Precapitalist narrative states that art is part of the failure of culture, but only if the premise of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory is invalid. Therefore, the main theme of Pickett's[2] analysis of neodialectic cultural theory is a mythopoetical paradox.
Hanfkopf[3] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic subdeconstructivist theory and the subcapitalist paradigm of context. However, Debord uses the term 'dialectic postcultural theory' to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent genre, of capitalist class.
Marx's critique of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory holds that art serves to reinforce sexism. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic desublimation that includes reality as a totality.
Sartre uses the term 'dialectic subdeconstructivist theory' to denote not, in fact, discourse, but postdiscourse. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Burroughs is the role of the participant as artist. 2. Realism and capitalist presemanticist theory
The main theme of Abian's[4] essay on capitalist presemanticist theory is the difference between society and class. The subject is contextualised into a Derridaist reading that includes consciousness as a paradox. However, Foucault uses the term 'capitalist presemanticist theory' to denote the meaninglessness, and some would say the defining characteristic, of textual sexual identity.
Subconstructivist theory suggests that consensus comes from communication. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a capitalist presemanticist theory that includes language as a whole.
If the textual paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern. Therefore, Debord uses the term 'cultural Marxism' to denote the role of the poet as artist. Lyotard suggests the use of capitalist presemanticist theory to read narrativity. However, in The Books of Magic, Gaiman affirms realism; in Neverwhere, however, he denies capitalist presemanticist theory. 1. Hanfkopf, A. B. ed. (1978) Realism in the works of Burroughs. Panic Button Books
2. Pickett, V. P. A. (1981) The Genre of Narrative: The textual paradigm of consensus and realism. Loompanics
3. Hanfkopf, R. ed. (1996) Realism in the works of McLaren. And/Or Press
4. Abian, N. D. F. (1970) The Stone Sky: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books
Last night I attended a Linux user group meeting in South Florida. One of the speakers, Reinhard Wiesemann from the LinuxHotel (LinuxHotel) in Germany mentioned something very interesting. He said that he'd been using a Unisys system. At some point, when the machine itself became outdated, a colleague showed him Linux. He was able to take his source code, re-run gcc, and *it worked*. He did mention some high-order problem that was fixed by a short program (he didn't know about the gcc flag that would have solved this).
The idea that he could take 15yr old code and have it just work is pretty amazing. Imagine the time and development resources saved on this project alone.
So there's a lot to be said for portable code...
In a similar vein, I've recently been experimenting with the latest Sun Java on an older laptop using Fedora Core 1. I'd always heard that Java was slow, and it was on earlier setups. But it seems to work wonderfully with Fedora. It might be the MPTL or the 2.6.0 kernel I dropped in, but everything seems as good as native QT or GTK+ apps.
Now I don't trust Sun fully after their comments about Linux, but in this case I can separate the technology from the company and say that the portability is a good thing.
Personally, I don't care if it's any cheaper than a Windows machine. I just want all the features on the laptop to work perfectly, including DVD playback, wireless ethernet, power management, video, sound and all the extra buttons.
Good Lord, you mean you have to use regedit to turn off HTML? I got upset with some family members because I told them to turn off HTML email for both sending and receiving. Didn't think they'd have to muck around with the registry to do this simple thing.
Every day it amazes me that people think the Internet experience on Windows is so much better than Mac or Linux. I can't browse for two minutes in IE without a bunch of popups appearing. There's no tabbed browsing. Inadvertent key presses can install stupid ClearSearch spyware. Now you show me that you need this non-intuitive procedure just to disable HTML. Amazing.
I drink five cups before Noon. By three, when I usually stop, I've usually added anoter four or five of strong coffee. And when I say a cup, I mean a mugful, which is more than the standard "cup". In other words, I'd say that on an average day I easily drink 10 cups of coffee plus another 1.5 cups of half&half.
I don't have a problem if I run out of coffee. In fact, I've noticed that I sleep a lot better on those days when I don't drink. I did have high blood pressure, but cutting out the salt from my diet has helped a lot more than cutting the coffee.
At night I usually drink three or four cups of Lipton or Earl Grey's. Sometimes I enjoy a hot green tea with honey, but the caffeine content of tea is nowhere near the average cup of coffee (I'm not talking the extra caffeinated teas).
For medical reasons I had to drastically reduce my caffeine intake. On a typical day I was drinking 1 carafe (10 cups) of American coffee and maybe three or four cafe con leches. I started by substituting a cup of tea for each cup of coffee. No matter what some folks will tell you, garden variety Lipton or Nestea has no where near the amount of caffeine as an equivalent cup of American coffee (there are extra-caffeinated teas but I'm not talking about those).
The problem with coffee is that it's a neverending cycle. Lots of coffee prevents you from getting a good sleep. In the morning you're not rested so need coffee. Throughout the day you snag another cup or two. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. By cutting out the coffee and drinking a small glass of water before sleeping you'll wake up more refreshed (and will wake up, since that water will go through you).
Coffee can also act as a diuretic and you don't sleep as well when dehydrated. And despite what some chain letters may say about the benefits of water, your body does retain the majority of the H20 in a cup of coffee. For lontime coffee drinkers this percentage goes up.
You can also try cutting the coffee with maybe half decaf. I can personally taste the hideous metallic bitterness of decaf so don't do this myself, but others don't seem to mind.
You can also try substituing hot chocolate. Some chocolates have a good amount of caffeine so you'll have to check the labels. They generally have less caffeine than American coffee however.
If it's not the caffeine that's bothering you, try a different brewing process.
And no matter how thoroughly you PROVE to them that the ratio of good music to shit music released has been constant forever (this is true for all artistic endeavours: movies, music, books, art, video games, etc.), they always insist that everything was better back in the day. They'll just ignore you when you show them all the absolute crap that was released back at the same time as their favorite stuff.
I don't agree.
It's a lot easier today to get something published. It's harder to get into the elite publications (meaning "established" not necessarily better) than it was before because of the sheer numbers of submissions. This, however, is balanced by the many more venues to rant and rave.
Movies are cheaper to make now than 20 years ago. Cheaper means that more people have access. It's an almost identical situation to when computers (notably the first Macs) and a laser printer allowed just about anyone to churn out newsletters and small publications. Before the DTP revolution you had to pay a print shop lots of money and spend lots of time in front of a cutting board to get a single page ready. The problem was that many of these new computer owners knew very little about graphic design so the pages, despite have some very good resolution and technical cleanliness, looked like total garbage. It wasn't until more designers started using computers (and many scoffed at the idea of a computer replacing xacto knives and rubber cement) that many publications began to look good again.
Nowadays, many more people are making music, slapping together movies on their PCs and Macs, making websites, etc..
The funny thing is, as far as music is concerned, we have less choice on the airwaves than we did twenty years ago. Playlists are generated on a national scale now. Gone are many of the local DJs and amateur hours. And the problem of broadcasting for the majority is that you cannot play niche music because you'll alienate a large portion of your listeners. Instead the three or four broadcast megacorps choose music that will alienate the fewest, rather than pushing what will be liked by the most. A subtle difference, but important.
But yes, you are right in that it comes down to taste. My wife enjoys Creed but I can't stand them. They sound boring (to me), their lyrics seem juvenile (to me), the lead singer is a worse egomaniac than even Bono from U2 (IMHO, and I like U2's music).
Local music is different, of course. There are still amateur bands and many nationally signed bands that sound great. I just think it's harder to find them now than it was ten years ago.
Moral of the Story: Operating systems can add a lot of overhead.
Sometimes. If the machine is otherwise unloaded then pure CPU intensive applications run roughly the same speed. I've benchmarked some extensive POVRay renderings on otherwise identical machines running NT2000 and RedHat 9. The difference is that I can disable a lot more on the Linux machine than on 2000. In this case there is a noticeable difference, maybe 5% or so, in favor of Linux. With GUIs the difference does not seem to be significant.
A bigger factor as others have noted is the compiler and even the compiler settings. Running with "agressive" gcc optimizations (-O5, unroll loops, Athlon specific, etc..) has led to anywhere from 2% to 15%(!!!) improvements) in CPU intensive programs. I've heard that Intel compilers can add equally dramatic speedups though I don't have any recent Intel machines to test.
"Well with a little tweaking, you can make Windows XP look like Windows 2000 as well. "
To a point. XP came installed on a recent laptop. I couldn't stand the Fisher-Price interface so turned on a more traditional style. Problem is that it doesn't work cleanly. There were lots of visual glitches and it kept on resetting to the XP interface when I did things like turn off some animations. It felt... unfinished. And that's a lot to say about a Microsoft product. The software may be unstable, bloated and clumsy to use, but (except for Win3x) always *looked* pretty.
Anyway, XP's gone now and been replaced with 200Pro. It's the only MS OS that I will run.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the firearms thing, all the self loaders I know do it because they shoot a lot and save money. Some even cast their own slugs. It's cheaper to buy the parts, espically since you can reuse the brass. Not worth it if you shoot 100 routns once a year but if you shoot 1000 per week, it can save you a lot.
Sure, there are lots of legitimate reasons for using reloads. I've considered getting a press and mold for a while, but I don't mind paying for the 200-400 or so rounds I shoot per month (it's mostly a matter of time). There are reasons to make hot loads and reasons to cast your own bullets. The main point I was making was that some people thinking that doubling the powder will make their firearms shoot better. I absolutely hate shooting next to some novice gun owner who is obviously shooting with hot loads.
Plenty of legit gun modifications too. Guns don't always come just how you want them. Triggers are a big thing to modify. Like on Glocks, they come with a 5.5lb trigger pull from the factory. Ok, but maybe you want something heavier, so you can't accidentally pull the trigger as easy, or maybe you competition shoot, and want something lighter.
Yup, this is true. I owned a G36 once and would have increased the pull if I'd kept it. It was stock otherwise. However, these modifications are generally safe. There are others (non factory parts to shave off a few grams here are there, modified internals that can increase jams, etc..) that decrease the safety of the weapon. And I completely agree that you'd want to customize your firearms; my only problem is with those who really don't know what they are doing and end up jeopardizing not only their lives but those sharing the range. Though I'm not an expert, I've owned many firearms and have a healthy respect for them.
Years ago I owned a '77 Camaro with a small block 350. I didn't know a thing about cars then. One of my first projects was to try to replace the stock carburetor with a Holley 4 barrel from an SS Monte Carlo. It actually fitted and only required a couple bends in the control wires to get it to work. I cranked the engine and was greeted by this sweet purring sound. Oooh yeah.
About thirty seconds later I noticed flames shooting from the engine. Crap. Thinking it was something with the carburetor, I tried to fix and re-install the stock unit using a carburetor rebuild kit. It seemed simple enough -- replace a few springs, a float, clean some parts. I got everything back together and bolted the rebuilt carburetor into place. Cranked the engine. Sputter. Cough. Then my whole engine caught on fire as gasoline was leaking everywhere. The flames died pretty quickly but it scorched a bunch of parts. So I had to put the Holley back in place. I did, but noticed that the gasket was torn. Hell, I thought, if I tighten the bolts up enough there's no way any gas could leak from the seal...
Was I ever wrong.
What other stupid things have I done?
I once forget to re-attach the lawn mower blade before testing the engine I'd just rebuilt. The funniest thing happened. Apparently the mass of the lawnmower blade is enough to slow down the RPMs of the engine. If the blade is removed the lawnmover spins very, very, VERY quickly. And just as quickly wrecks the engine. Lots of little coat-hanger like wire just flies out. And there's no way to get them back inside. I was trying to tweak the damned thing to spin a little faster...
Firearms.
There are lots of self-loaders out there who think that adding more powder makes them shoot better. Or they modify their weapons because they read somewhere on the Internet that it would shave off a microsecond or two from the firing rate or lessen the trigger pull. Funny thing is that the people who have used the most bizarre rifles tend to shoot the worst.
Airplanes you say?
I live about 100 yards from a small airfield in South Florida. I was driving to work one morning and noticed a bunch of fire trucks and police a few doors away. Heard on the news later that day that an experimental plane had crashed into a house. I've seen a couple of these accidents so far (well, not the actual crash, but the after effects).
Home wiring...
I've visited lots of friends' houses that have really bad wiring jobs. I've seen lots of outlets that would fail inspection. At my last house the previous occupants had been running a small business from their converted garage. They had installed extra outlets to run the electrical equipment (heater, various electrical motors, etc..). Everything was connected to an extension cord with a bunch of daisy-chained power strips *behind the wall*.
I dunno, the latest BG actually seemed pretty good. I could tolerate the original BG also. But Buck Rogers has always made me think of something the local high school would put together. It always seemed cheesy.
...
Since BtVS has gone, there's not much science fiction/fantasy that I can watch. I've been getting by with some Sliders reruns and one or two Highlander episodes, but I'm dying here man.
Anyway, I thought I'd post a list of things I hate in SF shows:
1) Time travel -- Any episode where you can go back in time, either with a with a wish from a vengeance demon or from jumping into some wormhole makes me think of some deus ex machina copout.
2) Uniforms showing bare midriffs -- sure, I love when Willow shows some tummy, but it really destroys the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing and screams studio exec trying to pander to the teenage boy crowd he thinks is his only audience.
3) Alternate universe where the characters are just slightly different from the current.
4) Light speed travel at the push of a button. This is one reason why I enjoyed the new BG. At least it made an attempt to show that FTL is not something simple (yeah, or even possible).
5) Annoying casts that seem like ensemble boy-band ripoffs. I.e., they have a character for everyone: the rebel; the nerdy scientist; the hottie scientist; the loner. This is one reason Enterprise is so difficult for me to watch.
6) Pretty boy captains with perfect hair. This is another reason I enjoyed the new BG. Olmos is an actor and not some Jonathan Timberlake clone. (This may have something to do with the fact that I'm completely opposite on the the runway model scale. I can scare children with a smile. I relate the to Olmoses and Rhys-Davies of the world.)
7) Unnecessarily brooding characters. Marvin the paranoid Android was fun, but the humorless ice zombies in other series get boring after the first episode. "But they have issues, man!" No brother, stop whining.
8)
A few years ago there was some nonsense "Hello, World!" code that would compile in several languages with the same source. It used a bunch of #defines and clever use of comment characters to allow c++, c, pascal, fortran and other compilers to create and executable from the same single text file. Anyone remember this?
Kid's life happier? Hell, I think almost every frame of "Finding Nemo" is a work of art. I've watched that movie maybe twenty times since I got it on DVD a couple months ago.
Knoppix and many of the others allow persistent data, either by saving to an existing partition or things like USB drives. Knoppix in particular allows you to mount FAT and NTFS, though I have not tried writing to NTFS.
MandrakeMove, another LiveCD, has support for USB drives so you could maintain your working environment (settings, documents, etc.) across any PC.
You can also configure some to automount an NFS home partition.
I followed these instructions on the Linux Journal site to create a Fedora and RedHat 9 based live CD:
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7233
Only sticking point was the initial partition. I tried with a loopback mounted ISO but there were permission problems. Then went to a NFS mounted share. It worked but required a second machine. Finally just stuck another drive inside and created a bunch of 700M partitions.
There was a project a while back to take a snapshot of a boot state then load this snapshot directly into memory. Any modern harddrive can move the 40M or so in a few seconds. The sticking points were mainly due to hardware that needed initialization and some OS design issues (beyond my understanding, but had to do with how control is passed to the operating system). If not for these issues, the machine could boot completely in seconds.
Yes, that is true. Turned off debugging but still somewhat slower than before. No big deal, and if GCC 3.3 gives a decent increase (3%-5% or more) then it's worth it.
I got it running under VMWare 4 on a Linux host recently. Largely uneventful except that I needed to use the Safe Mode kernel and add the following entry to the .vmx file:
monitor_control.disable_apic="TRUE"
It took a few hours to run updates and rebuild the kernel but is functional now. It seemed to take a lot longer this time than normal, but this may be because of the new GCC. Not sure.
This indeed does work. Sleep is very useful for solving difficult problems. For example, suppose you were tasked with printing pi to 6 digits. The sleep-deprived program may do something inefficient, like using arctan formulas, or summing series, or using Pascal's method, or calling the Mathematica module.. etc. etc.. The sleep-enabled program would look something like this:
/* Look busy for a while */
printf ("Beginning calculation. Please wait.\n");
sleep(20)
printf ("3.141592\n");
Prices range from $29 for DSL Lite (capped, dynamic IP) to about $79 at the top end of the home offering (multiple users, static IP, better downloads, multiple emails). I use the $59 offering which is the cheapest one with static IP that I found at the time. Nothing prevents the $29 offering from being shared, but this service seems to be targeted at mostly non-technical folks.
From The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) Here.
The Expression of Fatal flaw: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Rushdie
Hans Q. Dahmus
Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1. Consensuses of failure
"Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of truth," says Derrida. But an abundance of dematerialisms concerning the textual paradigm of consensus may be discovered.
"Society is intrinsically elitist," says Lyotard; however, according to Hanfkopf[1] , it is not so much society that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the dialectic of society. Precapitalist narrative states that art is part of the failure of culture, but only if the premise of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory is invalid. Therefore, the main theme of Pickett's[2] analysis of neodialectic cultural theory is a mythopoetical paradox.
Hanfkopf[3] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic subdeconstructivist theory and the subcapitalist paradigm of context. However, Debord uses the term 'dialectic postcultural theory' to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent genre, of capitalist class.
Marx's critique of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory holds that art serves to reinforce sexism. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic desublimation that includes reality as a totality.
Sartre uses the term 'dialectic subdeconstructivist theory' to denote not, in fact, discourse, but postdiscourse. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Burroughs is the role of the participant as artist.
2. Realism and capitalist presemanticist theory
The main theme of Abian's[4] essay on capitalist presemanticist theory is the difference between society and class. The subject is contextualised into a Derridaist reading that includes consciousness as a paradox. However, Foucault uses the term 'capitalist presemanticist theory' to denote the meaninglessness, and some would say the defining characteristic, of textual sexual identity.
Subconstructivist theory suggests that consensus comes from communication. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a capitalist presemanticist theory that includes language as a whole.
If the textual paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern. Therefore, Debord uses the term 'cultural Marxism' to denote the role of the poet as artist. Lyotard suggests the use of capitalist presemanticist theory to read narrativity. However, in The Books of Magic, Gaiman affirms realism; in Neverwhere, however, he denies capitalist presemanticist theory.
1. Hanfkopf, A. B. ed. (1978) Realism in the works of Burroughs. Panic Button Books
2. Pickett, V. P. A. (1981) The Genre of Narrative: The textual paradigm of consensus and realism. Loompanics
3. Hanfkopf, R. ed. (1996) Realism in the works of McLaren. And/Or Press
4. Abian, N. D. F. (1970) The Stone Sky: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books
Last night I attended a Linux user group meeting in South Florida. One of the speakers, Reinhard Wiesemann from the LinuxHotel (LinuxHotel) in Germany mentioned something very interesting. He said that he'd been using a Unisys system. At some point, when the machine itself became outdated, a colleague showed him Linux. He was able to take his source code, re-run gcc, and *it worked*. He did mention some high-order problem that was fixed by a short program (he didn't know about the gcc flag that would have solved this).
The idea that he could take 15yr old code and have it just work is pretty amazing. Imagine the time and development resources saved on this project alone.
So there's a lot to be said for portable code...
In a similar vein, I've recently been experimenting with the latest Sun Java on an older laptop using Fedora Core 1. I'd always heard that Java was slow, and it was on earlier setups. But it seems to work wonderfully with Fedora. It might be the MPTL or the 2.6.0 kernel I dropped in, but everything seems as good as native QT or GTK+ apps.
Now I don't trust Sun fully after their comments about Linux, but in this case I can separate the technology from the company and say that the portability is a good thing.
Personally, I don't care if it's any cheaper than a Windows machine. I just want all the features on the laptop to work perfectly, including DVD playback, wireless ethernet, power management, video, sound and all the extra buttons.
That's funny. I told them last year not to open any batch files *ever*, even if they came from my account.
Good Lord, you mean you have to use regedit to turn off HTML? I got upset with some family members because I told them to turn off HTML email for both sending and receiving. Didn't think they'd have to muck around with the registry to do this simple thing.
Every day it amazes me that people think the Internet experience on Windows is so much better than Mac or Linux. I can't browse for two minutes in IE without a bunch of popups appearing. There's no tabbed browsing. Inadvertent key presses can install stupid ClearSearch spyware. Now you show me that you need this non-intuitive procedure just to disable HTML. Amazing.
I drink five cups before Noon. By three, when I usually stop, I've usually added anoter four or five of strong coffee. And when I say a cup, I mean a mugful, which is more than the standard "cup". In other words, I'd say that on an average day I easily drink 10 cups of coffee plus another 1.5 cups of half&half.
I don't have a problem if I run out of coffee. In fact, I've noticed that I sleep a lot better on those days when I don't drink. I did have high blood pressure, but cutting out the salt from my diet has helped a lot more than cutting the coffee.
At night I usually drink three or four cups of Lipton or Earl Grey's. Sometimes I enjoy a hot green tea with honey, but the caffeine content of tea is nowhere near the average cup of coffee (I'm not talking the extra caffeinated teas).
He'll outgrow it. Mine used to do this too, but he stopped somewhere around the time he turned 24.
He stopped at 24? Wow. How did he ever get through high school and college with this habit?
Personally, I've never liked DVDs. Too many pits. Plus the idea of eating a WORM just turns me off.
For medical reasons I had to drastically reduce my caffeine intake. On a typical day I was drinking 1 carafe (10 cups) of American coffee and maybe three or four cafe con leches. I started by substituting a cup of tea for each cup of coffee. No matter what some folks will tell you, garden variety Lipton or Nestea has no where near the amount of caffeine as an equivalent cup of American coffee (there are extra-caffeinated teas but I'm not talking about those).
The problem with coffee is that it's a neverending cycle. Lots of coffee prevents you from getting a good sleep. In the morning you're not rested so need coffee. Throughout the day you snag another cup or two. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. By cutting out the coffee and drinking a small glass of water before sleeping you'll wake up more refreshed (and will wake up, since that water will go through you).
Coffee can also act as a diuretic and you don't sleep as well when dehydrated. And despite what some chain letters may say about the benefits of water, your body does retain the majority of the H20 in a cup of coffee. For lontime coffee drinkers this percentage goes up.
You can also try cutting the coffee with maybe half decaf. I can personally taste the hideous metallic bitterness of decaf so don't do this myself, but others don't seem to mind.
You can also try substituing hot chocolate. Some chocolates have a good amount of caffeine so you'll have to check the labels. They generally have less caffeine than American coffee however.
If it's not the caffeine that's bothering you, try a different brewing process.
And no matter how thoroughly you PROVE to them that the ratio of good music to shit music released has been constant forever (this is true for all artistic endeavours: movies, music, books, art, video games, etc.), they always insist that everything was better back in the day. They'll just ignore you when you show them all the absolute crap that was released back at the same time as their favorite stuff.
I don't agree.
It's a lot easier today to get something published. It's harder to get into the elite publications (meaning "established" not necessarily better) than it was before because of the sheer numbers of submissions. This, however, is balanced by the many more venues to rant and rave.
Movies are cheaper to make now than 20 years ago. Cheaper means that more people have access. It's an almost identical situation to when computers (notably the first Macs) and a laser printer allowed just about anyone to churn out newsletters and small publications. Before the DTP revolution you had to pay a print shop lots of money and spend lots of time in front of a cutting board to get a single page ready. The problem was that many of these new computer owners knew very little about graphic design so the pages, despite have some very good resolution and technical cleanliness, looked like total garbage. It wasn't until more designers started using computers (and many scoffed at the idea of a computer replacing xacto knives and rubber cement) that many publications began to look good again.
Nowadays, many more people are making music, slapping together movies on their PCs and Macs, making websites, etc..
The funny thing is, as far as music is concerned, we have less choice on the airwaves than we did twenty years ago. Playlists are generated on a national scale now. Gone are many of the local DJs and amateur hours. And the problem of broadcasting for the majority is that you cannot play niche music because you'll alienate a large portion of your listeners. Instead the three or four broadcast megacorps choose music that will alienate the fewest, rather than pushing what will be liked by the most. A subtle difference, but important.
But yes, you are right in that it comes down to taste. My wife enjoys Creed but I can't stand them. They sound boring (to me), their lyrics seem juvenile (to me), the lead singer is a worse egomaniac than even Bono from U2 (IMHO, and I like U2's music).
Local music is different, of course. There are still amateur bands and many nationally signed bands that sound great. I just think it's harder to find them now than it was ten years ago.
38 Simplify URLs Why can't [some long URL be simplified]
It's called an href tag.
39 Upgrade to IPv6
Why? NAT works great. It is even arguably more secure than some flat space. IPV6 is pretty cool, but not because of the number of possible devices.
42 Replace servers with P2P
They mentioned something about servers being vulnerable to attack... I guess I should run Kazaa so that my machines become invulnerable.
Moral of the Story: Operating systems can add a lot of overhead.
Sometimes. If the machine is otherwise unloaded then pure CPU intensive applications run roughly the same speed. I've benchmarked some extensive POVRay renderings on otherwise identical machines running NT2000 and RedHat 9. The difference is that I can disable a lot more on the Linux machine than on 2000. In this case there is a noticeable difference, maybe 5% or so, in favor of Linux. With GUIs the difference does not seem to be significant.
A bigger factor as others have noted is the compiler and even the compiler settings. Running with "agressive" gcc optimizations (-O5, unroll loops, Athlon specific, etc..) has led to anywhere from 2% to 15%(!!!) improvements) in CPU intensive programs. I've heard that Intel compilers can add equally dramatic speedups though I don't have any recent Intel machines to test.
"Well with a little tweaking, you can make Windows XP look like Windows 2000 as well. "
To a point. XP came installed on a recent laptop. I couldn't stand the Fisher-Price interface so turned on a more traditional style. Problem is that it doesn't work cleanly. There were lots of visual glitches and it kept on resetting to the XP interface when I did things like turn off some animations. It felt... unfinished. And that's a lot to say about a Microsoft product. The software may be unstable, bloated and clumsy to use, but (except for Win3x) always *looked* pretty.
Anyway, XP's gone now and been replaced with 200Pro. It's the only MS OS that I will run.