You're talking about Salon.com - as Daschund says below. I used to read it regularly, and I did take a Premium subscription for a year when it put up the paywall, but after the first year I stopped and exactly as you say never really went back there again. Indeed I've only just discovered they took the paywall down thanks to your post!!! (how ironic is that?). I read Slate for a bit after that precisely because it didn't have the paywall/ad barrier.
It is remarkably easy for online media to mess up. Indeed at a far lower level I used to contribute to Slashdot far more than I do now. Except several years ago my mod status was removed for no apparent reason (my Karma then, as now, is excellent) and somehow I couldn't be bothered to chase it, I started looking at it less, and before long it's dropped down from a site I used to post a lot to to a sort of glorified news feed I still scan daily as it tends to find stuff I'm interested in (for some reason I never really got into digg). Oh and the current version of the interface (current as in the past few years) I find irritating compared to the classic layout.
I really like macs, even though most of my client development work is for PCs. I've been running a MacBook with Parallels and a couple of virtual PC installs for a while, and over the last couple of months I've been looking at replacing my desktop machine and going down the serious virtualization route (and I wanted a three screen setup too)
My choice - A Mac Pro, a PC with Windows 7 or a PC with Ubuntu. I've a couple of retiring desktops one running Vista SP2 and one Unbuntu 9.04
I really wanted to go with the Mac, I really did. But I priced the hardware up. My spec - a 2.6 Ghz I7, 6Gb Ram, 2 x 1Tb HD, two graphics cards and cables came to £2,527. I built the same spec (actually slightly better, and more esily upgradable) with PC hardware for £950 and then paid an extra £200 to renew my Microsoft MAPS license which gives me 1 copy of Win7 Ultimate and 10 of Win7 Professional (of which I'll use three, and I'm deploying the 64 bit version) so the total cost for the Windows machine is around £1,100.
Having been using Win7 for a couple of days now my opinion is that it's not as good as Snow Leopard, but it feels pretty snappy and is more than usable. Certainly it's a lot less intrusive than Vista. I would have paid the premium for Apple, but when that premium was a whole £1,400 - i.e. a whopping 127% - then it's just not feasible.
And why not Ubuntu instead of Windows? Well that's shear practicality - I've been running one of my main development machines under Ubuntu for over a year now, it's great when working on linux web servers as terminal mode just fits better and it's great to have around so it's not being retired (just moved to the end of the desk and dropped from two screen to one) but the lack of Cloudmark spam filter running on Thunderbird, reliable Dreamweaver under wine or anything else, and ditto Photoshop means it wasn't quite in the running.
So my opnion - Mac is still the best OS when you look at just the OS, but factor in the hardware and unless money is really no object then Win7 wins - unfortunatly.
Fine, except the EU now contains 150% more people than the USA, is more densly populated than the USA so making infrastructural improvements more cost effective (our mobile network is easily 10 years ahead of yours), has a total GDP of USD$16.5 trillion compared to the US's paltry USD$14 trillion with more room for growth as we modernise the old eastern block, and now we're progressively getting our joint political act together is shaping up to be one of the three major economic powerblocks of the 21st century - the others being India and China*.
Sure you'll stick around in 4th place, but no International company like Microsoft is going to want to be confined to a minority market place in the longer term. If the EU says jump, MS will jump.
*I guess we'll probably let you stick around and fight our wars for us for the forseeable though.
' ' ' ' OK OK, I'm pulling your string, but the facts are true and the conclusion equally valid.
Actually I live in the highlands. I have a 2700 ft mountain in my back yard, literally. And I have 14 munros (3000 ft hills) within a 30 minute drive.
I get broadband at 6.4mps. Indeed the raw connection to the exchange is 7.4mbs.
Trick is the Scottish Government, in conjunction with the EEC, upgraded all local exchanges to broadband a couple of years ago. Mine supports 120 odd people and I'm 3.1 miles from it - but the line has to run another 12 miles to the furthest connection so it's extremely good copper. So I have a broadband enabled exchange, very good telephone network, and a very low number of people on it.
Yeah, I know, drives my friends mad who live in the centre of glasgow/edinburgh and only get 2mbs
So come and live in the Highlands - just about the best connectivity in the UK:-)
Says it all, when I was in my early 30's I wasnt getting a straight nights sleep 9 times out of 10 and was constantly exhausted from juggling infants and work. I'd happily admit my IQ took a U dive of stellar proportions for the best part of a decade. If you have a family - and for most graduates who do they start it in their late 20s/early 30s - this is the most godawfull time of your life as far as physical and mental exhaustion goes. Of Course it has other compensations - wouldn't have missed it for the world - but as far as intellectual performance goes, well it's survival.
Personally I find Objective C really rather neat. Of course it undoubtably helps that I grew up with C and can hack it upside down and backwards. I never really used C++ to anything like the same degree (having moved on to other things) and so when I started playing around with the iPhone recently this was my first taste of Objective C.
It's syntax really is weird I agree, but once you get past that - and it's no worse than many other languages - it's just hunky dory. Certainly the freedom of not having C++'s bondage style language features and ridiculous complexity really is rather refreshing. And no gabage-collection - well if you're just coding something the size of an iPhone app and you can't handle your own garbage then really you should go stick to visual basic in a nice safe environment.
So the jist of this article is several semi-permanent chatrooms have been identified where proto-terrorists gather to recruit and discuss strategy, and they want to take these down??!!!
That's perverse. Why on earth would you want to take out honeypots that your foes are kind enough to set up for you?
So yesterday the Chancellor announced a massive boost to the economy. Loads to be spent on construction of yet more fucking schools, hospitals and roads.
Not a penny on wiring the country up for fibre. We could have everyone on 50Mb broadband for a fraction of the dosh but once again because we're ruled by failed arts and humanities graduates and lead by ex-lawyers. The one opportunity they have to lay the foundations for a 21st Century economy and we're going to divert money to moving dumb matter around more quickly.
It'd be worth you while rechecking that. My exchange was one of the last to be upgraded to ADSL as it was under the magic 250 subscriber number at which BT said it would never be commercially viable and so never going to upgrade them. However ALL the exchanges in Scotland were upgraded around four years ago courtesy of an ~ £50 million rural access grant from the EC. We were limited to 1Mb originally but that was upgraded a couple of years back. So the problem should not (now) be your exchange.
The other issue that you may have run into is that BT were massively keen on DACS'ing rural lines in the 80s and 90s, which means they could get two phone connections on one line and not have to lay more cable. This doesn't work with ADSL and you have to get the line reverted to a single connection - which means moving the other sharing line elsewhere. Generally they'll swap DACSs between whoever they can (i.e. non-broadband subscribers) before laying new cable, and if they're out of space they may just say ADSL isn't available. There are ways around this - see various advice sites but generally it involves pleading/shouting very loudly/talking to your MP/etc. (and befrending you local BT engineer is a good move too - BT Corp. may be evil, but these guys are your friends).
Despite my extraordinary good connection it could have been better as recently BT had to lay a new cable down the glen to provide new lines - having run out of space on the original cable, no room to DACS any more and being obliged to provide lines to new property when requested. As the telephone engineer overseeing this said to me, he couldn't understand why they laid copper when they could have laid fibre for little additional expense, and they were going to have to lay fibre sooner or later anyway.
I live in the Scottish Highlands, 3.5 Miles from the local exchange measured point to point. We don't have fibre of course, but we do seem to have extremely good copper - possibly because the branch of the line I'm on ends another 8 miles further down the glen. I routinely get 4.5Mb on my line (Demon as ISP), have seen 6.5Mb, and Demon tell me they are seeing a little over 7.2Mb raw connection speed at the Exchange. Furthermore because the exchange only has 130 people on it contention is virtually unknown.
Whilst I've love faster, bizzarly given the current state of the network I'd most likely see a drop in speeds if I moved into an urban area.
Hehe, you're not British:-). Blair was know as a privatly strongly committed Catholic leaning Anglian most of the time he was in number 10, however he was *very* careful never to speak about it or bring religion into his politics - a sort of don't ask don't tell policy. He converted to Catholicism within a few weeks of leaving number 10, and the 'nutter' comment was made in an interview around that time.
The leader of our third major party - the Liberal Democrats - is a publically declared athiest. We've have several other party leaders who were only nominally Christian before, but this is the first one we've had who has been forthright about it - and it's made absolutly no difference to his approval ratings whatsoever.
Ireland is a really interesting case. I've been visiting the republic since the early 80's. Up until about 10 years ago it was a *very* obviously clerical state, but since 2000 or so it's secularised in a big way. The hard statistics that bear this out are the number of vocations. Ireland used to export priests all over the world and particularly to the USA. In the last few years it's exported virtually none, the number of priests trained has fallen to practically nothing - just nine ordained last year (160 died) and similar figures for nuns - 2 new ones and 228 dead.
And how would you reconcile that proposition against Tony Blair's comments to the effect that talking about religion in the UK branded you as a bit of a nutter?
In the UK we have a regularly worshipping religious community of around 1 million each of CofE, Catholic and Muslims from 60 odd million, and the Christian groups are vastly over-inflated due to parents attending church so they can get their kids into 'faith' schools. We're talking single percentage figures here of similar relgious conviction to the majority in the states, and that is reflected across europe - even nowdays in the more traditional countries around the med.
Even in Ireland religion is increasingly a dead issue - the relentless outing of paedophilia among priests and cruelty in the religious orders generally from the mid 90's onwards was just the final blow.
Increasingly I think most Europeans recognise the difference between the civilized people on the west and east coasts who keep trying to vote in a sensible president and the more, ahem, challenged in the middle and south who vote for whatever the Republican party throws up. It also goes almost without saying as well that any American who makes it to Europe will be of the former varity and hence most likely to be treated with sympathy than hostility.
So as long as you don't make supportive comments about Bush or Religion you'll fit in just fine. Make the odd noise against either or both of these and we'll positively love you.
You yourself should know that coding is an aptitude - if your kid wants to learn how to code then they will despite you, if they don't then no amount 'encouragement' will produce anything other than resentment.
Make sure your motive isn't 'I want to encourage my kid to code so they can appreciate what a clever and cool guy I am'. Your keenness to show off your kernal hacking skillz suggest there might be just a whisper of this in there. Be honest with yourself and your motives first.
Right, that said there's no reason why if your kid does have aptitude then you shouldn't facilitate things. Myself I have two kids of mid to late teen years. Both are completely computer user literate and virtually live on the net with IM, Social Networking, Gaming etc. Both have unrestricted access to their own PCs (in the home office tho - don't believe in PCs in kids bedrooms). For both of them I've dangled the interesting stuff where they can see it so they can pick it if they want too - interesting stuff is access to coding software, graphics software, game moding software, their own domain with complete access, pointers to interesting sites - slashdot and others, pointers to articles good articles and videos about tech, gadgets and coding etc. Nothing heavyhanded, I just dangle it for the picking.
The result is that my son just isn't interested. Sure he knows it's there but he's heading off to uni to study Earth Sciences and tech to him is a tool. My daughter otoh has the apptitude - she likes seeing how things work, likes taking stuff apart and tweaking it, and when I dangle stuff picks it up and runs with the bits she likes. It's unclear at the moment where her actual interests really lie - she does graphics to skin her social networking sites, writes bits of code to tweak toys and widgets, and likes modelling 3D objects a lot, but I figure what she does is up to her. If she wants to write more serious code then I'll help her and make the best tools for what she wants to do available, or more serious graphics then I'll make sure she has the software and knows where to go, but she's in the driving seat.
Oh and interesting bonus is my daughter has decided being a Geekgirl is cool and a great way to be an individual at school. Oestregen earrings for christmas from Fractalspin were an absolute hit!
Seriously, the Gorilla Arm syndrom always kills any touchscreen technology stone dead for extensive use (I was first told this on an IT course in 1986 and it's still true, despite several attempts to popularize them since), but I really don't understand why we persist in using Mice for general use over Trackerballs.
A good tracker (logitech or microsoft high end ones) are just as accurate as mice, considerably less tiring as you're not moving your arm around all day, take up less desk space an for the truly geeky have more room available for extra buttons (because you don't have to push all the weight around). RSI is much less a risk with trackers, especially the ones configured so the primary mouse button is under the thumb - with consequently more muscle and more robust tendons - than the index finger.
Who ever sets up a windows PC with a direct internet connection? Being behind a NAT will cover the drive-by attack issue perfectly adequatly, and whilst it was it was common a few years ago for consumer broadband companies to supply USB broadband 'modems' which did connect directly, in practice now this is rare as most now use a pre-configured (generally wireless) router.
Not quite. The poster is refering to OpenSpace sims, which do run four to a processor (as opposed to normal sims of 1 per processor). These come with less than 1/4 of the usual prim allocation and are apparently intended to be for light personal use or 'open landscape' type sims. However I don't think this is a common cause of lag as you can only buy an openspace sim if you already have a normal one and they are relatively unusual still.
I seem to recall that a mechanism had been proposed whereby the material for the colliding body collected at a Trojan point, from which is was dislodged once it reached sufficient size - after which collision with the proto-earth would be just about inevitable. If the mars collider formed in the same way then collision with a large body could be pretty much normal in our sort of system and the incidence of large moons might be very high indeed.
You have this completely the wrong way around. I always welcome interested user-access to my databases, except of course I make sure that they have access to read-only views set up so they can extract the maxiumum amount of business information out with the minimal amount of sql and if performance is an issue I give them access to a replicated copy (it's very rare indeed that a business user won't be happy with a nightly update).
I used to work in blue-chips inhouse as dba, and now I'm an consultant to a mix of large and small businesses. In both positions one thing I always try to do is identify an office worker who is interested in IT and encourage them to act as the local 'expert' for extracting data from their databases. There's always someone in an office who everyone else asks first to fix their computers, if you identify them and take them under your wing not only do they get a lot of status from being the local expert (and possibly a good argument for a pay increment!) but they keep you from having to do mundane sql enquiries and you get a natural ally with your users.
Don't make the mistake of dismissing office clerks as somehow stupid and not capable of handling the mysteries of IT like you do. Generally these people will be massively familiar with spreadsheets so explaining tables as like spreadsheets is an easy first step. I've encouraged and trained clerks to the level where they can throw around multi-level joins and subqueries quite happily (and taking acount of the indexes!) before now and these people often have an advantage over you in that they probably know the data at a more intimate level then you do. Furthermore having a good fan base of such people tends to work well for you as they then appreciate what a dba actually does and they're sure to make nice noises to their bosses.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
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I've seen Banks talk a couple of times now - once to an SF audience and once to a more mainstream. On both occassions he's been asked which are his favourite books and the ones he'd recommend people to start with. On the mainstream side it's 'The Bridge' (which he claims is his best work), but for his SF he recommends 'Use of Weapons' - and has this long story about how he paired down the plot structure (thanks to ken MacLeod) from something unreadable to the backwards/forwards converging story structure he ended up with which he's rather proud of.
I'd have to agree, I love Banks, and Ken MacLeod (who incidentally were at school together), and Alastair Reynold and have devoured everything they're written. Hamilton however just cannot write. Generally I find his first couple of chapters pull you in with an intriguing idea or two, but thereafter they lack characterization and read like *very* long, increasingly tedious, teenage comic books. I've waded through the start of several now and sooner or later he completely jumps the shark and I find I've better things to do with my life.
These are just ridiculous figures. To start with the chances of a star having planets now appear to be way way lower than one in a million, given the rate at which we keep finding them even with our primative technologies (273 to date, with an estimate of at least on in 10 stars having planets).
Once you have planets the odds of one being in a reasonably correct orbit for liquid water would now appear to be quite good as latest evidence indicates that it seems planets form wherever they can. Even being cautious it's difficult to see how a figure of one in a hundred systems with a a planet in a suitable position could be anything other than pesimistic. Anywhere from about 0.7AU out to 2 would be fine - Mars only just fails to have oceans because of it's low gravity.
The most troublesome item on planet formation is one you don't mention - a large moon is really helpful to stabilize rotation, an even there we have two planets (well one is an ex-planet) in our system with relatively large moons.
My personal feeling, with a biological background, is that if water-bearing planets are fairly common (and the indications are good) then life is probably everywhere, given that it seems to have arisen on Earth at the arliest opportunity we can conceive of it happening. The issue is most likely that the steps to 1) multicellular and 2) intelligent life seem much more likely to be rate limiting. The odds would seem to be there's green worlds out the aplenty, but very few with anyone to talk to.
Your point about an educated clergy is so true. Likewise as a athiest I have little time for any religion in the evangelical mould because at base they are fundamentally anti-intellectual. OTOH it's always worthwile listening to the elite of the non-evangelical sects of any religion. One may fundementally disagree with them, but these are always smart people, do have worthwhile things to say about 'the human condition' and at the very least will hone one's own thoughts.
BBC Radio 4 tends to be very good at producing programmes of this description. The 'Humphrys in Search of God' series for example are well worth listening too (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/misc/insearchofgod.shtml). For the non-brits Humphrys is an elderly and vastly respected BBC Journalist who is also an athiest who would like to believe in God, but cannot reconcile this with his experience. Great stuff.
Well all this says is that you're a not very nice person who is obsessed by being an asshole (griefing), sex and money. Of course there are loads of people in SL doing the cybersex thing, and if that's what you go looking for then that's what you'll find. But it's a bit like going to Amsterdam, just touring the red light district, and then concluding everyone in Amsterdam is just interested in buying and selling sex. Myself I run a quite profitable RP-orientated design business which nets me around USD$500 a month. I don't earn at real-life pay rates, but SL has basically replaced the time I used to spend playing other games and the like, so I now have entertainment that pays me:-). Most of the people I deal with are there for entertainment in various forms, and certainly not the cybersex obsessed griefers you hang with.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about Salon.com - as Daschund says below. I used to read it regularly, and I did take a Premium subscription for a year when it put up the paywall, but after the first year I stopped and exactly as you say never really went back there again. Indeed I've only just discovered they took the paywall down thanks to your post!!! (how ironic is that?). I read Slate for a bit after that precisely because it didn't have the paywall/ad barrier.
It is remarkably easy for online media to mess up. Indeed at a far lower level I used to contribute to Slashdot far more than I do now. Except several years ago my mod status was removed for no apparent reason (my Karma then, as now, is excellent) and somehow I couldn't be bothered to chase it, I started looking at it less, and before long it's dropped down from a site I used to post a lot to to a sort of glorified news feed I still scan daily as it tends to find stuff I'm interested in (for some reason I never really got into digg). Oh and the current version of the interface (current as in the past few years) I find irritating compared to the classic layout.
I really like macs, even though most of my client development work is for PCs. I've been running a MacBook with Parallels and a couple of virtual PC installs for a while, and over the last couple of months I've been looking at replacing my desktop machine and going down the serious virtualization route (and I wanted a three screen setup too)
My choice - A Mac Pro, a PC with Windows 7 or a PC with Ubuntu. I've a couple of retiring desktops one running Vista SP2 and one Unbuntu 9.04
I really wanted to go with the Mac, I really did. But I priced the hardware up. My spec - a 2.6 Ghz I7, 6Gb Ram, 2 x 1Tb HD, two graphics cards and cables came to £2,527. I built the same spec (actually slightly better, and more esily upgradable) with PC hardware for £950 and then paid an extra £200 to renew my Microsoft MAPS license which gives me 1 copy of Win7 Ultimate and 10 of Win7 Professional (of which I'll use three, and I'm deploying the 64 bit version) so the total cost for the Windows machine is around £1,100.
Having been using Win7 for a couple of days now my opinion is that it's not as good as Snow Leopard, but it feels pretty snappy and is more than usable. Certainly it's a lot less intrusive than Vista. I would have paid the premium for Apple, but when that premium was a whole £1,400 - i.e. a whopping 127% - then it's just not feasible.
And why not Ubuntu instead of Windows? Well that's shear practicality - I've been running one of my main development machines under Ubuntu for over a year now, it's great when working on linux web servers as terminal mode just fits better and it's great to have around so it's not being retired (just moved to the end of the desk and dropped from two screen to one) but the lack of Cloudmark spam filter running on Thunderbird, reliable Dreamweaver under wine or anything else, and ditto Photoshop means it wasn't quite in the running.
So my opnion - Mac is still the best OS when you look at just the OS, but factor in the hardware and unless money is really no object then Win7 wins - unfortunatly.
Fine, except the EU now contains 150% more people than the USA, is more densly populated than the USA so making infrastructural improvements more cost effective (our mobile network is easily 10 years ahead of yours), has a total GDP of USD$16.5 trillion compared to the US's paltry USD$14 trillion with more room for growth as we modernise the old eastern block, and now we're progressively getting our joint political act together is shaping up to be one of the three major economic powerblocks of the 21st century - the others being India and China*.
Sure you'll stick around in 4th place, but no International company like Microsoft is going to want to be confined to a minority market place in the longer term. If the EU says jump, MS will jump.
*I guess we'll probably let you stick around and fight our wars for us for the forseeable though.
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OK OK, I'm pulling your string, but the facts are true and the conclusion equally valid.
Actually I live in the highlands. I have a 2700 ft mountain in my back yard, literally. And I have 14 munros (3000 ft hills) within a 30 minute drive.
I get broadband at 6.4mps. Indeed the raw connection to the exchange is 7.4mbs.
Trick is the Scottish Government, in conjunction with the EEC, upgraded all local exchanges to broadband a couple of years ago. Mine supports 120 odd people and I'm 3.1 miles from it - but the line has to run another 12 miles to the furthest connection so it's extremely good copper. So I have a broadband enabled exchange, very good telephone network, and a very low number of people on it.
Yeah, I know, drives my friends mad who live in the centre of glasgow/edinburgh and only get 2mbs
So come and live in the Highlands - just about the best connectivity in the UK :-)
Says it all, when I was in my early 30's I wasnt getting a straight nights sleep 9 times out of 10 and was constantly exhausted from juggling infants and work. I'd happily admit my IQ took a U dive of stellar proportions for the best part of a decade.
If you have a family - and for most graduates who do they start it in their late 20s/early 30s - this is the most godawfull time of your life as far as physical and mental exhaustion goes. Of Course it has other compensations - wouldn't have missed it for the world - but as far as intellectual performance goes, well it's survival.
Personally I find Objective C really rather neat. Of course it undoubtably helps that I grew up with C and can hack it upside down and backwards. I never really used C++ to anything like the same degree (having moved on to other things) and so when I started playing around with the iPhone recently this was my first taste of Objective C.
It's syntax really is weird I agree, but once you get past that - and it's no worse than many other languages - it's just hunky dory. Certainly the freedom of not having C++'s bondage style language features and ridiculous complexity really is rather refreshing. And no gabage-collection - well if you're just coding something the size of an iPhone app and you can't handle your own garbage then really you should go stick to visual basic in a nice safe environment.
So the jist of this article is several semi-permanent chatrooms have been identified where proto-terrorists gather to recruit and discuss strategy, and they want to take these down??!!!
That's perverse. Why on earth would you want to take out honeypots that your foes are kind enough to set up for you?
So yesterday the Chancellor announced a massive boost to the economy. Loads to be spent on construction of yet more fucking schools, hospitals and roads.
Not a penny on wiring the country up for fibre. We could have everyone on 50Mb broadband for a fraction of the dosh but once again because we're ruled by failed arts and humanities graduates and lead by ex-lawyers. The one opportunity they have to lay the foundations for a 21st Century economy and we're going to divert money to moving dumb matter around more quickly.
It'd be worth you while rechecking that. My exchange was one of the last to be upgraded to ADSL as it was under the magic 250 subscriber number at which BT said it would never be commercially viable and so never going to upgrade them. However ALL the exchanges in Scotland were upgraded around four years ago courtesy of an ~ £50 million rural access grant from the EC. We were limited to 1Mb originally but that was upgraded a couple of years back. So the problem should not (now) be your exchange.
The other issue that you may have run into is that BT were massively keen on DACS'ing rural lines in the 80s and 90s, which means they could get two phone connections on one line and not have to lay more cable. This doesn't work with ADSL and you have to get the line reverted to a single connection - which means moving the other sharing line elsewhere. Generally they'll swap DACSs between whoever they can (i.e. non-broadband subscribers) before laying new cable, and if they're out of space they may just say ADSL isn't available. There are ways around this - see various advice sites but generally it involves pleading/shouting very loudly/talking to your MP/etc. (and befrending you local BT engineer is a good move too - BT Corp. may be evil, but these guys are your friends).
Despite my extraordinary good connection it could have been better as recently BT had to lay a new cable down the glen to provide new lines - having run out of space on the original cable, no room to DACS any more and being obliged to provide lines to new property when requested. As the telephone engineer overseeing this said to me, he couldn't understand why they laid copper when they could have laid fibre for little additional expense, and they were going to have to lay fibre sooner or later anyway.
I live in the Scottish Highlands, 3.5 Miles from the local exchange measured point to point. We don't have fibre of course, but we do seem to have extremely good copper - possibly because the branch of the line I'm on ends another 8 miles further down the glen. I routinely get 4.5Mb on my line (Demon as ISP), have seen 6.5Mb, and Demon tell me they are seeing a little over 7.2Mb raw connection speed at the Exchange. Furthermore because the exchange only has 130 people on it contention is virtually unknown.
Whilst I've love faster, bizzarly given the current state of the network I'd most likely see a drop in speeds if I moved into an urban area.
"Tony Blair non-religious?"
Hehe, you're not British :-). Blair was know as a privatly strongly committed Catholic leaning Anglian most of the time he was in number 10, however he was *very* careful never to speak about it or bring religion into his politics - a sort of don't ask don't tell policy. He converted to Catholicism within a few weeks of leaving number 10, and the 'nutter' comment was made in an interview around that time.
The leader of our third major party - the Liberal Democrats - is a publically declared athiest. We've have several other party leaders who were only nominally Christian before, but this is the first one we've had who has been forthright about it - and it's made absolutly no difference to his approval ratings whatsoever.
Ireland is a really interesting case. I've been visiting the republic since the early 80's. Up until about 10 years ago it was a *very* obviously clerical state, but since 2000 or so it's secularised in a big way. The hard statistics that bear this out are the number of vocations. Ireland used to export priests all over the world and particularly to the USA. In the last few years it's exported virtually none, the number of priests trained has fallen to practically nothing - just nine ordained last year (160 died) and similar figures for nuns - 2 new ones and 228 dead.
And how would you reconcile that proposition against Tony Blair's comments to the effect that talking about religion in the UK branded you as a bit of a nutter?
In the UK we have a regularly worshipping religious community of around 1 million each of CofE, Catholic and Muslims from 60 odd million, and the Christian groups are vastly over-inflated due to parents attending church so they can get their kids into 'faith' schools. We're talking single percentage figures here of similar relgious conviction to the majority in the states, and that is reflected across europe - even nowdays in the more traditional countries around the med.
Even in Ireland religion is increasingly a dead issue - the relentless outing of paedophilia among priests and cruelty in the religious orders generally from the mid 90's onwards was just the final blow.
I have a faint suspicion that what remains of the Native American population might just have a bit of a dispute with that reading.
Increasingly I think most Europeans recognise the difference between the civilized people on the west and east coasts who keep trying to vote in a sensible president and the more, ahem, challenged in the middle and south who vote for whatever the Republican party throws up. It also goes almost without saying as well that any American who makes it to Europe will be of the former varity and hence most likely to be treated with sympathy than hostility.
So as long as you don't make supportive comments about Bush or Religion you'll fit in just fine. Make the odd noise against either or both of these and we'll positively love you.
Don't, really, just don't.
You yourself should know that coding is an aptitude - if your kid wants to learn how to code then they will despite you, if they don't then no amount 'encouragement' will produce anything other than resentment.
Make sure your motive isn't 'I want to encourage my kid to code so they can appreciate what a clever and cool guy I am'. Your keenness to show off your kernal hacking skillz suggest there might be just a whisper of this in there. Be honest with yourself and your motives first.
Right, that said there's no reason why if your kid does have aptitude then you shouldn't facilitate things. Myself I have two kids of mid to late teen years. Both are completely computer user literate and virtually live on the net with IM, Social Networking, Gaming etc. Both have unrestricted access to their own PCs (in the home office tho - don't believe in PCs in kids bedrooms). For both of them I've dangled the interesting stuff where they can see it so they can pick it if they want too - interesting stuff is access to coding software, graphics software, game moding software, their own domain with complete access, pointers to interesting sites - slashdot and others, pointers to articles good articles and videos about tech, gadgets and coding etc. Nothing heavyhanded, I just dangle it for the picking.
The result is that my son just isn't interested. Sure he knows it's there but he's heading off to uni to study Earth Sciences and tech to him is a tool. My daughter otoh has the apptitude - she likes seeing how things work, likes taking stuff apart and tweaking it, and when I dangle stuff picks it up and runs with the bits she likes. It's unclear at the moment where her actual interests really lie - she does graphics to skin her social networking sites, writes bits of code to tweak toys and widgets, and likes modelling 3D objects a lot, but I figure what she does is up to her. If she wants to write more serious code then I'll help her and make the best tools for what she wants to do available, or more serious graphics then I'll make sure she has the software and knows where to go, but she's in the driving seat.
Oh and interesting bonus is my daughter has decided being a Geekgirl is cool and a great way to be an individual at school. Oestregen earrings for christmas from Fractalspin were an absolute hit!
Seriously, the Gorilla Arm syndrom always kills any touchscreen technology stone dead for extensive use (I was first told this on an IT course in 1986 and it's still true, despite several attempts to popularize them since), but I really don't understand why we persist in using Mice for general use over Trackerballs.
A good tracker (logitech or microsoft high end ones) are just as accurate as mice, considerably less tiring as you're not moving your arm around all day, take up less desk space an for the truly geeky have more room available for extra buttons (because you don't have to push all the weight around). RSI is much less a risk with trackers, especially the ones configured so the primary mouse button is under the thumb - with consequently more muscle and more robust tendons - than the index finger.
Who ever sets up a windows PC with a direct internet connection? Being behind a NAT will cover the drive-by attack issue perfectly adequatly, and whilst it was it was common a few years ago for consumer broadband companies to supply USB broadband 'modems' which did connect directly, in practice now this is rare as most now use a pre-configured (generally wireless) router.
Not quite. The poster is refering to OpenSpace sims, which do run four to a processor (as opposed to normal sims of 1 per processor). These come with less than 1/4 of the usual prim allocation and are apparently intended to be for light personal use or 'open landscape' type sims. However I don't think this is a common cause of lag as you can only buy an openspace sim if you already have a normal one and they are relatively unusual still.
I seem to recall that a mechanism had been proposed whereby the material for the colliding body collected at a Trojan point, from which is was dislodged once it reached sufficient size - after which collision with the proto-earth would be just about inevitable. If the mars collider formed in the same way then collision with a large body could be pretty much normal in our sort of system and the incidence of large moons might be very high indeed.
You have this completely the wrong way around. I always welcome interested user-access to my databases, except of course I make sure that they have access to read-only views set up so they can extract the maxiumum amount of business information out with the minimal amount of sql and if performance is an issue I give them access to a replicated copy (it's very rare indeed that a business user won't be happy with a nightly update).
I used to work in blue-chips inhouse as dba, and now I'm an consultant to a mix of large and small businesses. In both positions one thing I always try to do is identify an office worker who is interested in IT and encourage them to act as the local 'expert' for extracting data from their databases. There's always someone in an office who everyone else asks first to fix their computers, if you identify them and take them under your wing not only do they get a lot of status from being the local expert (and possibly a good argument for a pay increment!) but they keep you from having to do mundane sql enquiries and you get a natural ally with your users.
Don't make the mistake of dismissing office clerks as somehow stupid and not capable of handling the mysteries of IT like you do. Generally these people will be massively familiar with spreadsheets so explaining tables as like spreadsheets is an easy first step. I've encouraged and trained clerks to the level where they can throw around multi-level joins and subqueries quite happily (and taking acount of the indexes!) before now and these people often have an advantage over you in that they probably know the data at a more intimate level then you do. Furthermore having a good fan base of such people tends to work well for you as they then appreciate what a dba actually does and they're sure to make nice noises to their bosses.
I've seen Banks talk a couple of times now - once to an SF audience and once to a more mainstream. On both occassions he's been asked which are his favourite books and the ones he'd recommend people to start with. On the mainstream side it's 'The Bridge' (which he claims is his best work), but for his SF he recommends 'Use of Weapons' - and has this long story about how he paired down the plot structure (thanks to ken MacLeod) from something unreadable to the backwards/forwards converging story structure he ended up with which he's rather proud of.
I'd have to agree, I love Banks, and Ken MacLeod (who incidentally were at school together), and Alastair Reynold and have devoured everything they're written. Hamilton however just cannot write. Generally I find his first couple of chapters pull you in with an intriguing idea or two, but thereafter they lack characterization and read like *very* long, increasingly tedious, teenage comic books. I've waded through the start of several now and sooner or later he completely jumps the shark and I find I've better things to do with my life.
These are just ridiculous figures. To start with the chances of a star having planets now appear to be way way lower than one in a million, given the rate at which we keep finding them even with our primative technologies (273 to date, with an estimate of at least on in 10 stars having planets).
Once you have planets the odds of one being in a reasonably correct orbit for liquid water would now appear to be quite good as latest evidence indicates that it seems planets form wherever they can. Even being cautious it's difficult to see how a figure of one in a hundred systems with a a planet in a suitable position could be anything other than pesimistic. Anywhere from about 0.7AU out to 2 would be fine - Mars only just fails to have oceans because of it's low gravity.
The most troublesome item on planet formation is one you don't mention - a large moon is really helpful to stabilize rotation, an even there we have two planets (well one is an ex-planet) in our system with relatively large moons.
My personal feeling, with a biological background, is that if water-bearing planets are fairly common (and the indications are good) then life is probably everywhere, given that it seems to have arisen on Earth at the arliest opportunity we can conceive of it happening. The issue is most likely that the steps to 1) multicellular and 2) intelligent life seem much more likely to be rate limiting. The odds would seem to be there's green worlds out the aplenty, but very few with anyone to talk to.
Your point about an educated clergy is so true. Likewise as a athiest I have little time for any religion in the evangelical mould because at base they are fundamentally anti-intellectual. OTOH it's always worthwile listening to the elite of the non-evangelical sects of any religion. One may fundementally disagree with them, but these are always smart people, do have worthwhile things to say about 'the human condition' and at the very least will hone one's own thoughts.
BBC Radio 4 tends to be very good at producing programmes of this description. The 'Humphrys in Search of God' series for example are well worth listening too (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/misc/insearchofgod.shtml). For the non-brits Humphrys is an elderly and vastly respected BBC Journalist who is also an athiest who would like to believe in God, but cannot reconcile this with his experience. Great stuff.
Well all this says is that you're a not very nice person who is obsessed by being an asshole (griefing), sex and money. Of course there are loads of people in SL doing the cybersex thing, and if that's what you go looking for then that's what you'll find. But it's a bit like going to Amsterdam, just touring the red light district, and then concluding everyone in Amsterdam is just interested in buying and selling sex. :-). Most of the people I deal with are there for entertainment in various forms, and certainly not the cybersex obsessed griefers you hang with.
Myself I run a quite profitable RP-orientated design business which nets me around USD$500 a month. I don't earn at real-life pay rates, but SL has basically replaced the time I used to spend playing other games and the like, so I now have entertainment that pays me