That's because you didn't RTFA, and the summary is utter shite.
The rift isn't new, it happened in 2005 when two volcanoes went off. What is new is that just this week, this very week in which this duped story came out, the very thing that these articles are talking about, it was shown for the very first time that it is possible for a huge magnetic deformation to occur on the surface in a matter of days, as it does in the ocean. For the first time they've been able to show that activity in one segment can "trigger a major episode of magma injection and associated deformation on a neighbouring segment." That's new, and generally the term we apply to new things that are being reported on for the first time is "news". I know it's a strange concept, but I'm sure you can handle it.
Afar is now a fabulous place to do plate-tectonics research, for one because they are seeing a new plate form right before their eyes (even if it is rather slow from a human perspective), and for another because unlike oceanic plates, this baby plate is extremely accessible. Ordinarily to study plate tectonics scientists have to go down in a sub, but until the crack reaches the ocean (many hundreds of thousands of years away, more than likely) they can study it on the surface.
In other words, it's not the rift that is news, it's the fact that this actually is just like the oceanic plates that are so hard to study.
We have pretty good bike paths along the sides of the streets where I live, but no experienced rider uses them. I asked a co-worker who biked to work why, and he told me the only times he's ever been hit or had a close call was when he was using the bike paths + crosswalks instead of riding in the road with traffic.
The reason is pretty simple if you think about your own and other's driving habits: dumbass drivers coming up to the light or coming to a main street from a side street do NOT check to see if there is a biker about to cross before pulling up. In this case, nearly all drivers qualify as dumbass drivers, because they are literally breaking the law almost every time they stop at a light or intersection (you are supposed to stop before the path/crosswalk and pull up if no pedestrians are coming). This means a biker can have a clear right-of-way (walk sign + traffic moving his direction) and still have people pull out in front of him or, if the timing is bad, even hit a biker using a crosswalk.
When bikers ride in the road with the cars, the people driving, no matter how much they may curse at the bikers, are forced to notice them. Crossing intersections and side streets, making turns, waiting for traffic, EVERYTHING becomes safer.
Bike lanes in the road are only better if drivers are forced to notice the bikers in the process.
A Pentium 75 won't run a control system, this system was more than likely a VAX or DCS system running VMS, that's what most of the old control systems run where I work.
They are beastly machines, and solid as a rock - they almost never crash. You can grind them to a halt, but you'll never get the equivalent of a blue screen of death. If you can free up whatever resources you managed to hog it'll go on purring like a kitten. Tons of processing power for their age, and more than likely 64-bit to boot (if they run VMS they have to be 64bit).
More than likely the situation is some sort of hardware failure, combined with the fact that you can't get 35+ year old hardware any more and it's incredibly difficult to find hardware to run 35+ year old software on, and the fact that they apparently hadn't considered the system going down and thus had no redundancy, and it might take a while to fix this.
Except that it was scrapped when it was provent that it didn't work. We don't exactly have phsychic warriors on the ground in Afghanistan killing goats today.
The Iraqi's, however, are using dowsing rods to find bombs at every checkpoint instead of getting out and searching for them. That seems quite a bit different than completely failing (in the long run) to find psychic goat killers.
Would you replace a system that works 99% of the time with a system that works 0% of the time? Because no other practical solution to the problem has ever been presented.
It should be obvious that "dismantle all the nukes man" is completely impractical, as the first country to do so is at the complete mercy of any other country with nukes. Also, the cat is already out of the bag - every nation with nukes has the ability to build new nukes at any time, and more nations are gaining that ability.
You're opening up a whole can of worms there, it's the old grandpa time paradox military style.
If you use a missile to blow up the missile launcher before it launches the missile, how did you get a missile to blow up the missile launcher in the first place?
War would create ultimate time paradoxes.
But in reality it would do you no good, as the missile launcher you blew up would be the one in an alternate dimension anyway, and you'd succeed in blowing nothing up in the dimension you cared about.
And you knew that he had not obtained new WMD's since that time exactly... how?
We had information that suggested he had obtained or was attempting to obtain materials for WMD's. That information turned out later to be unreliable, but we also know that Hussein was at least attempting to obtain WMD's, and he actively used them in the past. Even with bad information in one particular case, the justification was still there, if somewhat shakier and less immediate than originally thought.
Bush had the political clout to go ahead and fix a mistake we (particularly, his father) made in the past. Whether or not he was an immediate threat didn't really matter, Hussein was trying very hard to be a threat, and if something wasn't done when Bush had political favor to get away with it then it might not be until Hussein succeeded in attacking an ally that any president would be able to do anything about him. At that point he is a much tougher target.
You can disagree with that decision, obviously, but honestly I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes. Now, there is a crapload after that that I disagree with, but I don't think the initial decision to take Saddam out of power was wrong.
It's certainly possible that someone could pick up basic geographic cues that tend to indicate where water should be - especially if you already know where some water is nearby.
We have people who go to school for years to learn to do this, and as a side benefit they can greatly increase your chances of finding Oil or any type of metal or rock you may be interested in.
They are called Geologists, and unlike dowsers they are reliable. They are also a hell of a lot more expensive than dowsers, though surveyors should be on par and would be able to tell you the best place to drill for water. An experienced well-digger could give you a good idea based simply on where they have found the best water in the past.
You do realize we have gone through many political parties in the US, right? The reason parties die out is because more people "throw their vote away" than vote for the original primary party. For example, the Whig party is gone. They are no more. The current two parties, Democrat and Republican, actually started out as one party. Back then, the major polarizing issues were completely different, and the current polarizing issues were little more than minor philosophical differences among party members. Eventually the northern, industrialized portion of the party split off over issues like slavery and representation in congress, while the deep south Democrats consolidated their base. The Republican party has since gone through a number of near-deaths and re-births since then, while the Democrats have changed slowly and steadily since then.
One particular election that nearly saw the death of the Republican party in somewhat recent history was Theodor Roosavelt's second term - he became angry with the Republican party and ran under the Bull party. He took around 20% of the vote, while the republican candidate took around 30% of the vote giving the Democrat candidate the victory. Had his party been a little more established it might have overtaken the Republican party and we'd have the Democrats and Bulls today.
So, while it may seem like voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away, it isn't. You can think of it as voting against both parties, and if enough people agree with you a new party may rise to dominance. The mere fact that you voted has an effect on the election. No candidate can win by less than 50% of the electoral votes, so a strong enough third party siphoning votes from both sides can really shake up the political system. That isn't possible when nobody votes third party. For example, if the Green Party managed to take California and (inexplicably) Texas, both major parties would be screwed. Basically whichever party is dominant in the House of Reps chooses the president (effectively, it is run like another election), and the Senate elects the VP. Just imagine the message that would be sent to both parties and the grass-roots political efforts that would be generated. It would almost be a given that a new party will rise to dominance.
Honestly, I think if more people voted for the candidate that actually represented what what they believed instead of saying "well, it's better than the other guy" we would be in a lot better shape today.
Not just generic steel or aluminum, Toughbooks have titanium cases, to keep them light, stiff, and strong. Now you can get a Toughbook with a solid state drive, and the biggest weakness to the system is eliminated. With an SSD on board, it becomes extremely difficult to damage the laptop. You have to hit something so hard you literally tear the components off the motherboard (very hard to do) or overcome the strength of the titanium (which is not thin, btw) to crush it. Even then you're more likely to damage the LCD than anything, and destroying the hard drive would be nearly impossible.
I work with people who require laptops where surviving being run over by a truck is a minimum requirement, because that or worse is a distinct possibility. Things like dropping a laptop from 20 feet up onto concrete because you had more residual lubricant on your gloved hand than you realized happen on occasion.
If you're going to spend $3,000+ on a ruggedized laptop, it should be able to handle anything. The ToughBook line comes pretty close, but apparently Dell is nowhere close.
On the other hand, I do not understand why Panasonic drivers change for every single component of every model of a particular line (cf-30k vs cf-30n, for example). Sure I could see some parts being different, but a different MODEM for each version? Really?
Since those X11 extensions are hacks onto X11 to enable such exposure, I'd say the GP is right. X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff.
If what you say were true, NVIDIA would not have had to hack the hell out of X11 to get decent 3d performance out of it.
I've used Compiz and Beryl, they both crash regularly and slow my laptop significantly (a couple years old, but runs Vista just fine). Gnome-Shell looks ok, but it isn't exactly out yet (you can get a preview from live.gnome.org) so it's hard to compare it. Metisse looks more like a "neat toy" than anything else, but I'm sure some people would find it useful, and if it is designed for flexibility then apps designed specifically for it could be quite powerful. Nothing I've used is as polished as Vista, or even XP, and not even close to OSX (OSX has the best desktop I've used, but I have a number of other reasons for not owning a Mac).
Beryl may have been around when Vista was still Longhorn, but in all this time it has still not managed to be a stable compositor, and most of its features aren't that useful (the 3d cube, my favorite feature, is useless beyond the "neato" effect).
The modular nature multiplies the number of potential bugs by an order of magnitude for each layer. I.e. if the Client/Server model of X11 were merged into simply the X11 renderer, GUI applications would be an order of magnitude easier to write. It isn't too bad for X11 because it isn't that big or all that complicated, but the client/server nature of X11 creates the potential for a lot more bugs.
The biggest example of the bug problem with modular systems is the GNU HURD kernel. It is modular, I believe it has 4-5 parts that must work in unison to function, and in 20 years Stallman and his group have yet to produce a working kernel. Compare that to Torvold's Linux kernel, which was integrated and took a couple years to develop pretty much by himself.
Part of the problem with X11 is that it is NOT a complete package - it's the "last mile", so to speak, and you need three or four more layers to get a modern desktop. If you make an honest comparison of a complete desktop package based on X11 that matches Windows Vista/7 or Mac OSX and there is no question as far as quality. The X11 based setup is harder to use and generally less useful than the Windows or Mac counterparts. Incidentally, I've used OSX the least but found it the easiest to pick up - good design counts.
, and it has a client server model because originally the display was normally on a different machine than the server (this is often raised as a bad design)
You should read that section on X the GP posted, they actually tried to use X for its intended purpose (back when that actually was an intended purpose, and had not been hacked around yet) and found it nearly useless as a remote display server/client setup compared to other setups, most notably Sun's at the time. It was arbitrarily devided into client/server (and "client" and "server" roles were reversed from convention, for some strange reason) without much rhyme or reason, which made it a bandwidth hog and meant half the graphics application had to reside on the client (the end computer the graphics, not X's retarded definition of client) anyway.
...it was optimised to be as fast as possible within the design limitations it had
Except that it wasn't. For the longest time X11 was the most bloated and slowest option out there, for remote and local applications alike. The only reason it is fast now is because hardware has moved so far beyond it that it is fast in spite of itself. It certainly isn't nearly as powerful as any other GUI system, and when you actually add on all the bells and whistles (which must be created separately by somebody else) it's still slower than anything around. Seriously, add the necessary components to make X11 match Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OSX, particularly a good window manager window dressing from Compiz, and you'll find almost everything GUI-based runs slower on X11.
That Chrome is an exception is shocking, and is why everybody is surprised, hence TFA.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
The handbook may be out of date, but that section on X is just as true today as it was then. This part in particular hits the nail on the head:
(The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.)
If X outperforms anything, it is by sheer luck and unexpected consequence. The planets align "just so" and for once it is the best implimentation for a particular task. It is not a common occurance. Coming to the conclusion that it "stood the test of time" based on a single piece of software is rather foolish. If X regularly out-performed Windows and Mac this would not be a surprise, but of course, it is a surprise.
First we wasted money on war; now we're wasting it on other shit. We need fiscal restraint.
While I don't agree that war in Afghanistan or Iraq were a waste, we have certainly wasted a crapload of money in both wars because we namby-pamby around and get distracted. They should have been over and done with in a few years and cost a fraction of what they have cost and will continue to cost.
My biggest beef since Bush's first term has been how much he spent on useless crap (asshole had the gall to cut taxes and raise spending, it's cut-cut, raise-cut, or raise-raise, unless you've been severly over-taxing it's never cut-raise). Now Obama seems to be on the war path to completely destroy our economy. There is a reason we have been the dominant financial power in the world for decades, and it's because our government didn't waste as much money as all the other first world countries, which allowed us to be more productive than everybody else. Now that is changing as Bush hit us hard with debt, and now Obama is trying to out-spend Bush in his very first year in office. It's insanity.
Why the hell can't presidents get their heads around the idea of "spend less than you take in"? It's not that hard, any responsible adult can do it. I suppose when you never have to live in the real world you don't have to learn these things.
Everybody here is blaming the programmers when the Patriot issue was a hardware, not a software issue!
You are absolutely correct, but not for the reasons you think you are.
The Patriot missile system was designed to shoot down aircraft, not missiles. The design of the system, even if it were operating at perfect precision, would not have a high success rate for destroying high-speed missiles.
The article is bullshit for the same reason, because the Patriot system was successful at destroying aircraft and slow-moving missiles. Frankly, being off by 600 feet is going to blow your chances of killing an airplane traveling at or near Mach 1 almost as much as it will blow your chances of killing a missile traveling at Mach 5.
The biggest problem here is the Patriot system was designed to spray shrapnel in a cone at aircraft. There are any number of places the shrapnel can hit and successfully down the aircraft. The explosive is a proximity explosive and it has a known delay. This is completely acceptable when downing aircraft traveling at or below Mach 1. When dealing with a missile traveling at Mach 5, however, you aren't very likely to get a solid hit on the missile body with the shrapnel and it is almost impossible to destroy the warhead. In case you don't know how big missiles work, the warhead is the part that goes boom when it lands, and it is very important that your missile defense system destroys or disables that warhead.
So what would be necessary to make a successful SCUD killer? Probably either a really big warhead and a tight proximity sensor to create a shockwave big enough to destroy the missile entirely, or a multi-warhead missile that could split and cover a large enough area to reliable destroy the missiles. Of course, everything works better with a more precise tracking system, as the closer you can get the better your chances of blowing it up.
Seriously, bad floating point math, if that was a true factor here, is way down on the list of reasons the missiles failed.
And if you think computers are bad at math, try calculating Pi or Phi and you'll discover that decimal math has the exact same problems binary math has, they simply occur in different places. Some concepts that seem simple in decimal (like 0.1) are hard in binary, and vice versa. Frankly, people suck at binary math so we never see any advantages.
Actually it's a case of re-purposing an anti-aircraft weapon for anti-missile purposes. The system time error likely doesn't factor in to the equation much at all, because the original design would almost certainly have used the system time as a starting point for the tracking clock, meaning it has at most a minute or two for the error to accumulate.
The fact is the Patriot missile is a poor design for an anti-missile defense, and as such there are exactly zero verified SCUD kills with the Patriot system. The Patriot uses a proximity sensor to detonate near the target, which then sprays shrapnel at the missile to destroy it. The delay on the sensor is fine for destroying an airplane - it has a very large target the shrapnel can hit and still destroy the aircraft. The delay is not so good for a SCUD missile traveling at Mach 5, however. Chances are the shrapnel, if it even hits the SCUD traveling that fast, will hit the rear of the missile which leaves a live warhead still falling toward earth and likely still on target, depending on the size of the target.
The poor performance as an anti-SCUD has been known in the military for a long time now, the Israeli's in particular were very dissatisfied with its inability to stop Iraqi SCUDS during the Gulf War. Basically the Patriot system works on aircraft and large, slow missiles. It does not work well at all on fast missiles, never has and probably never will.
In other words, the problem here was with the management (i.e. the US Military) for shoe-horning the Patriot system into a role it was not designed for, not the designers or programmers who created the system. Sure, we can look back and wish it was designed to be more flexible, but that does not mean you should bash the programmers for creating a system that worked very well for its intended purpose.
Successful competitors to the iPhone will be those that understand that the point is to make a better ultraportable computing platform... but I don't think RIM can...
Do you even know what RIM does for a living? They are practically the source of the entire smartphone market. No brand of smart phone is as popular as the Blackberry line, which still far out-sells the iPhone.
Granted, on a model to model basis iPhone is king, but the whole point of the Blackberry is that you can choose from any number of business phones on the platform and get most of the same features and all of the reliability of a Blackberry. There are a number of features on the Blackberry that the iPhone doesn't even touch. You've got to remember that the Blackberry is a smartphone geared for the business market, not the general retail market. The goals, products, and feature-sets for the two overlap in a few areas but are very different in others.
Basically, the iPhone is trying to weazle into RIM's market and having moderate success, mainly in situations where people were using a Blackberry when all they needed was a plain-jane smartphone because the alternatives were just not that great. However unless the iPhone makes some serious changes in their platform and service offerings, RIM and their Blackberries will continue to dominate the business professional cell phone market.
In terms of powering our progress I think that fusion or breeder reactors are the only viable technologies in the very long term.
Nothing else comes close to the net energy that we get currently from burning up...
You should probably hold your horses on that statement until fusion power actually produces any net energy.
From what I've been able to find the best fusion reactor so far (also the biggest until ITER) has been the JET experiment, which was able to produce 65% of the power they put into it. Basically, the best so far in fusion power loses 35% of the energy put into it, which is obviously far, far less than the least efficient traditional or alternative non-nuclear option.
Right now fission produces the most bang for the buck, even in the US where we are restricted to very inefficient use of the uranium fuel (for fear of producing weaponizable uranium). If we could pull our head out of the sand we could make fission many times more efficient and the spent fuel simpler to store.
Then, in another 50 years or however long it will take to figure out controlled fusion power (they have been working on it for a long, long time now with nothing useful to show for it), fusion can replace fission as the cleaner and hopefully cheaper upgrade.
In other words, unless the ITER is a monumental leap forward in fusion technology (and it doesn't sound like it is), don't expect stellar results out of it yet. If it can break even on power though, things will really start to move I think.
He didn't say supported, he said had. HAD. Consumers don't often buy ECC RAM, hence Intel doesn't see the need to include support for it.
Frankly, Intel doesn't seem to care about the half-dozen hobyists who think their nightly WoW session is a "mission critical" application. Maybe if someday that half-dozen turns into a few million they'll change their minds.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you didn't RTFA, and the summary is utter shite.
The rift isn't new, it happened in 2005 when two volcanoes went off. What is new is that just this week, this very week in which this duped story came out, the very thing that these articles are talking about, it was shown for the very first time that it is possible for a huge magnetic deformation to occur on the surface in a matter of days, as it does in the ocean. For the first time they've been able to show that activity in one segment can "trigger a major episode of magma injection and associated deformation on a neighbouring segment." That's new, and generally the term we apply to new things that are being reported on for the first time is "news". I know it's a strange concept, but I'm sure you can handle it.
Afar is now a fabulous place to do plate-tectonics research, for one because they are seeing a new plate form right before their eyes (even if it is rather slow from a human perspective), and for another because unlike oceanic plates, this baby plate is extremely accessible. Ordinarily to study plate tectonics scientists have to go down in a sub, but until the crack reaches the ocean (many hundreds of thousands of years away, more than likely) they can study it on the surface.
In other words, it's not the rift that is news, it's the fact that this actually is just like the oceanic plates that are so hard to study.
We have pretty good bike paths along the sides of the streets where I live, but no experienced rider uses them. I asked a co-worker who biked to work why, and he told me the only times he's ever been hit or had a close call was when he was using the bike paths + crosswalks instead of riding in the road with traffic.
The reason is pretty simple if you think about your own and other's driving habits: dumbass drivers coming up to the light or coming to a main street from a side street do NOT check to see if there is a biker about to cross before pulling up. In this case, nearly all drivers qualify as dumbass drivers, because they are literally breaking the law almost every time they stop at a light or intersection (you are supposed to stop before the path/crosswalk and pull up if no pedestrians are coming). This means a biker can have a clear right-of-way (walk sign + traffic moving his direction) and still have people pull out in front of him or, if the timing is bad, even hit a biker using a crosswalk.
When bikers ride in the road with the cars, the people driving, no matter how much they may curse at the bikers, are forced to notice them. Crossing intersections and side streets, making turns, waiting for traffic, EVERYTHING becomes safer.
Bike lanes in the road are only better if drivers are forced to notice the bikers in the process.
A Pentium 75 won't run a control system, this system was more than likely a VAX or DCS system running VMS, that's what most of the old control systems run where I work.
They are beastly machines, and solid as a rock - they almost never crash. You can grind them to a halt, but you'll never get the equivalent of a blue screen of death. If you can free up whatever resources you managed to hog it'll go on purring like a kitten. Tons of processing power for their age, and more than likely 64-bit to boot (if they run VMS they have to be 64bit).
More than likely the situation is some sort of hardware failure, combined with the fact that you can't get 35+ year old hardware any more and it's incredibly difficult to find hardware to run 35+ year old software on, and the fact that they apparently hadn't considered the system going down and thus had no redundancy, and it might take a while to fix this.
However, we don't rely on God to aim our morters for us, the Iraqi's do.
Except that it was scrapped when it was provent that it didn't work. We don't exactly have phsychic warriors on the ground in Afghanistan killing goats today.
The Iraqi's, however, are using dowsing rods to find bombs at every checkpoint instead of getting out and searching for them. That seems quite a bit different than completely failing (in the long run) to find psychic goat killers.
Would you replace a system that works 99% of the time with a system that works 0% of the time? Because no other practical solution to the problem has ever been presented.
It should be obvious that "dismantle all the nukes man" is completely impractical, as the first country to do so is at the complete mercy of any other country with nukes. Also, the cat is already out of the bag - every nation with nukes has the ability to build new nukes at any time, and more nations are gaining that ability.
You're opening up a whole can of worms there, it's the old grandpa time paradox military style.
If you use a missile to blow up the missile launcher before it launches the missile, how did you get a missile to blow up the missile launcher in the first place?
War would create ultimate time paradoxes.
But in reality it would do you no good, as the missile launcher you blew up would be the one in an alternate dimension anyway, and you'd succeed in blowing nothing up in the dimension you cared about.
And you knew that he had not obtained new WMD's since that time exactly... how?
We had information that suggested he had obtained or was attempting to obtain materials for WMD's. That information turned out later to be unreliable, but we also know that Hussein was at least attempting to obtain WMD's, and he actively used them in the past. Even with bad information in one particular case, the justification was still there, if somewhat shakier and less immediate than originally thought.
Bush had the political clout to go ahead and fix a mistake we (particularly, his father) made in the past. Whether or not he was an immediate threat didn't really matter, Hussein was trying very hard to be a threat, and if something wasn't done when Bush had political favor to get away with it then it might not be until Hussein succeeded in attacking an ally that any president would be able to do anything about him. At that point he is a much tougher target.
You can disagree with that decision, obviously, but honestly I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes. Now, there is a crapload after that that I disagree with, but I don't think the initial decision to take Saddam out of power was wrong.
It's certainly possible that someone could pick up basic geographic cues that tend to indicate where water should be - especially if you already know where some water is nearby.
We have people who go to school for years to learn to do this, and as a side benefit they can greatly increase your chances of finding Oil or any type of metal or rock you may be interested in.
They are called Geologists, and unlike dowsers they are reliable. They are also a hell of a lot more expensive than dowsers, though surveyors should be on par and would be able to tell you the best place to drill for water. An experienced well-digger could give you a good idea based simply on where they have found the best water in the past.
You do realize we have gone through many political parties in the US, right? The reason parties die out is because more people "throw their vote away" than vote for the original primary party. For example, the Whig party is gone. They are no more. The current two parties, Democrat and Republican, actually started out as one party. Back then, the major polarizing issues were completely different, and the current polarizing issues were little more than minor philosophical differences among party members. Eventually the northern, industrialized portion of the party split off over issues like slavery and representation in congress, while the deep south Democrats consolidated their base. The Republican party has since gone through a number of near-deaths and re-births since then, while the Democrats have changed slowly and steadily since then.
One particular election that nearly saw the death of the Republican party in somewhat recent history was Theodor Roosavelt's second term - he became angry with the Republican party and ran under the Bull party. He took around 20% of the vote, while the republican candidate took around 30% of the vote giving the Democrat candidate the victory. Had his party been a little more established it might have overtaken the Republican party and we'd have the Democrats and Bulls today.
So, while it may seem like voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away, it isn't. You can think of it as voting against both parties, and if enough people agree with you a new party may rise to dominance. The mere fact that you voted has an effect on the election. No candidate can win by less than 50% of the electoral votes, so a strong enough third party siphoning votes from both sides can really shake up the political system. That isn't possible when nobody votes third party. For example, if the Green Party managed to take California and (inexplicably) Texas, both major parties would be screwed. Basically whichever party is dominant in the House of Reps chooses the president (effectively, it is run like another election), and the Senate elects the VP. Just imagine the message that would be sent to both parties and the grass-roots political efforts that would be generated. It would almost be a given that a new party will rise to dominance.
Honestly, I think if more people voted for the candidate that actually represented what what they believed instead of saying "well, it's better than the other guy" we would be in a lot better shape today.
They've typically got a metal case
Not just generic steel or aluminum, Toughbooks have titanium cases, to keep them light, stiff, and strong. Now you can get a Toughbook with a solid state drive, and the biggest weakness to the system is eliminated. With an SSD on board, it becomes extremely difficult to damage the laptop. You have to hit something so hard you literally tear the components off the motherboard (very hard to do) or overcome the strength of the titanium (which is not thin, btw) to crush it. Even then you're more likely to damage the LCD than anything, and destroying the hard drive would be nearly impossible.
I work with people who require laptops where surviving being run over by a truck is a minimum requirement, because that or worse is a distinct possibility. Things like dropping a laptop from 20 feet up onto concrete because you had more residual lubricant on your gloved hand than you realized happen on occasion.
If you're going to spend $3,000+ on a ruggedized laptop, it should be able to handle anything. The ToughBook line comes pretty close, but apparently Dell is nowhere close.
On the other hand, I do not understand why Panasonic drivers change for every single component of every model of a particular line (cf-30k vs cf-30n, for example). Sure I could see some parts being different, but a different MODEM for each version? Really?
She showed her lovely lady lumps in Powder Blue, that was enough to make that movie almost bearable.
Since those X11 extensions are hacks onto X11 to enable such exposure, I'd say the GP is right. X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff.
If what you say were true, NVIDIA would not have had to hack the hell out of X11 to get decent 3d performance out of it.
I've used Compiz and Beryl, they both crash regularly and slow my laptop significantly (a couple years old, but runs Vista just fine). Gnome-Shell looks ok, but it isn't exactly out yet (you can get a preview from live.gnome.org) so it's hard to compare it. Metisse looks more like a "neat toy" than anything else, but I'm sure some people would find it useful, and if it is designed for flexibility then apps designed specifically for it could be quite powerful. Nothing I've used is as polished as Vista, or even XP, and not even close to OSX (OSX has the best desktop I've used, but I have a number of other reasons for not owning a Mac).
Beryl may have been around when Vista was still Longhorn, but in all this time it has still not managed to be a stable compositor, and most of its features aren't that useful (the 3d cube, my favorite feature, is useless beyond the "neato" effect).
The modular nature multiplies the number of potential bugs by an order of magnitude for each layer. I.e. if the Client/Server model of X11 were merged into simply the X11 renderer, GUI applications would be an order of magnitude easier to write. It isn't too bad for X11 because it isn't that big or all that complicated, but the client/server nature of X11 creates the potential for a lot more bugs.
The biggest example of the bug problem with modular systems is the GNU HURD kernel. It is modular, I believe it has 4-5 parts that must work in unison to function, and in 20 years Stallman and his group have yet to produce a working kernel. Compare that to Torvold's Linux kernel, which was integrated and took a couple years to develop pretty much by himself.
Part of the problem with X11 is that it is NOT a complete package - it's the "last mile", so to speak, and you need three or four more layers to get a modern desktop. If you make an honest comparison of a complete desktop package based on X11 that matches Windows Vista/7 or Mac OSX and there is no question as far as quality. The X11 based setup is harder to use and generally less useful than the Windows or Mac counterparts. Incidentally, I've used OSX the least but found it the easiest to pick up - good design counts.
, and it has a client server model because originally the display was normally on a different machine than the server (this is often raised as a bad design)
You should read that section on X the GP posted, they actually tried to use X for its intended purpose (back when that actually was an intended purpose, and had not been hacked around yet) and found it nearly useless as a remote display server/client setup compared to other setups, most notably Sun's at the time. It was arbitrarily devided into client/server (and "client" and "server" roles were reversed from convention, for some strange reason) without much rhyme or reason, which made it a bandwidth hog and meant half the graphics application had to reside on the client (the end computer the graphics, not X's retarded definition of client) anyway.
Except that it wasn't. For the longest time X11 was the most bloated and slowest option out there, for remote and local applications alike. The only reason it is fast now is because hardware has moved so far beyond it that it is fast in spite of itself. It certainly isn't nearly as powerful as any other GUI system, and when you actually add on all the bells and whistles (which must be created separately by somebody else) it's still slower than anything around. Seriously, add the necessary components to make X11 match Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OSX, particularly a good window manager window dressing from Compiz, and you'll find almost everything GUI-based runs slower on X11.
That Chrome is an exception is shocking, and is why everybody is surprised, hence TFA.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
The handbook may be out of date, but that section on X is just as true today as it was then. This part in particular hits the nail on the head:
(The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.)
If X outperforms anything, it is by sheer luck and unexpected consequence. The planets align "just so" and for once it is the best implimentation for a particular task. It is not a common occurance. Coming to the conclusion that it "stood the test of time" based on a single piece of software is rather foolish. If X regularly out-performed Windows and Mac this would not be a surprise, but of course, it is a surprise.
First we wasted money on war; now we're wasting it on other shit. We need fiscal restraint.
While I don't agree that war in Afghanistan or Iraq were a waste, we have certainly wasted a crapload of money in both wars because we namby-pamby around and get distracted. They should have been over and done with in a few years and cost a fraction of what they have cost and will continue to cost.
My biggest beef since Bush's first term has been how much he spent on useless crap (asshole had the gall to cut taxes and raise spending, it's cut-cut, raise-cut, or raise-raise, unless you've been severly over-taxing it's never cut-raise). Now Obama seems to be on the war path to completely destroy our economy. There is a reason we have been the dominant financial power in the world for decades, and it's because our government didn't waste as much money as all the other first world countries, which allowed us to be more productive than everybody else. Now that is changing as Bush hit us hard with debt, and now Obama is trying to out-spend Bush in his very first year in office. It's insanity.
Why the hell can't presidents get their heads around the idea of "spend less than you take in"? It's not that hard, any responsible adult can do it. I suppose when you never have to live in the real world you don't have to learn these things.
Everybody here is blaming the programmers when the Patriot issue was a hardware, not a software issue!
You are absolutely correct, but not for the reasons you think you are.
The Patriot missile system was designed to shoot down aircraft, not missiles. The design of the system, even if it were operating at perfect precision, would not have a high success rate for destroying high-speed missiles.
The article is bullshit for the same reason, because the Patriot system was successful at destroying aircraft and slow-moving missiles. Frankly, being off by 600 feet is going to blow your chances of killing an airplane traveling at or near Mach 1 almost as much as it will blow your chances of killing a missile traveling at Mach 5.
The biggest problem here is the Patriot system was designed to spray shrapnel in a cone at aircraft. There are any number of places the shrapnel can hit and successfully down the aircraft. The explosive is a proximity explosive and it has a known delay. This is completely acceptable when downing aircraft traveling at or below Mach 1. When dealing with a missile traveling at Mach 5, however, you aren't very likely to get a solid hit on the missile body with the shrapnel and it is almost impossible to destroy the warhead. In case you don't know how big missiles work, the warhead is the part that goes boom when it lands, and it is very important that your missile defense system destroys or disables that warhead.
So what would be necessary to make a successful SCUD killer? Probably either a really big warhead and a tight proximity sensor to create a shockwave big enough to destroy the missile entirely, or a multi-warhead missile that could split and cover a large enough area to reliable destroy the missiles. Of course, everything works better with a more precise tracking system, as the closer you can get the better your chances of blowing it up.
Seriously, bad floating point math, if that was a true factor here, is way down on the list of reasons the missiles failed.
And if you think computers are bad at math, try calculating Pi or Phi and you'll discover that decimal math has the exact same problems binary math has, they simply occur in different places. Some concepts that seem simple in decimal (like 0.1) are hard in binary, and vice versa. Frankly, people suck at binary math so we never see any advantages.
Actually it's a case of re-purposing an anti-aircraft weapon for anti-missile purposes. The system time error likely doesn't factor in to the equation much at all, because the original design would almost certainly have used the system time as a starting point for the tracking clock, meaning it has at most a minute or two for the error to accumulate.
The fact is the Patriot missile is a poor design for an anti-missile defense, and as such there are exactly zero verified SCUD kills with the Patriot system. The Patriot uses a proximity sensor to detonate near the target, which then sprays shrapnel at the missile to destroy it. The delay on the sensor is fine for destroying an airplane - it has a very large target the shrapnel can hit and still destroy the aircraft. The delay is not so good for a SCUD missile traveling at Mach 5, however. Chances are the shrapnel, if it even hits the SCUD traveling that fast, will hit the rear of the missile which leaves a live warhead still falling toward earth and likely still on target, depending on the size of the target.
The poor performance as an anti-SCUD has been known in the military for a long time now, the Israeli's in particular were very dissatisfied with its inability to stop Iraqi SCUDS during the Gulf War. Basically the Patriot system works on aircraft and large, slow missiles. It does not work well at all on fast missiles, never has and probably never will.
In other words, the problem here was with the management (i.e. the US Military) for shoe-horning the Patriot system into a role it was not designed for, not the designers or programmers who created the system. Sure, we can look back and wish it was designed to be more flexible, but that does not mean you should bash the programmers for creating a system that worked very well for its intended purpose.
Successful competitors to the iPhone will be those that understand that the point is to make a better ultraportable computing platform... but I don't think RIM can...
Do you even know what RIM does for a living? They are practically the source of the entire smartphone market. No brand of smart phone is as popular as the Blackberry line, which still far out-sells the iPhone.
Granted, on a model to model basis iPhone is king, but the whole point of the Blackberry is that you can choose from any number of business phones on the platform and get most of the same features and all of the reliability of a Blackberry. There are a number of features on the Blackberry that the iPhone doesn't even touch. You've got to remember that the Blackberry is a smartphone geared for the business market, not the general retail market. The goals, products, and feature-sets for the two overlap in a few areas but are very different in others.
Basically, the iPhone is trying to weazle into RIM's market and having moderate success, mainly in situations where people were using a Blackberry when all they needed was a plain-jane smartphone because the alternatives were just not that great. However unless the iPhone makes some serious changes in their platform and service offerings, RIM and their Blackberries will continue to dominate the business professional cell phone market.
In terms of powering our progress I think that fusion or breeder reactors are the only viable technologies in the very long term.
Nothing else comes close to the net energy that we get currently from burning up...
You should probably hold your horses on that statement until fusion power actually produces any net energy.
From what I've been able to find the best fusion reactor so far (also the biggest until ITER) has been the JET experiment, which was able to produce 65% of the power they put into it. Basically, the best so far in fusion power loses 35% of the energy put into it, which is obviously far, far less than the least efficient traditional or alternative non-nuclear option.
Right now fission produces the most bang for the buck, even in the US where we are restricted to very inefficient use of the uranium fuel (for fear of producing weaponizable uranium). If we could pull our head out of the sand we could make fission many times more efficient and the spent fuel simpler to store.
Then, in another 50 years or however long it will take to figure out controlled fusion power (they have been working on it for a long, long time now with nothing useful to show for it), fusion can replace fission as the cleaner and hopefully cheaper upgrade.
In other words, unless the ITER is a monumental leap forward in fusion technology (and it doesn't sound like it is), don't expect stellar results out of it yet. If it can break even on power though, things will really start to move I think.
There was a MacGyver episode of Myth Busters - that particular plane dropped like a rock when they built the replica.
I sure hope they aren't copying MacGyver's designs for a fusion reactor...
Wait, I think I missed part of his post.
He's obviously not an AMD fanboi then. My bad.
Still, otherwise, the point stands.
He didn't say supported, he said had. HAD. Consumers don't often buy ECC RAM, hence Intel doesn't see the need to include support for it.
Frankly, Intel doesn't seem to care about the half-dozen hobyists who think their nightly WoW session is a "mission critical" application. Maybe if someday that half-dozen turns into a few million they'll change their minds.
Seriously, why the hell do you need ECC RAM?