Slashdot - the place where the uninformed morons are modded insightful.
Have you even used your brain when you wrote "warez version" ?
Since when aren't I allowed to make as many copies of Linux as I please ? Assuming I bought one CD with some distribution, I still am allowed to make as many copies as I please, share them with friends and anybody else, as long as I don't make more than the beer they'd have to invest in me for burning the cd's for them.
Here's an excerpt from the licence posted on the SuSE website:
You may make and use unlimited copies of the Software for Your distribution and use within Your Organization. You may make and distribute unlimited copies of the Software outside Your organization provided that: 1) You receive no consideration; and, 2) you do not bundle or combine the Software with another offering
Moreover, Suse has always provided their distribution on their FTP server. I've been using it for 7 years now and I never had any issues with downloading it, while I still bought one of each major release, to support them.
There are tons of mirrors across the world.
With 9.3, they provided the choice between a net-based installation, and a cd-based one. As such, the CDs available as torrents are actually copies downloaded from the website.
As for the other posts: 9.3 has been available online for more than a month now.
One comment: the Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card combined a smidge with the Foundation.
The first for the setup of the journey and the colonisation of the destination planets, the other for the rise to an empire through religious domination.
What's new or great in this, eh ?
I mentioned these two books primarily because they pass as SF and, as such, they're right on topic. Plenty other writings that deal with the same topic in about the same way.
Err, insightful or uninformed ? Then again, it's Slashdot...
So, as I'm writing from a HP zv5000 laptop, running Suse 9.1 x86_64, I have to say the following:
- power management works. No specific patches, kernel compilations or the like. Just set it up as you please.
- the two things that don't work properly are the memory card reader (some 5-in-1 thing which is not recognised by the kernel) and the integrated modem, which, I haven't even tried to configure.
- everything else works. Of course, one needs to install the NVidia drivers if one wanted hardware 3D acceleration, but that's not laptop specific. Plus, it can be done by HP.
But I'll tell you this much: even with the latest video drivers, the colours of the IT scheme of Slashdot still look painfully idiotic.
Wankers... Both you and the one who posted underneath you.
Smokers tend to group and talk, which you do less. They think more than you do, which increases their productivity. This is their way of socialising.
And you did take at least five minutes to masturbate. From a social point of view. As a matter of fact, at the time I'm writing this you took these five minutes 12 times only today, by posting on Slashdot. You just wasted more time online, typing not so well thought comments (to write euphemistically). How's your productivity better ? If you smoked, you'd at least have had gotten to learn something about the people you're working with. Hell, you don't even have to smoke to go out with them on a cigarette break.
Having to go out for some fresh air, eh? Since you work mostly out of your office anyway, what are you complaining about ? You don't even know what you're talking about since you're not there most of the time anyway.
And no, I'm not a smoker. I did smoke for years, and for all I know I might start again in the future, although not in the near one.
Actually publishers are quite useful, although there might be a need for them to change some of their working style.
Currently there are two ways to get one's work published: through conferences and through journals. All fields other than computer science value journals quite highly, whereas computer science puts a quite a bit stronger emphasis on conferences.
The main reason for the latter is that the journal reviewing system is too slow for the pace at which CS research progresses.
The fact that reputable journals take so long to publish an article is caused by two reasons: most research publishes is crap and whatever is worthwhile needs some understanding and verification.
About the amount of crap being published: the mentality in US is to "publish or perish". It doesn't matter whether what is written in one's article isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It doesn't matter that all it shows are some tables with numbers, which nobody even bothered to check. Forget about understanding or interpreting them. Basic verification is rarely done. Just stick in there some tables with numbers.
Conversely, articles containing only ideas, but not numbers are rejected by default, regardless of the quality of the content. The times when the Ph in PhD stood for "philosophiae" are long gone. Nowadays nobody is allowed to throw an idea on the table, to talk of one's dream, if you will. Results must be quantifiable, immediate and should come fast. Running like a chicken with its head cut off between experiments and editing, one doesn't have much time left for taking a step back to think a little about one's work.
What's the point of all this ? At least the good journals provide the means for filtering through all the crap out there, by employing a slow and tedious process that involves going through a lot of hoops. This makes sure that what is published meets certain criteria. Perhaps not everything published in a good journal is the topmost quality, but, most frequently, it is much better than what is published in conferences.
Personally I see the future of journals as organisations who publish lists of interesting readings. Some sort of highly educated "Readers' digest"... This won't be affected a bit by the free availability of publications. There is so much information out there, that most researchers would be happy to have at least a source to point them to interesting research.
For those who like to think that publications will flourish in an open environment, analogously to the F/OSS projects, there will be an opportunity to address this matter. Perhaps someone will come up with a good idea about ranking scientific articles by quality.
Citeseer citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ attempted to provide some metrics. They can be useful, but frequently enough they are too limited.
The Journal of Machine Learning Research http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ is an example of a free online journal. Personally I admire the dedication of its editors and the quality of the articles published in it. I consider it an astounding achievement, and even more so when I think that it was launched in 1999, with its first edition published in 2000.
Particularly when considering these two examples, I find that both have their merits, but for most practical purposes CiteSeer is an indexing and search engine, while JMLR is the source to ask for quality. This is why I said that publishers do have a place in scientific publishing, although perhaps they might have to alter some of their current ways.
It's actually possible, although I don't think anyone has tried it. North Korea is the closest to this system, as far as I know, because they control the monetary system very strictly, and basically they provide their citizens for most of their needs (that are also approved by the party, of course!).
Most socialist countries have higher levels of taxation (they can go up to some 60%, if memory serves), and they invest this money in education, health, agriculture, public transportation (this includes the infrastructure as well, i.e. roads, railways, etc.), etc. It has been seen to work throughout Western Europe quite well. For instance, this is one of the reasons public transportation is so much better in Europe than in US.
Such high levels of taxation don't make those economies weak in any obvious way. As a matter of fact, I once worked out a list of advantages and disadvantages of the earnings on both sides of the pond. It was at a time when I didn't know where I wanted to live and I needed some logical reason. I found that the lifetime achievements of a middle class individual are pretty much the same on either side (give or take some 20,000 over a life time). The difference is that in US the average person has to waste a lot more time on figuring out financial matters, along with often longer work days. In Europe, such matters are much left into the hands of the state, so one has some time for enjoying one's life.
There is a reason I don't think the 100% taxation would work: it would mean the state would have to provide for the needs of its citizens and that would require too large a bureaucratic system, which is a very weak spot. But, since nobody has tried it, I don't have any evidence to claim anything else.
Also, after having read your post, I think you'd need to slightly alter your nickname. Make it "Think 1st" and use it as a reminder of something you have to do before opening your mouth (or, in this case, pressing the submit button)
Hmm, I don't know which post will be more off-topic: this or the parent. Anyway...
The government is not an independent entity. It actually represents the people and whatever it does affects the people. The debt of your country is your debt as well, and you share it with your co-nationals. Moreover, your government operates with the money from your taxes which is, ultimately, your money. Basically your country being a debtor means that your government has been spending the money you haven't given to it yet (simplistically written, admittedly, but you haven't gone beyond the republican slogans either).
If you didn't like that thought, then think for whom you vote next time.
You might find excuses to prove me wrong, but they won't amount to more than being just excuses.
Raising taxes is not a problem. It's how they are spent that makes a difference. If your government raised the taxes to provide universal health care, nobody would need to pay for insurance. Take with one hand, give with the other. However, that also means that your government would be managing more of your money, and some people have a problem with that (for good reasons too).
You don't provide any reason for saying that low taxes encourage increasing productivity and, implicitly, economic growth. And that's because it's wrong and you don't have a valid reason. The statistics waved so dearly by the republicans are misleading at best. They are measured in yearly intervals and the reference is always the worst year of the recent period (e.g. 1982 for Reagan's tax cuts, 1999 for Bush II). The claims made based on these numbers are fraud. The measurements should be compared over whole economical cycles (i.e. periods between two successive recessions; this usually translates into one decade). The peaks and the averages should be considered, not the lowest points.
If you did all this, you'd find that the tax rate doesn't have any significant influence on the state of the economy.
And browser identification isn't taken into account, as usual... With Konqueror which makes it trivial to send a specific identification for each (sub-)domain, and considering that many web sites implement routines that kick you off unless you're IE or Mozilla, it's not surprising that many people simply set the default identification string to something more commonly accepted.
Personally I think I am an exception, because I set the browser identification only for domains which I cannot access otherwise, while sending the Konqueror id to everyone who won't mind it.
Along the same lines, I typically send a Firefox identification when Konqueror's won't do, and IE only when none of the other works. So, I suppose I'm kicking up the numbers for Firefox too, even when I don't actually use it.
Such a nicely written point deserves an answer, so I hope this helps.
My experience is that formal training in biology and chemistry cannot hurt, but they're not mandatory.
I have degrees in Comp Sci & Math (like a double major in US), but nothing beyond an introduction to biology and chemistry. I have a good understanding of what I know in biology and chemistry, but I'm just a novice in these areas.
I hold a PhD in CS, with a thesis on bioinformatics. I am fairly active in the area, so my experience might be relevant.
Over the years I found that the only necessary skills are good communication and some mathematical intuition. Programming skills are useful, but marginally so. One good idea easily compensates for ten top programmers. I am a good programmer, with years of practice and a few projects of at least 50,000 lines (some published under GPL). So don't think I'm bashing coders because I'm not good at it myself.
However, I always found that the most successful projects followed from good communication between the modellers and the biologists. As long as they were able to tell each other what they wanted and where things weren't going well, all went beautifully.
The quality of the code was a side issue, discussed only when we didn't have anything else to say.
There were some pitfalls I encountered over time, too.
Modellers thinking they understood everything, and that they could do everything on their own. Usually they produced beautiful theories, without much practical application or success.
Biologists thinking the modellers were trying to devise programmes that would replace them. They generally sneered upon our projects and they went back to staring at some experimental results hoping they could sift through thousands of rows in Excel. It rarely worked.
Overly complex programme design because some programmer decided it was useful to use the latest buzzword technology. Usually this failed because it actually wasn't necessary to make the project so complex.
In what concerns the available literature, there are some books that deal with the problems and solutions in the field. One such example would be "Bioinformatics" written by Baldi & Brunak. Another would be "Molecular modelling" by Alan Hinchliffe. I found these geared more towards presenting the problems at hand, and some of the existing algorithms.
So, all in all: one can work in bioinformatics without much training on life sciences. Some general knowledge is necessary, although mostly for allowing the communication with the experts in biology or chemistry.
From a social perspective, a somewhat modest attitude (not humble, just know your limitations!) is also important, because it facilitates communication. A positive attitude towards group work is also necessary, since I really cannot see anyone being able to do such research alone.
Well, I'll do my bitching about the moderators first: where the hell are your brains if you considered the parent post insightful ? It's just a brainless statement that doesn't even rely on facts. It's much like saying that "the Windows GUI relies on libraries all written by Microsoft" so GNOME is better because it doesn't.
The truth is that the KDE libraries are not all clumped together into KDE libs. They have never been. In version 1.0 KDE libs might have been larger than the others, but that was five years ago. Things have evolved a little bit and the KDE libraries are actually very modular.
So, Gnome is not more difficult to compile because there are a lot of different people work on it. Hell, there are more people working on KDE and the results are much better. The problem with GNOME is that it's poorly coordinated and it's way too dominated by ideological issues (we have to write it in C comes to mind, even if it was unrelated).
As about your statement that programs that need some KDE feature exclusively are KDE programs: bollocks! You don't have a clue about the structure of KDE or how to link a program. Unless you need to write the program as a DCOP client, you don't need other any part of KDE except for what you link in your program.
Personally I think that the English language being taught in schools in the USA is devolving. Kids are taught to identify syllables in a word and then to simply 'say' those syllables.
Have you considered that this is a tendency to move towards a (quasi-)phonetical language ? I don't see anything bad in this, except for the inaccuracy of the fact that it'll probably still be called "English".
It is also highly debatable that it is an involution. As far as I know, among live Indo-European languages (i.e. Europe, much of Asia and the Americas) English is the only one which has "spelling contests". Being myself a native speaker or a quasi-phonetic language, I find absurd this situation in English. I never had to worry about spelling, and there definitely weren't any "spelling contests" in school. Grammar was a different matter, but that's a whole different story.
Also, there are numerous studies that link dyslexia with non-phonetical spelling, in particular with English and French.
If you considered these aspects, I don't think that "dumbing down" the language taught in schools in US is a very bad idea. It will change the language and it will likely separate it from English (first in pronunciation, then likely in spelling as well), but it will also likely be easier to learn and understand (both by children and foreigners). Don't you think this is a good idea ? Why should we waste time with an artificially difficult language ?
Of course, it is likely it would still be called English, which is something I would disagree with. Hopefully somebody will have the brilliant idea (and the political balls) to call it something else (e.g. American).
And for what it's worth: the parent post wasn't anywhere near informative. He made unsupported claims, based mostly on a smug sense of superiority because he's using FreeBSD.
Shouldn't that be closer to trolling ? If he had said "Windows" instead of "FreeBSD" he would have been labelled as a troll, and the thread would have been swamped with replies, ranging from sarcastic to offended.
My guess is that the size of the swap partitions are different between the two machines. I think the swap on the one running Suse is larger.
Grep should claim "memory exhausted "when it would have filled the entire memory. Since this includes the swap, systems with larger swaps will take longer to stop the process.
Also, since all this time is spent in a malloc/realloc + read from/dev/zero, it might be possible that a slower processor would take a tad longer. If your computers had similar hardware and were similarly configured (i.e. size of swap), I think the command should be stopped in about the same amount of time.
If you were curious, here's what I found on my SuSE from running 'time grep foo/dev/zero':
real 0m2.424s user 0m1.827s sys 0m0.546s
I would guess that the sytem time accounts for the malloc, while the user time accounts for the reading from/dev/zero.
Suse 9.2 x86_64 with 2.6.8 stops the process with the message "grep: memory exhausted" after a couple of seconds.
top shows the processor used at 6% during this time, which is not surprising, since it doesn't have much to do (foo is not that much of a regexp).
The machine has 1GB of RAM, so I assume that's how long it takes to do the malloc and the reading from/dev/zero
As I don't have a FreeBSD readily available, I cannot be amazed. I'll just be pleased that my machine behaved normally.
Re:Good LORD it's got some useless stuff!
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KDE 3.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Funny
It's a good contraception method! Not as good as Slashdot, though, as anyone could verify. Still, in some places in this world dial-up lines are expensive, so one doesn't always have access to the very best...
And this was deemed "informative" ? For crying out loud: the author hasn't even bothered to check that his point is moot. Even if not mentioned in the article, Oracle is still a member of EDS.
Actually that doesn't have anything to do with Nero. It's a feature of the 2.6 kernel, thus it's available with k3b as well.
>Right now - K3B is high quality software, but there were times where the picture was different
Your point ? Who cares how k3b was two years ago ? I would suspect that distributions would prefer newer packages, so odds are that new users wouldn't care about how early versions of k3b worked. Coincidentally, I was in the same situation: I used the command line tools because I didn't like k3b. For about one year now, I've given up on that because k3b works much better and it saves me time.
I'm not against encouraging Ahead for their effort. It is a clever move, precisely for the reason you mentioned: their software comes with most writers. Right now it doesn't really matter when users wipe the disk and install Windows, because they already paid for software they won't use. But in a not very distant future it might be more important. Disk manufacturers might choose to include Linux software in their packages, and I can see why Ahead would want to meet this need. Otherwise, manufacturers would easily switch to some other software and Ahead would be the one at loss.
So, as far as I can tell, Ahead are using the current Linux user base to test their software in what concerns functionality, bugs, etc.
If what I said was true, then Ahead is making a logical step towards maintaining its market share, possibly expanding it. Intelligent and (pre)visionary decisions are commendable, of course, especially considering they are so rare in today's market.
Real bricks are expensive, even when bought in bulk. Doing the animation would require shooting still images with the characters being moved only a little, so a computer could interpolate between these frames afterwards. Storing the scene set means renting a space to store it, and this space is added to the office space needed by the artists.
Actually, according to the legal system of the USA, it is not possible to prove that the joke is true.
It doesn't mean it isn't, however. A legal decision is different than the truth, wouldn't you agree ?
Or perhaps you believe to such an extent in the judiciary system of the USA, that you cannot differentiate between truth and legal decisions. Brainwashing is a common health problem nowadays...
Have actually read the articles ? How exactly do phase change and peltier coolers work similarly ?
The only similarity there is that they both use electric current. Do you think that's enough similarity to say that they work on the same principles ?
Or perhaps I missed the point that both were invented in the 19th century ?
The peltier effect is simply heat transfer between two conductors with different electron densities. That's the whole catch, actually: the flow of electrons generates energy. One side gets warmer due to more electrons "bombarding" it, the other gets cooler due to fewer electrons there. The rest is basic heat transfer from the CPU to the cooler surface.
A phase change thermal engine is based on the second principle of thermodynamics, namely that pressure x volume = constant x temperature
Reduce the pressure or the volume (or both), the temperature drops, and vice-versa. In particular, there's a closed circuit, filled with some gas, that's compressed on top of the CPU, then expanded in a radiator. When compressed the gas cools down, and takes some heat from the CPU, then the gas is expanded into the radiator which whisks away the extra heat.
No, no, you got it all wrong. It's the hydrogen hydroxide that kills you.
The di-hydrogen monoxide is a dietary supplement that has shown to be indispensable to a good living. Worst of all, the body only consumes it, but it doesn't produce it.
Re:Good discussion on this last December
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Fun Tabletop Games?
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· Score: 1
Along the same line: I recently bought Carcassone from http://www.funagain.com/ and I chose them for their good prices.
If you were concerned this might be an ad, it's not: I was genuinely pleased with their service and I'm just recommending them.
Actually adding some random element in the timestamp might not be a very good idea. There are a couple of reasons: you still have to implement the TCP stack, as specified by IEEE. In the paper was said that this limits your variance to 1s. The addition of a random variable to another random variable can be reverse engineered. The algorithm of generating the timestamp would become terribly complex.
Possible, but quite complex.
I like the following solution somewhat better: do exactly what this guy is doing, and collect time skews from some machine elsewhere. Using several measurements extrapolate a timestamp, then use it for your own packets. Cycle through skews obtained from several machines, if you'd like... This kind of code could be equally complex, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot - the place where the uninformed morons are modded insightful.
Have you even used your brain when you wrote "warez version" ?
Since when aren't I allowed to make as many copies of Linux as I please ? Assuming I bought one CD with some distribution, I still am allowed to make as many copies as I please, share them with friends and anybody else, as long as I don't make more than the beer they'd have to invest in me for burning the cd's for them.
Here's an excerpt from the licence posted on the SuSE website:
You may make and use unlimited copies of the Software for Your distribution and use within
Your Organization. You may make and distribute unlimited copies of the Software outside Your organization provided that: 1) You receive
no consideration; and, 2) you do not bundle or combine the Software with another offering
Moreover, Suse has always provided their distribution on their FTP server. I've been using it for 7 years now and I never had any issues with downloading it, while I still bought one of each major release, to support them.
There are tons of mirrors across the world.
With 9.3, they provided the choice between a net-based installation, and a cd-based one. As such, the CDs available as torrents are actually copies downloaded from the website.
As for the other posts: 9.3 has been available online for more than a month now.
One comment: the Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card combined a smidge with the Foundation.
The first for the setup of the journey and the colonisation of the destination planets, the other for the rise to an empire through religious domination.
What's new or great in this, eh ?
I mentioned these two books primarily because they pass as SF and, as such, they're right on topic. Plenty other writings that deal with the same topic in about the same way.
Err, insightful or uninformed ? Then again, it's Slashdot...
So, as I'm writing from a HP zv5000 laptop, running Suse 9.1 x86_64, I have to say the following:
- power management works. No specific patches, kernel compilations or the like. Just set it up as you please.
- the two things that don't work properly are the memory card reader (some 5-in-1 thing which is not recognised by the kernel) and the integrated modem, which, I haven't even tried to configure.
- everything else works. Of course, one needs to install the NVidia drivers if one wanted hardware 3D acceleration, but that's not laptop specific. Plus, it can be done by HP.
But I'll tell you this much: even with the latest video drivers, the colours of the IT scheme of Slashdot still look painfully idiotic.
Wankers... Both you and the one who posted underneath you.
Smokers tend to group and talk, which you do less. They think more than you do, which increases their productivity.
This is their way of socialising.
And you did take at least five minutes to masturbate. From a social point of view. As a matter of fact, at the time I'm writing this you took these five minutes 12 times only today, by posting on Slashdot. You just wasted more time online, typing not so well thought comments (to write euphemistically). How's your productivity better ?
If you smoked, you'd at least have had gotten to learn something about the people you're working with. Hell, you don't even have to smoke to go out with them on a cigarette break.
Having to go out for some fresh air, eh? Since you work mostly out of your office anyway, what are you complaining about ? You don't even know what you're talking about since you're not there most of the time anyway.
And no, I'm not a smoker. I did smoke for years, and for all I know I might start again in the future, although not in the near one.
Actually publishers are quite useful, although there might be a need for them to change some of their working style.
Currently there are two ways to get one's work published: through conferences and through journals. All fields other than computer science value journals quite highly, whereas computer science puts a quite a bit stronger emphasis on conferences.
The main reason for the latter is that the journal reviewing system is too slow for the pace at which CS research progresses.
The fact that reputable journals take so long to publish an article is caused by two reasons:
most research publishes is crap and whatever is worthwhile needs some understanding and verification.
About the amount of crap being published: the mentality in US is to "publish or perish". It doesn't matter whether what is written in one's article isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It doesn't matter that all it shows are some tables with numbers, which nobody even bothered to check. Forget about understanding or interpreting them. Basic verification is rarely done. Just stick in there some tables with numbers.
Conversely, articles containing only ideas, but not numbers are rejected by default, regardless of the quality of the content. The times when the Ph in PhD stood for "philosophiae" are long gone. Nowadays nobody is allowed to throw an idea on the table, to talk of one's dream, if you will. Results must be quantifiable, immediate and should come fast. Running like a chicken with its head cut off between experiments and editing, one doesn't have much time left for taking a step back to think a little about one's work.
What's the point of all this ? At least the good journals provide the means for filtering through all the crap out there, by employing a slow and tedious process that involves going through a lot of hoops. This makes sure that what is published meets certain criteria. Perhaps not everything published in a good journal is the topmost quality, but, most frequently, it is much better than what is published in conferences.
Personally I see the future of journals as organisations who publish lists of interesting readings. Some sort of highly educated "Readers' digest"... This won't be affected a bit by the free availability of publications. There is so much information out there, that most researchers would be happy to have at least a source to point them to interesting research.
For those who like to think that publications will flourish in an open environment, analogously to the F/OSS projects, there will be an opportunity to address this matter. Perhaps someone will come up with a good idea about ranking scientific articles by quality.
Citeseer citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ attempted to provide some metrics. They can be useful, but frequently enough they are too limited.
The Journal of Machine Learning Research http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ is an example of a free online journal. Personally I admire the dedication of its editors and the quality of the articles published in it. I consider it an astounding achievement, and even more so when I think that it was launched in 1999, with its first edition published in 2000.
Particularly when considering these two examples, I find that both have their merits, but for most practical purposes CiteSeer is an indexing and search engine, while JMLR is the source to ask for quality. This is why I said that publishers do have a place in scientific publishing, although perhaps they might have to alter some of their current ways.
Okay then, let's set it to 100% and stop arguing!
It's actually possible, although I don't think anyone has tried it. North Korea is the closest to this system, as far as I know, because they control the monetary system very strictly, and basically they provide their citizens for most of their needs (that are also approved by the party, of course!).
Most socialist countries have higher levels of taxation (they can go up to some 60%, if memory serves), and they invest this money in education, health, agriculture, public transportation (this includes the infrastructure as well, i.e. roads, railways, etc.), etc. It has been seen to work throughout Western Europe quite well. For instance, this is one of the reasons public transportation is so much better in Europe than in US.
Such high levels of taxation don't make those economies weak in any obvious way. As a matter of fact, I once worked out a list of advantages and disadvantages of the earnings on both sides of the pond. It was at a time when I didn't know where I wanted to live and I needed some logical reason. I found that the lifetime achievements of a middle class individual are pretty much the same on either side (give or take some 20,000 over a life time). The difference is that in US the average person has to waste a lot more time on figuring out financial matters, along with often longer work days. In Europe, such matters are much left into the hands of the state, so one has some time for enjoying one's life.
There is a reason I don't think the 100% taxation would work: it would mean the state would have to provide for the needs of its citizens and that would require too large a bureaucratic system, which is a very weak spot. But, since nobody has tried it, I don't have any evidence to claim anything else.
Also, after having read your post, I think you'd need to slightly alter your nickname. Make it "Think 1st" and use it as a reminder of something you have to do before opening your mouth (or, in this case, pressing the submit button)
Now I wish I were able to mod this up :)
There is someone civilised in this discussion.
Cheers, mate!
Hmm, I don't know which post will be more off-topic: this or the parent. Anyway...
The government is not an independent entity. It actually represents the people and whatever it does affects the people. The debt of your country is your debt as well, and you share it with your co-nationals. Moreover, your government operates with the money from your taxes which is, ultimately, your money. Basically your country being a debtor means that your government has been spending the money you haven't given to it yet (simplistically written, admittedly, but you haven't gone beyond the republican slogans either).
If you didn't like that thought, then think for whom you vote next time.
You might find excuses to prove me wrong, but they won't amount to more than being just excuses.
Raising taxes is not a problem. It's how they are spent that makes a difference. If your government raised the taxes to provide universal health care, nobody would need to pay for insurance. Take with one hand, give with the other. However, that also means that your government would be managing more of your money, and some people have a problem with that (for good reasons too).
You don't provide any reason for saying that low taxes encourage increasing productivity and, implicitly, economic growth. And that's because it's wrong and you don't have a valid reason. The statistics waved so dearly by the republicans are misleading at best. They are measured in yearly intervals and the reference is always the worst year of the recent period (e.g. 1982 for Reagan's tax cuts, 1999 for Bush II). The claims made based on these numbers are fraud. The measurements should be compared over whole economical cycles (i.e. periods between two successive recessions; this usually translates into one decade). The peaks and the averages should be considered, not the lowest points.
If you did all this, you'd find that the tax rate doesn't have any significant influence on the state of the economy.
And browser identification isn't taken into account, as usual... With Konqueror which makes it trivial to send a specific identification for each (sub-)domain, and considering that many web sites implement routines that kick you off unless you're IE or Mozilla, it's not surprising that many people simply set the default identification string to something more commonly accepted.
Personally I think I am an exception, because I set the browser identification only for domains which I cannot access otherwise, while sending the Konqueror id to everyone who won't mind it.
Along the same lines, I typically send a Firefox identification when Konqueror's won't do, and IE only when none of the other works. So, I suppose I'm kicking up the numbers for Firefox too, even when I don't actually use it.
Such a nicely written point deserves an answer, so I hope this helps.
My experience is that formal training in biology and chemistry cannot hurt, but they're not mandatory.
I have degrees in Comp Sci & Math (like a double major in US), but nothing beyond an introduction to biology and chemistry. I have a good understanding of what I know in biology and chemistry, but I'm just a novice in these areas.
I hold a PhD in CS, with a thesis on bioinformatics. I am fairly active in the area, so my experience might be relevant.
Over the years I found that the only necessary skills are good communication and some mathematical intuition. Programming skills are useful, but marginally so. One good idea easily compensates for ten top programmers. I am a good programmer, with years of practice and a few projects of at least 50,000 lines (some published under GPL). So don't think I'm bashing coders because I'm not good at it myself.
However, I always found that the most successful projects followed from good communication between the modellers and the biologists. As long as they were able to tell each other what they wanted and where things weren't going well, all went beautifully.
The quality of the code was a side issue, discussed only when we didn't have anything else to say.
There were some pitfalls I encountered over time, too.
Modellers thinking they understood everything, and that they could do everything on their own. Usually they produced beautiful theories, without much practical application or success.
Biologists thinking the modellers were trying to devise programmes that would replace them. They generally sneered upon our projects and they went back to staring at some experimental results hoping they could sift through thousands of rows in Excel. It rarely worked.
Overly complex programme design because some programmer decided it was useful to use the latest buzzword technology. Usually this failed because it actually wasn't necessary to make the project so complex.
In what concerns the available literature, there are some books that deal with the problems and solutions in the field. One such example would be "Bioinformatics" written by Baldi & Brunak. Another would be "Molecular modelling" by Alan Hinchliffe.
I found these geared more towards presenting the problems at hand, and some of the existing algorithms.
So, all in all: one can work in bioinformatics without much training on life sciences. Some general knowledge is necessary, although mostly for allowing the communication with the experts in biology or chemistry.
From a social perspective, a somewhat modest attitude (not humble, just know your limitations!) is also important, because it facilitates communication. A positive attitude towards group work is also necessary, since I really cannot see anyone being able to do such research alone.
Well, I'll do my bitching about the moderators first: where the hell are your brains if you considered the parent post insightful ? It's just a brainless statement that doesn't even rely on facts. It's much like saying that "the Windows GUI relies on libraries all written by Microsoft" so GNOME is better because it doesn't.
The truth is that the KDE libraries are not all clumped together into KDE libs. They have never been. In version 1.0 KDE libs might have been larger than the others, but that was five years ago. Things have evolved a little bit and the KDE libraries are actually very modular.
So, Gnome is not more difficult to compile because there are a lot of different people work on it. Hell, there are more people working on KDE and the results are much better. The problem with GNOME is that it's poorly coordinated and it's way too dominated by ideological issues (we have to write it in C comes to mind, even if it was unrelated).
As about your statement that programs that need some KDE feature exclusively are KDE programs: bollocks! You don't have a clue about the structure of KDE or how to link a program. Unless you need to write the program as a DCOP client, you don't need other any part of KDE except for what you link in your program.
Personally I think that the English language being taught in schools in the USA is devolving.
Kids are taught to identify syllables in a word and then to simply 'say' those syllables.
Have you considered that this is a tendency to move towards a (quasi-)phonetical language ? I don't see anything bad in this, except for the inaccuracy of the fact that it'll probably still be called "English".
It is also highly debatable that it is an involution. As far as I know, among live Indo-European languages (i.e. Europe, much of Asia and the Americas) English is the only one which has "spelling contests". Being myself a native speaker or a quasi-phonetic language, I find absurd this situation in English. I never had to worry about spelling, and there definitely weren't any "spelling contests" in school. Grammar was a different matter, but that's a whole different story.
Also, there are numerous studies that link dyslexia with non-phonetical spelling, in particular with English and French.
If you considered these aspects, I don't think that "dumbing down" the language taught in schools in US is a very bad idea. It will change the language and it will likely separate it from English (first in pronunciation, then likely in spelling as well), but it will also likely be easier to learn and understand (both by children and foreigners). Don't you think this is a good idea ? Why should we waste time with an artificially difficult language ?
Of course, it is likely it would still be called English, which is something I would disagree with. Hopefully somebody will have the brilliant idea (and the political balls) to call it something else (e.g. American).
And for what it's worth: the parent post wasn't anywhere near informative. He made unsupported claims, based mostly on a smug sense of superiority because he's using FreeBSD.
Shouldn't that be closer to trolling ? If he had said "Windows" instead of "FreeBSD" he would have been labelled as a troll, and the thread would have been swamped with replies, ranging from sarcastic to offended.
Grep should claim "memory exhausted "when it would have filled the entire memory. Since this includes the swap, systems with larger swaps will take longer to stop the process.
Also, since all this time is spent in a malloc/realloc + read from
If you were curious, here's what I found on my SuSE from running 'time grep foo
Suse 9.2 x86_64 with 2.6.8 stops the process with the message "grep: memory exhausted" after a couple of seconds.
/dev/zero
top shows the processor used at 6% during this time, which is not surprising, since it doesn't have much to do (foo is not that much of a regexp).
The machine has 1GB of RAM, so I assume that's how long it takes to do the malloc and the reading from
As I don't have a FreeBSD readily available, I cannot be amazed. I'll just be pleased that my machine behaved normally.
It's a good contraception method! Not as good as Slashdot, though, as anyone could verify. Still, in some places in this world dial-up lines are expensive, so one doesn't always have access to the very best...
And this was deemed "informative" ? For crying out loud: the author hasn't even bothered to check that his point is moot. Even if not mentioned in the article, Oracle is still a member of EDS.
> CDwriting without scsi-emulation support
Actually that doesn't have anything to do with Nero. It's a feature of the 2.6 kernel, thus it's available with k3b as well.
>Right now - K3B is high quality software, but there were times where the picture was different
Your point ? Who cares how k3b was two years ago ? I would suspect that distributions would prefer newer packages, so odds are that new users wouldn't care about how early versions of k3b worked. Coincidentally, I was in the same situation: I used the command line tools because I didn't like k3b. For about one year now, I've given up on that because k3b works much better and it saves me time.
I'm not against encouraging Ahead for their effort. It is a clever move, precisely for the reason you mentioned: their software comes with most writers. Right now it doesn't really matter when users wipe the disk and install Windows, because they already paid for software they won't use. But in a not very distant future it might be more important. Disk manufacturers might choose to include Linux software in their packages, and I can see why Ahead would want to meet this need. Otherwise, manufacturers would easily switch to some other software and Ahead would be the one at loss.
So, as far as I can tell, Ahead are using the current Linux user base to test their software in what concerns functionality, bugs, etc.
If what I said was true, then Ahead is making a logical step towards maintaining its market share, possibly expanding it. Intelligent and (pre)visionary decisions are commendable, of course, especially considering they are so rare in today's market.
Because of some old REAL problem: dosh
Real bricks are expensive, even when bought in bulk. Doing the animation would require shooting still images with the characters being moved only a little, so a computer could interpolate between these frames afterwards.
Storing the scene set means renting a space to store it, and this space is added to the office space needed by the artists.
Actually, according to the legal system of the USA, it is not possible to prove that the joke is true.
It doesn't mean it isn't, however. A legal decision is different than the truth, wouldn't you agree ?
Or perhaps you believe to such an extent in the judiciary system of the USA, that you cannot differentiate between truth and legal decisions.
Brainwashing is a common health problem nowadays...
Have actually read the articles ? How exactly do phase change and peltier coolers work similarly ?
The only similarity there is that they both use electric current. Do you think that's enough similarity to say that they work on the same principles ?
Or perhaps I missed the point that both were invented in the 19th century ?
The peltier effect is simply heat transfer between two conductors with different electron densities. That's the whole catch, actually: the flow of electrons generates energy. One side gets warmer due to more electrons "bombarding" it, the other gets cooler due to fewer electrons there.
The rest is basic heat transfer from the CPU to the cooler surface.
A phase change thermal engine is based on the second principle of thermodynamics, namely that pressure x volume = constant x temperature
Reduce the pressure or the volume (or both), the temperature drops, and vice-versa. In particular, there's a closed circuit, filled with some gas, that's compressed on top of the CPU, then expanded in a radiator. When compressed the gas cools down, and takes some heat from the CPU, then the gas is expanded into the radiator which whisks away the extra heat.
Similar, eh ?
No, no, you got it all wrong. It's the hydrogen hydroxide that kills you.
The di-hydrogen monoxide is a dietary supplement that has shown to be indispensable to a good living. Worst of all, the body only consumes it, but it doesn't produce it.
Along the same line: I recently bought Carcassone from http://www.funagain.com/ and I chose them for their good prices.
If you were concerned this might be an ad, it's not: I was genuinely pleased with their service and I'm just recommending them.
Actually adding some random element in the timestamp might not be a very good idea. There are a couple of reasons: you still have to implement the TCP stack, as specified by IEEE. In the paper was said that this limits your variance to 1s. The addition of a random variable to another random variable can be reverse engineered. The algorithm of generating the timestamp would become terribly complex.
Possible, but quite complex.
I like the following solution somewhat better: do exactly what this guy is doing, and collect time skews from some machine elsewhere. Using several measurements extrapolate a timestamp, then use it for your own packets. Cycle through skews obtained from several machines, if you'd like...
This kind of code could be equally complex, though.