You really shouldn't trust the press/media for news, nor leftist websites (Kos et al). They have a habit of not pointing out things Democrats do, and obsessing over Republicans when they do the same thing. The fact that two thirds of journalists across the USA, and nine tenths of journalists in Washington DC, self-identify as Democrats in confidential polls probably has something to do with this.
FYI, I am a foreigner living in the USA, and find it rather sad the way people cleave to identity politics in this country. The free pass Democrats get in this country also irritates me. From my point of view, you need to cut politicians open with a tree saw and count the rings to tell the difference in party.
I made the mistake of deciding to read the transcripts of White House press meetings, since Sept 2001. The end result is that I'll never trust any journalist again. I really feel sorry for any president, regardless of party.
You, fairly obviously, are trusting someone you shouldn't.
I like the sound of what you say. I would love to be able to do CSS web sites that work on everything.
I am a very technical guy who is usually designing and building hardware and software. However, I am in a small company, and am going to end up producing a web site for it whether I like it or not.
Soo.. could you provide a few links or names of books that I read that would allow me to make web sites in the way you describe? Assume someone who is used to being given a pile of books in a new subject, and has a working prototype running in about three weeks. I normally sit down and just start implementing stuff, using the books as a continuous reference. Then I redo the stuff I did badly, once I know more about the subject. I suppose this means that little code snippets are of the most use to me, along with good explanations of what is actually going on.
I realise you may have better things to do, but I am interested in what you consider to be "good" sources of information for this; you approach is one I appreciate.
Not really, but if the country were at the state where you could get that added in as an amendment, then the amendment would be irrelevant anyway. Amendments are hard to add for a reason.
The reality is that it's much easier to corrupt the judiciary, which is why people try it. The results are no less awful, but they happen in more insidious a manner.
You don't fix things by breaking the system, because the only thing you have that makes things work is the system. You change the system, and you do it by finding common ground with those around you, and changing the rules accordingly. To do otherwise is just another form of intolerance, in a form which sadly seems to be sanctioned by most of the American media at the moment.
The US system of government is fairly well designed in that it tries to balance many factors against each other, tries to stop mob rule, and tries to give people a way to change things if they have to. It annoys me that Americans don't realise just how rare and wonderful that is. I guess they don't travel enough to realise just how lucky they are.
The US Constitution is mainly a limit on the government's power. Should you add an amendment that limits the government less than another part of the constitution, it should be meaningless, because the government is limited by any part of the constitution. It is at that point that you hope your judges are willing to balance their judgements in favour of the government being more limited.
Convincing a judge to play god on your behalf is very short-sighted, because tomorrow he will be playing god, and not on your behalf. And, his successors might decide this god thing looks like fun.
One amendment that I wish hadn't been passed was the 17th. It was a great way to suborn Senators, who were supposed to be independent of the influences on Congressmen. Unfortunately they are no longer as effective a check on Congress, because they are voted for by the same people and influenced by the campaign contributions as a result.
Now I could be wrong, but I think the constitution is that document that has all those liberties and privacy garuntees defined and outlined in it. Go figure!
Yes, actually, you are wrong. It is sad but true that there is no protection of privacy mandated in the US Constitution. Back in the day, there was no need, and nobody predicted it either.
Of course, you can get said protection by adding an amendment. That is the mechanism provided for you. I use "you" because I am not American, BTW.
On the whole, I like the US Constitution. I just wish people would amend it rather than attempting to get the judiciary to pretend it says things it doesn't. Oh, and it would be nice if some Americans were to read it too.;-)
So losing $200/unit and gaining $10/game- they need to seel 20 games/unit to make it up. That seems like a long repayment period to me.
I think what everyone forgets is that they don't take a loss on the hardware forever. Eventually, the PS3 will consist of maybe 2 chips and some peripherals and a box. The PS2 has been in this place for a while.
It's a corollary of Moore's Law that the cost of a logic gate halves every 18 months, and the life of a console seems to be around 5 years. By the time Sony could bring the price of their console down, there are so many games and such a following for the console that they don't have to.
Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly. I can't do it under WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME or even E17, and the problems are in the X Server
Ah. There's your problem. The nVidia drivers blow goats for X. They are about 2MB of 3D drivers and "application specific" optimizations for 3D benchmarking programs. The don't care about some linux desktop user - they sell cards to run 3D benchmarks on gamer websites.
Their implementation of the Render extension is a little bit faster than a granny with a crayon. Oh, and the drivers crash my machine once every three weeks or so too, and seeing as they run in kernel space, they crash things very effectively. That's totally unacceptable - it was the only thing that took my machine down.
I can watch my screen redraw with the nVidia drivers. One version actually had a 2 second pause whenever I switched virtual terminals, for no apparent reason. Needless to say I reverted to an older version of the drivers.
I eventually had a sense of humour failure and got an old ATI card (9200) and use the open source X.org drivers. Suddenly I have a usable system again.
Try using an open source driver with known-good 2D acceleration, and make sure it is enabled. I was so badly burnt by the closed source nVidia drivers that I'll never run closed source drivers again.
Um, except that the we all know that in this case a "box" is a computer... And guess what - there is no definition of "box" as a computer at that link. So perhaps here we have the use of a word that hasn't made it into a dictionary yet? A homonym? And maybe homonyms are words with the same spelling and yet different meanings that have to be inferred from context? And maybe that word is a field-specific specialisation of a general term? And, if it's a whole new word, perhaps it gets its own plural or collective noun? Perhaps you are being just a teensy bit obsessive compulsive about this?
I know I get irritated when I see people say "here here!" or "tow the line", but that's because there is a well defined idiom there already, and people are getting it wrong. This is a new word in a specific field. English is all about application specific words.
I hope that "boxen" becomes the collective noun for "boxes", where "boxes" are computers, but I'm not going to get anal about it. It has character, like saying you saw "a murder of ravens" yesterday. It's one of the reasons why English is a rich language.
Are you also going to correct people that talk about "mp3ing their files"? Perhaps they meant "transcode"?
Pathsync looks interesting for directory synchronization. Is there something to do this between two linux clients or windows and linux that is rsync or cvs based. Preferably GUI clients or easy to use ones. I need windows > linux backup and linux laptop > linux backup. I saw backuppc in the debian archives, but I'm intersted in user opinions as it is always so much better. Thanks!
Have a look at rdiff-backup. I use it regularly, and I find it very useful for the sorts of things you are talking about.
They say 50.000 at the end of a human hair. Do anybody know the actual size of this cell?
Not only that, but they don't even mention how many Libraries of Congress those cells store! How am I supposed to compare press releases from different companies if they don't use the complete set of PR specs? Sheesh.
rsync is great, but I still haven't figured out how to do incremental backups with it.
Have a look at rdiff-backup. It uses rsync on the backup and does incremental backups. I use it to back up my local and remote machines. Diffs between versions are stored in a single directory and you can back those up. I can't recommend it enough.
Here is it's homepage: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
All this extra speed will not be available for the common public until they can resolve the problem with the sonic boom. Once that is resolved I think it would be a lot more interesting where they could have supersonic flights that go over land as well.
Good point. It looks this problem is on the way to being solved. Have a look at the following link:
Uh, you do realise that microwaves are used for a bunch of things? They were first used for radar and astronomy, AFAIK. WiFi uses microwaves too, as do cellphones. It's a matter of how much power you use.
Your body puts out a measurable amount of microwave energy (anything at room temperature emits them - it's just one frequency band of black body radiation).
You could use a 1KW halogen bulb inside your microwave instead of a magnetron - it's just that microwaves penetrate futher into the food (they have a lower frequency than light, and thus a higher skin depth), and you can make sure that the only thing that absorbs them is the food, which isn't as easy for light. This makes them more efficient.
I'm sorry if you were just being funny, but I get irritated with the immediate association people make between microwaves and cooking. A red hot iron bar can cook things, but we use metal for other things too. We even stick metal cutlery in our mouths. Shock. Horror.
One person just has to say "microwave" or "radiation" and we get clueless press people making comments about cooked people and the environment. It really doesn't make the world a better place, and we really shouldn't encourage this sort of ignorance.
I think we all do that, myself included. I'm glad you appreciate my interference.:-)
Well, thanks for your kind words. I think it unlikely that I will try to become a US citizen as long as I have to give up my old citizenship. I kind of like the idea of being able to change countries if a government annoys me enough. I guess I'll live with maybe just trying for a green card.:-)
NX actually uses RDP to achieve the low-bandwidth solution that is still capable of displaying a whole desktop and still retaining responsiveness. And Microsoft put a huge amount of research into RDP, and it's what they've been using for their Terminal Server and Remote Desktop applications for a _long_ time now.
My personal experience is that Remote Desktop from my home box is more responsive displaying the entire desktop and all apps(fuldc++, Ultraedit, Miranda, Virc, CodeWarrior) than X11 is with just one app(Codewarrior for Linux) from the same machine to the same machine via the same connection.
I bought NX a while back and use it to control some of my machines when I went to South Africa for christmas. I used it to run an Gnome - Evolution session on a machine here in Seattle.
NX does not use RDP for X sessions. NX uses careful caching of the X11 protocol, along with a library that pretends to be xlib. NX is capable of handling RDP, but then it uses its own optimised version of RDP. It doesn't use RDP for X. I'm pretty sure about this, because I downloaded the GPL source they provide and made a working version (which was not easy.:-) ). I eventually bought it for the convenience of the wrapper applications they provided.
X11 has serious issues with slow links, not because of bandwidth requirements, but because xlib requires a stupid number of synchronous queries for many operations. One estimate I have seen, is that around 300 X packets have to make a round trip before a window will open (in older versions of X, without the Render extension). On a local session, this is all short circuited and you don't see any delay. On a link with (say) a 300ms delay, you are looking a 300*300ms delay, even though each packet is minute.
Keith Packard has done a lot of work on adding extensions to X that mitigate this. Also, there is work on writing a library the implements the X protocol that is completely asynchronous and caches data when possible (which is sort of what the NX.so replacement for xlib does).
NCB can be found here, at http://freedesktop.org/Software/xcb.
I agree with you. Current X is dog slow over high latency links.
Yes, RCP leans a bit right. However, it's a good place to check in the morning for links to newspaper op-eds across the spectrum. I use it to get an idea of the narrative each paper and its columnists subscribe to.
I only use source determination to figure out whether I have to extensively fact check an article. I thoroughly reject the post-modernist principle of subjective realities - they do exist, but only if you ignore reality. I admit a great deal of effort is required to avoid subjective realities, but it is possible on a case by case basis. In the meantime, you can build a picture of the worldview of each paper, and get a feel for when you know they are letting it affect their reporting.
I read the National Review article, then I went and read the entire report it referenced (Yes, I am weird), and I think the article is pretty close to correct; don't discard it out of hand. There was much political hay to be made making allegations about those elections, and much money to be made by the media blowing them out of proportion. I tend to give the boring story a higher chance of being right, but I checked anyway.
I hadn't followed that link. You're right. It's good.
As for the Bob Herbert thing, I think the side that presents the most pertinent facts wins, and it looks like Herbert left a lot of stuff out in an attempt to construct a narrative. By my estimation, in this bout, he loses.
Heh. You'd think that for all the effort I put into this stuff, I could vote or something - I'm not a US citizen.:-)
Don't want to scare you even more, but did anyone read the recent NY times Op Ed piece by Bob Herbert?
Don't have a link because it is the NY Times, but here is the summary/introduction. The article was very scary, especially when you combine hanging chads, the Bush running the state, Floridia's "too close to call" status, and all of its electoral votes.
Voting While Black
By BOB HERBERT (NYT) Op-Ed August 20, 2004, Friday Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 23 , Column 6
The smell of voter suppression coming out of Florida is getting stronger. It turns out that a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation, in which state troopers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando in a bizarre hunt for evidence of election fraud, is being conducted...
If you're wondering, I tend to collect links that counter the prevailing winds in the media. Also I tend to distrust something I read in the NY Times unless I can find corroboration from trustworthy sources.
This speech by Michael Crichton is good reading too:
Assuming you are not a troll - dude, toss some of those jobs *my* way!
Nope. Not a troll. I can't really toss them your way though - they're a little specialised. I can tell you how I got into the position I am in, though.
This assumes you are in a place with a reasonable population. I live in Seattle, but any city will probably do. I prefer to work for small companies and do interesting stuff. In this space, word of mouth and referrals are everything.
These tips are for people who want to get into software or electronics hardware with a bit more of an emphasis on consumer stuff rather than IT stuff. It also assumes that you are reasonably good at what you do. Word of mouth comes from making people proud to recommend you. It has taken me three years to get to my current position, and I did it as a sort of freelance contractor.
Here are some hints:
1:
Join the local Audio Engineering Society chapter, or if nothing else, go to some of their meetings. They are happy to see new faces. I think the AES is a particularly good one to go to because they attract all sorts of people - musicians, people with home audio setups, hardcore analog design engineers, students, DJs, software engineers, etc.
Talk to people. Be friendly, ask them what they are doing. Ask them about stuff that they are obviously interested in. If someone mentions that they need a person that can do such-and-such, and you know someone that is a good fit, offer to connect them and then do so. Don't recommend people you don't think are a good fit. Being someone who knows people who can help is a good long term thing to be. Eventually it will affect you directly because a person you have helped will probably recommend you for something.
Don't push yourself, but be enthusiastic about the technical stuff you like doing. If someone needs you, they will tell you. You are not selling yourself, you are just being you. This is important.
2:
Be willing to do odd jobs that would otherwise be beneath you. I have done things like install SSH chroot environments to allow secure uploads. I charged $60/hour, and it only took a few hours. As a result, there are now five people that think of me first when they want something technical on unix done.
3:
Be willing to accept jobs that you know you can do, but that you know you haven't done before. Be honest about this to a potential client. It's a wonderful way to to learn new things, and keep food on the table. Keep track of your time, and estimate how much time it would have taken you if you were an expert. Only charge for that time. Your customers should get good value for money - they aren't subsidising your learning directly.
This leads to an important corollary: If people know you accept things you have never done before and then do them well, you get a reputation as a person who can do anything. This is priceless, and is the main reason I am turning away juicy offers. People phone me when they are in a jam, and say things like "We know you don't do this sort of stuff normally, but we also know you finish things. Please help".
4:
Dont be afraid to say "no". Saying no, when done right, increases your value. These are the conditions: You have to say no for a good reason, like "I'm sorry, but I'm busy working on another project" or "I'm sorry, but I cant allocate that much time to a project, and I wouldn't be providing the kind of service that I think is a minimum requirement". If you need the work, take it, but realise that saying "no" isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you refer as per 5:.
5:
Don't be afraid to refer. After a while, you will know a lot of people that can do different things, and you would have worked with many of them. If someone offers you work and you can't take it, pass it on - refer someone you know will make them happy. People will learn that even if they aren't sure you can do something, you probably know someone
You forgot the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrant guest workers let in under the pretext of a "labor shortage."
Heh. The funny thing is that I am one of those workers, and I can't keep people from offering me jobs at pretty nice salaries ($100K/year or so). It's quite annoying really, having people phone you all the time and try to get you to work for them. I hate turning people down.
It's become a lot worse in the last 6 months or so.
I feel no shame. I am more expensive than an American and there is severe pain getting visas for me, and yet people are still competing to hire me. If an American in the same field can't get a job, the problem is not me.
I will be moving to a new job next month, and I expect my job to directly add at least another 2 jobs to the market in the next year (I'll need minions). Go philanthropist me!
Maybe one way to start changing things is to make this type of "defensive" patent an explicitly separate type. Create a category of patents that it's not possibile to sue anyone for infringing, unless they sue you over IP first. And this provision would remain attached to the patent no matter who bought the rights.
Oooh. I like this idea. I agree with you that it wont work, but it's an idea worth remembering. Maybe it could be used in some modified form one day.
I had another idea that involved changing the rules slightly - when you get a patent, it has to be actively used in a product that is actually sold sometime in the last two years. Thus, if you don't use it, you lose it. This would at least get in the way of some of the more stupid submarine tactics.
It makes sense to me that if you came up with a better way of doing something, and people are actively buying your product because of this, then perhaps you deserve to have some protection for your idea.
Another idea that occurs to me is to make all patents available for licensing compulsorily. If someone has a patent, they have to license it to you. The trick then would be coming up with rules about the licensing terms so that both sides benefit, but it still sounds better to me than what we have today.
Of course it applies here. All measurements have some margin of error. If the change is large with respect to your error bar, then the change is statistically significant. If it's not, then it's not.
In the article, they claim that they sample 30 million browsers daily, which puts their error bar down in the 0.01% region (making some assumptions putting it similar to a random sample). Even if the bar itself is much larger than that, they are measuring something statistically significant. Of course, as you said, we don't really know what that something is.:-)
They claim to get their data from a sample of 30 million broswers a day. With that large a sample, 1% is very significant, as we are talking about an error bar somewhere down around 0.01%. It might not be significant by another measure, but it is "statistically significant".
I was quite excited about dcraw until I actually tried it.
Its Bayer Demosaicing is terrible. It's several times worse than the in-camera algorithm on my Nikon D70. It's so bad that I can't use it for any of my raw processing needs. Problems are visible to the nacked eye even when the image is scaled down to fit on my 1600x1200 display.
I'll be writing my own demosaicer (or hacking dcraw or something) when I get the chance. Until then I guess I'll live with Nikon Capture 4.1.:-P
There is one waste product from nuclear plants that people seem to always overlook. They raise the ambient temperature of whatever area they are in. This is a small amount, and I'm not even sure that it's noticable anywhere, but it is there, and will affect the environment over time.
This is a side effect of thermodynamics. We extract energy from the temperature gradient between the nuclear pile and the surrounding environment. The efficiency of this operation is dependent on the temperature difference.
But:
1) Coal and oil-fired stations also produce said heat, as do any other heat engine based systems. 2) If the nuclear pile operates at a higher temperature than the boilers in a conventional powerplant, then the nuclear power station will produce less environmental heat for a given energy output.
So, relative to a large patch of nothing, a nuclear power station will heat up its environment. However, we do not currently generate our power from large patches of nothing.
[ Have a look here for some info on Carnot cycles and heat engines ]
Just using a microkernel will not give you any sort of controlled latency on the desktop, and I suspect you know this as well.:)
Well, it is my experience that it is fairly simply to control latency in such systems. In linux it is being done using horrible hacks that complicate the code and make modifications to affected areas error prone. Also, I feel comfortable blaming linux and not my IO devices for my latency issues - my mouse shouldn't stutter just because there is disk IO.
I am not talking about waiting for IO, so much as if it doesnt tie directly to the process I am using, it shouldn't affect me.
I'm not saying that a microkernel will give me low latency for free, but it would give developers the opportunity to implement it without quite so many headaches.:-)
Treating the micro v. monolithic debate as a solved problem ("microkernels win!") is as idiotic as suggesting that object orientation is the ideal solution to all programming problems.
I'll agree with that. However, I can say that for the stuff I do, microkernels win. I've written a microkernel RTOS for an embedded system, and it had the following advantages for me:
1) It was easy to write. (Very modular) 2) It is easy to maintain. (Very modular, and because all interaction is done with messaging, you dont worry about the code you are doing now interacting in some unknown way with something else. ie. You can ignore the rest of the system except for the messages you send to it) 3) It is easy to give it strong deterministic real-time response. This is a big thing for me in the applications I use it for. Data ends up flowing from one task to another, and I just have to make sure my scheduler doesn't mess that up. 4) The overhead introduced by message passing was negligible (The RTOS was implemented to replace an existing system, and did so comfortably) 5) Its really easy to make stable and reliable systems, because everything is chopped up into small well understood sections with well defined interaction between sections.
Microkernels might have slightly lower throughput than monolithic macrokernels, but I am not running a batch transaction processor.
For desktop use, I want controlled latency and reliability. I don't feel that Linux gives me all that it should in those departments, though I use it because it is better than most (with some patching). Kernel modules feel like the worst of both worlds to me.
So, given the priorities I stated above, I think I would prefer a microkernel OS, all other things being equal. I'd jump ship from Linux to one, if most other things are equal.
Other people will have other priorities and I encourage them to use whatever works for them.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/2 6/145248
You really shouldn't trust the press/media for news, nor leftist websites (Kos et al). They have a habit of not pointing out things Democrats do, and obsessing over Republicans when they do the same thing. The fact that two thirds of journalists across the USA, and nine tenths of journalists in Washington DC, self-identify as Democrats in confidential polls probably has something to do with this.
FYI, I am a foreigner living in the USA, and find it rather sad the way people cleave to identity politics in this country. The free pass Democrats get in this country also irritates me. From my point of view, you need to cut politicians open with a tree saw and count the rings to tell the difference in party.
I made the mistake of deciding to read the transcripts of White House press meetings, since Sept 2001. The end result is that I'll never trust any journalist again. I really feel sorry for any president, regardless of party.
You, fairly obviously, are trusting someone you shouldn't.
Good luck.
I like the sound of what you say. I would love to be able to do CSS web sites that work on everything.
I am a very technical guy who is usually designing and building hardware and software. However, I am in a small company, and am going to end up producing a web site for it whether I like it or not.
Soo.. could you provide a few links or names of books that I read that would allow me to make web sites in the way you describe? Assume someone who is used to being given a pile of books in a new subject, and has a working prototype running in about three weeks. I normally sit down and just start implementing stuff, using the books as a continuous reference. Then I redo the stuff I did badly, once I know more about the subject. I suppose this means that little code snippets are of the most use to me, along with good explanations of what is actually going on.
I realise you may have better things to do, but I am interested in what you consider to be "good" sources of information for this; you approach is one I appreciate.
Thanks
Not really, but if the country were at the state where you could get that added in as an amendment, then the amendment would be irrelevant anyway. Amendments are hard to add for a reason.
The reality is that it's much easier to corrupt the judiciary, which is why people try it. The results are no less awful, but they happen in more insidious a manner.
You don't fix things by breaking the system, because the only thing you have that makes things work is the system. You change the system, and you do it by finding common ground with those around you, and changing the rules accordingly. To do otherwise is just another form of intolerance, in a form which sadly seems to be sanctioned by most of the American media at the moment.
The US system of government is fairly well designed in that it tries to balance many factors against each other, tries to stop mob rule, and tries to give people a way to change things if they have to. It annoys me that Americans don't realise just how rare and wonderful that is. I guess they don't travel enough to realise just how lucky they are.
The US Constitution is mainly a limit on the government's power. Should you add an amendment that limits the government less than another part of the constitution, it should be meaningless, because the government is limited by any part of the constitution. It is at that point that you hope your judges are willing to balance their judgements in favour of the government being more limited.
Convincing a judge to play god on your behalf is very short-sighted, because tomorrow he will be playing god, and not on your behalf. And, his successors might decide this god thing looks like fun.
One amendment that I wish hadn't been passed was the 17th. It was a great way to suborn Senators, who were supposed to be independent of the influences on Congressmen. Unfortunately they are no longer as effective a check on Congress, because they are voted for by the same people and influenced by the campaign contributions as a result.
Now I could be wrong, but I think the constitution is that document that has all those liberties and privacy garuntees defined and outlined in it. Go figure!
;-)
Yes, actually, you are wrong. It is sad but true that there is no protection of privacy mandated in the US Constitution. Back in the day, there was no need, and nobody predicted it either.
Of course, you can get said protection by adding an amendment. That is the mechanism provided for you. I use "you" because I am not American, BTW.
On the whole, I like the US Constitution. I just wish people would amend it rather than attempting to get the judiciary to pretend it says things it doesn't. Oh, and it would be nice if some Americans were to read it too.
So losing $200/unit and gaining $10/game- they need to seel 20 games/unit to make it up. That seems like a long repayment period to me.
I think what everyone forgets is that they don't take a loss on the hardware forever. Eventually, the PS3 will consist of maybe 2 chips and some peripherals and a box. The PS2 has been in this place for a while.
It's a corollary of Moore's Law that the cost of a logic gate halves every 18 months, and the life of a console seems to be around 5 years. By the time Sony could bring the price of their console down, there are so many games and such a following for the console that they don't have to.
Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly. I can't do it under WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME or even E17, and the problems are in the X Server
Ah. There's your problem. The nVidia drivers blow goats for X. They are about 2MB of 3D drivers and "application specific" optimizations for 3D benchmarking programs. The don't care about some linux desktop user - they sell cards to run 3D benchmarks on gamer websites.
Their implementation of the Render extension is a little bit faster than a granny with a crayon. Oh, and the drivers crash my machine once every three weeks or so too, and seeing as they run in kernel space, they crash things very effectively. That's totally unacceptable - it was the only thing that took my machine down.
I can watch my screen redraw with the nVidia drivers. One version actually had a 2 second pause whenever I switched virtual terminals, for no apparent reason. Needless to say I reverted to an older version of the drivers.
I eventually had a sense of humour failure and got an old ATI card (9200) and use the open source X.org drivers. Suddenly I have a usable system again.
Try using an open source driver with known-good 2D acceleration, and make sure it is enabled. I was so badly burnt by the closed source nVidia drivers that I'll never run closed source drivers again.
The plural of box is boxes.
Um, except that the we all know that in this case a "box" is a computer... And guess what - there is no definition of "box" as a computer at that link. So perhaps here we have the use of a word that hasn't made it into a dictionary yet? A homonym? And maybe homonyms are words with the same spelling and yet different meanings that have to be inferred from context? And maybe that word is a field-specific specialisation of a general term? And, if it's a whole new word, perhaps it gets its own plural or collective noun? Perhaps you are being just a teensy bit obsessive compulsive about this?
I know I get irritated when I see people say "here here!" or "tow the line", but that's because there is a well defined idiom there already, and people are getting it wrong. This is a new word in a specific field. English is all about application specific words.
I hope that "boxen" becomes the collective noun for "boxes", where "boxes" are computers, but I'm not going to get anal about it. It has character, like saying you saw "a murder of ravens" yesterday. It's one of the reasons why English is a rich language.
Are you also going to correct people that talk about "mp3ing their files"? Perhaps they meant "transcode"?
Chill, dude.
Pathsync looks interesting for directory synchronization. Is there something to do this between two linux clients or windows and linux that is rsync or cvs based. Preferably GUI clients or easy to use ones. I need windows > linux backup and linux laptop > linux backup. I saw backuppc in the debian archives, but I'm intersted in user opinions as it is always so much better. Thanks!
Have a look at rdiff-backup. I use it regularly, and I find it very useful for the sorts of things you are talking about.
They say 50.000 at the end of a human hair. Do anybody know the actual size of this cell?
Not only that, but they don't even mention how many Libraries of Congress those cells store! How am I supposed to compare press releases from different companies if they don't use the complete set of PR specs? Sheesh.
rsync is great, but I still haven't figured out how to do incremental backups with it.
Have a look at rdiff-backup. It uses rsync on the backup and does incremental backups. I use it to back up my local and remote machines. Diffs between versions are stored in a single directory and you can back those up. I can't recommend it enough.
Here is it's homepage: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
All this extra speed will not be available for the common public until they can resolve the problem with the sonic boom. Once that is resolved I think it would be a lot more interesting where they could have supersonic flights that go over land as well.
r craft/qsp.htm
Good point. It looks this problem is on the way to being solved. Have a look at the following link:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ai
Uh, you do realise that microwaves are used for a bunch of things? They were first used for radar and astronomy, AFAIK. WiFi uses microwaves too, as do cellphones. It's a matter of how much power you use.
:-)
Your body puts out a measurable amount of microwave energy (anything at room temperature emits them - it's just one frequency band of black body radiation).
You could use a 1KW halogen bulb inside your microwave instead of a magnetron - it's just that microwaves penetrate futher into the food (they have a lower frequency than light, and thus a higher skin depth), and you can make sure that the only thing that absorbs them is the food, which isn't as easy for light. This makes them more efficient.
I'm sorry if you were just being funny, but I get irritated with the immediate association people make between microwaves and cooking. A red hot iron bar can cook things, but we use metal for other things too. We even stick metal cutlery in our mouths. Shock. Horror.
One person just has to say "microwave" or "radiation" and we get clueless press people making comments about cooked people and the environment. It really doesn't make the world a better place, and we really shouldn't encourage this sort of ignorance.
Ok. Rant mode off.
I think we all do that, myself included. I'm glad you appreciate my interference. :-)
:-)
Well, thanks for your kind words. I think it unlikely that I will try to become a US citizen as long as I have to give up my old citizenship. I kind of like the idea of being able to change countries if a government annoys me enough. I guess I'll live with maybe just trying for a green card.
More to the point than you might think.
NX actually uses RDP to achieve the low-bandwidth solution that is still capable of displaying a whole desktop and still retaining responsiveness.
And Microsoft put a huge amount of research into RDP, and it's what they've been using for their Terminal Server and Remote Desktop applications for a _long_ time now.
My personal experience is that Remote Desktop from my home box is more responsive displaying the entire desktop and all apps(fuldc++, Ultraedit, Miranda, Virc, CodeWarrior) than X11 is with just one app(Codewarrior for Linux) from the same machine to the same machine via the same connection.
I bought NX a while back and use it to control some of my machines when I went to South Africa for christmas. I used it to run an Gnome - Evolution session on a machine here in Seattle.
NX does not use RDP for X sessions. NX uses careful caching of the X11 protocol, along with a library that pretends to be xlib. NX is capable of handling RDP, but then it uses its own optimised version of RDP. It doesn't use RDP for X. I'm pretty sure about this, because I downloaded the GPL source they provide and made a working version (which was not easy.
X11 has serious issues with slow links, not because of bandwidth requirements, but because xlib requires a stupid number of synchronous queries for many operations. One estimate I have seen, is that around 300 X packets have to make a round trip before a window will open (in older versions of X, without the Render extension). On a local session, this is all short circuited and you don't see any delay. On a link with (say) a 300ms delay, you are looking a 300*300ms delay, even though each packet is minute.
Keith Packard has done a lot of work on adding extensions to X that mitigate this. Also, there is work on writing a library the implements the X protocol that is completely asynchronous and caches data when possible (which is sort of what the NX
NCB can be found here, at http://freedesktop.org/Software/xcb.
I agree with you. Current X is dog slow over high latency links.
Soon, we'll have the XDamage extension too, which will help a lot. It's at http://freedesktop.org/Software/XDamage
As an aside, I am very pleased we have moved away from XFree. X.org should be a massive improvement.
Yes, RCP leans a bit right. However, it's a good place to check in the morning for links to newspaper op-eds across the spectrum. I use it to get an idea of the narrative each paper and its columnists subscribe to.
:-)
I only use source determination to figure out whether I have to extensively fact check an article. I thoroughly reject the post-modernist principle of subjective realities - they do exist, but only if you ignore reality. I admit a great deal of effort is required to avoid subjective realities, but it is possible on a case by case basis. In the meantime, you can build a picture of the worldview of each paper, and get a feel for when you know they are letting it affect their reporting.
I read the National Review article, then I went and read the entire report it referenced (Yes, I am weird), and I think the article is pretty close to correct; don't discard it out of hand. There was much political hay to be made making allegations about those elections, and much money to be made by the media blowing them out of proportion. I tend to give the boring story a higher chance of being right, but I checked anyway.
I hadn't followed that link. You're right. It's good.
As for the Bob Herbert thing, I think the side that presents the most pertinent facts wins, and it looks like Herbert left a lot of stuff out in an attempt to construct a narrative. By my estimation, in this bout, he loses.
Heh. You'd think that for all the effort I put into this stuff, I could vote or something - I'm not a US citizen.
Don't want to scare you even more, but did anyone read the recent NY times Op Ed piece by Bob Herbert?
Don't have a link because it is the NY Times, but here is the summary/introduction. The article was very scary, especially when you combine hanging chads, the Bush running the state, Floridia's "too close to call" status, and all of its electoral votes.
Voting While Black
By BOB HERBERT (NYT) Op-Ed
August 20, 2004, Friday
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 23 , Column 6
The smell of voter suppression coming out of Florida is getting stronger. It turns out that a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation, in which state troopers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando in a bizarre hunt for evidence of election fraud, is being conducted...
Yes. I read it. You'll want to read this too:
What Bob Herbert Didnt Tell you
And
Herbert's Dishonest Jihad Continues
After that, you could find the following meme-killing article on the Florida elections interesting:
Florida Forever
If you're wondering, I tend to collect links that counter the prevailing winds in the media. Also I tend to distrust something I read in the NY Times unless I can find corroboration from trustworthy sources.
This speech by Michael Crichton is good reading too:
Why Speculate?
Have fun.
Assuming you are not a troll - dude, toss some of those jobs *my* way!
Nope. Not a troll. I can't really toss them your way though - they're a little specialised. I can tell you how I got into the position I am in, though.
This assumes you are in a place with a reasonable population. I live in Seattle, but any city will probably do. I prefer to work for small companies and do interesting stuff. In this space, word of mouth and referrals are everything.
These tips are for people who want to get into software or electronics hardware with a bit more of an emphasis on consumer stuff rather than IT stuff. It also assumes that you are reasonably good at what you do. Word of mouth comes from making people proud to recommend you. It has taken me three years to get to my current position, and I did it as a sort of freelance contractor.
Here are some hints:
1:
Join the local Audio Engineering Society chapter, or if nothing else, go to some of their meetings. They are happy to see new faces. I think the AES is a particularly good one to go to because they attract all sorts of people - musicians, people with home audio setups, hardcore analog design engineers, students, DJs, software engineers, etc.
Talk to people. Be friendly, ask them what they are doing. Ask them about stuff that they are obviously interested in. If someone mentions that they need a person that can do such-and-such, and you know someone that is a good fit, offer to connect them and then do so. Don't recommend people you don't think are a good fit. Being someone who knows people who can help is a good long term thing to be. Eventually it will affect you directly because a person you have helped will probably recommend you for something.
Don't push yourself, but be enthusiastic about the technical stuff you like doing. If someone needs you, they will tell you. You are not selling yourself, you are just being you. This is important.
2:
Be willing to do odd jobs that would otherwise be beneath you. I have done things like install SSH chroot environments to allow secure uploads. I charged $60/hour, and it only took a few hours. As a result, there are now five people that think of me first when they want something technical on unix done.
3:
Be willing to accept jobs that you know you can do, but that you know you haven't done before. Be honest about this to a potential client. It's a wonderful way to to learn new things, and keep food on the table. Keep track of your time, and estimate how much time it would have taken you if you were an expert. Only charge for that time. Your customers should get good value for money - they aren't subsidising your learning directly.
This leads to an important corollary: If people know you accept things you have never done before and then do them well, you get a reputation as a person who can do anything. This is priceless, and is the main reason I am turning away juicy offers. People phone me when they are in a jam, and say things like "We know you don't do this sort of stuff normally, but we also know you finish things. Please help".
4:
Dont be afraid to say "no". Saying no, when done right, increases your value. These are the conditions: You have to say no for a good reason, like "I'm sorry, but I'm busy working on another project" or "I'm sorry, but I cant allocate that much time to a project, and I wouldn't be providing the kind of service that I think is a minimum requirement". If you need the work, take it, but realise that saying "no" isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you refer as per 5:.
5:
Don't be afraid to refer. After a while, you will know a lot of people that can do different things, and you would have worked with many of them. If someone offers you work and you can't take it, pass it on - refer someone you know will make them happy. People will learn that even if they aren't sure you can do something, you probably know someone
You forgot the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrant guest workers let in under the pretext of a "labor shortage."
Heh. The funny thing is that I am one of those workers, and I can't keep people from offering me jobs at pretty nice salaries ($100K/year or so). It's quite annoying really, having people phone you all the time and try to get you to work for them. I hate turning people down.
It's become a lot worse in the last 6 months or so.
I feel no shame. I am more expensive than an American and there is severe pain getting visas for me, and yet people are still competing to hire me. If an American in the same field can't get a job, the problem is not me.
I will be moving to a new job next month, and I expect my job to directly add at least another 2 jobs to the market in the next year (I'll need minions). Go philanthropist me!
Maybe one way to start changing things is to make this type of "defensive" patent an explicitly separate type. Create a category of patents that it's not possibile to sue anyone for infringing, unless they sue you over IP first. And this provision would remain attached to the patent no matter who bought the rights.
Oooh. I like this idea. I agree with you that it wont work, but it's an idea worth remembering. Maybe it could be used in some modified form one day.
I had another idea that involved changing the rules slightly - when you get a patent, it has to be actively used in a product that is actually sold sometime in the last two years. Thus, if you don't use it, you lose it. This would at least get in the way of some of the more stupid submarine tactics.
It makes sense to me that if you came up with a better way of doing something, and people are actively buying your product because of this, then perhaps you deserve to have some protection for your idea.
Another idea that occurs to me is to make all patents available for licensing compulsorily. If someone has a patent, they have to license it to you. The trick then would be coming up with rules about the licensing terms so that both sides benefit, but it still sounds better to me than what we have today.
Oh well.
Of course it applies here. All measurements have some margin of error. If the change is large with respect to your error bar, then the change is statistically significant. If it's not, then it's not.
:-)
In the article, they claim that they sample 30 million browsers daily, which puts their error bar down in the 0.01% region (making some assumptions putting it similar to a random sample). Even if the bar itself is much larger than that, they are measuring something statistically significant. Of course, as you said, we don't really know what that something is.
They claim to get their data from a sample of 30 million broswers a day. With that large a sample, 1% is very significant, as we are talking about an error bar somewhere down around 0.01%. It might not be significant by another measure, but it is "statistically significant".
I was quite excited about dcraw until I actually tried it.
:-P
Its Bayer Demosaicing is terrible. It's several times worse than the in-camera algorithm on my Nikon D70. It's so bad that I can't use it for any of my raw processing needs. Problems are visible to the nacked eye even when the image is scaled down to fit on my 1600x1200 display.
I'll be writing my own demosaicer (or hacking dcraw or something) when I get the chance. Until then I guess I'll live with Nikon Capture 4.1.
There is one waste product from nuclear plants that people seem to always overlook. They raise the ambient temperature of whatever area they are in. This is a small amount, and I'm not even sure that it's noticable anywhere, but it is there, and will affect the environment over time.
This is a side effect of thermodynamics. We extract energy from the temperature gradient between the nuclear pile and the surrounding environment. The efficiency of this operation is dependent on the temperature difference.
But:
1) Coal and oil-fired stations also produce said heat, as do any other heat engine based systems.
2) If the nuclear pile operates at a higher temperature than the boilers in a conventional powerplant, then the nuclear power station will produce less environmental heat for a given energy output.
So, relative to a large patch of nothing, a nuclear power station will heat up its environment. However, we do not currently generate our power from large patches of nothing.
[ Have a look here for some info on Carnot cycles and heat engines ]
Just using a microkernel will not give you any sort of controlled latency on the desktop, and I suspect you know this as well. :)
:-)
Well, it is my experience that it is fairly simply to control latency in such systems. In linux it is being done using horrible hacks that complicate the code and make modifications to affected areas error prone. Also, I feel comfortable blaming linux and not my IO devices for my latency issues - my mouse shouldn't stutter just because there is disk IO.
I am not talking about waiting for IO, so much as if it doesnt tie directly to the process I am using, it shouldn't affect me.
I'm not saying that a microkernel will give me low latency for free, but it would give developers the opportunity to implement it without quite so many headaches.
Treating the micro v. monolithic debate as a solved problem ("microkernels win!") is as idiotic as suggesting that object orientation is the ideal solution to all programming problems.
I'll agree with that. However, I can say that for the stuff I do, microkernels win. I've written a microkernel RTOS for an embedded system, and it had the following advantages for me:
1) It was easy to write. (Very modular)
2) It is easy to maintain. (Very modular, and because all interaction is done with messaging, you dont worry about the code you are doing now interacting in some unknown way with something else. ie. You can ignore the rest of the system except for the messages you send to it)
3) It is easy to give it strong deterministic real-time response. This is a big thing for me in the applications I use it for. Data ends up flowing from one task to another, and I just have to make sure my scheduler doesn't mess that up.
4) The overhead introduced by message passing was negligible (The RTOS was implemented to replace an existing system, and did so comfortably)
5) Its really easy to make stable and reliable systems, because everything is chopped up into small well understood sections with well defined interaction between sections.
Microkernels might have slightly lower throughput than monolithic macrokernels, but I am not running a batch transaction processor.
For desktop use, I want controlled latency and reliability. I don't feel that Linux gives me all that it should in those departments, though I use it because it is better than most (with some patching). Kernel modules feel like the worst of both worlds to me.
So, given the priorities I stated above, I think I would prefer a microkernel OS, all other things being equal. I'd jump ship from Linux to one, if most other things are equal.
Other people will have other priorities and I encourage them to use whatever works for them.