You're overestimating the hardware requirements. You can run debian just fine, with a GUI, on a pentium-class machine. As long as it's a faster pentium (>100MHz), and you have some RAM (48-64MB makes life easier), and some HD (like, a couple GB, preferably 4), and pretty much any random SVGA video card. The kind of stuff you can get used for approaching $0. Is it fast? No. Is it perfectly reasonable? Yes. Want ethernet? What's your average rtl8139-based card cost, $8?
If you're willing to go used, you can go absolutely as low as you want, depending on how much hardware you need. I used a system that was a 133MHz Cyrix, 64MB, 1.2GB, Diamond Stealth to run basic word-processing and web browsing just fine. It was even okay with KDE once you got past the load times. And no, it wasn't that long ago, it was like around the kde3 release.
I'm not sure. If you look at it formalistically, then addition is fundamental, and subtraction only exists because negative numbers do. But if you look at it more concretely, then "take away" is just as fundamental to us as "add to", because it's really all just moving things around (conservation of mass and such). So addition and subtraction are just as natural to us by the time we get to thinking more formally about math, and then negative numbers are these things that somehow represent a quantity "subtracted". Which tends to be really confusing. I spent a long time, when I was younger, trying to figure out why addition commutes when subtraction doesn't; I knew it was true, but I couldn't figure out what the difference was. But a-b = a+(-b) explains it perfectly.
Maybe we should be like German; they seem to get by alright without an apostrophe. Then again, even without the apostrophe, possesion in German looks (and sounds) different from pluralization. On the gripping hand, who wants German's pluralization rules?:)
Nothing needs to be investigated. People research things because they expect to gain something from the research. Or, at the least, they expect someone to pay them for the research:)
I think that TightVNC has the most active development among projects with a truly free mentality. It's also got history, great platform support, and, of course, the "tight" encoding.:)
The final tally is in: turns out that while knapsack is incredibly hard to come up with a proven solution to, with the right tweaks it's much easier to come up with an answer that's probably right. Anyway, the final number is 21.8% of voters required, if voter turnout parallels 2000 levels. If voter turnout soars to 100% of eligible voters (again by 2000 census estimates), different states come into play, but the threshold only moves to 22.0%, so the inequity due to differences in state turnouts isn't really significant compared to the inequity due to the non-proportionality of electors.
(For those not quite catching the point: if we used an electoral college system, but elector assignment was perfectly proportional to voting population, the threshold would be just above 25%, which is a fairly poor worst case, in my opinion. But the imbalances due to non-proportionality stretch it a little further.)
I re-ran the numbers with a better solution (yay knapsack problem; a better answer turned up after I posted), and the number I quoted first is in fact less than 22%, at just over 21.9%.
I should also note that all this is based on the assumption that voter turnout is equal to 2000 Census figures; small variations in turnout would cause small variations in this result, and of course with unreasonable situations such as states where only one or three votes are cast, the final numbers get equally ridiculous. That's why I chose 2000 voter turnout as a reasonable reference.
However, there's a further point, in that a candidate can win the election with less than 23% of voters voting for him, if all electors vote according to the plurality of votes in their state and there are only two candidates. As the number of candidates goes to infinity, naturally the required proportion goes to zero, but it does it faster than you'd expect. In an election with three candidates, a candidate can be elected when as many as 85.2% of the voters cast votes for someone else.
Don't you think that when MS's major apps all run on top of.NET, they'll find some way to make them depend on "native extensions" that happen to only be available compiled for Windows? It's in their best interest to make sure that people who want to use Office (on PC hardware, anyway) have to buy Windows.
Well, I tried the game out, and it uses a fixed card size, and they're too small, and it's impossible to get the game to take up more than a small corner of the screen. I had thought that maybe they were using scalable graphics or something, but they're not.
Not that anything is wrong with the graphics on GNOME's; I'm sure on this hi-res laptop display it looks far better than programs that only have a fixed card size. But... with a name like that, nobody will ever use it. Especially when you quote it without capital letters, it's downright unreadable.
23% is not a majority. If one candidate has 23% of the votes, and no other candidate has more than 23%, then that is a plurality but by no definition can 23% ever be a majority.
Why is it that everyone reading my message seems to think that I have a problem with 5MP? What I said is that 5MP is great, and that anything less doesn't match up.
That's not the argument. The argument is "it isn't a problem. But if you really want to think it is, why not rail against X, Y, Z, and T before you worry about Q which hardly matters? It might not solve the problem, but at least you'll stop bothering me for a while."
Slashdot Mirror
> What will be in the atmosphere 24 hours from now?
Where?
> Everywhere.
And what sort of things were you interested in?
> Everything.
Mostly a bunch of airplanes and some water.
You haven't "predicted the path" unless the predicted path matches the real one ;)
You keep using that word. I do not think it's spelled how you think it's spelled.
You're overestimating the hardware requirements. You can run debian just fine, with a GUI, on a pentium-class machine. As long as it's a faster pentium (>100MHz), and you have some RAM (48-64MB makes life easier), and some HD (like, a couple GB, preferably 4), and pretty much any random SVGA video card. The kind of stuff you can get used for approaching $0. Is it fast? No. Is it perfectly reasonable? Yes. Want ethernet? What's your average rtl8139-based card cost, $8?
If you're willing to go used, you can go absolutely as low as you want, depending on how much hardware you need. I used a system that was a 133MHz Cyrix, 64MB, 1.2GB, Diamond Stealth to run basic word-processing and web browsing just fine. It was even okay with KDE once you got past the load times. And no, it wasn't that long ago, it was like around the kde3 release.
I'm not sure. If you look at it formalistically, then addition is fundamental, and subtraction only exists because negative numbers do. But if you look at it more concretely, then "take away" is just as fundamental to us as "add to", because it's really all just moving things around (conservation of mass and such). So addition and subtraction are just as natural to us by the time we get to thinking more formally about math, and then negative numbers are these things that somehow represent a quantity "subtracted". Which tends to be really confusing. I spent a long time, when I was younger, trying to figure out why addition commutes when subtraction doesn't; I knew it was true, but I couldn't figure out what the difference was. But a-b = a+(-b) explains it perfectly.
Or maybe "affected", unless the vulnerability produces, causes to be, or brings to pass one or more Linux distributions. :)
Maybe we should be like German; they seem to get by alright without an apostrophe. Then again, even without the apostrophe, possesion in German looks (and sounds) different from pluralization. On the gripping hand, who wants German's pluralization rules? :)
As opposed to "its", which is, um, a possessive pronoun, and which... obeys different rules?
Not that AAC or WMA are among the superior codecs, mind...
Nothing needs to be investigated. People research things because they expect to gain something from the research. Or, at the least, they expect someone to pay them for the research :)
I think that TightVNC has the most active development among projects with a truly free mentality. It's also got history, great platform support, and, of course, the "tight" encoding. :)
If possible, but it takes a little more than entry-level martial-arts skills to give them both boots at once without hurting oneself in the process.
Right.
Yes, yes, replying to myself.
The final tally is in: turns out that while knapsack is incredibly hard to come up with a proven solution to, with the right tweaks it's much easier to come up with an answer that's probably right. Anyway, the final number is 21.8% of voters required, if voter turnout parallels 2000 levels. If voter turnout soars to 100% of eligible voters (again by 2000 census estimates), different states come into play, but the threshold only moves to 22.0%, so the inequity due to differences in state turnouts isn't really significant compared to the inequity due to the non-proportionality of electors.
(For those not quite catching the point: if we used an electoral college system, but elector assignment was perfectly proportional to voting population, the threshold would be just above 25%, which is a fairly poor worst case, in my opinion. But the imbalances due to non-proportionality stretch it a little further.)
I re-ran the numbers with a better solution (yay knapsack problem; a better answer turned up after I posted), and the number I quoted first is in fact less than 22%, at just over 21.9%.
I should also note that all this is based on the assumption that voter turnout is equal to 2000 Census figures; small variations in turnout would cause small variations in this result, and of course with unreasonable situations such as states where only one or three votes are cast, the final numbers get equally ridiculous. That's why I chose 2000 voter turnout as a reasonable reference.
However, there's a further point, in that a candidate can win the election with less than 23% of voters voting for him, if all electors vote according to the plurality of votes in their state and there are only two candidates. As the number of candidates goes to infinity, naturally the required proportion goes to zero, but it does it faster than you'd expect. In an election with three candidates, a candidate can be elected when as many as 85.2% of the voters cast votes for someone else.
Don't you think that when MS's major apps all run on top of .NET, they'll find some way to make them depend on "native extensions" that happen to only be available compiled for Windows? It's in their best interest to make sure that people who want to use Office (on PC hardware, anyway) have to buy Windows.
Well, I tried the game out, and it uses a fixed card size, and they're too small, and it's impossible to get the game to take up more than a small corner of the screen. I had thought that maybe they were using scalable graphics or something, but they're not.
Not that anything is wrong with the graphics on GNOME's; I'm sure on this hi-res laptop display it looks far better than programs that only have a fixed card size. But... with a name like that, nobody will ever use it. Especially when you quote it without capital letters, it's downright unreadable.
Of course, Java is not the car, but rather the Hummvee. It's "robust", but think of the gas mileage!
23% is not a majority. If one candidate has 23% of the votes, and no other candidate has more than 23%, then that is a plurality but by no definition can 23% ever be a majority.
So by "latest Intel processor" they mean "the slowest Pentium-M that's still in production"
Right, because in the real world we get $200 every time we pass "GO."
Why is it that everyone reading my message seems to think that I have a problem with 5MP? What I said is that 5MP is great, and that anything less doesn't match up.
That's not the argument. The argument is "it isn't a problem. But if you really want to think it is, why not rail against X, Y, Z, and T before you worry about Q which hardly matters? It might not solve the problem, but at least you'll stop bothering me for a while."