Thanks, but I'm not, in fact, a total moron. I think I would know if my computer copied 640MB of data to the hard disk every time I closed the lid, and loaded 640MB of data off the hard disk every time I opened it.
My laptop goes to sleep within three seconds of closing the lid, and it's ready for use within three seconds of opening it, all with no hard disk activity.
It just keeps the memory slightly powered. It doesn't take a lot of electricity, even with my two-year-old battery, one charge will keep the machine safely in sleep mode for several days. Mac portables have been doing this for about ten years now.
I'm not running linux, but OS X, on a laptop. I had an uptime of about 65 days before I screwed something up and it had a kernel panic. I racked up about ten thousand miles of travel during that time too. It has a sleep mode where the contents of memory are preserved while the rest of the machine is turned off.
My girlfriend's PC laptop supports a similar thing, except it apparently saves the contents of memory to the hard disk, and then very quickly reads that back into memory when you turn the thing on, making it "boot" and go back to where it was in about three seconds. Does Linux support this kind of thing on hardware that supports it?
Yeah, because the one milliwatt of absorbed radiation is really going to make a temperature difference in your skull against the couple hundred watts of background heat from the body.
So just because Yahoo's official client is the most horrible, crashy, CPU-sucking, ugly chat client I have ever used (and, by the way, the Mac version which I use contains absolutely no advertising whatsoever, so they gain nothing from my use), and I want to use a third-party program that doesn't actually suck, that makes me a leech? Please explain further.
Open Source bugs get press when a couple of guys look at the code and say, "Hey, if someone were really clever, they might be able to exploit this obscure vulnerability that nobody has ever seen before in order to gain access."
Windows bugs get press when a couple of guys write a worm that infects millions of machines worldwide and causes global internet slowdowns and billions of dollars in economic damages.
With the weather getting more and more extreme....
I'm sorry? What the hell are you smoking? Could you point out some examples of this "more and more extreme" weather? I haven't made up my mind on global warming, but I really hate it when people say it must be true because it got up to 105, or because it rained in the middle of March instead of snowing. Do people really think stuff like that never happened before?? And anyway, how exactly is a global temperature increase supposed to be creating more extreme weather, by magic? Weather is driven by temperature differences.
Re:I still don't get cryptomoncomonmon
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
It's obvious we have a pretty fundamental disagreement. Of Stephenson's books, I've read Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and Snow Crash, in that order. I thought Diamond Age was just about the Best Thing Ever. Snow Crash I thought was "just" pretty good. And finally, for me, Cryptonomicon is to Diamond Age what Diamond Age is to Snow Crash. But that's ok, we're allowed to disagree.
My problem with the OP is that he seems to be saying that the cause of his dislike for Cryptonomicon is some deep, fundamental flaw with the book. (And, let's be honest, with "lazily written", so are you.) This despite the fact that Stephenson's work (particularly Cryptonomicon!) are immensely popular, selling millions of copies, and garnering praise for both the works and the author equal to any I have seen.
A quick case study: I left my copy of Cryptonomicon at a friend's house once. (When I was two-thirds through my first reading, oh the horror.) My friend is from Cameroon, and as far as I know has never read SF or even heard the name "Neal Stephenson" before. But when I saw him again, he didn't want to give it back! I had borrowed a copy from another friend and finished it in the meantime, so I let him hang on to it, and I haven't seen it since.
I submit that Stephenson does not actually have a problem at all, but that you, the OP, and everybody else who can't stand Cryptonomicon simply have a difference of opinion. This is fine. But to blame it on the author when so many people adore his work is absurd. Say you don't like it, ok, but saying that this is some enormous fault with the work that somehow nobody but you can actually see is just a paranoid delusion, like believing that everyone in the world is crazy and you are the only sane one.
Only on slashdot can you have a "book review" that's actually only a review of the first 7% of the book.
(If that was a typo for "600", then I apologize.)
Re:*which* English Civil War?
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
A civil war which terminates with the two sides permanently remaining separate nations is not generally called a "civil war", they're called "revolutions" or "wars of independence" or things like that.
Re:Has Neal been reading jwz?
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
I would doubt the connection, simply because such bad experiences seem common. And while my experience with wisdom teeth wasn't as bad as jwz's, it seems to me that anyone with some bad experiences and a healthy paranoid fear and hate of dentists and dentistry could use them as a base and them embellish at will.
Re:I still don't get cryptomoncomonmon
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
If you ever manage to write a book that makes it on the New York Times bestseller list, then you can start talking about what Stephenson should remember when he's writing. Until then, feel free to complain and mark your personal distaste, but don't act like it's some general problem with his work. It is possible for a writer and a reader to not be compatible without it being some massive problem.
(Disclaimer: I thought Cryptonomicon was The Best Thing Ever. What the parent poster calls "stuff that has absolutely no bearing on the plot [and] is uninteresting in its own right", I call "really cool shit". But such is life to disagree.)
What if your name was used as the code name for one of three big computer models being worked on. The other two are named after well-known hoaxes and examples of bad science. You are a famous scientist.
This is what happened. Carl Sagan was the 7100, the mid-range in the first three models that used the then-new PowerPC. The 6100 and 8100 were called Cold Fusion and PDM, which stood for Piltdown Man (a faked "missing link" fossil, if you don't know). It's entirely possible you'd still be honored (I think if it were me I'd just laugh), but I can understand why Sagan was upset.
If you know all this already, sorry, consider it as extra information for the others.:P
You're making the incorrect assumption that all lossy compression is equal.
Modem compressors work very, very poorly. This isn't just because the people who come up with them suck, there are fundamental problems with doing compression in the modem. In order to avoid introducing really horrible latency, you have to compress the data in fairly small chunks. You can't wait for 50k of data to arrive from the computer and compress it all at once. Yet any decent compression scheme will achieve better compression ratios on longer chunks of data than shorter ones in non-pathological cases. So you have a modem which is stuck trying to compress a hundred bytes at a time, and a web server which can compress all 100k of page at once, and you have a significant difference in size. Also, gzip runs on a computer with a truly mind-boggling amount of number-crunching power available compared to a modem, which has a CPU just powerful enough to handle complicated commands like "ATH". With more CPU power, you can achieve better compression ratios.
In the end, modem hardware compression is basically a hack, and mostly a worthless one. There's a reason why everybody who distributes a file for download compresses it first, and it's not because it makes the file look prettier.
Re:The Russians figured this one out years ago ...
on
The Return of Apollo?
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· Score: 1
The thing that makes Soyuz seem a lot safer to me is, ironically, the non-fatal accidents that Soyuz has had over the years.
If you look at the Shuttle, there are exactly two types of missions. There are the missions that go without any kind of flaw whatsoever, and there are the missions that end with the death of everyone onboard.
Soyuz, on the other hand, at least has a range of outcomes. There are missions of each kind listed above, of course. But then there are the accidents that don't result in the death of the entire crew. The explosion on the launch pad, where the escape tower correctly worked to pull the capsule to safety. (If the Shuttle had a similar accident, everyone inside would die.) And then there is the amazing story of Soyuz 5, where the craft reentered with various modules still attached, which were supposed to be ditched before reentry, and ended up flying backwards for a good portion of the reentry. Fuel tanks exploded, the capsule filled with smoke from various burning things, and it finally landed 2000km away from the intended landing point, but the one crew onboard survived. Contrast this with the Shuttle, where a small hit from a bit of foam results in, (surprise!) the instant death of the entire crew.
So yes, the historic accident rates are about the same. However, the Soyuz has been refined over a long time, and as you say, the recent models have (so far) a perfect record. And as I said, these non-fatal accidents actually increase my confidence in the vehicle, because it shows me that it is robust. It can take punishment and survive. Similar incidents during the Mercury, Gemeni, and Apollo programs (Apollo being particularly rife with spectacular but non-fatal incidents, like Apollo 13's big explosion, Apollo 12's lightning strike, and the Saturn V's continuous problems with near-disastrous resonance in the engines and structure) give me the distinct impression that capsules are inherently safer than the Shuttle, if not spaceplanes in general.
That's a nice axe you have. It's a shame you're grinding it so hard, I'm afraid you might ruin it.
> We have harnessed fusion,
Nope.
There's this cool thing called a hydrogen bomb. Perhaps you've heard of it? It was first tested in 1952, and it worked pretty well.
> mapped the genome,
Only a few months ago, and I don't believe that it's been independently reviewed as of yet.
Get real. It's been done. Just because it's recent or you don't believe it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Get your head out of the sand.
> created antibiotics,
s/created/discovered/
So the big drug companies send out expeditions into the wilderness to harvest new antibiotics? Yes, we discovered antibiotics. We also create antibiotics in these big factories and sell them by the millions.
> forged fiber optics,
That word, forged, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Big deal. He knew what he meant. I knew what he meant. You knew what he meant.
> designed the integrated circuit,
Well, there you go, you got one. Well done.
I count five. Out of six. And the one wrong one is correctable just by knocking a couple of zeros off his exaggerated figure.
Yeah, that might set off an explosion that would be perhaps one thousandth of one percent as powerful as the explosions that happened when comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter a couple of years ago. What a catastrophe!
Even if you buy a CD, according to copyright laws you are allowed to make one backup copy for archival purposes.
I am amazed at how much this idea has spread.
It's true that most media companies kindly give you the right to make a backup copy of your CD, disk, or other media.
However, the law gives you the right to make an unlimited number of copies so long as you don't let other people have them. You can wallpaper your apartment with CDR copies of your music collection without breaking any laws.
People badly misunderstand copyright in a variety of fundamental ways. When you buy a CD, you are not buying a license or anything. You own the CD, and you own that copy of the music. The only difference is that someone else owns the copyright. A copyright is a right to determine distribution of a work. You can do whatever you want with copyrighted media that you own except distribute copies of it to other people. (Modulo DMCA, which I'm not even going to get into.)
Are we just totally misunderstanding each other, am I not being clear, or are you just being totally obtuse? It's behavior like this that makes me wash my hands of the whole anti-war thing, no matter how much I am tempted to agree.
All three articles you quoted are talking about the latest inspections, right before the war started.
I am talking about all inspections since the end of the war in 1991.
Do you see how we have a problem with this?
In fact, those articles do not contradict anything I said. I said that Iraq was as uncooperative as it could get away with with the inspectors without causing a war. They were so cooperative right at the end because they knew that Bush wouldn't take any shit from them and they'd have to be as nice as possible to keep him from coming in. And even that wasn't enough, in fact. If you can come up with some references showing that Iraq was nice and happy and cooperative before then there is an issue, but until then you aren't showing me anything relevant at all. But I shouldn't be surprised; the vocal anti-war crowd seems to revel in presenting irrelevant material as "evidence".
Various UN resolutions were passed regarding Iraq, and weapons inspectors were sent there.
Iraq continually violated those resolutions and was as uncooperative with the inspectors as it felt it could get away with without provoking another war.
Iraq at the present moment does not appear to posess WMDs.
Those three statements can logically exist together in the same universe without any self-contradictions.
It seems to me that you're like most anti-Bush fanatics out there, trying to paint anyone who disagrees with you as a pro-Bush fanatic. That's wrong; I can disagree with you and him at the same time. The fact that Bush was wrong about WMDs and lied in his case for war does not change the fact that Iraq was extremely uncooperative in every way with the UN and with the weapons inspectors. Are you capable of understanding this?
If you respond to this post, please try arguing with the points and opinions I have actually expressed, rather than the points and opinions you imagine I should hold.
I didn't put the "off the ground" qualifier in there for no reason.
The Apollo 1 fire was tragic, but it was not a fundamental design flaw in the Apollo craft. The response was swift, the problem was fixed, and the program continued.
Ironically, the Apollo 1 fire happened during a test, when there should have been no danger to the crew. In all the very dangerous parts of space flight, there were no fatalities. That was the point I was trying to make and so I didn't include this in my summary.
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Thanks, but I'm not, in fact, a total moron. I think I would know if my computer copied 640MB of data to the hard disk every time I closed the lid, and loaded 640MB of data off the hard disk every time I opened it.
My laptop goes to sleep within three seconds of closing the lid, and it's ready for use within three seconds of opening it, all with no hard disk activity.
It just keeps the memory slightly powered. It doesn't take a lot of electricity, even with my two-year-old battery, one charge will keep the machine safely in sleep mode for several days. Mac portables have been doing this for about ten years now.
If you really find it that disturbing, we could always just put the solar cells on the side of the moon we never see.
On a crappy laptop, I think you mean. :-)
I'm not running linux, but OS X, on a laptop. I had an uptime of about 65 days before I screwed something up and it had a kernel panic. I racked up about ten thousand miles of travel during that time too. It has a sleep mode where the contents of memory are preserved while the rest of the machine is turned off.
My girlfriend's PC laptop supports a similar thing, except it apparently saves the contents of memory to the hard disk, and then very quickly reads that back into memory when you turn the thing on, making it "boot" and go back to where it was in about three seconds. Does Linux support this kind of thing on hardware that supports it?
Yeah, because the one milliwatt of absorbed radiation is really going to make a temperature difference in your skull against the couple hundred watts of background heat from the body.
Don't forget that California is the world's fifth largest economy. If Russia can have a space program, why not California?
So just because Yahoo's official client is the most horrible, crashy, CPU-sucking, ugly chat client I have ever used (and, by the way, the Mac version which I use contains absolutely no advertising whatsoever, so they gain nothing from my use), and I want to use a third-party program that doesn't actually suck, that makes me a leech? Please explain further.
Open Source bugs get press when a couple of guys look at the code and say, "Hey, if someone were really clever, they might be able to exploit this obscure vulnerability that nobody has ever seen before in order to gain access."
Windows bugs get press when a couple of guys write a worm that infects millions of machines worldwide and causes global internet slowdowns and billions of dollars in economic damages.
So why, exactly, should we be lenient?
With the weather getting more and more extreme....
I'm sorry? What the hell are you smoking? Could you point out some examples of this "more and more extreme" weather? I haven't made up my mind on global warming, but I really hate it when people say it must be true because it got up to 105, or because it rained in the middle of March instead of snowing. Do people really think stuff like that never happened before?? And anyway, how exactly is a global temperature increase supposed to be creating more extreme weather, by magic? Weather is driven by temperature differences.
It's obvious we have a pretty fundamental disagreement. Of Stephenson's books, I've read Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and Snow Crash, in that order. I thought Diamond Age was just about the Best Thing Ever. Snow Crash I thought was "just" pretty good. And finally, for me, Cryptonomicon is to Diamond Age what Diamond Age is to Snow Crash. But that's ok, we're allowed to disagree.
My problem with the OP is that he seems to be saying that the cause of his dislike for Cryptonomicon is some deep, fundamental flaw with the book. (And, let's be honest, with "lazily written", so are you.) This despite the fact that Stephenson's work (particularly Cryptonomicon!) are immensely popular, selling millions of copies, and garnering praise for both the works and the author equal to any I have seen.
A quick case study: I left my copy of Cryptonomicon at a friend's house once. (When I was two-thirds through my first reading, oh the horror.) My friend is from Cameroon, and as far as I know has never read SF or even heard the name "Neal Stephenson" before. But when I saw him again, he didn't want to give it back! I had borrowed a copy from another friend and finished it in the meantime, so I let him hang on to it, and I haven't seen it since.
I submit that Stephenson does not actually have a problem at all, but that you, the OP, and everybody else who can't stand Cryptonomicon simply have a difference of opinion. This is fine. But to blame it on the author when so many people adore his work is absurd. Say you don't like it, ok, but saying that this is some enormous fault with the work that somehow nobody but you can actually see is just a paranoid delusion, like believing that everyone in the world is crazy and you are the only sane one.
Only on slashdot can you have a "book review" that's actually only a review of the first 7% of the book.
(If that was a typo for "600", then I apologize.)
A civil war which terminates with the two sides permanently remaining separate nations is not generally called a "civil war", they're called "revolutions" or "wars of independence" or things like that.
I would doubt the connection, simply because such bad experiences seem common. And while my experience with wisdom teeth wasn't as bad as jwz's, it seems to me that anyone with some bad experiences and a healthy paranoid fear and hate of dentists and dentistry could use them as a base and them embellish at will.
If you ever manage to write a book that makes it on the New York Times bestseller list, then you can start talking about what Stephenson should remember when he's writing. Until then, feel free to complain and mark your personal distaste, but don't act like it's some general problem with his work. It is possible for a writer and a reader to not be compatible without it being some massive problem.
(Disclaimer: I thought Cryptonomicon was The Best Thing Ever. What the parent poster calls "stuff that has absolutely no bearing on the plot [and] is uninteresting in its own right", I call "really cool shit". But such is life to disagree.)
Jupiter is not "larger" than Earth, it's a whole hell of a lot larger than Earth. According to Google:
mass of Jupiter / mass of Earth = 317.816611
So Jupiter has 317 times the mass of Earth. That's why the orbit is faster.
You have a laptop, so it's not a good idea to be yanking drives.
But you have a laptop. Just take the entire computer to your friend's place and you're set.
Read more closely. He gave two alternatives. EITHER (1) you're lying OR (2) you could sue the company. Since you're not lying, clearly it's #2.
What if your name was used as the code name for one of three big computer models being worked on. The other two are named after well-known hoaxes and examples of bad science. You are a famous scientist.
:P
This is what happened. Carl Sagan was the 7100, the mid-range in the first three models that used the then-new PowerPC. The 6100 and 8100 were called Cold Fusion and PDM, which stood for Piltdown Man (a faked "missing link" fossil, if you don't know). It's entirely possible you'd still be honored (I think if it were me I'd just laugh), but I can understand why Sagan was upset.
If you know all this already, sorry, consider it as extra information for the others.
You're making the incorrect assumption that all lossy compression is equal.
Modem compressors work very, very poorly. This isn't just because the people who come up with them suck, there are fundamental problems with doing compression in the modem. In order to avoid introducing really horrible latency, you have to compress the data in fairly small chunks. You can't wait for 50k of data to arrive from the computer and compress it all at once. Yet any decent compression scheme will achieve better compression ratios on longer chunks of data than shorter ones in non-pathological cases. So you have a modem which is stuck trying to compress a hundred bytes at a time, and a web server which can compress all 100k of page at once, and you have a significant difference in size. Also, gzip runs on a computer with a truly mind-boggling amount of number-crunching power available compared to a modem, which has a CPU just powerful enough to handle complicated commands like "ATH". With more CPU power, you can achieve better compression ratios.
In the end, modem hardware compression is basically a hack, and mostly a worthless one. There's a reason why everybody who distributes a file for download compresses it first, and it's not because it makes the file look prettier.
The thing that makes Soyuz seem a lot safer to me is, ironically, the non-fatal accidents that Soyuz has had over the years.
If you look at the Shuttle, there are exactly two types of missions. There are the missions that go without any kind of flaw whatsoever, and there are the missions that end with the death of everyone onboard.
Soyuz, on the other hand, at least has a range of outcomes. There are missions of each kind listed above, of course. But then there are the accidents that don't result in the death of the entire crew. The explosion on the launch pad, where the escape tower correctly worked to pull the capsule to safety. (If the Shuttle had a similar accident, everyone inside would die.) And then there is the amazing story of Soyuz 5, where the craft reentered with various modules still attached, which were supposed to be ditched before reentry, and ended up flying backwards for a good portion of the reentry. Fuel tanks exploded, the capsule filled with smoke from various burning things, and it finally landed 2000km away from the intended landing point, but the one crew onboard survived. Contrast this with the Shuttle, where a small hit from a bit of foam results in, (surprise!) the instant death of the entire crew.
So yes, the historic accident rates are about the same. However, the Soyuz has been refined over a long time, and as you say, the recent models have (so far) a perfect record. And as I said, these non-fatal accidents actually increase my confidence in the vehicle, because it shows me that it is robust. It can take punishment and survive. Similar incidents during the Mercury, Gemeni, and Apollo programs (Apollo being particularly rife with spectacular but non-fatal incidents, like Apollo 13's big explosion, Apollo 12's lightning strike, and the Saturn V's continuous problems with near-disastrous resonance in the engines and structure) give me the distinct impression that capsules are inherently safer than the Shuttle, if not spaceplanes in general.
That's a nice axe you have. It's a shame you're grinding it so hard, I'm afraid you might ruin it.
> We have harnessed fusion,
Nope.
There's this cool thing called a hydrogen bomb. Perhaps you've heard of it? It was first tested in 1952, and it worked pretty well.
> mapped the genome,
Only a few months ago, and I don't believe that it's been independently reviewed as of yet.
Get real. It's been done. Just because it's recent or you don't believe it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Get your head out of the sand.
> created antibiotics,
s/created/discovered/
So the big drug companies send out expeditions into the wilderness to harvest new antibiotics? Yes, we discovered antibiotics. We also create antibiotics in these big factories and sell them by the millions.
> forged fiber optics,
That word, forged, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Big deal. He knew what he meant. I knew what he meant. You knew what he meant.
> designed the integrated circuit,
Well, there you go, you got one. Well done.
I count five. Out of six. And the one wrong one is correctable just by knocking a couple of zeros off his exaggerated figure.
Yeah, that might set off an explosion that would be perhaps one thousandth of one percent as powerful as the explosions that happened when comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter a couple of years ago. What a catastrophe!
Even if you buy a CD, according to copyright laws you are allowed to make one backup copy for archival purposes.
I am amazed at how much this idea has spread.
It's true that most media companies kindly give you the right to make a backup copy of your CD, disk, or other media.
However, the law gives you the right to make an unlimited number of copies so long as you don't let other people have them. You can wallpaper your apartment with CDR copies of your music collection without breaking any laws.
People badly misunderstand copyright in a variety of fundamental ways. When you buy a CD, you are not buying a license or anything. You own the CD, and you own that copy of the music. The only difference is that someone else owns the copyright. A copyright is a right to determine distribution of a work. You can do whatever you want with copyrighted media that you own except distribute copies of it to other people. (Modulo DMCA, which I'm not even going to get into.)
Are we just totally misunderstanding each other, am I not being clear, or are you just being totally obtuse? It's behavior like this that makes me wash my hands of the whole anti-war thing, no matter how much I am tempted to agree.
All three articles you quoted are talking about the latest inspections, right before the war started.
I am talking about all inspections since the end of the war in 1991.
Do you see how we have a problem with this?
In fact, those articles do not contradict anything I said. I said that Iraq was as uncooperative as it could get away with with the inspectors without causing a war. They were so cooperative right at the end because they knew that Bush wouldn't take any shit from them and they'd have to be as nice as possible to keep him from coming in. And even that wasn't enough, in fact. If you can come up with some references showing that Iraq was nice and happy and cooperative before then there is an issue, but until then you aren't showing me anything relevant at all. But I shouldn't be surprised; the vocal anti-war crowd seems to revel in presenting irrelevant material as "evidence".
Are you deliberately trying to be obtuse?
Various UN resolutions were passed regarding Iraq, and weapons inspectors were sent there.
Iraq continually violated those resolutions and was as uncooperative with the inspectors as it felt it could get away with without provoking another war.
Iraq at the present moment does not appear to posess WMDs.
Those three statements can logically exist together in the same universe without any self-contradictions.
It seems to me that you're like most anti-Bush fanatics out there, trying to paint anyone who disagrees with you as a pro-Bush fanatic. That's wrong; I can disagree with you and him at the same time. The fact that Bush was wrong about WMDs and lied in his case for war does not change the fact that Iraq was extremely uncooperative in every way with the UN and with the weapons inspectors. Are you capable of understanding this?
If you respond to this post, please try arguing with the points and opinions I have actually expressed, rather than the points and opinions you imagine I should hold.
I didn't put the "off the ground" qualifier in there for no reason.
The Apollo 1 fire was tragic, but it was not a fundamental design flaw in the Apollo craft. The response was swift, the problem was fixed, and the program continued.
Ironically, the Apollo 1 fire happened during a test, when there should have been no danger to the crew. In all the very dangerous parts of space flight, there were no fatalities. That was the point I was trying to make and so I didn't include this in my summary.