I've been thinking of picking up an X-Box specifically for a MythTV front-end, and had figured I'd wait and pick up a good price on a used one, from some early adopter. But then again, maybe I can just get a good price on a brand new one.
I presume recent-vintage X-Boxes are still under the owner's control. They've said that won't be true of the 360.
It wasn't the way you said it, it was actually the content, which is usually representative of a way of thought. I lumped you in with that way of thought. If that's unfair, sorry. If not...
Background: I'm a die-hard moderate, with a hefty touch of contrarian thrown in. According to my brother, he, our sister, and me still adhere to the old-fashioned conservative Republican values we were raised with back in the 50's and 60's.
It's just that the political landscape has shifted that much since. Beyond that, there's a strong tendancy to take everyone who doesn't meet today's definition of "Conservative" and call them a Liberal, using that term as a curse.
I was taught "conservative" meant: Mind your own business, let other people mind theirs. Pay your own way. Waste not, want not. Take your fair share, let the other guy get his.
So on to what I said, and you said: I said I wished we had more knowledge, in different words. I wish I had worded it more strongly, "One of the most urgent things we need to be doing today is understanding our climate!" Whether man-induced or natural, climatic catastrophe makes just as much chaos, and the people are just as dead. There is pretty strong agreement that change is coming, and regardless of the cause, we should be trying to understand it better. People are, but IMHO at a societal level it doesn't have sufficient urgency.
I didn't say anything about "slow down," though I don't think it's a bad idea, in moderation. I suspect you keyed in on my "profit" sentence for your response.
Your response was so "party line" that I lumped you in with others who erect an "environmentalist straw man" and pronounce it an utter economic disaster, then decide that things must remain exactly as they are. You didn't make a personal attack, but your argument mirrored others who do.
When I say "slow down" I mean for instance, "Do we really need to be driving around in 2 or 3 tons of steel, just to get to work or go shopping?" Drop that to 1 or 2 tons, and people could still get to work or go shopping, and have more money to spend when they got there.
I'll lump you in with others, perhaps unfairly, who seem to think that any attempt at conservation will DESTROY OUR ECONOMY, and therefore must be avoided until absolute evidence is found otherwise. Funny thing, it seems to me that energy is an *expense*, and perhaps in other less car-happy societies, it's a good idea to reduce expenses. I've done what I can do insulate and seal my house, or instance. When I buy a car, I take mileage into account. I buy incandescent lights, but that's because my wife doesn't like the color balance of the compact fluorescents. I drive to work, because I'm too far to bike, alone because I usually need time flexibility.
There are *many* things that can be done to reduce energy usage without compromising lifestyle. There are more things that can be done without serious impacts to lifestyle. Yet as a nation we practically refuse to do anything at all - perhaps because the terrorists will WIN if we do. (unfair remark, I admit) One thing from the past that really FROSTED me was when Reagan cut $5e7 from the budget to help people insulate their homes, to save money, then ran up gigantic defense deficits. The $5e7 wasn't even a pimple on the deficit, and would have done some serious good.
If our economy can't tolerate efforts to consume energy wisely, then something's wrong. In that case, we ought to be fixing it.
Now you're talking old money vs new money. I'm just wondering what a 20 ft rise in sea level will do to the level of Lake Champlain, usually somewhere between 90 and 100 ft. (and my house, about 30 ft or so above that.)
Too many people on both sides want this to be a black-and-white issue, and it's just not going to be. Take a slight analogy, "PROVE to me that there's an icy patch on the highway up ahead!" The adjoining statement being, "I'm not going to slack off on my speed a bit until I have absolute proof that there's ice."
In that situation, most of us would slow down a little. I'm not saying stop, I'm not saying back up, I'm not saying take a detour. I'm saying exercise a little caution.
In the current environment, it seems to me that getting an "amazingly accurate model of the Earth's climate created" would be one of the absolutely most urgent tasks of our time. You may not agree with the conclusions some people are reaching, and I may not either. But given the amount of chatter, including chatter by highly qualified people, nobody with an open mind would say that there's NO cause for concern and study.
I find it highly *convenient* and *comfortable* but not profitable. I wasn't saying that the rest of us weren't beneficiaries... Now that you mention it, I guess I should have differentiated "profit" of the dollar sort from "profit" of the lifestyle sort.
Making that distinction, imagine if you were to put the question of "losing some profit" to the "lifestyle profit" group vs the "financial profit" group. I suspect that more of the former would be willing to compromise^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H give up a little than the latter.
You may well be correct to say it's absurd to call it "unstoppable." But lacking evidence or better models, any statements are absurd. Perhaps/probably all of our activities are a pimple on the 300My cycle, I won't deny that. I'd be more curious to know how our activities are compared to the 100ky cycle which, as you say, we don't understand.
But the phrase comes to mind, "Unusually sensitive to initial conditions." Assuming, and this may be a big assumption, that there are chaotic elements at work here, our activities may be sufficient to drive climate cycles in a slightly different direction. For better or worse, or are we insignificant, who knows?
Would this really be ANY sort of issue at all if it weren't so darned profitable for some people that we emit a bunch of greenhouse gases?
Sometimes the content of a tab get stale, perhaps simply because I've lost interest in it. Today Firefox closes the current tab. So if I've decided based on the title that a tab is stale, I've still got to make it current, and then I can close it. With individual "X"s I can close by-title and don't have to redraw first.
Of course this is a 2-edged sword, because by the time too many tabs are open, especially with a little "X" on each one, the titles are shortened to the point of useless. (Heck, sometimes that happens even without the "X".) Maybe in this case the UI could drop back to the one "X" of today, since you need to see windows before closing them.
Along that line, when it gets that cluttered, sometimes I'd like a "Close every tab except the current one." button.
There are currently 2 ways, AFAIK, to effectively destroy a system. ie, beyond the ability of reformat and reinstall to fix.
1: Flash the BIOS to something useless that won't bring up the system. 2: There are some not-to-be-used ATA commands that can turn a hard drive into scrap metal. A while back on lkml there was a bit of discussion on whether or not to filter them out at the driver level.
I'm sure there are more, just waiting to be discovered. Time was, you could destroy older monitors by misprogramming the video chip. Today we have dynamic fan control, so maybe it's possible to stop the fan, and send the CPU into its hottest loop. (That probably doesn't destroy before the thing crashes, but it's definitely not good for it.)
So maybe this answers a question I'll be asking in the next several weeks. I'm looking at building a new system, and at the moment am thinking Athlon-64, socket 939, PCI-Express. At the moment, it would be Linux-only, most likely Gentoo.
So am I better off with: CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" or: CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
To be honest, I'm note really going to push the memory requirements or anything else. It's just that it's a faster 32-bit machine, plus has more inches, length *and* girth. Plus it's something fun to fool with.
We've begun to learn that forest fires are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, and that by suppressing the normal small fires, we've really messed things up royally.
I guess by aberration I meant temporary and won't continue indefinitely. In each of your other cases, which I agree with, there was a correction, either by the market or by the Sherman Anti-Trust act.
It all falls apart in the second clause of your second sentence: "especially one driven by the need for short term profits such as ours"
My favorite example is the Internet. Go back into the 80's, and we had TheSource, GEnie, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc, all vying to be THE online provider. They were ALL trying to own the whole pie.
Yet that very act of attempting exclusive ownership is what made each of those pies rather small. Then the Internet came along, the pie that couldn't be owned, and it GREW. The only one of those early ISPs that's still around in any significant way is AOL, the one who did the best job of embracing the idea of owning it's piece of a much bigger pie.
Even after that example, American business didn't learn. I swear that they all look at the big pie called the Internet, and say, "I want to OWN that pie," and just can't realize that non-ownership is an essential property. Witness instant messaging, streaming media, or any other Internet add-on.
So perhaps you're right, and Utopian ideals of open standards just won't happen in today's society. In that case NOTHING big will happen, we'll just have a collection of little pies.
Microsoft's ownership of the PC OS is/was an aberration, and they're trying like all get-out to extend that aberration into everything they can get their hands on. But it's still an aberration, a refusal to allow THEIR products to become commodities, while driving everything surrounding them in that direction.
You appear to not understand "statute of limitations" as currently defined.
The statute of limitations for Democratic missteps is eternal. The statute of limitations for Republican missteps has so far maxxed out at about 2 months.
Witness a $140k *loss* by Clinton's wife launched a 7 year full-press investigation which wandered from topic to topic, eventually settling on Zippergate. Notice that the perjury happened more than 2 months after Monica-day-0.
On the other hand: Invite private enterprise in to determine the nations energy policy, with no public review of comments or even participants. Remember that this is setting national - public - policy. Blown over in 2 months or so.
Legislation to exempt the Vice President's former company from asbestos liability, amounting to billions. The company had acquired that liability when they purchased a different company. I wonder what the books looked like, and if the acquisition would make any sense without the eventual legislation. AFAIK no public commotion at all.
Capture Bin Laden, or go into Iraq. Still noise, but only noise.
WMDs? Noise.
The outing of Plame. Big noise, but for less than 2 months.
And the Right casts derision on, "The Liberal Media." "Liberal Media," my (insert anatomical part, here)! By these standards, Gore ought to be in Levenworth for life for the Internet thing!
...except for the name. They were always searching for "deutronium" fuel for their spacecraft. Whenever they found it, it came out looking like pellets, stored in a bottle. So either they got the name wrong, or now we know what we should be calling the AMMINEX pellets.
As I said, "I" want to dodge the bullet. I'd rather have civilization around, and am not presumptive enough to think I'd be one of the lucky(?) survivors.
Slashdot Mirror
and I thought after LSC the race would be between LSD and LSP.
I've been thinking of picking up an X-Box specifically for a MythTV front-end, and had figured I'd wait and pick up a good price on a used one, from some early adopter. But then again, maybe I can just get a good price on a brand new one.
I presume recent-vintage X-Boxes are still under the owner's control. They've said that won't be true of the 360.
I'm going to rip Linux out of all my boxes, install WinXP SP2, and do all of my web surfing on IE with ActiveX enabled, just to be safe!
4. Use supplied scissors on the network and power cables.
It wasn't the way you said it, it was actually the content, which is usually representative of a way of thought. I lumped you in with that way of thought. If that's unfair, sorry. If not...
Background: I'm a die-hard moderate, with a hefty touch of contrarian thrown in. According to my brother, he, our sister, and me still adhere to the old-fashioned conservative Republican values we were raised with back in the 50's and 60's.
It's just that the political landscape has shifted that much since. Beyond that, there's a strong tendancy to take everyone who doesn't meet today's definition of "Conservative" and call them a Liberal, using that term as a curse.
I was taught "conservative" meant:
Mind your own business, let other people mind theirs.
Pay your own way.
Waste not, want not.
Take your fair share, let the other guy get his.
So on to what I said, and you said:
I said I wished we had more knowledge, in different words. I wish I had worded it more strongly, "One of the most urgent things we need to be doing today is understanding our climate!" Whether man-induced or natural, climatic catastrophe makes just as much chaos, and the people are just as dead. There is pretty strong agreement that change is coming, and regardless of the cause, we should be trying to understand it better. People are, but IMHO at a societal level it doesn't have sufficient urgency.
I didn't say anything about "slow down," though I don't think it's a bad idea, in moderation. I suspect you keyed in on my "profit" sentence for your response.
Your response was so "party line" that I lumped you in with others who erect an "environmentalist straw man" and pronounce it an utter economic disaster, then decide that things must remain exactly as they are. You didn't make a personal attack, but your argument mirrored others who do.
When I say "slow down" I mean for instance, "Do we really need to be driving around in 2 or 3 tons of steel, just to get to work or go shopping?" Drop that to 1 or 2 tons, and people could still get to work or go shopping, and have more money to spend when they got there.
As an aside, what is your opinion on "Peak Oil?"
As long as you're lumping me in with eco-nuts, why not?
Couple of points...
I'll lump you in with others, perhaps unfairly, who seem to think that any attempt at conservation will DESTROY OUR ECONOMY, and therefore must be avoided until absolute evidence is found otherwise. Funny thing, it seems to me that energy is an *expense*, and perhaps in other less car-happy societies, it's a good idea to reduce expenses. I've done what I can do insulate and seal my house, or instance. When I buy a car, I take mileage into account. I buy incandescent lights, but that's because my wife doesn't like the color balance of the compact fluorescents. I drive to work, because I'm too far to bike, alone because I usually need time flexibility.
There are *many* things that can be done to reduce energy usage without compromising lifestyle.
There are more things that can be done without serious impacts to lifestyle.
Yet as a nation we practically refuse to do anything at all - perhaps because the terrorists will WIN if we do. (unfair remark, I admit) One thing from the past that really FROSTED me was when Reagan cut $5e7 from the budget to help people insulate their homes, to save money, then ran up gigantic defense deficits. The $5e7 wasn't even a pimple on the deficit, and would have done some serious good.
If our economy can't tolerate efforts to consume energy wisely, then something's wrong. In that case, we ought to be fixing it.
Now you're talking old money vs new money. I'm just wondering what a 20 ft rise in sea level will do to the level of Lake Champlain, usually somewhere between 90 and 100 ft. (and my house, about 30 ft or so above that.)
Too many people on both sides want this to be a black-and-white issue, and it's just not going to be. Take a slight analogy, "PROVE to me that there's an icy patch on the highway up ahead!" The adjoining statement being, "I'm not going to slack off on my speed a bit until I have absolute proof that there's ice."
In that situation, most of us would slow down a little. I'm not saying stop, I'm not saying back up, I'm not saying take a detour. I'm saying exercise a little caution.
In the current environment, it seems to me that getting an "amazingly accurate model of the Earth's climate created" would be one of the absolutely most urgent tasks of our time. You may not agree with the conclusions some people are reaching, and I may not either. But given the amount of chatter, including chatter by highly qualified people, nobody with an open mind would say that there's NO cause for concern and study.
I find it highly *convenient* and *comfortable* but not profitable. I wasn't saying that the rest of us weren't beneficiaries... Now that you mention it, I guess I should have differentiated "profit" of the dollar sort from "profit" of the lifestyle sort.
Making that distinction, imagine if you were to put the question of "losing some profit" to the "lifestyle profit" group vs the "financial profit" group. I suspect that more of the former would be willing to compromise^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H give up a little than the latter.
You may well be correct to say it's absurd to call it "unstoppable." But lacking evidence or better models, any statements are absurd. Perhaps/probably all of our activities are a pimple on the 300My cycle, I won't deny that. I'd be more curious to know how our activities are compared to the 100ky cycle which, as you say, we don't understand.
But the phrase comes to mind, "Unusually sensitive to initial conditions." Assuming, and this may be a big assumption, that there are chaotic elements at work here, our activities may be sufficient to drive climate cycles in a slightly different direction. For better or worse, or are we insignificant, who knows?
Would this really be ANY sort of issue at all if it weren't so darned profitable for some people that we emit a bunch of greenhouse gases?
Is there anything off-the-shelf to do rot13 in Firefox?
Each tab has its own "X" to close it.
Sometimes the content of a tab get stale, perhaps simply because I've lost interest in it. Today Firefox closes the current tab. So if I've decided based on the title that a tab is stale, I've still got to make it current, and then I can close it. With individual "X"s I can close by-title and don't have to redraw first.
Of course this is a 2-edged sword, because by the time too many tabs are open, especially with a little "X" on each one, the titles are shortened to the point of useless. (Heck, sometimes that happens even without the "X".) Maybe in this case the UI could drop back to the one "X" of today, since you need to see windows before closing them.
Along that line, when it gets that cluttered, sometimes I'd like a "Close every tab except the current one." button.
There are currently 2 ways, AFAIK, to effectively destroy a system. ie, beyond the ability of reformat and reinstall to fix.
1: Flash the BIOS to something useless that won't bring up the system.
2: There are some not-to-be-used ATA commands that can turn a hard drive into scrap metal. A while back on lkml there was a bit of discussion on whether or not to filter them out at the driver level.
I'm sure there are more, just waiting to be discovered. Time was, you could destroy older monitors by misprogramming the video chip. Today we have dynamic fan control, so maybe it's possible to stop the fan, and send the CPU into its hottest loop. (That probably doesn't destroy before the thing crashes, but it's definitely not good for it.)
What's wrong with that?
Is it a bit of a pain to set up, or impossible?
This system is also destined to be a MythTV back-end.
So maybe this answers a question I'll be asking in the next several weeks. I'm looking at building a new system, and at the moment am thinking Athlon-64, socket 939, PCI-Express. At the moment, it would be Linux-only, most likely Gentoo.
So am I better off with:
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
or:
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
To be honest, I'm note really going to push the memory requirements or anything else. It's just that it's a faster 32-bit machine, plus has more inches, length *and* girth. Plus it's something fun to fool with.
How about forest fires?
We've begun to learn that forest fires are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, and that by suppressing the normal small fires, we've really messed things up royally.
I guess by aberration I meant temporary and won't continue indefinitely. In each of your other cases, which I agree with, there was a correction, either by the market or by the Sherman Anti-Trust act.
It all falls apart in the second clause of your second sentence:
"especially one driven by the need for short term profits such as ours"
My favorite example is the Internet. Go back into the 80's, and we had TheSource, GEnie, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc, all vying to be THE online provider. They were ALL trying to own the whole pie.
Yet that very act of attempting exclusive ownership is what made each of those pies rather small. Then the Internet came along, the pie that couldn't be owned, and it GREW. The only one of those early ISPs that's still around in any significant way is AOL, the one who did the best job of embracing the idea of owning it's piece of a much bigger pie.
Even after that example, American business didn't learn. I swear that they all look at the big pie called the Internet, and say, "I want to OWN that pie," and just can't realize that non-ownership is an essential property. Witness instant messaging, streaming media, or any other Internet add-on.
So perhaps you're right, and Utopian ideals of open standards just won't happen in today's society. In that case NOTHING big will happen, we'll just have a collection of little pies.
Microsoft's ownership of the PC OS is/was an aberration, and they're trying like all get-out to extend that aberration into everything they can get their hands on. But it's still an aberration, a refusal to allow THEIR products to become commodities, while driving everything surrounding them in that direction.
You appear to not understand "statute of limitations" as currently defined.
The statute of limitations for Democratic missteps is eternal.
The statute of limitations for Republican missteps has so far maxxed out at about 2 months.
Witness a $140k *loss* by Clinton's wife launched a 7 year full-press investigation which wandered from topic to topic, eventually settling on Zippergate. Notice that the perjury happened more than 2 months after Monica-day-0.
On the other hand:
Invite private enterprise in to determine the nations energy policy, with no public review of comments or even participants. Remember that this is setting national - public - policy. Blown over in 2 months or so.
Legislation to exempt the Vice President's former company from asbestos liability, amounting to billions. The company had acquired that liability when they purchased a different company. I wonder what the books looked like, and if the acquisition would make any sense without the eventual legislation. AFAIK no public commotion at all.
Capture Bin Laden, or go into Iraq. Still noise, but only noise.
WMDs? Noise.
The outing of Plame. Big noise, but for less than 2 months.
And the Right casts derision on, "The Liberal Media." "Liberal Media," my (insert anatomical part, here)! By these standards, Gore ought to be in Levenworth for life for the Internet thing!
...except for the name. They were always searching for "deutronium" fuel for their spacecraft. Whenever they found it, it came out looking like pellets, stored in a bottle. So either they got the name wrong, or now we know what we should be calling the AMMINEX pellets.
As I said, "I" want to dodge the bullet. I'd rather have civilization around, and am not presumptive enough to think I'd be one of the lucky(?) survivors.
Yes we are part of nature, and species go extinct all the time. Get ready.
I'd rather try and dodge the bullet, rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
Filled a row on my Buzzword Bingo card in just the summary, didn't even need to follow the links.
Thanks for the definitions, now the summary makes a little more sense.
From the cultural stereotypes I've been steeped in, the Chinese don't care too much about what kinds of meat they eat, either.