The summary is idiotic. The article isn't explaining why unlocked phones can't work in the US. It's merely stating the obvious facts that unlocking an AT&T phone wont work out that well for you right now...
The big problem? The EU has one standard, while the US has two. The EU standard uses 3 frequencies, while each US standard uses four. Big deal. A trivial technical issue requiring a universal phone to cost 5$ more. They don't exist for one simple reason... the carriers in the US are allowed to lock you in, and its more profitable for them to do so.
That's not to say it matters. Cell companies do such a good job advertising, that people will complain endlessly about their phone bill, but never switch to some other service with unlimited calling/data for half the price. Even with unlocked phones, their behavor wont magically change.
No spin involved. Doing something "even if [...] in fact makes your own life harder" is textbook idealism, while the opposite is pragmatism. Neither is "difficult to respect".
The only question is which path is better for society.
While I can respect the position that people should provide for themselves I find it very difficult to respect the position that it is always preferable to avoid paying for someone else, even if avoiding paying for others in fact makes your own life harder.
Its the other way around. Someone who will make their own life harder, merely for the sake of avoiding giving someone something they do not deserve, is an idealist. Its the idealist... the guy who refuses to pay protection money to the mob, despite that being the cheaper and easier way out.
Its also known as a "moral hazard", and a variation of it is "the prisioners dilemma".
It is instead the shortsighted pragmatist that will do what's cheapest and easiest RIGHT NOW, regardless of the moral or long-term implications.
Now, that's not saying I'm against single payer health care... just that you've got your moral compass turned around 180 degrees.
A singificant issue to note is that medicare patients are generally losses for doctors. ie. They will accept only a minimum of medicare patients, and will never advertise that they do so, for fear of being flooded with unprofitable patients. It must be said that the british system is sustainable, while medicare for everyone would not be...
California's weather isn't like north dakota, but neither is washington's, so why would they be worried?
And california's great weather is just as much myth as fact... Northern California gets plenty cold, yet San Francisco is much more populous and VASTLY more expensive than, say, Hemet CA, where it never gets below freezing...
People move to California in droves not because they like the weather (though there may be some of that) but because there are ridiculous numbers of jobs here, more than basically any three other states put together excluding New York, which also has lots of jobs, extremely high cost of living, and most definitely isn't favored for its climate...
An equivalent pay job offer in the Seattle area vs. many other states actually means more take-home pay here.
I never understood why people care so much about state income tax. The Fed is the one that takes the big chunk, and that doesn't change wherever you go. State income tax accounts for about 1/10th, by comparison... ie. The fed takes 30% out of my income, while the state takes 3%... big deal.
No question income tax is more fair. Those barely getting by don't pay anything, and in Ca at least, no sales tax at all on food, and the like.
Why does everyone think Apple stopped making servers? They just stopped making xserves.
You apparently don't know what a server is.
With Apple calling their Mac Mini a "server", I think it's safe to say, no, Apple doesn't make servers anymore. They put an OS with file-sharing and directory services on a desktop PC and sell it to the gullible.
Even with their "Pro server", it has NO LIGHTS-OUT MANAGEMENT, NO REDUNDANT POWER SUPPLIES, NO RACK-MOUNTING, etc. This is a "server" in the same way an old Packard Bell PC with Windows 2003 installed is a "Server" (ie. it's not).
Terminal Services is simply better, without qualification, for the administration use case.
Absolutely not. A desktop inside a window has always been bad design. You know what happens when you load up your desktop at 640x480? Icons scattered across your desktop. No sane way around that. And how about when you want to click on the very corner pixel on your screen, do you go with jailing the input and the associated hassle, or do you make accessing the edge of the virtual screen practically impossible?
"Rootless" is the only way to go. An application just pops up like magic and integrates with your current desktop. Wonderful if you frequently need to run GUI programs remotely. Hell, I can have an app from one server side by side with an app from another server... no bounding boxes to worry about. And the few hacks that can make something resembling this happen on Windows are a clumsy mess.
But perhaps more importantly is the design model the two methods impose.
When a Windows user sees some antivirus program in their system tray, they've actually got a system-level privileged application right there, sharing user-level memory space, exposed to their abuse, and easy to exploit to get root level access. With X11, that GUI interface to whatever is just an unprivileged module passing data back and forth between the system and the user level, it doesn't essentially need to operate with system rights in the user's memory space to work, as Windows' model basically imposes. This is just one more place where Windows is inherently inferior and insecure.
The recent history of X development is a series of workarounds to overcome this.
The development history of any platform is a series of changes to cut down on the impact of inherent design limitations.
When the overhead, complexity and workarounds can't be suffered then X is abandoned;
X11 worked well on devices less powerful than the cheapest phone you can find today. It runs fine on 26MHz ARM CPUs with severely constrained RAM when xterm is considered a memory hog (~2MB): (http://www.openpsion.org/howtos/series5mx_new/x628.htm)
see Android, arguably the most successful Linux platform ever.
It's a somewhat unfortunate side effect of the openness of open source, that everyone feels compelled to "roll (their) own" at the drop of a hat. Back when the first PDAs were coming out, there were a dozen contenders to replace X11. Damn near all failed quickly. It seems everyone is doomed to repeat the same mistakes, and misunderstanding that most of the overhead of X11 is necessary overhead, in the same way that while a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system has overhead, it is very much NECESSARY overhead.
Sure, invent your new display technology. It will either perform terribly or be terribly hardware-specific and fall apart when the next generation of video chips come out that deprecate some feature you used. It will either be extremely good at a specific use case, and extremely poor at all others, or will simply be mediocre all-around.
Would you care to guess why the ubiquitous framebuffer hasn't killed off X11?
It's not to say X11 is perfect, but it's pretty damn good and shows just how incredibly flexible it is to be a top competitor after all these years, and there simply isn't enough room for performance improvement to make a change worthwhile for anybody.
it is the assumption that 'all' means just the US which is an attitude sadly only too common in the US.
Bull. In this context, they're explaining it's not a closed trial anymore. It's most certainly not necessary for every 5-word headline to be completely accurate. And your assumption that the paid hulu might be different is just that, and that a single mis-placed word gets your hopes up is not anybody's fault but your own...
No, the headline didn't cater to you. It didn't explain the particular detail you were anxious to hear about. Neither did it conflate the US with the entire world, or specifically state something that was untrue.
And I'd just like to say, I'd be willing to bet there's more Americans who can point out France on a map, than Europeans who can point out New Jersey.
Who knows what the long term effects of not doing this for an extended period of time are.
You know who I'd ask a question like that? NASA SCIENTISTS! They study crap like that, and even make nifty apparel using the information they've discovered. If anybody knows, they do...
Since I am from Europe that whole netflix and hulu-thing is beyond me. Why do you guys want to pay for this? You have torrents, youtube etc. What's on netflix or hulu that you just have to see? This is just a question from someone not familiar with these products and not intended as a troll or whatever. Just want to make that clear;)
That's a bit like asking why anyone would rent or buy DVDs when they have 500+ channels, with movies on every day.
The answer is about the same. Torrents work great for popular content, while it's still insanely popular. Looking for a torrent of some old cult film that not many people know about, is a challenge. And if you do find it, expect that the tracker has been down for 6 months, and you aren't getting it anyhow...
Netflix and Hulu is great because of the huge, huge selection of off-beat titles. Think you'll find a working torrent of the 1990s Flipper TV series, that introduced Jessica Alba? Possible, but a slim chance. Meanwhile it's definitely on Hulu, and will take all of 30 seconds to start watching. How about The Ice Pirates? Rocky and Bullwinkle? It's possible you'll find a torrent that works, but why not head over to Netflix and start watching them now (not in a couple days)?
It's video on-demand with a vastly wider selection than can be found from your cable/satellite provider, legally, and without the hassle of torrents. Youtube isn't even in the same league.
If your users have access to a web browser but lack the privileges to install a native client on machines that they use, then you have no choice but to write your application in a language that runs inside the web browser.
If your users have access to emacs, but lack a web browser......never mind.
Web browsers are everywhere, because they are useful applications. They weren't written in Flash, or Javascript, or anything like that. That's part of the reason they are useful to begin with.
I agree that there need to be web interfaces for many things, because, in a pinch, it might be necessary to work that way. But that's a long way from saying you should need an septuple-core CPU, a browser that hasn't been released yet, and a super-high-speed internet connection, to check your e-mail... Google maps is popular, but that's not to say it does anything that the old plain HTML Mapquest didn't do just as well before it came along (and on 100MHz CPUs over dial-up without trouble).
That's the question, today. Do you need some massive web interface made of hacked up javascript, or do you just need to have a little app on the server that outputs plain old HTML? Yeah, if I can't navigate your site because you use drop-down boxes for all navigation, and omitted a "Go" button in favor of script because you don't like how the single extra button clashes with the design of the site, I say screw you. Unless I've got absolutely no other choice, NoScript and I are going elsewhere. When Slashdot eliminates the "Classic interface" option, I'll be leaving here, too. I use the web for the content, not to experiment with every random idiot's ideas about interface usability. Hell, anyone who has been on the web long enough will tell you what a nightmare it was when every site was laid out differently, before the world collectively standardized on the format everyone is familiar with today.
Games? Developers are just be stupid by not putting it in a single EXE that can be run directly. Even a seriously locked down computer will let users download and run a file. And if you're on a ridiculously locked down system which doesn't allow even that... maybe you'll have to live without playing that one game on this computer you're obviously not supposed to be playing games on...
First off, this looks like a nightmare to learn... Why do" hunt and peck" typists type so slow? It's not the "peck" part... Completely rearranging a keyboard is a sure way to give yourself a 100 meter sheer cliff of a learning curve... If you've used a keyboard frequently for a couple years, qwerty is so hard coded in your muscle memory that switching to a simple alphabetical layout is painful. I say this as a dual dvorak/qwerty typist, who has extensively used (not just toyed with) a great many small-format mobile devices over decades (typing on my droid2 right now).
The immutible facts I've learned from all this is that:
A) The best mobile devies out there today have barely made any improvements over the PDAs of 10+ years ago. I'm hard-pressed to come up with something an iphone/droid does that my Cassiopeia E-100 or Psion 5mx couldn't do way back when.
B) The keyboard is still the overwhelimingly fastest and easiest way to input any amout of data. Yeah, even a couple digits, its still faster to flip out a full keyboards. For getting actual work done, nothing I've seen to this day compares with my old Psion 5mx for the simple reason that it has a keyboard large enough to touch type on, yet fits in a pocket.
I could list 100 other reasons too, starting with a B&W LCD viewable in any light, and so low power it remains on for several minutes of inactivity... and similarly, the keyboard as well as other buttons that are always functional thanks to a flip-open case design that avoids the need for cumbersome speedbumps like screen unlock sequences. And did I mention it was made to be tethered to cell phones for wireless internet from the very start? And that it allowed writing up full office documents with common formatting, embedding of other documents and files, and even directly printing these documents to any printer with IRDA (or wired serial) quite easily? Psion, of course, became Symbian, and never reclaimed its vaunted position as the neceassary tool of the business travler.
The month of battery life was a nice feature too... but what do we have now? The same battery life on a smartphone that I was getting from an E-100 circa '00.
But I digress. The idea of kinda-sorta-like-writing idea was tried repeatedly in the PDA days as well, with a forward loop being an A, backward loop being an O, and the like. It wasn't workable then, and I don't see a tiny target area with a scrambled alphabet helping. If you can't get full qwerty, 10-key is probably next-best. On-screen pseudo keyboards need to die already. And while slide out qwerty is infinitely better than nothing, a device you can set on your desk/armrest makes the difference between the toy phones out there, and a real, productive computing device. Of course rock-solid apps with a good interface and desktop equivalent features are needed, but a full-speed input deice is a prereq, and nothing comes close to competing with the tried and true touch-type keyboard.
Yeah, i know, tablets make nice toys too despite to lack of keyboards, just like PDAs did, and were projected to take over the world in their heyday as well...
Until devices like that start coming out (again...) write off the smartphone's delusions of grandure and large budget advertising to the same effect, and accept that a netbook is the smallest device you're going to be able to find on which you can actually do non-trivial amounts of work. Yes, the neato-factor convinces people their teeny device with a web browser can do everything their desktop can do, but the shine fades quickly, and with much pain and money spent, you'll merely learn the exact same things I've stated above.
Being "cowboy country" helps, rather than hurts, in a disaster. I'm not going of on a guns make us safer diatribe, but rather, if you recognize the world around you is dangerous, you prepare for it.
What kills people isn't harsh weather, but UNCHARACTERISTIC weather. Eg. Blizzards in a normally mild climate. Heat waves in colder areas, etc. Hell, people gathering together on the beach to go watch the hurricane barreling down on them.
City dwellers in particular are most often guilty of having no margin of safety and being unable to survive without the conveniences they've grown so accustomed to always having...
The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere. I really think the only way we will ever see competitive advancements in alternative energies beyond research and press blurbs is if we really get conclusive proof that fossil fuels are running out.
Let's see... Power companies throughout California are in a mad rush to squire as much land as they can get, in order to secure their plans for rolling out numerous massive solar power plants (both PV and solar-thermal). Car companies are shipping dozens of hybrids, and a few even have fully-electric cars with 100 mile range on the market you can go out and buy TODAY.
So, what in the hell are you talking about? We're living in the future right now. The big news recently is that analysts think it might take up to 10 years before fully-electric vehicles make up a substantial portion of car sales, while others think it will happen sooner... Quit complaining, and jump in and help!
It wasn't the US gov that built the largest sky scrapers in the world, yet they were all built in the US until recently... who built them? Chrysler... Sears... etc.
Companies most certainly do need massive supercomputers. Oil companies are a good target, and Exxon happens to be the largest corp in the world.
As to using surplus supercomputers being cheaper... well supercomputers tend to be rather task specific. Additionally, since you're completely generalizing, i'd have to say you're making that up on the spot and haven't got the slightest clue whether its true or not.
When I "upgraded" versions of Ubuntu, I had to deal with a completely different looking interface. WHY?
Same for pretty much ANY version of Windows. 98 to 2000 doesn't look drastically different on the surface, but getting anything done (control panel, etc.) shows how very different it really is. And with Windows, I don't have the choice to downgrade to an older UI. With Linux, I can keep the exact same version of the desktop environment for decades if I choose to do so. This is a huge benefit difference when deploying hundreds of workstations within a company. For all Microsoft's talk about retraining people when switching over to Linux, it (or any other open source OS) is the only way you can actually get the tools to maintain an interface that will never, ever, ever, ever change. With Windows, the subtle changes are a PITA, and the big changes require much retraining. Compare this to absolutely none.
Honestly, of all the things to complain about, this is the most trivial. You're complaining only about the DEFAULTS, which are incredibly easy to override. Hell, I don't even KNOW what the default desktops, for most distros I use, are. With a netinstall of Fedora, I told it what to install, it handled the dependencies, and everything integrated together perfectly. Even picked up most of the user config options dropped-in from my FreeBSD system, and worked just fine.
It's not the user's job to make the computer more efficient.
In the same way it's not the driver's job to drive in a way that makes their car more fuel-efficient...
Computers aren't magic. Sometimes human intervention is important.
More importantly, the parent's point is that the fix lies in userland... If you can come up with an algorithm to select which processes should have the highest and lowest priority, you can write-up a tiny program that will automatically do the nice/ionice thing for you.
I'd also like to point out that Linux does it as well as any other OS out there, so it's not as if this is a solved problem anywhere.
Right, everywhere EXCEPT that one big place where the majority of all cars (and miles driven) are...
And even that's not true... Diesels have caught on in EUROPE. Why? Because...
and that's because the US was slow in adopting the low-sulfur diesel fuel needed by modern diesels
No, it's because the taxes on fuel in most European countries is greater than the actual cost of fuel, and therefore the fuel with slightly less tax burden turned into the most economical by-far. Nowhere outside of Europe is there such high adoption of diesel cars. It's all because of the taxes.
if anything, the diesel will have longer gearing than the petrol version to take advantage of all that torque at low revs
IMHO, all non-CVT vehicles should die off ASAP. You need much less horsepower when you don't get "stuck" in a high gear while trying to accelerate. Not to mention the much more predictable behavior on slick (rain/snow/ice) roads, and less dangerous behavior in cruise control. CVT is so frickin' overdue, it's hard to believe old automatics are still being made.
Why the heck don't people like you post more often? I love hearing this stuff.
In the past 2-3 years, there has been an absolute flood of new blood into/., which was either caused by, or resulted in the shift away from realy technical stories, and into more flambait political stories. The moderation system, as well, seems to have been overwhelmed by this flood, and an inordinant number of good comments get lost in the noise, while loud and ignorant me-too comments get all the points. And sadly, the editors here not only aren't trying to change things for the better, but seem to revel in undercutting their base for increasing click-through rates. Clearly, there haven't been enough stories on global warming recently...
I've often considered leaving in recent times, but I've rode through worse problems on/. repeatedly before, and am still hoping this one will be temporary as well.
The friends/foes system is really the only reason I've stayed this long. It at least ensures I'll see some insightful comments from a handful of long-time regulars like myself, and can drop the flamers and trolls that regularly get points. Still it's a much smaller pool of intelligence, and nowhere near as good a public discussion forum as it was a few short years ago.
So there's your answer. Want more insightful user feedback? Go start up a new Slashdot, with better leadership, and a focus on quality over pure click-through ad numbers.
Un huh. EER, SEER, and COP are all standards for measuring efficiency. They do nothing to "prove" your point that heat pumps are greater than 100% efficiency
They are indeed standards for measuring efficiency. What you apparently did not do is check THE NUMBERS. COP is the simplest example. A COP of 1 would be "100% efficient", yet heatpumps get COP ratings of more than 1.
For EER and SEER, look up the equations for converting to/from COP.
Also, you could just look at the ratings of commonly available air conditioners. Ratings are in watts for power consumption, and BTUs for heat moved, yet if you convert the BTUs to watts, you get a value higher than the power consumption (in fact always around 3:1, as I keep saying). Here's a quick link:
You don't know basic physics. Note that my post got meeded up by several people, while you did not. Do what I said the first time, and LOOK UP EER, SEER, or COP. If you do so, instead of remaining willfully ignorant, you'll see I'm 100% correct.
It doesn't matter if you buy a nation, or buy an island, or buy a satellite. You have to get your internet pipe from some external source of which isn't in your "bubble of safety".
Notice that people were watching TV from satellites since long before the internet existed.
Everyone on this half of the planet points their little suplus DBS satellite dishes at one spot in the sky, and hooks it up to their DVB-S card, and bam, like magic, copyrighted data appears out of nowhere. In fact I'd argue such methods are VASTLY more efficient than P2P, as it's a pure broadcast medium. Software like udpcast is already designed for one-way satellite distribution of large files over IP. It's a solved problem.
Now, someone needs to be doing the upllinking of all that data, and there, it wouldn't be difficult for anyone with a more powerful uplink to jam the sat. However, doing the uplinking in a friendly country should ensure rule of law enforcement against anyone close enough to try that.
It's unfortunate all those small dishes aren't powerful enough to uplink and do two-way comms. However, there are surely a rather large number of amatures who could be called on to volunteer their services.
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The summary is idiotic. The article isn't explaining why unlocked phones can't work in the US. It's merely stating the obvious facts that unlocking an AT&T phone wont work out that well for you right now...
The big problem? The EU has one standard, while the US has two. The EU standard uses 3 frequencies, while each US standard uses four. Big deal. A trivial technical issue requiring a universal phone to cost 5$ more. They don't exist for one simple reason... the carriers in the US are allowed to lock you in, and its more profitable for them to do so.
That's not to say it matters. Cell companies do such a good job advertising, that people will complain endlessly about their phone bill, but never switch to some other service with unlimited calling/data for half the price. Even with unlocked phones, their behavor wont magically change.
No spin involved. Doing something "even if [...] in fact makes your own life harder" is textbook idealism, while the opposite is pragmatism. Neither is "difficult to respect".
The only question is which path is better for society.
Its the other way around. Someone who will make their own life harder, merely for the sake of avoiding giving someone something they do not deserve, is an idealist. Its the idealist... the guy who refuses to pay protection money to the mob, despite that being the cheaper and easier way out.
Its also known as a "moral hazard", and a variation of it is "the prisioners dilemma".
It is instead the shortsighted pragmatist that will do what's cheapest and easiest RIGHT NOW, regardless of the moral or long-term implications.
Now, that's not saying I'm against single payer health care... just that you've got your moral compass turned around 180 degrees.
A singificant issue to note is that medicare patients are generally losses for doctors. ie. They will accept only a minimum of medicare patients, and will never advertise that they do so, for fear of being flooded with unprofitable patients. It must be said that the british system is sustainable, while medicare for everyone would not be...
Just because Russia's done 75% of the dying doesn't mean they've accomplished a equivalent amount of the progress.
In the US-Afghan war, did the Taliban do 1000% of the work? Because the casualties work out about that way...
California's weather isn't like north dakota, but neither is washington's, so why would they be worried?
And california's great weather is just as much myth as fact... Northern California gets plenty cold, yet San Francisco is much more populous and VASTLY more expensive than, say, Hemet CA, where it never gets below freezing...
People move to California in droves not because they like the weather (though there may be some of that) but because there are ridiculous numbers of jobs here, more than basically any three other states put together excluding New York, which also has lots of jobs, extremely high cost of living, and most definitely isn't favored for its climate...
I never understood why people care so much about state income tax. The Fed is the one that takes the big chunk, and that doesn't change wherever you go. State income tax accounts for about 1/10th, by comparison... ie. The fed takes 30% out of my income, while the state takes 3%... big deal.
No question income tax is more fair. Those barely getting by don't pay anything, and in Ca at least, no sales tax at all on food, and the like.
You apparently don't know what a server is.
With Apple calling their Mac Mini a "server", I think it's safe to say, no, Apple doesn't make servers anymore. They put an OS with file-sharing and directory services on a desktop PC and sell it to the gullible.
Even with their "Pro server", it has NO LIGHTS-OUT MANAGEMENT, NO REDUNDANT POWER SUPPLIES, NO RACK-MOUNTING, etc. This is a "server" in the same way an old Packard Bell PC with Windows 2003 installed is a "Server" (ie. it's not).
Absolutely not. A desktop inside a window has always been bad design. You know what happens when you load up your desktop at 640x480? Icons scattered across your desktop. No sane way around that. And how about when you want to click on the very corner pixel on your screen, do you go with jailing the input and the associated hassle, or do you make accessing the edge of the virtual screen practically impossible?
"Rootless" is the only way to go. An application just pops up like magic and integrates with your current desktop. Wonderful if you frequently need to run GUI programs remotely. Hell, I can have an app from one server side by side with an app from another server... no bounding boxes to worry about. And the few hacks that can make something resembling this happen on Windows are a clumsy mess.
But perhaps more importantly is the design model the two methods impose.
When a Windows user sees some antivirus program in their system tray, they've actually got a system-level privileged application right there, sharing user-level memory space, exposed to their abuse, and easy to exploit to get root level access. With X11, that GUI interface to whatever is just an unprivileged module passing data back and forth between the system and the user level, it doesn't essentially need to operate with system rights in the user's memory space to work, as Windows' model basically imposes. This is just one more place where Windows is inherently inferior and insecure.
The development history of any platform is a series of changes to cut down on the impact of inherent design limitations.
X11 worked well on devices less powerful than the cheapest phone you can find today. It runs fine on 26MHz ARM CPUs with severely constrained RAM when xterm is considered a memory hog (~2MB): (http://www.openpsion.org/howtos/series5mx_new/x628.htm)
It's a somewhat unfortunate side effect of the openness of open source, that everyone feels compelled to "roll (their) own" at the drop of a hat. Back when the first PDAs were coming out, there were a dozen contenders to replace X11. Damn near all failed quickly. It seems everyone is doomed to repeat the same mistakes, and misunderstanding that most of the overhead of X11 is necessary overhead, in the same way that while a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system has overhead, it is very much NECESSARY overhead.
Sure, invent your new display technology. It will either perform terribly or be terribly hardware-specific and fall apart when the next generation of video chips come out that deprecate some feature you used. It will either be extremely good at a specific use case, and extremely poor at all others, or will simply be mediocre all-around.
Would you care to guess why the ubiquitous framebuffer hasn't killed off X11?
It's not to say X11 is perfect, but it's pretty damn good and shows just how incredibly flexible it is to be a top competitor after all these years, and there simply isn't enough room for performance improvement to make a change worthwhile for anybody.
Bull. In this context, they're explaining it's not a closed trial anymore. It's most certainly not necessary for every 5-word headline to be completely accurate. And your assumption that the paid hulu might be different is just that, and that a single mis-placed word gets your hopes up is not anybody's fault but your own...
No, the headline didn't cater to you. It didn't explain the particular detail you were anxious to hear about. Neither did it conflate the US with the entire world, or specifically state something that was untrue.
And I'd just like to say, I'd be willing to bet there's more Americans who can point out France on a map, than Europeans who can point out New Jersey.
You know who I'd ask a question like that? NASA SCIENTISTS! They study crap like that, and even make nifty apparel using the information they've discovered. If anybody knows, they do...
That's a bit like asking why anyone would rent or buy DVDs when they have 500+ channels, with movies on every day.
The answer is about the same. Torrents work great for popular content, while it's still insanely popular. Looking for a torrent of some old cult film that not many people know about, is a challenge. And if you do find it, expect that the tracker has been down for 6 months, and you aren't getting it anyhow...
Netflix and Hulu is great because of the huge, huge selection of off-beat titles. Think you'll find a working torrent of the 1990s Flipper TV series, that introduced Jessica Alba? Possible, but a slim chance. Meanwhile it's definitely on Hulu, and will take all of 30 seconds to start watching. How about The Ice Pirates? Rocky and Bullwinkle? It's possible you'll find a torrent that works, but why not head over to Netflix and start watching them now (not in a couple days)?
It's video on-demand with a vastly wider selection than can be found from your cable/satellite provider, legally, and without the hassle of torrents. Youtube isn't even in the same league.
If your users have access to emacs, but lack a web browser... ...never mind.
Web browsers are everywhere, because they are useful applications. They weren't written in Flash, or Javascript, or anything like that. That's part of the reason they are useful to begin with.
I agree that there need to be web interfaces for many things, because, in a pinch, it might be necessary to work that way. But that's a long way from saying you should need an septuple-core CPU, a browser that hasn't been released yet, and a super-high-speed internet connection, to check your e-mail... Google maps is popular, but that's not to say it does anything that the old plain HTML Mapquest didn't do just as well before it came along (and on 100MHz CPUs over dial-up without trouble).
That's the question, today. Do you need some massive web interface made of hacked up javascript, or do you just need to have a little app on the server that outputs plain old HTML? Yeah, if I can't navigate your site because you use drop-down boxes for all navigation, and omitted a "Go" button in favor of script because you don't like how the single extra button clashes with the design of the site, I say screw you. Unless I've got absolutely no other choice, NoScript and I are going elsewhere. When Slashdot eliminates the "Classic interface" option, I'll be leaving here, too. I use the web for the content, not to experiment with every random idiot's ideas about interface usability. Hell, anyone who has been on the web long enough will tell you what a nightmare it was when every site was laid out differently, before the world collectively standardized on the format everyone is familiar with today.
Games? Developers are just be stupid by not putting it in a single EXE that can be run directly. Even a seriously locked down computer will let users download and run a file. And if you're on a ridiculously locked down system which doesn't allow even that... maybe you'll have to live without playing that one game on this computer you're obviously not supposed to be playing games on...
First off, this looks like a nightmare to learn... Why do" hunt and peck" typists type so slow? It's not the "peck" part... Completely rearranging a keyboard is a sure way to give yourself a 100 meter sheer cliff of a learning curve... If you've used a keyboard frequently for a couple years, qwerty is so hard coded in your muscle memory that switching to a simple alphabetical layout is painful. I say this as a dual dvorak/qwerty typist, who has extensively used (not just toyed with) a great many small-format mobile devices over decades (typing on my droid2 right now).
The immutible facts I've learned from all this is that:
A) The best mobile devies out there today have barely made any improvements over the PDAs of 10+ years ago. I'm hard-pressed to come up with something an iphone/droid does that my Cassiopeia E-100 or Psion 5mx couldn't do way back when.
B) The keyboard is still the overwhelimingly fastest and easiest way to input any amout of data. Yeah, even a couple digits, its still faster to flip out a full keyboards. For getting actual work done, nothing I've seen to this day compares with my old Psion 5mx for the simple reason that it has a keyboard large enough to touch type on, yet fits in a pocket.
I could list 100 other reasons too, starting with a B&W LCD viewable in any light, and so low power it remains on for several minutes of inactivity... and similarly, the keyboard as well as other buttons that are always functional thanks to a flip-open case design that avoids the need for cumbersome speedbumps like screen unlock sequences. And did I mention it was made to be tethered to cell phones for wireless internet from the very start? And that it allowed writing up full office documents with common formatting, embedding of other documents and files, and even directly printing these documents to any printer with IRDA (or wired serial) quite easily? Psion, of course, became Symbian, and never reclaimed its vaunted position as the neceassary tool of the business travler.
The month of battery life was a nice feature too... but what do we have now? The same battery life on a smartphone that I was getting from an E-100 circa '00.
But I digress. The idea of kinda-sorta-like-writing idea was tried repeatedly in the PDA days as well, with a forward loop being an A, backward loop being an O, and the like. It wasn't workable then, and I don't see a tiny target area with a scrambled alphabet helping. If you can't get full qwerty, 10-key is probably next-best. On-screen pseudo keyboards need to die already. And while slide out qwerty is infinitely better than nothing, a device you can set on your desk/armrest makes the difference between the toy phones out there, and a real, productive computing device. Of course rock-solid apps with a good interface and desktop equivalent features are needed, but a full-speed input deice is a prereq, and nothing comes close to competing with the tried and true touch-type keyboard.
Yeah, i know, tablets make nice toys too despite to lack of keyboards, just like PDAs did, and were projected to take over the world in their heyday as well...
Until devices like that start coming out (again...) write off the smartphone's delusions of grandure and large budget advertising to the same effect, and accept that a netbook is the smallest device you're going to be able to find on which you can actually do non-trivial amounts of work. Yes, the neato-factor convinces people their teeny device with a web browser can do everything their desktop can do, but the shine fades quickly, and with much pain and money spent, you'll merely learn the exact same things I've stated above.
Being "cowboy country" helps, rather than hurts, in a disaster. I'm not going of on a guns make us safer diatribe, but rather, if you recognize the world around you is dangerous, you prepare for it.
What kills people isn't harsh weather, but UNCHARACTERISTIC weather. Eg. Blizzards in a normally mild climate. Heat waves in colder areas, etc. Hell, people gathering together on the beach to go watch the hurricane barreling down on them.
City dwellers in particular are most often guilty of having no margin of safety and being unable to survive without the conveniences they've grown so accustomed to always having...
Let's see... Power companies throughout California are in a mad rush to squire as much land as they can get, in order to secure their plans for rolling out numerous massive solar power plants (both PV and solar-thermal). Car companies are shipping dozens of hybrids, and a few even have fully-electric cars with 100 mile range on the market you can go out and buy TODAY.
So, what in the hell are you talking about? We're living in the future right now. The big news recently is that analysts think it might take up to 10 years before fully-electric vehicles make up a substantial portion of car sales, while others think it will happen sooner... Quit complaining, and jump in and help!
It wasn't the US gov that built the largest sky scrapers in the world, yet they were all built in the US until recently... who built them? Chrysler... Sears... etc.
Companies most certainly do need massive supercomputers. Oil companies are a good target, and Exxon happens to be the largest corp in the world.
As to using surplus supercomputers being cheaper... well supercomputers tend to be rather task specific. Additionally, since you're completely generalizing, i'd have to say you're making that up on the spot and haven't got the slightest clue whether its true or not.
Same for pretty much ANY version of Windows. 98 to 2000 doesn't look drastically different on the surface, but getting anything done (control panel, etc.) shows how very different it really is. And with Windows, I don't have the choice to downgrade to an older UI. With Linux, I can keep the exact same version of the desktop environment for decades if I choose to do so. This is a huge benefit difference when deploying hundreds of workstations within a company. For all Microsoft's talk about retraining people when switching over to Linux, it (or any other open source OS) is the only way you can actually get the tools to maintain an interface that will never, ever, ever, ever change. With Windows, the subtle changes are a PITA, and the big changes require much retraining. Compare this to absolutely none.
Honestly, of all the things to complain about, this is the most trivial. You're complaining only about the DEFAULTS, which are incredibly easy to override. Hell, I don't even KNOW what the default desktops, for most distros I use, are. With a netinstall of Fedora, I told it what to install, it handled the dependencies, and everything integrated together perfectly. Even picked up most of the user config options dropped-in from my FreeBSD system, and worked just fine.
POSTING IN ALL CAPS MAKES IT MORE DIFFICULT TO READ AS WELL.
ANDLETSNOTFORGETABOUTWRITINGWITHOUTANYPUNCTUATUON
YOU CAN DO BETTER!
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Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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evilviper [ Log Out ]
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In the same way it's not the driver's job to drive in a way that makes their car more fuel-efficient...
Computers aren't magic. Sometimes human intervention is important.
More importantly, the parent's point is that the fix lies in userland... If you can come up with an algorithm to select which processes should have the highest and lowest priority, you can write-up a tiny program that will automatically do the nice/ionice thing for you.
I'd also like to point out that Linux does it as well as any other OS out there, so it's not as if this is a solved problem anywhere.
Right, everywhere EXCEPT that one big place where the majority of all cars (and miles driven) are...
And even that's not true... Diesels have caught on in EUROPE. Why? Because...
No, it's because the taxes on fuel in most European countries is greater than the actual cost of fuel, and therefore the fuel with slightly less tax burden turned into the most economical by-far. Nowhere outside of Europe is there such high adoption of diesel cars. It's all because of the taxes.
IMHO, all non-CVT vehicles should die off ASAP. You need much less horsepower when you don't get "stuck" in a high gear while trying to accelerate. Not to mention the much more predictable behavior on slick (rain/snow/ice) roads, and less dangerous behavior in cruise control. CVT is so frickin' overdue, it's hard to believe old automatics are still being made.
Why the heck don't people like you post more often? I love hearing this stuff.
In the past 2-3 years, there has been an absolute flood of new blood into /., which was either caused by, or resulted in the shift away from realy technical stories, and into more flambait political stories. The moderation system, as well, seems to have been overwhelmed by this flood, and an inordinant number of good comments get lost in the noise, while loud and ignorant me-too comments get all the points. And sadly, the editors here not only aren't trying to change things for the better, but seem to revel in undercutting their base for increasing click-through rates. Clearly, there haven't been enough stories on global warming recently...
Not to single him out as the single raindrop responsible for said flood, but I happen to be dealing with one such loud and ignorant new user right now: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1833190&cid=33985468
I've often considered leaving in recent times, but I've rode through worse problems on /. repeatedly before, and am still hoping this one will be temporary as well.
The friends/foes system is really the only reason I've stayed this long. It at least ensures I'll see some insightful comments from a handful of long-time regulars like myself, and can drop the flamers and trolls that regularly get points. Still it's a much smaller pool of intelligence, and nowhere near as good a public discussion forum as it was a few short years ago.
So there's your answer. Want more insightful user feedback? Go start up a new Slashdot, with better leadership, and a focus on quality over pure click-through ad numbers.
They are indeed standards for measuring efficiency. What you apparently did not do is check THE NUMBERS. COP is the simplest example. A COP of 1 would be "100% efficient", yet heatpumps get COP ratings of more than 1.
For EER and SEER, look up the equations for converting to/from COP.
Also, you could just look at the ratings of commonly available air conditioners. Ratings are in watts for power consumption, and BTUs for heat moved, yet if you convert the BTUs to watts, you get a value higher than the power consumption (in fact always around 3:1, as I keep saying). Here's a quick link:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6046606&CatId=4566
http://www.mhi-inc.com/Converter/watt_calculator.htm
And wikipedia calls you an loud-mouthed idiot too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance#Example
If you can't read, or can't understand what it says, don't blame me for your ignorance.
You don't know basic physics. Note that my post got meeded up by several people, while you did not. Do what I said the first time, and LOOK UP EER, SEER, or COP. If you do so, instead of remaining willfully ignorant, you'll see I'm 100% correct.
Notice that people were watching TV from satellites since long before the internet existed.
Everyone on this half of the planet points their little suplus DBS satellite dishes at one spot in the sky, and hooks it up to their DVB-S card, and bam, like magic, copyrighted data appears out of nowhere. In fact I'd argue such methods are VASTLY more efficient than P2P, as it's a pure broadcast medium. Software like udpcast is already designed for one-way satellite distribution of large files over IP. It's a solved problem.
Now, someone needs to be doing the upllinking of all that data, and there, it wouldn't be difficult for anyone with a more powerful uplink to jam the sat. However, doing the uplinking in a friendly country should ensure rule of law enforcement against anyone close enough to try that.
It's unfortunate all those small dishes aren't powerful enough to uplink and do two-way comms. However, there are surely a rather large number of amatures who could be called on to volunteer their services.