Why must people with no idea on a particular subject always be in charge of the budgets around a particular subject?
Because a "budget" has to make choices between ALL different possible areas of funding, based on the relative trade-offs of each, and NOBODY is a skilled expert on every subject.
The theory is, you have a group of experts on the range of topics reporting to someone who is impartial, and will take that information and decide which options are potentially the best use of the money. It's just that, in reality, choosing people who are good at that last important part is rarely done properly.
Save your pain and just go with IBM/Lenovo. They are still the standard bearer when it comes to keyboards (despite what they have done).
I've owned two Thinkpads over the years. Their keyboards aren't the worst, but they aren't all that great, either.
That, and you don't have to have a cut-rate quality netbook attached to it. An older X series can do just fine and still fit the bill.
The world is moving on... Power consumption, weight, etc. The EEE PC is the one everyone latched on to, but some others are even better (spec-wise), provided their designs were fleshed out just a little bit more. eg. http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
but you're totally okay with the bald-faced lie that we're operating under a two-party system.
It is a two party system, by any rational measure.
The reason we have corruption on both sides is blindingly simple: There is only one side.
Of course! And other countries, with two, three, or even more viable political parties, are so well-known for NEVER having experienced any corruption? Try again.
the world's first carbon nanotube-based color e-paper.
How much extra do I have to pay for the additional unnecessary buzzword? I don't recall carbon nanotubes being particularly cheap.
even under bright lights or sunlight, the user would be able to view the display clearly
B&W LCDs are so terribly under-appreciated... I still keep my decades old PDAs working specifically because B&W LCD screens are superior, but rather difficult to find (in reasonably large sizes) now.
Hell, I'd love to get a 15" B&W LCD screen for my PC... Infinitely easier to read text on without eye strain, and vastly lower power than any other technology out there. You can always do the dual-desktop thing, and only turn on your second (color) LCD screen when you need to look at something in color like pictures, maps, etc.
One for my laptop wouldn't be a bad idea either... Get rid of the backlight and you'll likely more than double your existing battery run time.
EPD's ability to reflect light and therefore able to preserve text or images on the display without frequently refreshing.
Refreshing an LCD screen has nothing to do with the backlight... Only with CRT & Plasma displays are the two issues linked.
And this conveniently ignores the fact that e-ink screens have TERRIBLE power consumption when the screen contents ARE changed frequently.
Fair Use existed as US common law over a hundred years ago.
He said "fair use" but he very obviously meant the Safe Harbor provision.
The DMCA did not give us, the end users, any benefit that I can see.
So you've never used YouTube, Flikr, etc.? Because they would all be shut down (ala. Napster) for contributory copyright infringement as soon as the first copyrighted and non-fair use material was uploaded to the respective sites.
Napster wasn't the only example, just the most well known and recognizable. Innumerable web sites were sued into oblivion before the DMCA... It was a free-for-all, with numerous sites trying to do such things, because as soon as any one was big enough to get noticed, it would disappear suddenly.
I'm tired of hearing this nonsense over and over again.
Yes, Democrats have done plenty of wrong, but on the whole, they're absolute choir boys compared to the flagrant, bald-faced corruption of most of the Republican party.
Of course, pointing the finger in willful ignorance is a typical Republican campaign tactic as well... See the McCain campaign's distribution of tire pressure gauges labeled "Obama's Energy Plan," Bush campaign promises that he was going to do more to combat global warming than Al Gore, and pretty much everything else they whole party has done in the past 20 years.
It's a bit like a guy driving 110MPH in a 45MPH zone, and complaining to the cops about being singled out for a ticket, single HE wasn't the only one speeding, as everyone else on the road was going 50MPH... So why should HE get singled out and ticketed?
There's plenty of fuckups on both sides, but pointing out that the Democrats aren't perfect, while the Republicans are widespread and institutionally corrupt, is purely feigned ignorance.
It would be far cheaper to grant politicians in key positions generous allowances for the rest of their lives
Yes, because history has shown over and over again that greedy and corrupt people want a certain amount of wealth and comfort, after which point they entirely stop trying to get more money for themselves... right??? </sarcasm>
Once a politician enters public service, he should never again need to consider private sector life and would therefore have less tempting him now and in the future.
That would be ridiculously expensive, with every underling joining up for one term and retiring with their oh-so-cushy pension. It would not remove the motivation to get favors for friends and family that aren't covered. Ditto for any staff and the like not included. It would either have to entirely remove the motivation to get reelected (which is bad), or it would still leave open the temptation to get pork projects to ensure your reelection.
I can't believe we didn't solve the oldest and biggest problem in the history of the world in a one-paragraph policy recommendation on slashdot...
What is a "Felony," versus a "Misdemeanor," varies from state to state. I know someone who was ticketed for not having her dog on a leash, and so, now has a felony conviction on her record... Presumably, you wouldn't want a "good" senator kicked out because they didn't obey a leash law.
However, they are unable to hold leadership positions in the Congress after being just indicted for a felony (they don't have to be convicted). Tom Delay stepping down as House Majority Leader would be an example... Or it ALMOST would be, if the Republicans hadn't voted to strike the rule shortly after his conviction. To his credit, he resigned anyways.
Should a few parking tickets get someone kicked out of congress?
They can already wave their U.S. Congressman badge and get immunity from such infractions (which most of them do to get out of speeding tickets, on a regular basis), so that's not actually an issue. It would have to be something more serious.
Give Ted Stevens a break on the "series of tubes" analogy. He was trying to describe saturation of available bandwidth in terms of water going through a pipe. It is a particularly good analogy given that educational metaphor for electrical systems are usually in terms of water in a pipe (or tube).
The "tubes" comment wasn't the ridiculous part... That's just the quickest short-hand for that whole speech he gave.
While the numerous mis-statements, like calling the internet "tubes", and repeatedly calling an "e-mail" an "internet" where stupid... The fact that he thinks an e-mail from his staff took 4 days to get to his inbox because the "tubes" were "full" of movies downloading is what really demonstrates his woeful ignorance.
But what really makes it really sad, important, etc., is the fact that he chaired the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, tasked with regulating the internet, and used his overwhelming clear ignorance to justify striking down network neutrality legislation.
John McCain got similarly criticized for getting the Sunni/Shia thing wrong while making a speech, and failing to correct his own mistake.
When you have a role of responsibility regulating something, and you demonstrate an utter ignorance of the subject, it's not "snickering" to point out that fact, as often as necessary.
on my old computer (Celeron 333 + 128Mo of RAM), BeOS booted from GRUB to a responsive desktop in about 14s, Linux booted from GRUB to KDE took more than 1min (1min40s if memory serves).
Both took about 16s on my 233Mhz system. I certainly wasn't running KDE or GNOME, however. Probably XFce at the time.
The only "custom" part of my system was the fact that I downloaded and compiled the 2.4 kernel (march=686) on the system.
The 9" netbooks are not really good for anything that involves a lot of typing.
That may be true, but it's entirely the fault of the designers. 9 inches (diagonal) is entirely enough room for a full-sized keyboard. The keyboard I'm typing on right now is just slightly larger than that. (http://www.vpi.us/keyboard-mini.html)
But somehow, when it's for a laptop, designers go stupid on us, making brain-dead design decisions. I have a MUCH easier time touch-typing accurately on my tiny (7") Psion 5's keyboard, than on my much larger (11") laptop.
IMHO, manufacturers could EASILY choose better-designed keyboards for laptops, at nominal extra cost. But since they've proven unwilling to do so, they should at least standardize keyboard sizes, connectors, etc., and make it trivially easy to swap them out with 3rd party units.
One huge difference between the Apollo/Saturn design and the Space Shuttle was multiple methods of abort that would separate the manned portion from the rest of the rocket.
No, that's not actually a difference at all...
The shuttle HAD an escape system, with ejection seats for the astronauts. IIRC, it was in place for the first few test launches, when there were only a few crew members aboard. It was removed when the Shuttle became operational... more or less to make way for the compliment of 7 astronauts the shuttle can now carry. NASA engineers have said (some time after the Challenger disaster) that the escape system was just not possible (no room for it) with a full crew.
For problems on the pad, as described with the Soyuz in another post, the Emergency Egress Slide should allow the crew to escape the launch vehicle.
it *certainly* doesn't boot nearly as fast as BeOS did.
It *certainly* does.
Circa 2000, when BeOS' boot times were being touted, I timed my Linux system with the shiny new 2.4 kernel, and BeOS on the same hardware... Without practically any tweaking, the Linux system booted nominally FASTER than BeOS.
I think the hype about BeOS' boot times was the same as the reason for splash screens... People FEEL like things are happening faster if they can SEE pictures on the screen changing and moving around quickly.
Well, you decided you wanted more features from your operating system.
You want a multi-user capable system. You want plug-and-play hardware automatically detected. You want your system to automatically find an open WiFi router it can use, and the nearest printer...
I say YOU decided, because you could just as well be using whatever OS is running on that "IBM PS/1" (OS/2 or Win3.1) on your brand new hardware, at blazing fast speeds...
I, however, decided to stick with faster (and sometimes somewhat older) software, for most of my needs. My computer is probably far more responsive than your system, despite fairly old and modest hardware.
Are you trying to imply that ClamAV uses an inner loop written in an interpreted language?
No, I was "trying to imply" that ClamAV was not designed and written for use on Windows, but rather clumsily ported from the Unix/Linux code-base, and is really not at all optimized.
The GUI front-end(s) for ClamAV (and Clamwin) are in fact Python based, however, which may also be somewhat contributing to the poor performance.
I second the mention of ClamWin. [...] A weekly full scan is enough.
A full scan with ClamWin or ClamAV (for Windows) will take FOUR TIMES AS LONG as the same scan with a native antivirus program, like AVG or Avira.
That, for me, was a full-stop... Well worth paying the $30 for a professional antivirus program to save that much time.
Fortunately, I have found a free, decent option since... Moon Secure AV is open source, does on-access scanning, and uses the standard ClamAV database to identify viruses. Not only is the performance better, but with on-access scanning, you don't need to do a full weekly scan in the first place.
Be sure to use the beta/unstable version 2.xx.xx of MSAV though... stable/1.x has terrible performance. v 2.x may make app startup seem a bit less responsive (delaying the splash screen, and the like), but despite appearances, apps actually do finish loading just as fast as with no AV at all! It does grab a lot of memory on start-up (almost 80MBs), but 3/4ths of that can be paged out to swap immediately, and isn't needed until the next virus database update (on start-up then once daily).
It's not exactly fully-featured... Just denying access and popping up a message by the system tray when it finds a virus, but it'll does the basic job of protecting the system quite well.
A 56k dialup is approximately 10 gigabytes per month...ten times what his current service provides and far cheaper ($7-10).
First off, where are you getting pricing information? I see nothing saying how much he's paying per month for that 1GB.
Secondly, dial-up isn't as cheap as you'd think. What does it cost to maintain a land-line for a month where you are? And what about everywhere else in the world where you are charged per-minute even for local calls (including DSL)?
To be fair, a dry loop (no dial-tone) in the US is only about $10/mo. on top of the $20/mo. for DSL, but it won't work with dial-up, so that's rather moot.
Still, the point remains that you can do plenty on 1GB/mo. You're certainly not cut off from information.
How can you honestly call the internet "non-necessary" ?
Spare me... He didn't say internet access was unnecessary, quite the opposite, really. He said a more expensive "unlimited" account is unnecessary.
It wasn't long ago that we internet dwellers were doing great things with far, far less bandwidth than submitter has. What does 56K dial-up translate to in MBs/month? 14.4K? 9600 baud?
Some may argue that for a site to require JavaScript for navigation is ridiculous; but we've got to deal with the real world here.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the World. The unreasonable man persists in adapting the World to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unresonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
Disabling all client-side scripting by default just breaks too many sites.
NoScript is able to automatically fix a large number of javascript links. It's a minority of sites that are even affected by a lack of scripting, and frankly, most sites use it so horribly that finding other means of navigation (eg. link at the bottom of the page?) can actually be a substantial usability improvement...
This might be an opportunity for a European or US ISP (or university) to offer a Citrix (or VNC or other similar) connection where the processing is done at the ISP and (relatively) low bandwidth screenshots are all that are sent between the user and the ISP.
I sincerely doubt that's going to help. After all web pages are mainly text, which is going to be substantially smaller than any image, no matter how good your compression.
In a similar vein, though, there are HTTP proxies out there which do heavy lossy compression of images to speed-up internet access. Such options have been heavily advertised by AOL and Netzero for dial-up users in the US. Open source proxies exist to do this.
It could potentially do a lot better, too, if good implementations of "ordered dither" were available in graphics processing libraries and applications other than NetPBM (requiring multiple conversion steps). See: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/35634.html for an idea of how much a proxy doing image re-compression with good-looking dither could save on bandwidth.
6) Read/. with the "Low Bandwith", simple design and such set
Since the last site redesign the only difference between "Simple Design" and normal is that the CSS file isn't loaded. Once you've cached it once, you're not going to save any bandwidth...
"Low Bandwidth" might be any improvement, but here, with Javascript disabled, I can't see any differences. Perhaps if you actually LIKE and use the new comment system, it may help.
Slashdot Mirror
Because a "budget" has to make choices between ALL different possible areas of funding, based on the relative trade-offs of each, and NOBODY is a skilled expert on every subject.
The theory is, you have a group of experts on the range of topics reporting to someone who is impartial, and will take that information and decide which options are potentially the best use of the money. It's just that, in reality, choosing people who are good at that last important part is rarely done properly.
I've owned two Thinkpads over the years. Their keyboards aren't the worst, but they aren't all that great, either.
The world is moving on... Power consumption, weight, etc. The EEE PC is the one everyone latched on to, but some others are even better (spec-wise), provided their designs were fleshed out just a little bit more. eg. http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
It is a two party system, by any rational measure.
Of course! And other countries, with two, three, or even more viable political parties, are so well-known for NEVER having experienced any corruption? Try again.
Only when they get together in large groups. Then they've got numbers on their side.], and become dangerous.
How much extra do I have to pay for the additional unnecessary buzzword? I don't recall carbon nanotubes being particularly cheap.
B&W LCDs are so terribly under-appreciated... I still keep my decades old PDAs working specifically because B&W LCD screens are superior, but rather difficult to find (in reasonably large sizes) now.
Hell, I'd love to get a 15" B&W LCD screen for my PC... Infinitely easier to read text on without eye strain, and vastly lower power than any other technology out there. You can always do the dual-desktop thing, and only turn on your second (color) LCD screen when you need to look at something in color like pictures, maps, etc.
One for my laptop wouldn't be a bad idea either... Get rid of the backlight and you'll likely more than double your existing battery run time.
Refreshing an LCD screen has nothing to do with the backlight... Only with CRT & Plasma displays are the two issues linked.
And this conveniently ignores the fact that e-ink screens have TERRIBLE power consumption when the screen contents ARE changed frequently.
He said "fair use" but he very obviously meant the Safe Harbor provision.
So you've never used YouTube, Flikr, etc.? Because they would all be shut down (ala. Napster) for contributory copyright infringement as soon as the first copyrighted and non-fair use material was uploaded to the respective sites.
Napster wasn't the only example, just the most well known and recognizable. Innumerable web sites were sued into oblivion before the DMCA... It was a free-for-all, with numerous sites trying to do such things, because as soon as any one was big enough to get noticed, it would disappear suddenly.
I'm tired of hearing this nonsense over and over again.
Yes, Democrats have done plenty of wrong, but on the whole, they're absolute choir boys compared to the flagrant, bald-faced corruption of most of the Republican party.
Of course, pointing the finger in willful ignorance is a typical Republican campaign tactic as well... See the McCain campaign's distribution of tire pressure gauges labeled "Obama's Energy Plan," Bush campaign promises that he was going to do more to combat global warming than Al Gore, and pretty much everything else they whole party has done in the past 20 years.
It's a bit like a guy driving 110MPH in a 45MPH zone, and complaining to the cops about being singled out for a ticket, single HE wasn't the only one speeding, as everyone else on the road was going 50MPH... So why should HE get singled out and ticketed?
There's plenty of fuckups on both sides, but pointing out that the Democrats aren't perfect, while the Republicans are widespread and institutionally corrupt, is purely feigned ignorance.
Yes, because history has shown over and over again that greedy and corrupt people want a certain amount of wealth and comfort, after which point they entirely stop trying to get more money for themselves... right??? </sarcasm>
That would be ridiculously expensive, with every underling joining up for one term and retiring with their oh-so-cushy pension.
It would not remove the motivation to get favors for friends and family that aren't covered. Ditto for any staff and the like not included.
It would either have to entirely remove the motivation to get reelected (which is bad), or it would still leave open the temptation to get pork projects to ensure your reelection.
I can't believe we didn't solve the oldest and biggest problem in the history of the world in a one-paragraph policy recommendation on slashdot...
...indicted for a felony (no waiting for them be convicted). ...shortly after his INDICTMENT...
What is a "Felony," versus a "Misdemeanor," varies from state to state. I know someone who was ticketed for not having her dog on a leash, and so, now has a felony conviction on her record... Presumably, you wouldn't want a "good" senator kicked out because they didn't obey a leash law.
However, they are unable to hold leadership positions in the Congress after being just indicted for a felony (they don't have to be convicted). Tom Delay stepping down as House Majority Leader would be an example... Or it ALMOST would be, if the Republicans hadn't voted to strike the rule shortly after his conviction. To his credit, he resigned anyways.
They can already wave their U.S. Congressman badge and get immunity from such infractions (which most of them do to get out of speeding tickets, on a regular basis), so that's not actually an issue. It would have to be something more serious.
The "tubes" comment wasn't the ridiculous part... That's just the quickest short-hand for that whole speech he gave.
While the numerous mis-statements, like calling the internet "tubes", and repeatedly calling an "e-mail" an "internet" where stupid... The fact that he thinks an e-mail from his staff took 4 days to get to his inbox because the "tubes" were "full" of movies downloading is what really demonstrates his woeful ignorance.
But what really makes it really sad, important, etc., is the fact that he chaired the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, tasked with regulating the internet, and used his overwhelming clear ignorance to justify striking down network neutrality legislation.
John McCain got similarly criticized for getting the Sunni/Shia thing wrong while making a speech, and failing to correct his own mistake.
When you have a role of responsibility regulating something, and you demonstrate an utter ignorance of the subject, it's not "snickering" to point out that fact, as often as necessary.
Both took about 16s on my 233Mhz system. I certainly wasn't running KDE or GNOME, however. Probably XFce at the time.
The only "custom" part of my system was the fact that I downloaded and compiled the 2.4 kernel (march=686) on the system.
That may be true, but it's entirely the fault of the designers. 9 inches (diagonal) is entirely enough room for a full-sized keyboard. The keyboard I'm typing on right now is just slightly larger than that. (http://www.vpi.us/keyboard-mini.html)
But somehow, when it's for a laptop, designers go stupid on us, making brain-dead design decisions. I have a MUCH easier time touch-typing accurately on my tiny (7") Psion 5's keyboard, than on my much larger (11") laptop.
IMHO, manufacturers could EASILY choose better-designed keyboards for laptops, at nominal extra cost. But since they've proven unwilling to do so, they should at least standardize keyboard sizes, connectors, etc., and make it trivially easy to swap them out with 3rd party units.
No, that's not actually a difference at all...
The shuttle HAD an escape system, with ejection seats for the astronauts. IIRC, it was in place for the first few test launches, when there were only a few crew members aboard. It was removed when the Shuttle became operational... more or less to make way for the compliment of 7 astronauts the shuttle can now carry. NASA engineers have said (some time after the Challenger disaster) that the escape system was just not possible (no room for it) with a full crew.
For problems on the pad, as described with the Soyuz in another post, the Emergency Egress Slide should allow the crew to escape the launch vehicle.
It *certainly* does.
Circa 2000, when BeOS' boot times were being touted, I timed my Linux system with the shiny new 2.4 kernel, and BeOS on the same hardware... Without practically any tweaking, the Linux system booted nominally FASTER than BeOS.
I think the hype about BeOS' boot times was the same as the reason for splash screens... People FEEL like things are happening faster if they can SEE pictures on the screen changing and moving around quickly.
Well, you decided you wanted more features from your operating system.
You want a multi-user capable system. You want plug-and-play hardware automatically detected. You want your system to automatically find an open WiFi router it can use, and the nearest printer...
I say YOU decided, because you could just as well be using whatever OS is running on that "IBM PS/1" (OS/2 or Win3.1) on your brand new hardware, at blazing fast speeds...
I, however, decided to stick with faster (and sometimes somewhat older) software, for most of my needs. My computer is probably far more responsive than your system, despite fairly old and modest hardware.
No, I was "trying to imply" that ClamAV was not designed and written for use on Windows, but rather clumsily ported from the Unix/Linux code-base, and is really not at all optimized.
The GUI front-end(s) for ClamAV (and Clamwin) are in fact Python based, however, which may also be somewhat contributing to the poor performance.
A full scan with ClamWin or ClamAV (for Windows) will take FOUR TIMES AS LONG as the same scan with a native antivirus program, like AVG or Avira.
That, for me, was a full-stop... Well worth paying the $30 for a professional antivirus program to save that much time.
Fortunately, I have found a free, decent option since... Moon Secure AV is open source, does on-access scanning, and uses the standard ClamAV database to identify viruses. Not only is the performance better, but with on-access scanning, you don't need to do a full weekly scan in the first place.
Be sure to use the beta/unstable version 2.xx.xx of MSAV though... stable/1.x has terrible performance. v 2.x may make app startup seem a bit less responsive (delaying the splash screen, and the like), but despite appearances, apps actually do finish loading just as fast as with no AV at all! It does grab a lot of memory on start-up (almost 80MBs), but 3/4ths of that can be paged out to swap immediately, and isn't needed until the next virus database update (on start-up then once daily).
It's not exactly fully-featured... Just denying access and popping up a message by the system tray when it finds a virus, but it'll does the basic job of protecting the system quite well.
erm, should be "(including dial-up)"... not DSL.
First off, where are you getting pricing information? I see nothing saying how much he's paying per month for that 1GB.
Secondly, dial-up isn't as cheap as you'd think. What does it cost to maintain a land-line for a month where you are? And what about everywhere else in the world where you are charged per-minute even for local calls (including DSL)?
To be fair, a dry loop (no dial-tone) in the US is only about $10/mo. on top of the $20/mo. for DSL, but it won't work with dial-up, so that's rather moot.
Still, the point remains that you can do plenty on 1GB/mo. You're certainly not cut off from information.
Spare me... He didn't say internet access was unnecessary, quite the opposite, really. He said a more expensive "unlimited" account is unnecessary.
It wasn't long ago that we internet dwellers were doing great things with far, far less bandwidth than submitter has. What does 56K dial-up translate to in MBs/month? 14.4K? 9600 baud?
The reasonable man adapts himself to the World. The unreasonable man persists in adapting the World to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unresonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
NoScript is able to automatically fix a large number of javascript links. It's a minority of sites that are even affected by a lack of scripting, and frankly, most sites use it so horribly that finding other means of navigation (eg. link at the bottom of the page?) can actually be a substantial usability improvement...
I sincerely doubt that's going to help. After all web pages are mainly text, which is going to be substantially smaller than any image, no matter how good your compression.
In a similar vein, though, there are HTTP proxies out there which do heavy lossy compression of images to speed-up internet access. Such options have been heavily advertised by AOL and Netzero for dial-up users in the US. Open source proxies exist to do this.
It could potentially do a lot better, too, if good implementations of "ordered dither" were available in graphics processing libraries and applications other than NetPBM (requiring multiple conversion steps). See: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/35634.html for an idea of how much a proxy doing image re-compression with good-looking dither could save on bandwidth.
Since the last site redesign the only difference between "Simple Design" and normal is that the CSS file isn't loaded. Once you've cached it once, you're not going to save any bandwidth...
"Low Bandwidth" might be any improvement, but here, with Javascript disabled, I can't see any differences. Perhaps if you actually LIKE and use the new comment system, it may help.