Enlightenment is more or less where lightweight meets design and "prettiness", rather than the polarity of KDE, Gnome or Blackbox and Fluxbox, etc.
Okay. And how about Sawfish...? (Without GNOME)
You certainly can't say it doesn't look modern, since it IS the entire basis (WM) for the GNOME desktop (just as Enlightenment was back in the 0.x days), and it's certainly fast when used on its own.
Because every company can afford redundant internet connections,
Dial-up is, what, $10/mo? Plenty of (Business) DSL providers offer ~20 hours of free dial-up every month. 56kpbs is more than enough to handle e-mails (provided you don't constantly send huge attachments like legal documents).
back up generators,
If your entire building doesn't have power, you're probably not going to care that your employees, sitting in the dark, can't send and receive e-mail. It's not like a web server... Any e-mail sent to you during that time will be queued up on the sending server for days, until you come back online.
Still, I can walk into the nearest auto parts store and pick up a small, portable 1500W gasoline generator for $200 in 10 minutes. If you're a big enough company that you can't handle e-mail being down for a day, that's a pretty modest price for fairly reliable service. And when the shit hits the fan, just let the IT guy steal a couple janitors or other marginal employees, and have them alternate between refueling the generator.
For slightly longer outages (eg. natural disasters), heavy equipment shops rent massive and hassle-free diesel generator trailers, which can run an entire medium-sized office, nonstop. They hold upwards of 80 gal and run at run at high loads for a full couple days between refueling.
a fall over mail server,
You'd probably get off cheaper and more reliable with TWO low-end servers rather than just ONE high end server.
and a 24/7 IT staff and I don't mean some poor guy with a cell phone and no life.
Why not? If somebody's going to come in within an hour, and be able to take care of it (one way or another) in an couple more, your business probably isn't going to grind to a halt.
In case it isn't clear, a few years ago I WAS that IT guy (with no life... Hmmm) in a small office when the electrical panel at work caught fire, and took a couple weeks to replace. With a pickup truck and plenty of cash on hand, you can handle any situation. Keep all your receipts.
You've selected a tiny portion of the crimes Bush has committed against this country
I didn't pick ANY of them. YOU picked every last one. I merely responded.
and excused every last one of them with a pack of unverifiable and unsuppported assertions.
Pick ANY statement I've made here in the numerous replies in this thread. It's all verified easily.
Of course, to refute any of my points you'd have to look up the relevant information (and you'd certainly find that I'm correct) instead of depending on your favorite pundits, opinion pieces, etc., etc.
You're as partisan on the right as I am on the left.
I don't think there's been any doubt you're heavily partisan. So much so that you (ironically) see *me* (PBS-watching, heavily Dem. voting, etc.) as far right-wing... but I've defended myself more than enough from your baseless personal attacks. Your head just might explode if you ever met a Fox News and AM talk-radio addict.
Suggest you try that particular idiot remark out on some Iraq veterans, or the Iraqis themselves.
I was talking about it with an Iraq war vet less than a month ago. He was happy to extol all the good work his unit has been doing for the people over there.
I have numerous friends and relatives currently in the military, and many more old vets. I worked on-base for a military contractor for about a year, not long ago, and had numerous discussions with people about to go to Iraq, often for their 3rd tour.
They'll have some fun hanging you from the nearest lampost and beating your corpse to a pulp.
I'm not all that far from SF. Driven there numerous times over the years.
There aren't any discussions about whether SF is in too dangerous an area to be sustained... There were innumerable such debates about the viability of New Orleans, a very long time before Katrina.
you're really too stupid to waste any more time on. Bye.
I have to keep correcting your "facts" and I'm supposedly the "stupid" one?
I think you've pretty well proven you're just the blind ("drooling morons") partisan I was describing in my first reply... No wonder you think there's so many far-right-wingers on slashdot... Might have something to do with the fact that your (factually ignorant) view of reality is heavily to the left. So far, you've gone out of your way to condemn every little thing that can possibly be ascribed to the Republicans, with no real rational basis for your chosen criticisms. You've also completely failed to realize the Democrats have numerous failings, and the left wing has plenty of shortcomings of their own and flaws in their favored ideology.
If you were a right-wing moron, I'd criticize you just as much for (a whole different set of) brainless assertions in direct opposition to reality.
Flash gave us two things: 1) A standardized plugin that everybody had and was under tight control, and 2) the server side was well designed and gave instant start-up.
1) Nearly everybody had Windows Media Player installed as well. It is, today, actually just as popular as all combined versions of Flash.
2) The "server side" consists of putting the video file on an HTTP server... Exactly the same way it is and was done almost all of the time with Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc.
And I would go so far as to say that RealPlayer, QuickTime and WMP STILL all suck when it comes to streaming reliability
You've so far utterly failed to list any place Flash video could possibly have a technical advantage. Understandable since it's all exactly the same underlying technology...
I can list several serious disadvantages, however, like overhead (thumbnail-sized videos maxing out fast multi-core CPUs), constantly changing interface, horrible accessibility, and hundreds more.
The multimedia world really hasn't changed notably since MPEG-1 was introduced. Streaming MJPEG, H.261 and MPEG-1 video over RTP was happening throughout universities in the late 80s and early 1990s. Streaming ("progressive download") delivery of video files over HTTP as well.
If you can point out any reason why Flash is superior to other video technologies, I'd very much like to hear it.
Do you think it's a coincidence that YouTube became popular *exactly* at the same time that Flash released their video capability?
Macromedia Flash Player 7 (September 2003) YouTube (May 2005) That's not exactly an overwhelming coincidence there.
Youtube got popular because it provided a free site for everyone to share videos, when free hosting providers were putting up more and more file size (and type) limits. The fact that it became popular while using Flash is entirely coincidental, and is likely the sole reason Flash video has propagated. They would have done just as well with WMV.
You apparently don't remember the Bad Old Days before Flash video when streaming video worked about 10% of the time, and when it did work, it took about 60 seconds to start up.
Flash has nothing to do with any of this. The codecs, container, and streaming technology Flash/FLV uses are exactly the same as used in The Bad Old Days. In fact they're really quite sub-par today (Sorenson Spark, MP3, and even VP6).
The only difference is that you've got a higher speed connection today than you did the last time you used RealPlayer, or Quicktime, or Windows Media Player.
Point of fact... Flash 9 added support for MP4/H.264/AAC files. Exactly the same format used by Quicktime for years and years.
Other players are infinitely more flexible, higher performance, etc., than Flash could ever hope to be. An animation plug-in, loading a player applet, loading a video, in a browser, was never a good idea. It just caught on because so many people already had flash installed.
Gnash is a clunky, slow, bloated, hacked together mess. You might say GNU/FSF is doing the HURD thing again...
My hopes are squarely with SWFDEC: http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/ It's just as immature as Gnash, but it's a much lighter code-base, installing it doesn't throw you into dependency hell, and where it does work (which also isn't many places yet), it isn't as much of a dog.
the Right have had absolutely everything their own way in the United States for most of this decade (including a mostly supine Democratic congress since 2006). So we really don't need to waste a lot of time discussing the verity of the Right's policy "ideas".
Why do you think the right-wing gained it's grip on the government? The Left wing had a huge margin of control for a good 50 years, resulting in numerous recessions, high unemployment, high rates of crime, fraud, and corruption.
I'm not saying this to deride the Left at all. Merely pointing out that you're selectively picking and choosing your facts. There have been terrible Republican administrations, and terrible Democratic administrations. Neither of which can be conflated with the be all end all of their theologies.
The country is losing two wars,
Actually, Iraq is working out nicely now. Sure, it was a terrible situation for 3 years, due entirely to a lack of leadership, but your facts are never the less wrong.
we are hated even by our allies,
Our relationship with France is closer and better than it has ever been. It's in part due to the election of Sarkozy, but was a movement developing in earnest for about a decade.
In France, American Rap music is popular, hamburgers are everywhere, the economy is being de-socialized progressively to appear more similar to the American model. etc.
our enemies (like Russia) demonstrate their contempt for us in ways we do not dare answer,
Not at all. Heavy political pressure has been directed at Moscow, which is very likely the only reason for the pullout of Russian troops from Georgia. Putin is actually the one lobbying empty threats, to try and get Washington to lay off.
the size of the national debt has tripled,
When there's economic troubles, the national debt is supposed to increase to pay for recovery programs. So this isn't a direct indicator of anything.
a mid-sized American city was wiped out by a natural disaster and left to rot,
No, actually just one Parish of a major city was wiped out, and left to rot. It is, of course, an open question if the city should have been there (20' below sea level) in the first place. The poor quality of the levies dates back through several Republican and democratic administrations alike.
You aren't going to get me to defend Bush at all. Never the less, none of your points has any hope of proving that there are no good ideas on the Right, nor that everything the Left does is therefore good. Jimmy Carter, in particular performed almost as badly as Bush in every area you're criticizing Bush for.
Good drivers die on the roads too. [...] but there are plenty of others on the road who do fit that criteria, and that's what you don't have control over.
Decent drivers die on the roads through no fault of their own. GREAT drivers, however, almost never do. There are things you can't control while driving (like the weather, hidden road debris, etc.), but "other drivers" isn't actually one of them. Your own driving has a HUGE influence on others. Go look up some "defensive driving" techniques.
I can practically guarantee I will never be rear-ended by another vehicle, because of how gradually I decelerate to a stop... ie. the driver behind me has a huge amount of reaction time. If he completely fails to react (drunk, distracted, heart attack, whatever), I'm paying attention, and almost always have a way out (like changing lanes) and in the worst case it's just going to be a 5MPH (net speed) collision, so fatalities are extremely unlikely.
I can also nearly guarantee I will never be side-swiped... Cars have substantial inertia, and it's pretty easy to tell if one is safely slowing to a stop (or close enough that you'll get by before they violate the intersection), or if it's going to be risky to pull out in front of them. You can ALWAYS adjust your speed so you don't cross an intersection at the exact moment cross traffic is pulling up and potentially failing to stop.
Not that I put myself in the category of great drivers at all. I'm pretty good, though, and always improving. This is just stuff anyone can do if they pay attention and focus on driving, rather than most people who just barely following the rules most of the time, and are at the mercy of the road which is so common today.
Statistically, you are far more likely to die in a car on the way to work than you are in a commercial passenger aircraft.
That's the thing about crash statistics... They don't consider individual cases.
If you're not drunk, or a teenager who just got a license, you're much less likely to be killed in a car accident. If you're driving during daylight hours, near the speed limit, not talking on a cell phone, etc., etc., your odds go down much more.
Cars are really a terrible comparison, because YOU control your odds of being killed. Not so with any form of mass transit. Airlines should properly be contrasted with other forms of mass transit, like trains and buses, rather than cars (or bicycles, or walking, et al.).
And it's a poor comparison anyhow, because the distances traveled in airliners greatly outstrips that of cars. You wouldn't compare the per-mile accident statistics of walking with commercial flights, though I bet, per mile, you'll see far more deaths from walking... That doesn't mean there's any chance of being killed by walking to your fridge (heart attacks and other underlying medical conditions that could kill you during any activities not withstanding).
Most of the time, you never know what hit you in an airplane catastrophe.
I'm not sure what scenario is most common. But I know there have been several incidents where the passengers and crew have had MINUTES of spiraling out of control as the jet falls from altitude, before hitting the ground. eg. Alaska Airlines Flight 261, after several minutes of difficulty controlling the aircraft, completely inverted and dived at full speed for 81 seconds before impact.
Qantas is one of the safest airlines in the world.
That's quite a loaded statement.
Worldwide, 8 of the top 10 are in North America. Delta and Southwest being virtually tied for the #1 spot, both a large margin ahead of any others.
Lufthansa (#4) and British Airways (#7) rounding out the top 10.
Quantas ranks just 17th. Since there are likely more than 100 airlines, I suppose you could call them "one of the safest" in some vague way. Top 20 (out of ~100) isn't exactly great, though.
if you see the EU as a single economy, it outperforms the US
Ahem. The discussion was NOT about GDP, but manufacturing.
Never the less... Yes, with a population about 170% as large as that of the US, the EU manages to just barely outperform the US in GDP.
in consumer goods it quite frankly doesn't look as good.
"consumer goods" are cheap crap, so to speak. Yes, the US imports much of its cheap crap from foreign countries, while exporting heavy equipment and high tech goods at very high prices. On a monetary scale, the US has a huge lead. Per-capita as well.
Topics here have certainly been getting much more politicized than I recall them ever being before, and diverging from factual and technical discussion more than they used to. It's not over the past few weeks, however, it's been long in coming. There were complaints about the process a couple years ago. Introducing the YRO section just made the editors feel better about doing it more and more, and seemingly sped-up the process...
Technical discussions have become similarly undermined as well, as the demographics of/. have changed... With 90% of comments on technical stories being jokes, mindless anecdotes, and other clearly baseless nonsense that gets modded up.
But in both cases, for every 100 morons, there is still one very well informed individual occasionally posting a comment, and shedding important new light and context on a subject... So, IMHO, it's still worth staying, even as a signal-to-noise slowly increases.
I've seen repeated phases like this in the past as well. A few years ago, the trolls and flamers were winning, and discussions were even worse than they are now. It's just that now there seems little way to combat it, and it's rather condoned and encouraged by the editors, for the sake of more page views I assume. Hence the regular banalization of stories here.
But as I said, despite the increasing quantities of smoke, I'd still say the
Just a few more Bush Regime diehards
That seems a strange comment to make. The hard core left-wing crowd that mindlessly bash everything from the right is just as bad, and, at least appear to be, far more numerous.
There are good ideas and bad ideas on both sides. But picking the good from the bad requires the kind of intelligent discussion of policy issues we haven't seen here in some time. Of course if you're buying into the political party nonsense, it's easy to think that everyone on the other side of an issue are drooling morons, while your side is always right...
No. Everything you are crediting him with saying was WRONG.
"This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"
In fact the US is the #1 manufacturer in the world, more than twice as much as #2, and several times ahead of the likes of China.
The notion that we are a nation that makes nothing but houses, is idiotic. Go anywhere in the world, and you'll see mostly US-made airplanes (Boeing), turbines (GE, Pratt&Whitney), heavy construction equipment (CAT, Mack, Peterbuilt, etc.), et al.
Our economy is as safe as houses. Unfortunately, given current prices and our dependence on foreign lenders, houses aren't safe at all.
Nothing here predicts the US bank and lending market collapse. Quite the opposite really. In fact foreign lenders got the short end of the stick this time around, so they were the un-safe ones. He's only right that prices were ridiculously high, but that's a bit like predicting the sky will be blue in the future...
tell me about it once you have a working prototype with a noteworthy efficiency improvement.
If you have no interest in technological advancements, you simply shouldn't be reading Slashdot... You don't go to car dealership and complain that they don't have cantaloupes.
I haven't yet seen such a chart from any vehicle that improves economy with higher speed. I suspect you might get different numbers, however, with large trucks, SUVs, and the like, with engines so large they barely more than idle going 45MPH when not pulling a trailer...
on the equivalent energy from one gallon of petrol our biker goes about 671 miles. i'm not sure what small engine you think you're going to be able to mount on a bike and have it to better than that.
Let's see... An automatic trans. 2WD Chevy S-10 is about 120HP, and gets 22MPG in (high-speed!) highway driving.
120*22 == 2,640 MPG for 1HP
But a person pedaling a bicycle at low speeds needs/burns less than 0.10 HP, but let's assume the added weight doubles that and go with 0.20 HP.
you seem to be claiming that having people switch to bikes for much of our driving, where practical, wouldn't have an appreciable effect.
That's a bit like saying we could all save energy if we switched from block ice to crushed ice... Bicycles are NOT distinct from any other form of individual transportation. All the "efficiency" they supposedly get is pure smoke and mirrors... FORCING someone to travel at low speed would provide GREAT fuel efficiency, but a bicycle isn't going to do any better than a gas scooter in similar circumstances...
Data center UPS units take the AC current convert to DC then back again just so the server can convert it back to DC. Even if you have 95% efficiency at each stage the conversion losses will add up.
There's only 2 stages in there that are affected. You aren't going to get DC from the power company.
And while the final stage is affected, since the servers are getting DC at lower (48V?) voltages, do you really think a DC power supply is possibly going to be any more efficient than an AC one? Just because the input/output numbers are closer together doesn't mean your saving energy...
The only thing you're saving is having to convert from the batteries, to AC. Well, I've done some research on DC inverters, and I have to tell you, the best top-out at 97% efficiency... So, now you're saving just 3% by going DC.
But, you're also going to need larger, more expensive power lines (bus bars) to all the servers, and even with them, you can still expect to have more line losses than you would with relatively tiny ~240V AC wires.
And even if there were no line-losses, you've still got to make-up for the cost of investing in this new system. At well under 3% energy savings, it's going to take a LONG TIME at best.
People wouldn't be going DC if it didn't result in measurable power savings.
Companies rolling out DC datacenters are very few and far between. It's probably safe to say they are all just left-overs remnants that were in the works back when AC power supplies were hovering around 60% efficiency (because nobody had complained yet), and simply couldn't practically be stopped and reworked in time, once the very high efficiency AC power supplies came around.
If you know of any companies that have just started planning a DC datacenter today, point them out. I would certainly like to find out their reasons.
So then you're saying don't insure your home, wait for the state to declare an emergency, and let the taxpayer bail you out, put you in a FEMA trailer for months?
I did not encourage it at all. I simply pointed out that insurance companies saving the day is more fantasy than reality. The reality (in large-scale disasters) is just as often, insurance companies going into bankruptcy.
The problem with letting the taxpayer bail you out is that you create a moral hazard. Since you pay nothing in premium, you have less incentive to prevent loss
I would say you have the same problem with insurance. Homeowners are disincentiveized to make safety improvements to their home, from fire safety, to paying more for repairs. If your insurance cost isn't going to go down, and you don't bear the loss if something happens, clearly, it's economically better for you to be cheap and dangerous.
People have a really hard time understanding that the premium you pay is for the contractual transfer of risk from the insured to the insurer, an intangible that only becomes tangible (and very much so) once a loss occurs.
There's nothing intangible about it. It's a simple transaction set in the paperwork. You pay X dollars every month, and you are (vaguely) covered for damage up to a (strict) maximum dollar amount. Above that, and you're on your own. Consider the same amount of money going into a bank (C.D.) account, estimate how often natural disasters occur in your area, and then determine how long it will take before you have paid out enough money that you could cover the damages out of pocket yourself... The only problem with that system is if some "accident" happens very early on, you haven't accrued significant capital to cover the losses. Just a few years, though, and you're better off without insurance.
And you don't have to deal with an insurer that will try to shirk their responsibility because of the fine print, or just giving you a raw deal with some ridiculous excusing, hoping a significant number of people will just give up and take the deal rather than fight them for the full amount owed.
But I suspect I'm just ranting now. I'm really NOT opposed to insurance, or insurance companies in theory. It's just in practice that you can see that the reality tends to have infinite pitfalls, and very likely little if any benefits for you. You can blame whoever you want, but it is reality. What's not real is insurance companies making a show of coming to a disaster area in a van and handing out signed checks... THAT is just a PR stunt to get their name in the news, which doesn't actually happen for practically anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. And how about Sawfish...? (Without GNOME)
You certainly can't say it doesn't look modern, since it IS the entire basis (WM) for the GNOME desktop (just as Enlightenment was back in the 0.x days), and it's certainly fast when used on its own.
Wouldn't a slimmed-down Enlightenment just be Blackbox with transparency, menus that "slide" a bit, and more "textured" themes? What did I miss?
Blackbox seems to be using all of 4MBs of RAM here, and next to no CPU time. With a 3MB binary, that's not surprising.
Dial-up is, what, $10/mo? Plenty of (Business) DSL providers offer ~20 hours of free dial-up every month. 56kpbs is more than enough to handle e-mails (provided you don't constantly send huge attachments like legal documents).
If your entire building doesn't have power, you're probably not going to care that your employees, sitting in the dark, can't send and receive e-mail. It's not like a web server... Any e-mail sent to you during that time will be queued up on the sending server for days, until you come back online.
Still, I can walk into the nearest auto parts store and pick up a small, portable 1500W gasoline generator for $200 in 10 minutes. If you're a big enough company that you can't handle e-mail being down for a day, that's a pretty modest price for fairly reliable service. And when the shit hits the fan, just let the IT guy steal a couple janitors or other marginal employees, and have them alternate between refueling the generator.
For slightly longer outages (eg. natural disasters), heavy equipment shops rent massive and hassle-free diesel generator trailers, which can run an entire medium-sized office, nonstop. They hold upwards of 80 gal and run at run at high loads for a full couple days between refueling.
You'd probably get off cheaper and more reliable with TWO low-end servers rather than just ONE high end server.
Why not? If somebody's going to come in within an hour, and be able to take care of it (one way or another) in an couple more, your business probably isn't going to grind to a halt.
In case it isn't clear, a few years ago I WAS that IT guy (with no life... Hmmm) in a small office when the electrical panel at work caught fire, and took a couple weeks to replace. With a pickup truck and plenty of cash on hand, you can handle any situation. Keep all your receipts.
Superstition isn't a good way to make decisions.
I didn't pick ANY of them. YOU picked every last one. I merely responded.
Pick ANY statement I've made here in the numerous replies in this thread. It's all verified easily.
Of course, to refute any of my points you'd have to look up the relevant information (and you'd certainly find that I'm correct) instead of depending on your favorite pundits, opinion pieces, etc., etc.
I don't think there's been any doubt you're heavily partisan. So much so that you (ironically) see *me* (PBS-watching, heavily Dem. voting, etc.) as far right-wing... but I've defended myself more than enough from your baseless personal attacks. Your head just might explode if you ever met a Fox News and AM talk-radio addict.
I was talking about it with an Iraq war vet less than a month ago. He was happy to extol all the good work his unit has been doing for the people over there.
I have numerous friends and relatives currently in the military, and many more old vets. I worked on-base for a military contractor for about a year, not long ago, and had numerous discussions with people about to go to Iraq, often for their 3rd tour.
I'm not all that far from SF. Driven there numerous times over the years.
There aren't any discussions about whether SF is in too dangerous an area to be sustained... There were innumerable such debates about the viability of New Orleans, a very long time before Katrina.
I have to keep correcting your "facts" and I'm supposedly the "stupid" one?
I think you've pretty well proven you're just the blind ("drooling morons") partisan I was describing in my first reply... No wonder you think there's so many far-right-wingers on slashdot... Might have something to do with the fact that your (factually ignorant) view of reality is heavily to the left. So far, you've gone out of your way to condemn every little thing that can possibly be ascribed to the Republicans, with no real rational basis for your chosen criticisms. You've also completely failed to realize the Democrats have numerous failings, and the left wing has plenty of shortcomings of their own and flaws in their favored ideology.
If you were a right-wing moron, I'd criticize you just as much for (a whole different set of) brainless assertions in direct opposition to reality.
1) Nearly everybody had Windows Media Player installed as well. It is, today, actually just as popular as all combined versions of Flash.
2) The "server side" consists of putting the video file on an HTTP server... Exactly the same way it is and was done almost all of the time with Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc.
You've so far utterly failed to list any place Flash video could possibly have a technical advantage. Understandable since it's all exactly the same underlying technology...
I can list several serious disadvantages, however, like overhead (thumbnail-sized videos maxing out fast multi-core CPUs), constantly changing interface, horrible accessibility, and hundreds more.
The multimedia world really hasn't changed notably since MPEG-1 was introduced. Streaming MJPEG, H.261 and MPEG-1 video over RTP was happening throughout universities in the late 80s and early 1990s. Streaming ("progressive download") delivery of video files over HTTP as well.
If you can point out any reason why Flash is superior to other video technologies, I'd very much like to hear it.
Macromedia Flash Player 7 (September 2003)
YouTube (May 2005)
That's not exactly an overwhelming coincidence there.
Youtube got popular because it provided a free site for everyone to share videos, when free hosting providers were putting up more and more file size (and type) limits. The fact that it became popular while using Flash is entirely coincidental, and is likely the sole reason Flash video has propagated. They would have done just as well with WMV.
Umm... There WAS a Windows NT 3.1...
I still have a copy, but it errors out when trying to run it on modern hardware.
Flash has nothing to do with any of this. The codecs, container, and streaming technology Flash/FLV uses are exactly the same as used in The Bad Old Days. In fact they're really quite sub-par today (Sorenson Spark, MP3, and even VP6).
The only difference is that you've got a higher speed connection today than you did the last time you used RealPlayer, or Quicktime, or Windows Media Player.
Point of fact... Flash 9 added support for MP4/H.264/AAC files. Exactly the same format used by Quicktime for years and years.
Other players are infinitely more flexible, higher performance, etc., than Flash could ever hope to be. An animation plug-in, loading a player applet, loading a video, in a browser, was never a good idea. It just caught on because so many people already had flash installed.
Gnash is a clunky, slow, bloated, hacked together mess. You might say GNU/FSF is doing the HURD thing again...
My hopes are squarely with SWFDEC: http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/ It's just as immature as Gnash, but it's a much lighter code-base, installing it doesn't throw you into dependency hell, and where it does work (which also isn't many places yet), it isn't as much of a dog.
Why do you think the right-wing gained it's grip on the government? The Left wing had a huge margin of control for a good 50 years, resulting in numerous recessions, high unemployment, high rates of crime, fraud, and corruption.
I'm not saying this to deride the Left at all. Merely pointing out that you're selectively picking and choosing your facts. There have been terrible Republican administrations, and terrible Democratic administrations. Neither of which can be conflated with the be all end all of their theologies.
Actually, Iraq is working out nicely now. Sure, it was a terrible situation for 3 years, due entirely to a lack of leadership, but your facts are never the less wrong.
Our relationship with France is closer and better than it has ever been. It's in part due to the election of Sarkozy, but was a movement developing in earnest for about a decade.
In France, American Rap music is popular, hamburgers are everywhere, the economy is being de-socialized progressively to appear more similar to the American model. etc.
Not at all. Heavy political pressure has been directed at Moscow, which is very likely the only reason for the pullout of Russian troops from Georgia. Putin is actually the one lobbying empty threats, to try and get Washington to lay off.
When there's economic troubles, the national debt is supposed to increase to pay for recovery programs. So this isn't a direct indicator of anything.
No, actually just one Parish of a major city was wiped out, and left to rot. It is, of course, an open question if the city should have been there (20' below sea level) in the first place. The poor quality of the levies dates back through several Republican and democratic administrations alike.
You aren't going to get me to defend Bush at all. Never the less, none of your points has any hope of proving that there are no good ideas on the Right, nor that everything the Left does is therefore good. Jimmy Carter, in particular performed almost as badly as Bush in every area you're criticizing Bush for.
Decent drivers die on the roads through no fault of their own. GREAT drivers, however, almost never do. There are things you can't control while driving (like the weather, hidden road debris, etc.), but "other drivers" isn't actually one of them. Your own driving has a HUGE influence on others. Go look up some "defensive driving" techniques.
I can practically guarantee I will never be rear-ended by another vehicle, because of how gradually I decelerate to a stop... ie. the driver behind me has a huge amount of reaction time. If he completely fails to react (drunk, distracted, heart attack, whatever), I'm paying attention, and almost always have a way out (like changing lanes) and in the worst case it's just going to be a 5MPH (net speed) collision, so fatalities are extremely unlikely.
I can also nearly guarantee I will never be side-swiped... Cars have substantial inertia, and it's pretty easy to tell if one is safely slowing to a stop (or close enough that you'll get by before they violate the intersection), or if it's going to be risky to pull out in front of them. You can ALWAYS adjust your speed so you don't cross an intersection at the exact moment cross traffic is pulling up and potentially failing to stop.
Not that I put myself in the category of great drivers at all. I'm pretty good, though, and always improving. This is just stuff anyone can do if they pay attention and focus on driving, rather than most people who just barely following the rules most of the time, and are at the mercy of the road which is so common today.
That's the thing about crash statistics... They don't consider individual cases.
If you're not drunk, or a teenager who just got a license, you're much less likely to be killed in a car accident. If you're driving during daylight hours, near the speed limit, not talking on a cell phone, etc., etc., your odds go down much more.
Cars are really a terrible comparison, because YOU control your odds of being killed. Not so with any form of mass transit. Airlines should properly be contrasted with other forms of mass transit, like trains and buses, rather than cars (or bicycles, or walking, et al.).
And it's a poor comparison anyhow, because the distances traveled in airliners greatly outstrips that of cars. You wouldn't compare the per-mile accident statistics of walking with commercial flights, though I bet, per mile, you'll see far more deaths from walking... That doesn't mean there's any chance of being killed by walking to your fridge (heart attacks and other underlying medical conditions that could kill you during any activities not withstanding).
I'm not sure what scenario is most common. But I know there have been several incidents where the passengers and crew have had MINUTES of spiraling out of control as the jet falls from altitude, before hitting the ground. eg. Alaska Airlines Flight 261, after several minutes of difficulty controlling the aircraft, completely inverted and dived at full speed for 81 seconds before impact.
Enjoy your trip!
Not actually true, there just haven't been any since 1951:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas#Airline_incidents
Southwest Airlines and America West Airlines (both US) are about the only airlines who can credibly claim to have never had a passenger fatality.
That's quite a loaded statement.
Worldwide, 8 of the top 10 are in North America. Delta and Southwest being virtually tied for the #1 spot, both a large margin ahead of any others.
Lufthansa (#4) and British Airways (#7) rounding out the top 10.
Quantas ranks just 17th. Since there are likely more than 100 airlines, I suppose you could call them "one of the safest" in some vague way. Top 20 (out of ~100) isn't exactly great, though.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm
Topics here have certainly been getting much more politicized than I recall them ever being before, and diverging from factual and technical discussion more than they used to. It's not over the past few weeks, however, it's been long in coming. There were complaints about the process a couple years ago. Introducing the YRO section just made the editors feel better about doing it more and more, and seemingly sped-up the process...
Technical discussions have become similarly undermined as well, as the demographics of /. have changed... With 90% of comments on technical stories being jokes, mindless anecdotes, and other clearly baseless nonsense that gets modded up.
But in both cases, for every 100 morons, there is still one very well informed individual occasionally posting a comment, and shedding important new light and context on a subject... So, IMHO, it's still worth staying, even as a signal-to-noise slowly increases.
I've seen repeated phases like this in the past as well. A few years ago, the trolls and flamers were winning, and discussions were even worse than they are now. It's just that now there seems little way to combat it, and it's rather condoned and encouraged by the editors, for the sake of more page views I assume. Hence the regular banalization of stories here.
But as I said, despite the increasing quantities of smoke, I'd still say the
That seems a strange comment to make. The hard core left-wing crowd that mindlessly bash everything from the right is just as bad, and, at least appear to be, far more numerous.
There are good ideas and bad ideas on both sides. But picking the good from the bad requires the kind of intelligent discussion of policy issues we haven't seen here in some time. Of course if you're buying into the political party nonsense, it's easy to think that everyone on the other side of an issue are drooling morons, while your side is always right...
No. Everything you are crediting him with saying was WRONG.
In fact the US is the #1 manufacturer in the world, more than twice as much as #2, and several times ahead of the likes of China.
The notion that we are a nation that makes nothing but houses, is idiotic. Go anywhere in the world, and you'll see mostly US-made airplanes (Boeing), turbines (GE, Pratt&Whitney), heavy construction equipment (CAT, Mack, Peterbuilt, etc.), et al.
Nothing here predicts the US bank and lending market collapse. Quite the opposite really. In fact foreign lenders got the short end of the stick this time around, so they were the un-safe ones. He's only right that prices were ridiculously high, but that's a bit like predicting the sky will be blue in the future...
If you have no interest in technological advancements, you simply shouldn't be reading Slashdot... You don't go to car dealership and complain that they don't have cantaloupes.
I can point to a few charts pretty easily...
There's certainly economy to be gained if you drive a Geo Metro or Chevy/Suzuki/et al. spinoff:
http://metrompg.com/posts/photos/mpg-vs-speed-chart-z.gif
The improvement is much less dramatic, but still there, with a Honda CRX: http://xs205.xs.to/xs205/06352/Spdmpg.jpg
And lower speeds also make a big improvement with a Toyota Prius:
http://home.hiwaay.net/~bzwilson/prius/calculated_MPG_Rev_B.jpg
I haven't yet seen such a chart from any vehicle that improves economy with higher speed. I suspect you might get different numbers, however, with large trucks, SUVs, and the like, with engines so large they barely more than idle going 45MPH when not pulling a trailer...
Let's see... An automatic trans. 2WD Chevy S-10 is about 120HP, and gets 22MPG in (high-speed!) highway driving.
120*22 == 2,640 MPG for 1HP
But a person pedaling a bicycle at low speeds needs/burns less than 0.10 HP, but let's assume the added weight doubles that and go with 0.20 HP.
2640/0.20 == 13,200 MPG.
And as for the engine? It's not difficult: http://www.hobbyhorse.com/zenoah.shtml
That's a bit like saying we could all save energy if we switched from block ice to crushed ice... Bicycles are NOT distinct from any other form of individual transportation. All the "efficiency" they supposedly get is pure smoke and mirrors... FORCING someone to travel at low speed would provide GREAT fuel efficiency, but a bicycle isn't going to do any better than a gas scooter in similar circumstances...
I go around giving people preemptive Darwin Awards for just this reason...
There's only 2 stages in there that are affected. You aren't going to get DC from the power company.
And while the final stage is affected, since the servers are getting DC at lower (48V?) voltages, do you really think a DC power supply is possibly going to be any more efficient than an AC one? Just because the input/output numbers are closer together doesn't mean your saving energy...
The only thing you're saving is having to convert from the batteries, to AC. Well, I've done some research on DC inverters, and I have to tell you, the best top-out at 97% efficiency... So, now you're saving just 3% by going DC.
But, you're also going to need larger, more expensive power lines (bus bars) to all the servers, and even with them, you can still expect to have more line losses than you would with relatively tiny ~240V AC wires.
And even if there were no line-losses, you've still got to make-up for the cost of investing in this new system. At well under 3% energy savings, it's going to take a LONG TIME at best.
Companies rolling out DC datacenters are very few and far between. It's probably safe to say they are all just left-overs remnants that were in the works back when AC power supplies were hovering around 60% efficiency (because nobody had complained yet), and simply couldn't practically be stopped and reworked in time, once the very high efficiency AC power supplies came around.
If you know of any companies that have just started planning a DC datacenter today, point them out. I would certainly like to find out their reasons.
I did not encourage it at all. I simply pointed out that insurance companies saving the day is more fantasy than reality. The reality (in large-scale disasters) is just as often, insurance companies going into bankruptcy.
I would say you have the same problem with insurance. Homeowners are disincentiveized to make safety improvements to their home, from fire safety, to paying more for repairs. If your insurance cost isn't going to go down, and you don't bear the loss if something happens, clearly, it's economically better for you to be cheap and dangerous.
There's nothing intangible about it. It's a simple transaction set in the paperwork. You pay X dollars every month, and you are (vaguely) covered for damage up to a (strict) maximum dollar amount. Above that, and you're on your own. Consider the same amount of money going into a bank (C.D.) account, estimate how often natural disasters occur in your area, and then determine how long it will take before you have paid out enough money that you could cover the damages out of pocket yourself... The only problem with that system is if some "accident" happens very early on, you haven't accrued significant capital to cover the losses. Just a few years, though, and you're better off without insurance.
And you don't have to deal with an insurer that will try to shirk their responsibility because of the fine print, or just giving you a raw deal with some ridiculous excusing, hoping a significant number of people will just give up and take the deal rather than fight them for the full amount owed.
But I suspect I'm just ranting now. I'm really NOT opposed to insurance, or insurance companies in theory. It's just in practice that you can see that the reality tends to have infinite pitfalls, and very likely little if any benefits for you. You can blame whoever you want, but it is reality. What's not real is insurance companies making a show of coming to a disaster area in a van and handing out signed checks... THAT is just a PR stunt to get their name in the news, which doesn't actually happen for practically anybody.