They need to stop fining "corporations" and instead determine which named human made the offending decision,
Which will lead to a whole system of low-paid, worthless, scapegoat employees.
In a group, you don't usually have one person who is entirely responsible for a decision...
Corporate fines should be much higher than they are now. Holding individuals responsible for doing what their boss told them to do, certainly won't improve the situation.
Re:It doesn't have to be zero sum
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
Places with high humidity might see no difference in rainfall,
Yes, but nobody is going to want one of these in places with high humidity. Cisterns are far simpler and cheaper in that case.
Ditto for areas near a lake.
These devices are only useful in the driest regions.
nobody has come up with an alternative way to flash device BIOS's.
The flash program doesn't even care what media it's running on. Put it on a USB Flash drive, an ElTorito CD, etc.
Personally, when I need to update the firmware on my FreeBSD system, I boot-up from a BartPE CD, and run the flashing program from there.
Companies for RAID, Network and other devices sometimes still only release a floppy self-writing image file.
The VMware trick is a good one, though qemu or bochs might be more apropos given the audience.
Besides that, WinImage compressed disk images are just zip files with some executable code tacked on... Run "zip -FF $FILE" to "repair" it, then unzip like normal to get the uncompressed.IMA file. Other exes may use cab, rar, etc. files, but opening them with an archiver like 7-zip, more often than not, works perfectly. Which is damn good luck, because I can't remember the number of times I've had some integrated installer fail, while the compressed info inside was just fine... This goes for everything from disk images, to drivers, to program installers, et al.
Despite my workload being decidedly twisted, dealing with extremely obsolete versions of most every different OS, and getting them to do things they REALLY don't WANT to do, I haven't had the need to use a floppy in perhaps 4 years now... Which is good, because nearly all of them have probably failed by now.
there are a lot of cases where you need one for power-user reasons or fixing glitches ("X.dll not found").
Quite the opposite. Floppies are now no-longer even helpful for "power-user reasons". Your "X.dll" no longer fits on a floppy, and even if it did, you couldn't use it, because you can't boot-up into DOS and copy it to your NTFS partition...
For power users, BartPE (on a CD) and a USB drive is now the bare minimum. Actually, I usually get away with copying files over the network (instead of sneakernet with the USB drive) but not always...
When Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista reports "inaccessible boot device" or any of thousands of other registry problems, there's nothing your boot floppy can do to help.
I had to go out and buy a floppy drive just a few months ago so I could flash my video BIOS
You didn't need one. You could easily have booted-up off of a CD, Flash, hard drive, etc.
because I needed to write a backup and CDs couldn't do that.
CDs can indeed do that. It's a hassle to set-up, but if you install some CD-burning software as well, you can write whatever you want to the free space on the CD.
Or you could have booted from CD, and written a file to flash.
Or you could have booted from CD, and copied the file to another system over the network.
Or you could have booted from CD, and written the file to the hard drive in the system.
Or you could have booted from your USB Flash drive.
etc.
Floppys are not going to die until there is a cheap, writable , bootable replacement.
AJAX is going to be a buzzword for a couple years, then it's going to fade out just as quickly. Just like Java applets before it. Once the "new" factor wears off, people will more clearly see the limitations and problems, and stop bothering.
Let me ask this... who the hell WANTS to move their apps to the web? Web pages are a mess of inconsistency that is rather painful to navigate... As much as people complain about desktop apps, the biggest differences there are nowhere near the variations in web pages.
AJAX apps have to be perfect, because the baseline (the browser footprint and network response time) puts them at significant disadvantage, before you even start adding any features. From there, it can only get worse.
What's more, AJAX really only stands a chance of replacing the most basic programs (There's not going to be an AJAX version of Photoshop any time soon). So for all this overhead, you're still only doing what a tiny, lighting fast desktop program has been doing, and doing well, 2 decades ago. And my tiny, non-AJAX e-mail program is faster, better, more readable, more customizable, and has far more features, many not even technically possible via AJAX.
AJAX strikes me as the kind of thing that is popular, just because it can be.
And personally, I avoid any companies that go out of their way to remove backwards compatibility, for flashy new features.
I hardly get any lag with just my old-fashioned single-core 1.8 ghz amd64.
I don't believe that for a second. At the very least, you need one of the top processors out now to decode h.264 at 1080 in realtime (at full quality).
At the same resolution?
Obviously. h.264 uses several times more CPU power than most other codecs out there.
The one advantage mpeg gives me is xvmc -- I can offload it to my video card.
I believe there's only one (VIA) video chipset that supports MPEG-4 (part 2) XVMC. The rest do not.
But, it may simply be some dedicated chip for the purpose of mpeg decoding,
Yes, that's what XVMC is. What else would it be?
and how powerful is that? Are there limits to what resolution it will do?
First off, it varies from card to card. VIA's chips offload a lot more of the decoding, but are limited to about standard resolution as a side effect. Normal XVMC chips, like NVidia, can decode well over HD resolutions, but with a resonably fast system, software decoding is actually faster than XVMC.
So, assuming you need lossy compression at all (I have quite a lot of FLACs), why did we go with MP3, and not Vorbis?
Because Vorbis came out several years too late to contend with MP3. The situation is now the same for Theora.
I imagine if YouTube switched to h.264 in.mov format (thus insisting on QuickTime), you'd have two immediate results: Everyone and their dog would have QuickTime, and it would also use _less_ CPU (in the browser) and look _better_ than it does now.)
I can agree with that. Yes, there are some (many?) specific cases where h.264 is more than worth the drawbacks. But as a rule, I still recommend against it for general purpose use.
If you're talking about something huge -- say, 1080p -- first, generally systems hooked up to a display device that can handle it will also have the CPU to handle it.
There is barely anything out there that can handle highdef h.264. The end. Just because someone has a $400 1080i HDTV, doesn't mean the computer they have it hooked-up to is an overclocked quad core Opteron...
Second, EVERYONE has a highdef display. LCDs for maybe the past 5 years have been able to display around 1920x1080, and CRTs from long ago could as well. Never the less, those 5 year-old system sure can't decode h.264... They CAN decode MPEG-4 (part 2).
But also, 20% is significant. 20% is the difference between, say, 20 gigs and 16 gigs. It may be only 20%, but it's also 4 gigs.
20% is 20%. It's neither significant, nor insignificant. It is what it is.
And as I pointed out, 20% is pretty much in the BEST of circumstances. Don't expect to get that with most encodings. There are some cases where h.264 does worse than codecs like lavc and xvid... That's mainly because the latter are simply more mature.
Right now, h.264 just doesn't come out as a plus. Sticking to MPEG-4 is a better idea for at least a few years into the future.
However, when there are two different network cards in a system, in BSD, I know exactly which one I am configuring, but in linux, it depends on where on the bus it is, and I'm usually wrong on the scan order.:(
I very, very rarely end up with DIFFERENT cards in a system. If it's something like a router, I'll have 5 cards in there, but they'll all be the same brand. The naming scheme simply doesn't help differentiate them.
Plus, if you add/remove on of those cards, it might bump the numbering on all the rest of them, so it doesn't help there, either.
Even when I use the integrated NICs, more often than not, it is (coincidentally) using the same driver as the PCI NICs anyhow... There's only a few common chipsets out there.
If they wanted to create a network interface naming system that didn't clash, they could easily prefix "eth" (or whatever), and then suffix it with the last (4?) digits of the MAC address, to make it extremely unique, and vastly unlikely to clash.
But, since they AREN'T doing that, they might as well use a catch-all name like eth0. No worse in 99% of cases, and better in 20% of cases (wild guess).
It is just some simple facts. BSD kernels auto-detect most hardware on boot-up, while Linux does not. So that makes something like FreeBSD a lot closer to the OS X "just works" motto than Linux, while still being completely stable on the vast array of hardware out there.
Google has gone to great lengths to build that image of itself. But that is what that it is, it is a marketing front! It is no more "good" than Microsoft. Or rather it is only as "good" as that perception keeps making them money.
I have no doubt taking this view of the world is how investors sleep at night.
The fact of the matter remains that companies are good and evil. Some will stop at nothing to make money. Others will make (less) money, on principle.
There are a great many companies out there, making far less profit than they could, because they go out of their way to observe human rights, and do many times more non-profit work than similar companies. they often don't even advertise these facts. This always results in a net loss of money, but as long as they make SOME money, they are still an effective corporation.
The idea that a company can't avoid being evil, other than for PR purposes, is absolutely absurd. It is, however, a justification just about every evil company in the world uses, when confronted.
Because then OSX would be just as troublesome as Windows and Linux.
No. Not unless Apple half-asses the project.
Linux is troublesome only because it hasn't been designed to just work, and because vendor support is nil.
The BSDs are far better, in this area. OpenBSD detects all the hardware in a system on boot-up. So either it works, or it doesn't. There is no messing around, no configuration, no hdparm, no editing modules.conf, no loading modules, etc.
FreeBSD, is probably the best example, though. It detects pretty much everything except for soundcards on boot-up, but that is detected and loaded by the installation program, and you can tell it to load all the soundcard modules, without adverse effects, and be able to put that FreeBSD system in any PC hardware around. Even with that, FreeBSD is rock-solid on every bit of PC hardware out there.
Linux has two minor things over the BSDs... One is eth0... The BSDs use different names for network cards (xl0, de0, etc.), so you have to set your network addresses again when you change cards, or you have to put the information in the config file repeatedly, with the different card types you think you might use. The other advantage is X11, since the BSD's don't have programs like Kudzu, X11 needs to be configured by hand. Not that either of these two issues isn't pretty close to trivial to workaround.
So with OSes like FreeBSD out there, and working perfectly right now, the excuses of instability due to variety don't hold one bit of credibility. It's purely an attempt to do what software companies have always done... Blame hardware for their bugs.
If people look up "facist," they should get Hitler or Stalin, even if those guys never called themselves that, and there's no precise definition. It's what people think about them.
Googlebombs weren't about history.org linking to hilter.com with the text: "Fascist"... Googlebombs were about CuteKittenBlog.blogsyou.cx linking to a site, using the text "French Military Victories".
It shouldn't be hard to automatically sort out which of those cases should be given weight, and which should not.
But to speak to your example... Hitler and Stalin don't have a lot of control over the webpages dedicated to them, so they WILL contain the term "fascist", and come up on any search engine.
"Idiot" shouldn't turn up Whitehouse.gov, no matter how much of an idiot Bush is, because the webpage will have NOTHING about the subject, and so will be completely useless. Google isn't about compiling a list like that (Hitler, Stalin, etc.), it's about finding additional references, and you won't find that on a site that doesn't even mention the issue you've searched for.
ie. If I search Google for "Best Cookies", I don't want it to link 500 companies that make cookies. I would want a site that DISCUSSES which cookies are the best. Would anybody search for a generic, non-brand term, and WANT to get a huge search result list of possible brands, as opposed to useful info?
That would require the patent clerks to be, or to hire, experts in the relevant field. That's possible but expensive. The cost of doing so is almost certainly higher than the cost of the current system:
Sounds good to me. You get far, far less idiotic patents through, AND you significantly increase the price of a patent application, so applying for 100 stupid patents in the hopes you'll be able to sue someone, someday, becomes a lose-lose situation.
you realize that when you burn rubbish that you are releasing greenhouse gases and toxins into the air you breathe, right?
Burning garbage is only nominally worse than letting it naturally decay. It's really just a question of time-frame, but you get the same result in the end.
Using it for power decidedly puts burning it out ahead of decomposition... Garbage, as fuel is mostly carbon neutral, so it's much more Koyoto friendly than burning oil/coal and probably even (fossil) natural gas.
Plus, with power plants, you have all kinds of filtering going on, to scrub out all the environmental pollutants, so it comes out much better than letting it decompose. Not to mention it comes out far, far better if you let it decompose, AND take into account the coal you're burning to get electricity, instead of the garbage (going to waste).
if given a 10 year window to change, simple retirement of vending machines as they wear out is enough.
Uhhh, no. Vending machines aren't replaced every 10 years. I've seen soda machines in-use for 30 years, without significant maintenance done on them. Less active or unpowered vending machines can last for much longer still.
The stupid little $0.25 toy and candy vending machines aren't likely to be upgraded, as most of them are barely turning a profit to begin with.
Walk into some little gas station in the middle of nowhere, and you'll still find mechanical (non-electric) vending machines from 50+ years ago.
If all the coinage changes in 10 years, you'll just likely see signs on modern machines that says "dollars only", or "request coins from cashier" and the like. It takes a VERY long time to change.
so da j00s did 9/11 and the cia sold crack in south central LA and nasa never went to the moon too, right?
Actually, the evidence is pretty solid, that the CIA was involved in, at the very least, flying drugs into the US.
That shouldn't be surprising, either, as it's well established that they've extensively sold drugs, in other countries, to fund their operations, for a very long time.
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In a group, you don't usually have one person who is entirely responsible for a decision...
Corporate fines should be much higher than they are now. Holding individuals responsible for doing what their boss told them to do, certainly won't improve the situation.
Ditto for areas near a lake.
These devices are only useful in the driest regions.
Personally, when I need to update the firmware on my FreeBSD system, I boot-up from a BartPE CD, and run the flashing program from there. The VMware trick is a good one, though qemu or bochs might be more apropos given the audience.
Besides that, WinImage compressed disk images are just zip files with some executable code tacked on... Run "zip -FF $FILE" to "repair" it, then unzip like normal to get the uncompressed
Despite my workload being decidedly twisted, dealing with extremely obsolete versions of most every different OS, and getting them to do things they REALLY don't WANT to do, I haven't had the need to use a floppy in perhaps 4 years now... Which is good, because nearly all of them have probably failed by now.
FLOPPY: I don't want to go on the cart!
For power users, BartPE (on a CD) and a USB drive is now the bare minimum. Actually, I usually get away with copying files over the network (instead of sneakernet with the USB drive) but not always...
When Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista reports "inaccessible boot device" or any of thousands of other registry problems, there's nothing your boot floppy can do to help. You didn't need one. You could easily have booted-up off of a CD, Flash, hard drive, etc. CDs can indeed do that. It's a hassle to set-up, but if you install some CD-burning software as well, you can write whatever you want to the free space on the CD.
Or you could have booted from CD, and written a file to flash.
Or you could have booted from CD, and copied the file to another system over the network.
Or you could have booted from CD, and written the file to the hard drive in the system.
Or you could have booted from your USB Flash drive.
etc. You mean exactly like USB Flash drives?
AJAX is going to be a buzzword for a couple years, then it's going to fade out just as quickly. Just like Java applets before it. Once the "new" factor wears off, people will more clearly see the limitations and problems, and stop bothering.
Let me ask this... who the hell WANTS to move their apps to the web? Web pages are a mess of inconsistency that is rather painful to navigate... As much as people complain about desktop apps, the biggest differences there are nowhere near the variations in web pages.
AJAX apps have to be perfect, because the baseline (the browser footprint and network response time) puts them at significant disadvantage, before you even start adding any features. From there, it can only get worse.
What's more, AJAX really only stands a chance of replacing the most basic programs (There's not going to be an AJAX version of Photoshop any time soon). So for all this overhead, you're still only doing what a tiny, lighting fast desktop program has been doing, and doing well, 2 decades ago. And my tiny, non-AJAX e-mail program is faster, better, more readable, more customizable, and has far more features, many not even technically possible via AJAX.
AJAX strikes me as the kind of thing that is popular, just because it can be.
And personally, I avoid any companies that go out of their way to remove backwards compatibility, for flashy new features.
Second, EVERYONE has a highdef display. LCDs for maybe the past 5 years have been able to display around 1920x1080, and CRTs from long ago could as well. Never the less, those 5 year-old system sure can't decode h.264... They CAN decode MPEG-4 (part 2). 20% is 20%. It's neither significant, nor insignificant. It is what it is.
And as I pointed out, 20% is pretty much in the BEST of circumstances. Don't expect to get that with most encodings. There are some cases where h.264 does worse than codecs like lavc and xvid... That's mainly because the latter are simply more mature.
Right now, h.264 just doesn't come out as a plus. Sticking to MPEG-4 is a better idea for at least a few years into the future.
Plus, if you add/remove on of those cards, it might bump the numbering on all the rest of them, so it doesn't help there, either.
Even when I use the integrated NICs, more often than not, it is (coincidentally) using the same driver as the PCI NICs anyhow... There's only a few common chipsets out there.
If they wanted to create a network interface naming system that didn't clash, they could easily prefix "eth" (or whatever), and then suffix it with the last (4?) digits of the MAC address, to make it extremely unique, and vastly unlikely to clash.
But, since they AREN'T doing that, they might as well use a catch-all name like eth0. No worse in 99% of cases, and better in 20% of cases (wild guess).
Otherwise (ie. a criminal case for individual offenses), no.
I fail to see how this is a troll at all.
It is just some simple facts. BSD kernels auto-detect most hardware on boot-up, while Linux does not. So that makes something like FreeBSD a lot closer to the OS X "just works" motto than Linux, while still being completely stable on the vast array of hardware out there.
The fact of the matter remains that companies are good and evil. Some will stop at nothing to make money. Others will make (less) money, on principle.
There are a great many companies out there, making far less profit than they could, because they go out of their way to observe human rights, and do many times more non-profit work than similar companies. they often don't even advertise these facts. This always results in a net loss of money, but as long as they make SOME money, they are still an effective corporation.
The idea that a company can't avoid being evil, other than for PR purposes, is absolutely absurd. It is, however, a justification just about every evil company in the world uses, when confronted.
A company like Google, which puts so much effort into good PR, deserves to be raked over the coals for doing things like this. I see. So now it's "Don't be evil, unless lots of money is on the line." ?
Where the hell are the spelling and grammar Nazis when you need them?
For once, they might legitimately be able to make this post more easily comprehensible.
Linux is troublesome only because it hasn't been designed to just work, and because vendor support is nil.
The BSDs are far better, in this area. OpenBSD detects all the hardware in a system on boot-up. So either it works, or it doesn't. There is no messing around, no configuration, no hdparm, no editing modules.conf, no loading modules, etc.
FreeBSD, is probably the best example, though. It detects pretty much everything except for soundcards on boot-up, but that is detected and loaded by the installation program, and you can tell it to load all the soundcard modules, without adverse effects, and be able to put that FreeBSD system in any PC hardware around. Even with that, FreeBSD is rock-solid on every bit of PC hardware out there.
Linux has two minor things over the BSDs... One is eth0... The BSDs use different names for network cards (xl0, de0, etc.), so you have to set your network addresses again when you change cards, or you have to put the information in the config file repeatedly, with the different card types you think you might use. The other advantage is X11, since the BSD's don't have programs like Kudzu, X11 needs to be configured by hand. Not that either of these two issues isn't pretty close to trivial to workaround.
So with OSes like FreeBSD out there, and working perfectly right now, the excuses of instability due to variety don't hold one bit of credibility. It's purely an attempt to do what software companies have always done... Blame hardware for their bugs.
It shouldn't be hard to automatically sort out which of those cases should be given weight, and which should not.
But to speak to your example... Hitler and Stalin don't have a lot of control over the webpages dedicated to them, so they WILL contain the term "fascist", and come up on any search engine.
"Idiot" shouldn't turn up Whitehouse.gov, no matter how much of an idiot Bush is, because the webpage will have NOTHING about the subject, and so will be completely useless. Google isn't about compiling a list like that (Hitler, Stalin, etc.), it's about finding additional references, and you won't find that on a site that doesn't even mention the issue you've searched for.
ie. If I search Google for "Best Cookies", I don't want it to link 500 companies that make cookies. I would want a site that DISCUSSES which cookies are the best. Would anybody search for a generic, non-brand term, and WANT to get a huge search result list of possible brands, as opposed to useful info?
Sounds about right. It had approximately the same appearance as the typical geek wardriver...
Who knew Twilight Zone was so forward-thinking?
Using it for power decidedly puts burning it out ahead of decomposition... Garbage, as fuel is mostly carbon neutral, so it's much more Koyoto friendly than burning oil/coal and probably even (fossil) natural gas.
Plus, with power plants, you have all kinds of filtering going on, to scrub out all the environmental pollutants, so it comes out much better than letting it decompose. Not to mention it comes out far, far better if you let it decompose, AND take into account the coal you're burning to get electricity, instead of the garbage (going to waste).
The stupid little $0.25 toy and candy vending machines aren't likely to be upgraded, as most of them are barely turning a profit to begin with.
Walk into some little gas station in the middle of nowhere, and you'll still find mechanical (non-electric) vending machines from 50+ years ago.
If all the coinage changes in 10 years, you'll just likely see signs on modern machines that says "dollars only", or "request coins from cashier" and the like. It takes a VERY long time to change.
That shouldn't be surprising, either, as it's well established that they've extensively sold drugs, in other countries, to fund their operations, for a very long time.