This isn't exactly astronomy related like Niel deGrass Tyson's stuff, but when I was a kid I got an electronics set, complete with a bread-board, several LED's, a rheostat, heaps and heaps of resistors and capacitors, and several other things having to do with digital and analog circuitry. That was one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, and still from time to time wish I had it to pull out and tinker with. I remember one time I probably could have burned the house down had I not smelled the melting plastic on the set. What happened was that I had learned at school how to make an electromagnet out of a battery, a coil of wire, and a nail. Well, I did the same thing with the set when I got home, but then left it on for about an hour. As you well may know, connecting the two terminals of a battery without any resistor can cause the batteries to overheat, and most likely rupture. I think I probably caught the thing just before the batteries broke, because they were very hot. Anyway, I'm rambling, but you get the idea: I learned to love tinkering with electronics as a kid, and now am majoring in Computer Science.
So that's what happened. I exploded a battery when I was a kid. Luckily no fire started and I wasn't in the room so I was safe. Of course, that battery that exploded was just a small watch battery but it made a pretty loud sound considering.
At first glance I thought it said How To Build a Quantum Popsicle Machine. Then I thought Quantum Popsicle would have been a great name for a hair band in the 80's.
Except we reached Peak Spandex in 1992 so this idea will never be accepted.
Which is exactly why you do not want to convince people to vote. A low voter turn-out can be a very good thing if the turn-out is low because only people who have educated themselves on the issues at hand will go vote.
It is when the educated get apathetic enough to stop going to polls that we need to start worrying.
I admit that my attitude is at least slightly elitist but I would like to propose a system where people get extra votes based on some sort of a test or quiz that they can fill out that would test their IQ and their knowledge of relevant facts. Now that would make interesting results.
RTFA (or even just the summary!) This is Quebec. They don't have nuclear missiles.
And we know this for a fact because if they did, they would have already nuked all English-speaking Canadian cities and declared independence years ago.
lol So true. I visited there a couple years ago for a coding competition and the people are nice... if you can speak French.
well i have no idea how annoying outlook is having never used it - but it has to be damn annoying to be worse than evolution. claws is the way forward although the windows port is still a bit limited - no spell checker for example . ..
Concerning Outlook, imagine a program that you have constantly running in the background that will occasionally break your clipboard and make copy and paste stop working until you kill it. Fun.
gnome-shell is still missing a way to see what applications are all running. After a day or two of having gnome-shell open, I have 15 different terminal windows open.
UNR 9.10 takes some getting used to, and I sorely miss the "switch to traditional desktop mode" of UNR 9.04... I really want to try out Moblin 2.1 but I don't have time to mess with it on the road for 4 weeks if something breaks. Perhaps when I get back.
I found Moblin to be very painful to use on my hp mini. A lot of the settings for basic programs were buried and hard to find. I gave up on moblin after spending a not insignificant amount of time trying to find my Preferences dialog for my web browser. My conclusion was that Moblin is not for power users.
Moblin does not fit with my computing habits. Whenever I startup a new application, I go through all the menu items and familiarize myself with what the application does. Moblin made me feel claustrophobic (much the same way the ribbon bar in MS Office does).
You could drill a hole in the case, pipe some water in and then have a water fountain coming out of the top of your computer. I'll bet you would be the first person to do that hack!
You can call the users fools if you want but a lot are quite simply desperate. A lot of people have had bad experiences with Windows (cue people saying that Windows works for them) and they are desperate to buy something else. And Mac happens to be that something else.
We could have an entire discussion about why exactly people have bad experiences with Windows. But the reasons are irrelevant. A lot of people (fools as you call them) are willing to pay a lot for something that is not Windows.
Economically, the most likely to turn a profit are a series of $0.99 throwaways that might become the next "pet rock". If it's rejected by some guy because his corn flakes got soggy that morning, little is lost. Statistically, some of them will certainly be accepted.
You have then all the power of Access as a RAD tool to make all your programmers want to jump off tall buildings with the integrity of a real database.
I've posted this before, but I think it's worth repeating because, despite my evangelizing, people on the Internet are still wrong.:P
Why is "OMGROADS" a justification for any and all taxation? As far as roads and police go, very little money comes from the Federal government, which leaves the local government. And in my experience, roads and police are the first things cut by local politicians because it scares up support for more taxes.
Ok, I choose to respond to your reply of the three that I got.
First, the comment which I was replying to was simply
Fuck taxes
Which appears to me as pure ignorance.
Education is a mess. We're #3 worldwide in terms of spending per pupil, but Slashdot as a whole seems to find public education inadequate.
I'm not American but perhaps I can provide some insight. I attended a small, under-funded, and all around terrible private school. And yet, I'm not intellectually stunted for the rest of my life. I'm in my fourth year of university now and the high school I went to does not rule my life. I do.
It is my opinion that what people need is motivation. When the motivation for studying is Iwantcoolstuff!!! the person is less likely to take it seriously than if the motivation is If I don't get an education I will starve. Who knows, maybe the recession will be the perspective change that some people need.
Now, what percentage of our taxes actually goes to roads, police, fire, education, and defense? I can guarantee you the majority of Federal spending does not, and how much local spending does is a function of local corruption and incompetence.
I like the sig of one slashdotter, something about "taxes buying civilization." But, can you fault those who feel ripped off?
I'm from Canada and we get taxed a lot. And yes, I do bitch and complain sometimes but in general I want to keep getting taxed. I like my health care and other such benefits.
But I have also seen this corruption that you speak of. I grew up in a rural area where we have absolutely terrible roads because the lack of funding and farmers who don't want to sell strips of land along the road that would be needed to widen the road. The local pm used fixing the roads as his platform. Sure enough when he got elected he put a million dollars into fixing one road that almost nobody drives on. It goes right by his place though. Idiot. Not subtle at all.
But I hear people complaining all the time about taxes and how people are dodging taxes and these people don't understand that if you take away all taxes then we wouldn't have a functional government. They really do expect all kinds of gifts to fall onto their lap from out of the ether.
[...] Where the fuck do you think all those craters on the moon come from? [...]
Wait! You're saying that the U.S. has been crashing stuff into the moon for years and they never told us!? The horror! They are probably TRYING to break it in half.
CNETNate writes about a test on CNET's site which isn't a test at all. They have tried several browsers, described them in two to three paragraphs each, and measured JavaScript execution speed with the help of a nameless benchmark. Not even a mention of which sites were used for testing.
That's not entirely accurate. HPC systems are designed to solve a class of problems. That's not the same thing as a "particular" problem. Jaguar has, in fact, solved many different problems, including fluid flow, weather, nuclear fusion and supernova modeling. It's not going to run Word any faster than your PC but that's not what you buy a supercomputer to do.
So you're saying that OpenOffice would still take forever to start.
Slashdot Mirror
[...]You can't bubble wrap the entire world! [...]
Bubble wrap... the entire world... *stares into distance* That would be awesome!!!
This isn't exactly astronomy related like Niel deGrass Tyson's stuff, but when I was a kid I got an electronics set, complete with a bread-board, several LED's, a rheostat, heaps and heaps of resistors and capacitors, and several other things having to do with digital and analog circuitry. That was one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, and still from time to time wish I had it to pull out and tinker with. I remember one time I probably could have burned the house down had I not smelled the melting plastic on the set. What happened was that I had learned at school how to make an electromagnet out of a battery, a coil of wire, and a nail. Well, I did the same thing with the set when I got home, but then left it on for about an hour. As you well may know, connecting the two terminals of a battery without any resistor can cause the batteries to overheat, and most likely rupture. I think I probably caught the thing just before the batteries broke, because they were very hot. Anyway, I'm rambling, but you get the idea: I learned to love tinkering with electronics as a kid, and now am majoring in Computer Science.
So that's what happened. I exploded a battery when I was a kid. Luckily no fire started and I wasn't in the room so I was safe. Of course, that battery that exploded was just a small watch battery but it made a pretty loud sound considering.
lol So true. I visited there a couple years ago for a coding competition and the people are nice... if you can speak French.
Right, just like the southern US TOTALLY embraces spanish speaking citizens. *Spits*
Ok first learn to use the quote tag.
Second, I'm not from southern US or anywhere else in the US.
And third,
*Spits*
Seriously? Wow.
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
Thanks. I was reading through the comments looking for the usual DRM rants.
How To Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine
At first glance I thought it said How To Build a Quantum Popsicle Machine. Then I thought Quantum Popsicle would have been a great name for a hair band in the 80's.
Except we reached Peak Spandex in 1992 so this idea will never be accepted.
Which is exactly why you do not want to convince people to vote. A low voter turn-out can be a very good thing if the turn-out is low because only people who have educated themselves on the issues at hand will go vote.
It is when the educated get apathetic enough to stop going to polls that we need to start worrying.
I admit that my attitude is at least slightly elitist but I would like to propose a system where people get extra votes based on some sort of a test or quiz that they can fill out that would test their IQ and their knowledge of relevant facts. Now that would make interesting results.
RTFA (or even just the summary!) This is Quebec. They don't have nuclear missiles.
And we know this for a fact because if they did, they would have already nuked all English-speaking Canadian cities and declared independence years ago.
lol So true. I visited there a couple years ago for a coding competition and the people are nice... if you can speak French.
If price is below 200$ as they say and it already runs linux, then perhaps hack it and use use it as a home "server"
And then create a beowolf cluster of these!
well i have no idea how annoying outlook is having never used it - but it has to be damn annoying to be worse than evolution. claws is the way forward although the windows port is still a bit limited - no spell checker for example . . .
Concerning Outlook, imagine a program that you have constantly running in the background that will occasionally break your clipboard and make copy and paste stop working until you kill it. Fun.
gnome-shell is still missing a way to see what applications are all running. After a day or two of having gnome-shell open, I have 15 different terminal windows open.
UNR 9.10 takes some getting used to, and I sorely miss the "switch to traditional desktop mode" of UNR 9.04... I really want to try out Moblin 2.1 but I don't have time to mess with it on the road for 4 weeks if something breaks. Perhaps when I get back.
I found Moblin to be very painful to use on my hp mini. A lot of the settings for basic programs were buried and hard to find. I gave up on moblin after spending a not insignificant amount of time trying to find my Preferences dialog for my web browser. My conclusion was that Moblin is not for power users.
Moblin does not fit with my computing habits. Whenever I startup a new application, I go through all the menu items and familiarize myself with what the application does. Moblin made me feel claustrophobic (much the same way the ribbon bar in MS Office does).
Well, on my Thinkpad I wasn't even able to install XP. Everytime I tried it would blue screen. And yes, the cd was legitimate.
You could drill a hole in the case, pipe some water in and then have a water fountain coming out of the top of your computer. I'll bet you would be the first person to do that hack!
Scientists using MAC's and the place controlled by Linux...
Yes, I'm guessing that if their computers are networked then they are using MAC addresses.
Yeah and "zombie" processes. I'm looking at you Transmission!
You can call the users fools if you want but a lot are quite simply desperate. A lot of people have had bad experiences with Windows (cue people saying that Windows works for them) and they are desperate to buy something else. And Mac happens to be that something else.
We could have an entire discussion about why exactly people have bad experiences with Windows. But the reasons are irrelevant. A lot of people (fools as you call them) are willing to pay a lot for something that is not Windows.
Economically, the most likely to turn a profit are a series of $0.99 throwaways that might become the next "pet rock". If it's rejected by some guy because his corn flakes got soggy that morning, little is lost. Statistically, some of them will certainly be accepted.
To be fair, soggy corn flakes suck.
You have then all the power of Access as a RAD tool to make all your programmers want to jump off tall buildings with the integrity of a real database.
Fixed that for you.
I've posted this before, but I think it's worth repeating because, despite my evangelizing, people on the Internet are still wrong. :P
Why is "OMGROADS" a justification for any and all taxation? As far as roads and police go, very little money comes from the Federal government, which leaves the local government. And in my experience, roads and police are the first things cut by local politicians because it scares up support for more taxes.
Ok, I choose to respond to your reply of the three that I got.
First, the comment which I was replying to was simply
Fuck taxes
Which appears to me as pure ignorance.
Education is a mess. We're #3 worldwide in terms of spending per pupil, but Slashdot as a whole seems to find public education inadequate.
I'm not American but perhaps I can provide some insight. I attended a small, under-funded, and all around terrible private school. And yet, I'm not intellectually stunted for the rest of my life. I'm in my fourth year of university now and the high school I went to does not rule my life. I do.
It is my opinion that what people need is motivation. When the motivation for studying is Iwantcoolstuff!!! the person is less likely to take it seriously than if the motivation is If I don't get an education I will starve. Who knows, maybe the recession will be the perspective change that some people need.
Now, what percentage of our taxes actually goes to roads, police, fire, education, and defense? I can guarantee you the majority of Federal spending does not, and how much local spending does is a function of local corruption and incompetence.
I like the sig of one slashdotter, something about "taxes buying civilization." But, can you fault those who feel ripped off?
I'm from Canada and we get taxed a lot. And yes, I do bitch and complain sometimes but in general I want to keep getting taxed. I like my health care and other such benefits.
But I have also seen this corruption that you speak of. I grew up in a rural area where we have absolutely terrible roads because the lack of funding and farmers who don't want to sell strips of land along the road that would be needed to widen the road. The local pm used fixing the roads as his platform. Sure enough when he got elected he put a million dollars into fixing one road that almost nobody drives on. It goes right by his place though. Idiot. Not subtle at all.
But I hear people complaining all the time about taxes and how people are dodging taxes and these people don't understand that if you take away all taxes then we wouldn't have a functional government. They really do expect all kinds of gifts to fall onto their lap from out of the ether.
taxes.
Yeah! And rodes and armed forces and firefighters and public schools! Why do we put up with this!?
And don't split your sentences between your title and post. It's annoying.
[...] Where the fuck do you think all those craters on the moon come from? [...]
Wait! You're saying that the U.S. has been crashing stuff into the moon for years and they never told us!? The horror! They are probably TRYING to break it in half.
I wouldn't care but since its on cnet its probably in 10pages. Screw that .... thanks for the warning.
Nope. 9.
CNETNate writes about a test on CNET's site which isn't a test at all. They have tried several browsers, described them in two to three paragraphs each, and measured JavaScript execution speed with the help of a nameless benchmark. Not even a mention of which sites were used for testing.
Great job!
You clicked on a CNET article. Surprised?
Solar power IS nuclear power, we've just offshored the actual reactor. Some loss of energy occurs during transport, though.
If we run out of Sun, running my hairdryer is going to get really low on my list of priorities, really fast.
Wait... I thought Oracle was fixing that.
That's not entirely accurate. HPC systems are designed to solve a class of problems. That's not the same thing as a "particular" problem. Jaguar has, in fact, solved many different problems, including fluid flow, weather, nuclear fusion and supernova modeling. It's not going to run Word any faster than your PC but that's not what you buy a supercomputer to do.
So you're saying that OpenOffice would still take forever to start.