)
While I appreciate a good info help file (esp. for bigger
programs like Emacs) I prefer man pages. BTW cperl-perldoc in
Emacs is great!
Oh thanks... cperl-perldoc *is* pretty cool. I
hadn't come across it before... I was still in the habit of
doing stuff like "Esc-x man perlfunc" and a text search...
but then I only just started using cperl-mode (as opposed to
perl-mode).
If there are any perl-emacs folk out there who haven't
looked at cperl-mode yet, I highly recommend it, if only
because it's syntax highlighting doesn't get confused
as easily. But *don't* waste any time with their "hairy"
option that turns on all the bells and whistles. It's
worthless. Oh, and I highly recommend sticking one of
these in your.emacs, to turn off that ridiculous "highlight
trailing space" feature:
That doesn't help when you're in a terminal window, which is one
of the big advantages to Unix
Agreed...and 'info' is a pain to use. However, I have found pinfo
to be quite usable. It behaves similarly to lynx
with respect to following links, page scrolling, and searching.
This sounds like a piece of helpful information (which some
other folks have brought up). Myself I prefer to work inside
of emacs, hence I use the built-in info reader (Esc-x info)
-- and incidentally there's also a built-in man page reader
that isn't bad: Esc-x man.
Why do people insist on inventing new and confusing interfaces to
programs? Sometimes even it is a huge win for a program to use
one that people are familiar with rather than inventing something
that might be 1% more efficient for the people who actually
bother to learn to use it (of course wasting far more time than
could theoretically be saved using the "more efficient"
interface). I have noticed this in several GNU programs. Many of
them seem to enjoy changing established conventions just for the
heck of it. Oh well.
I'll see your peeve and raise you one. Yes, I agree it's
usually better to have some knowledge of the
state-of-the-art and try and stay compatible to what other
people know already (myself, I'm thinking about forming
an assasination squad to eliminate people inventing knew
scripting languages).
But: your example is exactly backwards here. You see,
"info" format existed *long* before "lynx" did. The real
question is, why did the guys who write lynx invent a new
interface, when they could have used the default keymap
from "info"?
There seems to be a weird dogmatic attitude that Gnu-haters
develop that's just as bizarre as the worst of RMS's
personality quirks: They refuse to admit that there might
be some value in *anything* the FSF has come up with, and
insist on re-inventing it.
most GNU utilities come with perfectly adequate info
documentations. the man pages usually represent a barebones.
and "info" isn't really that much harder to type.
Yeah, it never ceases to amaze me how many leet hacker dudes
are willing to whine in public about how they can't use
docs in info format. Hitting the space bar pages you down
through the docs, hitting tab jumps you to the next link,
hitting enter follows the link, an "s" let's you do
searches. Got that? You could also just try an "info info"
and hit the space bar for a few minutes.
don't forget, GNU likes to do things "differently"
Now come on, there are reasons info exists. For one thing,
because, the GNU project standardized on Texinfo format,
it makes it relatively easy for them to crank out printed
versions of their docs (you can order it in book form
from the FSF). For another thing, it's much better suited
to writing interlinked chains of documents than nroff.
But my gripe about that is someone could've written a beautiful
piece of software. But until he or someone else writes a manual,
it can't be distributed in a Debian package. I think that can
hold back certain things--I know when I code I usually don't
write a manual, even my really useful stuff. I doc the code,
obviously, but other than that, nothing. And frankly, I don't
feel like writing manuals for things, and I'm sure most people
don't. Just seems restrictive, but the more I think about this,
it's a horribly moot point. To each their own, but if Debian
wants to become the more widely distributed package type, that
would usually mean becoming the most used package type, and I
think that requiring manuals could hinder that. Of course one
could argue that they're higher quality because of manuals, but
is the code higher quality?
If you're lazy about writing manuals, you should either
partner with someone who isn't or just give up on writing
code, because otherwise the project is incomplete, and
whether or not the "code is of higher quality" is
irrelevant, because the code is close to being unusable
unless someone is willing to write down how to use it. The
person who does this needs to be someone who understands the
code, and that almost always means *you* the guy who wrote
it. What are you writing the code for if you don't want
people to actually use it?
(3) a comprehensible and
standards-compliant-as-possible data repository (i.e.: mySQL,
Postgress).
It's quite possible that I've missed something, but in what
sense can "mySQL" be said to be "standards-compliant"?
The Postgresql folks clearly care a lot about complying with
the SQL standard, but despite the name "mySQL" doesn't
seem to care that much (maybe that was the joke? "It's
*my* SQL now!").
There's also the issue of introducing innovations that "pollute" the
standard in an attempt to hijack it, as one company often discussed
on/. has been prone to do.
This has seemed obvious to me for some time,
but for *some* reason your average geek seems
to be resistant to this hypothesis: you were
not an outcast because you're smart, you became
smart because you were an outcast. There's
something about you, maybe a slight physical disability,
maybe a certain social incapacity, that made you
run from the other kids and crawl inside your
head.
Some I "should've saids" have been running
through my mind since writing this review
(or "review", if you like):
The physical quality of the books is pretty
good: they're roughly comparable to the
trade paper backs that you get from
O'Reilley or the Free Software Foundation.
I mentioned the pricing of the books, but
neglected the pricing of the PDF subscription
service: $15/year/volume gets you a subscription
to the current PDFs based
on the latest versions of the documentation.
There are somewhat cheaper deals if you order
more, e.g. the three Postgresql volumes I discuss
are probably a "topical set", so a subscription
to PDFs of all three of them would be $10 * 3 =
$30/year.
I didn't talk about the PDF option much because
personally I'm not that interested in it: I want
pages trimmed and bound like a real book. But it's
option you should know about to make your own
decisions.
Does the cost of the PDF seem excessive? Well
you know, if you think you can do better, no one
is stopping you (if you haven't tried it yet:
formatting on-line docs in a reasonable way for
paper printout is probably harder than you think).
And in defense of my quasi-review here: what kind of
review would be *preferable* for these kinds of
books? The source material for them is out there
on the web, you can go and skim it yourself...
though probably you know what it's like, more
or less. (However: don't just assume it's all man pages.
The postgresql docs are considerably better
fleshed out than that.) My take is: does it
help to have the information in this form?
What do you get out of it that you wouldn't
get from having it on your hard drive (or on the web)?
And in case it isn't clear, the point is that
you tend to do a different kind of browsing
with books than with computers, and so you learn about
slightly different things.
Benford apparently isn't aware that centrifuge experiments
*have* been conducted on the space shuttle. Or that Columbia
was carrying a physiology experiment that would have done a
lot for revealing just why exposure to zero-G causes
orthostatic intolerance [inability to stand or remain
standing].
Specifically, the 1998 STS-90 mission [Neurolab], among
other things, studied how humans perceived centrifugal
motion in the absence of an existing 1G gravity vector. This
mission was designed to study the vestibular system, but
others have looked at cardiovascular effects.
The long and the short is that it helps some, but the
inertial problem is still sticky. Worse, it tends to make
the astronauts sick. Losing track of your vertical tends to
make your body do bad things.
The radius of the centrifuge obviously matters *a lot* if
you're talking about having people live in them for long
periods of time. The acceleration gradient of a centrifuge
is really weird when you're near the axis: imagine a radical
change in "gravity" when you stand-up or sit-down. Imagine
"gravity" being stronger at your feet than at your head.
The point of using the long tether gimmick is to get
a flat acceleration gradient that more closely approximates
a planets surface gravity.
Actually, I've read his work. I don't think fiction's really
a strong-point, either.
And, not that it's relevant or anything, but some of his
fiction strikes me as being some of the best SF written in
the last several decades (I'm a fan of "Across the Sea of
Suns" myself).
Well, I think the central trouble is that NASA isn't doing
much in particular with this man-in-space jazz, and it's
pretty obvious to everyone that this is the case ("With all
the problems we have here on earth, why are we--").
Mars exploration is a thought, at least it's dramatic enough
that it might grab people's attention. I submit that we
would be better off pursuing a goal in space with some
obvious practical benefit, e.g. this scheme of Robert Kennedy
of the Ultimax Group:
390,000 sq.km of solar sails, placed in non-Keplerian orbits
around the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, can intercept enough
(~0.25%) sunlight to offset global warming and concomitant
rapid climate change due to anthropogenic CO2, or if you
will, a mirrored Maunder Minimum. Such mirrors can also
provide total planetary electricity demand, estimated at 300
quads (quadrillion BTUs) by 2050, displacing all terrestrial
carbon-burners.
Apparently NASA "studied" the SPSS idea again a few years
back. They said it looked good, but they needed to reduce
launch costs "a problem which is being addressed" (by the
space shuttle?):
I think you guys are missing the point of the original sarcasm. The press release is bragging
about bringing "the enterprise class OS" to intel
hardware, as though this platform didn't already have an enterprise class OS... Arguably Linux and FreeBSD are "enterprise class" (certainly they're in use in many entrerpises).
Though, I don't doubt that
there are still some technical limitations of
Linux compared to Solaris (and I'd be interested
in hearing about them... as I remember it Solaris
is supposed to scale to multiple processors better
than Linux, though that might be old news).
Anyway, I agree that the various attempts at
getting "sort of" like open source are pathetic (the source code under glass licenses and so on).
There are certainly sound conservative reasons
a large enterprise should stick with what's working for them... e.g. if you're business
centers around Oracle running on Solaris, you're
not going to change either of those in a hurry.
But on the other hand, if you were starting
a new business, you'd be a fool not to think about
Postgresql running on Linux/FreeBSD. And even
an established business that's looking for ways
of cutting costs should at least start thinking
about switching.
Put this together and you've got a grim future for closed-source "enterprise class" software.
I actually think this point is one of
the more interesting ones:
2)
TRAINS: The crowded, fast-paced, modern
commuter culture of Japan's urban
lifestyle has had a gigantic impact on
the proliferation of Manga. Today a huge
number of people in Japan spend a great
deal of time on trains.
Compare this to that other story on
Slashdot, where people are babbling
about how to prevent scratches on
their cars.
(This is shaping up to be one of the
culture wars of the next decade, in my
opinion. Over in this corner, we
have: "Cities GOOD! Trains GOOD!
Suburbs BAD! Cars BAD! Television
BAD!" And over in the other corner we
have "Oh don't listen to those
negative, unamerican environmental
whackos. Do they really think you
fine people would have wasted your
lives on bland, boring and pointless
pursuits? Ha! Go back to sleep.")
It makes perfect sense when you think about who they go up against.
Big media, big industry, big government, big money. Swift, underpaid
non-profit lawyers have a far better chance in the courtroom than
swift, underpaid lobbyists would have in Gucci Gulch.
The problem with this thinking is that the judges these
swift underpaid folks must appeal to are chosen in
Washington. Because EFF (and the ACLU as well) have
dismissed democracy and legislative process as a lost
cause, the judiciary of our nation keeps drifting slowly
to the right, especially in the Supreme Court. Makes
absolutely no goddamned sense not to be in Washington,
if you ask me.
Well, I suspect what's it's really about is a symbolic
challenge... they probably liked the idea that the SF
Bay Area is a new center of power, challenging the old
east coast establishment.
A little while back, ESR was talking about founding a new
organization, something like a political lobbying
counterpart to the EFFs legal approach. I don't know
what happened with that...
I wish he'd get on it, though. After 9/11 I joined the
EFF. Then I joined the ACLU. If things get any worse,
I'll need something else to join.
These rights are only extended to citizens of the United States. Non-citizens are basically at the government's pleasure. There are no guarantees in the Constitution that apply to non-citizens.
So yes, basically the government can take any non-citizen and throw them in a bottomless pit forever. It's legal. It's distasteful,
The constitution, in fact, guarantees due process
to "all persons", there's nothing in it about
restricting it to citizens.
but sometimes it's necessary.
Right. Whatever Ashcroft says is necessary is
necessary.
You might want to stop and consider how you would
feel if another country grabbed some US citizens
and gave them the bottomless pit treatment.
on the things that all slashdotters love: 'the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture.'
Twirlip of the Mists (615030) wrote:
Speak for yourself. I for one am utterly bored with the political direction Slashdot has taken in the past couple of years. And it's not even good politics! When the issues of the day are domestic and international terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, the prospect of war in Iraq and elsewhere, the economy, or even the space shuttle, the prevailing topics of discussion on Slashdot still center around that same list of drivel: the RIAA, Microsoft, and stories about "chilling effects" that are just barely more than "we hate the government but we don't know why" flamefests.
If Slashdot wants to get political, at least get political in ways that people give a damn about.
Yeah, why doesn't slashdot go into a feeding
frenzy about the same hot button issues that
the rest of the media is freaking out about?
Why do they keep going on about irrelvent
issues like intellectual freedom when we're
all supposed to be focusing on hating the
appointed national enemy?
Oh, and what's up with this Barlow guy? He sounds
like he's not a patriot:
The Total Information Awareness project is truly diabolical -- mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.
Gravity waves have been used in many stories as a FTL
communication system, now that's all out of date.
What? Name one.
That's such a dorky idea, I have trouble thinking of an SF
writer bright enough to have heard of "gravity waves" who
would think it's at all plausible that they would travel
FTL.
As you might guess from the above list, I'm located in California...
I hang out at KZSU, myself.
One thing to remember about college radio is that it changes
constantly from program to program... there's often very
litte of an attempt at presenting a consistent sound as in
commercial radio. So don't just listen once or twice
to a station and assume you know what they're about.
Maybe you should look for an online program schedule
to figure out when to listen.
It doesn't support all the old NS4 rubbish that I had to code
into my pages because idiots still use the browser (yes, take offense,
please. Then go upgrade your browser)
Here we have a fine example of a fellow who thinks that the
customers are supposed to jump through hoops to make his
life easier.
You'll need to live with NS4 users for another few years
most likely. In the meantime, might I suggest KISS?
"Okay, what can you export from the
moon that would make any economic
sense? My suggestion would be solar
power satellites that you then
station near the L1 point so they
double as sun shades. "
OK. Why exactly would we need a moon
colony to put solar power satellites
in L1 orbit?
It's not a requirement, it just
helps. Moving mass up out of
earth's gravity well is expensive.
Starting from the lunar surface (or
the asteroid belt) is a lot cheaper
in energy terms.
To act as "sun shades" these things
would have to be frickin' huge.
Well excuse me. Not thinking small
enough for you, I guess.
I know very little about solar
satellites,
No kidding.
The only way your suggestion of
building them on the moon makes
sense is if that substance were
ridiculously abundant and easily
accessible on the moon.
Glancing at my copy of "Space
Industrialization", the article
"Materials Processing in Space" by
Waldron and Criswell, says:
For the major mineral
constituents of lunar rock and soil
-- pyroxenes, feldspars, and olivine
-- the compositions are silicates
which may be described as addition
compounds of metal oxides and
silica. Conceptually the processing
of such materials may be broken down
into separation of the constituent
oxides (including silica) followed
by reduction of that portion of the
metallic oxides and silica desired
to obtain structural metals and
oxygen (or higher oxides,
e.g. Fe2O3). For ilmentie, FeTiO3,
the same steps are necessary except
that no silica is involved.
Given a source of silicon and aluminum,
I think you can probably figure out how
to make solar power arrays. Note: the
above article was written before it was known
that water ice exists on the moon.
In my admittedly limited experience
I have never once heard anyone talk
about the extreme abundance of
photovoltaics on the moon... Maybe
they're there, maybe not.
Maybe you should get in the habit
of doing a couple of web searches
before shooting your mouth off. Just a
suggestion.
Next, assuming all other problems
with your enormous satellites were
worked out, how do you keep a) solar
winds from blowing them away since
they would have gargantuan surface
areas similar to solar sails
Let's see... you'd either pick stable
orbits, or equip them with small
propulsion systems (my guess would be
ion drives).
and b) all manner of space debris
from punching holes in them to the
point of destruction.
Well, that sounds like an actual
problem that you'd have to design
around, presumably with redundant
engineering and some sort of repair
program.
Just think of the
Perseids alone!
Oops, for a moment there it sounded
like you knew what you were talking
about.
Third, you mention
"beaming" the energy to earth. Most
proposals to do this I have read
have suggested microwaves. Two
things: 1) not sure whether cancer
deaths would rise or fall what with
all the stray microwaves bounching
around...
My understanding is that this is
practical even with relatively low
intensity microwave beams. If
microwaves don't sound good for some reason
then we would use lasers.
and 2) ever play Sim
City? You could literally be the
"toast of the town"...
Well damn, no I've never played Sim
City. I guess I'm grossly ignorant on
this subject. And yet I remember
hearing it argued that it isn't a
difficult trick to add a safety
interlock to a microwave beam, so that
if you wander off target the beam shuts
off.
Finally, I'm not sure if by sun
shade you mean filtering the light
or blocking it. I certainly don't
want any part of an artificial
night...
Seriously, we have such a
fingernail's grasp on all the
variables involved in our weather
patterns that I am confident any
such attempt to control the weather
(global warming) would be
disasterous.
We either reduce global warming by
reducing greenhouse emissions, or
not at all.
But why are you confident that reducing
greenhouse gas emissions won't be
disastrous? It might be you know, it
could turn out that the human-induced
greenhouse effect is the only thing
holding back the next ice-age. Or it
could be that Julian Simon was right,
and warmer weather is actually a great
thing for the human race in general,
and the environmentalist catastrophe
scenarios (e.g. a sudden diversion of
the gulf stream) are totally off base.
Or it could be that the catstrophe
scenarios are dead on, and that
reducing emissions at this point is not
good enough to divert them.
Welcome to the human condition.
Great power without perfect
understanding.
I just don't see your super
satellites as a realistic way to do
that.
That's nice. I guess we should all
take your word for it.
I also do not believe we have enough
time left to wait for super-de-duper
new technology.
Who told you to wait for anything?
Feel free to do anything you can think
of to reduce greenhouse emissions. If
you can convince people to stop burning
coal, you'll get a lot less lung cancer
deaths out of the bargain. I might
suggest switching to nuclear power, but
I wouldn't recommend holding your
breath while waiting for people to
realize that that's a good idea.
OK, there is one quick
way I can think of we can eliminate
global warming: nuclear winter.;-)
Just to finish up, here's a few things
you might open your mind with a tad:
Speaker: Robert G. Kennedy III, PE
President, The Ultimax
Group, Inc.
About the talk:
390,000 sq.km of solar sails, placed in
non-Keplerian orbits around the
Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, can
intercept enough (~0.25%) sunlight to
offset global warming and concomitant
rapid climate change due to
anthropogenic CO2, or if you will, a
mirrored Maunder Minimum. Such mirrors
can also provide total planetary
electricity demand, estimated at 300
quads (quadrillion BTUs) by 2050,
displacing all terrestrial
carbon-burners.
The capital cost of solar sails is at
least an order of magnitude less than
the sum of economic, social, and
environmental damages/ externalities
due to unmitigated climate change over
the next century, rough order of
magnitude (ROM) estimate US$200
trillion in 1999 dollars. The capital
cost may also be less than the already
budgeted replacement/expansion cost of
the world's energy generation plant
(ROM est. US$20 trillion through 2050).
This world-saving concept is:
scalable (twice the mirror
produces twice the effect),
uncoupled (each mirror works
independently of the others),
incremental (pay as you go with
immediate benefit),
unobtrusive (umbra does not reach
Earth, so the sails are essentially
invisible), and finally
reversible (sails can
be moved off-axis to restore
insolation).
In 1995, NASA embarked on what's
tagged as a Fresh Look study. SSP
feasibility, technologies, costs,
markets, and international public
attitudes were addressed. In
general, NASA found that the march
of technology and America's overall
space prowess has re-energized the
case for SSP. NASA did point out,
however, that launch cost to orbit
remains far too high - but that this
problem was being attacked.
I suggest that one method of attacking
the launch cost problem would be to use
stuff that's up there already, so you
don't have to lift it from earth.
Okay, what can you export from the moon that
would make any economic sense? My suggestion
would be solar power satellites that you then
station near the L1 point so they double as sun
shades.
With the power beamed from space you can burn
less coal (and reduce greenhouse gases, not to mention cancer deaths), and the ability to change solar
insolation let's us stop worrying quite so much
about the global warming problem.
There are plausible scenarios for things to do
with industry in space, they're just all up against
some bad bootstrap problems... you need to get
a lot of things in place before you definitely
have something worth doing. And at their
present rate of progress, NASA is going to get
us there around the year 3001.
It at least used to be that the word was
that a technically trained person could pick
up a lot of cash doing things like, say,
working on a nuclear power plant in China.
I wouldn't count on it being an interesting
part of China, but you never know until you
look into these things.
I've known a number of people who did the
overseas English instruction gig -- mostly in
Japan. Almost all had a good time with it,
the one exception being a black woman who felt
she had to deal with a lot of racism there.
One of the points in favor of this is that
you will definitely make human contact with
the locals (unlike much geek work, and most
forms of tourism).
Joining the military would not be my pick,
for many of the reasons mentioned, but if you
were going to do it, joining the infantry
with an engineering degree would be a total
waste of your time. I would consider doing the air force
to get yourself set-up for
working in the aerospace industry. A freind
of mine did the Navy because he liked submarines...
when last I talked to him he was living in
Santa Cruz, getting paid a full engineers salary
to earn his PhD, while doing a lot of scuba
diving in his spare time.
I think the industry has to stop being blinded by clock speed. Before
you can improve the speed of the chip there are still bottle necks on
the motherboards (e.g. PCI bus, Disk controllers). Also, there is the
problem of power consumption and heat.
Not to mention NOISE. But this sounds good to me, I'm with
you so far.
I think a better approach for the future are smaller less power hungry
modular CPUs.
Now you're kind of losing me. If the bus is the bottleneck,
shouldn't you be going after the bus?
(If you want to improve your disk controller, that's fairly
easy for most of you: just switch to SCSI.)
Maybe it's time to dump the current PC architecture
entirely... maybe stick with the double-bus design, but
instead of ISA and PCI swtich to PCI and whatever the next
generation is?
But granted that clusters of low power processors sound nifty
(transmeta?). It wouldn't surprise me if this is the wave
of the future in server designs (the place where I used to
work, the IT guys had to keep telling people "yes, we have
physical rack space to put in another server, but we're
maxed out on our power allocation").
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's a comment that I actually *have* heard from people...
If there are any perl-emacs folk out there who haven't looked at cperl-mode yet, I highly recommend it, if only because it's syntax highlighting doesn't get confused as easily. But *don't* waste any time with their "hairy" option that turns on all the bells and whistles. It's worthless. Oh, and I highly recommend sticking one of these in your .emacs, to turn off that ridiculous "highlight
trailing space" feature:
But: your example is exactly backwards here. You see, "info" format existed *long* before "lynx" did. The real question is, why did the guys who write lynx invent a new interface, when they could have used the default keymap from "info"?
There seems to be a weird dogmatic attitude that Gnu-haters develop that's just as bizarre as the worst of RMS's personality quirks: They refuse to admit that there might be some value in *anything* the FSF has come up with, and insist on re-inventing it.
"Why didn't they just use HTML?"
"Because HTML didn't exist back then, punk."
The Postgresql folks clearly care a lot about complying with the SQL standard, but despite the name "mySQL" doesn't seem to care that much (maybe that was the joke? "It's *my* SQL now!").
Could it be that objects distributed across a network are a fundamentally bad idea for some reason?
Here the author makes the point that Gnome has never lived up to the promise of CORBA. Has anything ever lived up to that promise?
I've heard recently that the SOAP guys are changing the meaning of the acronym. O isn't for Object any more.
I don't know much about the issue myself -- though I guess I've still a bit of an OOP skeptic -- mostly I'm just an interested bystander.
This has seemed obvious to me for some time, but for *some* reason your average geek seems to be resistant to this hypothesis: you were not an outcast because you're smart, you became smart because you were an outcast. There's something about you, maybe a slight physical disability, maybe a certain social incapacity, that made you run from the other kids and crawl inside your head.
The physical quality of the books is pretty good: they're roughly comparable to the trade paper backs that you get from O'Reilley or the Free Software Foundation.
I mentioned the pricing of the books, but neglected the pricing of the PDF subscription service: $15/year/volume gets you a subscription to the current PDFs based on the latest versions of the documentation. There are somewhat cheaper deals if you order more, e.g. the three Postgresql volumes I discuss are probably a "topical set", so a subscription to PDFs of all three of them would be $10 * 3 = $30/year.
I didn't talk about the PDF option much because personally I'm not that interested in it: I want pages trimmed and bound like a real book. But it's option you should know about to make your own decisions.
Does the cost of the PDF seem excessive? Well you know, if you think you can do better, no one is stopping you (if you haven't tried it yet: formatting on-line docs in a reasonable way for paper printout is probably harder than you think).
And in defense of my quasi-review here: what kind of review would be *preferable* for these kinds of books? The source material for them is out there on the web, you can go and skim it yourself... though probably you know what it's like, more or less. (However: don't just assume it's all man pages. The postgresql docs are considerably better fleshed out than that.) My take is: does it help to have the information in this form? What do you get out of it that you wouldn't get from having it on your hard drive (or on the web)? And in case it isn't clear, the point is that you tend to do a different kind of browsing with books than with computers, and so you learn about slightly different things.
Take a look at the "off-axis rotator" they used in these Neurolab experiments. It's really *small*... no wonder if it made them sick: Astronaut Training for The Vestibular Team Experiments
Gregory Benford's technical credentials are somewhat better established than yours, Anonymous: Gregory Benford Professor Plasma Physics and Astrophysics And, not that it's relevant or anything, but some of his fiction strikes me as being some of the best SF written in the last several decades (I'm a fan of "Across the Sea of Suns" myself).Mars exploration is a thought, at least it's dramatic enough that it might grab people's attention. I submit that we would be better off pursuing a goal in space with some obvious practical benefit, e.g. this scheme of Robert Kennedy of the Ultimax Group:
Apparently NASA "studied" the SPSS idea again a few years back. They said it looked good, but they needed to reduce launch costs "a problem which is being addressed" (by the space shuttle?):Mirrors & Smoke: Ameliorating Climate Change with Giant Solar Sails;
Topic: Mirrors & Smoke, and Other Shady Schemes
Bright Future for Solar Power Satellites
Though, I don't doubt that there are still some technical limitations of Linux compared to Solaris (and I'd be interested in hearing about them... as I remember it Solaris is supposed to scale to multiple processors better than Linux, though that might be old news).
Anyway, I agree that the various attempts at getting "sort of" like open source are pathetic (the source code under glass licenses and so on).
There are certainly sound conservative reasons a large enterprise should stick with what's working for them... e.g. if you're business centers around Oracle running on Solaris, you're not going to change either of those in a hurry. But on the other hand, if you were starting a new business, you'd be a fool not to think about Postgresql running on Linux/FreeBSD. And even an established business that's looking for ways of cutting costs should at least start thinking about switching.
Put this together and you've got a grim future for closed-source "enterprise class" software.
(This is shaping up to be one of the culture wars of the next decade, in my opinion. Over in this corner, we have: "Cities GOOD! Trains GOOD! Suburbs BAD! Cars BAD! Television BAD!" And over in the other corner we have "Oh don't listen to those negative, unamerican environmental whackos. Do they really think you fine people would have wasted your lives on bland, boring and pointless pursuits? Ha! Go back to sleep.")
A little while back, ESR was talking about founding a new organization, something like a political lobbying counterpart to the EFFs legal approach. I don't know what happened with that...
I wish he'd get on it, though. After 9/11 I joined the EFF. Then I joined the ACLU. If things get any worse, I'll need something else to join.
You might want to stop and consider how you would feel if another country grabbed some US citizens and gave them the bottomless pit treatment.
Oh, and what's up with this Barlow guy? He sounds like he's not a patriot:
You could also look at Bruce Sterling's "Distraction" from 1998 which pretty much totally nailed the concept.
(Not to mention that Washington Post article on "swarming")...
That's such a dorky idea, I have trouble thinking of an SF writer bright enough to have heard of "gravity waves" who would think it's at all plausible that they would travel FTL.
Here's a short listing of some I know about (thanks to another poster for reminding me about KDVS):
- Pittsburg: WRCT
- Georgia: WREK
- New York: WFUV
- Los Altos, CA: KFJC
- Berkeley, CA: KALX
- San Francisco, CA KUSF
- Davis, CA: KDVS
- Stanford, CA: KZSU
As you might guess from the above list, I'm located in California... I hang out at KZSU, myself.One thing to remember about college radio is that it changes constantly from program to program... there's often very litte of an attempt at presenting a consistent sound as in commercial radio. So don't just listen once or twice to a station and assume you know what they're about. Maybe you should look for an online program schedule to figure out when to listen.
You'll need to live with NS4 users for another few years most likely. In the meantime, might I suggest KISS?
(This message posted with lynx, by the way.)
With the power beamed from space you can burn less coal (and reduce greenhouse gases, not to mention cancer deaths), and the ability to change solar insolation let's us stop worrying quite so much about the global warming problem.
There are plausible scenarios for things to do with industry in space, they're just all up against some bad bootstrap problems... you need to get a lot of things in place before you definitely have something worth doing. And at their present rate of progress, NASA is going to get us there around the year 3001.
Neil Watson wrote:
Not to mention NOISE. But this sounds good to me, I'm with you so far.
Now you're kind of losing me. If the bus is the bottleneck, shouldn't you be going after the bus? (If you want to improve your disk controller, that's fairly easy for most of you: just switch to SCSI.) Maybe it's time to dump the current PC architecture entirely... maybe stick with the double-bus design, but instead of ISA and PCI swtich to PCI and whatever the next generation is?
But granted that clusters of low power processors sound nifty (transmeta?). It wouldn't surprise me if this is the wave of the future in server designs (the place where I used to work, the IT guys had to keep telling people "yes, we have physical rack space to put in another server, but we're maxed out on our power allocation").