My girlfriend has a hard enough time remembering to charge her mobile phone every night and often ends up with a dead battery.
Does your girlfriend get stuck by the side of the road because she forgot to put gas in the tank? I don't see how an electric would be much worse in that regard... there will still be a charge meter (nee fuel gauge) that will tell her when she is getting low on juice.
It could actually be easier than the current situation, if some clever person invents an auto-charging mechanism -- i.e. all you have to do is park your car in the garage, and a charger in the floor engages automatically. Dunno if that's at all practical, though.
Or in other words: wouldn't it be better to just run the database in RAM?
Yes... as long as there was a way to ensure data integrity in the event of an unexpected shtudown. The one nice thing about a journalled filesystem on a persistent store is that it doesn't go away when the lights go out...
Last I checked there was enough nuclear fuel to run fission reactors for the next 10,000 to 5,000,000,000 years depending on which method you choose to use. I don't think we'll be using that up.
Hmm... last I checked, we were trying our hardest to make sure 'interesting' states like Iran and North Korea weren't allowed to use nuclear power. So unless and until we feel comfortable giving everybody access to nuclear power (and not just the states we trust), nuclear power won't be a good solution.
Yeah, good luck generating all the world's electricity from solar and wind. Let me know when you've finished that up...
At some point (when all non-renewable fuel sources have been used up), it will happen. Of course, "all the world's electricity" may become a much smaller amount at that point...
They'll say "OK, we won't be renewing your grant next year. Thanks for all your hard work," and then I'll use the published research to get another position somewhere else.
Since they paid for your research, and they (likely) don't want the results of that research to become public, they will very likely forbid you from publishing the research or even telling anyone about your results.
So if you come up with the "wrong" answers, you most likely won't get to use them to obtain a position elsewhere. You'll have spent several years of your life and have nothing to show for it but a set of pay stubs and some unemployment insurance.
The ACLU thnks that anything negative that happens to minorities is directly attributable to, or ultimately caused by, racist white people.
No, you think they think that. That's because it's easier for you to bloviate about outrageous caricatures than to actually learn about the world around you. Look how emotionally you reacted to a single unverified comment on Slashdot. Because the previous poster said something that conformed to your cartoonish stereotype, you took it as gospel and made up a bunch of additional slurs to go along with it.
William James said that "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.". I'm pretty sure he had you in mind.
They all charged around like drunken rhinoceros, bellowing loudly, waiving their appendages, and making *lots* of accusations that were never proven aside from a few minor cases.
A voting system where fraud can't be proven isn't good enough. We need a system where the (inevitable) accusations of fraud can be easily disproven.
It's easy to dismiss the complaints of others when the political party you favor has just won the election. Imagine what you will feel like when a party you really dislike has won the election, under questionable circumstances. Will you just shrug it off and say "well, probably everyone was honest, the suspicious discrepancies are just coincidence", or will you wish you had a system that allowed for a meaningful review? If it's the latter, then you need to choose your voting system very carefully, in advance. By the time the election comes around, it will be too late.
What good is observability if you neglect accuracy to get it?
100% accuracy isn't necessary... if there are random mistakes made, there will be about as many mistakes made in one party's favor as another's, and in the end they will more or less cancel each other out. Given a large enough number of votes, the mistakes will be statistically insignificant.
Much more worrisome is the possibility of fraud -- that's why observability is so important. It needs to be verifiably obvious to all parties that the counting was accurate and that no shennanigans occurred. Otherwise, even the honestly and accurately counted elections will be diminished, because there will inevitably be un-refutable accusations of cheating from the losing candidates, and people's faith in the process will be lost.
How about a slightly different scheme? Instead of electing our leaders once every (n) years, we could have an election every day, or perhaps every week. Of course, doing that the traditional way would be completely impractical, so the elections would be held electronically, and for everyone who didn't vote in the election (read: most people, at least under normal circumstances), their votes from the previous election would be automatically carried over.
That way we'd still have the benefits of representative government, but we'd also have a very fast and effective way of making sure our elected officials "feel the heat" if they start doing things we don't like. If they knew they could be out of power tomorrow (or next week), they'd be very attentive to voter concerns...
I'm gonna sit and wait until they perfect this, and just before it gets popular (because its so cheap) I'm going to patent the 2 pixel camera with twice the resolution for only a tiny higher cost, and beat them at their own game!
You joke, but it might be a good idea... there's no need to stick to either the one-CCD-pixel-per-camera or the one-CCD-pixel-per-image-pixel extremes. Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere, like having 256 scanning-CCD-pixels operating in parallel to build up a (simulated) 16-megapixel image?
Only if you live a very uninteresting life that never takes you outside of your home city.
Welcome to Slashdot:^)
Why are athiests so angry and intolerant, especially at the mere mention of religion? Maybe they're missing something.
You've fallen victim to self-selection bias: it's the atheists that you hear from that are outspoken and opinionated about their (lack of) faith. There are many other atheists (like myself) who are perfectly content to leave the subject alone -- but of course you'll almost certainly never know that we're atheists, because we don't bring up the subject.
I could just as easily say "why are Christians so angry and intolerant, especially at the mere mention of atheism? Maybe they're missing something".... but I don't, because I realize that it's a just an illusion -- I'm only hearing from the squeaky wheels.
we come back with "well, we have sleep and standby and hibernate; hibernate is really cool because the computer is almost completely powered off but standby allows the computer to come back a lot faster
The problem is that neither standby nor hibernate does what the user wants. What the user wants is for the computer to use no power while unattended, and wake back up instantaneously when the user returns. The user doesn't want to have to think about tradeoffs, he wants the best of both worlds.
How to implement that ideal solution may be a tough problem, but the fact that it hasn't been done only shows that the technology isn't fully developed yet, not that users are lazy or programmers are stupid.
Except that KDE devs expect KDE4 to significantly reduce memory usage. Again
Just like Microsoft's Longhorn devs expected their SQL filesystem to revolutionize data storage. The moral: don't believe any claims nade about vaporware until you see it for yourself in the shipping product.
There's nothing to stop you from porting Qt to Windows, VAX/VMS or even the ZX81, if you were so inclined
Right, but as you said, nobody was so inclined. The difference with Qt4 (as I understand it) is that Qt4's Windows-specific back-end is also released under the GPL, so nobody needs to "port" Qt4 to Windows at all -- TrollTech has already done so and GPL'd the result. Thus, we now have GPL'd Qt for Windows (as opposed to just having the theoretical possibility of GPL'd Qt for Windows)
What they all seem to have in common is that they assume they have access to all the RAM, or as much of it as they can grab.
They don't assume "access to as much RAM as they can grab", they assume "access to as much RAM as they need". Given the presence of gigabyte RAM modules, virtual memory, and near-terabyte hard drives, this is usually a reasonable assumption.
I have to wonder if he's actually looked at things these days. I don't see where programming (properly done) to conserve memory is a bad thing. If anything, it seems that few are actually doing it
Certainly one shouldn't gratuitously waste memory, but it's possible to go to far the other way too... you can become so wrapped up in reducing memory usage that the other aspects of your program (e.g. runtime performance, code simplicity, code correctness, or maintainability) suffer. I'd much rather have a program use a lot of memory and work well, than one that uses a teensy amount of memory but crashes, or doesn't get the job done. Memory is dirt-cheap these days, and if you've got it you might as well put it to use.
Write the algorithms correctly and there won't BE any buffer-overflows.
What's so hard about this?
The "write the algorithms correctly" part. The demand for programs is much larger than the supply of sufficiently trained/disciplined/talented programmers. Therefore, we need a solution that gives acceptable results even when the programmer isn't a guru (and preferably when the programmer is a trained monkey, because he often will be)
He must be criticizing open source programmers only. Because in business, programmers aren't focussed on speed and efficiency
Business software isn't the problem. The software that is the problem is the software that runs on every naive home user's PC... Windows, Outlook, IE, Mozilla, AIM, etc etc. This is the software whose security problems allow spam, credit card fraud, virus outbreaks, etc. And last time I checked, all of that stuff is still written in C or C++, not in any VM.
Berger sounds like a VM-language bigot (or paid ($30K from MS).Net Runtime shill) who doesn't understand how most software is really made, and prefers to believe in caricatures of programmers.
Great, you've called the guy a bigot, a shill, and an idiot, without even having understood what he was talking about.
They seem to misunderstand that the rhythm of nature is a slightly different thing then what is society here least in the capitolistic land of New England, she begs for a better balance and tighter control on states of being.
Hmm, so which is it, letting the "rhythm of nature" take care of itself, or having humans manage nature the way they see fit? You seem to be arguing for both ways at once.
Personally, I think if nature is 'begging' for anything, it's to be left alone.
My 2006 Christmas pet peeve: people who are rude enough to use the phrase "shut the fuck up", but too cowardly to spell it out. Here's a tip: if you don't feel comfortable writing it out, you shouldn't feel comfortable using the acronym either. It's just as rude, and it makes you look inhibited as well.
Jury duty though... that concept is just plain stupid.
You're right... much better to be tried and convicted by the same government that is arresting and prosecuting you in the first place. You're sure to get a fair and unbiased trial then.
Talk about immediate environmental impact. WAKE UP people - wind farms take energy directly out of a very complex self-regulating system.
Good. Maybe that will offset a bit of the extra energy being added to that same system via the greenhouse effect.
Let's see how long it takes the greenies to realise this is NOT a long term solution
Probably some time after the alleged deleterious effects become apparent. The reason you don't mention any of those effects is because (barring the occasional insignificant bird kill) there are none. Come back when you have more than half-panicked hand-waving.
As I have repeated said, energy efficiency is the only soultion to our energy problems.
Nothing is "the only solution". There are many partial solutions that will help, and we can implement most of them in parallel -- it's not a one-or-the-other decision. Maybe a little clear thinking is in order for you also.
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Does your girlfriend get stuck by the side of the road because she forgot to put gas in the tank? I don't see how an electric would be much worse in that regard... there will still be a charge meter (nee fuel gauge) that will tell her when she is getting low on juice.
It could actually be easier than the current situation, if some clever person invents an auto-charging mechanism -- i.e. all you have to do is park your car in the garage, and a charger in the floor engages automatically. Dunno if that's at all practical, though.
Yes... as long as there was a way to ensure data integrity in the event of an unexpected shtudown. The one nice thing about a journalled filesystem on a persistent store is that it doesn't go away when the lights go out...
Hmm... last I checked, we were trying our hardest to make sure 'interesting' states like Iran and North Korea weren't allowed to use nuclear power. So unless and until we feel comfortable giving everybody access to nuclear power (and not just the states we trust), nuclear power won't be a good solution.
At some point (when all non-renewable fuel sources have been used up), it will happen. Of course, "all the world's electricity" may become a much smaller amount at that point...
Since they paid for your research, and they (likely) don't want the results of that research to become public, they will very likely forbid you from publishing the research or even telling anyone about your results.
So if you come up with the "wrong" answers, you most likely won't get to use them to obtain a position elsewhere. You'll have spent several years of your life and have nothing to show for it but a set of pay stubs and some unemployment insurance.
See how it works?
No, you think they think that. That's because it's easier for you to bloviate about outrageous caricatures than to actually learn about the world around you. Look how emotionally you reacted to a single unverified comment on Slashdot. Because the previous poster said something that conformed to your cartoonish stereotype, you took it as gospel and made up a bunch of additional slurs to go along with it.
William James said that "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.". I'm pretty sure he had you in mind.
A voting system where fraud can't be proven isn't good enough. We need a system where the (inevitable) accusations of fraud can be easily disproven.
It's easy to dismiss the complaints of others when the political party you favor has just won the election. Imagine what you will feel like when a party you really dislike has won the election, under questionable circumstances. Will you just shrug it off and say "well, probably everyone was honest, the suspicious discrepancies are just coincidence", or will you wish you had a system that allowed for a meaningful review? If it's the latter, then you need to choose your voting system very carefully, in advance. By the time the election comes around, it will be too late.
100% accuracy isn't necessary
Much more worrisome is the possibility of fraud -- that's why observability is so important. It needs to be verifiably obvious to all parties that the counting was accurate and that no shennanigans occurred. Otherwise, even the honestly and accurately counted elections will be diminished, because there will inevitably be un-refutable accusations of cheating from the losing candidates, and people's faith in the process will be lost.
That way we'd still have the benefits of representative government, but we'd also have a very fast and effective way of making sure our elected officials "feel the heat" if they start doing things we don't like. If they knew they could be out of power tomorrow (or next week), they'd be very attentive to voter concerns...
Just a crazy thought...
Why do you keep breaking your CFLs?
You joke, but it might be a good idea... there's no need to stick to either the one-CCD-pixel-per-camera or the one-CCD-pixel-per-image-pixel extremes. Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere, like having 256 scanning-CCD-pixels operating in parallel to build up a (simulated) 16-megapixel image?
Welcome to Slashdot
Why are athiests so angry and intolerant, especially at the mere mention of religion? Maybe they're missing something.
You've fallen victim to self-selection bias: it's the atheists that you hear from that are outspoken and opinionated about their (lack of) faith. There are many other atheists (like myself) who are perfectly content to leave the subject alone -- but of course you'll almost certainly never know that we're atheists, because we don't bring up the subject.
I could just as easily say "why are Christians so angry and intolerant, especially at the mere mention of atheism? Maybe they're missing something".... but I don't, because I realize that it's a just an illusion -- I'm only hearing from the squeaky wheels.
The problem is that neither standby nor hibernate does what the user wants. What the user wants is for the computer to use no power while unattended, and wake back up instantaneously when the user returns. The user doesn't want to have to think about tradeoffs, he wants the best of both worlds.
How to implement that ideal solution may be a tough problem, but the fact that it hasn't been done only shows that the technology isn't fully developed yet, not that users are lazy or programmers are stupid.
Just like Microsoft's Longhorn devs expected their SQL filesystem to revolutionize data storage. The moral: don't believe any claims nade about vaporware until you see it for yourself in the shipping product.
Right, but as you said, nobody was so inclined. The difference with Qt4 (as I understand it) is that Qt4's Windows-specific back-end is also released under the GPL, so nobody needs to "port" Qt4 to Windows at all -- TrollTech has already done so and GPL'd the result. Thus, we now have GPL'd Qt for Windows (as opposed to just having the theoretical possibility of GPL'd Qt for Windows)
access to all the RAM, or as much of it as they can grab.
They don't assume "access to as much RAM as they can grab", they assume "access to as much RAM as they need". Given the presence of gigabyte RAM modules, virtual memory, and near-terabyte hard drives, this is usually a reasonable assumption.
I have to wonder if he's actually looked at things these days. I don't see where programming (properly done) to conserve memory is a bad thing. If anything, it
seems that few are actually doing it
Certainly one shouldn't gratuitously waste memory, but it's possible to go to far the other way too... you can become so wrapped up in reducing memory usage that the other aspects of your program (e.g. runtime performance, code simplicity, code correctness, or maintainability) suffer. I'd much rather have a program use a lot of memory and work well, than one that uses a teensy amount of memory but crashes, or doesn't get the job done. Memory is dirt-cheap these days, and if you've got it you might as well put it to use.
What's so hard about this?
The "write the algorithms correctly" part. The demand for programs is much larger than the supply of sufficiently trained/disciplined/talented programmers. Therefore, we need a solution that gives acceptable results even when the programmer isn't a guru (and preferably when the programmer is a trained monkey, because he often will be)
Business software isn't the problem. The software that is the problem is the software that runs on every naive home user's PC
Berger sounds like a VM-language bigot (or paid ($30K from MS)
who doesn't understand how most software is really made, and prefers to believe in caricatures of programmers.
Great, you've called the guy a bigot, a shill, and an idiot, without even having understood what he was talking about.
Is this feature standard in Linux yet? I'd hate to see us OSS guys get shown up by Bill...
Ah, that's the stuff. Much better!
Hmm, so which is it, letting the "rhythm of nature" take care of itself, or having humans manage nature the way they see fit? You seem to be arguing for both ways at once.
Personally, I think if nature is 'begging' for anything, it's to be left alone.
What, because the mere sight of a deer drives people into such a state of lustful desire that they can't control themselves?
"Yer honor, the deer was asking for it! His lips said no, but his antlers were saying yes, yes, yes!"
My 2006 Christmas pet peeve: people who are rude enough to use the phrase "shut the fuck up", but too cowardly to spell it out. Here's a tip: if you don't feel comfortable writing it out, you shouldn't feel comfortable using the acronym either. It's just as rude, and it makes you look inhibited as well.
bah.
You're right... much better to be tried and convicted by the same government that is arresting and prosecuting you in the first place. You're sure to get a fair and unbiased trial then.
Good. Maybe that will offset a bit of the extra energy being added to that same system via the greenhouse effect.
Let's see how long it takes the greenies to realise this is NOT a long term solution
Probably some time after the alleged deleterious effects become apparent. The reason you don't mention any of those effects is because (barring the occasional insignificant bird kill) there are none. Come back when you have more than half-panicked hand-waving.
As I have repeated said, energy efficiency is the only soultion to our energy problems.
Nothing is "the only solution". There are many partial solutions that will help, and we can implement most of them in parallel -- it's not a one-or-the-other decision. Maybe a little clear thinking is in order for you also.