I use CrunchBang, a modified Debian Squeeze distro that is almost entirely controlled by keyboard shortcuts. Sure, you use the mouse as normal for browsing and all that, but the interface is keyboard-based. I'm not sure if Windows can be customized like that, but it almost certainly takes a lot more work.
Any sources for these claims? I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers I have on Facebook who keep going on about Germany and its "fantastic ambient-friendly move"...
No way in hell just 5% are infected. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. I fix PCs as an occasional job, and not one Windows computer I've had to fix was completely malware-free. That's not to say 100% are infected, but the uninfected ones are probably owned by nerds who don't come to me to get them fixed, so I can't give a proper statistic. Still, the 5% figure is completely unrealistic.
This is the question the anti-nuke people never seem to answer, it's always just "something else".
Nah, they have the answer: "solar". Never mind that the average solar energy on the surface of the planet is anywhere from 164 to 250 watt per square metre (according to different sources)... which sounds like a fair amount of energy, until you consider that every method we have for collecting it is hopelessly inefficient. Even with super-efficient, super-expensive solar cells with, oh, 25% efficiency, you're talking 40 to 60 watts per square metre. This is not terrible for the average household, but even ignoring for the sake of argument the additional inefficiency in getting that power to what needs it, it takes a whole lot of space and cells (which don't last forever and take resources to make) to power, oh, an aluminium smelter, or a train system, or any of a million power-hungry things in your average city. And most solar cells aren't going to be of the super-efficient kind anyway.
As for solar collection powerplants, they are a nightmare of high maintenance and super-reflective mirrors aren't cheap either.
But don't worry, I'm sure if enough trees are hugged they'll magically start giving us all the energy we need.
Considering the vast amounts of pirated ebooks available online, I'm always curious as to why so few people mention the phenomenon at all. Mention music prices being expensive and you get dozens of comments about torrents, wink wink nudge nudge. But mention ebooks being too expensive and people start talking about paper versions, when huge and neatly categorized collections of hundreds if not thousands of ebooks are a btjunkie search away. It seems most people ignore ebook piracy completely. Why?
Something smells fishy. A hundred million dollars is a fucking huge pile of money; many companies with far more market impact than Limewire would have trouble coming up with that kind of cash. Where the hell did Limewire get all of that, especially considering that the vast majority of people were using the free version?
...and how well 7 runs on netbooks even though it is slower than congealed shit.
I'm by no means a fanboy or shill - in fact, I hate Microsoft and their operating system and am a Linux user at heart - but when one must use Windows, I've personally found that 7 behaves better in almost all environments - exceptions being the truly slow netbooks such as those early 12" abominations using Z520 Atoms.
Even chernobyl only killed around 50 people. Total death toll for the nuclear industry over 60 years is perhaps 100 people.
I'm in favour of nuclear energy and I too feel safer after the Japanese events, but I fear that that statement is grossly incorrect. The WHO might say that there have only been 60 direct deaths among the liquidators, but every other source says at least several thousand. Considering the slapdash methods of the Soviet Union, I find it hard to believe that only a few dozen were exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
Other than that, I'm happy there are SOME people making sense.
You mean like the fact that the release of those pictures is almost certainly going to incite violence against the US and its citizens?
Perhaps, but some sort of proof is needed here. So far, the only proof the world has of Bin Laden's death is what the US government has said, and sadly that is not enough by a long shot.
I think all those who go on and on and on about video quality and all that are missing the crucial point: bluray failed to make a significant impact because it isn't convenient to burn data on it.
When DVD came out, it was the best way to store large amounts of data. In fact, plain ol' DVDs are still the cheapest way to do so (if not the most efficient for truly huge amounts), although hard drives are finally encroaching on their territory as well.
Back when DVDs were a new thing, with USB thumdrives and broadband still expensive, people who wanted to bring a few pirated movies, albums or games from their home to their friends' place would burn'em on a DVD or three and carry them over. There were, and still are, huge amounts of pirated entertainment meticulously preserved on piles of DVDs. Offices backed data up on DVDs. Even larger places with redundant drives and tapes and all that often made a DVD backup, because it was incredibly cheap and one more backup is always better than one less. In fact, it'd really surprise me if more than half of the world's burned DVDs were strictly for movie usage, to be watched on the living room television.
And now we have Bluray, which just isn't competitive. The burners are still expensive, each bluray costs as much as ten (or more) DVDs while holding about half as much data, and if you don't shop online IRL stores often don't even sell them. And we don't have rewritable ones, or dual-layer ones that you can actually buy. And then there are thumbdrives; we've come to the point where a thumbdrive that holds more data than a bluray now has an acceptable price even if you aren't rich, and you don't need to bother with the whole burning process, and compared to a delicate, scratch-prone plastic disc thumbdrives are practically indesctructable. And then, of course, there are hard drives. 3.5" disks have passed BluRays in price-per-gigabyte, and while 2.5" ones haven't yet they're far more practical.
In short: nobody is interested in burning data on blurays, which robs the format of its greatest potential market. Add to this that, even in its second market - movies - most people don't much care about its advantages, and even those who do care have to bend over for the MPAA, and you see why the format is in trouble. I wonder how worse it'd be if the PS3 didn't use them...
Often not even that much. Many V1s crashed short of their target because the engine quit due to fuel line problems, or flamed out due to broken valves or other types of structural failure. The V1 pulsejet was strictly disposable. Even valved pulsejets built with current technology have problems, because there's only so much new materials can do when a thin disc of metal is being violently slapped by a detonation about fifty times every second (increasing as engine size goes down up to a whopping 250 times per second for small model engines... though due to square-cube law, small engines with tiny valves may well last longer even if they pulse a lot faster). That's why the valveless pulsejet was invented... it solves all of the valved's problems except for the awful fuel economy, which is one of the two reasons (the other being the truly ludicrously loud noise) we don't currently use pulsejets on a large scale.
P2P downloads are going down because everyone's too busy downloading the latest releases off Rapidshare, Megaupload and all the other clones. I'm not sure if the RIAA just doesn't get this, or is purposefully ignoring it for propaganda reasons.
But I'll tell you why I am not inclined towards E-books. I like to read in the tub.
Put the reader in a ziploc bag and use your preferred method for sealing it. Won't be completely waterproof unless you seal the bag with an electric bag sealer (and then you have to rip it open to get the reader back; on the other hand, sealing it with air inside will make sure it floats), but it'll stand casual splashing and probably even short immersion, at least for the time necessary for you to go "OH FUCK" and fish it out.:P
Stop spreading this sensationalistic bullshit. Even in a worst-case scenario, that being meltdown of all cores, cracking of all containment buildings and fires in all spent fuel pools, the consequences would be tiny compared to those of Chernobyl. Yes, the whole area would be evacuated (some of it already is), and there would be large amounts of radioactive pollution, but there would be no "liquidators" giving their lives up to contain the situation, and people wouldn't be sacrificed in an attempt to save face. Japan isn't the Soviet Union.
Note: after writing the above writeup I considered deleting the whole thing because the parent post is obviously trolling, but then I decided to leave it in place anyway as there's already too much misinformation about this situation.
Yeah, the supposed nerds were all way too cool to be real, the technobabble was uninspired and the representation of the virtual environment was absolutely ridiculous, but try to see it from a more open-minded point of view: once you remove all the eye candy, the characters were essentially DDoSing a server with the intention of bypassing its security and recovering important files for the benefit of themselves and everyone else, which is the closest representation of hacker ethics to reality I've ever seen in the world of movies.
It's a bit like trying to explain complicated things to non-savvy people by way of analogies and exaggerations: it's not how things REALLY work, but people get the underlying message, and with all its flaws Hackers managed to do that quite well in my opinion.
Also, HALF-SECOND SHOT OF YOUNG NOT-YET-INSANE ANGELINA JOLIE'S BOOBS WOOHOO
"Oggi, però, mi accordo di desiderare, dal profondo del cuore, la morte di Silvio Berlusconi . Non solo: ***mi sento proprio disposta ad andarlo a far fuori personalmente.***"
The asterisked part translates to "I am ready to go kill him myself". Now granted, the rest of the blog post is obviously satyrical and even thinking this person actually wants to go kill the dude (whom I intensely dislike, by the way) is insane, but the fact is, she did violate the law by stating this. It's still ridiculous that the blog was seized when any search for "kill berlusconi" will reveal that if someone did off the man half of italy would welcome his death and dance on his grave, but you can't technically fault the police for their actions.
Still and all, the only thing seizing the blog will accomplish is to make the attempt at censorship more widely known via your friend the Streisand effect.
I'm all for freedom of information, hacker ethics, cracking everything that can be cracked for teh lulz and all that, and I hate Sony as much as the next nerd so I'm happy the PS3 got cracked, despite my complete lack of interest in consoles (I'm a PC gamer at heart). But why did Geohot go public with the PS3 keys once he'd found them? He could easily have distributed them anonymously, achieving the same result without all the trouble. If he really HAD to bolster his e-peen, he could have done things so as to imply he was behind it, but with nothing explicit to prosecute him from.
This should be common sense whoever is on the other end of your guns, let alone if Sony is there, who are known for attempting to sue out of existence anyone who even remotely goes against their wishes.
I'm more of the opinion that some games need to be played on the PC (first person shooters and real-time strategy above all), but there's no game that MUST be played on a console - anything a console can do, a PC can do better - including living-room gaming if connected to a HD TV set. Yes, even beat-em-ups and racing games. If you don't like to use the keyboard for those, just plug a cheapo USB pad and go nuts.
1) You can spend even less than $100 and get a perfectly OK card that'll play Crysis at close to full detail 2) You do development work on a laptop and you can't be bothered installing the occasional driver update and/or game patch? It's not much different than upgrading your console's firmware, a couple clicks is all it takes. 3) Constantly upgrading hardware hasn't been necessary for a while now. I've been playing Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 on my old Q6600 with its HD4770 card and having a blast, no performance issues whatsoever.
Using an ad-supported service to distribute firmware for your commercial device doesn't exactly scream professionality.
That said, I've never quite figured out how rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload etc make enough money to keep themselves afloat, much less profit. Installing JDownloader is the only thing that stands between the user and functionally unlimited ad-free downloads, provided he has a modicum of patience.
The only explanation I can find is that people DON'T have any patience to speak of and want their files NOW NOW NOW, but it seems a bit of a stretch to think that enough people are that impatient.
I can see why someone with "It's GNU/Linux dammit!" in their signature would be scared by the sound of their phone ringing. I imagine it's something that happens roughly twice a year.:P
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I use CrunchBang, a modified Debian Squeeze distro that is almost entirely controlled by keyboard shortcuts. Sure, you use the mouse as normal for browsing and all that, but the interface is keyboard-based.
I'm not sure if Windows can be customized like that, but it almost certainly takes a lot more work.
Any sources for these claims? I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers I have on Facebook who keep going on about Germany and its "fantastic ambient-friendly move"...
No way in hell just 5% are infected. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. I fix PCs as an occasional job, and not one Windows computer I've had to fix was completely malware-free. That's not to say 100% are infected, but the uninfected ones are probably owned by nerds who don't come to me to get them fixed, so I can't give a proper statistic. Still, the 5% figure is completely unrealistic.
This is the question the anti-nuke people never seem to answer, it's always just "something else".
Nah, they have the answer: "solar". Never mind that the average solar energy on the surface of the planet is anywhere from 164 to 250 watt per square metre (according to different sources)... which sounds like a fair amount of energy, until you consider that every method we have for collecting it is hopelessly inefficient. Even with super-efficient, super-expensive solar cells with, oh, 25% efficiency, you're talking 40 to 60 watts per square metre. This is not terrible for the average household, but even ignoring for the sake of argument the additional inefficiency in getting that power to what needs it, it takes a whole lot of space and cells (which don't last forever and take resources to make) to power, oh, an aluminium smelter, or a train system, or any of a million power-hungry things in your average city. And most solar cells aren't going to be of the super-efficient kind anyway.
As for solar collection powerplants, they are a nightmare of high maintenance and super-reflective mirrors aren't cheap either.
But don't worry, I'm sure if enough trees are hugged they'll magically start giving us all the energy we need.
Considering the vast amounts of pirated ebooks available online, I'm always curious as to why so few people mention the phenomenon at all. Mention music prices being expensive and you get dozens of comments about torrents, wink wink nudge nudge. But mention ebooks being too expensive and people start talking about paper versions, when huge and neatly categorized collections of hundreds if not thousands of ebooks are a btjunkie search away. It seems most people ignore ebook piracy completely.
Why?
Something smells fishy. A hundred million dollars is a fucking huge pile of money; many companies with far more market impact than Limewire would have trouble coming up with that kind of cash. Where the hell did Limewire get all of that, especially considering that the vast majority of people were using the free version?
...and how well 7 runs on netbooks even though it is slower than congealed shit.
I'm by no means a fanboy or shill - in fact, I hate Microsoft and their operating system and am a Linux user at heart - but when one must use Windows, I've personally found that 7 behaves better in almost all environments - exceptions being the truly slow netbooks such as those early 12" abominations using Z520 Atoms.
Even chernobyl only killed around 50 people. Total death toll for the nuclear industry over 60 years is perhaps 100 people.
I'm in favour of nuclear energy and I too feel safer after the Japanese events, but I fear that that statement is grossly incorrect. The WHO might say that there have only been 60 direct deaths among the liquidators, but every other source says at least several thousand. Considering the slapdash methods of the Soviet Union, I find it hard to believe that only a few dozen were exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
Other than that, I'm happy there are SOME people making sense.
You mean like the fact that the release of those pictures is almost certainly going to incite violence against the US and its citizens?
Perhaps, but some sort of proof is needed here. So far, the only proof the world has of Bin Laden's death is what the US government has said, and sadly that is not enough by a long shot.
since it's Sony who's doing the right thing, it must be bad somehow, right?
Yes. Sony can't ever do anything without screwing it up in some critical way. I wish I were fucking kidding.
Do I tell him to use Debian and have a slightly more difficult time setting things up, but a better system in the end?
Yes.
I think all those who go on and on and on about video quality and all that are missing the crucial point: bluray failed to make a significant impact because it isn't convenient to burn data on it.
When DVD came out, it was the best way to store large amounts of data. In fact, plain ol' DVDs are still the cheapest way to do so (if not the most efficient for truly huge amounts), although hard drives are finally encroaching on their territory as well.
Back when DVDs were a new thing, with USB thumdrives and broadband still expensive, people who wanted to bring a few pirated movies, albums or games from their home to their friends' place would burn'em on a DVD or three and carry them over. There were, and still are, huge amounts of pirated entertainment meticulously preserved on piles of DVDs. Offices backed data up on DVDs. Even larger places with redundant drives and tapes and all that often made a DVD backup, because it was incredibly cheap and one more backup is always better than one less.
In fact, it'd really surprise me if more than half of the world's burned DVDs were strictly for movie usage, to be watched on the living room television.
And now we have Bluray, which just isn't competitive. The burners are still expensive, each bluray costs as much as ten (or more) DVDs while holding about half as much data, and if you don't shop online IRL stores often don't even sell them.
And we don't have rewritable ones, or dual-layer ones that you can actually buy.
And then there are thumbdrives; we've come to the point where a thumbdrive that holds more data than a bluray now has an acceptable price even if you aren't rich, and you don't need to bother with the whole burning process, and compared to a delicate, scratch-prone plastic disc thumbdrives are practically indesctructable.
And then, of course, there are hard drives. 3.5" disks have passed BluRays in price-per-gigabyte, and while 2.5" ones haven't yet they're far more practical.
In short: nobody is interested in burning data on blurays, which robs the format of its greatest potential market. Add to this that, even in its second market - movies - most people don't much care about its advantages, and even those who do care have to bend over for the MPAA, and you see why the format is in trouble. I wonder how worse it'd be if the PS3 didn't use them...
Often not even that much. Many V1s crashed short of their target because the engine quit due to fuel line problems, or flamed out due to broken valves or other types of structural failure. The V1 pulsejet was strictly disposable. Even valved pulsejets built with current technology have problems, because there's only so much new materials can do when a thin disc of metal is being violently slapped by a detonation about fifty times every second (increasing as engine size goes down up to a whopping 250 times per second for small model engines... though due to square-cube law, small engines with tiny valves may well last longer even if they pulse a lot faster).
That's why the valveless pulsejet was invented... it solves all of the valved's problems except for the awful fuel economy, which is one of the two reasons (the other being the truly ludicrously loud noise) we don't currently use pulsejets on a large scale.
P2P downloads are going down because everyone's too busy downloading the latest releases off Rapidshare, Megaupload and all the other clones. I'm not sure if the RIAA just doesn't get this, or is purposefully ignoring it for propaganda reasons.
But I'll tell you why I am not inclined towards E-books. I like to read in the tub.
Put the reader in a ziploc bag and use your preferred method for sealing it. Won't be completely waterproof unless you seal the bag with an electric bag sealer (and then you have to rip it open to get the reader back; on the other hand, sealing it with air inside will make sure it floats), but it'll stand casual splashing and probably even short immersion, at least for the time necessary for you to go "OH FUCK" and fish it out. :P
Stop spreading this sensationalistic bullshit. Even in a worst-case scenario, that being meltdown of all cores, cracking of all containment buildings and fires in all spent fuel pools, the consequences would be tiny compared to those of Chernobyl. Yes, the whole area would be evacuated (some of it already is), and there would be large amounts of radioactive pollution, but there would be no "liquidators" giving their lives up to contain the situation, and people wouldn't be sacrificed in an attempt to save face. Japan isn't the Soviet Union.
Note: after writing the above writeup I considered deleting the whole thing because the parent post is obviously trolling, but then I decided to leave it in place anyway as there's already too much misinformation about this situation.
Yeah, the supposed nerds were all way too cool to be real, the technobabble was uninspired and the representation of the virtual environment was absolutely ridiculous, but try to see it from a more open-minded point of view: once you remove all the eye candy, the characters were essentially DDoSing a server with the intention of bypassing its security and recovering important files for the benefit of themselves and everyone else, which is the closest representation of hacker ethics to reality I've ever seen in the world of movies.
It's a bit like trying to explain complicated things to non-savvy people by way of analogies and exaggerations: it's not how things REALLY work, but people get the underlying message, and with all its flaws Hackers managed to do that quite well in my opinion.
Also, HALF-SECOND SHOT OF YOUNG NOT-YET-INSANE ANGELINA JOLIE'S BOOBS WOOHOO
What, no Italy?
I'm sincerely shocked.
Quoting from the text:
"Oggi, però, mi accordo di desiderare, dal profondo del cuore, la morte di Silvio Berlusconi .
Non solo: ***mi sento proprio disposta ad andarlo a far fuori personalmente.***"
The asterisked part translates to "I am ready to go kill him myself".
Now granted, the rest of the blog post is obviously satyrical and even thinking this person actually wants to go kill the dude (whom I intensely dislike, by the way) is insane, but the fact is, she did violate the law by stating this. It's still ridiculous that the blog was seized when any search for "kill berlusconi" will reveal that if someone did off the man half of italy would welcome his death and dance on his grave, but you can't technically fault the police for their actions.
Still and all, the only thing seizing the blog will accomplish is to make the attempt at censorship more widely known via your friend the Streisand effect.
I'm all for freedom of information, hacker ethics, cracking everything that can be cracked for teh lulz and all that, and I hate Sony as much as the next nerd so I'm happy the PS3 got cracked, despite my complete lack of interest in consoles (I'm a PC gamer at heart). But why did Geohot go public with the PS3 keys once he'd found them? He could easily have distributed them anonymously, achieving the same result without all the trouble. If he really HAD to bolster his e-peen, he could have done things so as to imply he was behind it, but with nothing explicit to prosecute him from.
This should be common sense whoever is on the other end of your guns, let alone if Sony is there, who are known for attempting to sue out of existence anyone who even remotely goes against their wishes.
I'm more of the opinion that some games need to be played on the PC (first person shooters and real-time strategy above all), but there's no game that MUST be played on a console - anything a console can do, a PC can do better - including living-room gaming if connected to a HD TV set. Yes, even beat-em-ups and racing games. If you don't like to use the keyboard for those, just plug a cheapo USB pad and go nuts.
I'm sorry, are you from the past?
1) You can spend even less than $100 and get a perfectly OK card that'll play Crysis at close to full detail
2) You do development work on a laptop and you can't be bothered installing the occasional driver update and/or game patch? It's not much different than upgrading your console's firmware, a couple clicks is all it takes.
3) Constantly upgrading hardware hasn't been necessary for a while now. I've been playing Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 on my old Q6600 with its HD4770 card and having a blast, no performance issues whatsoever.
Using an ad-supported service to distribute firmware for your commercial device doesn't exactly scream professionality.
That said, I've never quite figured out how rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload etc make enough money to keep themselves afloat, much less profit. Installing JDownloader is the only thing that stands between the user and functionally unlimited ad-free downloads, provided he has a modicum of patience.
The only explanation I can find is that people DON'T have any patience to speak of and want their files NOW NOW NOW, but it seems a bit of a stretch to think that enough people are that impatient.
Can't they just put the boards in the ovens and simply lift the damaged chip off?
I can see why someone with "It's GNU/Linux dammit!" in their signature would be scared by the sound of their phone ringing. I imagine it's something that happens roughly twice a year. :P