The sheer amount of chutzpah passing in place of intelligence in this post is just... astounding. It's like stupid has become legitimized!
Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs.
Which has what to do with sustainability, again? You imply sustainability by mentioning it in the next sentence.
If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
I mean... wow! It's just like farming!
We know almost *nothing* about this process, except that the metabolic rate of these bacteria are mind numbingly slow. We're talking at rates where a single reproduction is a thousand years in length. Just how long are you willing to wait for your next tank of gas?
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous
Unless, of course, you look at this with something other than stupid. Get that out of the way, and you see that this changes about as much the grass growth on your lawn over the next 3.5 minutes.
With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
This happens in all wells, either with Oil or Water. It's not like there's a bladder down under ground and we're going to empty it. Oil and water are present in the fissures and pores of the surrounding rocks and soil. When you pump out the water/oil, you create a low pressure point, and fluid seeps from the surrounding soil. It's only in the case of extreme ignorance that this effect seems remarkable.
Your post is an extremely good example of why relying on the "wisdom of the crowds" can instead be relying on the "stupid foibles and commonly mistunderstood ideas" of the crowds.
This is why I am extremely skeptical of claims that we will be able to effectively model the brain, or recreate it artificially, any time soon.
Well, maybe, maybe not. It may be that we are finding unexpected complexity in the brain. On the other hand, we're seeing continued advances in computing technology - I remember reading about the end of Moore's law 20 years ago! Sure, physics have forced certain ideas to be tossed, such as the Uni-Processor model, but progress is still occurring at a blistering pace, with my battery-powered Android phone handily outperforming the top-of-the-line computers highlighted in those "Moore's law is almost dead" articles of yore.
Even if it's 100x as complicated as we thought, that only adds 10 years or so to Moore's law with an 18-month doubling.
Look at it this way: for a long time, sequencing the human genome was predicted to take decades. Thanks to advances in computing technology, it took less than one, and nowadays it's within the reach of any middle-class American to get their own individual DNA sequenced.
I've started using Mercurial, and I LOVE it! It's lightweight nature means I can make ANY directory a repo, and keep track of changes within that directory, using nothing more than that directory. This makes it feasibly easy to use source control in places I never would have with SVN - such as admin scripts buried in/usr/local, or all the system settings in/etc...
It has solved problems I never thought truly possible to solve instantly, easily, and accurately.
Scams are, by definition, acts where people work to appear 'legit'. But being 'legit' is itself nothing more than an act! There's nothing about a professional that isn't anything but an act, an intentional presentation of what you want the user to believe. You think that the Terminex guy in the uniform spent his/her life wanting to kill bugs?
The only difference with a scam artist is the degree to which they will go to keep up the act -real professionals will act all the way through doing the job, while scam artists only act long enough to get your money. Since this is the ONLY difference, there will ALWAYS be problems with scam artists in any society big enough to force its members to transact with strangers.
In a strange sort of way, Microsoft has always been rather open with their stuff. The problem with WinMo isn't that it was closed, the problem was that it just sucked.
I had a WinMo 6.1 phone, and compared to a $20 Samsung phone, it was awesome. But it honestly looked and felt like a comical parody of Microsoft Windows 3.1. It had all the spit and polish of a 200 pound, meth-addicted trailer trash chick in a stained white wife-beater and ripped pajama bottoms. And I just think to myself: Microsoft has enough money in the bank to rival many nations' GDP - and this is the best that they could come up with in the area that they clearly thought was most important for future growth?
It's no wonder that Apple came along and stomped them, and Android is really a rehash of iOS with an open license.
More importantly, I'm just as likely to be posting this from my phone as my laptop. I basically don't browse on my desktop - that's where the printer is, and is far more likely to be showing videos from Hulu/Netflix than normal "desktop computer" use.
Pretty dang easy, btw. 'Just record the signals, we'll process them later' is a good start, followed up by jr employee thinking that doing so was a good idea, until sr exec says "what the h377 were you thinking!" As a close second.
The wi-fi situation wasn't a case of Google "getting caught" - it was a case of them noticing the data being collected had more than they had wanted and being up front and open about its disclosure. And in the latter case, it's basically never a good idea to prosecute as it shows good faith, and attacking people for good faith effort only encourages bad faith. Nobody in their right mind wants that!
We provide technology solutions. Despite all our care and attention otherwise, mistakes get made. And when they do, it's our policy just to say what happened, how we fixed it, and whether or not we think it violates TOS. This simple act creates trust and goodwill because by casually acknowledging that your pants were down in the first place, everybody realizes that they're just happy you pulled them back up and quickly lose interest.
Go to Northeast Ohio, and you'll find out how job losses to foreign countries are handled. Actually, I haven't a single transaction at that store post-NAFTA. Walking in Wal-Mart is like walking in a foreign land.
I call bullsh---zle. The Wal*Marts are still there, which means that even in Northeast Ohio, there are still enough people "lining up" to justify their existence! If you aren't lying about your post-NAFTA moratorium, you are the exception. But the "truthiness" in your first statement does major damage to the credibility of the rest.
For some reason, this story reminded me of Flowers for Algernon a story that was simultaneously stimulating, exciting, and sad.
It was one of the very few books of literature I was made to read in school that actually interested me. (funny, I would choke my way through whatever insanely boring book I was being told to read while cranking through a novel per day through most of my elementary and high school years)
The way I interpret this terse language is that the stuff they learned (or didn't) persisted, not continued ability (or inability) to learn!
Yes, it would be problematic to permanently impair somebody's ability to learn by the proximity to electricity, though that might explain lots of recent politics...
But you are missing the point. X is a protocol layed out long, long ago. And there are long standing issues with it that become glaring as we move forward. Long known issues such as 3D support.
Are the advantages of the new server enough to outweigh the costs?
Besides, when did Slashdot become a crowd that believes that there should only be one right way? Forks are GOOD for software evolution - it's how new ideas get tried out!
Go Ubuntu for being brave enough to try to tackle the problems of X!
Flash isn't perfect, I'll grant that. But if Flash didn't solve a very real set of problems, it wouldn't be installed on 98% of all computers made!
Go back just 1 year. Want to watch a video, online, what tool do you use? Want to make an interactive, graphically rich application to deliver via the Internet, what tool do you use?
See what I'm saying? Sure, flash has its warts. But it does neatly solve a problem that even HTML 5 doesn't do all that well at, yet. And the cost is a bit of CPU time, which has traditionally been considered cheap....
How many conversations have been ended with: "No need to rewrite your PHP application in C - Hardware is cheap!"? It's the same conversation with Flash! It's highly abstract, platform independent, looks nice, and performs better than any other product available (still!) given these requirements.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be done better, but even with HTML 5, there still isn't a tool with a better overall combination of features and availability. (Hint: my small company's online training videos are all delivered with flash and FlowPlayer because it actually works - HTML 5 is not even close to universally available, yet)
If I design a better brake pad, I can test this fairly simply AND thorougly. We know exactly what it is supposed to do, how it does it and how we can compare performance. There is no magic, if the brakepad reaches 198 degrees on a sunday, the trunk will pop open. Also nobody will ask a brake pad engineer to add a christmas special to it, on the 25th of december, at 8 in the evening.
I'm guessing you don't design brake pads - because I've known a few mechanical engineers and your understanding of the situation is just wrong. Designing *anything* is bloody hard. One specific engineer I knew worked on fuel tanks for Chevrolet. He was given a very detailed spec for the fuel tank, thickness, size, weight, distribution, position within the car, and his entire job was to find the safety flaws in the fuel tanks!
He would spend months on a single design, simulating crashes, torsions, likely scenarios (what happens if this bolt is missing? What happens if that bolt is missing?) vibration fatigue, and do everything he could think of to break it, as well as come up with ways to mitigate failure scenarios that could potentially become a safety hazard. This guy would go thru perhaps 3-5 tanks in a year. He was one of a team of engineers who did the same.
And this is for one part, the fuel tank, on cars under development. This sounds every bit as much hard work as anything I do as a software engineer!
We're not talking 11 Mbps USB 2.x. We're not talking about the 1.5 Mbps USB 1.x. We're talking the 19.2 Kbps 16550 UART RS-232 style 1980s era serial port!?!? That you have to get to by invalidating your warranty and putting a 6" "dongle" on the side of your 12" iPad?
As somebody who spent years dealing data rates, parity, word sizes, and stop bits, armed with a soldering iron and MILES of 4-lead telephone wire routed to the back of a DEC VAX 11/750, this just brings back nightmares...
And THIS is why we won't be using Chrome OS for any of our company's private data. No, we aren't in Google's RADAR (yet) but we are a rapidly growing company, growing close to 100% this year, and with all indications of accelerating growth in the future. At what point does this privacy suddenly matter?
Everybody wants to be needed. And a common tactic is to try to make yourself irreplaceable. This is a common strategy at work - the programmer who intentionally codes in an incompatible way just so that he'd be needed to make heads or tails out of the spaghetti work.
This was specifically Microsoft's goal with IE 6: to promote and build a standards-incompliant browser, and use their market leverage to make their non-standard extensions part of the platform that they sold. It was all about lock-in.
Everybody around here moaned and wailed about what a horribly bad awful nasty double-plus ungood idea this was for the sorry victims of Microsoft's strategy. What we didn't realize is that one of those victims would be Microsoft!
The travelling salesman problem is nice because the "best" answer is actually the worst answer, in that to arrive at it, you have to perform massive amounts of computation that's difficult to serialize. But bees most certainly do not do this! I'm going to guess that, like people, they automatically factor in the expected cost of computation and look for an answer that's "good enough" - not technically perfect, but an approximation thereof that's cheap to compute.
Look at it this way - you are more likely to go for a software solution that's a button-click or uses off-the-shelf or already available OSS simply because the computational overhead of writing your own webserver is generally considered too difficult, even though you would arrive at a more technically correct or optimum solution by going at it yourself.
Good software design consists of many "good enough" solutions that avoid unnecessary "Expensive" computation (Engineer's time) at the cost of "Cheap" computation. (CPU time) When we apply this idea to the algorithm, we can have similar results. Compare simple literal string matching algorithms to the Boyer-Moore search algorithm - dramatic improvements in performance by pruning the amount of necessary computation!
Taco Bell programming fails when your needs extend beyond 'putting food on the table'. I love syslog, I use it every day. But it has numerous limitations:
1) each log entry has a very limited size. For most needs, syslog is enough. But what happens when you want to svae 100,000 characters of input? At this point, syslog fails.
2) You need High Availability - Unix is all about a single system, when you have a cluster of operations that scale in need beyond a single system, you have trouble.
That said, the point is well taken! Use the appropriate tool for the job!
The terms "3g" and "4g" mean NOTHING. Given that Verizon uses CDMA and Sprint uses GSM, comparing the two on any technical basis is meaningless.
"3g" is a term I've been hearing for a decade or so. It's meant many things and it seems to be recycled over and over. It seems that "4g" is death to any technology that gets its label; within a year or to it's called "3G". But what is it? What is 4g?
1) It's not an encoding technology for wireless; those are already covered with terms like "cdma" and "gsm".
2) It has nothing to do with speed; I've seen "3g" coverage at 40Kbps, I've also seen "3g" coverage at over 1 Mbps.
3) It has nothing to do with handsets - my (now 4 year old) winmo phone was "4g capable" when I bought it. How is it now that new phones are just now getting 4g capabilities?
XG is bullshiat marketing terms. Want to know what I want?
1) Low latency: RELIABLE Ping times to hosts on the 'net under 75 ms or so.
2) Bandwidth: I want to pass 5 Mbits without sweat.
not just 3) Caps: Who needs 'em? Why? there's no minimum material cost for transfering data, why should there be a bandwidth cap? It's like limiting the consumption of water among fish swimming in a lake. (dumb dumb dumb) Wny not just give me what my connection allows?
I was a Libertarian for many, many years until I realized that no matter what you do, Libertarianism could never address the 'tragedy of the commons'. This is at the heart of ecology, global warming, clean water, public education, and too many other things to name.
By my reckon, the United States is the first modern 'first world' country to actually try Libertarianism, with the orgy of deregulation, privatization, and 'free market' gospel.
It's destroying us - our economy is crumbling along with our infrastructure and the corporate media has everybody with an average or less IQ convinced that socialism is why. Remember - there are a LOT more idiots than geniuses, and they can vote!
Old thread is old, nobody's gonna read it. But you think spreadsheets are just about crunching numbers?
I'm a database guru. PostgreSQL is wonderful! But often you need to import/export data from other systems. How you gonna do that? See, the most common way is CSV. And how are you going to look at it to make sure you got whatcha want?
I'm gonna get a karma beating for saying this, but sadly, Open Office isn't entirely reliable. Yes, it works well for smaller projects, is free, cross platform, and mostly compatible with MS office.
But there are.... issues. Like the autonumbering makes you want to axe murder somebody. Spacing in Impress has a beeeelion little weirds.
And... get this! The spreadsheet can't have more than 65535 rows! Here it is, 2010 and I have a roaring, quadcore laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a TB hard drive, and I'm limited to an architecture that was considered limiting 10 or more hardware generations ago?!?
OoO is sadly just not as good, and it isn't until you lose 100,000 rows of financial data that you start to appreciate just how bad this actually is. (Which has never happened to me but not everybody is as anally retentive about backups as I am)
I really wish I were an astrotufing MS shill, but I'm a Linux nerd with more than a decade as such...(check my UID)
Everything you need for an FBI tracking device can be found in your smartphone:
GPS? Check!
Communications upload? Check!
Low price? Check!
Ability to be scripted? Check!
Given that Android can do OTA updates, it's possible (likely?) already to track somebody just by 'updating' their phone with a script that just send GPS coordinates to a remote location every 10 minutes with the onboard Internet connection.
It's a script I could hack up in bash in 5 minutes. (I already do this kind of thing as part of my job - the bash script, not the announcing location part)
Slashdot Mirror
The sheer amount of chutzpah passing in place of intelligence in this post is just... astounding. It's like stupid has become legitimized!
Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs.
Which has what to do with sustainability, again? You imply sustainability by mentioning it in the next sentence.
If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
I mean... wow! It's just like farming!
We know almost *nothing* about this process, except that the metabolic rate of these bacteria are mind numbingly slow. We're talking at rates where a single reproduction is a thousand years in length. Just how long are you willing to wait for your next tank of gas?
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous
Unless, of course, you look at this with something other than stupid. Get that out of the way, and you see that this changes about as much the grass growth on your lawn over the next 3.5 minutes.
With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
This happens in all wells, either with Oil or Water. It's not like there's a bladder down under ground and we're going to empty it. Oil and water are present in the fissures and pores of the surrounding rocks and soil. When you pump out the water/oil, you create a low pressure point, and fluid seeps from the surrounding soil. It's only in the case of extreme ignorance that this effect seems remarkable.
Your post is an extremely good example of why relying on the "wisdom of the crowds" can instead be relying on the "stupid foibles and commonly mistunderstood ideas" of the crowds.
This is why I am extremely skeptical of claims that we will be able to effectively model the brain, or recreate it artificially, any time soon.
Well, maybe, maybe not. It may be that we are finding unexpected complexity in the brain. On the other hand, we're seeing continued advances in computing technology - I remember reading about the end of Moore's law 20 years ago! Sure, physics have forced certain ideas to be tossed, such as the Uni-Processor model, but progress is still occurring at a blistering pace, with my battery-powered Android phone handily outperforming the top-of-the-line computers highlighted in those "Moore's law is almost dead" articles of yore.
Even if it's 100x as complicated as we thought, that only adds 10 years or so to Moore's law with an 18-month doubling.
Look at it this way: for a long time, sequencing the human genome was predicted to take decades. Thanks to advances in computing technology, it took less than one, and nowadays it's within the reach of any middle-class American to get their own individual DNA sequenced.
I've started using Mercurial, and I LOVE it! It's lightweight nature means I can make ANY directory a repo, and keep track of changes within that directory, using nothing more than that directory. This makes it feasibly easy to use source control in places I never would have with SVN - such as admin scripts buried in /usr/local, or all the system settings in /etc...
It has solved problems I never thought truly possible to solve instantly, easily, and accurately.
Scams are, by definition, acts where people work to appear 'legit'. But being 'legit' is itself nothing more than an act! There's nothing about a professional that isn't anything but an act, an intentional presentation of what you want the user to believe. You think that the Terminex guy in the uniform spent his/her life wanting to kill bugs?
The only difference with a scam artist is the degree to which they will go to keep up the act -real professionals will act all the way through doing the job, while scam artists only act long enough to get your money. Since this is the ONLY difference, there will ALWAYS be problems with scam artists in any society big enough to force its members to transact with strangers.
In a strange sort of way, Microsoft has always been rather open with their stuff. The problem with WinMo isn't that it was closed, the problem was that it just sucked.
I had a WinMo 6.1 phone, and compared to a $20 Samsung phone, it was awesome. But it honestly looked and felt like a comical parody of Microsoft Windows 3.1. It had all the spit and polish of a 200 pound, meth-addicted trailer trash chick in a stained white wife-beater and ripped pajama bottoms. And I just think to myself: Microsoft has enough money in the bank to rival many nations' GDP - and this is the best that they could come up with in the area that they clearly thought was most important for future growth?
It's no wonder that Apple came along and stomped them, and Android is really a rehash of iOS with an open license.
More importantly, I'm just as likely to be posting this from my phone as my laptop. I basically don't browse on my desktop - that's where the printer is, and is far more likely to be showing videos from Hulu/Netflix than normal "desktop computer" use.
Pretty dang easy, btw. 'Just record the signals, we'll process them later' is a good start, followed up by jr employee thinking that doing so was a good idea, until sr exec says "what the h377 were you thinking!" As a close second.
The wi-fi situation wasn't a case of Google "getting caught" - it was a case of them noticing the data being collected had more than they had wanted and being up front and open about its disclosure. And in the latter case, it's basically never a good idea to prosecute as it shows good faith, and attacking people for good faith effort only encourages bad faith. Nobody in their right mind wants that!
We provide technology solutions. Despite all our care and attention otherwise, mistakes get made. And when they do, it's our policy just to say what happened, how we fixed it, and whether or not we think it violates TOS. This simple act creates trust and goodwill because by casually acknowledging that your pants were down in the first place, everybody realizes that they're just happy you pulled them back up and quickly lose interest.
Small, Easily Disassembled, cheap, proprietary.
Pick any three. (FTFY)
Go to Northeast Ohio, and you'll find out how job losses to foreign countries are handled.
Actually, I haven't a single transaction at that store post-NAFTA. Walking in Wal-Mart is like walking in a foreign land.
I call bullsh---zle. The Wal*Marts are still there, which means that even in Northeast Ohio, there are still enough people "lining up" to justify their existence! If you aren't lying about your post-NAFTA moratorium, you are the exception. But the "truthiness" in your first statement does major damage to the credibility of the rest.
/Sorry.
For some reason, this story reminded me of Flowers for Algernon a story that was simultaneously stimulating, exciting, and sad.
It was one of the very few books of literature I was made to read in school that actually interested me. (funny, I would choke my way through whatever insanely boring book I was being told to read while cranking through a novel per day through most of my elementary and high school years)
The way I interpret this terse language is that the stuff they learned (or didn't) persisted, not continued ability (or inability) to learn!
Yes, it would be problematic to permanently impair somebody's ability to learn by the proximity to electricity, though that might explain lots of recent politics...
But you are missing the point. X is a protocol layed out long, long ago. And there are long standing issues with it that become glaring as we move forward. Long known issues such as 3D support.
Are the advantages of the new server enough to outweigh the costs?
Besides, when did Slashdot become a crowd that believes that there should only be one right way? Forks are GOOD for software evolution - it's how new ideas get tried out!
Go Ubuntu for being brave enough to try to tackle the problems of X!
Augh! Enough!
Flash isn't perfect, I'll grant that. But if Flash didn't solve a very real set of problems, it wouldn't be installed on 98% of all computers made!
Go back just 1 year. Want to watch a video, online, what tool do you use? Want to make an interactive, graphically rich application to deliver via the Internet, what tool do you use?
See what I'm saying? Sure, flash has its warts. But it does neatly solve a problem that even HTML 5 doesn't do all that well at, yet. And the cost is a bit of CPU time, which has traditionally been considered cheap....
How many conversations have been ended with: "No need to rewrite your PHP application in C - Hardware is cheap!"? It's the same conversation with Flash! It's highly abstract, platform independent, looks nice, and performs better than any other product available (still!) given these requirements.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be done better, but even with HTML 5, there still isn't a tool with a better overall combination of features and availability. (Hint: my small company's online training videos are all delivered with flash and FlowPlayer because it actually works - HTML 5 is not even close to universally available, yet)
If I design a better brake pad, I can test this fairly simply AND thorougly. We know exactly what it is supposed to do, how it does it and how we can compare performance. There is no magic, if the brakepad reaches 198 degrees on a sunday, the trunk will pop open. Also nobody will ask a brake pad engineer to add a christmas special to it, on the 25th of december, at 8 in the evening.
I'm guessing you don't design brake pads - because I've known a few mechanical engineers and your understanding of the situation is just wrong. Designing *anything* is bloody hard. One specific engineer I knew worked on fuel tanks for Chevrolet. He was given a very detailed spec for the fuel tank, thickness, size, weight, distribution, position within the car, and his entire job was to find the safety flaws in the fuel tanks!
He would spend months on a single design, simulating crashes, torsions, likely scenarios (what happens if this bolt is missing? What happens if that bolt is missing?) vibration fatigue, and do everything he could think of to break it, as well as come up with ways to mitigate failure scenarios that could potentially become a safety hazard. This guy would go thru perhaps 3-5 tanks in a year. He was one of a team of engineers who did the same.
And this is for one part, the fuel tank, on cars under development. This sounds every bit as much hard work as anything I do as a software engineer!
I guess I'm having trouble seeing the point.
We're not talking 11 Mbps USB 2.x. We're not talking about the 1.5 Mbps USB 1.x. We're talking the 19.2 Kbps 16550 UART RS-232 style 1980s era serial port!?!? That you have to get to by invalidating your warranty and putting a 6" "dongle" on the side of your 12" iPad?
As somebody who spent years dealing data rates, parity, word sizes, and stop bits, armed with a soldering iron and MILES of 4-lead telephone wire routed to the back of a DEC VAX 11/750, this just brings back nightmares...
(shudder)
And THIS is why we won't be using Chrome OS for any of our company's private data. No, we aren't in Google's RADAR (yet) but we are a rapidly growing company, growing close to 100% this year, and with all indications of accelerating growth in the future. At what point does this privacy suddenly matter?
Everybody wants to be needed. And a common tactic is to try to make yourself irreplaceable. This is a common strategy at work - the programmer who intentionally codes in an incompatible way just so that he'd be needed to make heads or tails out of the spaghetti work.
This was specifically Microsoft's goal with IE 6: to promote and build a standards-incompliant browser, and use their market leverage to make their non-standard extensions part of the platform that they sold. It was all about lock-in.
Everybody around here moaned and wailed about what a horribly bad awful nasty double-plus ungood idea this was for the sorry victims of Microsoft's strategy. What we didn't realize is that one of those victims would be Microsoft!
The travelling salesman problem is nice because the "best" answer is actually the worst answer, in that to arrive at it, you have to perform massive amounts of computation that's difficult to serialize. But bees most certainly do not do this! I'm going to guess that, like people, they automatically factor in the expected cost of computation and look for an answer that's "good enough" - not technically perfect, but an approximation thereof that's cheap to compute.
Look at it this way - you are more likely to go for a software solution that's a button-click or uses off-the-shelf or already available OSS simply because the computational overhead of writing your own webserver is generally considered too difficult, even though you would arrive at a more technically correct or optimum solution by going at it yourself.
Good software design consists of many "good enough" solutions that avoid unnecessary "Expensive" computation (Engineer's time) at the cost of "Cheap" computation. (CPU time) When we apply this idea to the algorithm, we can have similar results. Compare simple literal string matching algorithms to the Boyer-Moore search algorithm - dramatic improvements in performance by pruning the amount of necessary computation!
Taco Bell programming fails when your needs extend beyond 'putting food on the table'. I love syslog, I use it every day. But it has numerous limitations:
1) each log entry has a very limited size. For most needs, syslog is enough. But what happens when you want to svae 100,000 characters of input? At this point, syslog fails.
2) You need High Availability - Unix is all about a single system, when you have a cluster of operations that scale in need beyond a single system, you have trouble.
That said, the point is well taken! Use the appropriate tool for the job!
The terms "3g" and "4g" mean NOTHING. Given that Verizon uses CDMA and Sprint uses GSM, comparing the two on any technical basis is meaningless.
"3g" is a term I've been hearing for a decade or so. It's meant many things and it seems to be recycled over and over. It seems that "4g" is death to any technology that gets its label; within a year or to it's called "3G". But what is it? What is 4g?
1) It's not an encoding technology for wireless; those are already covered with terms like "cdma" and "gsm".
2) It has nothing to do with speed; I've seen "3g" coverage at 40Kbps, I've also seen "3g" coverage at over 1 Mbps.
3) It has nothing to do with handsets - my (now 4 year old) winmo phone was "4g capable" when I bought it. How is it now that new phones are just now getting 4g capabilities?
XG is bullshiat marketing terms. Want to know what I want?
1) Low latency: RELIABLE Ping times to hosts on the 'net under 75 ms or so.
2) Bandwidth: I want to pass 5 Mbits without sweat.
not just
3) Caps: Who needs 'em? Why? there's no minimum material cost for transfering data, why should there be a bandwidth cap? It's like limiting the consumption of water among fish swimming in a lake. (dumb dumb dumb) Wny not just give me what my connection allows?
I was a Libertarian for many, many years until I realized that no matter what you do, Libertarianism could never address the 'tragedy of the commons'. This is at the heart of ecology, global warming, clean water, public education, and too many other things to name.
By my reckon, the United States is the first modern 'first world' country to actually try Libertarianism, with the orgy of deregulation, privatization, and 'free market' gospel.
It's destroying us - our economy is crumbling along with our infrastructure and the corporate media has everybody with an average or less IQ convinced that socialism is why. Remember - there are a LOT more idiots than geniuses, and they can vote!
I'm a born-again, left leaning moderate now!
Old thread is old, nobody's gonna read it. But you think spreadsheets are just about crunching numbers?
I'm a database guru. PostgreSQL is wonderful! But often you need to import/export data from other systems. How you gonna do that? See, the most common way is CSV. And how are you going to look at it to make sure you got whatcha want?
Yep. Starting to see the problem now?
I'm gonna get a karma beating for saying this, but sadly, Open Office isn't entirely reliable. Yes, it works well for smaller projects, is free, cross platform, and mostly compatible with MS office.
But there are.... issues. Like the autonumbering makes you want to axe murder somebody. Spacing in Impress has a beeeelion little weirds.
And... get this! The spreadsheet can't have more than 65535 rows! Here it is, 2010 and I have a roaring, quadcore laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a TB hard drive, and I'm limited to an architecture that was considered limiting 10 or more hardware generations ago?!?
OoO is sadly just not as good, and it isn't until you lose 100,000 rows of financial data that you start to appreciate just how bad this actually is. (Which has never happened to me but not everybody is as anally retentive about backups as I am)
I really wish I were an astrotufing MS shill, but I'm a Linux nerd with more than a decade as such...(check my UID)
Everything you need for an FBI tracking device can be found in your smartphone:
GPS? Check!
Communications upload? Check!
Low price? Check!
Ability to be scripted? Check!
Given that Android can do OTA updates, it's possible (likely?) already to track somebody just by 'updating' their phone with a script that just send GPS coordinates to a remote location every 10 minutes with the onboard Internet connection.
It's a script I could hack up in bash in 5 minutes. (I already do this kind of thing as part of my job - the bash script, not the announcing location part)