This does not compete with solar panels, nor is it a "better" or "worse" idea. This should be obvious. Paint is several orders of magnitude cheaper than solar panels.
As to your "bootstrapping" idea on making solar panels with the electricity from solar panels - guess what - it takes more than electricity to make solar panels.
You are right though, something here sounds retarded.
I don't understand why people want to "rip" with anything more complex than "cp/dev/cdrom GoneWithTheWind.iso". When you play back the file, you get the exact same quality and options as on the DVD. Other than choosing a filename, it is zero-click. What am I missing?
Terrans well on our way to Flying Buildings
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 3, Funny
In StarCraft, Terran buildings fly. It's just an ability the Terrans build into all their buildings for free, because they like it. Its good to see that we're progressing towards that ideal, because it will really help us fight off the Zerg.
Remember how annoying it was that every player had to have a license for StarCraft in order to play over LAN or Battlenet? Not everyone in our game group wanted to shell out for it. However, I think many groups will have a "true believer" who will indeed pay $150, while two of his mates can leach off him for lan play. This may actually make multiplayer a better experience in small groups.
The proper vehicle for hurricane evacuation is the parasail. The hurricane literally blows you out of town for free. Failing that, bicycles don't get stuck in traffic, don't overheat, and are powered by food and water.
> The safest speed to drive is the same speed as everyone else -- by driving a substantially different speed you create a hazard, whether that speed is higher or lower than that of everyone else. WRONG!
That would be true if we lived on a giant, perfectly smooth parking lot, frequented only with cars travelling the same direction as you. THAT'S WRONG!
In the real world, deer, bicyclists, Amish carriages, city busses, children, parked cars, garbage trucks, overturned tractor trailers, trains, ditches, rockslides, road construction, and chickens crossing the road all travel at a speed ungoverned by the speed limit. By exceeding the speed limit you're limiting your ability to react to the unforseen, and increasing your danger and the danger to those around you.
Also, you overestimate the hazard of getting hit from behind by travelling below the speed limit. I've seen bicycle safety studies that show that overtaking cars hitting bikes from behind are only 3% of bike-car accidents. Given a cars greater speed, greater visiblity, and greater survivability after a crash, its probably less than 1% for car-car.
For this generation of "average" programmers, yes its too hard. Its the programming language, stupid. The average programming language has come a remarkably short distance in the last 30 years. Java and Fortran really aren't very different, and neither is well suited to paralellizing programs.
Why isn't there a mass stampede to Erlang or Haskell, languages that address this problem in a serious way? My conclusion is that most programmers are just too dumb to do major mind-bending once they've burned their first couple languages into their ROMs.
Wait for the next generation, or make yourself above average.
Argh! Stop proving my point for me! You moved here for a specific job, but you failed to pick a place that was near your job in the transit-space, instead choosing a place that WAS close in car-space. It wasn't a priority for you, and now you're complaining that the transit is not good? Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
If you're moving for a certain job, you don't have to be smack in the middle of the grid, you just have to be within a mile-wide swath of a direct, transfer-free line. That's usually a huge area, composed of both urban and suburban.
You're making the problem too hard and then throwing up your hands. If you really wanted to use tranist, you'd move to a place with decent public transit routes. Just as you probably thought about the proximity of roads when you chose your current place, you'd think of the proximity of public transit routes and how they'd affect your connectivity.
If you're always consuming power, never producing, what's the point of telling the electric company that you even have your own generation capacity? Just use the regular rates, and they'll be none the wiser. Seems like a non-story to me.
Let me tell you why standalone apps suck: I recently helped my friend install NeoOffice. Even with a slick simple download and install, there were still 50 mouse clicks envolved. Afterwards, we wondered if that file we'd d/l'ed to the desktop was deletable, or vital to NeoOffice working. Then there was wondering why it was in the dock initially (answer: it ran automatically after install), but after we quit it disappeared (answer: we hadn't explicitly put it in the dock). This is complex stuff for joe sixpack. Just using an ajax office suite would have been smarter.
If you've only ever bought software in cardboard boxes, then Ajax is an exciting new way of doing business.
I also find it ironic that all the Windows Vendors seek to add Value Added crapplets to their version of windows, yet whine about the opportunity to give Value Added by making a better distro choice than their competitors.
When cars first came out, they broke down all the time, and every driver was also his own mechanic. This persisted through to the 60s when men were still expected to be able to fix a car by pulling up the hood and futzing about. You also saw a lot of opining about the internals of how cars should be put together.
Then Toyota showed up, and made cars that stopped breaking down. Gradually, nobody was hyper-opinionated about the internals of cars, till we get to the point today where nobody but Toyota dealership can actually understand the internals.
Same with Linux distros. We've been so starved of turnkey solutions for so long, that we're all hyper knowedgable distro experts! Just like the early auto operator/mechanics. Of course these people are going to have fine-grained and diverse favorites.
When someone gets a new laptop and figures out that its "good enough", they'll stop worrying that it doesn't have Slack (or whathaveyou), and just appreciate its "good enough"ness. This can't happen from the demand side, the supply side has to lead the way. Then the userbase of Linux will change. Then we'll start to complain bitterly. Remember when AOL happened and the Internet started to suck? That fate awaits Linux too.
______
And anywho, nobody's asking them to support every possible distribution for their computers. They're asking for two things:
1) support SOME distro, it doesn't matter what it is 2) open source any hardware wierdness you control, stuff like sleep/suspend, software volume control buttons, and whatnot. Just put that stuff out there and all the big distros will automatically move to support you. That's what distros do.
We're not asking, say, Toshiba to create a huge linux compile farm and put out Toshutils for every distro. Just expose the API, create a reference implementation, and let the community do the rest.
Not in our household. Master's Degrees and our Jobs both are perfectly happy with OO.o. Periodically my wife breaks in with "I couldn't find Export to PDF in MS Word today. Why?". Because its not there to screw you over, honey. "Aaah".
I think context menus and drag'n'drop are good examples of 2nd-tier UI functionality that simple applications should do without on their first cut. If a analysis later reveals that the functionality is necessary (and I think your MUA example is a good one), then by all means graduate to Ajax hell or better yet a GUI program! There's a continuum between a static page and complicated app with custom controls. Nobody's suggesting that 3D Studio Max should be implemented in a web browser! : )
If I write my backend in Perl, then I'll not be shocked when Perl changes. Its a language with no specification! That's not a CGI versus GUI issue, that's simply a stability issue. ANSI C code written in 1994 compiles and runs most excellently in 2007. ANSI Common Lisp written in 1994 and run in interpreted mode doesn't even need a recompile. Of the programs I wrote in the mid 90s, the only ones I still use are in ANSI C. The fanciest of them uses Xlib to ring the system bell, but it never opens a window. In the meantime, my gui program from 2002 languishes, having been "mostly" ported from GTK to GTK2, it still has strange bugs.:(
Unfortunately modern web browsers are way way too good at rendering ancient dialects of HTML. Hopefully in a decade or so your point about HTML changing will be more valid.:)
The original post was solely about CGI, and not at all about client side javascript. This being slashdot, however, almost nobody bothered to notice.
Yes, compared to a "real" gui, html forms don't have the same richness of user interaction possible. Guess what? For 90% of applications, that's a GOOD THING. Forms have evolved the way they have because they're reasonable and reasonably secure for networked UIs. There's always temptation to use some shady "experimental" ui technique, but it turns out that developing good UIs is tricksy, and that these are failures most of the time. Stick to Forms unless you know the reason why not.
There are other advantages as well. Is the best language to solve the problem something wierd and non-deployed, ala Common Lisp? CGI lets you use the language of your choice, without having to do security audits on all the machines envolved.
CGI also enforces a fairly strict seperation between application guts and UI. Even in this day and age, many people still manage to mix these, to their sorrow.
Unlike GUI platform of your choice, CGI has not changed specification since, what, 1994? A script written then will still run today. The same can not be said of GTK or KDE or Mac apps, and I'm not so sure about Windows 3.1 to Windows Vista compatiblity either.
I'm mystified as to why Parent thinks enabling CGI is a "pain in the ass". For me it was a 1-line change in apache.conf for the first script, and then a 0-line change for each additional script. What's so hard about that?
3d printing is going to really breath life into tabletop gaming!
Think about the hassle of maintaing a Warhammer 40,000 army, versus just printing out the pieces you need when you need them, then recycling them into the "toner cartridge" when you're done.
Your tools are for-loops and very occassionally recursion, eh pal? Ever heard of map? Folding higher order functions? Remember, you bang the rocks together.
Slashdot Mirror
This does not compete with solar panels, nor is it a "better" or "worse" idea. This should be obvious. Paint is several orders of magnitude cheaper than solar panels.
As to your "bootstrapping" idea on making solar panels with the electricity from solar panels - guess what - it takes more than electricity to make solar panels.
You are right though, something here sounds retarded.
I don't understand why people want to "rip" with anything more complex than "cp /dev/cdrom GoneWithTheWind.iso". When you play back the file, you get the exact same quality and options as on the DVD. Other than choosing a filename, it is zero-click. What am I missing?
In StarCraft, Terran buildings fly. It's just an ability the Terrans build into all their buildings for free, because they like it. Its good to see that we're progressing towards that ideal, because it will really help us fight off the Zerg.
Remember how annoying it was that every player had to have a license for StarCraft in order to play over LAN or Battlenet? Not everyone in our game group wanted to shell out for it. However, I think many groups will have a "true believer" who will indeed pay $150, while two of his mates can leach off him for lan play. This may actually make multiplayer a better experience in small groups.
The proper vehicle for hurricane evacuation is the parasail. The hurricane literally blows you out of town for free. Failing that, bicycles don't get stuck in traffic, don't overheat, and are powered by food and water.
> The safest speed to drive is the same speed as everyone else -- by driving a substantially different speed you create a hazard, whether that speed is higher or lower than that of everyone else.
WRONG!
That would be true if we lived on a giant, perfectly smooth parking lot, frequented only with cars travelling the same direction as you. THAT'S WRONG!
In the real world, deer, bicyclists, Amish carriages, city busses, children, parked cars, garbage trucks, overturned tractor trailers, trains, ditches, rockslides, road construction, and chickens crossing the road all travel at a speed ungoverned by the speed limit. By exceeding the speed limit you're limiting your ability to react to the unforseen, and increasing your danger and the danger to those around you.
Also, you overestimate the hazard of getting hit from behind by travelling below the speed limit. I've seen bicycle safety studies that show that overtaking cars hitting bikes from behind are only 3% of bike-car accidents. Given a cars greater speed, greater visiblity, and greater survivability after a crash, its probably less than 1% for car-car.
What's the #1 cause of accidental death to Americans age 45 and under?
Cars crashing into them and killing them.
So, yeah, its a problem.
For this generation of "average" programmers, yes its too hard. Its the programming language, stupid. The average programming language has come a remarkably short distance in the last 30 years. Java and Fortran really aren't very different, and neither is well suited to paralellizing programs.
Why isn't there a mass stampede to Erlang or Haskell, languages that address this problem in a serious way? My conclusion is that most programmers are just too dumb to do major mind-bending once they've burned their first couple languages into their ROMs.
Wait for the next generation, or make yourself above average.
Bummer. Better luck next time.
On my end I've pocketed the $8000/year x 7 years saved from not operating a car, and payed of my mortgage early.
Argh! Stop proving my point for me! You moved here for a specific job, but you failed to pick a place that was near your job in the transit-space, instead choosing a place that WAS close in car-space. It wasn't a priority for you, and now you're complaining that the transit is not good? Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
If you're moving for a certain job, you don't have to be smack in the middle of the grid, you just have to be within a mile-wide swath of a direct, transfer-free line. That's usually a huge area, composed of both urban and suburban.
You're making the problem too hard and then throwing up your hands. If you really wanted to use tranist, you'd move to a place with decent public transit routes. Just as you probably thought about the proximity of roads when you chose your current place, you'd think of the proximity of public transit routes and how they'd affect your connectivity.
If you're always consuming power, never producing, what's the point of telling the electric company that you even have your own generation capacity? Just use the regular rates, and they'll be none the wiser. Seems like a non-story to me.
Let me tell you why standalone apps suck: I recently helped my friend install NeoOffice. Even with a slick simple download and install, there were still 50 mouse clicks envolved. Afterwards, we wondered if that file we'd d/l'ed to the desktop was deletable, or vital to NeoOffice working. Then there was wondering why it was in the dock initially (answer: it ran automatically after install), but after we quit it disappeared (answer: we hadn't explicitly put it in the dock). This is complex stuff for joe sixpack. Just using an ajax office suite would have been smarter.
If you've only ever bought software in cardboard boxes, then Ajax is an exciting new way of doing business.
Was Pi sci-fi at all? I thought it was just a straightforward case-study in schitzophrenia.
A Lexus is just a Kia with triple the cost-per-mile to operate over the lifetime of the car.
I also find it ironic that all the Windows Vendors seek to add Value Added crapplets to their version of windows, yet whine about the opportunity to give Value Added by making a better distro choice than their competitors.
When cars first came out, they broke down all the time, and every driver was also his own mechanic. This persisted through to the 60s when men were still expected to be able to fix a car by pulling up the hood and futzing about. You also saw a lot of opining about the internals of how cars should be put together.
Then Toyota showed up, and made cars that stopped breaking down. Gradually, nobody was hyper-opinionated about the internals of cars, till we get to the point today where nobody but Toyota dealership can actually understand the internals.
Same with Linux distros. We've been so starved of turnkey solutions for so long, that we're all hyper knowedgable distro experts! Just like the early auto operator/mechanics. Of course these people are going to have fine-grained and diverse favorites.
When someone gets a new laptop and figures out that its "good enough", they'll stop worrying that it doesn't have Slack (or whathaveyou), and just appreciate its "good enough"ness. This can't happen from the demand side, the supply side has to lead the way. Then the userbase of Linux will change. Then we'll start to complain bitterly. Remember when AOL happened and the Internet started to suck? That fate awaits Linux too.
______
And anywho, nobody's asking them to support every possible distribution for their computers. They're asking for two things:
1) support SOME distro, it doesn't matter what it is
2) open source any hardware wierdness you control, stuff like sleep/suspend, software volume control buttons, and whatnot. Just put that stuff out there and all the big distros will automatically move to support you. That's what distros do.
We're not asking, say, Toshiba to create a huge linux compile farm and put out Toshutils for every distro. Just expose the API, create a reference implementation, and let the community do the rest.
Not in our household. Master's Degrees and our Jobs both are perfectly happy with OO.o. Periodically my wife breaks in with "I couldn't find Export to PDF in MS Word today. Why?". Because its not there to screw you over, honey. "Aaah".
I think context menus and drag'n'drop are good examples of 2nd-tier UI functionality that simple applications should do without on their first cut. If a analysis later reveals that the functionality is necessary (and I think your MUA example is a good one), then by all means graduate to Ajax hell or better yet a GUI program! There's a continuum between a static page and complicated app with custom controls. Nobody's suggesting that 3D Studio Max should be implemented in a web browser! : )
:(
:)
If I write my backend in Perl, then I'll not be shocked when Perl changes. Its a language with no specification! That's not a CGI versus GUI issue, that's simply a stability issue. ANSI C code written in 1994 compiles and runs most excellently in 2007. ANSI Common Lisp written in 1994 and run in interpreted mode doesn't even need a recompile. Of the programs I wrote in the mid 90s, the only ones I still use are in ANSI C. The fanciest of them uses Xlib to ring the system bell, but it never opens a window. In the meantime, my gui program from 2002 languishes, having been "mostly" ported from GTK to GTK2, it still has strange bugs.
Unfortunately modern web browsers are way way too good at rendering ancient dialects of HTML. Hopefully in a decade or so your point about HTML changing will be more valid.
I guess so, though I usually just have the program copy a ".html" file, or html fragments stored in files.
Actually, for a fair number of programs I output "content-type: text/plain". Might as well be command-line, I know. Some people hate command-line.
Web apps are the way to go for a lot of things.
The original post was solely about CGI, and not at all about client side javascript. This being slashdot, however, almost nobody bothered to notice.
Yes, compared to a "real" gui, html forms don't have the same richness of user interaction possible. Guess what? For 90% of applications, that's a GOOD THING. Forms have evolved the way they have because they're reasonable and reasonably secure for networked UIs. There's always temptation to use some shady "experimental" ui technique, but it turns out that developing good UIs is tricksy, and that these are failures most of the time. Stick to Forms unless you know the reason why not.
There are other advantages as well. Is the best language to solve the problem something wierd and non-deployed, ala Common Lisp? CGI lets you use the language of your choice, without having to do security audits on all the machines envolved.
CGI also enforces a fairly strict seperation between application guts and UI. Even in this day and age, many people still manage to mix these, to their sorrow.
Unlike GUI platform of your choice, CGI has not changed specification since, what, 1994? A script written then will still run today. The same can not be said of GTK or KDE or Mac apps, and I'm not so sure about Windows 3.1 to Windows Vista compatiblity either.
I'm mystified as to why Parent thinks enabling CGI is a "pain in the ass". For me it was a 1-line change in apache.conf for the first script, and then a 0-line change for each additional script. What's so hard about that?
Yawn...somebody wake me when they can make it 500 pounds, 2 spaces, $8000, and it can cut through an engine block in 1/10th of a second.
-Uncle Albert
3d printing is going to really breath life into tabletop gaming!
Think about the hassle of maintaing a Warhammer 40,000 army, versus just printing out the pieces you need when you need them, then recycling them into the "toner cartridge" when you're done.
Your tools are for-loops and very occassionally recursion, eh pal? Ever heard of map? Folding higher order functions? Remember, you bang the rocks together.
I don't like FPSes. I do like Real Time Strategy.