I was in your position about 8 years ago - had tried Linux several times, but never really got it working well enough - and being a programmer myself, I wanted to spend my time programming - not stuffing around installing the OS or resolving things like getting video card drivers configured right.
I did persevere though - and finally settled on a distro that works well for me - Ubuntu. I tried many - Mandrake(now called Mandriva), Debian, Xandros, Suse, Red hat and Gentoo. All those distros are great, but I found Ubuntu gave me the least problems. Printers, sound and video works straight off now with no problems, the installer asks a minimum of questions and basically does it's own thing with hardly any questions to answer, with a completely graphical base installer. There is also excellent help available online if you ever do need to do something a little different or get stuck.
As a programmer, you will love the wealth of development tools available - being a windows developer you will want to have a look at the following development environments:
For C / C++: I find Code::Blocks is the closest thing to Visual studio. Nice clean IDE, without all the clutter of kdevelop. It's now in the repository for Ubuntu 8.10 so can be easily installed through the standard package manager now instead of having to use dpkg command line voodoo and resolve dependencies yourself.
for C# /.Net: Mono, and the mono IDE, monodevelop. Get it right from the repository.
Java: its hard to beat Netbeans or Eclipse. Both are Available straight from the repository.
For web development: I don't do a lot of this but there's stacks of tools for that stuff too.
Definitely time to give it another look. There's been a lot of improvements the last few years.
Since the stuff is conductive, it might be possible to 'clean' it of particles by applying a charge to it - hopefully that would transfer charge to the dust/pollution particles on the ends of the hairs and make them repel off? can any physics types confirm if th is would work?
As far as prices are concerned, I think that SD cards or USB flash drives are more likely to overtake Blue-ray's place in the world. A quick search turns up that a single recordable 50GB blank blu-ray disk (blank) costs somewhere around $47, and a spindle of 50 25GB disks costs something like $996 - about $20 a disk.
I don't collect movies, but if I did, I would be most concerned that chip based storage technology is going to overtake the clunky optical-mechanical drives and leave me with a (yet again) obsolete media library.
I can buy 8GB USB memory sticks for $16 bucks now, and even 16Gb sticks for under $40 from Here for example, which are rewritable and a lot more indestructible (no scratch worries), why would I want a blu-ray drive for data storage? I can see USB memory sticks, SD cards or some other kind of chip based data storage making optical drives obsolete in the very near future. I dont know how many disks I have lost from scratches, or CD or DVD drives have ended up breaking or going out of alignment over the years - but I know its a lot more than is acceptable to me, and I personally cant wait to kiss optical drives goodbye for good. It is a technology that belongs in the 20th century.
Is it still a captalist system if the state is having to effectively buy the banks and run them, to prevent total collapse? I suspect that might have been the OP's point.
it's illegal to harvest power that's being wasted via leakage from the lines
Actually, it does cost the electric company more when you leech power in this way - you are basically setting up a huge air gap transformer, with the overhead electrical line as the primary and your leeching loop as the secondary.
The day Microsoft acquires Yahoo is the day I abandon my Yahoo email account. I used to have a Hotmail account before Microsoft bought them, and watched the service turn to crap. I left Hotmail and got a Yahoo account.
I will definitely be encouraging friends and family to leave Yahoo and get say, a Gmail account, if Microsoft ever ends up owning a sizable chunk of Yahoo.
I know that one guy and a few of his friends leaving the free email service provided by Yahoo isnt going to worry them too much, but how many of you with Yahoo email accounts feel this way too?
If it is "invented" it can be patented I was looking for an appropriate place to say exactly this - and it is the reason why a debate as to whether mathematics is invented or discovered is so important, and should not be ignored as merely frivolous. If we allow enough groups to declare that mathematics is invented, we will soon see patents allowable on mathematics, and any future resistance to expansion of the patent system into both mathematics and other pure sciences will rapidly fall. Mathematics must not be allowed to be seen as being "invented" if we want to still be able to build mathematics knowledge on the foundation of previous efforts unhindered by patents and "intellectual property" claims.
I cant help but wonder why the hoaxer did it in the first place. I wouldn't mind betting it was because Megan had been harassing or bullying their own child, so they felt a little payback in kind was in order. It is tragic that Megan took her own life, but I don't believe anyone should be held accountable for her death other than herself. Perhaps her parents should have told her the sticks and stones rhyme more often...
By that logic, teaching about gravity is teaching a point of view - I am sure the flat Earth society has been up in arms about that being taught for years now. Fortunately they don't have as much influence as they used to.
Self destruct systems have mass and volume. That is a very tight resource on something sent into space.
So its cheaper not to build in a self destruct in and instead have to carry enough extra fuel for a de-orbit, or send up a missile to shoot the thing down (that has some chance of missing too)if that plan fails?
Why does it need to be remotely detonated? Surely they could put a trigger on the explosives that would fire when it reached a certain minimum altitude or sensed it was re-entering the atmosphere. No remote detonation required (so no security issues), and the thing will then only blow up once it is actually re-entering the atmosphere. It doesn't even have to blow it to smithereens - just break it up into small chunks that can burn up - say by using explosive bolts at certain key points etc in a much more controlled manner. The satellite would be a little heavier, sure - but much cheaper than having to launch another whole missile up there to blow it up. It should be mandatory to have such a self destruct on any satellite that is over a certain size.
Who said anything about using standard Ii-Ion batteries? TFA just says they are using Lithium batteries. I would imagine they are using LiFePO4 batteries (Lithium phosphate batteries) as have already been covered on slashdot several times before. The nano particle versions of these have charge characteristics similar to what are described in the article, have much longer duty cycles than lead acid batteries, much better power to weight rations and capacity, and have significantly improved safety over standard lithium Ion batteries. ( eg. you can cut them in half / shoot them / mash them to a pulp) and they wont explode. Companies such as A123 and Valence Technology and many others are already making these commercially available batteries.
They are also apparently recyclable and not as nasty on the environment as lead acid batteries either.
Just because a dental problem is not causing you pain yet, doesn't mean it isn't there. would you rather your dentist just ignored the smaller holes and waited until they became huge holes?
Obviously you have never been to Australia. There's kangaroos who use 2 legs (albeit with a hopping gait and a tail for balance) - but they have no problems clearing 6 ft fences, can cruise at 25 km/h and sprint for up to 2km at 40km/h) , and emus for a start (top speed about 50km/h. Africa has ostriches too of course.
Not to mention penguins? how could you forget about them, on slashdot!
Having recently set up a file server I feel somewhat qualified to respond to this. What you want to do is the following: Set up a GNU/Linux box, (whatever flavour you choose doesn't really matter all that much - I chose Ubuntu 6.04 because it's got a long support life) next, get two or more big fat Seagate SATA drives E.g. Seagate SATAII NCQ 320GB 7200RPM with a 16mb Cache are close to the sweet spot in terms of cost per GB (anout AU$105 each here in Australia) and have a 5 year warranty. Why Seagate? Just my preference due to their being quiet, having had minimal problems with them in the past, and having decent warranties. last time I bought Western digital drives a couple of years ago I found them a bit noisy, though that might have changed.
next, partition your drives into small partitions - say, 4 partitions.
Make each corresponding set of partitions on a drive a raid set ( raid 1 if only 2 drives, raid 5 if 3 or more). the idea is that partition 1 from each drive will make up RAID set 1, partition 2 from each drive will make up RAID set 2, etc. Set up LVM over the top of this, to tie each of the 5 sets of partitions into one logical volume that can then be repartitioned to your hearts content to suit your requirements
The problem with just traditional RAID partitions is that you cant resize them without reformatting. by having small sets of raid partitions, you can easily add more drives in the future, to add capacity without having to wipe everything. If you want to extend the set in teh future, you do the following: 1) add extra drive, partitioned the same as the other drives. 2) free up 1 raid set's worth of space from the LVM set. 3) use LVM's management tools (pvmove, vgreduce and vgrmove) to tell it to stop using that raid set. 4) tear down that raid set, and use the now unused partitions plus one from the new drive to build a new RAID set. 5) tell LVM to use the newly created RAID set (pvcreate, vgextend) 6) repeat from step 2, for the next Raid set, until you have all the partitions from the new drive included.
you can even write a script to do all this. I'm sure theres been a post on slashdot about this in the past. The expansion process wont be fast, but it will eliminate the need to back up the entire RAID as would be the case if you had to add a new drive to a RAID set that used a single large partition on each drive. Theoretically this can all be done even while the machine's running, once the new drive has been installed - though file server performance is likely to take a bit of a hit.
See this website for a better explanation of the above.
Theres one small problem with that theory. The Machine gun, in it's early form, was one of the most powerful weapons there was - for defence. Being too heavy to carry into battle by foot, it's offensive capabilities were limited - but given a couple of miles of trenches and appropriately placed machine guns, and you could hold off thousands with a handful. The result? The massive massacres of WW1.
Just because a weapon is mostly usable in a defensive role does not mean that it does not cause a lot of deaths should war break. Sure, you might be able to hold your position for a long time, but there are going to be a lot of deaths.
The UK alone has a stockpile of 200 warheads - France another 350 or so.
if even half of them are launched, you are going to have a pretty bad hair day. Don't underestimate just how ridiculously over capacity the nuclear powers are in terms of wiping life off the planet.
Sure, Europe wouldn't survive a return strike, but then could you really call that a win, when your back yards glass, most of your family is probably vapor and any survivors have fond memories of when it looked like the planet was going to be going into global warming instead of a nuclear winter? Imagine what just 10 would do, if they landed on the to 10 US cities? Utter chaos - everyone would loose.
Even if the US somehow managed to block every single missile and wiped Europe off the map, it would be ruined economically - there is so much interdependence between Europe, China and the US, that for any such action to occur would be financial and economic disaster for all parties involved.
And what about people that aren't on welfare but don't pay taxes (all those at housewives/househusbands)
While we are at it why don't we exclude anyone that doesn't pay land tax and rates - after all if you don't own a piece of the country how can you vote right?
Oh wait a minute. I think that system went out over 100 years ago - for very good reasons.
No-one (well very few) people stay on welfare out of choice - it's soul-destroying. To deny them a vote too is another kick in the guts to someone who's already down.
If you really want to make your cabling able to survive the next flood, simply use the gell filled version of Cat5e or Cat6 stuff that's use for outdoors (it's usually run in conduit underground of course.)
When you get flooded out, worst case is you'd just have to re-terminate the ends where the water had gotten into the punch-down blocks.
It's more expensive than regular cat6 - like perhaps an extra $50 a box for a 1000 ft box. I would be surprised if even the most networked house uses more than a box or two. (I used 1/2 a box for 8 points around my two floor house - and a double run to the house next door.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was in your position about 8 years ago - had tried Linux several times, but never really got it working well enough - and being a programmer myself, I wanted to spend my time programming - not stuffing around installing the OS or resolving things like getting video card drivers configured right.
I did persevere though - and finally settled on a distro that works well for me - Ubuntu. I tried many - Mandrake(now called Mandriva), Debian, Xandros, Suse, Red hat and Gentoo. All those distros are great, but I found Ubuntu gave me the least problems. Printers, sound and video works straight off now with no problems, the installer asks a minimum of questions and basically does it's own thing with hardly any questions to answer, with a completely graphical base installer. There is also excellent help available online if you ever do need to do something a little different or get stuck.
As a programmer, you will love the wealth of development tools available - being a windows developer you will want to have a look at the following development environments:
For C / C++: I find Code::Blocks is the closest thing to Visual studio. Nice clean IDE, without all the clutter of kdevelop. It's now in the repository for Ubuntu 8.10 so can be easily installed through the standard package manager now instead of having to use dpkg command line voodoo and resolve dependencies yourself.
for C# / .Net: Mono, and the mono IDE, monodevelop. Get it right from the repository.
Java: its hard to beat Netbeans or Eclipse. Both are Available straight from the repository.
For web development: I don't do a lot of this but there's stacks of tools for that stuff too.
Definitely time to give it another look. There's been a lot of improvements the last few years.
Since the stuff is conductive, it might be possible to 'clean' it of particles by applying a charge to it - hopefully that would transfer charge to the dust/pollution particles on the ends of the hairs and make them repel off? can any physics types confirm if th is would work?
As far as prices are concerned, I think that SD cards or USB flash drives are more likely to overtake Blue-ray's place in the world.
A quick search turns up that a single recordable 50GB blank blu-ray disk (blank) costs somewhere around $47, and a spindle of 50 25GB disks costs something like $996 - about $20 a disk.
I don't collect movies, but if I did, I would be most concerned that chip based storage technology is going to overtake the clunky optical-mechanical drives and leave me with a (yet again) obsolete media library.
I can buy 8GB USB memory sticks for $16 bucks now, and even 16Gb sticks for under $40 from Here for example, which are rewritable and a lot more indestructible (no scratch worries), why would I want a blu-ray drive for data storage? I can see USB memory sticks, SD cards or some other kind of chip based data storage making optical drives obsolete in the very near future. I dont know how many disks I have lost from scratches, or CD or DVD drives have ended up breaking or going out of alignment over the years - but I know its a lot more than is acceptable to me, and I personally cant wait to kiss optical drives goodbye for good. It is a technology that belongs in the 20th century.
Is it still a captalist system if the state is having to effectively buy the banks and run them, to prevent total collapse?
I suspect that might have been the OP's point.
Simple - mount it in a gimbal
it's illegal to harvest power that's being wasted via leakage from the lines
Actually, it does cost the electric company more when you leech power in this way - you are basically setting up a huge air gap transformer, with the overhead electrical line as the primary and your leeching loop as the secondary.
The day Microsoft acquires Yahoo is the day I abandon my Yahoo email account.
I used to have a Hotmail account before Microsoft bought them, and watched the service turn to crap. I left Hotmail and got a Yahoo account.
I will definitely be encouraging friends and family to leave Yahoo and get say, a Gmail account, if Microsoft ever ends up owning a sizable chunk of Yahoo.
I know that one guy and a few of his friends leaving the free email service provided by Yahoo isnt going to worry them too much, but how many of you with Yahoo email accounts feel this way too?
Mmm Beef Stroganoff
Best with those fine vermicelli egg noodles, with poppy seeds. My favorite!
If it is "invented" it can be patented
I was looking for an appropriate place to say exactly this - and it is the reason why a debate as to whether mathematics is invented or discovered is so important, and should not be ignored as merely frivolous. If we allow enough groups to declare that mathematics is invented, we will soon see patents allowable on mathematics, and any future resistance to expansion of the patent system into both mathematics and other pure sciences will rapidly fall. Mathematics must not be allowed to be seen as being "invented" if we want to still be able to build mathematics knowledge on the foundation of previous efforts unhindered by patents and "intellectual property" claims.
I cant help but wonder why the hoaxer did it in the first place. I wouldn't mind betting it was because Megan had been harassing or bullying their own child, so they felt a little payback in kind was in order. It is tragic that Megan took her own life, but I don't believe anyone should be held accountable for her death other than herself. Perhaps her parents should have told her the sticks and stones rhyme more often...
By that logic, teaching about gravity is teaching a point of view - I am sure the flat Earth society has been up in arms about that being taught for years now. Fortunately they don't have as much influence as they used to.
Self destruct systems have mass and volume. That is a very tight resource on something sent into space.
So its cheaper not to build in a self destruct in and instead have to carry enough extra fuel for a de-orbit, or send up a missile to shoot the thing down (that has some chance of missing too)if that plan fails?
Why does it need to be remotely detonated? Surely they could put a trigger on the explosives that would fire when it reached a certain minimum altitude or sensed it was re-entering the atmosphere. No remote detonation required (so no security issues), and the thing will then only blow up once it is actually re-entering the atmosphere. It doesn't even have to blow it to smithereens - just break it up into small chunks that can burn up - say by using explosive bolts at certain key points etc in a much more controlled manner.
The satellite would be a little heavier, sure - but much cheaper than having to launch another whole missile up there to blow it up. It should be mandatory to have such a self destruct on any satellite that is over a certain size.
I wouldnt implant myself with any of thoe things either - I'd get someone else to implant them in me.
Stick with being a programmer. All other roles are down-hill from there.
Mabey you want to consider changing the powerdown options n your laptop's BIOS.
Who said anything about using standard Ii-Ion batteries? TFA just says they are using Lithium batteries. I would imagine they are using LiFePO4 batteries (Lithium phosphate batteries) as have already been covered on slashdot several times before. The nano particle versions of these have charge characteristics similar to what are described in the article, have much longer duty cycles than lead acid batteries, much better power to weight rations and capacity, and have significantly improved safety over standard lithium Ion batteries. ( eg. you can cut them in half / shoot them / mash them to a pulp) and they wont explode.
Companies such as A123
and Valence Technology
and many others are already making these commercially available batteries.
They are also apparently recyclable and not as nasty on the environment as lead acid batteries either.
Just because a dental problem is not causing you pain yet, doesn't mean it isn't there.
would you rather your dentist just ignored the smaller holes and waited until they became huge holes?
Obviously you have never been to Australia.
There's kangaroos who use 2 legs (albeit with a hopping gait and a tail for balance) - but they have no problems clearing 6 ft fences, can cruise at 25 km/h and sprint for up to 2km at 40km/h) , and emus for a start (top speed about 50km/h. Africa has ostriches too of course.
Not to mention penguins? how could you forget about them, on slashdot!
Oops - version number mis-information.
Um of course I meant Ubuntu 6.06 LTS not Ubuntu 6.04...
Having recently set up a file server I feel somewhat qualified to respond to this.
What you want to do is the following:
Set up a GNU/Linux box, (whatever flavour you choose doesn't really matter all that much - I chose Ubuntu 6.04 because it's got a long support life)
next, get two or more big fat Seagate SATA drives
E.g. Seagate SATAII NCQ 320GB 7200RPM with a 16mb Cache are close to the sweet spot in terms of cost per GB (anout AU$105 each here in Australia) and have a 5 year warranty.
Why Seagate? Just my preference due to their being quiet, having had minimal problems with them in the past, and having decent warranties. last time I bought Western digital drives a couple of years ago I found them a bit noisy, though that might have changed.
next, partition your drives into small partitions - say, 4 partitions.
Make each corresponding set of partitions on a drive a raid set ( raid 1 if only 2 drives, raid 5 if 3 or more). the idea is that partition 1 from each drive will make up RAID set 1, partition 2 from each drive will make up RAID set 2, etc.
Set up LVM over the top of this, to tie each of the 5 sets of partitions into one logical volume that can then be repartitioned to your hearts content to suit your requirements
The problem with just traditional RAID partitions is that you cant resize them without reformatting.
by having small sets of raid partitions, you can easily add more drives in the future, to add capacity without having to wipe everything.
If you want to extend the set in teh future, you do the following:
1) add extra drive, partitioned the same as the other drives.
2) free up 1 raid set's worth of space from the LVM set.
3) use LVM's management tools (pvmove, vgreduce and vgrmove) to tell it to stop using that raid set.
4) tear down that raid set, and use the now unused partitions plus one from the new drive to build a new RAID set.
5) tell LVM to use the newly created RAID set (pvcreate, vgextend)
6) repeat from step 2, for the next Raid set, until you have all the partitions from the new drive included.
you can even write a script to do all this. I'm sure theres been a post on slashdot about this in the past.
The expansion process wont be fast, but it will eliminate the need to back up the entire RAID as would be the case if you had to add a new drive to a RAID set that used a single large partition on each drive. Theoretically this can all be done even while the machine's running, once the new drive has been installed - though file server performance is likely to take a bit of a hit.
See this website for a better explanation of the above.
Theres one small problem with that theory.
The Machine gun, in it's early form, was one of the most powerful weapons there was - for defence. Being too heavy to carry into battle by foot, it's offensive capabilities were limited - but given a couple of miles of trenches and appropriately placed machine guns, and you could hold off thousands with a handful. The result? The massive massacres of WW1.
Just because a weapon is mostly usable in a defensive role does not mean that it does not cause a lot of deaths should war break. Sure, you might be able to hold your position for a long time, but there are going to be a lot of deaths.
The UK alone has a stockpile of 200 warheads - France another 350 or so.
if even half of them are launched, you are going to have a pretty bad hair day.
Don't underestimate just how ridiculously over capacity the nuclear powers are in terms of wiping life off the planet.
Sure, Europe wouldn't survive a return strike, but then could you really call that a win, when your back yards glass, most of your family is probably vapor and any survivors have fond memories of when it looked like the planet was going to be going into global warming instead of a nuclear winter?
Imagine what just 10 would do, if they landed on the to 10 US cities? Utter chaos - everyone would loose.
Even if the US somehow managed to block every single missile and wiped Europe off the map, it would be ruined economically - there is so much interdependence between Europe, China and the US, that for any such action to occur would be financial and economic disaster for all parties involved.
And what about people that aren't on welfare but don't pay taxes (all those at housewives/househusbands)
While we are at it why don't we exclude anyone that doesn't pay land tax and rates - after all if you don't own a piece of the country how can you vote right?
Oh wait a minute. I think that system went out over 100 years ago - for very good reasons.
No-one (well very few) people stay on welfare out of choice - it's soul-destroying. To deny them a vote too is another kick in the guts to someone who's already down.
If you really want to make your cabling able to survive the next flood, simply use the gell filled version of Cat5e or Cat6 stuff that's use for outdoors (it's usually run in conduit underground of course.)
When you get flooded out, worst case is you'd just have to re-terminate the ends where the water had gotten into the punch-down blocks.
It's more expensive than regular cat6 - like perhaps an extra $50 a box for a 1000 ft box. I would be surprised if even the most networked house uses more than a box or two. (I used 1/2 a box for 8 points around my two floor house - and a double run to the house next door.)
http://www.americantechsupply.com/chromatic_out.h