Why does the government always want to mess up any good plans for renewable energy? Here in the UK we are starting to make progress with this sort of thing. A town near where I grew up has an enormous windmill which generates most of the energy needs of the town, which is cool. Off the coast of Scotland there is a wind farm with hundreds of these things, but the company operating them is thinking of getting out of the business, because they currently lose 60% of their revenue due to a new government rule that says if your energy source doesn't produce a reliable, steady amount of energy, you cannot sell it at the same rate as a reliable steady one. Which means of course that fossil fuel and nuclear power plant generators get paid a lot more than wind farms, hydroelectric dams and factories that generate electricity with heat exchangers off their normal machine cooling systems. Will they ever get a clue while there is still oil and gas in the North Sea?
The post you are replying to went on to qualify that the word cluster meant sharing a drive between two computers, not making several drives appear to be one drive to one computer.
SCSI can share a drive between multiple computers. Cool, huh?
Wow! Thanks for the info. I'd never heard of that before. Delivering mail in the US must be pretty stressful... Over here postmen and postwomen are generally smiling, happy friendly people. Its always nice to have a chat with the postman - especially when he's dropping off my latest eBay win;-)
Where does the name come from? There isn't any obvious reason why a game that appears to be about urban terrorism is called 'Postal'. Can anyone explain it?
If you are sitting in the back seat of a car, behind the driver, and you don't wear a seat belt, in the event of a crash there is an excellent chance that you will hit the driver so hard from behind that you will kill them. Here in the UK there is a safety advert running on TV pointing out that a lot of mothers are killed in this way by their own brats while driving them to school. Its odd that they don't mention on the advert that it is also illegal here to ride in a car in any seat without a seatbelt on.
Also in the world of work, look out for hero coders with a bad attitude. There are guys out there that have got to their point of power in the organisation by doing a lot more work than anyone else. Then they make sure that no-one else knows how to work with their stuff. They will do anything to keep anyone from being able to replace them or ever be able to be a hero in the same areana.
Fortunately, these people eventually paint themselves into a corner. At my company, there is this one guy that thinks he is the top coder. He works on the company's first generation Internet app, where he was put to get the thing going. By making himself difficult to replace though, he now can't do what I did, which was get lifted out of the now practically legacy stuff, and move onto the new and exciting stuff. There are quite a few talented guys on his team, and they will all escape before he does;-)
AFAIK, Mandrake defaults its desktop to KDE. If your point was that KDE is a struggle to get used to, did you eventually move the task bar by going into control centre? Or did you try left-clicking on it, and dragging it to the edge you wanted it on - EXACTLY THE WAY IT WORKS IN WINDOWS ???
A lot of people complain that KDE is too much like Windows for their tastes. A lot of the time, you can just do whatever you would have done in Windows, and it just works.
Also, please in future put all your dead-tree mail communication on the back of postcards instead of in envelopes. If everyone who has nothing to hide does this, we can open all the stuff in envelopes and catch those who do.
Great idea! I'm going to buy shares in a postcard company right now. I can see this being very popular.
Its often said that the best way to break into an open source project is to find an application you like, and add to it a feature that you would find useful.
The problem I have found with this is that few projects have any online design documents, to help someone new to the project find their way around. This is also frequently true in the commercial/closed source world of development, but in that setting you can always wander over to the lead developer's pod and ask him for some clues. Now I know you can email the maintainer, but you don't always feel comfortable taking up their time when you know they are very busy and doing this on their own time.
Why are design docs, in particular things like class diagrams, interaction diagrams, flow charts, whatever, so rarely available? Is it because the projects aren't created from design documents in the first place, or is it more a lack of a sensible way to share designs in a digital form? Are there any decent free software reverse engineering tools to create 'how it is' design documents from the sources?
<flamesuit>Is it a consequence of the kind of people heading up the individual project? I am aware that some of the most successful open source projects are run by experienced software engineers (apache being a classic example). But many of the smaller projects are run by teenagers who have recently learned to program. Is it simply that much open source software is produced by people who are not yet aware of the benefits and methods of design documentation?</flamesuit>
There is a player for Linux and Unices called MPlayer (homepage at http://mplayer.dev.hu/homepage/ ) which gives excellent hardware video acceleration on Matrox G200 and later video cards. It plays DivX with TV resolution (anime fansubs) scaled smoothly up to full screen (1280x1024) at full framerate. This is on a Celeron 300->450. It also does an excellent job of coping with damaged streams, and can cope with pretty much every format you can get a codec for on Windows (except Sorenson encoded QuickTime) through a bit of code borrowed from the WINE project. It also can do output using a number of other methods, including X, framebuffer, SDL and aalib (always fun). All in all, an awesome player.
Whether you believe in global warming caused by man or not, surely you can see that taking the steps to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions is just progress in the efficiency of manufacturing. Progress always requires up-front investment. The sooner you invest, the sooner you will get the cost-saving returns, and therefore you get more returns because you get them from now onwards instead of from ten years time onwards. Business is becoming to short sighted these days.
In the UK, Future Publishing produce a games magazine called Edge. A friend recently moved to the US, and tells me that it is not available there on newsstands, but that its technical articles are published three months later in the US magazine NextGen.
Edge gives an average game a 5 out of ten. I have seen games get 1, and it is common for games to get 2 or three. It is very rare for a game to get 10, I think the last game to get a 10 was probably Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Edge covers all formats, only reviews what it considers the very best releases each month (8 to 12 titles), and is highly respected by the industry. It is supposed to be a magazine for the games industry as well as the hardcore gamer.
One thing is their favour is that they don't usually carry adverts for games. Whether this is an editorial decision or a consequence of their review policy I don't know. They also don't review things until they are in the shops - they only review final code. For a taste of Edge, have a look at Edge Online.
I'm not jealous of Microsoft's success at all. I would like them not to have their current 'success' because they abuse it to ensure things stay that way. What I would really like to see is a large number of smaller companies sharing in a great success, with none of them dominating the rest (as is the case of Microsoft in the 'Windows market'). Open standards and open source, along with a change in business models could bring about this kind of situation. The current situation is that the mantra of every other industry that requires consumer participation, 'our business is driven by our customers', which seems a fair proposition, just doesn't exist in the Microsoft-dominated world, where it is standard practise to have a clause in the license that if the product doesn't work or causes you damage in any way, that is in no way the fault of the supplier, and you have no recourse.
People hate Gates because he is litterally out to destroy Linux. If he could find a way to obliterate Linux from the face of the planet, he would do it, along with everything else that is non-Windows. In contrast, most Linux users prefer a heterogenous software world, which includes Windows along with everyone else. Microsoft constantly try to escalate the situation though, by trying to break open standards for example, or making speeches about how the government ought to do something about free software.
Essentially, it isn't safe from a free software perspective, to just think of Microsoft in the same way as any other large closed source software company. Other large closed source software companies don't go out of their way to attack free software, they try to provide non-free software that stands on its own merits. Turning your back on Microsoft is like turning your back on an axe-wielding homicidal lunatic.
I don't want to be a spelling nazi here, but I am confused about the origin of the word 'walla' in the above post. I have seen this word used quite a few times recently, and always in a context which makes sense for the French word voila, which is commonly used in English.
Is this an example of poor spelling on the web, or a completely different word? It looks kind of middle-eastern as it is.
Read "An Introduction to Database Systems" by C J Date. The author is the source of much of the theory of relational databases. He worked in research at IBM when they were producing the very first relational databases, and very much 'wrote the book' on relational databases, and this is that book.
How much memory does a PS2 have? Does it really have enough to run Linux, X and some useful apps? I have read that the DreamCast has more memory than the PS2, and that only has 24MB total - or is it only video memory that the DC has more of?
And then you reuse a class defined in PHP in any other application, which includes lots of non-web apps? Is it really that easy to integrate PHP scripts with other language environments?
Java leaves your idea of PHP dead in the water for one big reason - with Java you write your application classes seperately from your HTML generation classes/JSPs/whatever. Then you use the application classes in both the web site and any number of different apps, without having to write them as 'web services' or whatever. If you wrote your application classes as data abstractions of your app data, using the Observer/Observable pattern, you now have shared data objects as well as shared code.
Re:Dvorak is wrong, but why defend TiVo?
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
My father has a Sky Digibox, and has found that it doesn't care if you leave it unplugged from the telephone line forever - as long as you don't want to do pay-per-view. But I will never get one of those - the main thing I have discovered about it is that by paying Sky £10 a month, you get quite a number of new channels that are not even up to the standards of Channel 5 (and none above that standard). They don't even have News Bunny any more:-(
Re:Dvorak is wrong, but why defend TiVo?
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the corrections. It doesn't sound so bad after all. I think I will wait a while to see how the backup options pan out, but maybe this is something I would find useful after all.
Dvorak is wrong, but why defend TiVo?
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
Dvorak is obviously wrong, as he seems to have forgotten the ubiquity of VCRs, and obviously there is nothing immoral about not watching adverts. But why do so many/. readers jump to the defence of TiVo?
As I understand it, TiVo is not a drop in replacement for a VCR. It only lets you watch what you have recorded once, and it doesn't let you back up to another device for later repeat viewing. I'll keep my VCR thankyou. Further, you can only continue to use the device that you have paid serious money for if you continue to pay a subscription fee to TiVo, and leave the thing connected to the 'phone line so that it can report in all your viewing and time shifting habits to TiVo to do what they want with. How is that an advantage to me?
It seems to me that between DVD and TiVo, the US television and film producers have got the future all sewn up, in a 1984 kind of way.
One more thing. I am British, so perhaps all this advertising stuff doesn't mean so much to me. Get this: On British television, you only get one advertising break (about 4 minutes long) during each half-hour of content. Also, the highest quality shows are all on the BBC, which is advertiser-free. The commercial channels have just as much opportunity to produce quality content, they just don't bother.
For your suggestion of a middle-client, check out Java Web Start, which Sun are promoting heavily at the moment. It basically does exactly what you described. The way Java is taking off right now, it really could become a very big thing.
As far as exploitation of women in porn goes, it is much more subtle. Whether the women depicted in the porn are being exploited or not, the effect that viewing the porn has upon the viewer's state of mind and world view is very important. Porn tends to portray the subjects of its images as promiscuous people that just can't get enough sex and would go with the viewer if they ever met them. The text that appears with the images seeks to reinforce a view that women are all desperate for sex and would go with (just about) anyone, etc.
What happens is that if a man views porn regularly, he gets a very distorted view of sex and women, which can cause two things. First he will treat women that do allow him to become close to them in ways that are (for many women) highly inappropriate, which is abuse of those women, and damaging to an otherwise good relationship. And secondly he will be approaching all women with this distorted view, which will cause him to find it more difficult to form relationships with women, and lead back, via frustration, to yet more porn. Its a negative feedback loop, and one that some men find very hard to see their way clear from. This is potentially harmful and dangerous to these men and the women around them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the government always want to mess up any good plans for renewable energy? Here in the UK we are starting to make progress with this sort of thing. A town near where I grew up has an enormous windmill which generates most of the energy needs of the town, which is cool. Off the coast of Scotland there is a wind farm with hundreds of these things, but the company operating them is thinking of getting out of the business, because they currently lose 60% of their revenue due to a new government rule that says if your energy source doesn't produce a reliable, steady amount of energy, you cannot sell it at the same rate as a reliable steady one. Which means of course that fossil fuel and nuclear power plant generators get paid a lot more than wind farms, hydroelectric dams and factories that generate electricity with heat exchangers off their normal machine cooling systems. Will they ever get a clue while there is still oil and gas in the North Sea?
The post you are replying to went on to qualify that the word cluster meant sharing a drive between two computers, not making several drives appear to be one drive to one computer.
SCSI can share a drive between multiple computers. Cool, huh?
Wow! Thanks for the info. I'd never heard of that before. Delivering mail in the US must be pretty stressful... Over here postmen and postwomen are generally smiling, happy friendly people. Its always nice to have a chat with the postman - especially when he's dropping off my latest eBay win ;-)
Where does the name come from? There isn't any obvious reason why a game that appears to be about urban terrorism is called 'Postal'. Can anyone explain it?
If you are sitting in the back seat of a car, behind the driver, and you don't wear a seat belt, in the event of a crash there is an excellent chance that you will hit the driver so hard from behind that you will kill them. Here in the UK there is a safety advert running on TV pointing out that a lot of mothers are killed in this way by their own brats while driving them to school. Its odd that they don't mention on the advert that it is also illegal here to ride in a car in any seat without a seatbelt on.
You wouldn't think a few cruise missiles were inconsequential if they were aimed at your house.
Also in the world of work, look out for hero coders with a bad attitude. There are guys out there that have got to their point of power in the organisation by doing a lot more work than anyone else. Then they make sure that no-one else knows how to work with their stuff. They will do anything to keep anyone from being able to replace them or ever be able to be a hero in the same areana.
;-)
Fortunately, these people eventually paint themselves into a corner. At my company, there is this one guy that thinks he is the top coder. He works on the company's first generation Internet app, where he was put to get the thing going. By making himself difficult to replace though, he now can't do what I did, which was get lifted out of the now practically legacy stuff, and move onto the new and exciting stuff. There are quite a few talented guys on his team, and they will all escape before he does
AFAIK, Mandrake defaults its desktop to KDE. If your point was that KDE is a struggle to get used to, did you eventually move the task bar by going into control centre? Or did you try left-clicking on it, and dragging it to the edge you wanted it on - EXACTLY THE WAY IT WORKS IN WINDOWS ???
A lot of people complain that KDE is too much like Windows for their tastes. A lot of the time, you can just do whatever you would have done in Windows, and it just works.
Also, please in future put all your dead-tree mail communication on the back of postcards instead of in envelopes. If everyone who has nothing to hide does this, we can open all the stuff in envelopes and catch those who do.
Great idea! I'm going to buy shares in a postcard company right now. I can see this being very popular.
Its often said that the best way to break into an open source project is to find an application you like, and add to it a feature that you would find useful.
The problem I have found with this is that few projects have any online design documents, to help someone new to the project find their way around. This is also frequently true in the commercial/closed source world of development, but in that setting you can always wander over to the lead developer's pod and ask him for some clues. Now I know you can email the maintainer, but you don't always feel comfortable taking up their time when you know they are very busy and doing this on their own time.
Why are design docs, in particular things like class diagrams, interaction diagrams, flow charts, whatever, so rarely available? Is it because the projects aren't created from design documents in the first place, or is it more a lack of a sensible way to share designs in a digital form? Are there any decent free software reverse engineering tools to create 'how it is' design documents from the sources?
<flamesuit>Is it a consequence of the kind of people heading up the individual project? I am aware that some of the most successful open source projects are run by experienced software engineers (apache being a classic example). But many of the smaller projects are run by teenagers who have recently learned to program. Is it simply that much open source software is produced by people who are not yet aware of the benefits and methods of design documentation?</flamesuit>
There is a player for Linux and Unices called MPlayer (homepage at http://mplayer.dev.hu/homepage/ ) which gives excellent hardware video acceleration on Matrox G200 and later video cards. It plays DivX with TV resolution (anime fansubs) scaled smoothly up to full screen (1280x1024) at full framerate. This is on a Celeron 300->450. It also does an excellent job of coping with damaged streams, and can cope with pretty much every format you can get a codec for on Windows (except Sorenson encoded QuickTime) through a bit of code borrowed from the WINE project. It also can do output using a number of other methods, including X, framebuffer, SDL and aalib (always fun). All in all, an awesome player.
Whether you believe in global warming caused by man or not, surely you can see that taking the steps to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions is just progress in the efficiency of manufacturing. Progress always requires up-front investment. The sooner you invest, the sooner you will get the cost-saving returns, and therefore you get more returns because you get them from now onwards instead of from ten years time onwards. Business is becoming to short sighted these days.
In the UK, Future Publishing produce a games magazine called Edge. A friend recently moved to the US, and tells me that it is not available there on newsstands, but that its technical articles are published three months later in the US magazine NextGen.
Edge gives an average game a 5 out of ten. I have seen games get 1, and it is common for games to get 2 or three. It is very rare for a game to get 10, I think the last game to get a 10 was probably Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Edge covers all formats, only reviews what it considers the very best releases each month (8 to 12 titles), and is highly respected by the industry. It is supposed to be a magazine for the games industry as well as the hardcore gamer.
One thing is their favour is that they don't usually carry adverts for games. Whether this is an editorial decision or a consequence of their review policy I don't know. They also don't review things until they are in the shops - they only review final code. For a taste of Edge, have a look at Edge Online.
I'm not jealous of Microsoft's success at all. I would like them not to have their current 'success' because they abuse it to ensure things stay that way. What I would really like to see is a large number of smaller companies sharing in a great success, with none of them dominating the rest (as is the case of Microsoft in the 'Windows market'). Open standards and open source, along with a change in business models could bring about this kind of situation. The current situation is that the mantra of every other industry that requires consumer participation, 'our business is driven by our customers', which seems a fair proposition, just doesn't exist in the Microsoft-dominated world, where it is standard practise to have a clause in the license that if the product doesn't work or causes you damage in any way, that is in no way the fault of the supplier, and you have no recourse.
People hate Gates because he is litterally out to destroy Linux. If he could find a way to obliterate Linux from the face of the planet, he would do it, along with everything else that is non-Windows. In contrast, most Linux users prefer a heterogenous software world, which includes Windows along with everyone else. Microsoft constantly try to escalate the situation though, by trying to break open standards for example, or making speeches about how the government ought to do something about free software.
Essentially, it isn't safe from a free software perspective, to just think of Microsoft in the same way as any other large closed source software company. Other large closed source software companies don't go out of their way to attack free software, they try to provide non-free software that stands on its own merits. Turning your back on Microsoft is like turning your back on an axe-wielding homicidal lunatic.
I don't want to be a spelling nazi here, but I am confused about the origin of the word 'walla' in the above post. I have seen this word used quite a few times recently, and always in a context which makes sense for the French word voila, which is commonly used in English.
Is this an example of poor spelling on the web, or a completely different word? It looks kind of middle-eastern as it is.
Read "An Introduction to Database Systems" by C J Date. The author is the source of much of the theory of relational databases. He worked in research at IBM when they were producing the very first relational databases, and very much 'wrote the book' on relational databases, and this is that book.
How much memory does a PS2 have? Does it really have enough to run Linux, X and some useful apps? I have read that the DreamCast has more memory than the PS2, and that only has 24MB total - or is it only video memory that the DC has more of?
And then you reuse a class defined in PHP in any other application, which includes lots of non-web apps? Is it really that easy to integrate PHP scripts with other language environments?
Java leaves your idea of PHP dead in the water for one big reason - with Java you write your application classes seperately from your HTML generation classes/JSPs/whatever. Then you use the application classes in both the web site and any number of different apps, without having to write them as 'web services' or whatever. If you wrote your application classes as data abstractions of your app data, using the Observer/Observable pattern, you now have shared data objects as well as shared code.
My father has a Sky Digibox, and has found that it doesn't care if you leave it unplugged from the telephone line forever - as long as you don't want to do pay-per-view. But I will never get one of those - the main thing I have discovered about it is that by paying Sky £10 a month, you get quite a number of new channels that are not even up to the standards of Channel 5 (and none above that standard). They don't even have News Bunny any more :-(
Thanks for the corrections. It doesn't sound so bad after all. I think I will wait a while to see how the backup options pan out, but maybe this is something I would find useful after all.
Dvorak is obviously wrong, as he seems to have forgotten the ubiquity of VCRs, and obviously there is nothing immoral about not watching adverts. But why do so many /. readers jump to the defence of TiVo?
As I understand it, TiVo is not a drop in replacement for a VCR. It only lets you watch what you have recorded once, and it doesn't let you back up to another device for later repeat viewing. I'll keep my VCR thankyou. Further, you can only continue to use the device that you have paid serious money for if you continue to pay a subscription fee to TiVo, and leave the thing connected to the 'phone line so that it can report in all your viewing and time shifting habits to TiVo to do what they want with. How is that an advantage to me?
It seems to me that between DVD and TiVo, the US television and film producers have got the future all sewn up, in a 1984 kind of way.
One more thing. I am British, so perhaps all this advertising stuff doesn't mean so much to me. Get this: On British television, you only get one advertising break (about 4 minutes long) during each half-hour of content. Also, the highest quality shows are all on the BBC, which is advertiser-free. The commercial channels have just as much opportunity to produce quality content, they just don't bother.
For your suggestion of a middle-client, check out Java Web Start, which Sun are promoting heavily at the moment. It basically does exactly what you described. The way Java is taking off right now, it really could become a very big thing.
As far as exploitation of women in porn goes, it is much more subtle. Whether the women depicted in the porn are being exploited or not, the effect that viewing the porn has upon the viewer's state of mind and world view is very important. Porn tends to portray the subjects of its images as promiscuous people that just can't get enough sex and would go with the viewer if they ever met them. The text that appears with the images seeks to reinforce a view that women are all desperate for sex and would go with (just about) anyone, etc.
What happens is that if a man views porn regularly, he gets a very distorted view of sex and women, which can cause two things. First he will treat women that do allow him to become close to them in ways that are (for many women) highly inappropriate, which is abuse of those women, and damaging to an otherwise good relationship. And secondly he will be approaching all women with this distorted view, which will cause him to find it more difficult to form relationships with women, and lead back, via frustration, to yet more porn. Its a negative feedback loop, and one that some men find very hard to see their way clear from. This is potentially harmful and dangerous to these men and the women around them.