You've got to understand, a lot of these Americans don't know what a "town centre" is.
Some of them do, of course. There are some beautiful traditionally structured towns. But a lot of the newer towns, the closest they have is a strip mall of chain fast food joints, a Target and a Walmart etc.
"PCI-e... PCIx16... PCI.... Um I donno whatever it say on the box. (looks at shelf) Its $19.95 thats about all I know."...
Note that I like talking to people in general, I just hate the brick and mortar shopping experience. Mostly because I know from personal experience the poor bastards are asking scripted questions and are rated by the boss on how well they follow the script.
But that's not the kind of local shop GP was talking about. They were talking about bookshops run by people who love books. Delis run by people who love food. Jewellery shops run by people who love jewellery. And yeah, PC shops run by computer enthusiasts.
As it happens there are a couple of shops in my town that sell PC parts, run be people who know how to assemble a desktop. I can see how they could be a good resource for customers with a certain medium level of expertise -- enough knowledge to know how to fit a new HDD; little enough knowledge that they'd like reassurance and advice from the shopkeeper. Sadly for them, there's no way they can compete with online prices, nor the convenience of ordering at home and getting the goods delivered next day.
OK, I'm only going by the Charing Cross Road branch of Foyles, which is a *large* independent bookshop. 5 floors, a cafe and a stage. No wonder it's got room for a respectable range of computing books.
Waterstones is a large chain, yes, but outside of flagship city-centre shops, they're not individually large shops - and of course they have limited room for stock, and therefore must concentrate on the mainstream.
They'll stock some niche corners of a mainstream subject (e.g. non-bestseller works of contemporary fiction); they'll stock the big hitters from specialist subjects (Java in 21 days). But if you want Programming Haskell, you're going to have to order.
Small independent booksellers will typically have even less space, and the same limited stock as a Waterstones branch. That is, unless they specialise. Specialist bookshops tend to do a lot of mail order, now primarily conducted over the internet, so we're onto a slightly different subject of not shopping "locally", but shopping with small traders.
Try buying programming books at the Waterstones in a moderate-sized British town. Yes, there will be a computing section. It will stock Java in a Nutshell. It won't stock Programming Haskell.
Now, a mainstream selection of fiction happens to be sufficient for me. But if I had more niche tastes, I suspect I'd find physical bookshops frustrating for fiction too. People who previously would get their bookshop to order obscure novels for them, are now more likely to order online.
But they still shaft you. Either you put it in the bank, in which case the rich get to use your money to make more money.
Or you stuff it under the mattress, and the rich steal it off you via the mechanism known as 'increasing the money supply' which serves to devalue the currency.
So, in essence, you're playing into their hands by earning it in the first place. A strange game - the only winning move is not to play.
It's quite appealing, but unfortunately I'm a little bit hooked on the things money can buy.
However I buy more books by visiting physical stores. This is the only place where I can go to and browse through the books, read a few passages, get acquainted with the volume in hand.
Have you never clicked the "look inside" link on Amazon?
And the problem with bricks'n'mortar bookshops is that, necessarily, they only have as much stock as will fit in the shop. The choice then becomes (a) order at the shop, wait a week, go back to collect it, or (b) order online, have book arrive at my office a couple of days later.
Every couple of years, my parents ask for help buying a laptop. I tell them to just go to a PC World-type shop and pick out one with a screen size they're comfortable with, that feels solid enough from a build quality perspective. They don't want to compile kernels or play Crysis; they want to run Word and a browser. So I know anything in the shop will do what they need for a couple of years at least.
All of this assumes that the vendor *wants* it to improve. TFA shows that where there's an incentive for good installers, they get written. MySQL installs in a snap. Mainstream open source software installs on Linux in an apt-get/yum/whatever one-liner.
Now look at Oracle DB -- one of TFA's examples of "bad". The people who specify Oracle are seldom the people who will be installing it; or if they are, they're people who've done Oracle training and are charging by the hour for Oracle consultancy.
Lots of people *benefit* from Oracle being a dog to install. Consultants, as above. Staffers who get to put down a week's timesheets for "Oracle installation and configuration". Oracle themselves, because for certain decision making managers, "serious" software is difficult to install -- if you can install it in 20 minutes it must be a toy; and because they can sell books / training / certification.
There's a lot of people who would lose out on profitable (but wasteful) activity if enterprise software was easier to install.
Since I used to run Vim (and X) perfectly happily on a 486SX25 with 4 MBs of RAM, I don't believe you.
Just to recap, that's a CPU clock 28 times faster - along with other improvements in CPU technology - and 64 times more RAM if you have the older model.
I'm afraid I believed Damon Lindelof when he was in interviews -- during the first series, he'd say "We already know how it's going to end; there's a full story arc planned out". Then during the second (or third?) series - "We've been treading water a bit because we weren't sure we'd get the green light to see through the story we'd planned, but now we're going to".
And that convinced me that, unlike (say) The X Files, there was a planned end in sight, and that it was conceived to be a coherent whole.
So it was only about halfway through the final season that I realised, nah, they're just glibly explaining their way out of corners they painted themselves into.
I don't mind admitting that I really enjoyed almost all of it, up until that realisation.
If I were smarter, I would have waited to buy an R-Pi. Early adopters get screwed around (if not actually screwed) and I forgot that to my detriment.
You probably should have done. The RPi is still effectively a beta product. I've not been following all that closely, so I don't know how explicit they've been on that. But it was definitely the sense I got: this was a way to find and iron out design issues, and for the community building an education platform to get working on.
If you happen to have a use for it that's outside that scope, then great. But it's a bonus.
I think GP's point is that "only the board, internet access, soldering iron and coding" is a finite list that does not include a breadboard or any other device.
Jeez, if you want to be a geologist, read some books.
But yeah, Wikipedia tells me that "The wide, shallow seas of the Carboniferous era provided ideal conditions for coal formation, although coal is known from most geological periods."
Meanwhile, in the present day, we've been digging up our peat long before it can become coal.
The post he was responding to said this: If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month
It is assumed that we're talking about local averages, not global.
That's an unfounded assumption.
I have experienced a month in which Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. I was in the UK at the moment it happened, and oblivious to what was going on in a compound in Pakistan at that moment. But nonetheless, I experienced that month.
I have an experienced a warmer-than-average month; that is, I have experienced a month during which the global average temperature for the month, was higher than the global average since records began. I have experienced that, because I am over 27. If you're under 27, then you have not. Simple.
However, you can't seem to get self-propelling electrics, and pushing a mower up even a slight slope is bloody hard work. I nearly bought a house with a ~40 yard lawn on a slope, and I was browsing online shops for self-propelling petrol mowers before we even put the offer in.
Hello...still here...food is still on the shelves, crops are still growing,
Haven't you noticed the headlines about failing crops affecting food prices? The rich are paying more for food. The poor aren't so lucky
there is still snow in the mountains
Not as much. Glaciers are shrinking. Sea ice is reducing.
and it still rains.
Wikipedia tells me that the 2012 drought is on track to become the costliest natural disaster in US history. Other parts of the world also have droughts.
In the Himalayas, solar kettles are fairly common - parabolic reflectors collecting sunlight on the water vessel. The thin air at altitude means sunlight is more intense, and the low pressure also means water boils at a lower temperature (meaning, I suppose, that you can't get a decent cup of tea).
I wonder, is there a correlation between people who don't believe in temperature records derived from the fossil record, and people who don't accept the evidence of evolution from the fossil record?
I'm not a cheerleader for the idea, and I'm only repeating a vague version of it from memory.
But, as I said, if you burn the algae in a suitably equipped furnace, you could sequester the CO2, in the same way as carbon sequestration works for coal burning power stations.
Or you could bury it in such a way that it doesn't leak CO2 as it decays.
Or you could argue that by burning it, you're reducing the use of fossil fuel. Only putting CO2 in the atmosphere that you recently fixed from the atmosphere.
Or, as you said, you could arrange for it to sink into the ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got to understand, a lot of these Americans don't know what a "town centre" is.
Some of them do, of course. There are some beautiful traditionally structured towns. But a lot of the newer towns, the closest they have is a strip mall of chain fast food joints, a Target and a Walmart etc.
"PCI-e... PCIx16... PCI.... Um I donno whatever it say on the box. (looks at shelf) Its $19.95 thats about all I know." ...
Note that I like talking to people in general, I just hate the brick and mortar shopping experience. Mostly because I know from personal experience the poor bastards are asking scripted questions and are rated by the boss on how well they follow the script.
But that's not the kind of local shop GP was talking about. They were talking about bookshops run by people who love books. Delis run by people who love food. Jewellery shops run by people who love jewellery. And yeah, PC shops run by computer enthusiasts.
As it happens there are a couple of shops in my town that sell PC parts, run be people who know how to assemble a desktop. I can see how they could be a good resource for customers with a certain medium level of expertise -- enough knowledge to know how to fit a new HDD; little enough knowledge that they'd like reassurance and advice from the shopkeeper. Sadly for them, there's no way they can compete with online prices, nor the convenience of ordering at home and getting the goods delivered next day.
OK, I'm only going by the Charing Cross Road branch of Foyles, which is a *large* independent bookshop. 5 floors, a cafe and a stage. No wonder it's got room for a respectable range of computing books.
Waterstones is a large chain, yes, but outside of flagship city-centre shops, they're not individually large shops - and of course they have limited room for stock, and therefore must concentrate on the mainstream.
They'll stock some niche corners of a mainstream subject (e.g. non-bestseller works of contemporary fiction); they'll stock the big hitters from specialist subjects (Java in 21 days). But if you want Programming Haskell, you're going to have to order.
Small independent booksellers will typically have even less space, and the same limited stock as a Waterstones branch. That is, unless they specialise. Specialist bookshops tend to do a lot of mail order, now primarily conducted over the internet, so we're onto a slightly different subject of not shopping "locally", but shopping with small traders.
... or perhaps on average that's a very effective way of selling things? It didn't work on you, but it might work on the next two suckers.
Foyle's is not a "small local bookstore".
Try buying programming books at the Waterstones in a moderate-sized British town. Yes, there will be a computing section. It will stock Java in a Nutshell. It won't stock Programming Haskell.
Now, a mainstream selection of fiction happens to be sufficient for me. But if I had more niche tastes, I suspect I'd find physical bookshops frustrating for fiction too. People who previously would get their bookshop to order obscure novels for them, are now more likely to order online.
But they still shaft you. Either you put it in the bank, in which case the rich get to use your money to make more money.
Or you stuff it under the mattress, and the rich steal it off you via the mechanism known as 'increasing the money supply' which serves to devalue the currency.
So, in essence, you're playing into their hands by earning it in the first place. A strange game - the only winning move is not to play.
It's quite appealing, but unfortunately I'm a little bit hooked on the things money can buy.
However I buy more books by visiting physical stores. This is the only place where I can go to and browse through the books, read a few passages, get acquainted with the volume in hand.
Have you never clicked the "look inside" link on Amazon?
And the problem with bricks'n'mortar bookshops is that, necessarily, they only have as much stock as will fit in the shop. The choice then becomes (a) order at the shop, wait a week, go back to collect it, or (b) order online, have book arrive at my office a couple of days later.
Every couple of years, my parents ask for help buying a laptop. I tell them to just go to a PC World-type shop and pick out one with a screen size they're comfortable with, that feels solid enough from a build quality perspective. They don't want to compile kernels or play Crysis; they want to run Word and a browser. So I know anything in the shop will do what they need for a couple of years at least.
All of this assumes that the vendor *wants* it to improve. TFA shows that where there's an incentive for good installers, they get written. MySQL installs in a snap. Mainstream open source software installs on Linux in an apt-get/yum/whatever one-liner.
Now look at Oracle DB -- one of TFA's examples of "bad". The people who specify Oracle are seldom the people who will be installing it; or if they are, they're people who've done Oracle training and are charging by the hour for Oracle consultancy.
Lots of people *benefit* from Oracle being a dog to install. Consultants, as above. Staffers who get to put down a week's timesheets for "Oracle installation and configuration". Oracle themselves, because for certain decision making managers, "serious" software is difficult to install -- if you can install it in 20 minutes it must be a toy; and because they can sell books / training / certification.
There's a lot of people who would lose out on profitable (but wasteful) activity if enterprise software was easier to install.
VI brings it to it's knees as bad as a forkbomb.
Since I used to run Vim (and X) perfectly happily on a 486SX25 with 4 MBs of RAM, I don't believe you.
Just to recap, that's a CPU clock 28 times faster - along with other improvements in CPU technology - and 64 times more RAM if you have the older model.
I wonder what you're doing wrong?
I'm afraid I believed Damon Lindelof when he was in interviews -- during the first series, he'd say "We already know how it's going to end; there's a full story arc planned out". Then during the second (or third?) series - "We've been treading water a bit because we weren't sure we'd get the green light to see through the story we'd planned, but now we're going to".
And that convinced me that, unlike (say) The X Files, there was a planned end in sight, and that it was conceived to be a coherent whole.
So it was only about halfway through the final season that I realised, nah, they're just glibly explaining their way out of corners they painted themselves into.
I don't mind admitting that I really enjoyed almost all of it, up until that realisation.
It's too late. The joy of Lost was the promise of a satisfactory conclusion to a coherent story arc. Now we know that there isn't one.
If I were smarter, I would have waited to buy an R-Pi. Early adopters get screwed around (if not actually screwed) and I forgot that to my detriment.
You probably should have done. The RPi is still effectively a beta product. I've not been following all that closely, so I don't know how explicit they've been on that. But it was definitely the sense I got: this was a way to find and iron out design issues, and for the community building an education platform to get working on.
If you happen to have a use for it that's outside that scope, then great. But it's a bonus.
At £25, I don't mind any of this.
I think GP's point is that "only the board, internet access, soldering iron and coding" is a finite list that does not include a breadboard or any other device.
Yes, it was pedantic. But pedantry is fun!
Jeez, if you want to be a geologist, read some books.
But yeah, Wikipedia tells me that "The wide, shallow seas of the Carboniferous era provided ideal conditions for coal formation, although coal is known from most geological periods."
Meanwhile, in the present day, we've been digging up our peat long before it can become coal.
The post he was responding to said this: If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month
It is assumed that we're talking about local averages, not global.
That's an unfounded assumption.
I have experienced a month in which Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. I was in the UK at the moment it happened, and oblivious to what was going on in a compound in Pakistan at that moment. But nonetheless, I experienced that month.
I have an experienced a warmer-than-average month; that is, I have experienced a month during which the global average temperature for the month, was higher than the global average since records began. I have experienced that, because I am over 27. If you're under 27, then you have not. Simple.
Electric mowers are the norm in the UK.
However, you can't seem to get self-propelling electrics, and pushing a mower up even a slight slope is bloody hard work. I nearly bought a house with a ~40 yard lawn on a slope, and I was browsing online shops for self-propelling petrol mowers before we even put the offer in.
Hello...still here...food is still on the shelves, crops are still growing,
Haven't you noticed the headlines about failing crops affecting food prices? The rich are paying more for food. The poor aren't so lucky
there is still snow in the mountains
Not as much. Glaciers are shrinking. Sea ice is reducing.
and it still rains.
Wikipedia tells me that the 2012 drought is on track to become the costliest natural disaster in US history. Other parts of the world also have droughts.
In the Himalayas, solar kettles are fairly common - parabolic reflectors collecting sunlight on the water vessel. The thin air at altitude means sunlight is more intense, and the low pressure also means water boils at a lower temperature (meaning, I suppose, that you can't get a decent cup of tea).
Out came something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike turkey.
"Share and enjoy!"
I wonder, is there a correlation between people who don't believe in temperature records derived from the fossil record, and people who don't accept the evidence of evolution from the fossil record?
People get paid to collect litter and sweep streets. They do it because it's necessary to keep the place liveable in.
Industry is compelled by government to sequester pollutants, and dispose of them in an approved manner.
CO2 sequestration is analogous to both of these. It's not free. It needs to be done.
That only applies if the organic matter ends up in anoxic conditions - buried under soil or anoxic water.
We could engineer that, I guess, if we put in a massive worldwide effort. It's unlikely to happen spontaneously at a large enough scale to help.
I'm not a cheerleader for the idea, and I'm only repeating a vague version of it from memory.
But, as I said, if you burn the algae in a suitably equipped furnace, you could sequester the CO2, in the same way as carbon sequestration works for coal burning power stations.
Or you could bury it in such a way that it doesn't leak CO2 as it decays.
Or you could argue that by burning it, you're reducing the use of fossil fuel. Only putting CO2 in the atmosphere that you recently fixed from the atmosphere.
Or, as you said, you could arrange for it to sink into the ocean.
Just a quick check: are you comparing a fully-occupied passenger aeroplane with an averagely loaded bus/train?