This car has a lot of innovations directed at both the gasoline components and the electric ones. Consequently, it is hard to evaluate the actual benefit of going electric compared to a gasoline-only car. Suppose you had a car with all the technology in this car that applies to the gasoline technology -- lightweight body, advanced engine, idle stop, aerodynamic shape, funny tires etc -- but without the additional weight and cost of the electric motor, NiMH battery and related hardware. Would such a car beat the hybrid in mileage?
I do not deny that the electric components offer some benefits here, such as the turbo-like performance boost. But is the additional weight and cost worth it? One should not underestimate the potential of cars based only on the internal combustion engine.
Qt comes in a number of different versions, with X and win32 being the better known. But there is now a frame buffer version that completely avoids X on Linux. This version of Qt (Qt/Embedded) already offers anti-aliasing and alpha blending: stuff you can only dream of in X. Thanks to Qt/KDE, a lightweight GUI with lots of available apps is theoretically possible.
Perhaps the problem is not any "fixing", but the superficial nature of web reviews. It is all too easy for reviewers to gush over the latest installer screens. It is not that easy to actually test the distribution after it is installed. I too have been disappointed by the cheesy, glowing reviews of Mandrake 7. When I installed it and tried to use it, I found it full of bugs: XEmacs' info system has not been working for the last few distributions, the ftape driver still does not load right, one Mandrake Security config script clobbered my/etc/inittab (making my machine unbootable) etc. A little digging beyond the skin-deep level would have revealed that Mandrake 7 does not deserve such overly positive reviews.
On another topic, I wonder what magic incantation is there for submitting articles? I sent in the same thing 2 days ago:
2000-07-12 14:49:01 Are Linux reviews fixed? (articles,media) (rejected)
If they have a negative feedback system, then stopnapster.com could organize a movement to flood the database with fake negatives, or positive feedback for the trojan mp3s. The whole thing would still be too messy for the casual user.
With a name like "Cyberjaya", do you think it has something to do with tech? Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is being developed as a Silicon Valley wannabe with legislation, networking, infrastructure and land designed to attract foreign high tech companies and talent. Cyberjaya, located in the MSC, is billed as a smart "cybercity" for those working and living in this IT fantasyland.
"Most graphs employ two axes, in which the horizontal axis represents a group of independent variables, and the vertical axis represents a group of dependent variables."
I think you misunderstand the terminology here. Let's skip the subjectivity: a graph is supposed to illustrate quantitative data, not interpersonal relationships. A variable is called "dependent" in that it is determined by the other variable called independent. The relationship is simply y = f(x): x determines y, regardless of what ultimately determines x. That is all. If you want to go further, it will be in the realm of philosophy, where you will find yourself tracing a long causality chain to the uncaused First Cause. I don't think that is where we want to go.
In short, we do not care who controls time. Learning/proficiency/whatever still changes as a function of time. It does not imply a causal relation. Causality is for Thomistic philosophers. Graphs are for data. Printer cables are for printers.
Popular usage, as we noticed, has this ability to hijack any jargon. Your version is obscure in that it is not understood by most people using the phrase. I was looking for the popular meaning, one that explains its usage. Its popular meaning, of course, is confused and illogical, but that is nevertheless its popular meaning. Yours does not qualify, since it is not the one meant by most people who throw the phrase around, and is probably no longer relevant in common usage.
I will grant you that an otherwise obscure word can be well understood in a select group of people. However, that group is not the relevant context here.
Actually, the word "arsenal" is listed in the dictionary as having both meanings that you described. The phrase "learning curve", however, still has the classic meaning steep==fast from 1922. Try looking them up on Merriam-Webster.
Thanks to all who replied. You have pretty much confirmed my private theory on what is going on. Basically, the phrase is nonsensical in conventional usage, and the confusion comes in two ways.
Reversing the axis: By mathematical convention, the independent variable (time or effort) is graphed on the X or horizontal axis. The explanations I have seen reverse this, insisting that learning, knowledge or proficiency (a function of time or effort) be graphed on the horizontal axis. Unless you are an economist (they are as a group often teased for transposing dependent/independent variables), you should think about following the mathematical convention.
Mixing up metaphors: You can climb a mountain. You can climb a hill. One does not climb a curve. It seems to me that some people muddle the steep hill metaphor with the graph metaphor.
That does it. The technical community should not embarrass itself with imprecise jargon. Every time someone uses this goofy phrase, I am going to ask "what's a steep learning curve?" and hope they get a clue.
Re:Steep learning curve means easy to learn
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
·
· Score: 1
Thank you. I wish more people would practice the Socratic method by asking (with an innocent look) "what's a learning curve?" and watch the clueless get a clue as they try to explain it.
That phrase always bugs me. The obvious first take would be to graph the independent variable (time) on the X axis, and learning on the Y. But then that would give any "hard" subject a shallow learning curve. Someone once tried to explain it to me by using a Z axis, muddling everything up even more. Is there an official interpretation, or did an economist invent this graph?
Have they fixed up the bugs that made Mandrake 7 so maddening? Some of these I reported, to no avail. Here is some of what I encountered:
XEmacs info system broken. They compressed the info files with bzip2, but forgot to tell XEmacs how to handle them. This bug was reported months, may even a year ago, and was broken in version 6.1. Is it still busted?
The ftape driver did not work. Somewhere between Mandrake 5 and 6, it broke. My floppy tape drive would not work until I manually loaded zftape.o. I reported the problem to Mandrake, and they closed the bug without fixing it. Still broken in Mandrake 7.
Upgrade install did not. I tried their upgrade installation over my Mandrake 6.1, tweaked some packages, and let 'er rip. After the install, I found that most of the packages were not upgraded. I think there was some dependency issue that they neglected to handle or inform me about.
Mandrake Security (msec) gone berzerk. One of their security customization scripts had a bug that clobbered my/etc/inittab, rendering my system unbootable. Most unnerving. The security settings did not make sense for a network-connected individual user either. Why isn't there a setting that gives strong network security but relaxed user security? A lot of the settings at the "normal" level was rather irritating, preventing access to a lot of normally accessible directories and files. Moreover, the thing regularly schedules lengthy (and noisy) disk scans to check permissions.
It really puzzles the mind how Mozilla advocates can be so sanguine about its future performance despite all available data. Data: nightly builds are about 3X slower and 2X bigger than Netscape on my machine. Let's face it: there is absolutely no proof that Mozilla will be anything but bloated and slow. There is no rational reason to believe that Mozilla will be small and fast. Just throwing the magic word "optimize" will not cut it: it is not like Opera will not do their own optimizing. Even in its buggy state, Opera has proven one thing that Mozilla has yet to do: it can be small and fast. That alone will ensure its popularity as it has when it battled Netscape and IE on Windows. In Linux-land, by contrast, the competition is mediocre, as long as you do not count long-unfulfilled promises and wishful "clear opinions".
So we are back to the solar-panels-on-the-roof argument. I'll remember to call you next time I need someone to shovel snow off my roof so my solar panels can see the sun.
I'm afraid I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, so I cannot check on your claimed 20 year longevity. However, I do see a Britannica article that points out that one needs 40sq m of solar panels per person per day, even in sunny regions. Not everyone can afford to buy one house per person. And these estimates are for thermal energy generation (the ones that I called viable in my original post). Other media success stories also use thermal energy solutions. Photovoltaics are far less efficient.
Your use of ICs as an analogy is poor. Our computers use very tiny amounts of silicon per person. Photovoltaics, on the other hand, need large surface areas and far more raw material.
Theory is nice, but changing the world needs more than a few nice theoretical numbers.
People do not often appreciate how far flourescent lighting has come since their flickery days. These days, CF lights do not flicker when started or give off bluish light. They all start pretty much instantly now. Most bulbs (excepting those marketed as "full spectrum") now give off "warm" lighting comparable to incandescent lights. I can't tell the difference. Some can even be used with dimmers.
They offer good cost savings, especially when you count how many times you have to replace conventional bulbs, and how much electricity they save over their lifetimes. The initial cost is no longer prohibitive, especially if your local energy utility offers rebates for purchase of CF bulbs. I checking with your local electric company to see if they offer a rebate program. I received a Starlights catalog that advertised quite a large range of lighting options.
The biggest energy savings may come where people replace their energy guzzling halogen lamps. You know them: those torchieres that shine their light upwards. Every so often, you might see a puff of flames as a moth catches fire on the bulb. I have a couple of flourescent lamps that look a lot like these halogen monsters, except they work a lot cooler. If you replace a 500W halogen with a 35W flourescent, you remove a fire hazard from your room. The energy savings will be significant: unlike a comparable appliance like a microwave, these things can be left running unattended for hours.
Apart from energy savings and safety, flourescents can make your life easier. You spend much less time standing on chairs changing light bulbs. Your circuit breaker will not overload because someone turned on the microwave and your halogen lights are on. They run cooler, so they give off less heat: important in the coming summer months. That's why I use CFs where they make sense.
The simple problem with renewable resources like solar power is that they depend on the sun. Sunlight, of course, confers only so much power per square ft. Powering any significant number of consumers would require way more land than is politically feasible. Also, there is the problem of storing sunlight: clouds and night plays havoc with supply, making predictable production a headache. Wind power is noisy and unpredictable. Hydro is limited and has its own environmental cost.
Electricity from solar panels is a loser. Photovoltaics are horribly inefficient. A physicist friend told me that it took more energy to manufacture photovoltaic cells than they would generate over their expected lifetime. Certainly, they are not cost effective. This is not to negate solar power altogether. Solar hot water heaters are far more viable, since light->heat conversion is more efficient and water -- due to its high capacitance -- makes a good energy storage medium. I have seen solar water heaters put to good use in areas with lots of sunlight.
I am not so bothered by the writer's smugness in writing -- this guy may not be a skilled writer after all -- as the information he offers. You may notice that the alleged spammers listed there appear to be all (or mostly) female. Certainly, the photos are all of women, and the "kinky stories" seem (I did not read them all) pointed in that general direction. There is a possibility that these pages are neither benign altruism nor an exercise in self-congratulation. Rather, the site could be an elaborate, sexually motivated scheme to harrass these women, especially "Rodona". If Slashdotters could be manupilated into harrassing them, "so much the better".
It is hard to determine the motive or actual circumstances from available information. There is too much uncertainty for me to actually make an accusation. One can think up a whole bunch of other possible motivations: the women-looking-for-attention theory, the disgruntled-ex-employee theory, the let's-make-Slashdotters-look-silly theory, the I-want-attention theory, etc. The guy could really be telling the truth and wants to do the net a service. I only want to point out the possibility that Slashdotters are being manupilated into harrassing possibly innocent victims.
That's what open source is about
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
Well, why not? This is GPL. Under this license, you write a hunk of code and say: "Here is my nifty code. Share and enjoy." So go ahead: share and enjoy. GPL coding is inherently altruistic, with egoism satisfied by acknowledgements in the code.
You are you calling a Model T?
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
The trouble with analogies: they only illustrate, but they cannot prove. In this case, the obvious question pops up: why not? What is it about Linux or BSD that would preclude incorporating specific hunks of code from Altheos? We are not talking about mechanical contraptions here, but more malleable software. Forget the automobile analogies: X Windows, RPC, NFS, JFS... if they are useful, we can stick 'em in. It has been done before, and can be done again.
This is an open source, GPL type OS, right? Well then, this means that one can grab whatever is good in there and stuff it into a more mature system. You say it has a good X alternative? Well, then, what would prevent someone from porting that to Linux or BSD? Why fragment the OS world further when you can assimilate it?
Think about it. If you're in the paper-based junk mail business, you would not want those pesky email-based spammers to be eating into your customer base. IBLI is a natural enemy of spammers, and would probably be happy to sponsor an anti-spam effort.
The paper notes the increasing dominance of newer toolkits like gtk and Qt, and the fact that they can make migration to X-NextGen easier. On the other hand, they could also make abandonment of X viable. This soul-searching may well reflect an awareness that alternatives loom in the still-distant horizon.
Troll Tech has already announced Qt/Embedded: this allows Qt apps to run without X, using Linux's framebuffer. It offers anti-aliased text and alpha-blending of images, as well as hardware acceleration. Imagine a Gtk/Qt system that can share the framebuffer and bypass X. You could get a lot done with the latest generation of apps, faster, and with less memory.
Slashdot Mirror
This car has a lot of innovations directed at both the gasoline components and the electric ones. Consequently, it is hard to evaluate the actual benefit of going electric compared to a gasoline-only car. Suppose you had a car with all the technology in this car that applies to the gasoline technology -- lightweight body, advanced engine, idle stop, aerodynamic shape, funny tires etc -- but without the additional weight and cost of the electric motor, NiMH battery and related hardware. Would such a car beat the hybrid in mileage?
I do not deny that the electric components offer some benefits here, such as the turbo-like performance boost. But is the additional weight and cost worth it? One should not underestimate the potential of cars based only on the internal combustion engine.
Qt comes in a number of different versions, with X and win32 being the better known. But there is now a frame buffer version that completely avoids X on Linux. This version of Qt (Qt/Embedded) already offers anti-aliasing and alpha blending: stuff you can only dream of in X. Thanks to Qt/KDE, a lightweight GUI with lots of available apps is theoretically possible.
Perhaps the problem is not any "fixing", but the superficial nature of web reviews. It is all too easy for reviewers to gush over the latest installer screens. It is not that easy to actually test the distribution after it is installed. I too have been disappointed by the cheesy, glowing reviews of Mandrake 7. When I installed it and tried to use it, I found it full of bugs: XEmacs' info system has not been working for the last few distributions, the ftape driver still does not load right, one Mandrake Security config script clobbered my /etc/inittab (making my machine unbootable) etc. A little digging beyond the skin-deep level would have revealed that Mandrake 7 does not deserve such overly positive reviews.
On another topic, I wonder what magic incantation is there for submitting articles? I sent in the same thing 2 days ago:
2000-07-12 14:49:01 Are Linux reviews fixed? (articles,media) (rejected)
If they have a negative feedback system, then stopnapster.com could organize a movement to flood the database with fake negatives, or positive feedback for the trojan mp3s. The whole thing would still be too messy for the casual user.
See Stopnapster.com for a site started by artists who have something similar in mind. Hey, they need to eat too.
With a name like "Cyberjaya", do you think it has something to do with tech? Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is being developed as a Silicon Valley wannabe with legislation, networking, infrastructure and land designed to attract foreign high tech companies and talent. Cyberjaya, located in the MSC, is billed as a smart "cybercity" for those working and living in this IT fantasyland.
From www.britannica.com's entry "Graph":
"Most graphs employ two axes, in which the horizontal axis represents a group of independent variables, and the vertical axis represents a group of dependent variables."
I think you misunderstand the terminology here. Let's skip the subjectivity: a graph is supposed to illustrate quantitative data, not interpersonal relationships. A variable is called "dependent" in that it is determined by the other variable called independent. The relationship is simply y = f(x): x determines y, regardless of what ultimately determines x. That is all. If you want to go further, it will be in the realm of philosophy, where you will find yourself tracing a long causality chain to the uncaused First Cause. I don't think that is where we want to go.
In short, we do not care who controls time. Learning/proficiency/whatever still changes as a function of time. It does not imply a causal relation. Causality is for Thomistic philosophers. Graphs are for data. Printer cables are for printers.
:-)
I will grant you that an otherwise obscure word can be well understood in a select group of people. However, that group is not the relevant context here.
Actually, the word "arsenal" is listed in the dictionary as having both meanings that you described. The phrase "learning curve", however, still has the classic meaning steep==fast from 1922. Try looking them up on Merriam-Webster.
Thanks to all who replied. You have pretty much confirmed my private theory on what is going on. Basically, the phrase is nonsensical in conventional usage, and the confusion comes in two ways.
By mathematical convention, the independent variable (time or effort) is graphed on the X or horizontal axis. The explanations I have seen reverse this, insisting that learning, knowledge or proficiency (a function of time or effort) be graphed on the horizontal axis. Unless you are an economist (they are as a group often teased for transposing dependent/independent variables), you should think about following the mathematical convention.
You can climb a mountain. You can climb a hill. One does not climb a curve. It seems to me that some people muddle the steep hill metaphor with the graph metaphor.
That does it. The technical community should not embarrass itself with imprecise jargon. Every time someone uses this goofy phrase, I am going to ask "what's a steep learning curve?" and hope they get a clue.
Thank you. I wish more people would practice the Socratic method by asking (with an innocent look) "what's a learning curve?" and watch the clueless get a clue as they try to explain it.
The "one everybody talks about" has the steep curve indicating difficult/slow learning. Yours is the reverse, not to mention fairly obscure.
That phrase always bugs me. The obvious first take would be to graph the independent variable (time) on the X axis, and learning on the Y. But then that would give any "hard" subject a shallow learning curve. Someone once tried to explain it to me by using a Z axis, muddling everything up even more. Is there an official interpretation, or did an economist invent this graph?
Have they fixed up the bugs that made Mandrake 7 so maddening? Some of these I reported, to no avail. Here is some of what I encountered:
Yeah, but have you seen any significant improvement from all that bug fixing? Anything quantifiable? I haven't.
It really puzzles the mind how Mozilla advocates can be so sanguine about its future performance despite all available data. Data: nightly builds are about 3X slower and 2X bigger than Netscape on my machine. Let's face it: there is absolutely no proof that Mozilla will be anything but bloated and slow. There is no rational reason to believe that Mozilla will be small and fast. Just throwing the magic word "optimize" will not cut it: it is not like Opera will not do their own optimizing. Even in its buggy state, Opera has proven one thing that Mozilla has yet to do: it can be small and fast. That alone will ensure its popularity as it has when it battled Netscape and IE on Windows. In Linux-land, by contrast, the competition is mediocre, as long as you do not count long-unfulfilled promises and wishful "clear opinions".
So we are back to the solar-panels-on-the-roof argument. I'll remember to call you next time I need someone to shovel snow off my roof so my solar panels can see the sun.
I'm afraid I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, so I cannot check on your claimed 20 year longevity. However, I do see a Britannica article that points out that one needs 40sq m of solar panels per person per day, even in sunny regions. Not everyone can afford to buy one house per person. And these estimates are for thermal energy generation (the ones that I called viable in my original post). Other media success stories also use thermal energy solutions. Photovoltaics are far less efficient.
Your use of ICs as an analogy is poor. Our computers use very tiny amounts of silicon per person. Photovoltaics, on the other hand, need large surface areas and far more raw material.
Theory is nice, but changing the world needs more than a few nice theoretical numbers.
They offer good cost savings, especially when you count how many times you have to replace conventional bulbs, and how much electricity they save over their lifetimes. The initial cost is no longer prohibitive, especially if your local energy utility offers rebates for purchase of CF bulbs. I checking with your local electric company to see if they offer a rebate program. I received a Starlights catalog that advertised quite a large range of lighting options.
The biggest energy savings may come where people replace their energy guzzling halogen lamps. You know them: those torchieres that shine their light upwards. Every so often, you might see a puff of flames as a moth catches fire on the bulb. I have a couple of flourescent lamps that look a lot like these halogen monsters, except they work a lot cooler. If you replace a 500W halogen with a 35W flourescent, you remove a fire hazard from your room. The energy savings will be significant: unlike a comparable appliance like a microwave, these things can be left running unattended for hours.
Apart from energy savings and safety, flourescents can make your life easier. You spend much less time standing on chairs changing light bulbs. Your circuit breaker will not overload because someone turned on the microwave and your halogen lights are on. They run cooler, so they give off less heat: important in the coming summer months. That's why I use CFs where they make sense.
The simple problem with renewable resources like solar power is that they depend on the sun. Sunlight, of course, confers only so much power per square ft. Powering any significant number of consumers would require way more land than is politically feasible. Also, there is the problem of storing sunlight: clouds and night plays havoc with supply, making predictable production a headache. Wind power is noisy and unpredictable. Hydro is limited and has its own environmental cost.
Electricity from solar panels is a loser. Photovoltaics are horribly inefficient. A physicist friend told me that it took more energy to manufacture photovoltaic cells than they would generate over their expected lifetime. Certainly, they are not cost effective. This is not to negate solar power altogether. Solar hot water heaters are far more viable, since light->heat conversion is more efficient and water -- due to its high capacitance -- makes a good energy storage medium. I have seen solar water heaters put to good use in areas with lots of sunlight.
I am not so bothered by the writer's smugness in writing -- this guy may not be a skilled writer after all -- as the information he offers. You may notice that the alleged spammers listed there appear to be all (or mostly) female. Certainly, the photos are all of women, and the "kinky stories" seem (I did not read them all) pointed in that general direction. There is a possibility that these pages are neither benign altruism nor an exercise in self-congratulation. Rather, the site could be an elaborate, sexually motivated scheme to harrass these women, especially "Rodona". If Slashdotters could be manupilated into harrassing them, "so much the better".
It is hard to determine the motive or actual circumstances from available information. There is too much uncertainty for me to actually make an accusation. One can think up a whole bunch of other possible motivations: the women-looking-for-attention theory, the disgruntled-ex-employee theory, the let's-make-Slashdotters-look-silly theory, the I-want-attention theory, etc. The guy could really be telling the truth and wants to do the net a service. I only want to point out the possibility that Slashdotters are being manupilated into harrassing possibly innocent victims.
Well, why not? This is GPL. Under this license, you write a hunk of code and
say: "Here is my nifty code. Share and enjoy." So go ahead: share and enjoy.
GPL coding is inherently altruistic, with egoism satisfied by
acknowledgements in the code.
The trouble with analogies: they only illustrate, but they cannot prove. In ... if
this case, the obvious question pops up: why not? What is it about Linux or
BSD that would preclude incorporating specific hunks of code from Altheos?
We are not talking about mechanical contraptions here, but more malleable
software. Forget the automobile analogies: X Windows, RPC, NFS, JFS
they are useful, we can stick 'em in. It has been done before, and can be
done again.
Chris
This is an open source, GPL type OS, right? Well then, this means that one can grab whatever is good in there and stuff it into a more mature system. You say it has a good X alternative? Well, then, what would prevent someone from porting that to Linux or BSD? Why fragment the OS world further when you can assimilate it?
Think about it. If you're in the paper-based junk mail business, you would
not want those pesky email-based spammers to be eating into your customer
base. IBLI is a natural enemy of spammers, and would probably be happy to
sponsor an anti-spam effort.
The paper notes the increasing dominance of newer toolkits like gtk and Qt, and the fact that they can make migration to X-NextGen easier. On the other hand, they could also make abandonment of X viable. This soul-searching may well reflect an awareness that alternatives loom in the still-distant horizon.
Troll Tech has already announced Qt/Embedded: this allows Qt apps to run without X, using Linux's framebuffer. It offers anti-aliased text and alpha-blending of images, as well as hardware acceleration. Imagine a Gtk/Qt system that can share the framebuffer and bypass X. You could get a lot done with the latest generation of apps, faster, and with less memory.