I just got done sitting on a jury for a drug trial. It was a frightening experience. The evidence was so weak and indirect that I couldn't even believe they had charged these two people with a crime. One of them was a transsexual prostitute who was clearly (to me) just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, when the jury started to deliberate, there were four of us who all thought it was going to be an open-and-shut not guilty verdict, but we ended up with a hung jury, 8 voting guilty and 4 not guilty. This is the kind of offense that can easily land you in prison for life under California's three strikes laws. And no, you don't have to be a career criminal to fall under three strikes. The prostitute was charged with three felonies from the same night, and that's enough. There's a guy who's in prison for life under three strikes for stealing four chocolate chip cookies. After the trial was over, I visited the place where the cop claimed he'd conducted surveillance from using binoculars. Well, you absolutely cannot see the stuff he claimed to have seen from that location. There are buildings, trees, and walls in the way. I hope these defendants don't have to go to trial again, because next time they might be unlucky in the jury they get.
Your advice misses the point. I have followed every single piece of advice on your list. I am getting pump and dump spam to the disposable e-mail address I set up solely for my ameritrade account. I couldn't care less about spam being sent to that address, because it's all going to the bitbucket. The problem is that (a) I have the vast majority of my life savings entrusted to these idiots, and they're apparently completely clueless about security, and (b) it's not clear to me that I have any way of bailing on them without incurring massive capital gains taxes.
I've had exactly the same problem with Ameritrade. I signed up for a new account last fall, and have been getting pump and dump spams ever since. Ameritrade has had this problem for years, as I quickly verified with a google search; it's been discussed on several of the major anti-spam boards. No, it is not a dictionary attack; my address has 13 characters before the @ sign, consisting of a mixture of letters and digits, and has no dictionary words in it; the domain is not a common one either. Yes, it is definitely a leak from ameritrade; this is a special-purpose account that I created solely for the purpose of receiving mail from ameritrade.
I would love to switch from ameritrade to somebody else, both because of their obvious cluelessness about security and because certain functionality on their site is not usable on Linux. (They only support IE on Windows, and Firefox on Windows or MacOS X. You cannot, for instance, withdraw money using their web interface on Linux, using firefox, because the Submit button will always stay inactivated. Works fine on firefox on my wife's MacOS X box.)
So here are the things stopping me from switching:
I don't know which companies are better in terms of security.
I don't know which companies support Linux.
I've had the misfortune of making a 5% profit on my investments since last fall. AFAIK, that means that if I sell all the stocks I own on ameritrade, I have to pay capital gains tax, which will amount to a ton of money. (It will be an especially large amount of money if I sell before fall 2008, because on investments you've owned for less than 12 months, you pay at your full income tax rate.) Is this correct, or is there some way to transfer a stock investment to another company without incurring capital gains?
If anyone can recommend a company that is better than ameritrade in terms of security and linux support, I would happily set up an account with them, and start gradually switching over to them in such a way as to avoid paying a massive tax penalty. I would also love to hear some advice from anyone about how to manage such a transition so that it's not too much work, and doesn't result in taxes. At the present moment, all I can imagine doing is selectively selling the stocks that have lost money, and then buying them on the new account.
And how would this all work for somebody who's got something like an IRA on ameritrade. Are they basically screwed?
It is still difficult to justify if you can more easily write more efficient single-threaded apps. What consumer-level apps out there really need more processing power than a single core of a modern CPU can provide?
Agreed. I just replaced my old machine with a dual-core machine a few months ago, and I find that I basically always have one cpu idle. When things are slow, they're usually slow because they're waiting on I/O. At one point I thought I had a killer app, which was ripping MP3s from CDs. I would run cdparanoia from the command line to rip, and then when that was done, I would have 01.wav, 02.wav, 03.wav, etc. I wrote little one-liner scripts that would then run the MP3 encoder so that one cpu would be doing all the odd-numbered tracks, the other cpu all the evens. Worked great. But then I decided to automate the whole thing a little more, so I wrote a fancy perl script that would start three sub-processes, one for ripping and two for encoding the tracks as soon as they were done being written to disk. Well it turned out that a single cpu was almost always capable of keeping up with the speed of my cd drive, so I still ended up with one idle cpu after all. You might think, "Hey, you can use that other cpu to run your gui apps." Actually, the linux scheduler is good enough that as long as I run the MP3 encoder with "nice," it has zero impact on interactive jobs, even when they're sharing a cpu. Typing characters into a word-processor just isn't a very cpu-intensive application.
I was born in 1966. A couple of big things were different then:
The obesity epidemic hadn't started.
The mass hysteria about kids' safety (child molesters, etc.) hadn't started.
Recently we got a mailing from our kids' principal about walking to and from school. It was survey about how many kids walked, but it came with a letter from the principal basically implying that any parent who let their kids walk was a bad parent, because it was so unsafe. This is the same principal who has instituted rules about which direction the kids can swing on the playground swings. The previous principal organized a bike rodeo for kids to improve their skills on bikes, and kids who worked on their skills, and demonstrated them at the bike rodeo, got the privilege of using the bike racks. My older kid passed, but then the new principal came in, and the whole idea suddenly went away. I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.
When I was a kid, I started walking to the babysitter's house after school when I was in kindergarten. Nobody thought that was unusual. This was in an urban environment (Albany, CA). I learned to look both ways before crossing the street, and to cross on the green. No biggie.
Today, it seems like most affluent kids' existence consists of being shuttled back and forth in their mom's SUV from one air-conditioned building to another. And we wonder why the obesity epidemic is happening.
Psychologically, people like to have the illusion of control. For instance, studies have shown that drivers consistently overestimate their own ability to deal with an emergency. When it comes to kids, parents want to have the illusion of safety that comes from having their kid carry a cell phone all the time. Radio-tracking your kids is just the latest instance of this kind of mass hysteria.
I think you're absolutely right. For years, I've been buying the $200 Great Quality PCs from Fry's. Bought one for my desk at work. Bought one for my father. Bought one for my daughter. They came with Linux preinstalled, and although I was always just wiping the hard disk clean and installing a different distro, it made me happy that I wasn't paying the Windows tax. But when you saw the documentation that came with those machines, it was basically "We're selling you this machine with an OS that we're sure you're not going to use. Here's how to install Windows on it." I mean seriously, there was absolutely no documentation on the Linux distro they'd installed, and 10 or 20 pages of documentation on the details of the process of doing the Windows install, finding drivers, etc. I think the vast majority of people buying them either (a) didn't understand what Linux was and what they were getting, or (b) knew what they were doing, and planned to install a legal copy of Windows, or (c) knew what they were doing, and planned to install an unlicensed copy of Windows. Within the last year, I've noticed that the big Fry's ad in the paper no longer has the $200 linux boxes listed. I don't know if that's because they no longer sell them, or just are no longer using them as loss leaders. But in any case, I wouldn't be surprised if Fry's and/or Great Quality decided that it was a bad idea to continue selling linux boxes to people who were typical, ignorant computer users, and often wouldn't even have any idea of what an operating system was.
Re:i hate these "email is dead" stories
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've communicated with Knuth, and I found him to be anything but a standoffish, asocial curmudgeon. I thought I might have found a typo in his book, and thought I might have a chance at getting one of his famous checks that he sends to people who find errata. (If I'd gotten one, then, like most recipients, I would have framed it instead of cashing it. It turned out that the "typo" was just an unusual-looking diacritical mark on a Hungarian name.) He wrote back a very friendly, gracious email, with an explanation. Knuth doesn't have anything against social contact or communication AFAICT -- he simply wants to have some control over how it takes place and how much of his time it's going to take up.
I feel the same way, really. The college where I work gave me an email an email address when I started teaching there, in 1996. I haven't read any mail sent to that address since 1997. (I believe my box is actually over its quota, and therefore messages sent to it are bouncing.) One of the reasons I don't read mail sent to that account is that there's an easy to use broadcast address, of the form mydivision@myschool.edu, that causes mail to go to that address. Therefore any address on that broadcast list gets a ton of what's come to be known as "occupational spam."
For the e-mail address I actually do use, I use it on my own terms. For example, I have a filter that automatically bounces mail sent in html-only format, or mail that comes with images as attachments. With my students, I require them to use a web-based form to send me mail, because otherwise I get, e.g., mail from students with aol addresses, whose names I can't infer from the mail, and mail with attachments in Word format which could have been sent as text.
This seems to have changed a *lot* in the last 12 months. 12 months ago, I got wifi working on my daughter's ubuntu desktop system, but it was a major PITA. This month, I installed ubuntu Feisty on a used laptop, and wifi Just Worked.
Who are these mystical people that are unaware of linux?
In my experience, they're the majority of computer users. Examples: (1) I bought a used laptop recently. The seller told me what version of Windows it had on it, and I said that didn't really matter to me, because I was going to wipe the hard disk and install linux on it. After that, as I was checking out the system and putting it through its paces, he kept telling me stuff like, "oh, if you ever need to do xyz, here's how to do it." It became clear that he didn't know what linux was, and didn't understand that I was going to erase his OS and install a different one. (2) I've been having an intermittent problem with my cable modem hookup. The first-level support person at my ISP didn't know what linux was, which was no big deal to me -- he actually seemed like a nice guy, and e.g., volunteered that he liked firefox better than IE. I switched to my wife's mac for debugging purposes. He and I made some progress on debugging the problem, but he was still stumped, so he passed me on to second-level support. Then second-level support ended up passing me on to third-level support. Now the lady at third level support says, "What version of Windows are you running?" By this time I was back on the linux box, so I say, "I'm not running Windows, I'm running Linux." "What's that?" "Linux." "What version of Windows is that?"
H2O has rotational frequencies at (ok, I googled it) 22.235 GHz and 183.31 GHz, so you have absorption peaks around those
Right, but those only exist in the gas phase, not in liquid. The link you gave is for atmospheric absorption, and explicitly states that it accounts for both water droplets and vapor. The dashed red line on the graph looks like it's the sum of absorption by liquid droplets and vapor. The sharp peaks are presumably from the vapor.
Maybe I'm a bit simple but I don't see where CUPS even has "usability" to complain about.[...] Where's the hangup?
Problems I've had:
the problem I described in my original post
Upgrading ubuntu to a new version made cups stop working.
The web interface says administrative functions are disabled. Because of that, I tried editing the config file to accomplish what I wanted. I also downloaded drivers directly from Brother, because that was what people on the ubuntu wiki suggested, but that actually didn't work because of poor packaging. Eventually I figured out that the web interface actually did work, and started using that instead.
After I tell the web interface my printer is a Brother, it lists a huge number of drivers, including a very large number for my printer. I initially picked the wrong one, and it sort of worked, but sort of didn't. Later I noticed that one of them was marked "foomatic, recommended." Well, OK, maybe I should have noticed that that one said "recommended," but I had no idea what "foomatic" was, and didn't know if I wanted foomatic or not.
Every time I try to print more than 5-10 pages from a GNOME app, the printer freezes. (This never happens with lpr printing from the command line.) When this happens, clearing and restarting the queue doesn't help. Rebooting doesn't help. The only thing that unfreezes CUPS is to delete the printer in the web interface, and then reinstall it.
To me, the issue isn't so much drivers as patents and usability.
My daughter's mp3 player didn't need any special drivers, because it's simply a standard keychain drive that happens to be able to play mp3's. However, she totally couldn't figure out how to use it on her ubuntu box. There was one problem after another. Ubuntu tried to do the right thing by popping up a gui app when she connected it, but then we couldn't get the gui app to do what we wanted to do. Part of the problem was that getting the mp3 codec to work was a pain, and that springs directly from the fact that mp3 is patented.
My Brother HL-1440 laser printer is 100% supported in Linux. Brother hired the CUPS developers to write GPL-licensed drivers for all their printers. Joy! Unfortunately, I've run into one usability problem after another, all of which are basically problems with the usability of CUPS. I know I'm not the only person in the world who thinks CUPS is a pain, because I've seen other people criticize it for problems that are the same ones I'm experiencing. For instance, CUPS remembers too much of its state, and when it freaks out (e.g., printer spewing page after page of garbage), it's difficult to get CUPS back into a known-good state.
I believe there is a scientific reason for the ISM band being there - I think water has a bit of an absorption peak in the 2.4 GHz region.
Are you sure about this? Steam would probably have all kinds of features in its molecular spectrum, and I can imagine that maybe some rotational bands would be in the microwave range. But I would expect liquid water to have a continuous absorption spectrum, with no sharp peaks in it. AFAIK the basic principle is simply that microwaves will heat anything containing molecules that have a dipole moment, and that are free to rotate (work=force x distance). That's why microwave ovens will not heat ice or solid butter very well, but will heat water, or butter that's already melted.
I think the problem with FireFox is one of performance, not "bloat" per se. I run FireFox on a Mac with only a single extension and a single theme. My computer is relatively new, the OS is up to date, it has a Gig and a half of RAM and a fast video card. On this machine FireFox is as slow as molasses. It takes ages to start and ages to load a page. It also crashes (a lot!).
It's true that the MacOS version of Firefox is ridiculously slow to start up, especially on older macs (like my wife's ~4 year old iMac). It's not true that Firefox's performance is generally bad. Firefox performs fine on my oldish Linux boxes with 128 Mb of ram and slow cpus. Part of what you're seeing here is that MacOS doesn't use shared libraries, and Linux does. That's a conscious design tradeoff that Apple made: make it easy to install software, at the expense of performance and download sizes. As far as crashes, I don't think that's generally true of Firefox on MacOS X. AFAIK it doesn't crash on my wife's mac.
What I'd like to know is whether there is any viable OSS browser that runs on old linux machines, and has better performance than firefox. I have an old laptop I just bought for $140. Gnome is annoyingly slow on it, but that's no problem because I'm using fluxbox instead. But I'm not aware of any browser that fills in the blank of gnome:fluxbox::firefox:_________.
if ($spam_flags{'html_only'}) {push @refusal, 'The mail was sent only in html format. Normal practice is to send mail either in plain text format or in both plain text and html.'} if ($spam_flags{'image_attachment'}) {push @refusal, 'This address does not accept mail sent with images as attachments.'} if ($spam_flags{'not_current_to_me'}) {push @refusal, 'The address to which this mail was sent was not the current one given at http://www.mydomain.com/contact.html'} if ((!$spammy) && @refusal) { # Don't reply if it appears to be spammy; just send it to the bitbucket. my $body = "Sorry, but your mail to $to with subject line\n$subject\nwas automatically rejected for the following reason(s):\n".join("\n",@refusal); my $e = send_mail($back_to,'no-reply@mydomain.com',$body,' mail refused by mydomain.com'); }
I navigated to CUPS' "Add a printer" page and it had auto-detected my printer so all I had to do was click a button to say "Yes, configure it". It was a thing of beauty.
One of the things that hung me up was that in ubuntu, the web interface for CUPS had a big warning message saying that it had been disabled for security reasons. For that reason, I initially tried installing drivers by hand at the command line, according to a recipe someone posted on the ubuntu forums. I got that working, then upgraded my system to a more recent version of ubuntu, at which point printing stopped working. Later on I found out that the web interface was actually enabled in ubuntu, and the warning message was incorrect.
Another issue I've had is that the printer freezes up, and nothing I can do in the web interface appears to unfreeze it. Even if I power-cycle the printer and reboot my computer, it's still frozen. The only solution has been to delete the printer in cups, and then set it back up again from scratch. Although this particular symptom may be specific to my setup, it seems to be an example of a more general problem with CUPS, which many people have pointed out: it remembers too much about its state, and it doesn't give you any easy, reliable way to get back into a known-good state.
Another issue I've noticed that seems to be a general issue with linux hardware support is that googling tends to turn up lots of out of date information, and it becomes hard to tell what the current setup procedure should be for the distro you're using. This was a big problem for me with both the wifi install last year and the printer this year. This is one good reason why it's so important to have things Just Work automatically. If power users want to tweak their setup later, that's fine, but the default should be that your hardware works with all basic functionality. It would also help if organizations like The Linux Documentation Project (tldp.org) would simply delete their obsolete documentation, rather than continuing to serve up information that dates back to 1997.
The article matches up fairly well with my own experience, although I think the contrast between her earlier trial and the current one may be a little overstated. I just did an install of ubuntu on a laptop yesterday, and I was impressed that (a) the system was installed successfully (not so long ago, installing linux on a laptop was unlikely to work without major pain and suffering), and (b) the wifi card automagically worked. This is in contrast to the situation a year ago, when I installed ubuntu on my daughter's desktop machine, and had to spend a weekend messing around before I could get her wifi to work.
One thing that I think is not acceptable yet is printing. Within the last few months, I got my vanilla laser printer working on my linux box. It was a truly nasty and time-consuming process. This is not a case where you can blame patents and proprietary interfaces, etc., either. The printer is a Brother HL-1440. Brother hired the CUPS developers to write GPL'd linux drivers. The problem is mainly just that the linux implementation of CUPS is a disaster. (The MacOS X implementation seems fine, AFAICT.)
He throws in the idea of using python as a system administration language, which has nothing to do with the rest of the article.
The biggest thing that's slowing down linux adoption on the desktop is the fact that most users are not competent to install their own OS -- any OS. Software as a service doesn't help with that.
Another thing that's slowing down linux adoption on the desktop is the fact that users are used to Microsoft's apps. Software as a service doesn't help with that.
...and people have their files stuck in proprietary formats. Software as a service doesn't help with that.
Software as a service is predicated on the assumption that traditional software costs money, and is a hassle to install. In the OSS world, software is free, and easy to install (e.g., on ubuntu).
Web 2.0 aspires to work transparently on all systems and browsers; that's one of its main attractions. So why does it have anything to do with linux distributions?
Readability isn't opposed to quality. Actually, WP has a policy that all articles are supposed to be written for the general reader. It's just that the policy is often ignored when it comes to science articles. Some of my favorite horror stories:
Kepler's laws... highly mathematical, and includes a ton of irrelevant mathematics (e.g., analytic geometry equations that belong in the conic sections article); the math is way too heavy, and starts way too soon
photon... completely unintelligible to the general reader, and makes the mathematics even less intelligible by defining lots of unnecessary notation, and presenting various equations in more than one notation
special relativity... violates WP policies by splitting off the nontechnical stuff into a separate article
Of course, people will tell me that if I thought there was a problem with these three articles, I should fix them. Actually, I tried in all three cases. (And in #3, if you look on the talk page, people have been commenting for years that it was inappropriate to split the article.) Also, note that in all three cases, the articles include external links to web pages that do a better job of explaining the topic for the general reader, so it's not just that these topics are inherently impossible to explain simply. (Special relativity, despite its reputation for being a difficult subject, can actually be developed with nothing more than simple algebra. In fact, Einstein wrote a popular-level treatment that did exactly that.) The problem is that most science geeks are not good at explaining science to nonscientists. I do it for a living (I teach physics at a community college), and it's hard. A lot of the people working on these articles appear to be young grad students who have no experience teaching the subject, and just haven't learned to communicate with people who don't have the same background.
Why isn't the electric utility installing large solar panels to generate electricity during peak hours?
They are, in some areas. There are some huge generating stations in San Bernardino County. Of course it helps that San Bernardino County is a desert, so land is cheap, and there's lots of sun.
It can generate power at a cost of ~4cents/kwh
That may be true in your area. Where I live, consumer rates are about 20 cents/kW.hr.
The biggest problem with the electric company building PV stations is that they'd have to buy land. As an individual homeowner, you already own the land, and the sunlight is just a resource that's hitting your house and being wasted until you put up PV panels. That's not to say that it makes economic sense for all homeowners, but for me, it comes out to be basically a financially neutral decision.
Can't you store off peak power, and then use it during peak times?
There are two types of systems: off-grid, and grid-tied. An off-grid system is what people get in rural areas where there's no other way
to get electricity. It includes a battery, which is big, expensive, and requires careful maintenance. In urban areas, a grid-tied system makes much more economic sense, so no, it isn't economically feasible for an urban homeowner to store the power and use it later at off-peak times. Also, you can't really store off-peak power with a PV system, because peak hours are during the day, which is when the sun is up.
In addition to all that, there's the situation in California that TFA describes, where if you get a PV system, they force you to switch to a less advantageous billing system.
Assuming you save $1500 a year after the first year with a $28100 initial investment (and assuming my back-of-the-envelope math is right), it would take you 57 years to beat a 5% annualized rate of return (and assuming no expenses).
One possible problem with your assumptions is that electric rates probably will not stay constant; they'll probably go up. California currently is not allowing any more nuclear power plants to be built. There is also no real room for any major increase in fossil fuel plants (NIMBY, global warming concerns,...), and the price of fossil fuels can only go up in the long term. Meanwhile the population is going up, and the per capita use of energy is going up. So really, investing in a PV system at this point is partially just a gamble on how much electric rates will go up in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I just got done sitting on a jury for a drug trial. It was a frightening experience. The evidence was so weak and indirect that I couldn't even believe they had charged these two people with a crime. One of them was a transsexual prostitute who was clearly (to me) just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, when the jury started to deliberate, there were four of us who all thought it was going to be an open-and-shut not guilty verdict, but we ended up with a hung jury, 8 voting guilty and 4 not guilty. This is the kind of offense that can easily land you in prison for life under California's three strikes laws. And no, you don't have to be a career criminal to fall under three strikes. The prostitute was charged with three felonies from the same night, and that's enough. There's a guy who's in prison for life under three strikes for stealing four chocolate chip cookies. After the trial was over, I visited the place where the cop claimed he'd conducted surveillance from using binoculars. Well, you absolutely cannot see the stuff he claimed to have seen from that location. There are buildings, trees, and walls in the way. I hope these defendants don't have to go to trial again, because next time they might be unlucky in the jury they get.
What are all these extra features you need if you are a casual investor?
Like I said in the original post: the ability to withdraw money.
Your advice misses the point. I have followed every single piece of advice on your list. I am getting pump and dump spam to the disposable e-mail address I set up solely for my ameritrade account. I couldn't care less about spam being sent to that address, because it's all going to the bitbucket. The problem is that (a) I have the vast majority of my life savings entrusted to these idiots, and they're apparently completely clueless about security, and (b) it's not clear to me that I have any way of bailing on them without incurring massive capital gains taxes.
I've had exactly the same problem with Ameritrade. I signed up for a new account last fall, and have been getting pump and dump spams ever since. Ameritrade has had this problem for years, as I quickly verified with a google search; it's been discussed on several of the major anti-spam boards. No, it is not a dictionary attack; my address has 13 characters before the @ sign, consisting of a mixture of letters and digits, and has no dictionary words in it; the domain is not a common one either. Yes, it is definitely a leak from ameritrade; this is a special-purpose account that I created solely for the purpose of receiving mail from ameritrade.
I would love to switch from ameritrade to somebody else, both because of their obvious cluelessness about security and because certain functionality on their site is not usable on Linux. (They only support IE on Windows, and Firefox on Windows or MacOS X. You cannot, for instance, withdraw money using their web interface on Linux, using firefox, because the Submit button will always stay inactivated. Works fine on firefox on my wife's MacOS X box.)
So here are the things stopping me from switching:
If anyone can recommend a company that is better than ameritrade in terms of security and linux support, I would happily set up an account with them, and start gradually switching over to them in such a way as to avoid paying a massive tax penalty. I would also love to hear some advice from anyone about how to manage such a transition so that it's not too much work, and doesn't result in taxes. At the present moment, all I can imagine doing is selectively selling the stocks that have lost money, and then buying them on the new account.
And how would this all work for somebody who's got something like an IRA on ameritrade. Are they basically screwed?
It is still difficult to justify if you can more easily write more efficient single-threaded apps. What consumer-level apps out there really need more processing power than a single core of a modern CPU can provide?
Agreed. I just replaced my old machine with a dual-core machine a few months ago, and I find that I basically always have one cpu idle. When things are slow, they're usually slow because they're waiting on I/O. At one point I thought I had a killer app, which was ripping MP3s from CDs. I would run cdparanoia from the command line to rip, and then when that was done, I would have 01.wav, 02.wav, 03.wav, etc. I wrote little one-liner scripts that would then run the MP3 encoder so that one cpu would be doing all the odd-numbered tracks, the other cpu all the evens. Worked great. But then I decided to automate the whole thing a little more, so I wrote a fancy perl script that would start three sub-processes, one for ripping and two for encoding the tracks as soon as they were done being written to disk. Well it turned out that a single cpu was almost always capable of keeping up with the speed of my cd drive, so I still ended up with one idle cpu after all. You might think, "Hey, you can use that other cpu to run your gui apps." Actually, the linux scheduler is good enough that as long as I run the MP3 encoder with "nice," it has zero impact on interactive jobs, even when they're sharing a cpu. Typing characters into a word-processor just isn't a very cpu-intensive application.
Why not George Phillies?
I was born in 1966. A couple of big things were different then:
Recently we got a mailing from our kids' principal about walking to and from school. It was survey about how many kids walked, but it came with a letter from the principal basically implying that any parent who let their kids walk was a bad parent, because it was so unsafe. This is the same principal who has instituted rules about which direction the kids can swing on the playground swings. The previous principal organized a bike rodeo for kids to improve their skills on bikes, and kids who worked on their skills, and demonstrated them at the bike rodeo, got the privilege of using the bike racks. My older kid passed, but then the new principal came in, and the whole idea suddenly went away. I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.
When I was a kid, I started walking to the babysitter's house after school when I was in kindergarten. Nobody thought that was unusual. This was in an urban environment (Albany, CA). I learned to look both ways before crossing the street, and to cross on the green. No biggie.
Today, it seems like most affluent kids' existence consists of being shuttled back and forth in their mom's SUV from one air-conditioned building to another. And we wonder why the obesity epidemic is happening.
Psychologically, people like to have the illusion of control. For instance, studies have shown that drivers consistently overestimate their own ability to deal with an emergency. When it comes to kids, parents want to have the illusion of safety that comes from having their kid carry a cell phone all the time. Radio-tracking your kids is just the latest instance of this kind of mass hysteria.
I think you're absolutely right. For years, I've been buying the $200 Great Quality PCs from Fry's. Bought one for my desk at work. Bought one for my father. Bought one for my daughter. They came with Linux preinstalled, and although I was always just wiping the hard disk clean and installing a different distro, it made me happy that I wasn't paying the Windows tax. But when you saw the documentation that came with those machines, it was basically "We're selling you this machine with an OS that we're sure you're not going to use. Here's how to install Windows on it." I mean seriously, there was absolutely no documentation on the Linux distro they'd installed, and 10 or 20 pages of documentation on the details of the process of doing the Windows install, finding drivers, etc. I think the vast majority of people buying them either (a) didn't understand what Linux was and what they were getting, or (b) knew what they were doing, and planned to install a legal copy of Windows, or (c) knew what they were doing, and planned to install an unlicensed copy of Windows. Within the last year, I've noticed that the big Fry's ad in the paper no longer has the $200 linux boxes listed. I don't know if that's because they no longer sell them, or just are no longer using them as loss leaders. But in any case, I wouldn't be surprised if Fry's and/or Great Quality decided that it was a bad idea to continue selling linux boxes to people who were typical, ignorant computer users, and often wouldn't even have any idea of what an operating system was.
I've communicated with Knuth, and I found him to be anything but a standoffish, asocial curmudgeon. I thought I might have found a typo in his book, and thought I might have a chance at getting one of his famous checks that he sends to people who find errata. (If I'd gotten one, then, like most recipients, I would have framed it instead of cashing it. It turned out that the "typo" was just an unusual-looking diacritical mark on a Hungarian name.) He wrote back a very friendly, gracious email, with an explanation. Knuth doesn't have anything against social contact or communication AFAICT -- he simply wants to have some control over how it takes place and how much of his time it's going to take up.
I feel the same way, really. The college where I work gave me an email an email address when I started teaching there, in 1996. I haven't read any mail sent to that address since 1997. (I believe my box is actually over its quota, and therefore messages sent to it are bouncing.) One of the reasons I don't read mail sent to that account is that there's an easy to use broadcast address, of the form mydivision@myschool.edu, that causes mail to go to that address. Therefore any address on that broadcast list gets a ton of what's come to be known as "occupational spam."
For the e-mail address I actually do use, I use it on my own terms. For example, I have a filter that automatically bounces mail sent in html-only format, or mail that comes with images as attachments. With my students, I require them to use a web-based form to send me mail, because otherwise I get, e.g., mail from students with aol addresses, whose names I can't infer from the mail, and mail with attachments in Word format which could have been sent as text.
Huh? The legend says green is oxygen, red is water.
This seems to have changed a *lot* in the last 12 months. 12 months ago, I got wifi working on my daughter's ubuntu desktop system, but it was a major PITA. This month, I installed ubuntu Feisty on a used laptop, and wifi Just Worked.
Who are these mystical people that are unaware of linux?
In my experience, they're the majority of computer users. Examples: (1) I bought a used laptop recently. The seller told me what version of Windows it had on it, and I said that didn't really matter to me, because I was going to wipe the hard disk and install linux on it. After that, as I was checking out the system and putting it through its paces, he kept telling me stuff like, "oh, if you ever need to do xyz, here's how to do it." It became clear that he didn't know what linux was, and didn't understand that I was going to erase his OS and install a different one. (2) I've been having an intermittent problem with my cable modem hookup. The first-level support person at my ISP didn't know what linux was, which was no big deal to me -- he actually seemed like a nice guy, and e.g., volunteered that he liked firefox better than IE. I switched to my wife's mac for debugging purposes. He and I made some progress on debugging the problem, but he was still stumped, so he passed me on to second-level support. Then second-level support ended up passing me on to third-level support. Now the lady at third level support says, "What version of Windows are you running?" By this time I was back on the linux box, so I say, "I'm not running Windows, I'm running Linux." "What's that?" "Linux." "What version of Windows is that?"
H2O has rotational frequencies at (ok, I googled it) 22.235 GHz and 183.31 GHz, so you have absorption peaks around those
Right, but those only exist in the gas phase, not in liquid. The link you gave is for atmospheric absorption, and explicitly states that it accounts for both water droplets and vapor. The dashed red line on the graph looks like it's the sum of absorption by liquid droplets and vapor. The sharp peaks are presumably from the vapor.
Problems I've had:
To me, the issue isn't so much drivers as patents and usability.
My daughter's mp3 player didn't need any special drivers, because it's simply a standard keychain drive that happens to be able to play mp3's. However, she totally couldn't figure out how to use it on her ubuntu box. There was one problem after another. Ubuntu tried to do the right thing by popping up a gui app when she connected it, but then we couldn't get the gui app to do what we wanted to do. Part of the problem was that getting the mp3 codec to work was a pain, and that springs directly from the fact that mp3 is patented.
My Brother HL-1440 laser printer is 100% supported in Linux. Brother hired the CUPS developers to write GPL-licensed drivers for all their printers. Joy! Unfortunately, I've run into one usability problem after another, all of which are basically problems with the usability of CUPS. I know I'm not the only person in the world who thinks CUPS is a pain, because I've seen other people criticize it for problems that are the same ones I'm experiencing. For instance, CUPS remembers too much of its state, and when it freaks out (e.g., printer spewing page after page of garbage), it's difficult to get CUPS back into a known-good state.
I believe there is a scientific reason for the ISM band being there - I think water has a bit of an absorption peak in the 2.4 GHz region.
Are you sure about this? Steam would probably have all kinds of features in its molecular spectrum, and I can imagine that maybe some rotational bands would be in the microwave range. But I would expect liquid water to have a continuous absorption spectrum, with no sharp peaks in it. AFAIK the basic principle is simply that microwaves will heat anything containing molecules that have a dipole moment, and that are free to rotate (work=force x distance). That's why microwave ovens will not heat ice or solid butter very well, but will heat water, or butter that's already melted.
I think the problem with FireFox is one of performance, not "bloat" per se. I run FireFox on a Mac with only a single extension and a single theme. My computer is relatively new, the OS is up to date, it has a Gig and a half of RAM and a fast video card. On this machine FireFox is as slow as molasses. It takes ages to start and ages to load a page. It also crashes (a lot!).
It's true that the MacOS version of Firefox is ridiculously slow to start up, especially on older macs (like my wife's ~4 year old iMac). It's not true that Firefox's performance is generally bad. Firefox performs fine on my oldish Linux boxes with 128 Mb of ram and slow cpus. Part of what you're seeing here is that MacOS doesn't use shared libraries, and Linux does. That's a conscious design tradeoff that Apple made: make it easy to install software, at the expense of performance and download sizes. As far as crashes, I don't think that's generally true of Firefox on MacOS X. AFAIK it doesn't crash on my wife's mac.
What I'd like to know is whether there is any viable OSS browser that runs on old linux machines, and has better performance than firefox. I have an old laptop I just bought for $140. Gnome is annoyingly slow on it, but that's no problem because I'm using fluxbox instead. But I'm not aware of any browser that fills in the blank of gnome:fluxbox::firefox:_________.
I navigated to CUPS' "Add a printer" page and it had auto-detected my printer so all I had to do was click a button to say "Yes, configure it". It was a thing of beauty.
One of the things that hung me up was that in ubuntu, the web interface for CUPS had a big warning message saying that it had been disabled for security reasons. For that reason, I initially tried installing drivers by hand at the command line, according to a recipe someone posted on the ubuntu forums. I got that working, then upgraded my system to a more recent version of ubuntu, at which point printing stopped working. Later on I found out that the web interface was actually enabled in ubuntu, and the warning message was incorrect.
Another issue I've had is that the printer freezes up, and nothing I can do in the web interface appears to unfreeze it. Even if I power-cycle the printer and reboot my computer, it's still frozen. The only solution has been to delete the printer in cups, and then set it back up again from scratch. Although this particular symptom may be specific to my setup, it seems to be an example of a more general problem with CUPS, which many people have pointed out: it remembers too much about its state, and it doesn't give you any easy, reliable way to get back into a known-good state.
Another issue I've noticed that seems to be a general issue with linux hardware support is that googling tends to turn up lots of out of date information, and it becomes hard to tell what the current setup procedure should be for the distro you're using. This was a big problem for me with both the wifi install last year and the printer this year. This is one good reason why it's so important to have things Just Work automatically. If power users want to tweak their setup later, that's fine, but the default should be that your hardware works with all basic functionality. It would also help if organizations like The Linux Documentation Project (tldp.org) would simply delete their obsolete documentation, rather than continuing to serve up information that dates back to 1997.
The article matches up fairly well with my own experience, although I think the contrast between her earlier trial and the current one may be a little overstated. I just did an install of ubuntu on a laptop yesterday, and I was impressed that (a) the system was installed successfully (not so long ago, installing linux on a laptop was unlikely to work without major pain and suffering), and (b) the wifi card automagically worked. This is in contrast to the situation a year ago, when I installed ubuntu on my daughter's desktop machine, and had to spend a weekend messing around before I could get her wifi to work.
One thing that I think is not acceptable yet is printing. Within the last few months, I got my vanilla laser printer working on my linux box. It was a truly nasty and time-consuming process. This is not a case where you can blame patents and proprietary interfaces, etc., either. The printer is a Brother HL-1440. Brother hired the CUPS developers to write GPL'd linux drivers. The problem is mainly just that the linux implementation of CUPS is a disaster. (The MacOS X implementation seems fine, AFAICT.)
- Kepler's laws
... highly mathematical, and includes a ton of irrelevant mathematics (e.g., analytic geometry equations that belong in the conic sections article); the math is way too heavy, and starts way too soon
- photon
... completely unintelligible to the general reader, and makes the mathematics even less intelligible by defining lots of unnecessary notation, and presenting various equations in more than one notation
- special relativity
... violates WP policies by splitting off the nontechnical stuff into a separate article
Of course, people will tell me that if I thought there was a problem with these three articles, I should fix them. Actually, I tried in all three cases. (And in #3, if you look on the talk page, people have been commenting for years that it was inappropriate to split the article.) Also, note that in all three cases, the articles include external links to web pages that do a better job of explaining the topic for the general reader, so it's not just that these topics are inherently impossible to explain simply. (Special relativity, despite its reputation for being a difficult subject, can actually be developed with nothing more than simple algebra. In fact, Einstein wrote a popular-level treatment that did exactly that.) The problem is that most science geeks are not good at explaining science to nonscientists. I do it for a living (I teach physics at a community college), and it's hard. A lot of the people working on these articles appear to be young grad students who have no experience teaching the subject, and just haven't learned to communicate with people who don't have the same background.Why isn't the electric utility installing large solar panels to generate electricity during peak hours?
They are, in some areas. There are some huge generating stations in San Bernardino County. Of course it helps that San Bernardino County is a desert, so land is cheap, and there's lots of sun.
It can generate power at a cost of ~4cents/kwh
That may be true in your area. Where I live, consumer rates are about 20 cents/kW.hr.
The biggest problem with the electric company building PV stations is that they'd have to buy land. As an individual homeowner, you already own the land, and the sunlight is just a resource that's hitting your house and being wasted until you put up PV panels. That's not to say that it makes economic sense for all homeowners, but for me, it comes out to be basically a financially neutral decision.
Can't you store off peak power, and then use it during peak times?
There are two types of systems: off-grid, and grid-tied. An off-grid system is what people get in rural areas where there's no other way to get electricity. It includes a battery, which is big, expensive, and requires careful maintenance. In urban areas, a grid-tied system makes much more economic sense, so no, it isn't economically feasible for an urban homeowner to store the power and use it later at off-peak times. Also, you can't really store off-peak power with a PV system, because peak hours are during the day, which is when the sun is up.
In addition to all that, there's the situation in California that TFA describes, where if you get a PV system, they force you to switch to a less advantageous billing system.
Assuming you save $1500 a year after the first year with a $28100 initial investment (and assuming my back-of-the-envelope math is right), it would take you 57 years to beat a 5% annualized rate of return (and assuming no expenses). ...), and the price of fossil fuels can only go up in the long term. Meanwhile the population is going up, and the per capita use of energy is going up. So really, investing in a PV system at this point is partially just a gamble on how much electric rates will go up in the future.
One possible problem with your assumptions is that electric rates probably will not stay constant; they'll probably go up. California currently is not allowing any more nuclear power plants to be built. There is also no real room for any major increase in fossil fuel plants (NIMBY, global warming concerns,