You're making the tacit assumption, here, that software developers will do a better job optimizing their code. The problem is, this hasn't been true for many many years, now. Heck, even memory management is being taken out of the hands of programmers, and the result is more efficient code (yes, believe it or not, studies show that GCs are generally faster than manually allocating and deallocating memory, as the system can do a better job of judging when and how to do it). I suspect the same will be true of parallel processing.
ot everybody can purchase a stack of disks at the same time to create a big RAID and then toss the whole thing 2 years later.
Then build an LVM-on-RAID. If a drive fails, you just swap out two. Is it less space efficient. Sure. But it's also more reliable and vastly more flexible.
As for lockups on drive crashes... I don't know what shitty system you're running, but I've never even heard of that happening.
Long story short, if you're just building a "free" Tivo with a kickass drive array, performance is *not* an issue.
Tell me that again when you're recording two programs, playing back a third, and doing commercial flagging on two more. This is doubly true if you're dealing with HD content.
So: do you *really* need to save all those Seinfeld reruns on a highly-redundant storage array? How *much* of the stuff on the server do you really need to keep?
On the topic of storage volume, that depends a lot on use cases. For example, if you have a wife that loves to record dozens of movies so she can watch them at her leisure, the answer could very well be, "a lot". My system had 250GB, and that became cramped rather quickly. I now have 750GB in an LVM-on-RAID1 setup, and things are much more comfortable.
It also depends greatly on if you're recording HD. HD takes something like 4 times the storage of SD content... 300GB suddenly looks rather paltry in the face of that.
Meanwhile, in my experience, the redundancy on a media center isn't to prevent data loss. It's to prevent downtime. If one of the drives goes down in one of my mirrors, my system can continue recording and my wife and continue watching TV, with only a few minutes of downtime while I physically install a new drive. In the end, that's worth the extra money, IMHO.
Besides, if you're gonna use RAID 0, for god sake, just use LVM. It's basically the same thing, but gives you far more flexibility (my Myth system is actually an LVM of mirrors... not the most storage-efficient, but it's flexible and reliable).
I can't in good faith suggest that younger programmers spend the time to learn either one.
Why not? It's just another skill. And if it turns out to improve their productivity, great. Otherwise, they've just added another tool under their belt. Win-win if you ask me.
I'm not discounting the influence of policy but I would like to suggest that any analysis of the situation should take into account declining population
And I'll bet dollars to donuts they already do this by looking at the values per capita. Your idea has an attractive simplicity to it, I grant you that, but it's very simplicity suggests that the experts have already considered the issue.
the wealth transfer policy is the environmental policy -- like all carbon trading schemes are, just this one is more upfront about it.
The thing is, that's essentially *required* to make a carbon trading scheme work. Why? Because if you don't provide the developing world with some economic impetus to curb emissions, which basically amounts to a subsidy for not polluting, then they won't bother to participate. After all, we're asking them to not do what the developing world did for over a hundred years, benefiting greatly from it in the process. It seems downright hypocritical not to provide them with some other path to economic gain and prosperity, and that path is in the form of economic credits, which then subsidize the development of green/efficient industry (in theory, anyway).
Point being, that, IMHO, isn't a reasonable basis for objection. The issues really come down to one of enforcement (which I think is manageable) and preventing corruption (this one I'm less confident on, but I'm willing to see how it goes).
they just reuse the resources to reopen a new plant. It's a sick form of recycling really.
That makes absolutely no sense. Carbon credits aren't a function of pollution reduction. They're a function of absolute emissions versus the current cap. ie, suppose China emits X tons of carbon per year, and the current cap is Y. That means they have Y-X carbon credits to sell that year. Now, if China tears down some plant and reduces emissions by some amount P, then they can sell P's worth of additional credits that year (presumably minus the number of tons emitted by the plant up until the date it went offline). But the following year, they get to sell those same P credits again.
All your scenario does is lock China to a given emissions level, albeit in an oddly complicated fashion, since they make no actual progress in curbing carbon emissions. But in that case, building a new plant is functionally (and economically) the same as doing exactly nothing at all (well, that's partly true... the yearly cap rollback gives China a very good reason to actually curb emissions, as Y slowly gets smaller, cutting into their credits).
So where, here, is the impetus to build a new plant, exactly?
That's not what will prevent carbon credits from working.
So why bother to bring it up? If your real criticism is one of enforcement, then just say so.
However, I might point out that all free trade agreements, among other things, have the exact same enforcement issues, and yet they seem to work (ish). In those cases, it's up to the players to ensure one another isn't breaking the rules (illegally subsidizing, etc), and yet somehow, the countries get by.
So, here comes X amount of emissions, only now the plant may be larger or more polluting to be a better target to attract foreign companies looking to purchase an offset.
So China then violates it's emission limits, which have been reduced due to the carbon credits they've sold, and they're punished accordingly, perhaps through economic sanctions or some other mechanism, not unlike any other treaty on the planet.
Is it guaranteed to work? Nope. China could just say "fuck y'all". Or they could lie on their emissions reports... and then probably get caught. Either way, they wouldn't get any more money from carbon trading. So there is some real economic incentive to play by the rules and stay in the game. Meanwhile, each year, the target carbon emissions level is reduced. And as the ceiling comes down, China has fewer and fewer credits to sell, unless they genuinely reduce their emissions. So if they want to stay in the game, there's incentive to do a good job.
Now, do I genuinely believe this can work in the long run? It's hard to say... international programs like this are generally rife with corrupt (can we say "oil-for-food"?). But it does look good on paper. Besides, if you can find some *other* way of motivating third world countries to curb carbon emissions, I'd love to hear it. Because, AFAICT, Kyoto is currently the best we've got.
But, locally, I can't imagine using vim for real work.
It all comes down to developer habits. I never became dependant on all those autocompletion features (and I'm considered one of the fastest devs in the office), and while I admit they are nice (emacs and vim both support a subset of what you describe, but I rarely those features), the price paid for those massive, bloated IDEs can be extremely painful at times. Hell, just waiting for VS to do... well... practically anything, can be irritating, especially if you're used to the snappiness of an editor like Vim.
So, absolutely, people use them as their primary development environment. But it doesn't sound like *you* should.
You laugh, but I had a boss who blamed his carpal on emacs and needing to type strange key combinations.
Well, chording is very difficult on the fingers, especially if you don't swap the capslock and control keys (I never could get used to that layout). I used emacs for *years* before finally relenting and switching cold turkey to vim. Suddenly the shooting pains in my left hand, which I'd been suffering with on and off for years, went away, and haven't returned since.
IMHO, emacs + GNU screen (well, these days, emacs + vim... alas, all the chording with emacs gave me mild RSI) is *the* way to go. Hack away at some code, detach session, reattach when you're on the road or at home, etc, etc. It's especially fantastic if you find yourself dev'ing on remote machines frequently (in my case, Solaris boxes, primarily)... makes it easy to spawn new shells and switch between without having to fire up an additional xterm+ssh.
If I went that route, I'd be worse off than I would with an old VCR - I'd be forced to watch whatever is being played on the digital cable box, unless I want to fork over more money for more STBs.
No, actually, you'd be just as bad off, since your VCR has the exact same limitation. Of course, that's why you hit Ebay and buy more DSTBs. I picked up another DCT-2524 for $20 CAD plus shipping. And as more and more DVRs enter people's homes, you can expect the dumb STBs to be practically given away.
Actually, I've started using MythTV less and less. I've found grabbing HDTV rips off bittorrent to be much better.
Well, if you've got the bandwidth, the patience, an ISP that will turn a blind eye to your (I'm sure quite noticeable) downloading, and only watch new, popular shows, that's great. Me, I spend most of my time watching niche programming or re-runs. Good luck finding a high-speed, well-seeded torrent for America's Test Kitchen or season 3 Stargate episodes...
Actually, the tuners are probably the cheapest part of a myth box. A PVR-150 SD tuner can be had for $40 if you look hard enough, and an HD-capable QAM tuner can be had for the same or less, these days. And an $80 videocard will give you full DVI out. However, I will concede that, thanks to the cable co subsidizing the cost of their DVRs, they are cheaper... of course, the tradeoff is no control over the box or the software running on it, which can often be quite buggy, with decidedly shoddy support. But for many, that's a reasonable compromise.
But IMHO, the real win for cable co DVRs is their ability to tune premium HD channels, and that's a capability Myth will likely never get (as long as the cable cos have their way). Well, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live in Europe, where DVB is the standard... lucky bastards.
If you have a nice widescreen TV and digital cable, MythTV just can't do the things you need
Uhh, just to be clear, what you mean is "if you have a nice, widescreen HDTV and HD channels". MythTV works just fine on widescreen displays (and has a number of widescreen themes), and will work just fine with digital cable, in the sense that you can capture content from a digital cable box, which you can drive with an IR blaster (my system has two DSTBs, each driven with a serial port blaster... works beautifully, good picture quality, and I've never missed a tune).
I couldn't agree more. My myth system has been running more or less flawlessly for months, now... TBH, I find it kind of troubling, as I like to tinker, but I have no reason to!:)
I'm no physicist, but I think the answer to the nuclear bomb thing is very simple: a nuclear bomb is the strongest explosion you can get
Ahhh... no. Even in fusion bombs, which are the most powerful explosions created by mankind, the energy released, while due to mass-energy conversion, is only in the difference between the mass of the reactants, and the mass of the products. The point being, in neither fission nor fusion devices, is there complete "mass to energy conversion", and the amount of energy released is no where near that of, say, a matter/anti-matter explosion.
This post confuses me, how is this person retarded?
Because the post belies a ridiculously simple-minded view of violence and alcoholism that makes me question their intelligence. Simplistic thinking such as "alcoholic == violent" and "violence + power == murderdeathkill" is simply idiotic and counterproductive. If you want to understand why Bush and his ilk believe what they do, it's important to do away with this simple logic and ridiculous hyperbole, and try to genuinely analyze why they do what they do.
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You're making the tacit assumption, here, that software developers will do a better job optimizing their code. The problem is, this hasn't been true for many many years, now. Heck, even memory management is being taken out of the hands of programmers, and the result is more efficient code (yes, believe it or not, studies show that GCs are generally faster than manually allocating and deallocating memory, as the system can do a better job of judging when and how to do it). I suspect the same will be true of parallel processing.
ot everybody can purchase a stack of disks at the same time to create a big RAID and then toss the whole thing 2 years later.
Then build an LVM-on-RAID. If a drive fails, you just swap out two. Is it less space efficient. Sure. But it's also more reliable and vastly more flexible.
As for lockups on drive crashes... I don't know what shitty system you're running, but I've never even heard of that happening.
Long story short, if you're just building a "free" Tivo with a kickass drive array, performance is *not* an issue.
Tell me that again when you're recording two programs, playing back a third, and doing commercial flagging on two more. This is doubly true if you're dealing with HD content.
So: do you *really* need to save all those Seinfeld reruns on a highly-redundant storage array? How *much* of the stuff on the server do you really need to keep?
On the topic of storage volume, that depends a lot on use cases. For example, if you have a wife that loves to record dozens of movies so she can watch them at her leisure, the answer could very well be, "a lot". My system had 250GB, and that became cramped rather quickly. I now have 750GB in an LVM-on-RAID1 setup, and things are much more comfortable.
It also depends greatly on if you're recording HD. HD takes something like 4 times the storage of SD content... 300GB suddenly looks rather paltry in the face of that.
Meanwhile, in my experience, the redundancy on a media center isn't to prevent data loss. It's to prevent downtime. If one of the drives goes down in one of my mirrors, my system can continue recording and my wife and continue watching TV, with only a few minutes of downtime while I physically install a new drive. In the end, that's worth the extra money, IMHO.
Besides, if you're gonna use RAID 0, for god sake, just use LVM. It's basically the same thing, but gives you far more flexibility (my Myth system is actually an LVM of mirrors... not the most storage-efficient, but it's flexible and reliable).
Or, for systems that don't require uber performance, just use software RAID.
I can't in good faith suggest that younger programmers spend the time to learn either one.
Why not? It's just another skill. And if it turns out to improve their productivity, great. Otherwise, they've just added another tool under their belt. Win-win if you ask me.
Same goes for the escape key; it was where Tab is now, so it was easier to hit. (Now I find ctrl-[ easier to hit than escape.)
:.
I just use jj... it's on the home row so it's easy to hit, and doesn't require chording. Similarly, I use ; instead of
I'm not discounting the influence of policy but I would like to suggest that any analysis of the situation should take into account declining population
And I'll bet dollars to donuts they already do this by looking at the values per capita. Your idea has an attractive simplicity to it, I grant you that, but it's very simplicity suggests that the experts have already considered the issue.
the wealth transfer policy is the environmental policy -- like all carbon trading schemes are, just this one is more upfront about it.
The thing is, that's essentially *required* to make a carbon trading scheme work. Why? Because if you don't provide the developing world with some economic impetus to curb emissions, which basically amounts to a subsidy for not polluting, then they won't bother to participate. After all, we're asking them to not do what the developing world did for over a hundred years, benefiting greatly from it in the process. It seems downright hypocritical not to provide them with some other path to economic gain and prosperity, and that path is in the form of economic credits, which then subsidize the development of green/efficient industry (in theory, anyway).
Point being, that, IMHO, isn't a reasonable basis for objection. The issues really come down to one of enforcement (which I think is manageable) and preventing corruption (this one I'm less confident on, but I'm willing to see how it goes).
they just reuse the resources to reopen a new plant. It's a sick form of recycling really.
That makes absolutely no sense. Carbon credits aren't a function of pollution reduction. They're a function of absolute emissions versus the current cap. ie, suppose China emits X tons of carbon per year, and the current cap is Y. That means they have Y-X carbon credits to sell that year. Now, if China tears down some plant and reduces emissions by some amount P, then they can sell P's worth of additional credits that year (presumably minus the number of tons emitted by the plant up until the date it went offline). But the following year, they get to sell those same P credits again.
All your scenario does is lock China to a given emissions level, albeit in an oddly complicated fashion, since they make no actual progress in curbing carbon emissions. But in that case, building a new plant is functionally (and economically) the same as doing exactly nothing at all (well, that's partly true... the yearly cap rollback gives China a very good reason to actually curb emissions, as Y slowly gets smaller, cutting into their credits).
So where, here, is the impetus to build a new plant, exactly?
All jokes aside, you do have me there. I can't think of any evil thing Canada has done.
Of course, one might argue that's as much a function of capability...
Except bombing the Baldwins, of course.
I'm sorry, but *that* we simply won't apologize for... they had it coming.
That's not what will prevent carbon credits from working.
So why bother to bring it up? If your real criticism is one of enforcement, then just say so.
However, I might point out that all free trade agreements, among other things, have the exact same enforcement issues, and yet they seem to work (ish). In those cases, it's up to the players to ensure one another isn't breaking the rules (illegally subsidizing, etc), and yet somehow, the countries get by.
So, here comes X amount of emissions, only now the plant may be larger or more polluting to be a better target to attract foreign companies looking to purchase an offset.
So China then violates it's emission limits, which have been reduced due to the carbon credits they've sold, and they're punished accordingly, perhaps through economic sanctions or some other mechanism, not unlike any other treaty on the planet.
Is it guaranteed to work? Nope. China could just say "fuck y'all". Or they could lie on their emissions reports... and then probably get caught. Either way, they wouldn't get any more money from carbon trading. So there is some real economic incentive to play by the rules and stay in the game. Meanwhile, each year, the target carbon emissions level is reduced. And as the ceiling comes down, China has fewer and fewer credits to sell, unless they genuinely reduce their emissions. So if they want to stay in the game, there's incentive to do a good job.
Now, do I genuinely believe this can work in the long run? It's hard to say... international programs like this are generally rife with corrupt (can we say "oil-for-food"?). But it does look good on paper. Besides, if you can find some *other* way of motivating third world countries to curb carbon emissions, I'd love to hear it. Because, AFAICT, Kyoto is currently the best we've got.
Eh, the problem with things like carbon credits is they are not "real" commodities; they are just...well, they are just made up.
Gee... just like... every single currency on the planet. Care to explain to me, again, why that can't work?
You're assuming everyone is willing to trade off the features vim/emacs provides for intelligent autocompletion. I know I'm on the fence...
But, locally, I can't imagine using vim for real work.
It all comes down to developer habits. I never became dependant on all those autocompletion features (and I'm considered one of the fastest devs in the office), and while I admit they are nice (emacs and vim both support a subset of what you describe, but I rarely those features), the price paid for those massive, bloated IDEs can be extremely painful at times. Hell, just waiting for VS to do... well... practically anything, can be irritating, especially if you're used to the snappiness of an editor like Vim.
So, absolutely, people use them as their primary development environment. But it doesn't sound like *you* should.
You laugh, but I had a boss who blamed his carpal on emacs and needing to type strange key combinations.
Well, chording is very difficult on the fingers, especially if you don't swap the capslock and control keys (I never could get used to that layout). I used emacs for *years* before finally relenting and switching cold turkey to vim. Suddenly the shooting pains in my left hand, which I'd been suffering with on and off for years, went away, and haven't returned since.
IMHO, emacs + GNU screen (well, these days, emacs + vim... alas, all the chording with emacs gave me mild RSI) is *the* way to go. Hack away at some code, detach session, reattach when you're on the road or at home, etc, etc. It's especially fantastic if you find yourself dev'ing on remote machines frequently (in my case, Solaris boxes, primarily)... makes it easy to spawn new shells and switch between without having to fire up an additional xterm+ssh.
Could you point me to a developed nation that hasn't "played it close" to "other questionable regimes"?
Canada.
If I went that route, I'd be worse off than I would with an old VCR - I'd be forced to watch whatever is being played on the digital cable box, unless I want to fork over more money for more STBs.
No, actually, you'd be just as bad off, since your VCR has the exact same limitation. Of course, that's why you hit Ebay and buy more DSTBs. I picked up another DCT-2524 for $20 CAD plus shipping. And as more and more DVRs enter people's homes, you can expect the dumb STBs to be practically given away.
Actually, I've started using MythTV less and less. I've found grabbing HDTV rips off bittorrent to be much better.
Well, if you've got the bandwidth, the patience, an ISP that will turn a blind eye to your (I'm sure quite noticeable) downloading, and only watch new, popular shows, that's great. Me, I spend most of my time watching niche programming or re-runs. Good luck finding a high-speed, well-seeded torrent for America's Test Kitchen or season 3 Stargate episodes...
Actually, the tuners are probably the cheapest part of a myth box. A PVR-150 SD tuner can be had for $40 if you look hard enough, and an HD-capable QAM tuner can be had for the same or less, these days. And an $80 videocard will give you full DVI out. However, I will concede that, thanks to the cable co subsidizing the cost of their DVRs, they are cheaper... of course, the tradeoff is no control over the box or the software running on it, which can often be quite buggy, with decidedly shoddy support. But for many, that's a reasonable compromise.
But IMHO, the real win for cable co DVRs is their ability to tune premium HD channels, and that's a capability Myth will likely never get (as long as the cable cos have their way). Well, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live in Europe, where DVB is the standard... lucky bastards.
If you have a nice widescreen TV and digital cable, MythTV just can't do the things you need
Uhh, just to be clear, what you mean is "if you have a nice, widescreen HDTV and HD channels". MythTV works just fine on widescreen displays (and has a number of widescreen themes), and will work just fine with digital cable, in the sense that you can capture content from a digital cable box, which you can drive with an IR blaster (my system has two DSTBs, each driven with a serial port blaster... works beautifully, good picture quality, and I've never missed a tune).
I couldn't agree more. My myth system has been running more or less flawlessly for months, now... TBH, I find it kind of troubling, as I like to tinker, but I have no reason to! :)
I'm no physicist, but I think the answer to the nuclear bomb thing is very simple: a nuclear bomb is the strongest explosion you can get
Ahhh... no. Even in fusion bombs, which are the most powerful explosions created by mankind, the energy released, while due to mass-energy conversion, is only in the difference between the mass of the reactants, and the mass of the products. The point being, in neither fission nor fusion devices, is there complete "mass to energy conversion", and the amount of energy released is no where near that of, say, a matter/anti-matter explosion.
This post confuses me, how is this person retarded?
Because the post belies a ridiculously simple-minded view of violence and alcoholism that makes me question their intelligence. Simplistic thinking such as "alcoholic == violent" and "violence + power == murderdeathkill" is simply idiotic and counterproductive. If you want to understand why Bush and his ilk believe what they do, it's important to do away with this simple logic and ridiculous hyperbole, and try to genuinely analyze why they do what they do.