A laser doesn't wear out int he same was as a stylus because its not being dragged along the surface of the disk, so in practice not being able to replace a laser isn't much of a problem. As to specialised speakers - what the hell are you smoking? Every CD player I've ever seen has a 3.5mm jack (if it's portable) or phono out (if it's not portable). Many also have an optical out, which could be one of a couple of different standards. Are you thinking of CD transports, with which you have to use an external DAC? They tend to use the same digital output as normal players, don't they?
[...]computers work in base 2, so it makes sense to make disks in base 2 (unlike cars/explosives/sugar, which work in base 10).
Humans work in powers of ten. Computers should accommodate humans, not the other way round. RAM comes in powers of two for technical reasons, but nothing else in a computer which the user is exposed to uses powers of two. It is not natural for disks to use powers of two (except for the bus) and certainly not natural for the human interface to information about a disk to use powers of two. Using a standardised prefix (giga) to mean something other than 10^9 is the fudging of a definition.
I'm good at maths and I still play the lottery sometimes. A potential £75m payout with 75m:1 odds and a £1.50 ticket price (a big EuroMillions rollover; about the only time I play) may not seem like a good deal, but I figure the odds of my accumulating £75m by any other means are even closer to zero than 1/75m, which shifts the balance somewhat. Oh, and I do use the only viable tactic for maximising the potential payout (as distinct from the odds of winning) - picking numbers other people less unlikely to pick. The real meaty statistics on lottery numbers would be data on the numbers people picked.
As to the lifestyle impact, it is a provable truism that most maximum payout winners do not actually improve their lives.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by a "provable truism" is (does that mean it's true but as yet unproven, or that it could be proven if it were true?), but I do know that lottery winners who ruin their lives are several orders of magnitude more newsworthy than ones who quietly live a happy and contented life. Not only that but (in the UK at least) you can choose whether or not to have publicity about your win. Those who chose publicity are, to my mind, a bit stupid in the first place. So, if the basis of your truism is reports in the media, it's based on a biased subset of a self-selecting sample.
From the point of view of avoiding accidents, the safest cars aren't generally the ones considered or rated as "safe". Avoiding accidents ("active safety") is an entirely different ball game to surviving crashes ("passive safety"), which is what most people think of when they talk about safety. If you want to avoid an accident, you want lots of grip, good brakes, minimal mass, good visibility and small size. In other words, you want a sports car. If you want to survive an accident, you want large size and high mass. In other words you (theoretically) want an SUV (theoretically because SUVs are not all built to the same standards as cars).
Epoxy, with stuff (fibres, micro balloons...) added to provide appropriate mechanical properties. You'd probably want some mechanism to mix it on demand so you can use fast curing epoxy.
Perhaps 30% of the OS market at current OS prices would be enough to make up for the loss of hardware sales, but the current price of operating systems is set by an abusive monopolist, not a competitive market. If Apple looked like getting anything like 30% of the OS market the price of OSes would suddenly drop like a stone.
She's not using the whole song, it's a 29 second clip. And the audio quality is awful. Nobody wold find that video an adequate substitute for the real deal. That's doesn't necessarily make it legal though.
Landing sites have different requirements to launch sites. When you launch something into space it helps to be near the equator, because the equator is the fastest moving part of the planet. The greater the speed your rocket starts with from the pad the lesser the push you need to give it to get it to where it's going. That translates to a higher payload for a given type of rocket or a smaller rocket for a given payload.
MS could give machines running Windows away, but so could Gates' foundation. I wonder how Warren Buffet would feel if Gates used some of the money he donated to Gates' foundation to fund donating millions of computers running Windows to further Microsoft's dominance.
A civil engineer should know about the structural properties of steel and concrete, but they don't need to know how to mix concrete or weld. A computer scientist or programmer needs to know how computers work, but they don't need to know how to assemble one.
Perhaps he actually bothers to read what's written and makes an effort to answer the question which was asked. That would take much more time than your typical corporate first-line support approach, which is to answer some irrelevant question you never asked and to which you already know the answer.
So what's missing? I find my Macs do all the *nix stuff I need (ssh, astronomy software, cross compilers, bash, tin,...) pretty well. X11 windows not being treated the same as other windows is the only real bugbear IME. I wonder if Leotard fixes that?
1. It lacks humility. He comes across as an arrogant loudmouth. Many people do not like this.
2. It tries to give the impression that ESR is someone of vital importance in the community, which is simply not true.
Both true of that message, but both are true of a lot of ESR's output. If that post changed someone's opinion of ESR for those reasons I'd say they didn't know him very well in the first place.
Idle on a laptop hard drive is typically around 0.5-1W, peaking at 2-3W during writes. Spin up could consume 5W on its own, albeit briefly. The CPU only uses 0.9W, so I don't think 5W would be an unreasonable number for normal operation.
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A laser doesn't wear out int he same was as a stylus because its not being dragged along the surface of the disk, so in practice not being able to replace a laser isn't much of a problem. As to specialised speakers - what the hell are you smoking? Every CD player I've ever seen has a 3.5mm jack (if it's portable) or phono out (if it's not portable). Many also have an optical out, which could be one of a couple of different standards. Are you thinking of CD transports, with which you have to use an external DAC? They tend to use the same digital output as normal players, don't they?
Humans work in powers of ten. Computers should accommodate humans, not the other way round. RAM comes in powers of two for technical reasons, but nothing else in a computer which the user is exposed to uses powers of two. It is not natural for disks to use powers of two (except for the bus) and certainly not natural for the human interface to information about a disk to use powers of two. Using a standardised prefix (giga) to mean something other than 10^9 is the fudging of a definition.
I'm good at maths and I still play the lottery sometimes. A potential £75m payout with 75m:1 odds and a £1.50 ticket price (a big EuroMillions rollover; about the only time I play) may not seem like a good deal, but I figure the odds of my accumulating £75m by any other means are even closer to zero than 1/75m, which shifts the balance somewhat. Oh, and I do use the only viable tactic for maximising the potential payout (as distinct from the odds of winning) - picking numbers other people less unlikely to pick. The real meaty statistics on lottery numbers would be data on the numbers people picked.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by a "provable truism" is (does that mean it's true but as yet unproven, or that it could be proven if it were true?), but I do know that lottery winners who ruin their lives are several orders of magnitude more newsworthy than ones who quietly live a happy and contented life. Not only that but (in the UK at least) you can choose whether or not to have publicity about your win. Those who chose publicity are, to my mind, a bit stupid in the first place. So, if the basis of your truism is reports in the media, it's based on a biased subset of a self-selecting sample.
From the point of view of avoiding accidents, the safest cars aren't generally the ones considered or rated as "safe". Avoiding accidents ("active safety") is an entirely different ball game to surviving crashes ("passive safety"), which is what most people think of when they talk about safety. If you want to avoid an accident, you want lots of grip, good brakes, minimal mass, good visibility and small size. In other words, you want a sports car. If you want to survive an accident, you want large size and high mass. In other words you (theoretically) want an SUV (theoretically because SUVs are not all built to the same standards as cars).
Epoxy, with stuff (fibres, micro balloons...) added to provide appropriate mechanical properties. You'd probably want some mechanism to mix it on demand so you can use fast curing epoxy.
[ deleted by mollymoo 200710310022 ]
Perhaps 30% of the OS market at current OS prices would be enough to make up for the loss of hardware sales, but the current price of operating systems is set by an abusive monopolist, not a competitive market. If Apple looked like getting anything like 30% of the OS market the price of OSes would suddenly drop like a stone.
They've not lost the World Cup again have they?
She's not using the whole song, it's a 29 second clip. And the audio quality is awful. Nobody wold find that video an adequate substitute for the real deal. That's doesn't necessarily make it legal though.
There's some truth to that, but how exactly are the music moguls harming her child by not allowing her to publish copyright music without a license?
Landing sites have different requirements to launch sites. When you launch something into space it helps to be near the equator, because the equator is the fastest moving part of the planet. The greater the speed your rocket starts with from the pad the lesser the push you need to give it to get it to where it's going. That translates to a higher payload for a given type of rocket or a smaller rocket for a given payload.
MS could give machines running Windows away, but so could Gates' foundation. I wonder how Warren Buffet would feel if Gates used some of the money he donated to Gates' foundation to fund donating millions of computers running Windows to further Microsoft's dominance.
A civil engineer should know about the structural properties of steel and concrete, but they don't need to know how to mix concrete or weld. A computer scientist or programmer needs to know how computers work, but they don't need to know how to assemble one.
Was there zero crime in Medieval England, where they did kill criminals publicly and gruesomely? No.
The EU is not particularly homogeneous. Most countries in the EU have do have pretty good internet access. Italy, well...
You're confusing A+ certification and a CS degree. Seriously, why on earth do you think a computer science degree should cover commodity PC hardware?
You can play Doom but nothing too much more recent, as the CPU will be doing the rendering.
Appropriately for an OT in a Sputnik story, there's a DRM-free music store called Bleep too.
Perhaps he actually bothers to read what's written and makes an effort to answer the question which was asked. That would take much more time than your typical corporate first-line support approach, which is to answer some irrelevant question you never asked and to which you already know the answer.
So what's missing? I find my Macs do all the *nix stuff I need (ssh, astronomy software, cross compilers, bash, tin,...) pretty well. X11 windows not being treated the same as other windows is the only real bugbear IME. I wonder if Leotard fixes that?
From the end of the month, Macs will be UNIX machines.
Both true of that message, but both are true of a lot of ESR's output. If that post changed someone's opinion of ESR for those reasons I'd say they didn't know him very well in the first place.
From reading ESR's post (I've done no further research) he makes it sound like he was given actual shares, not options.
Idle on a laptop hard drive is typically around 0.5-1W, peaking at 2-3W during writes. Spin up could consume 5W on its own, albeit briefly. The CPU only uses 0.9W, so I don't think 5W would be an unreasonable number for normal operation.