Well, there's a lot of what you say. my lifestyle changed somewhat as a result of my taking up cycling, obviously: it's little things like taking the car to get something I forgot at the grocery store, or going on errands at work at my boss' request, or going to the casino on a whim, or whatever. And for longer trips, I'd sometime take the car and drive many hours just for the sake of having the car where I went, etc... Miles add up when you think about it.
Without car, I plan ahead (it's not a headache mind you) and I do things differently. I don't lose much compared to when I had a car, but I gain other things, like being fit, having more time with the family, having more money for other things... Life isn't better or worse without a car, it's just different. I figured if my grandparents could do without one, why couldn't I:-)
Of course I do my own repairs, but I haven't done any major work.
I don't. If you can, great. As for not having spent a lot on your car(s), you haven't *yet*: cars break down eventually, and it quickly gets costly. Just because a car is very reliable for 5 or 6 years doesn't mean it's not going to cost you a lot afterward. Over the life of the car, it's costly, and you have to take that into account.
So my expenses are like $1500
And where do you factor in amortization? you didn't buy your car for free did you? You're a prime example of what I mean when people tend to have mass amnesia when it comes to calculating the true cost of their cars...
I said I use my bike, as well as public transportation and occasional rental cars. Of course I don't ride 20,000 miles a year. I do maybe 4000 on the bike per year.
No kidding. This gives the U.S. grounds to attack any part of the universe, considering that Hydrogen is the most common element in the cosmos. Look out Alpha Centari, we've got our eye on you!
Why go to Alpha Centauri? They could just attack the sea, or the sun if they really want raw H2 without having to crack it first.
but it won't actually matter until its cheaper to buy a Fuel Cell powered vehicle, and its ridiculously expensive to buy ridiculous cars like the Ford Excursion.
You know, it's funny how people become completely blind about the cost of owning a vehicle: buying and using a Ford Excursion *is* ridiculously expensive. So is buying and using most other cars. It's strange, but most people only consider the price of gas when they think about how much a car costs them.
I go around by bike and public transportation myself, and I occasionally call a cab, or rent a car whenever I need to. I'm not particularly ecology-minded, but I calculated that driving about 20000 miles per year (which isn't much really) in the mid-sized sedan I had costed about 5 grand a year. That included gasoline, insurance, amortization, repairs, parking tickets, etc etc etc... With my current scheme, I stay healthier and it costs a grand total of $1000 on bad years.
$5000 is a big hole in many people's budget, yet they don't seem to realize. And I dare not imagine what it is when people buy cars on credit...
THAT'S the kind of engine we need! A Beer and Bratwurst Post-Production Methane engine! There's a virtually unlimited supply of that particular gaseous substance here in the States!
There's an idea: install a gas-collection nozzle on the driver's seat, at the "strategic" location, so that the driver himself becomes the energy source when he sits down at the wheel. For refueling stations, the infrastructure is already there: just go to a Taco Bell drive-thru, "enjoy" your giant burrito with guacamole, wait 10 minutes and off you go!
It might not work so well: the EV1 was leased too much to the dismay of owners (well, leasees) when GM killed it. Green-minded people might prefer to buy the Hondas outright, in the light of Californian EV1 owners' experiences.
The most damning thing about Linux (for example) is that it has zero innovation. I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier. I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.
You say this because you expect innovation from Linux. However, the truth is, Linux started out as a brilliant student's pet project, and is now a commodity Unix kernel clone. Linux won't bring much innovation, as its architecture is deeply conventional.
The main innovation with Linux can be found in the social networking of F/OSS that Stallman started, and that Linus Torvalds and friends popularized. It demonstrated that decentralized, free software development was viable.
There are no truly groundbreaking innovation in the OS field. Yes I know about Hurd and BeOS and whatnot, but they are just variations of the same themes. What I'm waiting for is a true massively parallel OS, OSes with totally virtualized memories (disk and RAM and rom etc), OS/hardware combos that are designed to be switched on and off at will with next to no "reboot" time, etc...
Re:same old same old.... everybody is leader but..
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
just think about it, how each and every company always claims absolute leadership and innovation, market-leadership and to be the utmost and best of there is out there...
The reason they do that is best explained by the man who formalized that concept. Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels once said: "if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth".
Corporations (and, gee, governments too) these days use exactly that same technique, whether it's in PR statements, interviews, punditry or advertising. They found it's easier to buy time with VC money and try to let the lies sink in in the general public to get people to buy their products, than putting out actually good products. There are exceptions of course, but that's the rule these days. And don't forget the added benefit of workers buying the lies too and working harder as a result...
Robots are more and more leaving production lines and work duties (hence the name Robot, from "rabota", meaning "work" in russian) and getting into the field of art. It's great news because truly novel works can be created with them (not by them yet IMHO, mind you...).
Here's a great theatrical performance from swiss actors and engineers, that involve 2 human actors and 3 robots that have been program to interact in complex ways with the actors. The play is very surprising, as everything "clicks" together just as if the robots were truly alive and acting.
Why didn't Microsoft (owners of the.net platform) sued Verisign (owners of the.net domain registry) for trademark/copyright/whatever violations? Pure Evil vs. Impure Evil is every ambulance chaser's dream case.
Please, gee, take off your tinfoil hat and consider this:
1) The.net TLD existed way before Microsoft's silly marketnym. If anyone could sue, it would be Verisign
2) The.net TLD isn't a trademark anymore than a city name. If they had a registration software called ".net" or something however, that could be argued though.
3) Microsoft isn't Pure Evil, anymore than Verisign or any other company you don't like. Corporations answer to their shareholders by wanting to increase profits, and their management set the tone of this pursuit of profits (aggressive, dumb, failed, moral, etc...). You may or may not like it, but that doesn't make any company evil. Please stop thinking like a dumb teenage Slashdotter and get out of the cliché already...
I agree, but what's the point of quality packages if the packages are so far behind? There needs to be a balance between trust and ease of contribution, so that stable packages are reasonably current. As it is now, they're obviously asking too much from potential helpers.
Arch uses a "rolling release" schedule so use the builtin package manager to upgrade and bam! your current. The package manager even resolves dependencies!
Holy crap, I didn't realize Slack had become so modern! And just to think that I'm stuck with dpkg and apt, that can't resolve dependencies and automatically upgrade your box...
is that they make you jump through many loops before allowing you to help them. I have several pieces of software that I wanted to contribute to Debian, so I figured I might as well be the maintainer for them. I gave up eventually, because it's just too damn bothersome, and another Debian maintainer took my.debs over for me.
IMHO, that's why they have a shortage of manpower, because it's just not easy enough for people to jump in and help.
When will F/OSS fundamentalists learn that, sometimes, a company gets a Windows product out the door as soon as possible to meet deadlines, and they just have to do minor tweaks and a recompile to produce a (usually better) Linux version a few weeks after, and more often than not these days, when they announce it, they seriously do mean to put out a Linux version?
There's no pleasing some people. The state of Linux is what it is, but whenever I'm not happy with something (it tends to be OpenOffice and KDE these days, for bloat and speed reasons), I remember how much it has evolved and improved for the past 10 years, and really for free software, it's a great achievement.
Stanaphone.com is the FIRST usable multi-platform SIP application. They offer more free things than Skype does (it's a real telephone number for example, for free). Quality is not that great though, I prefer Gizmo's.
Skype works well enough for me, the sound quality is more than okay for telephony, and the latency really isn't bad at all considering. And the Linux client is stable, and is a snap to install. However, I don't use it because:
1 - There's outgoing traffic from my box all the time. I know it's the P2P routing, but it's a bit unsettling to watch it chew away that much bandwidth
2 - It's made by the Kazaa people, and therefore who know what the hell it does behind your back (spyware?). I straced it, and didn't see anything nasty a-priori, but I don't trust Kazaa folks in that respect, period.
3 - The most disquieting feature: it goes some UDP magic to punch its way out of the firewall without telling you anything of what it does. That's sneaky. I know they claim it's for user friendliness and easy of installation and yada, but I say the networking code is too damn sneaky for my strict Unix-bred style of making sure software I install behaves predictably.
So I can't *wait* for an open-source (or at least open-standard, as Gizmo pegs itself) Skype replacement. The biggest problem of course, now, will be to have a compelling enough alternative that the millions of Skype users are willing to switch over, which isn't too likely.
And what's more, given how well CAN-SPAM is working, the chinese aren't taking much risk joining this anti-spam posse. They'll just keep on spamming as long as they don't reach the top of the list.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's a lot of what you say. my lifestyle changed somewhat as a result of my taking up cycling, obviously: it's little things like taking the car to get something I forgot at the grocery store, or going on errands at work at my boss' request, or going to the casino on a whim, or whatever. And for longer trips, I'd sometime take the car and drive many hours just for the sake of having the car where I went, etc... Miles add up when you think about it.
:-)
Without car, I plan ahead (it's not a headache mind you) and I do things differently. I don't lose much compared to when I had a car, but I gain other things, like being fit, having more time with the family, having more money for other things... Life isn't better or worse without a car, it's just different. I figured if my grandparents could do without one, why couldn't I
Even Slashdot is affected...
Of course I do my own repairs, but I haven't done any major work.
I don't. If you can, great. As for not having spent a lot on your car(s), you haven't *yet*: cars break down eventually, and it quickly gets costly. Just because a car is very reliable for 5 or 6 years doesn't mean it's not going to cost you a lot afterward. Over the life of the car, it's costly, and you have to take that into account.
So my expenses are like $1500
And where do you factor in amortization? you didn't buy your car for free did you? You're a prime example of what I mean when people tend to have mass amnesia when it comes to calculating the true cost of their cars...
I said I use my bike, as well as public transportation and occasional rental cars. Of course I don't ride 20,000 miles a year. I do maybe 4000 on the bike per year.
No kidding. This gives the U.S. grounds to attack any part of the universe, considering that Hydrogen is the most common element in the cosmos. Look out Alpha Centari, we've got our eye on you!
Why go to Alpha Centauri? They could just attack the sea, or the sun if they really want raw H2 without having to crack it first.
but it won't actually matter until its cheaper to buy a Fuel Cell powered vehicle, and its ridiculously expensive to buy ridiculous cars like the Ford Excursion.
You know, it's funny how people become completely blind about the cost of owning a vehicle: buying and using a Ford Excursion *is* ridiculously expensive. So is buying and using most other cars. It's strange, but most people only consider the price of gas when they think about how much a car costs them.
I go around by bike and public transportation myself, and I occasionally call a cab, or rent a car whenever I need to. I'm not particularly ecology-minded, but I calculated that driving about 20000 miles per year (which isn't much really) in the mid-sized sedan I had costed about 5 grand a year. That included gasoline, insurance, amortization, repairs, parking tickets, etc etc etc... With my current scheme, I stay healthier and it costs a grand total of $1000 on bad years.
$5000 is a big hole in many people's budget, yet they don't seem to realize. And I dare not imagine what it is when people buy cars on credit...
THAT'S the kind of engine we need! A Beer and Bratwurst Post-Production Methane engine! There's a virtually unlimited supply of that particular gaseous substance here in the States!
There's an idea: install a gas-collection nozzle on the driver's seat, at the "strategic" location, so that the driver himself becomes the energy source when he sits down at the wheel. For refueling stations, the infrastructure is already there: just go to a Taco Bell drive-thru, "enjoy" your giant burrito with guacamole, wait 10 minutes and off you go!
It might not work so well: the EV1 was leased too much to the dismay of owners (well, leasees) when GM killed it. Green-minded people might prefer to buy the Hondas outright, in the light of Californian EV1 owners' experiences.
The most damning thing about Linux (for example) is that it has zero innovation. I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier. I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.
You say this because you expect innovation from Linux. However, the truth is, Linux started out as a brilliant student's pet project, and is now a commodity Unix kernel clone. Linux won't bring much innovation, as its architecture is deeply conventional.
The main innovation with Linux can be found in the social networking of F/OSS that Stallman started, and that Linus Torvalds and friends popularized. It demonstrated that decentralized, free software development was viable.
There are no truly groundbreaking innovation in the OS field. Yes I know about Hurd and BeOS and whatnot, but they are just variations of the same themes. What I'm waiting for is a true massively parallel OS, OSes with totally virtualized memories (disk and RAM and rom etc), OS/hardware combos that are designed to be switched on and off at will with next to no "reboot" time, etc...
just think about it, how each and every company always claims absolute leadership and innovation, market-leadership and to be the utmost and best of there is out there...
The reason they do that is best explained by the man who formalized that concept. Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels once said: "if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth".
Corporations (and, gee, governments too) these days use exactly that same technique, whether it's in PR statements, interviews, punditry or advertising. They found it's easier to buy time with VC money and try to let the lies sink in in the general public to get people to buy their products, than putting out actually good products. There are exceptions of course, but that's the rule these days. And don't forget the added benefit of workers buying the lies too and working harder as a result...
A: Well, really helping developers understand what we got
And Balmer really knows all about that doesn't he?
Robots are more and more leaving production lines and work duties (hence the name Robot, from "rabota", meaning "work" in russian) and getting into the field of art. It's great news because truly novel works can be created with them (not by them yet IMHO, mind you...).
Here's a great theatrical performance from swiss actors and engineers, that involve 2 human actors and 3 robots that have been program to interact in complex ways with the actors. The play is very surprising, as everything "clicks" together just as if the robots were truly alive and acting.
Are you asking for a pedophile minigame in GTA:SA as well?
Why didn't Microsoft (owners of the .net platform) sued Verisign (owners of the .net domain registry) for trademark/copyright/whatever violations? Pure Evil vs. Impure Evil is every ambulance chaser's dream case.
.net TLD existed way before Microsoft's silly marketnym. If anyone could sue, it would be Verisign
.net TLD isn't a trademark anymore than a city name. If they had a registration software called ".net" or something however, that could be argued though.
Please, gee, take off your tinfoil hat and consider this:
1) The
2) The
3) Microsoft isn't Pure Evil, anymore than Verisign or any other company you don't like. Corporations answer to their shareholders by wanting to increase profits, and their management set the tone of this pursuit of profits (aggressive, dumb, failed, moral, etc...). You may or may not like it, but that doesn't make any company evil. Please stop thinking like a dumb teenage Slashdotter and get out of the cliché already...
They said the same about Clinton and look what happened after he left...
He had a quadruple heart bypass?
ICANN is lifting restrictions on VeriSign's pricing of .net
Time to get your Passport account while it's cheap...
i think the world is ready for some cures
Please, I think the world had enough with one.
I agree, but what's the point of quality packages if the packages are so far behind? There needs to be a balance between trust and ease of contribution, so that stable packages are reasonably current. As it is now, they're obviously asking too much from potential helpers.
Arch uses a "rolling release" schedule so use the builtin package manager to upgrade and bam! your current. The package manager even resolves dependencies!
Holy crap, I didn't realize Slack had become so modern! And just to think that I'm stuck with dpkg and apt, that can't resolve dependencies and automatically upgrade your box...
is that they make you jump through many loops before allowing you to help them. I have several pieces of software that I wanted to contribute to Debian, so I figured I might as well be the maintainer for them. I gave up eventually, because it's just too damn bothersome, and another Debian maintainer took my .debs over for me.
IMHO, that's why they have a shortage of manpower, because it's just not easy enough for people to jump in and help.
When will F/OSS fundamentalists learn that, sometimes, a company gets a Windows product out the door as soon as possible to meet deadlines, and they just have to do minor tweaks and a recompile to produce a (usually better) Linux version a few weeks after, and more often than not these days, when they announce it, they seriously do mean to put out a Linux version?
There's no pleasing some people. The state of Linux is what it is, but whenever I'm not happy with something (it tends to be OpenOffice and KDE these days, for bloat and speed reasons), I remember how much it has evolved and improved for the past 10 years, and really for free software, it's a great achievement.
Stanaphone.com is the FIRST usable multi-platform SIP application. They offer more free things than Skype does (it's a real telephone number for example, for free). Quality is not that great though, I prefer Gizmo's.
Skype works well enough for me, the sound quality is more than okay for telephony, and the latency really isn't bad at all considering. And the Linux client is stable, and is a snap to install. However, I don't use it because:
1 - There's outgoing traffic from my box all the time. I know it's the P2P routing, but it's a bit unsettling to watch it chew away that much bandwidth
2 - It's made by the Kazaa people, and therefore who know what the hell it does behind your back (spyware?). I straced it, and didn't see anything nasty a-priori, but I don't trust Kazaa folks in that respect, period.
3 - The most disquieting feature: it goes some UDP magic to punch its way out of the firewall without telling you anything of what it does. That's sneaky. I know they claim it's for user friendliness and easy of installation and yada, but I say the networking code is too damn sneaky for my strict Unix-bred style of making sure software I install behaves predictably.
So I can't *wait* for an open-source (or at least open-standard, as Gizmo pegs itself) Skype replacement. The biggest problem of course, now, will be to have a compelling enough alternative that the millions of Skype users are willing to switch over, which isn't too likely.
Oh yeah?
China appears to be taking a page from Canada in how to be a liked country.
I don't remember Canadian mounties shooting people at the Gate of Heavenly Peace square in Ottawa...
And what's more, given how well CAN-SPAM is working, the chinese aren't taking much risk joining this anti-spam posse. They'll just keep on spamming as long as they don't reach the top of the list.