Assuming (and I realize that it is a grand assumption) that the chlorine is liberated as a part of the process: Isn't that chemical just another marketable byproduct?
*nod*, at least for various definitions of "manually."
I have a script which makes a hard-linked clone of the latest backup, and then rsyncs to that (with some manner of special commandline switch which is made for this scenario and that I can't be bothered to look up right now). It's easy, and it lets me have layered backups not totally unlike (though nowhere near as slick as) Netapp's snapshots.
I have done bare-metal restores of Linux boxen from backups made like this. Works just fine, with an iota of bootstrap knowledge.
Most touchscreens are fairly resilient. Part of my day-job involves putting touchscreen monitors in front of public safety dispatchers in place of physical buttons for them to mash their filthy hands onto 24 hours a day.
The finger grease isn't really very noticable at all on these things after years of use - I suspect the glass has been treated to some extent to reduce the problem. And it's tempered, and quite strong -- I read a spec on my own touchscreen of being able to drop something like a 1-kilogram weight from several feet onto the surface of the screen without visible damage. So far, none of the dozen or so that I've placed into 24-hour use has developed any scratches.
Go look at a friend's iPod Touch or iPhone for an example, if you can't fathom the notion of a durable touchscreen display. I haven't seen a scratched one of those, either.
I sit before a beautiful Elo-modified NEC 2090uxi LCD touchscreen monitor, connected to my Vista desktop machine. Vista refuses to use this device as a touch-based input device, instead insisting that it's a mouse.
And, I guess, that's probably true -- its driver does present the touchscreen as a mouse. I'm just frustrated after trying to make it work a couple of nights ago. I mean, sure, it's handy to have a touchscreen (pushing the "Play" button in Winamp with my finger never seems to get old), but it'd be cool to taste a bit of what specialized support the OS has for the interface.
If 7's touchscreen "support" is similar, then I guess it's a nonstarter for me. I'm currently too jaded to bother with plugging the NEC touchscreen into my Windows 7 laptop, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Disclaimer: This comment is anecdotal. It is not argumentative. I don't have an axe to grind. I simply have a geek desire to play with a touchscreen proper, and am disappointed that I've not been able to do so, despite having (AFAICT) all of the hardware and software needed to do so.)
I can't believe you actually got modded up for that. Usually, whenever I post anything disparaging about Linux (or Apple, for that matter), I get modded into the toilet no matter how truthful I was.
Congrats, but I don't have any good suggestions for your problem. I seem to have given up on using fancy-pants graphical stuff in Linux years ago, and things have been simpler for me ever since. The two Linux boxes I still actually use (not counting a heavily-hacked Linksys WRT54GS, or a diskless 386 laptop that I have) are both running Gentoo, and neither of them do anything but textmode.
My suggestion, then: You want unix? So learn unix, and not some ill-inspired GUI. You can get some cool stuff done with the command line. Skip Ubuntu altogether. Try Slackware if you actually want to get your feet wet.
(I told you I didn't have any good suggestions...)
Right. It's plain and obvious to the casual observer that there's absolutely nothing Firefox can do about this problem -- after all, a third party is involved.
It's only logical.
(Except, for the sarcasm-impaired: It's not logical at all.)
So you propose, AC, that adding more random noise to the test would improve the reliability of the results moreso than controlling the test environment?
I'm no statistician, either, but your proposal sounds like it would be more difficult (define "random" in this context, including time of day), more time-consuming, and less accurate.
There's no control in this experiment (and, no, I don't mean "control group.") The fact that they were flogging away at public, and probably dynamic (read: inconsistent) websites totally invalidates the entire comparison.
If Anand wanted to take it seriously, they should have eliminated more variables. If they'd set up a dedicated, light-weight web server running in a controlled minimalist environment (bare Slackware+Apache, perhaps?) somewhere on a dedicated LAN, that would have been be a good start. They might even have used a RAM disk to ensure consistent access times to the data being served.
Hell: They should have even measured the battery voltage both before and after the tests, to eliminate (or at least quantify) any incongruity in the charging circuit's behavior. And they should've made sure to rotate their testing, so as to average it out as the battery ages (which it quite measurably will in these relatively-abusive full-charge - full-discharge tests).
But they didn't do these things. And it might seem like I'm splitting hairs here, but the results are close enough that hairs must be split.
Meanwhile, I think battery life while browsing is an interesting and very practical metric which is often overlooked these days. I applaud them for attempting and documenting such a feat, which I'm sure was relatively time-consuming, and I admonish them for doing a piss-poor job of it.
(And, no: I don't care which browser "wins." I have most of the tested browsers installed on my own laptop, and for me, it would be instructive to know which one will conserve battery life best in times when I know I'll be without power for a long period of time.)
My softmodded Xbox has the original 8 (I think) gig drive, and played copied games just fine.
The trick, of course, was that once a game was ripped to the hard drive, you'd just nuke it over the network to a PC with a burner.
Which, of course, does require an Xbox, a burner, a PC, and a home network. But what it does not require is outside assistance.
(Besides, the softmod was bloody easy, and also didn't require any outside hands-on help. Buy a used copy of 007, an Xbox controller extension, and a memory card. Hack the extension onto a normal USB cable. Download a small driver to make the controller and card slot work with Windows. Install onto the card a special 007 save game which, upon loading, immediately boots Linux and hacks at the BIOS with very little interaction. And then, it's modded.)
Oh. And since that probably counts as a fancy European luxury car: It's no big deal to reset the oil change indicator. The idiot's procedure is thus:
Short a pin (pin 7, IIRC) on the underhood diagnostic connector to a nearby ground. Turn key to on. Have assistant tell you when the dashboard indicator has reset (several seconds). Remove ground.
Done!
Sure, it's not a simple push-button, but I guess I don't really mind: I grok/etc just fine, too.
Yes, some really do. My (US model) 1995 BMW 325i has a rather wordy sticker in the upper-left corner of the windshield proclaiming that aftermarket electronics (including, specifically, hand-held cellular telephones) should not be used in nor powered by nor connected to that particular car, lest it jeopardize the BMW Limited Warranty.
The mere facts that the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act exists, is generally a good law for consumers, and is fairly easily enforceable, does not preclude manufacturers from either creating contrary policies or outright violating it.
(I, of course, have hacked the shit out of that car, scary-looking warning label be damned.)
The controller is an issue, for sure, but is it the only issue? I'm not aware of anyone who posts around these parts with enough background knowledge to say for sure.
There are a few PS3 games which work with Remote Play. "Eden" is one such game that I happen to have, and it works well enough with the PSP and remote play.
Your corvette crash - what happens if you just end up a paralyzed vegetable? Oops!
I've put some thought into this. I've determined that it's not so hard to die in a single-car accident. The trick is using a car which is early enough to have few safety measures and good engine output, while being late enough to be light-weight. A late ('78-81) second-generation Camaro SS or Firebird Trans-Am fits the bill pretty well: No crumple zones, no electronics to speak of to overrule your foot, plenty of power, lots of speed, zero safety features except for the optional seatbelt, and hard, metal dashboard components.
Add that to a race with death on any road you can come up with, so long as it has either a sheer cliff on one side, or the occasional overhead bridge, and you're golden. Just make sure the driveline, tires and suspension are in good shape beforehand, lest you accidentally live due to mechanical failure.
(An '09 Civic, Camry, or Golf probably would not work so well, even if it is faster.)
Meanwhile...
Drowning, of course, sucks.
Drugs? Shoot. Lots of good folks die from drugs. Done right, one doesn't feel a thing. Research is important.
Sky diving without a chute? Hard to pull off. Too much documentation. The posthumous Inquisition would be ugly for the accessories. But it is quick, sure, and painless.
Kevorkian approach, though? IIRC, those folks took awhile to die, and didn't appear to particularly be enjoying themselves. Fuck that - if it's time to go, go out with something fun. That sounds ugly, to me.
Nonetheless, I agree with you. Paying minimum legal tax, whatever hoops one must jump through, is fine. And if it, for whatever reason, should not be fine, then the laws simply need updating to more clearly define that it's not OK.
End of story. Every American (who is not a fool) pays the minimum possible assessment to the IRS that they can perceive -- even if it involves lies.
(Hey, kids!: Quick poll. Who among you were completely honest on your IRS Form 1040 last year? Anyone?)
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What's so hard about heading back to the gas station a few hours earlier than you might have to once you've topped off the tank?
Assuming (and I realize that it is a grand assumption) that the chlorine is liberated as a part of the process: Isn't that chemical just another marketable byproduct?
Isn't there some Nazi lab journal somewhere that we can look at for the results of actual human trials?
*nod*, at least for various definitions of "manually."
I have a script which makes a hard-linked clone of the latest backup, and then rsyncs to that (with some manner of special commandline switch which is made for this scenario and that I can't be bothered to look up right now). It's easy, and it lets me have layered backups not totally unlike (though nowhere near as slick as) Netapp's snapshots.
I have done bare-metal restores of Linux boxen from backups made like this. Works just fine, with an iota of bootstrap knowledge.
What?
Actually....
Most touchscreens are fairly resilient. Part of my day-job involves putting touchscreen monitors in front of public safety dispatchers in place of physical buttons for them to mash their filthy hands onto 24 hours a day.
The finger grease isn't really very noticable at all on these things after years of use - I suspect the glass has been treated to some extent to reduce the problem. And it's tempered, and quite strong -- I read a spec on my own touchscreen of being able to drop something like a 1-kilogram weight from several feet onto the surface of the screen without visible damage. So far, none of the dozen or so that I've placed into 24-hour use has developed any scratches.
Go look at a friend's iPod Touch or iPhone for an example, if you can't fathom the notion of a durable touchscreen display. I haven't seen a scratched one of those, either.
I sit before a beautiful Elo-modified NEC 2090uxi LCD touchscreen monitor, connected to my Vista desktop machine. Vista refuses to use this device as a touch-based input device, instead insisting that it's a mouse.
And, I guess, that's probably true -- its driver does present the touchscreen as a mouse. I'm just frustrated after trying to make it work a couple of nights ago. I mean, sure, it's handy to have a touchscreen (pushing the "Play" button in Winamp with my finger never seems to get old), but it'd be cool to taste a bit of what specialized support the OS has for the interface.
If 7's touchscreen "support" is similar, then I guess it's a nonstarter for me. I'm currently too jaded to bother with plugging the NEC touchscreen into my Windows 7 laptop, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Disclaimer: This comment is anecdotal. It is not argumentative. I don't have an axe to grind. I simply have a geek desire to play with a touchscreen proper, and am disappointed that I've not been able to do so, despite having (AFAICT) all of the hardware and software needed to do so.)
I can't believe you actually got modded up for that. Usually, whenever I post anything disparaging about Linux (or Apple, for that matter), I get modded into the toilet no matter how truthful I was.
Congrats, but I don't have any good suggestions for your problem. I seem to have given up on using fancy-pants graphical stuff in Linux years ago, and things have been simpler for me ever since. The two Linux boxes I still actually use (not counting a heavily-hacked Linksys WRT54GS, or a diskless 386 laptop that I have) are both running Gentoo, and neither of them do anything but textmode.
My suggestion, then: You want unix? So learn unix, and not some ill-inspired GUI. You can get some cool stuff done with the command line. Skip Ubuntu altogether. Try Slackware if you actually want to get your feet wet.
(I told you I didn't have any good suggestions...)
Right. It's plain and obvious to the casual observer that there's absolutely nothing Firefox can do about this problem -- after all, a third party is involved.
It's only logical.
(Except, for the sarcasm-impaired: It's not logical at all.)
I'll tell you what: Go ahead and give it a shot. If you've got enough time to Tweet about it on Twitter after impact, you win.
Otherwise, it's painless.
Deal?
So you propose, AC, that adding more random noise to the test would improve the reliability of the results moreso than controlling the test environment?
I'm no statistician, either, but your proposal sounds like it would be more difficult (define "random" in this context, including time of day), more time-consuming, and less accurate.
No, really. It's a meaningless number.
There's no control in this experiment (and, no, I don't mean "control group.") The fact that they were flogging away at public, and probably dynamic (read: inconsistent) websites totally invalidates the entire comparison.
If Anand wanted to take it seriously, they should have eliminated more variables. If they'd set up a dedicated, light-weight web server running in a controlled minimalist environment (bare Slackware+Apache, perhaps?) somewhere on a dedicated LAN, that would have been be a good start. They might even have used a RAM disk to ensure consistent access times to the data being served.
Hell: They should have even measured the battery voltage both before and after the tests, to eliminate (or at least quantify) any incongruity in the charging circuit's behavior. And they should've made sure to rotate their testing, so as to average it out as the battery ages (which it quite measurably will in these relatively-abusive full-charge - full-discharge tests).
But they didn't do these things. And it might seem like I'm splitting hairs here, but the results are close enough that hairs must be split.
Meanwhile, I think battery life while browsing is an interesting and very practical metric which is often overlooked these days. I applaud them for attempting and documenting such a feat, which I'm sure was relatively time-consuming, and I admonish them for doing a piss-poor job of it.
(And, no: I don't care which browser "wins." I have most of the tested browsers installed on my own laptop, and for me, it would be instructive to know which one will conserve battery life best in times when I know I'll be without power for a long period of time.)
My softmodded Xbox has the original 8 (I think) gig drive, and played copied games just fine.
The trick, of course, was that once a game was ripped to the hard drive, you'd just nuke it over the network to a PC with a burner.
Which, of course, does require an Xbox, a burner, a PC, and a home network. But what it does not require is outside assistance.
(Besides, the softmod was bloody easy, and also didn't require any outside hands-on help. Buy a used copy of 007, an Xbox controller extension, and a memory card. Hack the extension onto a normal USB cable. Download a small driver to make the controller and card slot work with Windows. Install onto the card a special 007 save game which, upon loading, immediately boots Linux and hacks at the BIOS with very little interaction. And then, it's modded.)
Oh. And since that probably counts as a fancy European luxury car: It's no big deal to reset the oil change indicator. The idiot's procedure is thus:
Short a pin (pin 7, IIRC) on the underhood diagnostic connector to a nearby ground. Turn key to on. Have assistant tell you when the dashboard indicator has reset (several seconds). Remove ground.
Done!
Sure, it's not a simple push-button, but I guess I don't really mind: I grok /etc just fine, too.
Yes, some really do. My (US model) 1995 BMW 325i has a rather wordy sticker in the upper-left corner of the windshield proclaiming that aftermarket electronics (including, specifically, hand-held cellular telephones) should not be used in nor powered by nor connected to that particular car, lest it jeopardize the BMW Limited Warranty.
The mere facts that the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act exists, is generally a good law for consumers, and is fairly easily enforceable, does not preclude manufacturers from either creating contrary policies or outright violating it.
(I, of course, have hacked the shit out of that car, scary-looking warning label be damned.)
He said it was a good wedding.
Patents (in the US, at least) don't need to be actively defended in order to stay valid. Trademarks, on the other hand, must be.
No lamer than Skype.
Remember your context cues, kid.
The controller is an issue, for sure, but is it the only issue? I'm not aware of anyone who posts around these parts with enough background knowledge to say for sure.
There are a few PS3 games which work with Remote Play. "Eden" is one such game that I happen to have, and it works well enough with the PSP and remote play.
Naw. Google Voice works just fine with Gizmo5 over SIP. It looks pretty easy to set up, and by all appearances is totally free.
That bit (the part about bleeding to death) is going to feel wholly uncomfortable compared to a nice, healthy heroine overdose.
Your corvette crash - what happens if you just end up a paralyzed vegetable? Oops!
I've put some thought into this. I've determined that it's not so hard to die in a single-car accident. The trick is using a car which is early enough to have few safety measures and good engine output, while being late enough to be light-weight. A late ('78-81) second-generation Camaro SS or Firebird Trans-Am fits the bill pretty well: No crumple zones, no electronics to speak of to overrule your foot, plenty of power, lots of speed, zero safety features except for the optional seatbelt, and hard, metal dashboard components.
Add that to a race with death on any road you can come up with, so long as it has either a sheer cliff on one side, or the occasional overhead bridge, and you're golden. Just make sure the driveline, tires and suspension are in good shape beforehand, lest you accidentally live due to mechanical failure.
(An '09 Civic, Camry, or Golf probably would not work so well, even if it is faster.)
Meanwhile...
Drowning, of course, sucks.
Drugs? Shoot. Lots of good folks die from drugs. Done right, one doesn't feel a thing. Research is important.
Sky diving without a chute? Hard to pull off. Too much documentation. The posthumous Inquisition would be ugly for the accessories. But it is quick, sure, and painless.
Kevorkian approach, though? IIRC, those folks took awhile to die, and didn't appear to particularly be enjoying themselves. Fuck that - if it's time to go, go out with something fun. That sounds ugly, to me.
YMMV.
Indeed.
*sigh*
Ever download an MP3 without paying for it? Ever get a copy of an album on tape from a friend?
Do you have any illegitimate movies in your library?
Hey, kid: Check the UID. You're still young.
Nonetheless, I agree with you. Paying minimum legal tax, whatever hoops one must jump through, is fine. And if it, for whatever reason, should not be fine, then the laws simply need updating to more clearly define that it's not OK.
End of story. Every American (who is not a fool) pays the minimum possible assessment to the IRS that they can perceive -- even if it involves lies.
(Hey, kids!: Quick poll. Who among you were completely honest on your IRS Form 1040 last year? Anyone?)