The same reason you probably have a deadbolt and a regular lock on your front door, and possibly a chain bolt.
To help keep the honest people honest? Because none of those things are going to stop an attacker armed with a BFH. And none of those things are going to keep windows from turning into doorways when bricks are involved. And none of those things are going to keep a stealthy attacker from picking the locks (unless they're ridiculously high-quality locks) and cutting the chain with a small bicycle tool.
My house has locks on the doorknobs, and that is all. It's not worth the effort to go far enough to stop a motivated attacker (steel bars/shutters over windows, inside/outside doors).
Last time I ran an X11 application remotely, I used SSH with X forwarding with a simple command line. Worked great. (Flawless, I might say.)
Last time I ran a multi-headed X box (where multi-head == "two or more independent monitors+keyboards+mice, each with their own root window and window manager"), the configuration wasn't trivial, but it wasn't hard either. And once it was done, any X11 "server" could connect to this "client" and run any program over 100-mbps Ethernet. (Look, ma! A terminal server! Hot-desking! Remote access! THE CLOUD! Buzzword-bingo on the end of a 20-year-old carrot!)
And it doesn't much matter when the "last time" was, since the methods haven't changed a bit over the past decade or two.
These are things that other graphical systems cannot do. And they are the reasons why X, or perhaps X11, is still important.
Those who do not understand X, are doomed to recreate it. Badly.
To the mods who are marking my opinions as Troll: I've had a karma bonus ever since there was a karma bonus, and you don't phase me. Meanwhile, for the sake of whatever is left of the sanctity of/., remember: There is no "-1, Disagree" moderation.
Srsly, kids. Grow a pair and reply if you disagree. (And get off my lawn.)
No. I just like network-transparent applications. It was one of the main draws that I had toward Linux almost 20 years ago, and is why I still use it today.
(My home Linux boxen are all headless, and they can stay that way for all I care. If I want to run something graphical, it's trivial with X.)
(And no: VNC is more of a problem than it is a solution.)
I personally think that everyone should be forced to spent a meaningful amount of time incarcerated against their will, before they're allowed to form a meaningful opinion about how people who are incarcerated should be treated.
Residential wiring in the United States always has the lines 180 degrees out of phase, as is natural when using a singular center-tapped secondary on a transformer to feed a structure. It is always done this way. If you're in the US, just look up sometime to see it for yourself: One transformer on a pole, with just enough wires hanging onto it for a single primary and a center-tapped secondary.
3-phase power (or just two legs of it, as you suggest) is almost never even available in residential neighborhoods in the Unites States, except when those neighborhoods juxtapose commercial or industrial uses where things like large compressors and electric motors are used. When these areas have overhead lines, they also have three distinct transformers on a pole -- one for each 120 degree phase.
And even then, this never makes it into a residential home, as there are no (as in, zero) consumer appliances in the United States which require either 3-phase power or 208VAC.
You can get a quaility Halogen replacement bulb that will provide 100W equivalent performance while using only about 70 watts and will last 3500 hours for around $5.
Strangely, there are new NOT-high-quality halogen bulbs.
I recently moved to a new place and the lighting* (cheap CFLs of mixed color temperature, bad fixture locations) was less than spectacular. To make it temporarily liveable (bad lights distract me enough that it's almost impossible to get anything done), I went forth to buy some new light bulbs.
I -tried- to get some normal, cheap, 60-Watt incandescents, but they didn't exist at the particular Wal-Mart.
Instead, I left with some GE-branded 43-Watt (60W "equivalent") halogen craziness. These look like a regular light bulb, but there is a small Halogen widget inside of a normal-looking, frosted glass envelope. They were cheap enough, at around a dollar or a bit more each in a package of 4.
All is good, right? Indeed, until I turn them on and saw that they make very blue light compared to a normal, traditional, high-quality halogen. A bit puzzled, I looked closer at the packaging.
They're rated for only 1,000 hours.
So, in synopsis: They cost less and they burn out sooner. This is because they're running hotter, which does improve light-emitting efficiency, but also pushes the output further toward the blue end of the spectrum than even a normal halogen.
I haven't done a cost rundown on them yet, since I'll probably be switching them out with higher-quality CFLs as soon as I get the gas switched on, but with 1000 hours of life these things will never become popular....even if they do meet the new rules.
$40 a month? Oddly enough, that's exactly what the monthly service on my pocket computer costs. Well, that -- and $200 up-front.
It's going into its third year soon and still going strong, so that's about thirty cents a day in hardware expenses. (A can of cheap beer costs more than that.)
I've carried a pocket computer for a long time, starting with a surplus/refurb Handspring Visor over a decade ago ($30) that I absolutely stuffed full of useful data. After that, I carried a Palm Zire (which was free, as it was an unexpected gift), and I discovered the joys of having a camera with me at all times. I then used first-gen iPod Touch for awhile (also free, as a rebate item on a fancy Netgear switch), before Android devices matured enough that they were actually useful.
So, expensive? Nope, I'm just not seeing it: It still seems pretty frugal to me.
Meanwhile, I -do- need to get some places expeditiously, and without prior planning, and sometimes in unfamiliar cities. I'm not a firefighter, but I support the systems that allow firefighters to be alerted and respond to emergencies: Something might actually burn down or explode if I'm a few minutes late, and "pulling my big boy britches up" won't fix it if it does.
Freaking out at the store? Srsly. It's just the convenience of having a massive volume of recipes available at any time: "Wow, that's cheap. I wonder what I can do with that? *google* *buys ingredients*" (I used to keep a large number of unfamiliar recipes in my Palm Pilot, too, for much the same reason. Food is important to me and I like to learn about it.)
I'm not sure what your aversion to using tools is.
Hey, you know what? As long as we're swapping old stories: My grandpa was a businessman. Long before cell phones, or even high-power transistor-based transmitters, he put together a VHF 2-way radio system so his salespeople could talk back to the office from the road. He was also an early adopter of using computers in small business, instead of just using paper files. Once car phones became barely practical 25 or so years ago, he had one of those -- and a fax machine on the dash to go with it. He always did plenty of phone calls at night and on weekends, but he did quite well for himself in large part due to his rapid adoption and use of new tools: No matter where he was, he had the tools and information available to him to land another deal. And he did, over and over again, whether at his desk or on the road.
I'm not sure if your eyes work the same way that mine do, but mine aren't designed to be limited by pixels. I want to see smoothly-flowing text, with words that make easily-recognizable shapes, so that I can read more quickly, easily, and accurately.
There are never too many dots for kerning.
FFS: Until the monitor in front of me can provide a greater level of detail that my eyes can perceive (Nyquist), it's not enough. (And this includes positional detail as well.)
Or do you suggest that the proportional near-letter-quality Serif font from a Star 9-pin dot matrix printer is good enough for any document, ever? That presentation has nothing to do with reception? That we're done now, and that everyhing useful has already been invented, and that we should simply be happy with the technology that we have?
After all, who needs a plow and an ox, when they've already got a hoe and a strong back?
1. When I'm standing in someone's far-away office talking to them about some problem or solution that has already been hashed out in email with other parties, it makes me more money (as opposed to less money) to be able to just instantly forward stuff to them...and then they can read it comfortably on their desktop.
2. When I'm driving and get swiftly re-routed automatically onto surface streets because the freeway (perhaps miles ahead) ahead has turned into a parking lot due to multiple accidents, it saves me money (both fuel and time == money).
3. When I'm at the store and there's an unadvertised special for some item that I'm not familiar with, I can quickly figure out what other ingredients I also want to buy to go with that item so that I can prepare a meal....or make an informed decision to not buy the thing at all.
Your answer to 1 is to waste time and resources waiting to get back to your precious desktop, and put the sharing of information with other people off until you get there.
Your answer to 2 is to waste time trapped in a traffic jam, because your precious desktop wasn't able to predict this.
Your answer to 3 is, apparently, to either ignore the unfamiliar special, or make two more trips (one there, one back) after finding a suitable recipe on your precious desktop.
And your rationale is...cocaine?
Keep on with your bad self. Meanwhile, I'll keep making my pocket computer accomplish useful work on my behalf and let it continue to help me be frugal.
It's fucking regression. These "smart" phones have screens the size computers did when I was a kid. Why would I want to go back to 1980?
You carried a battery-operated pocket computer with 24-bit color, accelerated 3D graphics, a library of books (or music or movies or whatever), voice recognition, GPS-based navigation, a multi-point capacitive touchscreen, a surprisingly good digital camera or two, and a fast always-on wireless Internet connection in 1980?
Seriously. I do my real work with a multi-headed desktop, and I usually have one or more laptops in the trunk of the car for when I'm out and about, and I prefer to read books and magazines on paper.
But I do use my smartphone far more often than I anticipated -- if I want to Google some curiosity while sitting on the couch, find a recipe to use something that is on special at the grocery store, or if I'm chatting with someone (in real life) and I need to forward them an email, or document something with a photograph, or take a quick note without rounding up a pen and paper: I can just do it, and be done with that task, and move on to other things.
It even routes me around traffic congestion when driving, and gets me to the right bus/train/whatever station at the right time to get me where I'm going in an unfamiliar city.
And a myriad of other things. Pocket computers are useful tools for all sorts of stuff that I can't do with my desktop computer because, simply, the desktop computer does not fit into my pocket.
Do I edit spreadsheets and write code with it? No. But I could do so if I were strongly motivated to: It has an HDMI port and handles Bluetooth keyboards and mice just fine...but by the time I go through that amount of effort, I'm better off to fire up a laptop (which I will probably use with the tethering function on the pocket computer).
Then again, I do use it to ssh into various boxen to do various simple tasks while I'm out and about. It works just fine as a pocket-sized glass teletype.
What is this singular form of "road database" to which you refer? (Please be specific: A URL to a.tar.gz would be ideal.)
Because in my country (not surprisingly, also the home of Ford), such a database simply does not exist.
(And if "the" road database is incorrect, the only result is that the fancy goddamn cruise control system doesn't work and that millions of dollars of development costs are wasted -- by the consumers who ultimately pay for such development -- under the guise that it ought to work, but it cannot.)
That all said: What were you going on about, again?
You assume that there is a singular road database, and that it is correct, and that it is somehow able to be automatically updated in such a fashion that deliberate maliciousness is somehow either impossible, very difficult, or simply unlikely, and that there are facilities in place for such updates to "the" road database to be distributed easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily.
Google's DNS, along with some/all of the L3 servers use Anycast to automagically find the closest one (of many), network-wise.
And in any event, they work faster than my own ISP's nameservers.
To help keep the honest people honest? Because none of those things are going to stop an attacker armed with a BFH. And none of those things are going to keep windows from turning into doorways when bricks are involved. And none of those things are going to keep a stealthy attacker from picking the locks (unless they're ridiculously high-quality locks) and cutting the chain with a small bicycle tool.
My house has locks on the doorknobs, and that is all. It's not worth the effort to go far enough to stop a motivated attacker (steel bars/shutters over windows, inside/outside doors).
Spoken as someone who has never, ever deep-fried anything.
Remember, kids, cooking oil does not boil at the temperatures used for deep frying.
What is this?
Easy. I've been incarcerated against my will for a meaningful amount of time.
(Oh, look! Mr. Cushy-life knows how to take his own medicine!)
X is dead?
*looks around*
Gosh, it sure doesn't look like it.
[citation needed]
Really? Lots of configuration?
Last time I ran an X11 application remotely, I used SSH with X forwarding with a simple command line. Worked great. (Flawless, I might say.)
Last time I ran a multi-headed X box (where multi-head == "two or more independent monitors+keyboards+mice, each with their own root window and window manager"), the configuration wasn't trivial, but it wasn't hard either. And once it was done, any X11 "server" could connect to this "client" and run any program over 100-mbps Ethernet. (Look, ma! A terminal server! Hot-desking! Remote access! THE CLOUD! Buzzword-bingo on the end of a 20-year-old carrot!)
And it doesn't much matter when the "last time" was, since the methods haven't changed a bit over the past decade or two.
These are things that other graphical systems cannot do. And they are the reasons why X, or perhaps X11, is still important.
Those who do not understand X, are doomed to recreate it. Badly.
I hate to reply to myself, but:
To the mods who are marking my opinions as Troll: I've had a karma bonus ever since there was a karma bonus, and you don't phase me. Meanwhile, for the sake of whatever is left of the sanctity of /., remember: There is no "-1, Disagree" moderation.
Srsly, kids. Grow a pair and reply if you disagree. (And get off my lawn.)
No. I just like network-transparent applications. It was one of the main draws that I had toward Linux almost 20 years ago, and is why I still use it today.
(My home Linux boxen are all headless, and they can stay that way for all I care. If I want to run something graphical, it's trivial with X.)
(And no: VNC is more of a problem than it is a solution.)
No. *I* don't support Wayland.
That X also does not support Wayland is just win-win.
Yet another good reason to disparage Wayland: Not even X supports it.
Dude, these are -marketers-. They are, at best, third on the list behind lawyers and bankers.
Who cares?
I personally think that everyone should be forced to spent a meaningful amount of time incarcerated against their will, before they're allowed to form a meaningful opinion about how people who are incarcerated should be treated.
OSM is inaccurate, and has no topographical data.
But imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
(Also: Penis bird, Natalia Portman and hot grits. Get off my lawn: You're stepping on my liver.)
3D printed livers?
Bottoms up, mates!
No.
Residential wiring in the United States always has the lines 180 degrees out of phase, as is natural when using a singular center-tapped secondary on a transformer to feed a structure. It is always done this way. If you're in the US, just look up sometime to see it for yourself: One transformer on a pole, with just enough wires hanging onto it for a single primary and a center-tapped secondary.
3-phase power (or just two legs of it, as you suggest) is almost never even available in residential neighborhoods in the Unites States, except when those neighborhoods juxtapose commercial or industrial uses where things like large compressors and electric motors are used. When these areas have overhead lines, they also have three distinct transformers on a pole -- one for each 120 degree phase.
And even then, this never makes it into a residential home, as there are no (as in, zero) consumer appliances in the United States which require either 3-phase power or 208VAC.
Strangely, there are new NOT-high-quality halogen bulbs.
I recently moved to a new place and the lighting* (cheap CFLs of mixed color temperature, bad fixture locations) was less than spectacular. To make it temporarily liveable (bad lights distract me enough that it's almost impossible to get anything done), I went forth to buy some new light bulbs.
I -tried- to get some normal, cheap, 60-Watt incandescents, but they didn't exist at the particular Wal-Mart.
Instead, I left with some GE-branded 43-Watt (60W "equivalent") halogen craziness. These look like a regular light bulb, but there is a small Halogen widget inside of a normal-looking, frosted glass envelope. They were cheap enough, at around a dollar or a bit more each in a package of 4.
All is good, right? Indeed, until I turn them on and saw that they make very blue light compared to a normal, traditional, high-quality halogen. A bit puzzled, I looked closer at the packaging.
They're rated for only 1,000 hours.
So, in synopsis: They cost less and they burn out sooner. This is because they're running hotter, which does improve light-emitting efficiency, but also pushes the output further toward the blue end of the spectrum than even a normal halogen.
I haven't done a cost rundown on them yet, since I'll probably be switching them out with higher-quality CFLs as soon as I get the gas switched on, but with 1000 hours of life these things will never become popular....even if they do meet the new rules.
$40 a month? Oddly enough, that's exactly what the monthly service on my pocket computer costs. Well, that -- and $200 up-front.
It's going into its third year soon and still going strong, so that's about thirty cents a day in hardware expenses. (A can of cheap beer costs more than that.)
I've carried a pocket computer for a long time, starting with a surplus/refurb Handspring Visor over a decade ago ($30) that I absolutely stuffed full of useful data. After that, I carried a Palm Zire (which was free, as it was an unexpected gift), and I discovered the joys of having a camera with me at all times. I then used first-gen iPod Touch for awhile (also free, as a rebate item on a fancy Netgear switch), before Android devices matured enough that they were actually useful.
So, expensive? Nope, I'm just not seeing it: It still seems pretty frugal to me.
Meanwhile, I -do- need to get some places expeditiously, and without prior planning, and sometimes in unfamiliar cities. I'm not a firefighter, but I support the systems that allow firefighters to be alerted and respond to emergencies: Something might actually burn down or explode if I'm a few minutes late, and "pulling my big boy britches up" won't fix it if it does.
Freaking out at the store? Srsly. It's just the convenience of having a massive volume of recipes available at any time: "Wow, that's cheap. I wonder what I can do with that? *google* *buys ingredients*" (I used to keep a large number of unfamiliar recipes in my Palm Pilot, too, for much the same reason. Food is important to me and I like to learn about it.)
I'm not sure what your aversion to using tools is.
Hey, you know what? As long as we're swapping old stories: My grandpa was a businessman. Long before cell phones, or even high-power transistor-based transmitters, he put together a VHF 2-way radio system so his salespeople could talk back to the office from the road. He was also an early adopter of using computers in small business, instead of just using paper files. Once car phones became barely practical 25 or so years ago, he had one of those -- and a fax machine on the dash to go with it. He always did plenty of phone calls at night and on weekends, but he did quite well for himself in large part due to his rapid adoption and use of new tools: No matter where he was, he had the tools and information available to him to land another deal. And he did, over and over again, whether at his desk or on the road.
I'm not sure if your eyes work the same way that mine do, but mine aren't designed to be limited by pixels. I want to see smoothly-flowing text, with words that make easily-recognizable shapes, so that I can read more quickly, easily, and accurately.
There are never too many dots for kerning.
FFS: Until the monitor in front of me can provide a greater level of detail that my eyes can perceive (Nyquist), it's not enough. (And this includes positional detail as well.)
Or do you suggest that the proportional near-letter-quality Serif font from a Star 9-pin dot matrix printer is good enough for any document, ever? That presentation has nothing to do with reception? That we're done now, and that everyhing useful has already been invented, and that we should simply be happy with the technology that we have?
After all, who needs a plow and an ox, when they've already got a hoe and a strong back?
Hmm.
I think you're missing something: Frugality.
1. When I'm standing in someone's far-away office talking to them about some problem or solution that has already been hashed out in email with other parties, it makes me more money (as opposed to less money) to be able to just instantly forward stuff to them...and then they can read it comfortably on their desktop.
2. When I'm driving and get swiftly re-routed automatically onto surface streets because the freeway (perhaps miles ahead) ahead has turned into a parking lot due to multiple accidents, it saves me money (both fuel and time == money).
3. When I'm at the store and there's an unadvertised special for some item that I'm not familiar with, I can quickly figure out what other ingredients I also want to buy to go with that item so that I can prepare a meal....or make an informed decision to not buy the thing at all.
Your answer to 1 is to waste time and resources waiting to get back to your precious desktop, and put the sharing of information with other people off until you get there.
Your answer to 2 is to waste time trapped in a traffic jam, because your precious desktop wasn't able to predict this.
Your answer to 3 is, apparently, to either ignore the unfamiliar special, or make two more trips (one there, one back) after finding a suitable recipe on your precious desktop.
And your rationale is...cocaine?
Keep on with your bad self. Meanwhile, I'll keep making my pocket computer accomplish useful work on my behalf and let it continue to help me be frugal.
You carried a battery-operated pocket computer with 24-bit color, accelerated 3D graphics, a library of books (or music or movies or whatever), voice recognition, GPS-based navigation, a multi-point capacitive touchscreen, a surprisingly good digital camera or two, and a fast always-on wireless Internet connection in 1980?
Seriously. I do my real work with a multi-headed desktop, and I usually have one or more laptops in the trunk of the car for when I'm out and about, and I prefer to read books and magazines on paper.
But I do use my smartphone far more often than I anticipated -- if I want to Google some curiosity while sitting on the couch, find a recipe to use something that is on special at the grocery store, or if I'm chatting with someone (in real life) and I need to forward them an email, or document something with a photograph, or take a quick note without rounding up a pen and paper: I can just do it, and be done with that task, and move on to other things.
It even routes me around traffic congestion when driving, and gets me to the right bus/train/whatever station at the right time to get me where I'm going in an unfamiliar city.
And a myriad of other things. Pocket computers are useful tools for all sorts of stuff that I can't do with my desktop computer because, simply, the desktop computer does not fit into my pocket.
Do I edit spreadsheets and write code with it? No. But I could do so if I were strongly motivated to: It has an HDMI port and handles Bluetooth keyboards and mice just fine...but by the time I go through that amount of effort, I'm better off to fire up a laptop (which I will probably use with the tethering function on the pocket computer).
Then again, I do use it to ssh into various boxen to do various simple tasks while I'm out and about. It works just fine as a pocket-sized glass teletype.
Higher pixel density == better kerning. Better kerning == easier reading. (Even at a distance.)
What is this singular form of "road database" to which you refer? (Please be specific: A URL to a .tar.gz would be ideal.)
Because in my country (not surprisingly, also the home of Ford), such a database simply does not exist.
(And if "the" road database is incorrect, the only result is that the fancy goddamn cruise control system doesn't work and that millions of dollars of development costs are wasted -- by the consumers who ultimately pay for such development -- under the guise that it ought to work, but it cannot.)
That all said: What were you going on about, again?
Problem:
You assume that there is a singular road database, and that it is correct, and that it is somehow able to be automatically updated in such a fashion that deliberate maliciousness is somehow either impossible, very difficult, or simply unlikely, and that there are facilities in place for such updates to "the" road database to be distributed easily.
These assumptions are are all wrong.