I found myself with a Windows desktop a few years back, after more than a decade or so of Linux and an enjoyable stint with OS/2 before that.
I've always (well, ever since I was a kid) kept a *nix box around, whether as my primary machine or just for file-serving and all of the (big and small) things that it does well, but haven't plugged a monitor into my current Linux box in a coon's age: Last time I tried Ubuntu, I got really sick of its irrevocable click-to-focus (which is just not how X is supposed to be) and its bastardized incarnation of xscreensaver. And lately, with Unity, I just don't care about Ubuntu anymore -- I used to recommend it to people who might be less picky than I am, but that doesn't happen anymore now that they've jumped ship.
And at the pedantic end of things, I recently gave up on making PHP work with Apache on Gentoo: I just wanted to do a little bit of web development for a simple application, and found myself spending way, way, way too much time failing to make inline PHP work. (I had it working well several years ago on a very different installation and it was easy, but then those Gentoo fuckers went and changed everything while apparently neglecting to document...anything, really. I'd document and publish the process myself if I could make it work, but that's not going to happen now.)
Am currently installing PC-BSD 9 on ZFS. The installer has been slick, so far, with simple and reasonable choices to select from, and with Knoppix-like magic in hardware detection. It is taking forever, but then I seem to recall every BSD install I've ever done taking forever as well...and the box itself isn't particularly fast by today's measures (Athlon XP 1800, 1.5g RAM). (I strongly suspect it will get faster with a bit of ZFS tweaking and maybe a lighter kernel.)
I'm doing this partly to play with a good ZFS implementation that uses neither Solaris nor FUSE, partly because of my current frustration with Gentoo and PHP, and partly because I've had great experience with FreeBSD (off and on) for almost two decades between my own installs, and various shell accounts elsewhere. And I just want to see what the old girl's up to lately.
(When the singular hard drive crashed on my last FreeBSD machine (4.0-CURRENT?), it stayed alive and kept routing packets flawlessly for -months- until I had time to goof with it. I hang the scarred and grooved platters on the wall in remembrance of it.)
Depends on the construction of the headphones, not the size of them.
Headphones/earbuds/earspeakers/whatever come in four different basic forms:
1. Those that are sealed to the ear and against the environment (such as those that are used by performers for in-ear monitoring )
2. Those that are sealed against the ear and open to the environment.
3. Those that are sealed against the environment and open against the ear.
4. Those that are sealed against nothing.
And, well, that's it.
The more sealed-up they are, the less others can hear them.
*shrug*
My current favorite pair is a set of middle-of-the-road Sony in-ear jobbies that are reasonably isolated. It's nigh-impossible for others to hear them while I've got them in my head, at even insane ear-ringing levels.
That's nothing. Whoever built the wall that exists between my office and the dining room left inside a leather dog collar and a half-dozen pork (I think) rib bones.
We've also found a cast iron floor lamp inside of a wall, as well as several hundred copies of the Saturday Evening Post that are positively impossible to drill through.
Ping isn't intended to be a novice utility. It's a serious piece of a network diagnostic toolkit. Your grandma isn't going to be running it
Seriously? Ping is a "serious piece of network diagnostic toolkit"?
Please allow me to rephrase: "Ping is the most basic part of a network diagnostic toolkit. If your grandmother learns one thing about IP networking and nothing else, it will be ping."
But that's just dumb, and as a consumer who just wants to use IPV6 for what it offers me, I don't want to care that there are differences between ICMP and ICMPv6 (nor should I have to care).
AFAICT, the root of the real problems discussed in the article is that zip code and municipal boundaries can (and do) change. (The article also has some non sequitur statements, presented as fact, which I'm ignoring.)
Perhaps the fact that these things change may explain why the folks who package up such databases routinely offer updates.
Perhaps. 5-digit zip codes are certainly inappropriate.
However, I once lived in an apartment complex with several building with 16 units each. The mailboxes were in groups of four. Each of these groups had a unique 9-digit ZIP code.
To be sure, it seemed like overkill. I haven't made a study of things to see if such fine granularity is commonly available with zip codes, but it would not surprise me.
True. However, I'd imagine that the pollution generated by printing, stuffing, and soldering components to PCBs to be far less than the crap that arose out of the manufacture of those components to begin with (which was long-ago outsourced to the Far East).
"Manufacturing" a Raspberry Pi isn't really manufacturing in the dirty sense of the word -- it's basically just an assembly process. AFAICT the only real pollutants which might be released in such a process might be some VOCs from the printing processes involved, as much of the rest of the waste can be profitably reclaimed (copper-saturated etchant, for example).
If it can routinely be run in 5 hours, then it can certainly be occasionally done in 4 hours. Maybe not 3, but meh.
My main point was, I think, that it's not so much that your visitors from the US were particularly slow, but that visitors anywhere can tend to be slow.
It's worth noting that M+S tires can be completely lousy in snow.
The designation simply means that at least a certain percentage of the tread consists of open space (I believe the number is either 20 or 25%, but I don't feel like Googling a citation just now). It has nothing at all to do to the shapes of the tread blocks, the amount of siping, the compound of the rubber, or even the existence of treat blocks: Just the ratio of open spaces to filled spaces.
I had "M+S" Z-rated performance tires on a car once, and was absolutely surprised by the first dusting of snow: With less than an inch of the stuff on the road and no ice underneath, it was taking me hundreds of feet to stop from 30MPH with my asshole puckering the entire way. Accelerating up a mild incline was impossible.
It was the worst vehicle I'd ever driven in the winter, even with M+S tires that were nearly new and had deep tread.
After a very harrowing day of that madness (and horns honking as I adjusted my speed downward to compensate for the scary tires), I ordered a set of skinny Blizzaks mounted to the cheapest wheels I could get, using money I did not have. Once they showed up the car was transformed into the most reliable snow vehicle I've ever driven.
Good all-season tires can be ok, and I've worn out a few sets in various types of weather on a variety of cars, but simply being mud-and-snow rated means exactly shit in my book: The aforementioned M+S tires even did a lousy job in (proper) mud. (And ice? Fuhgettaboutit!)
You could legitimately market M+S tires that don't have tread blocks at all, but just long, plain uninterrupted radial grooves. You can even sell them with little tread depth, like say 5/32". And they'll be lousy on snow, mud, ice, and maybe even water: But they'll still be M+S.
My BMW is at about 4.5" off of the ground at the lowest point on the front end, and maybe 6" overall if I had to make a realistic average guess. It works fantastically with snow tires on smooth ice and fresh snow up to about 8", at any half-sane speed: It goes, it stops, it turns, and it does combinations of these calmly and without excitement. Beyond 8" it becomes a bit ponderous (but still seems to plod along more-or-less fine as long as I avoid three-point turns and make a point of hitting big drifts and snowbanks rather harder than I'd like), but it's never let me down or shown any particular wear from this treatment.
I've considered getting a set of spring rubbers to jack the whole thing up another inch or so, along with a set of chains. The former is a maddeningly NASCAR-like redneck concept, and the latter just makes good sense, but the two of them together should counter any weather I've ever seen in my lifetime in northern Ohio.
I've looked at studded tires, but those only help on ice, and ice is generally not the problem for this rig: I've pulled random lesser cars out of ditches using the BMW on an icy road with nothing but a fresh set of studless Blizzaks, a good strap, and a scrawny teenager pushing the stuck car in disbelief that it was being liberated by a little RWD BMW...
I'm from a very flat portion of the US that is built on a very large grid system, so I have to seek out my twisty roads (and I do).
But when I find one, especially one that's far away, I tend to slow down and/or stop to admire the surroundings more. I could easily turn your five-hour trip into either fourteen hours, or just four. Or maybe even three, if my balls were on fire...
But I'd certainly prefer to take my time the on my first pass just to attempt to absorb what I could about the place.
But if you do that trip routinely, there's really nothing new for you to see, so you probably don't bother with trying. A visitor who is unfamiliar might (and I dare say should) take a bit more time to look around.
My 1995 BMW is also off by about the same amount (5%) on the speedometer dial by default, though the speed reported by the car's OBC is much closer to being accurate.
Much of this got fixed by fitting slightly larger-than-stock summer tires, though I do need to recalibrate my brain back to BMW specifications in the winter.:)
Airbags? Feh. I already treat my car as if it already has a giant pointy-stick in the middle of the steering wheel and a dashboard covered in broken glass.
Or at least I do once I get some of the blood off of the window.
If that's all you've got for contrivity, then as far as I'm concerned it's game on.
Mind you, I reverse into the garage...my years in the Mafia taught me that being able to drive straight out is a potential life saver.
I disagree.
Unless you live at the end of a road and can therefore perform a proper balls-out drag launch from your garage, backing out is always better. It prevents the assailants from munging up the front of your car (no chance for the hood to obscure forward visibility) as you roar over them, and offers reasonable protection against the hollow-point bullets that such people are likely to be firing at that time without endangering any critical engine parts (which, at this point, are just as valuable as you are).
And reverse is generally geared lower, which allows for quicker acceleration in the first few critical seconds.
After all that, you've got choices: You can just make a quick partial J turn of the correct angle for the street in question and get the hell out of there driving forward (with little loss of momentum if executed correctly). Or keep reversing down the street while firing madly with your left hand hand, and either execute a high-speed J turn where appropriate, or a slower 3-point turn if conditions allow.
Choices are always good.
If overall speed in reverse is an issue, simply don't let it be: Mercedes-Benz has transmissions with two reverse gears for a reason and if you don't know that, you're just not doing it right.
This. It's easy for someone with their wits about them to add a 5-point harness to a random car that is stronger than the rest of the vehicle surrounding it, especially if you don't care too much about added weight (as is the case in a normal street-driven car).
It's impractical, though. If there were a 5-point with self-retracting shoulder straps, along with sprung/pyrotechnic/whatever pretensioners, it might be a good balance between what we've got now and the inconvenience of race restraints.
On another note, please kindly ignore the folks who take offense to the brake-check trick. It works, and whatever temporary damage you cause to the kids is far less than the damage that will occur to them when something unexpected happens.
I've done it to my own kids, and never had to do it again: They simply wear their seatbelts, now. No questions. I'll do it to other people's kids, too, if they ever find themselves arguing with me about seat belt usage in the back seat of my car.
Hell, I've done it with an adult friend in my BMW. He was asking why I drove such a "fancy" car, and I opined that it was because everyone else was stupid. He asked what I meant, and I re-checked the mirrors and demonstrated the brakes. Left a nice bruise on his shoulder from the belt, and his left arm knocked the GPS off of the side of the dashboard rather unintentionally. He said "wow," and my wife (in the back seat) said "I knew that was coming."
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder the same thing.
I found myself with a Windows desktop a few years back, after more than a decade or so of Linux and an enjoyable stint with OS/2 before that.
I've always (well, ever since I was a kid) kept a *nix box around, whether as my primary machine or just for file-serving and all of the (big and small) things that it does well, but haven't plugged a monitor into my current Linux box in a coon's age: Last time I tried Ubuntu, I got really sick of its irrevocable click-to-focus (which is just not how X is supposed to be) and its bastardized incarnation of xscreensaver. And lately, with Unity, I just don't care about Ubuntu anymore -- I used to recommend it to people who might be less picky than I am, but that doesn't happen anymore now that they've jumped ship.
And at the pedantic end of things, I recently gave up on making PHP work with Apache on Gentoo: I just wanted to do a little bit of web development for a simple application, and found myself spending way, way, way too much time failing to make inline PHP work. (I had it working well several years ago on a very different installation and it was easy, but then those Gentoo fuckers went and changed everything while apparently neglecting to document...anything, really. I'd document and publish the process myself if I could make it work, but that's not going to happen now.)
Am currently installing PC-BSD 9 on ZFS. The installer has been slick, so far, with simple and reasonable choices to select from, and with Knoppix-like magic in hardware detection. It is taking forever, but then I seem to recall every BSD install I've ever done taking forever as well...and the box itself isn't particularly fast by today's measures (Athlon XP 1800, 1.5g RAM). (I strongly suspect it will get faster with a bit of ZFS tweaking and maybe a lighter kernel.)
I'm doing this partly to play with a good ZFS implementation that uses neither Solaris nor FUSE, partly because of my current frustration with Gentoo and PHP, and partly because I've had great experience with FreeBSD (off and on) for almost two decades between my own installs, and various shell accounts elsewhere. And I just want to see what the old girl's up to lately.
(When the singular hard drive crashed on my last FreeBSD machine (4.0-CURRENT?), it stayed alive and kept routing packets flawlessly for -months- until I had time to goof with it. I hang the scarred and grooved platters on the wall in remembrance of it.)
If a list of filenames is all that separates your ideas of a "good" and a "bad" torrent, then I suspect that you'll have other problems soon enough.
Depends on the construction of the headphones, not the size of them.
Headphones/earbuds/earspeakers/whatever come in four different basic forms:
1. Those that are sealed to the ear and against the environment (such as those that are used by performers for in-ear monitoring )
2. Those that are sealed against the ear and open to the environment.
3. Those that are sealed against the environment and open against the ear.
4. Those that are sealed against nothing.
And, well, that's it.
The more sealed-up they are, the less others can hear them.
*shrug*
My current favorite pair is a set of middle-of-the-road Sony in-ear jobbies that are reasonably isolated. It's nigh-impossible for others to hear them while I've got them in my head, at even insane ear-ringing levels.
That's nothing. Whoever built the wall that exists between my office and the dining room left inside a leather dog collar and a half-dozen pork (I think) rib bones.
We've also found a cast iron floor lamp inside of a wall, as well as several hundred copies of the Saturday Evening Post that are positively impossible to drill through.
Pez dispensers seem so...basic.
Seriously? Ping is a "serious piece of network diagnostic toolkit"?
Please allow me to rephrase: "Ping is the most basic part of a network diagnostic toolkit. If your grandmother learns one thing about IP networking and nothing else, it will be ping."
But that's just dumb, and as a consumer who just wants to use IPV6 for what it offers me, I don't want to care that there are differences between ICMP and ICMPv6 (nor should I have to care).
What the hell good is 8MB of RAM, if it's never used for anything?
AFAICT, the root of the real problems discussed in the article is that zip code and municipal boundaries can (and do) change. (The article also has some non sequitur statements, presented as fact, which I'm ignoring.)
Perhaps the fact that these things change may explain why the folks who package up such databases routinely offer updates.
Perhaps. 5-digit zip codes are certainly inappropriate.
However, I once lived in an apartment complex with several building with 16 units each. The mailboxes were in groups of four. Each of these groups had a unique 9-digit ZIP code.
To be sure, it seemed like overkill. I haven't made a study of things to see if such fine granularity is commonly available with zip codes, but it would not surprise me.
It's not hard to find zip+4 data.
And I'm instead supposed to believe a guy who refers to the bung in the end of a capacitor as being "PVC insulation"?
Sorry.
In practice, this doesn't seem to be a problem.
Neither do air and dust. Or the air in July and the air in January.
*shrug*
Already works: Just find a suitable container, fill it with mineral oil, and submerge the electronics in it.
It's not a nightmare.
ZIP codes are only intended to improve the efficiency of mail delivery. Using them for any other purpose is at one's own peril.
True. However, I'd imagine that the pollution generated by printing, stuffing, and soldering components to PCBs to be far less than the crap that arose out of the manufacture of those components to begin with (which was long-ago outsourced to the Far East).
"Manufacturing" a Raspberry Pi isn't really manufacturing in the dirty sense of the word -- it's basically just an assembly process. AFAICT the only real pollutants which might be released in such a process might be some VOCs from the printing processes involved, as much of the rest of the waste can be profitably reclaimed (copper-saturated etchant, for example).
If it can routinely be run in 5 hours, then it can certainly be occasionally done in 4 hours. Maybe not 3, but meh.
My main point was, I think, that it's not so much that your visitors from the US were particularly slow, but that visitors anywhere can tend to be slow.
It's worth noting that M+S tires can be completely lousy in snow.
The designation simply means that at least a certain percentage of the tread consists of open space (I believe the number is either 20 or 25%, but I don't feel like Googling a citation just now). It has nothing at all to do to the shapes of the tread blocks, the amount of siping, the compound of the rubber, or even the existence of treat blocks: Just the ratio of open spaces to filled spaces.
I had "M+S" Z-rated performance tires on a car once, and was absolutely surprised by the first dusting of snow: With less than an inch of the stuff on the road and no ice underneath, it was taking me hundreds of feet to stop from 30MPH with my asshole puckering the entire way. Accelerating up a mild incline was impossible.
It was the worst vehicle I'd ever driven in the winter, even with M+S tires that were nearly new and had deep tread.
After a very harrowing day of that madness (and horns honking as I adjusted my speed downward to compensate for the scary tires), I ordered a set of skinny Blizzaks mounted to the cheapest wheels I could get, using money I did not have. Once they showed up the car was transformed into the most reliable snow vehicle I've ever driven.
Good all-season tires can be ok, and I've worn out a few sets in various types of weather on a variety of cars, but simply being mud-and-snow rated means exactly shit in my book: The aforementioned M+S tires even did a lousy job in (proper) mud. (And ice? Fuhgettaboutit!)
You could legitimately market M+S tires that don't have tread blocks at all, but just long, plain uninterrupted radial grooves. You can even sell them with little tread depth, like say 5/32". And they'll be lousy on snow, mud, ice, and maybe even water: But they'll still be M+S.
My BMW is at about 4.5" off of the ground at the lowest point on the front end, and maybe 6" overall if I had to make a realistic average guess. It works fantastically with snow tires on smooth ice and fresh snow up to about 8", at any half-sane speed: It goes, it stops, it turns, and it does combinations of these calmly and without excitement. Beyond 8" it becomes a bit ponderous (but still seems to plod along more-or-less fine as long as I avoid three-point turns and make a point of hitting big drifts and snowbanks rather harder than I'd like), but it's never let me down or shown any particular wear from this treatment.
I've considered getting a set of spring rubbers to jack the whole thing up another inch or so, along with a set of chains. The former is a maddeningly NASCAR-like redneck concept, and the latter just makes good sense, but the two of them together should counter any weather I've ever seen in my lifetime in northern Ohio.
I've looked at studded tires, but those only help on ice, and ice is generally not the problem for this rig: I've pulled random lesser cars out of ditches using the BMW on an icy road with nothing but a fresh set of studless Blizzaks, a good strap, and a scrawny teenager pushing the stuck car in disbelief that it was being liberated by a little RWD BMW...
I'm from a very flat portion of the US that is built on a very large grid system, so I have to seek out my twisty roads (and I do).
But when I find one, especially one that's far away, I tend to slow down and/or stop to admire the surroundings more. I could easily turn your five-hour trip into either fourteen hours, or just four. Or maybe even three, if my balls were on fire...
But I'd certainly prefer to take my time the on my first pass just to attempt to absorb what I could about the place.
But if you do that trip routinely, there's really nothing new for you to see, so you probably don't bother with trying. A visitor who is unfamiliar might (and I dare say should) take a bit more time to look around.
My 1995 BMW is also off by about the same amount (5%) on the speedometer dial by default, though the speed reported by the car's OBC is much closer to being accurate.
Much of this got fixed by fitting slightly larger-than-stock summer tires, though I do need to recalibrate my brain back to BMW specifications in the winter. :)
Challenge accepted.
Airbags? Feh. I already treat my car as if it already has a giant pointy-stick in the middle of the steering wheel and a dashboard covered in broken glass.
Or at least I do once I get some of the blood off of the window.
If that's all you've got for contrivity, then as far as I'm concerned it's game on.
I disagree.
Unless you live at the end of a road and can therefore perform a proper balls-out drag launch from your garage, backing out is always better. It prevents the assailants from munging up the front of your car (no chance for the hood to obscure forward visibility) as you roar over them, and offers reasonable protection against the hollow-point bullets that such people are likely to be firing at that time without endangering any critical engine parts (which, at this point, are just as valuable as you are).
And reverse is generally geared lower, which allows for quicker acceleration in the first few critical seconds.
After all that, you've got choices: You can just make a quick partial J turn of the correct angle for the street in question and get the hell out of there driving forward (with little loss of momentum if executed correctly). Or keep reversing down the street while firing madly with your left hand hand, and either execute a high-speed J turn where appropriate, or a slower 3-point turn if conditions allow.
Choices are always good.
If overall speed in reverse is an issue, simply don't let it be: Mercedes-Benz has transmissions with two reverse gears for a reason and if you don't know that, you're just not doing it right.
This. It's easy for someone with their wits about them to add a 5-point harness to a random car that is stronger than the rest of the vehicle surrounding it, especially if you don't care too much about added weight (as is the case in a normal street-driven car).
It's impractical, though. If there were a 5-point with self-retracting shoulder straps, along with sprung/pyrotechnic/whatever pretensioners, it might be a good balance between what we've got now and the inconvenience of race restraints.
On another note, please kindly ignore the folks who take offense to the brake-check trick. It works, and whatever temporary damage you cause to the kids is far less than the damage that will occur to them when something unexpected happens.
I've done it to my own kids, and never had to do it again: They simply wear their seatbelts, now. No questions. I'll do it to other people's kids, too, if they ever find themselves arguing with me about seat belt usage in the back seat of my car.
Hell, I've done it with an adult friend in my BMW. He was asking why I drove such a "fancy" car, and I opined that it was because everyone else was stupid. He asked what I meant, and I re-checked the mirrors and demonstrated the brakes. Left a nice bruise on his shoulder from the belt, and his left arm knocked the GPS off of the side of the dashboard rather unintentionally. He said "wow," and my wife (in the back seat) said "I knew that was coming."
One should never be afraid to stop.
What does your snarkiness have to do with...well, anything that I wrote?