I'll tell you why all the bitching... his numbers don't seem to support reality. And ultimately, he's suggesting that people run KDE because while it's got a higher base memory usage, the shared libraries and stuff mean that you can use less in total. If you stick with stuff like KMess, KOffice, and Konqueror as your primary browser. Personally, I think they're junk. I think it's also telling that he didn't bother tweaking Firefox's settings to get it to use a smaller memory footprint.
I can sum up the gist of TFA in one sentence: use software with a smaller memory footprint, and turn off unneeded services. But the "article" doesn't even go into detail on how to do this. I guess people are complaining because he's stating the obvious... anybody who knows enough to implement his suggestions probably already knows everything he's suggesting.
But it's worth mentionning that it isn't really *that* hard to set up a basic DNS server. Once it's up, there's really not a lot of maintenance you need to do. Actually, there's none if all you want to do is cache your ISP's DNS locally, except for the occasional security update (which isn't even that frequent; I can't remember the last time I heard about a major DNS exploit).
The reason I'm running one, though, is that the computer is up anyway. It's running on my web/mail server (which is behind a firewall, only ports being forwarded to it are 25, 80, 443, and 993), and it allowed me a single point with which to update the list from http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/
So I get the damned thing home, and try to connect through my wireless home LAN. (Linksys WRT54GS running the latest firmware) Guess what? Can't reach beyond my local network - something about TCP scaling problems with the primary DNS server!!! I never had this much trouble with basic networking under SuSE, Ubuntu, or XP. I was even able to get the kids PS2 and PSP networked with less trouble than this!
Is it even remotely possible you have a badly configured DNS server? I ran the Vista beta in various incarnations for about 4 months on my games machine and never encountered that kind of error, despite it running on a Linux-powered network with a home-brewed DNS and DHCP server.
Minor nitpick, but by volume Earth is mostly Silicon, and by mass it's almost half oxygen. (Silicon makes up another quarter of the Earth's mass total mass).
Earth is called a "water world" because it has a hydrosphere, though. The presence of water on a planet is by no means unique (Europa, Mars, most of the asteroids in our solar system), but the presence of water in abundance in the star's green zone hasn't been seen anywhere else. Earth is the only planet in the solar system where the *surface* temperature and pressure is in the appropriate range to find a lot of liquid water.
There's a difference between a "water" world and an "ocean" world, though. A "water" world has a hydrosphere. An "ocean" world has no surface other than the hydrosphere. Europa doesn't even count, but if it were warmer it would be an "ocean" world.
I had a copy of Word 97 on floppy distribution media... took up 96 of them.
It's not news that the floppy is dying a slow horrible death, though. What makes this different from the other times it's been predicted, though, is that fewer and fewer people are installing them in the first place. I stopped putting floppy drives in my computers 2 generations ago. I go with card readers now and DVD burners now. Removable USB storage is probably the way to go, with thumb drives, but I find that card readers are also very good.
There's just one thing wrong with the logic... as you take water out of the system (such as setting up a farm of these things), the efficiency naturally goes down. That is to say, it takes more energy to generate the same amount of water out of the air.
It won't completely eliminate the need for piping water through the streets. It simply can't. But it can reduce the dependance on piping water through the city, which is a good thing.
As far as I am aware the only way to get close to the mac UI is to buy a Mac. There are many free Linux distributions you can try. Ubuntu is the best for newcomers IMO. The gnome desktop offers a clean, uncluttered environment. KDE is more busy, but has more features. There is plenty of choice.
And XFCE is better than either Gnome or KDE for keeping your system clean from interruption. It's also the farthest from Windows, being based on the Common Desktop Environment, making it the least "intuitive" for a recovering Windows user (though I personally think it's more intuitive than Windows). It's probably the closest you're going to get to MacOS' UI without using desklets*, because MacOS is also based (loosely) on CDE.
*desklets can enhance the interface, though. There's a dock desklet for gdesklets, for example, that works almost exactly like the OS/X dock, and there's tons of OS/X skins available out in the wild. If you really want to, you can mimic the OS/X interface in Linux, but I don't see why you'd want to do that after you get used to what Linux has to offer natively.
Rootkits aside, I regularly play GuildWars in Linux on the NVidia proprietary drivers. The ATI drivers suck royally, but you're pretty safe going with NVidia. Always have been.
NVidia doesn't want to release their specs because the graphics card business is extremely cutthroat, with basically two competitors that matter when it comes to 3D gaming. They don't want the competition getting an edge, which is exactly what'll happen if they release their specs and ATI doesn't. You may or may not remember what happened to Matrox, and 3Dfx before them. 3Dfx doesn't exist any more, and they practically invented the 3D accelerator business, and Matrox was relegated to designing server-level graphics chipsets. Matrox still makes some great hardware. They're arguably the best there is in their niche, even. But gone are the days when they could be considered for 3D gaming.
But NVidia has been developping graphics drivers for Linux for a long time, and they work pretty well. I'm quite happy to use proprietary drivers in my system, as long as those drivers are properly implemented and supported. NVidia/ATI aren't the people to bitch at for crappy Linux support. How about Canon, who doesn't even admit that Linux exists. That's a royal pain in the ass to get working if you have one of their scanners, though the inkjet printers have been reasonably reverse engineered. Worse still are the companies like Brother that release Linux drivers for their hardware, but the drivers are downright shitty. The margins are off by half an inch with the Brother-provided drivers on their HL-20xx laser printers.
Automounting and popping up an icon on the desktop isn't part of XFCE; that's a different daemon you're running. In my Zen system, I've got it configured to automount the USB key/hard drive/whatever at/mnt/usb. It doesn't pop an icon on the desktop, because I don't want it to. In the Zen system, that's all handled by a udev monitor and fuse, not the desktop environment itself. I'd be surprised if any DE implemented that functionality directly, as it's way beyond the scope of what a DE is supposed to do.
In other words, it's possible to implement on any DE that supports desktop icons, but it's not the DE's job to automount the key and add the icon.
What a load of biased drive! After considering Fluxbox, Icewm, wmaker and a slew of other window managers; Xfce doesn't even come close to being the "lightest." Granted, it is light in comparison to GNOME/KDE but come on people lets be a tad more objective.
XFCE isn't actually a window manager. It includes a window manager, but it's a desktop environment. There's a difference. XFCE adds features that you simply won't see in any of the ones you mentionned, because they *aren't* dekstop environments.
The developers will more likely attempt to let their games be DX9 AND DX10 to make sure as many people as possible can buy and play their games. I remember at least one game that had the option to switch between DX9 and DX8 for backwards compatibility: Call of Duty 2
GuildWars has that ability, too. And there's already a mostly working implementation of DX9 under Linux, in the form of Cedega. I use it to play GW daily, among other games. No doubt the folks at Transgaming will start working on implementing DX10 soon, but I'd rather they get DX9 to 100% first.
If I told you that Penicillin has been found to have an effect speeding bone knitting, and could be used to help you heal from a broken bone in half the time it used to take, you'd probably be pretty surprised. Maybe even enough to use the word "astounded", though somebody might throw a thesaurus at you.
But that's about the level that this news is. DCA has been used for decades to treat lactic acidosis, a buildup of lactic acid in your body. To a lesser extent than they normally prescribe DCA for, it's the same chemical and biological process that gives you cramps when you exercise for too long. And now it's been found out that it can cause cancer cells to start dying again. Pretty big news. A cure for cancer has been a holy grail of medicine since the birth of modern medicine, and even though this probably won't be a panacea, it is still pretty big, because we don't have anything else that causes cancer cells to start dying naturally again.
They'd been planning to end the series at the end of Season 6. Then it got renewed. And again. And again. The final death knell was supposed to be at the end of Season 8. You don't think that time travel episode back to ancient Egypt, and the end scene with SG1 enjoying some downtime at Jack's cottage had a certain reek of "last episode"? Atlantis was envisioned as a replacement for the series, not a parallel series of events.
Then to everybody's surprise, it got renewed. But they'd already defeated the Goa'uld, and had to come up with a new enemy. Hence the Ori. The reason it got cancelled after Season 10 was because of exactly what you're saying: people got bored with the Ori, or weren't able to suspend their disbelief, or were just tired of the franchise. But there's still a few loose ends at the end of Season 10 that they need to tie up. I doubt it should make it to the silver screen, but a direct-to-TV miniseries that ties out the series would be in good taste. There are still a lot of diehard fans out there who want some closure to the storyline.
As for your not liking Atlantis, that's personal preference. I found I really started to enjoy the series about halfway through Season 2, and there've been some *really* intelligent episodes later on. Download McKay and Mrs. Miller (3x08), for example.
I'd gladly pay a buck a song to download a CD in its entirety. If I could be sure that every red cent went to the artists. When you download a song, you're ripping off the RIAA and their analogues. I don't have a problem with that. But I do have a problem with ripping off the musicians themselves.
Different people have different reactions. One time, when I was dehydrated, I walked into my regular coffee shop and asked for the biggest cup of tap water they had. 42oz. I drained it in under 20s, and asked for another, and then another. A gallon of water in about 2 minutes. I kept it all down, much to the amazement of the girl behind the counter who had never seen anybody drink as much. By the time I got home, I had to go to the can. Badly.;)
Drinking a gallon of water in one sitting is pretty stupid. Could have caused serious problems for me. And I sincerely doubt I could drink that much now. But the point is that there's a million and one factors that can affect how much of anything you can take before your body has an adverse reaction. And as this story tells, the adverse reaction isn't always immediate.
(As a side note, I don't find it fitting to make fun of this unfortunate woman for not being familiar with the physiological consequences of extreme water intake. I believe most people are not.)
Agreed. I didn't even learn about secondary drowning (another name for what killed this woman) until I started training to become a lifeguard. According to the reuters story about this that I read yesterday, the woman reported that she had a headache before she left. The medical professionals on site should have recognized that as a possible symptom, and they should have been aware of the possible health risks involved in this kind of contest.
Too much of anything can kill you. Water included.
I think part of the problem regarding current tensions between the US and the world is that the world views the US as a democracy.
I would disagree with that... the world doesn't see the US as a democracy. It's taught, here at least, as a republic. And, well... anybody who can read can figure it out for themselves with an ounce of thought. What's the first line of the pledge of allegiance? "I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands."
I think that the current escalation in tensions between the US and the world stem from two things... first, there isn't really a diplomatic way to say it, but American foreign policy is the shits. The current administration really doesn't have a clue how to be good international citizens, and so they're quite content to bully anybody who disagrees with them. Second, people don't realize that it's the current administration. Or don't recognize the word "current" in that phrase. Or can't distinguish the administration from the people. I freely admit that I used to fall into that last camp. Now, the tensions have been building for a long time, but I don't think there's any rational way to deny that the Bush administration isn't helping things. Really, though, you can trace the history of poor international relations back to the McCarthy era. The xenophobia that has always been a fundamental part of American foreign policy finally boiled over in the 1950's and you guys adopted an interventionist approach to dealing with conflicting ideology. And that interventionism is what I really think is at the core of the issue.
I don't think the problem is by any stretch irreparable. I just think that Bush and his cronies haven't got a clue how to do that, and the only past President who's still alive that did know how and when to negotiate is Clinton. Clinton started wars too, mind... but he was a lot better at choosing when to fight and when to talk, and he was and is a damned sight more popular in the international community.
That's right, you work for US! Your just hired help, as per your words. My original recommendation stands firm.
Interesting how Canada is the only country in the world that consistently tells the US to fuck off every time they demand something of us....
But this is getting nowhere. We're both making bigger asses of ourselves with every response, and we're accomplishing nothing. We aren't going to accomplish anything as long as you're on the defensive, so meh.
Actually, I'm Canadian. We're bigger, we're on top, and unlike the American economy, we aren't currently in a recession. And unlike the US, where you can find surveillance cameras all over the place in some cities, the only thing we have to worry about are red light cameras. We still have these things called "civil rights".
Oh, and the modern American space program wouldn't exist without us. We built the avionics that the shuttle is using, we built both of the space arms, we helped design the radar tellemetry system that Cape Canaveral uses to track rockets as they launch, half the scientists working on the Apollo program were Canadian... the list could go on but I think you get the point.
Nice try guessing where I come from, but you missed me by an ocean. One would think that the.CA address in my personal website would be a clue, but I guess not. Thanks for playing. Now fuck off.
yeah, and if you search for KillerBob on Google, my site comes up at the front. If you type my real name, my personal website isn't even on the front page. On the second page, there's a couple of scripts I wrote over 10 years ago, and a story I submitted to BBSpot years ago, but my personal website still doesn't show up. Selection of keywords. If you type the name of any specific site, you'll get that site first. If you type what the site does, you may find that it's much lower on the page ranking. They probably aren't worried about traffic from people who search for the word "javalobby", because those people probably already know about their site.
They're worried about the people who search for terms like "java help", which is what somebody who *doesn't* already know about their site would be searching for. In my case, it's quite deliberate. I'm using robots.txt to tell GoogleBot to ignore my personal website. It's *personal*. All it is is an e-mail gateway, anyway; the blog is restricted access. There's no point in having it in Google, so the robots.txt reduces my daily traffic.
I've heard that same excuse over and over when I ask Americans about it. My guess would be that they just don't want to admit that they're wrong. Yeah, ok. I can do fractions like 1/12th of a yard pretty easily. Can you do 1/10th of a yard so easily? How about 1/5th? Yeah, base 12 is good for some fractions. Base 10 is good for others. I find Base 10, and using a standardized system for increments makes a lot more sense.
How many inches in a foot? 12 How many feet in a yard? 3 How many yards in a mile? 1536 How many inches in a mile? buh?
How many centimeters in a decimeter? 10 How many decimeters in a meter? 10 How many meters in a kilometer? 1000 How many centimeters in a kilometer? 100,000
How many gallons of water could you fit in a cubic mile? Good luck doing that without a calculator.
How many litres in a cubic kilometer? Well.... 1L = 1 cubic decimeter. There's 1000 cubic decimeters in a cubic meter, and 1,000,000,000 cubic meters in a cubic kilometer. That'd mean 1,000,000,000,000 liters in a cubic kilometer. Fairly useless number, but it's an example of how easy it is to convert between units and do math with them in the metric system. Can make it even more complicated for the suckers using the imperial system: how much does that cubic mile of water weigh? In metric? Simple... there's 1,000,000,000,000 liters. 1L of water weighs 1kg, and 1 metric tonne is exactly 1000kg, so it'd weigh 1,000,000,000 tonnes. More if it's salt water, but let's pretend it's fresh.
The thing is... you can beat 'em over the head over and over with examples of why the metric system is superior, and they're still not going to change. Why? Because they are resistant to change anyway. What they have works. Except when they're trying to send probes to Mars. People are generally resistant to change, especially when they don't see any immediate advantage. More than that, you know who came up with the Metric system? The French. It's just not gonna happen.
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I'll tell you why all the bitching... his numbers don't seem to support reality. And ultimately, he's suggesting that people run KDE because while it's got a higher base memory usage, the shared libraries and stuff mean that you can use less in total. If you stick with stuff like KMess, KOffice, and Konqueror as your primary browser. Personally, I think they're junk. I think it's also telling that he didn't bother tweaking Firefox's settings to get it to use a smaller memory footprint.
I can sum up the gist of TFA in one sentence: use software with a smaller memory footprint, and turn off unneeded services. But the "article" doesn't even go into detail on how to do this. I guess people are complaining because he's stating the obvious... anybody who knows enough to implement his suggestions probably already knows everything he's suggesting.
I'm glad it's working...
But it's worth mentionning that it isn't really *that* hard to set up a basic DNS server. Once it's up, there's really not a lot of maintenance you need to do. Actually, there's none if all you want to do is cache your ISP's DNS locally, except for the occasional security update (which isn't even that frequent; I can't remember the last time I heard about a major DNS exploit).
The reason I'm running one, though, is that the computer is up anyway. It's running on my web/mail server (which is behind a firewall, only ports being forwarded to it are 25, 80, 443, and 993), and it allowed me a single point with which to update the list from http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/
Probably not much, considering the number of Linux enthusiasts around here, and the fact that ATI's Linux drivers suck donkey balls.
Minor nitpick, but by volume Earth is mostly Silicon, and by mass it's almost half oxygen. (Silicon makes up another quarter of the Earth's mass total mass).
Earth is called a "water world" because it has a hydrosphere, though. The presence of water on a planet is by no means unique (Europa, Mars, most of the asteroids in our solar system), but the presence of water in abundance in the star's green zone hasn't been seen anywhere else. Earth is the only planet in the solar system where the *surface* temperature and pressure is in the appropriate range to find a lot of liquid water.
There's a difference between a "water" world and an "ocean" world, though. A "water" world has a hydrosphere. An "ocean" world has no surface other than the hydrosphere. Europa doesn't even count, but if it were warmer it would be an "ocean" world.
I had a copy of Word 97 on floppy distribution media... took up 96 of them.
It's not news that the floppy is dying a slow horrible death, though. What makes this different from the other times it's been predicted, though, is that fewer and fewer people are installing them in the first place. I stopped putting floppy drives in my computers 2 generations ago. I go with card readers now and DVD burners now. Removable USB storage is probably the way to go, with thumb drives, but I find that card readers are also very good.
There's just one thing wrong with the logic... as you take water out of the system (such as setting up a farm of these things), the efficiency naturally goes down. That is to say, it takes more energy to generate the same amount of water out of the air.
It won't completely eliminate the need for piping water through the streets. It simply can't. But it can reduce the dependance on piping water through the city, which is a good thing.
*desklets can enhance the interface, though. There's a dock desklet for gdesklets, for example, that works almost exactly like the OS/X dock, and there's tons of OS/X skins available out in the wild. If you really want to, you can mimic the OS/X interface in Linux, but I don't see why you'd want to do that after you get used to what Linux has to offer natively.
Rootkits aside, I regularly play GuildWars in Linux on the NVidia proprietary drivers. The ATI drivers suck royally, but you're pretty safe going with NVidia. Always have been.
NVidia doesn't want to release their specs because the graphics card business is extremely cutthroat, with basically two competitors that matter when it comes to 3D gaming. They don't want the competition getting an edge, which is exactly what'll happen if they release their specs and ATI doesn't. You may or may not remember what happened to Matrox, and 3Dfx before them. 3Dfx doesn't exist any more, and they practically invented the 3D accelerator business, and Matrox was relegated to designing server-level graphics chipsets. Matrox still makes some great hardware. They're arguably the best there is in their niche, even. But gone are the days when they could be considered for 3D gaming.
But NVidia has been developping graphics drivers for Linux for a long time, and they work pretty well. I'm quite happy to use proprietary drivers in my system, as long as those drivers are properly implemented and supported. NVidia/ATI aren't the people to bitch at for crappy Linux support. How about Canon, who doesn't even admit that Linux exists. That's a royal pain in the ass to get working if you have one of their scanners, though the inkjet printers have been reasonably reverse engineered. Worse still are the companies like Brother that release Linux drivers for their hardware, but the drivers are downright shitty. The margins are off by half an inch with the Brother-provided drivers on their HL-20xx laser printers.
They're always planning something. The question is whether they act on it.
:(
Given the specific mention of Iran in the last state of the union, though....
You must be new here. Current management philosophy is that an article isn't a dupe until it's been posted at least 4 times.
err... that change in philosophy hasn't completely eliminated the problem. They may need to increase it to 10.
Why yes. Yes there is.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000818081805/http://
Automounting and popping up an icon on the desktop isn't part of XFCE; that's a different daemon you're running. In my Zen system, I've got it configured to automount the USB key/hard drive/whatever at /mnt/usb. It doesn't pop an icon on the desktop, because I don't want it to. In the Zen system, that's all handled by a udev monitor and fuse, not the desktop environment itself. I'd be surprised if any DE implemented that functionality directly, as it's way beyond the scope of what a DE is supposed to do.
In other words, it's possible to implement on any DE that supports desktop icons, but it's not the DE's job to automount the key and add the icon.
XFCE isn't actually a window manager. It includes a window manager, but it's a desktop environment. There's a difference. XFCE adds features that you simply won't see in any of the ones you mentionned, because they *aren't* dekstop environments.
TFA isn't biased, it's just ignorant.
GuildWars has that ability, too. And there's already a mostly working implementation of DX9 under Linux, in the form of Cedega. I use it to play GW daily, among other games. No doubt the folks at Transgaming will start working on implementing DX10 soon, but I'd rather they get DX9 to 100% first.
If I told you that Penicillin has been found to have an effect speeding bone knitting, and could be used to help you heal from a broken bone in half the time it used to take, you'd probably be pretty surprised. Maybe even enough to use the word "astounded", though somebody might throw a thesaurus at you.
But that's about the level that this news is. DCA has been used for decades to treat lactic acidosis, a buildup of lactic acid in your body. To a lesser extent than they normally prescribe DCA for, it's the same chemical and biological process that gives you cramps when you exercise for too long. And now it's been found out that it can cause cancer cells to start dying again. Pretty big news. A cure for cancer has been a holy grail of medicine since the birth of modern medicine, and even though this probably won't be a panacea, it is still pretty big, because we don't have anything else that causes cancer cells to start dying naturally again.
They'd been planning to end the series at the end of Season 6. Then it got renewed. And again. And again. The final death knell was supposed to be at the end of Season 8. You don't think that time travel episode back to ancient Egypt, and the end scene with SG1 enjoying some downtime at Jack's cottage had a certain reek of "last episode"? Atlantis was envisioned as a replacement for the series, not a parallel series of events.
Then to everybody's surprise, it got renewed. But they'd already defeated the Goa'uld, and had to come up with a new enemy. Hence the Ori. The reason it got cancelled after Season 10 was because of exactly what you're saying: people got bored with the Ori, or weren't able to suspend their disbelief, or were just tired of the franchise. But there's still a few loose ends at the end of Season 10 that they need to tie up. I doubt it should make it to the silver screen, but a direct-to-TV miniseries that ties out the series would be in good taste. There are still a lot of diehard fans out there who want some closure to the storyline.
As for your not liking Atlantis, that's personal preference. I found I really started to enjoy the series about halfway through Season 2, and there've been some *really* intelligent episodes later on. Download McKay and Mrs. Miller (3x08), for example.
I'd gladly pay a buck a song to download a CD in its entirety. If I could be sure that every red cent went to the artists. When you download a song, you're ripping off the RIAA and their analogues. I don't have a problem with that. But I do have a problem with ripping off the musicians themselves.
Different people have different reactions. One time, when I was dehydrated, I walked into my regular coffee shop and asked for the biggest cup of tap water they had. 42oz. I drained it in under 20s, and asked for another, and then another. A gallon of water in about 2 minutes. I kept it all down, much to the amazement of the girl behind the counter who had never seen anybody drink as much. By the time I got home, I had to go to the can. Badly. ;)
Drinking a gallon of water in one sitting is pretty stupid. Could have caused serious problems for me. And I sincerely doubt I could drink that much now. But the point is that there's a million and one factors that can affect how much of anything you can take before your body has an adverse reaction. And as this story tells, the adverse reaction isn't always immediate.
Agreed. I didn't even learn about secondary drowning (another name for what killed this woman) until I started training to become a lifeguard. According to the reuters story about this that I read yesterday, the woman reported that she had a headache before she left. The medical professionals on site should have recognized that as a possible symptom, and they should have been aware of the possible health risks involved in this kind of contest.
Too much of anything can kill you. Water included.
I would disagree with that... the world doesn't see the US as a democracy. It's taught, here at least, as a republic. And, well... anybody who can read can figure it out for themselves with an ounce of thought. What's the first line of the pledge of allegiance? "I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands."
I think that the current escalation in tensions between the US and the world stem from two things... first, there isn't really a diplomatic way to say it, but American foreign policy is the shits. The current administration really doesn't have a clue how to be good international citizens, and so they're quite content to bully anybody who disagrees with them. Second, people don't realize that it's the current administration. Or don't recognize the word "current" in that phrase. Or can't distinguish the administration from the people. I freely admit that I used to fall into that last camp. Now, the tensions have been building for a long time, but I don't think there's any rational way to deny that the Bush administration isn't helping things. Really, though, you can trace the history of poor international relations back to the McCarthy era. The xenophobia that has always been a fundamental part of American foreign policy finally boiled over in the 1950's and you guys adopted an interventionist approach to dealing with conflicting ideology. And that interventionism is what I really think is at the core of the issue.
I don't think the problem is by any stretch irreparable. I just think that Bush and his cronies haven't got a clue how to do that, and the only past President who's still alive that did know how and when to negotiate is Clinton. Clinton started wars too, mind... but he was a lot better at choosing when to fight and when to talk, and he was and is a damned sight more popular in the international community.
Interesting how Canada is the only country in the world that consistently tells the US to fuck off every time they demand something of us....
But this is getting nowhere. We're both making bigger asses of ourselves with every response, and we're accomplishing nothing. We aren't going to accomplish anything as long as you're on the defensive, so meh.
Actually, I'm Canadian. We're bigger, we're on top, and unlike the American economy, we aren't currently in a recession. And unlike the US, where you can find surveillance cameras all over the place in some cities, the only thing we have to worry about are red light cameras. We still have these things called "civil rights".
.CA address in my personal website would be a clue, but I guess not. Thanks for playing. Now fuck off.
Oh, and the modern American space program wouldn't exist without us. We built the avionics that the shuttle is using, we built both of the space arms, we helped design the radar tellemetry system that Cape Canaveral uses to track rockets as they launch, half the scientists working on the Apollo program were Canadian... the list could go on but I think you get the point.
Nice try guessing where I come from, but you missed me by an ocean. One would think that the
yeah, and if you search for KillerBob on Google, my site comes up at the front. If you type my real name, my personal website isn't even on the front page. On the second page, there's a couple of scripts I wrote over 10 years ago, and a story I submitted to BBSpot years ago, but my personal website still doesn't show up. Selection of keywords. If you type the name of any specific site, you'll get that site first. If you type what the site does, you may find that it's much lower on the page ranking. They probably aren't worried about traffic from people who search for the word "javalobby", because those people probably already know about their site.
They're worried about the people who search for terms like "java help", which is what somebody who *doesn't* already know about their site would be searching for. In my case, it's quite deliberate. I'm using robots.txt to tell GoogleBot to ignore my personal website. It's *personal*. All it is is an e-mail gateway, anyway; the blog is restricted access. There's no point in having it in Google, so the robots.txt reduces my daily traffic.
I've heard that same excuse over and over when I ask Americans about it. My guess would be that they just don't want to admit that they're wrong. Yeah, ok. I can do fractions like 1/12th of a yard pretty easily. Can you do 1/10th of a yard so easily? How about 1/5th? Yeah, base 12 is good for some fractions. Base 10 is good for others. I find Base 10, and using a standardized system for increments makes a lot more sense.
How many inches in a foot? 12
How many feet in a yard? 3
How many yards in a mile? 1536
How many inches in a mile? buh?
How many centimeters in a decimeter? 10
How many decimeters in a meter? 10
How many meters in a kilometer? 1000
How many centimeters in a kilometer? 100,000
How many gallons of water could you fit in a cubic mile? Good luck doing that without a calculator.
How many litres in a cubic kilometer? Well.... 1L = 1 cubic decimeter. There's 1000 cubic decimeters in a cubic meter, and 1,000,000,000 cubic meters in a cubic kilometer. That'd mean 1,000,000,000,000 liters in a cubic kilometer. Fairly useless number, but it's an example of how easy it is to convert between units and do math with them in the metric system. Can make it even more complicated for the suckers using the imperial system: how much does that cubic mile of water weigh? In metric? Simple... there's 1,000,000,000,000 liters. 1L of water weighs 1kg, and 1 metric tonne is exactly 1000kg, so it'd weigh 1,000,000,000 tonnes. More if it's salt water, but let's pretend it's fresh.
The thing is... you can beat 'em over the head over and over with examples of why the metric system is superior, and they're still not going to change. Why? Because they are resistant to change anyway. What they have works. Except when they're trying to send probes to Mars. People are generally resistant to change, especially when they don't see any immediate advantage. More than that, you know who came up with the Metric system? The French. It's just not gonna happen.