Oh, I do that. The thing that annoys me is when I see trouble ahead and start to slow, as soon as the tiniest gap opens, someone in an adjacent lane leaps in. It's so frustrating. Many of the problems are caused by poor 'me first' road discipline, for example, when approaching a constriction, so many drivers go right to the end and try and force their way in - and it's not helped by people not letting adjacent lanes merge in good time before the obstruction.
The art of proper merging should be something taught to drivers and tested on the driving test.
I fly light planes. Major roads, when VFR, are very good landmarks.
Quite often when it is very busy, you can see a standing wave in the traffic - there's an area where all the cars are stopped - but there is NO obstruction at all. The cars are filling the 'standing wave' from the back as quickly as cars at the front are leaving it - so it becomes self-sustaining.
When the road is full to capacity, moving at 70 mph, all it takes is one person to jab their brakes... then the drivers behind (probably following far too close) brake a bit harder, and the drivers behind them brake a bit harder still. The adjacent lanes, in seeing one lane suddenly slow go 'whoa', and someone also brakes in that lane. Pretty soon, just from one person braking a little bit - the braking has propagated down the road with greater and greater severity until one of two things happens: usually, the traffic comes to a standstill, and you get a self-sustaining standing wave of stopped traffic until the amount of traffic on the road reduces to the extent there are fewer cars joining the wave than are leaving. This can take HOURS, especially on the M6 in England. The second thing that may happen in this cascading braking severity is that someone runs into the back of the other. Then chaos ensues for most of the day.
The other problem is lorries (large trucks) overtaking lorries with a speed differential of 0.5 mph. It takes them several minutes to get past because they are both speed limited within 0.5 mph of each other, meaning the inside two lanes are 56mph, and the outside lane is 70mph+. When a frustrated driver pulls out into the outside lane after being stuck behind a lorry for "too long", they cause one of the outside lane drivers to brake down to 56 mph quite suddenly. This can easily get the 'braking cascade' started, and before you know it - you have a standing wave traffic jam with no actual obstruction (other than the standing wave itself).
Usually then what happens, is the opposite direction traffic, seeing the stoppage rubber necks for the possible accident. An inattentive driver looking at the other side of the road finally looks back in front and realises he's about to ram a truck in the rear and slams on the brakes. The driver behind him following far to closely has to brake even harder - and there's either a shunt or if they are lucky, ANOTHER standing wave traffic jam starts on this side of the road too.
It's fascinating to watch from the air. Frustrating to be in when driving.
The game Oolite (see my sig) was ONLY portable to Linux because of GNUstep. If there was no GNUstep, Oolite would be Macintosh only.
It's a shame that GNOME and KDE have become the mainstream desktops - if GNUstep had become dominant instead, we'd have had easy compatibility with Cocoa in Linux.
GNUstep Base is also a very handy Objective-C class library, and is pretty much completely compatible with Mac OS X Cocoa.
You get charged for *incoming* text messages? Ye gods! Run, don't walk - to a better cell phone provider who doesn't rip you off for what is essentially almost a penny a byte.
The Fiat X1/9 *is* a piece of shit though, unless you do one hour of maintenance for every hour you get to drive it. They are terribly fragile and unreliable unless you do a great deal of maintenance. Americans are used to cars that are built like tanks and do 300,000 miles needing only oil changes and perhaps a new set of spark plugs every so often.
While the X1/9 is probably a good car to do up or to own as an enthusiast, it's no good for a daily drive because it's so unreliable. Many European cars built at around that time were also pretty terrible, reliability wise - even if they WERE very stylish and nice to drive. I loved my old Mini - good fun, timeless design - but reliable it was not. It needed constant maintenance. The vast majority of Americans aren't prepared to put up with cars that need constant maintenance.
Just a note - it's the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), not the DCMA (which would be Digital Copyright Millennium Act, which doesn't really parse).
Who says the computer doesn't have the capability? Pressing down on the hook switch just does a loop disconnect. It would be trivial to add a computer-controlled relay in-line to perform a 3 second loop disconnect between each call. Control the relay coil with the computer's parallel port. Doesn't even need any fancy electronics.
It'll also be hard to see how an OFFSHORE eind farm in the UK (not noted for its bald eagle population, particularly the undiscovered marine form of bald eagle) is going to harm the bald eagle population.
Modern photovoltaic cells pay back energywise in 3 to 6 years (depending on how sunny the area they are in). It's been years (decades maybe) since it took more energy to make PV cells than they make. Also, quite a lot of the refined silicon used for solar cells is waste from the semiconductor industry.
It's an offshore windfarm, several miles off shore. No birds of prey. The majority of birds in the area will be seagulls - otherwise known as shitehawks or winged rats.
Actually, they can and will deport you if the chip doesn't work.
You make the invalid assumption that people at immigration desks are reasonable people - they are *not*. Some of them are little Hitlers with bad attitude, and the ones who aren't have their hands tied by the law - they have no discretion at all. If the law says you can't enter without a working chip, the immigration officer (even the world's friendliest and most reasonable one) has no choice but to deport you. Just as they would deport you if your passport photo was mutilated.
(I'll make one exception for the little Hitlers - one notable aberration is Houston's immigration desks - those people are polite and make you feel welcome to the United States - truly refreshing to get to an immigration desk where it isn't just stony faces and demands to see that you have a return plane ticket. I frequently travel through Houston and they've always had good people there. Dallas Ft.Worth on the other hand - I will never travel through that airport again).
Well, since even Windows server is a desktop OS (it's a server, why is everything done via a GUI and no decent way to script half the things you need to do on it?) it's perfectly reasonable, really. The very name 'Windows' gives it away as a desktop OS, even if they try and tack on the word 'Server'.
It's funny - my Dad has a similar story, except he chipped a tooth with a (metal) toy gun. He's never had the chip repaired either, although dentists always offer.
But Tonka trucks own. I had one when I was a kid which must have been a couple of generations hand-me-down (it was a bit rusty). It was fantastic fun in the snow, making snow constructions with Tonka diggers and dump trucks. Probably what made them rust!
For system-supported stuff, then apt/yum (with their graphical front ends) is actually much simpler - just choose the package from the list.
For 3rd party stuff (which is what I suspect you gripe about) - there's Autopackage. http://autopackage.org/. Works just like the InstallShield files on Windows, except it's better since it has dependency resolution built in. I package up Oolite-Linux as an autopackage - I've not come across anyone who's had a problem installing it so far.
There's nothing stopping you from releasing a package like that. RPM, apt et al. are really for *system* packages - stuff supported directly by the distro you are using. Therefore, having all the dependency stuff is a good thing - provided you have something like yum or apt that will resolve dependencies. It means an upgrade to, say, zlib - will fix all the system supported packages at once.
For third party stuff, Autopackage is better. It's designed to work in a distro independent manner. It can resolve dependencies too - by finding other Autopackages which meet it. However, for Oolite-Linux, when I built the autopackage, I did the "Windows thing" and put the dependencies in the autopackage - since gnustep was unlikely to ever be installed, I included as much of gnustep as the game needed, as well as the tested versions of the SDL libraries that aren't part of the standard SDL install. So it works on all the distros I've come across.
First off, I'm not a Free software zealot. Although I prefer open source software, if the right tool happens to be closed source, I'm not all that bothered by it - I'll use it.
The thing is, my entire computing background from age 8 or 9 or so is that computers were open and free to tinker with. For example, the ZX Spectrum was fully documented, and you could buy a book with a complete, clearly commented ROM disassembly, and Sinclair Research was quite happy about this. The basic user manual that came with the machine had a complete description of the computer's edge connector as well - information was easy to obtain even without the Internet. As I moved on to university, I started using UNIX systems - while the code might not have been open source, all the protocols were well documented - X11, NFS, TCP/IP etc. Vendors damned well made sure that you could easily obtain specifications to protocols so you could make your programs work with their programs.
It doesn't bother me that Microsoft are a closed source company. What bothers me is they make all their protocols secret so you can't interoperate with their programs without a huge effort of reverse engineering. The whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish'. The lack of interoperability is an anathema to me. I would quit hating Microsoft tomorrow if they documented all their protocols - and not with restrictive licenses which stops you using those protocol specifications to make your GPLed program interoperate with a Microsoft program.
Pennies should have gone away a long time ago. Possibly nickels as well (but vending machines take nickels so they aren't quite as useless as pennies - at least people tend to dispose of their nickels in vending machines).
Pennies simply get hoarded by most people - there's no point fishing them out to pay with exact change, so I suspect (on average) every American has at least a buck's worth of pennies they won't ever spend. That's just a useless withdrawal from the economy of $300M or so.
The UK did away with the 1/2 penny (worth about 1 US penny) back in the mid 1980s.
No, every 90 seconds a car is colliding with a train because of driver stupidity.
Take, for example, SH 3 as it runs out of the south of Houston down towards Galveston. Running alongside this road is a single line track, and usually oil tanker trains run up and down this bi-directional line. There are some intersections very near to the tracks.
When the lights are red at the intersections, idiotic drivers pull up to the back of cars in front, stopping RIGHT on the tracks. Drivers behind them stop right behind them, and so on - so if a train ever came and the bells went off to lower the barriers, these idiots who stopped right on the tracks instead of stopping behind where the barrier will come down have no option but to get out of their cars and hope the train is going slowly enough to stop in time - they can't go forward or back. Idiots. It's common sense that you don't just stop on the tracks. Yet people do it there every time the lights are red and there is enough traffic that the line of cars at the light tails back as far as the tracks.
Except that iTMS is very good for independent music. I've found a lot of small label stuff on iTMS.
However, I now have an eMusic account which is a far better deal (no DRM - not that DRM is a real obstacle off iTMS - I've not upgraded from iTunes 5, so I can strip off the DRM with jHymn with just a double click). eMusic works out cheaper, and it's better for exploring and finding stuff that's new to me since it's 40 downloads a month for 10 bucks.
Games is not the main barrier to adoption. The home desktop is low price, low margin cut-throat business. Why would VMware, XenSource etc. want to go after a market which will be difficult to support, and not provide them with the money they need to keep going? The corporate market (particularly servers) is far larger and far more important for them - so don't expect video drivers to ever be a priority.
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Oh, I do that. The thing that annoys me is when I see trouble ahead and start to slow, as soon as the tiniest gap opens, someone in an adjacent lane leaps in. It's so frustrating. Many of the problems are caused by poor 'me first' road discipline, for example, when approaching a constriction, so many drivers go right to the end and try and force their way in - and it's not helped by people not letting adjacent lanes merge in good time before the obstruction.
The art of proper merging should be something taught to drivers and tested on the driving test.
I fly light planes. Major roads, when VFR, are very good landmarks.
... then the drivers behind (probably following far too close) brake a bit harder, and the drivers behind them brake a bit harder still. The adjacent lanes, in seeing one lane suddenly slow go 'whoa', and someone also brakes in that lane. Pretty soon, just from one person braking a little bit - the braking has propagated down the road with greater and greater severity until one of two things happens: usually, the traffic comes to a standstill, and you get a self-sustaining standing wave of stopped traffic until the amount of traffic on the road reduces to the extent there are fewer cars joining the wave than are leaving. This can take HOURS, especially on the M6 in England. The second thing that may happen in this cascading braking severity is that someone runs into the back of the other. Then chaos ensues for most of the day.
Quite often when it is very busy, you can see a standing wave in the traffic - there's an area where all the cars are stopped - but there is NO obstruction at all. The cars are filling the 'standing wave' from the back as quickly as cars at the front are leaving it - so it becomes self-sustaining.
When the road is full to capacity, moving at 70 mph, all it takes is one person to jab their brakes
The other problem is lorries (large trucks) overtaking lorries with a speed differential of 0.5 mph. It takes them several minutes to get past because they are both speed limited within 0.5 mph of each other, meaning the inside two lanes are 56mph, and the outside lane is 70mph+. When a frustrated driver pulls out into the outside lane after being stuck behind a lorry for "too long", they cause one of the outside lane drivers to brake down to 56 mph quite suddenly. This can easily get the 'braking cascade' started, and before you know it - you have a standing wave traffic jam with no actual obstruction (other than the standing wave itself).
Usually then what happens, is the opposite direction traffic, seeing the stoppage rubber necks for the possible accident. An inattentive driver looking at the other side of the road finally looks back in front and realises he's about to ram a truck in the rear and slams on the brakes. The driver behind him following far to closely has to brake even harder - and there's either a shunt or if they are lucky, ANOTHER standing wave traffic jam starts on this side of the road too.
It's fascinating to watch from the air. Frustrating to be in when driving.
The game Oolite (see my sig) was ONLY portable to Linux because of GNUstep. If there was no GNUstep, Oolite would be Macintosh only.
It's a shame that GNOME and KDE have become the mainstream desktops - if GNUstep had become dominant instead, we'd have had easy compatibility with Cocoa in Linux.
GNUstep Base is also a very handy Objective-C class library, and is pretty much completely compatible with Mac OS X Cocoa.
You get charged for *incoming* text messages? Ye gods! Run, don't walk - to a better cell phone provider who doesn't rip you off for what is essentially almost a penny a byte.
The Fiat X1/9 *is* a piece of shit though, unless you do one hour of maintenance for every hour you get to drive it. They are terribly fragile and unreliable unless you do a great deal of maintenance. Americans are used to cars that are built like tanks and do 300,000 miles needing only oil changes and perhaps a new set of spark plugs every so often.
While the X1/9 is probably a good car to do up or to own as an enthusiast, it's no good for a daily drive because it's so unreliable. Many European cars built at around that time were also pretty terrible, reliability wise - even if they WERE very stylish and nice to drive. I loved my old Mini - good fun, timeless design - but reliable it was not. It needed constant maintenance. The vast majority of Americans aren't prepared to put up with cars that need constant maintenance.
Just a note - it's the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), not the DCMA (which would be Digital Copyright Millennium Act, which doesn't really parse).
Who says the computer doesn't have the capability? Pressing down on the hook switch just does a loop disconnect. It would be trivial to add a computer-controlled relay in-line to perform a 3 second loop disconnect between each call. Control the relay coil with the computer's parallel port. Doesn't even need any fancy electronics.
It'll also be hard to see how an OFFSHORE eind farm in the UK (not noted for its bald eagle population, particularly the undiscovered marine form of bald eagle) is going to harm the bald eagle population.
Modern photovoltaic cells pay back energywise in 3 to 6 years (depending on how sunny the area they are in). It's been years (decades maybe) since it took more energy to make PV cells than they make. Also, quite a lot of the refined silicon used for solar cells is waste from the semiconductor industry.
It's an offshore windfarm, several miles off shore. No birds of prey. The majority of birds in the area will be seagulls - otherwise known as shitehawks or winged rats.
Actually, they can and will deport you if the chip doesn't work.
You make the invalid assumption that people at immigration desks are reasonable people - they are *not*. Some of them are little Hitlers with bad attitude, and the ones who aren't have their hands tied by the law - they have no discretion at all. If the law says you can't enter without a working chip, the immigration officer (even the world's friendliest and most reasonable one) has no choice but to deport you. Just as they would deport you if your passport photo was mutilated.
(I'll make one exception for the little Hitlers - one notable aberration is Houston's immigration desks - those people are polite and make you feel welcome to the United States - truly refreshing to get to an immigration desk where it isn't just stony faces and demands to see that you have a return plane ticket. I frequently travel through Houston and they've always had good people there. Dallas Ft.Worth on the other hand - I will never travel through that airport again).
Well, since even Windows server is a desktop OS (it's a server, why is everything done via a GUI and no decent way to script half the things you need to do on it?) it's perfectly reasonable, really. The very name 'Windows' gives it away as a desktop OS, even if they try and tack on the word 'Server'.
Why remove the last digits of your Fido address? No one's gonna spam you :-)
My BBS, running at a blistering 2400 baud was 2:252/204.
It's funny - my Dad has a similar story, except he chipped a tooth with a (metal) toy gun. He's never had the chip repaired either, although dentists always offer.
But Tonka trucks own. I had one when I was a kid which must have been a couple of generations hand-me-down (it was a bit rusty). It was fantastic fun in the snow, making snow constructions with Tonka diggers and dump trucks. Probably what made them rust!
For system-supported stuff, then apt/yum (with their graphical front ends) is actually much simpler - just choose the package from the list.
For 3rd party stuff (which is what I suspect you gripe about) - there's Autopackage. http://autopackage.org/. Works just like the InstallShield files on Windows, except it's better since it has dependency resolution built in. I package up Oolite-Linux as an autopackage - I've not come across anyone who's had a problem installing it so far.
There's nothing stopping you from releasing a package like that. RPM, apt et al. are really for *system* packages - stuff supported directly by the distro you are using. Therefore, having all the dependency stuff is a good thing - provided you have something like yum or apt that will resolve dependencies. It means an upgrade to, say, zlib - will fix all the system supported packages at once.
For third party stuff, Autopackage is better. It's designed to work in a distro independent manner. It can resolve dependencies too - by finding other Autopackages which meet it. However, for Oolite-Linux, when I built the autopackage, I did the "Windows thing" and put the dependencies in the autopackage - since gnustep was unlikely to ever be installed, I included as much of gnustep as the game needed, as well as the tested versions of the SDL libraries that aren't part of the standard SDL install. So it works on all the distros I've come across.
First off, I'm not a Free software zealot. Although I prefer open source software, if the right tool happens to be closed source, I'm not all that bothered by it - I'll use it.
The thing is, my entire computing background from age 8 or 9 or so is that computers were open and free to tinker with. For example, the ZX Spectrum was fully documented, and you could buy a book with a complete, clearly commented ROM disassembly, and Sinclair Research was quite happy about this. The basic user manual that came with the machine had a complete description of the computer's edge connector as well - information was easy to obtain even without the Internet. As I moved on to university, I started using UNIX systems - while the code might not have been open source, all the protocols were well documented - X11, NFS, TCP/IP etc. Vendors damned well made sure that you could easily obtain specifications to protocols so you could make your programs work with their programs.
It doesn't bother me that Microsoft are a closed source company. What bothers me is they make all their protocols secret so you can't interoperate with their programs without a huge effort of reverse engineering. The whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish'. The lack of interoperability is an anathema to me. I would quit hating Microsoft tomorrow if they documented all their protocols - and not with restrictive licenses which stops you using those protocol specifications to make your GPLed program interoperate with a Microsoft program.
Pennies should have gone away a long time ago. Possibly nickels as well (but vending machines take nickels so they aren't quite as useless as pennies - at least people tend to dispose of their nickels in vending machines).
Pennies simply get hoarded by most people - there's no point fishing them out to pay with exact change, so I suspect (on average) every American has at least a buck's worth of pennies they won't ever spend. That's just a useless withdrawal from the economy of $300M or so.
The UK did away with the 1/2 penny (worth about 1 US penny) back in the mid 1980s.
Look for "Cook's matches" - same thing. My local newsagent sells them in a large box of a couple of hundred.
If PGP stands for 'Pretty Good Privacy', I wonder if PHP should really stand for 'Pretty Hopeless Privacy'...
I wish he'd make the word 'blogosphere' illegal. What a horrible marketing buzzword.
No, every 90 seconds a car is colliding with a train because of driver stupidity.
Take, for example, SH 3 as it runs out of the south of Houston down towards Galveston. Running alongside this road is a single line track, and usually oil tanker trains run up and down this bi-directional line. There are some intersections very near to the tracks.
When the lights are red at the intersections, idiotic drivers pull up to the back of cars in front, stopping RIGHT on the tracks. Drivers behind them stop right behind them, and so on - so if a train ever came and the bells went off to lower the barriers, these idiots who stopped right on the tracks instead of stopping behind where the barrier will come down have no option but to get out of their cars and hope the train is going slowly enough to stop in time - they can't go forward or back. Idiots. It's common sense that you don't just stop on the tracks. Yet people do it there every time the lights are red and there is enough traffic that the line of cars at the light tails back as far as the tracks.
Except that iTMS is very good for independent music. I've found a lot of small label stuff on iTMS.
However, I now have an eMusic account which is a far better deal (no DRM - not that DRM is a real obstacle off iTMS - I've not upgraded from iTunes 5, so I can strip off the DRM with jHymn with just a double click). eMusic works out cheaper, and it's better for exploring and finding stuff that's new to me since it's 40 downloads a month for 10 bucks.
Games is not the main barrier to adoption. The home desktop is low price, low margin cut-throat business. Why would VMware, XenSource etc. want to go after a market which will be difficult to support, and not provide them with the money they need to keep going? The corporate market (particularly servers) is far larger and far more important for them - so don't expect video drivers to ever be a priority.
Flash is pretty slow, unless you're willing to pay an awful lot of money for it - especially write speed. No quicker than a hard disk.