It's for precisely these layout reasons that any document I intend to 'read only' share with people I send as PDF. Things like CVs (tr. US: resume) and the like since I know they'll display properly at the other end that way.
*Every* kind of power generation is environmentally devastating in some way. I'd rather have the localized damage caused by a large hydro plant than the widespread damage from a coal burner.
The only way we can NOT do any environmental damage is go back to a pre-industrial revolution society. That means no electricity, no clean water and transport by horse. The cost of a modern civilization is you will do ecological damage. The best we can do (short of going back to living in mud huts) is to choose the methods that produce the least damage for the most power. At the moment, IMHO, nuclear (modern pebble-bed reactors, where the waste is stored all in a confined area) and hydro are really the only viable solutions in the long term.
But - to use programming terms - hydrogen is an abstraction layer. Like libc (which isn't as efficient as programming every program from scratch in asm), it provides the useful feature of being able to change the underlying workings (i.e. what's making the hydrogen) without having to change all the programs (i.e. cars) that depend on it.
For example, we may use natural gas at the moment to make hydrogen fuel. However, with improvements in solar technology, it would be possible to switch to hydrogen obtained by electrolysis without needing to change the distribution infrastructure or the cars that run on the fuel. Same goes for nuclear, or any other primary energy source - the hydrogen provides the 'abstraction layer' between the primary source and the consumer so it's much easier to switch primary energy sources as technology changes. The big problem with getting off a fuel we directly burn is that it's a massive upheaval to change to a different kind of fuel. (That and the fact that oil is still incredibly cheap). Oil will probably have to become two or three times more expensive as it is now to force an infrastructure change - however, if you've got the abstraction layer you can change much more easily.
Of course, when the cheap oil starts to run out, there will be added incentive to switch to fuels obtained by alternate means.
Re:I'm a micro-view of the job situation
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
Dunno about the immigration issues, but Britain is currently moaning about a teacher *shortage*. Sure, if you move to Britain you won't get paid anywhere near as much.
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
In Britain at least, unemployment is measured in pretty much the same way (for the official figures) - people out of work and actively looking for work (i.e. claiming benefit, as to claim unemployment benefit you have to demonstrate you are actively seeking work). I think the 'actively seeking work' is the definition an economist would use, too.
From that measure, Britain nearly has full employment at the moment.
No. The 'commandline POS' is very necessary - it's what runs underneath. I have no experience of Arch, but I do use Subversion - and if you want to use the GUI (say, on Windows) you use something like TortoiseSVN which integrates with Windows Explorer. However, advanced users may want to script some of their Subversion commands, or possibly just find it faster to use the command line than a GUI. Personally, I find Subversion pretty easy to use on the command line so I don't bother with a GUI - it gets in the way. I'm using Mac OSX right now - the epitome of a nice GUI, and whilst I use OSX's superb GUI for many things when it comes to my version control tools, I forgo the pretty GUI and just open a Terminal.
The main problemw ith a GUI is that you can't script them (or not trivially anyway). A development tool (which is largely what version control is) that cannot be scripted is useless. The GUI is not the be-all-and-end-all. This is what frustrates me so much about Windows on the server (and why it's not a very good server OS) - it's because many parts of Windows are totally unscriptable out of the box. Don't do this to our version control software too.
The GUI should be separate from the 'business logic' of any tool in any case - therefore there's absolutely nothing wrong with a GUI that drives command line tools underneath, or perhaps provides another interface by linking to a library which provides the heavy lifting parts of the code.
Don't forget the days that people used to call DOS (including MS themselves) 'The Microsoft MS-DOS Operating System' which of course expanded to 'The Microsoft Microsoft Disk Operating System Operating System'...
I went to the US and lived there for 7 years. I had to move back because I missed the wind and the rain! (I live in the Isle of Man, we have LOTS of wind and rain in the winter. People moaned about the odd tropical storm once every few years in Houston, but we get three similar storms each winter!) Also, the sea crashing not only over the sea walls but going right over the roof of the pub.
Re:Teletext never really popular in the USA....
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 1
The BBS scene was also strong in Britain (local calls weren't exactly expensive) and not only did Britain have electricity in the 1990s, there were also V.90 modems too!
The format used by Teletext (Ceefax etc.) was also used by early online services such as Prestel and Micronet 800 - essentially BBC Micro MODE 7.
I had Prestel/Micronet 800 as a young teenager (somehow I managed to convince my mother it'd be a good idea, god knows how) in 1986. They had a national network which had dialup POPs all over the British Isles. Prestel + Micronet cost around GBP 20 per quarter - or in real terms, a little less than broadband Internet costs these days (although there were telephone charges to add to that too). I had a Spectrum with a VTX-5000 modem which had a passable emulation of the BBC's MODE 7.
Micronet even had a MUD called Shades (WHICH IS STILL GOING! - see http://games.world.co.uk/) which was ultimately my downfall when the GBP 200.00 telephone bill arrived. My father promptly banned me from going online. So what I did was get up at 6 am when the household was sleeping, and go on for half an hour a morning instead - that level of usage was lost amongst the normal phone bill, and since the local telephone exchange was still an electromechanical Strowger monster, there was no option for itemised billing:-)
The modem was 1200/75 baud. Going through a Strowger exchange, line noise was common. However, it was good enough I could buy and download games for my Spectrum, as well as having email and a Micronet 'Gallery' (sort of like a web page, but teletext format) a decade before most people:-)
Ironically, the TV my computer was connected to was an old valve (tube) colour set which was totally incapable of displaying Ceefax.
You never have been (and possibly never will be) in the market that Apple are aiming the iMac at. The iMac isn't aimed at people who are quite happy having a rodents-nest of wiring under their desk - the iMac is aimed at people who care about form. I wager over 99.9% of iMac owners have no intention of adding an extra hard drive (and wouldn't even if they had a grey-box PC).
I certainly agree with you on CRTs. I won't be giving up my 21in. Sun (Trinitron tube) monitor any time soon - there's nothing even vaguely good-value-for-money which will do 1600x1200 and look good at all other resolutions as well. The only problem with the monitor is it's getting a little bit older and it's not quite as pin-sharp as it used to be (although once fully warmed up it's not bad, and DVDs look superb).
Quick question though: when I walk down the street, I see people with widescreen TVs in their front rooms. However, no one ever seems to ever be watching anything widescreen - instead they are usually watching 4x3 formatted TV in 'Fatvision' (i.e. stretched to fill the width, instead of 'vertical letterbox'). I suppose it brings new meaning to "TV makes people look fat". Do you watch 4x3 TV in Stretchvision or vertical letterbox? If you watch it in Stretchvision, WHY!?
And this is why the US as a whole will not get rid of its drink driving problem.
In Britain, if you get banned for drink driving you are BANNED. You have to find another method of transport to get into work. What's the point of a drink driving ban if it's not a ban at all? You also have to retake your driving test afterwards (and the driving test is *hard* - I've done a US driving test and it was trivial).
Although it's not perfect, it's hardly snake oil. We use client-side certificates to keep the random crackers away from the login screen - they don't see anything unless they have the certificate. However, we DO NOT use them to identify individuals - it's only a very rough grained and basic bit of authentication to keep random people away.
If you go to the UK, visit the London Science Museum. Not only do they have 8 or so of these things sitting in a row, they are connected to a rack of Strowger exchange equipment.
Pick up all of the phones and dial a number.
Then, with the help of an assistant or two, replace all the receivers at once.
The sound of all the bidirectional selectors returning home is so beautiful it could make a brave man weep. Old telephone exchanges were *alive*.
A co-worker, who is just about twice my age, used to be an engineer on this kit. It took 20 engineers to look after a 10,000 line exchange [0] in the 1970s. It now takes one engineer to look after SIX complete digital exchanges of far more capacity. Anyway, he told me a great story. He was on an evening shift, and things were quiet, just the normal light traffic of the evening stepping its way across the selectors. Then all of a sudden everything lit up. The sound grew to a creschendo of clattering stepper motors and relays as the exchange suddenly burst into life. He said it was spooky. What was it? The third world war starting? No - it was the end of a soap opera on TV with a particularly dramatic ending, and everyone started phoning each other about it!
Modern digital kit just doesn't do that. One phone call or a thousand going through a switch - all you get is the hum of the fan.
Google for 'Strowger telephone exchange'. The old electromechanical exchanges are fascinating.
And yes, the old GPO telephones from Britain are superb industrial design, only bettered by the Swedes with the Ericofon.
[0] Exchange - I think it's called the Central Office in the US, although when I lived there, everyone seemed to know what I meant when I called it an exchange.
After my grandmother died, the only thing I wanted to inherit was her old standard-issue GPO rotary-dial telephone. My grandparent's house was built at the tail end of the 1960s, and the phone was installed new in that house. My grandmother died at the tail end of last year. Since I want to keep it original (it's a reminder of my grandparents every time I use it) I haven't even changed the little paper disc in the dial that has their phone number and the usual 'Emergency: Fire, Police, Ambulance: 999' bit at the top.
The phone is one of these and anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s will remember them (and there's still quite a few around that have never been changed out for modern phones).
They are pretty much indestructable, having an electromechanical ringer and solidly-made mechanical parts (including the clockwork dial mechanism with generates the LD pulses). So as I didn't even have to change the wire that goes from the telephone to my modern RJ-45 jack - originally I had planned to just crimp on an RJ-45 plug to the cable - I managed to obtain an old GPO junction box from the same era. You just need to screw down the little connectors on the end of the telephone cable into one end, then crimp on some of those little fork-connectors to the free end of a piece of Cat5 with an RJ-45 at the other end, which you then screw down into the original junction box - then plug into the socket.
I'd also like an Ericofon, but I don't think without soldering resistors to the ringers of the phones to increase the impedance, the ringer current just won't make two phones with a real bell ring at the same time...and I don't want to modify the phones.
How about the conventional bombing of other Japanese cities? Was that also a crime against humanity? How about the bouncing bomb attacks on Hitler's Germany? Or the firebombing of Dresden?
It must have been the proximity of the letter 'B' to Job in the article topic, because I first misread the article as "Would You Bid for a Blow Job?"...
Something is clearly on my mind tonight...
Re:All of this could easily have been avoided.
on
Mambo Users Threatened
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not quite.
You can get the source code to Darwin, which is the BSD OS that underlies Mac OSX. The Aqua GUI itself is not derived from BSD - but you can still get all the BSD derived stuff for OSX in source form. Apple did not close up the BSD code they used.
I'd love to replace all my light bulbs with high-efficiency ones - but all my lights are on dimmer switches. The day I can get a reasonably priced energy efficient lamp that works with a dimmer I will though.
You still need a terminal server (which can be a PC with a USB multiport card for many servers) to get remote console over TCP/IP.
I'd prefer operating systems and hardware which can have a serial console, but we are forced to use PC hardware (so we can't see the BIOS screen over a serial port) and even in some instances forced to use Windows. And this brings me to my bug-bear about Windows - it is NOT, and never will be a good server OS. Its very name is a giveaway that it is not a server OS. A server OS should be able to be administered in its entirety via the command line, and should be able to run without a GUI at all.
Yes it will be. All the camcorders I've come across that have digital connectors use Firewire for video in/out. Firewire cards for PCs are cheap. Many PCs and laptops have Firewire built in.
I'd hardly say Firewire is a niche connector - it's a bloody big niche if it is. Most consumer camcorders have had a Firewire connector for years. My first Firewire camcorder was a Sony digital 8 camera which I had over 4 years ago (sadly it died in a motorcycle accident).
Computers like the Mac have DV editing software which just comes with the machine. I bought my Dad an eMac recently, and I could just plug my camcorder in and go (and iMovie doesn't suck like all the other inexpensive DV editing software I've tried).
These things already exist, but they plug into Ethernet, not USB. For example, our servers at work have some built-in hardware which allows us to access the console even during POST via TCP/IP. Many dedicated server providers will provide what amounts to a KVM switch that can be accessed over the Internet so you can fix your borked server.
Slashdot Mirror
It's for precisely these layout reasons that any document I intend to 'read only' share with people I send as PDF. Things like CVs (tr. US: resume) and the like since I know they'll display properly at the other end that way.
*Every* kind of power generation is environmentally devastating in some way. I'd rather have the localized damage caused by a large hydro plant than the widespread damage from a coal burner.
The only way we can NOT do any environmental damage is go back to a pre-industrial revolution society. That means no electricity, no clean water and transport by horse. The cost of a modern civilization is you will do ecological damage. The best we can do (short of going back to living in mud huts) is to choose the methods that produce the least damage for the most power. At the moment, IMHO, nuclear (modern pebble-bed reactors, where the waste is stored all in a confined area) and hydro are really the only viable solutions in the long term.
But - to use programming terms - hydrogen is an abstraction layer. Like libc (which isn't as efficient as programming every program from scratch in asm), it provides the useful feature of being able to change the underlying workings (i.e. what's making the hydrogen) without having to change all the programs (i.e. cars) that depend on it.
For example, we may use natural gas at the moment to make hydrogen fuel. However, with improvements in solar technology, it would be possible to switch to hydrogen obtained by electrolysis without needing to change the distribution infrastructure or the cars that run on the fuel. Same goes for nuclear, or any other primary energy source - the hydrogen provides the 'abstraction layer' between the primary source and the consumer so it's much easier to switch primary energy sources as technology changes. The big problem with getting off a fuel we directly burn is that it's a massive upheaval to change to a different kind of fuel. (That and the fact that oil is still incredibly cheap). Oil will probably have to become two or three times more expensive as it is now to force an infrastructure change - however, if you've got the abstraction layer you can change much more easily.
Of course, when the cheap oil starts to run out, there will be added incentive to switch to fuels obtained by alternate means.
Dunno about the immigration issues, but Britain is currently moaning about a teacher *shortage*. Sure, if you move to Britain you won't get paid anywhere near as much.
In Britain at least, unemployment is measured in pretty much the same way (for the official figures) - people out of work and actively looking for work (i.e. claiming benefit, as to claim unemployment benefit you have to demonstrate you are actively seeking work). I think the 'actively seeking work' is the definition an economist would use, too.
From that measure, Britain nearly has full employment at the moment.
No. The 'commandline POS' is very necessary - it's what runs underneath. I have no experience of Arch, but I do use Subversion - and if you want to use the GUI (say, on Windows) you use something like TortoiseSVN which integrates with Windows Explorer. However, advanced users may want to script some of their Subversion commands, or possibly just find it faster to use the command line than a GUI. Personally, I find Subversion pretty easy to use on the command line so I don't bother with a GUI - it gets in the way. I'm using Mac OSX right now - the epitome of a nice GUI, and whilst I use OSX's superb GUI for many things when it comes to my version control tools, I forgo the pretty GUI and just open a Terminal.
The main problemw ith a GUI is that you can't script them (or not trivially anyway). A development tool (which is largely what version control is) that cannot be scripted is useless. The GUI is not the be-all-and-end-all. This is what frustrates me so much about Windows on the server (and why it's not a very good server OS) - it's because many parts of Windows are totally unscriptable out of the box. Don't do this to our version control software too.
The GUI should be separate from the 'business logic' of any tool in any case - therefore there's absolutely nothing wrong with a GUI that drives command line tools underneath, or perhaps provides another interface by linking to a library which provides the heavy lifting parts of the code.
Don't forget the days that people used to call DOS (including MS themselves) 'The Microsoft MS-DOS Operating System' which of course expanded to 'The Microsoft Microsoft Disk Operating System Operating System'...
No. Sorry.
I went to the US and lived there for 7 years. I had to move back because I missed the wind and the rain! (I live in the Isle of Man, we have LOTS of wind and rain in the winter. People moaned about the odd tropical storm once every few years in Houston, but we get three similar storms each winter!) Also, the sea crashing not only over the sea walls but going right over the roof of the pub.
The BBS scene was also strong in Britain (local calls weren't exactly expensive) and not only did Britain have electricity in the 1990s, there were also V.90 modems too!
The format used by Teletext (Ceefax etc.) was also used by early online services such as Prestel and Micronet 800 - essentially BBC Micro MODE 7.
:-)
:-)
I had Prestel/Micronet 800 as a young teenager (somehow I managed to convince my mother it'd be a good idea, god knows how) in 1986. They had a national network which had dialup POPs all over the British Isles. Prestel + Micronet cost around GBP 20 per quarter - or in real terms, a little less than broadband Internet costs these days (although there were telephone charges to add to that too). I had a Spectrum with a VTX-5000 modem which had a passable emulation of the BBC's MODE 7.
Micronet even had a MUD called Shades (WHICH IS STILL GOING! - see http://games.world.co.uk/) which was ultimately my downfall when the GBP 200.00 telephone bill arrived. My father promptly banned me from going online. So what I did was get up at 6 am when the household was sleeping, and go on for half an hour a morning instead - that level of usage was lost amongst the normal phone bill, and since the local telephone exchange was still an electromechanical Strowger monster, there was no option for itemised billing
The modem was 1200/75 baud. Going through a Strowger exchange, line noise was common. However, it was good enough I could buy and download games for my Spectrum, as well as having email and a Micronet 'Gallery' (sort of like a web page, but teletext format) a decade before most people
Ironically, the TV my computer was connected to was an old valve (tube) colour set which was totally incapable of displaying Ceefax.
You never have been (and possibly never will be) in the market that Apple are aiming the iMac at. The iMac isn't aimed at people who are quite happy having a rodents-nest of wiring under their desk - the iMac is aimed at people who care about form. I wager over 99.9% of iMac owners have no intention of adding an extra hard drive (and wouldn't even if they had a grey-box PC).
I certainly agree with you on CRTs. I won't be giving up my 21in. Sun (Trinitron tube) monitor any time soon - there's nothing even vaguely good-value-for-money which will do 1600x1200 and look good at all other resolutions as well. The only problem with the monitor is it's getting a little bit older and it's not quite as pin-sharp as it used to be (although once fully warmed up it's not bad, and DVDs look superb).
Quick question though: when I walk down the street, I see people with widescreen TVs in their front rooms. However, no one ever seems to ever be watching anything widescreen - instead they are usually watching 4x3 formatted TV in 'Fatvision' (i.e. stretched to fill the width, instead of 'vertical letterbox'). I suppose it brings new meaning to "TV makes people look fat". Do you watch 4x3 TV in Stretchvision or vertical letterbox? If you watch it in Stretchvision, WHY!?
And this is why the US as a whole will not get rid of its drink driving problem.
In Britain, if you get banned for drink driving you are BANNED. You have to find another method of transport to get into work. What's the point of a drink driving ban if it's not a ban at all? You also have to retake your driving test afterwards (and the driving test is *hard* - I've done a US driving test and it was trivial).
Although it's not perfect, it's hardly snake oil. We use client-side certificates to keep the random crackers away from the login screen - they don't see anything unless they have the certificate. However, we DO NOT use them to identify individuals - it's only a very rough grained and basic bit of authentication to keep random people away.
If you go to the UK, visit the London Science Museum. Not only do they have 8 or so of these things sitting in a row, they are connected to a rack of Strowger exchange equipment.
Pick up all of the phones and dial a number.
Then, with the help of an assistant or two, replace all the receivers at once.
The sound of all the bidirectional selectors returning home is so beautiful it could make a brave man weep. Old telephone exchanges were *alive*.
A co-worker, who is just about twice my age, used to be an engineer on this kit. It took 20 engineers to look after a 10,000 line exchange [0] in the 1970s. It now takes one engineer to look after SIX complete digital exchanges of far more capacity. Anyway, he told me a great story. He was on an evening shift, and things were quiet, just the normal light traffic of the evening stepping its way across the selectors. Then all of a sudden everything lit up. The sound grew to a creschendo of clattering stepper motors and relays as the exchange suddenly burst into life. He said it was spooky. What was it? The third world war starting? No - it was the end of a soap opera on TV with a particularly dramatic ending, and everyone started phoning each other about it!
Modern digital kit just doesn't do that. One phone call or a thousand going through a switch - all you get is the hum of the fan.
Google for 'Strowger telephone exchange'. The old electromechanical exchanges are fascinating.
And yes, the old GPO telephones from Britain are superb industrial design, only bettered by the Swedes with the Ericofon.
[0] Exchange - I think it's called the Central Office in the US, although when I lived there, everyone seemed to know what I meant when I called it an exchange.
After my grandmother died, the only thing I wanted to inherit was her old standard-issue GPO rotary-dial telephone. My grandparent's house was built at the tail end of the 1960s, and the phone was installed new in that house. My grandmother died at the tail end of last year. Since I want to keep it original (it's a reminder of my grandparents every time I use it) I haven't even changed the little paper disc in the dial that has their phone number and the usual 'Emergency: Fire, Police, Ambulance: 999' bit at the top.
The phone is one of these and anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s will remember them (and there's still quite a few around that have never been changed out for modern phones).
They are pretty much indestructable, having an electromechanical ringer and solidly-made mechanical parts (including the clockwork dial mechanism with generates the LD pulses). So as I didn't even have to change the wire that goes from the telephone to my modern RJ-45 jack - originally I had planned to just crimp on an RJ-45 plug to the cable - I managed to obtain an old GPO junction box from the same era. You just need to screw down the little connectors on the end of the telephone cable into one end, then crimp on some of those little fork-connectors to the free end of a piece of Cat5 with an RJ-45 at the other end, which you then screw down into the original junction box - then plug into the socket.
I'd also like an Ericofon, but I don't think without soldering resistors to the ringers of the phones to increase the impedance, the ringer current just won't make two phones with a real bell ring at the same time...and I don't want to modify the phones.
How about the conventional bombing of other Japanese cities? Was that also a crime against humanity? How about the bouncing bomb attacks on Hitler's Germany? Or the firebombing of Dresden?
It must have been the proximity of the letter 'B' to Job in the article topic, because I first misread the article as "Would You Bid for a Blow Job?"...
Something is clearly on my mind tonight...
Not quite.
You can get the source code to Darwin, which is the BSD OS that underlies Mac OSX. The Aqua GUI itself is not derived from BSD - but you can still get all the BSD derived stuff for OSX in source form. Apple did not close up the BSD code they used.
I'd love to replace all my light bulbs with high-efficiency ones - but all my lights are on dimmer switches. The day I can get a reasonably priced energy efficient lamp that works with a dimmer I will though.
You still need a terminal server (which can be a PC with a USB multiport card for many servers) to get remote console over TCP/IP.
I'd prefer operating systems and hardware which can have a serial console, but we are forced to use PC hardware (so we can't see the BIOS screen over a serial port) and even in some instances forced to use Windows. And this brings me to my bug-bear about Windows - it is NOT, and never will be a good server OS. Its very name is a giveaway that it is not a server OS. A server OS should be able to be administered in its entirety via the command line, and should be able to run without a GUI at all.
Yes it will be. All the camcorders I've come across that have digital connectors use Firewire for video in/out. Firewire cards for PCs are cheap. Many PCs and laptops have Firewire built in.
I'd hardly say Firewire is a niche connector - it's a bloody big niche if it is. Most consumer camcorders have had a Firewire connector for years. My first Firewire camcorder was a Sony digital 8 camera which I had over 4 years ago (sadly it died in a motorcycle accident).
Computers like the Mac have DV editing software which just comes with the machine. I bought my Dad an eMac recently, and I could just plug my camcorder in and go (and iMovie doesn't suck like all the other inexpensive DV editing software I've tried).
These things already exist, but they plug into Ethernet, not USB. For example, our servers at work have some built-in hardware which allows us to access the console even during POST via TCP/IP. Many dedicated server providers will provide what amounts to a KVM switch that can be accessed over the Internet so you can fix your borked server.