I'll believe it when I see the drivers working on my Ubuntu system with desktop effects active. I've tried the OpenChrome drivers and other things and nothing works with the UniChrome Pro CN400/PM880 video card that I have. Via has been very disappointing so far.
The amusing thing is, I bought a "Linux PC" with Ubuntu preinstalled not long ago, which came with one of these cards. Couldn't get the damned thing to run in more than 800x600, and had to go out and buy an nvidia card in the end...!
I don't know how it works in the UK, but in the USA, most companies practice "at will" employment. Here, you have little (if any) recourse for being fired, excepting special cases related to race, sex, or disability.
In the UK, this is the case for an initial period of employment (about 3 months, IIRC), but after this the employer must have a good reason for firing you. Of course, such reasons are not normally hard to find, but if you can find good reason to show the employer was discriminating against you, you have a fairly good chance of being awarded compensation by an employment tribunal.
They are very useful for technical or specialized material that has a small audience. It's a way of keeping a book in-print without spending large amounts of money. I'm grateful when I can buy a POD copy of a book at a reasonable price, when a used copy would otherwise be priced at ridiculous levels. Equating POD with vanity publishing is extraordinarily short-sighted.
Well, perhaps. Except for the fact that most POD publishers pretty-much exclusively print the same kind of junk you find in vanity publishing.
One thing that should be remembered about the current regulations for mercury are very strict in contrast to the levels associated with deterministic effects. This is perfectly natural since the natural occurrence of mercury is in such low concentrations. In fact almost all practical problems with mercury and how to deal with it are somehow linked to the inability to accurately measure it at the concentrations it begins to harm organisms.
One thing that gets me about this story is that it refers back to the case of Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, who was apparently told that the "safe level" of atmospheric mercury is "300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter". This figure is utter bullshit. This equates to 3.3ng per litre. Average atmospheric background levels of mercury are 10ng per litre. This woman was panicing because she had levels "6 times the safe level", where the safe level is actually one third the background level. And if you live near a coal-fired power plant, you probably have substantially more than that. Insanity, is what this entire scare is.
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with the environmental movement in the US today, it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress. Fossil fuels are unacceptable because they pollute, but so is wind power because it interferes with migration paths. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient but we can't use CFL's because they contain mercury.
I strongly suspect this article of being astroturf. It recycles the same story that I thought was astroturf about this time last year. As I pointed out at the time, the amount of mercury in the room she was complaining about was about 1% of what you would absorb by eating a fish. The entire story is bullshit.
Microsoft's updates are of the "hey, remember when we fucked up? Oops, paying customers only" variety.
Validation of a genuine copy of Windows isn't required for bug fixes. Only additional features (off the top of my head, I can think of 2: the platform SDK and the javascript debugger) require this.
While I was always a Spectrum guy at heart, I do have fond memories of my school's BBC "B"s. You always got the feeling that they were _real_ computers. I mean, they had operating systems and everything...
Consider just ordering the UK edition from amazon.co.uk. I've found most titles arrive in less than a week, and prices are extremely comparable to buying in a bookshop in the USA.
Really? I've not done the comparison on hardcovers before, but looking at paperback prices suggests to me that the average US edition is about 2/3rds the price of the equivalent UK one. My local bookshop charges $1 -> £1 for US imported books, and still they come out no more expensive than local ones, and often cheaper.
One error I made in this review was to say that Benford's Timescape was published in the 1990s. This is incorrect: it was actually published in 1980
Well, yes, but frankly next to the thesis that Banks's culture novels fit into some kind of 2000s revival of space opera (overlooking the fact that he's been publishing them steadily since 1987), it kind-of fades into insignificance.;)
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Because I have very little time for fiction and so Excession is the only Banks novel I've read so far. I thought it was an absolutely killer story, and one of these days I'm going to make time to read more of him.
My personal recommendation is Player of Games next. Consider Phlebas is good, but doesn't really have the same flavour as the later books.
I'd also recommend The Business, which is published under the name Iain Banks (without the M.) due to not being SF. But it's still incredibly geeky.:)
For example some differences between procedural Languges
['IF x=1' examples trimmed to avoid lameness filter]
Wow there are 5 different languges and they all look simular almost anyone would be able to figure it out
Well, yes, if use trivial code, the differences between different languages is trivial.
I'm inclined to agree with the writer of the article, I'm afraid. Next language after mastering the traditional OO languages like C++ and Java should be a dynamic OO language. I'm not a fan of Ruby, but it has its followers. Smalltalk could be an interesting sideline, although it is rarely used in new projects these days. Both of these languages will be somewhat familiar, yet introduce important concept that will be new to a pure C++/Java programmer: duck typing and code as data. This allows some different programming styles that are important to master (e.g. use of continuation functions).
(x = 1)
ifTrue: [
code goes here, and is passed as a parameter to the ifTrue method of the boolean object
]
ifFalse: [ ...
].
Does that mean that it MAY not be? Because the story itself and the accompanying graph seem to indicate that it IS, not that it MAY be. Just, like, clarify, you know?
The graph is only a single test of performance with a small cross-section of web sites. Most notably, no AJAX-style sites are included. Using other sites may show different results.
I also left a couple of browser windows open all night last night and was able to navigate pretty well this morning; if I'd done that with FF2 it would have been like viewing the web over dial-up again.
Try that in FF2 with no extensions loaded, and I'm pretty sure you'll find it works fine. I leave FF2 running all the time, and other than occasional restarts due to memory leaks (approximately weekly) or odd behaviour (approximately monthly) I have no issue with it.
That said, FF3 does seem to be significantly more responsive.
Can you fault the methodology employed in the tool?
Yes. The pages loaded by the tool (mostly different language versions of a number of mediawiki-based sites' home pages) are not representative of a broad enough cross section of people's browsing habits.
>> Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
The reason is typically because the process is a Zombie process that no longer 'truly' exists
Actually, in my experience other reasons are much more common. I haven't seen zombie processes around for ages, but I regularly get processes I can't kill. The reason is typically that they're in the middle of a non-interruptible syscall, which means they cannot be terminated. Most frequently this is caused by an NFS server that isn't responding, but I've also seen it because of hard disk failures in the past. Crashed drivers can also cause it (although I've only experienced this while developing my own drivers).
With windows it never makes any sense when a process refuses to die - at least with Linux I know there's a reason (and if you understand the details - they make sense).
Actually, in Windows it's typically the same reason. Either that or the process is running as "LOCAL SYSTEM", which is actually a more priveleged user than Adminstrator. There are hacks to get a task manager instance running as system, at which point you can kill just about anything you want.
How many people use autocad and photoshop? Most photoshop users are on macs anyway.
As a professional web developer, photoshop and Windows are indespensible for my work: I have to use photoshop to communicate with the graphics designers I work alongside, and I have to use Windows for compatibility testing with Internet Exploder.
I'm sure I'm far from alone in these requirements.
What did I notice. I had to mess around for ages to get audio and video working properly in fedora. I know that mp3 isn't 'free', but I've got 100Gb of audio that uses it, so guess what, I want it. On windows mp3 works out of the box.
I'm afraid that a smug, 'oh well, we want to keep things pure with fedora, please use ogg', doesn't help if converting to ogg would take several weeks of 24/7 processing to achieve. It ain't gonna happen..
I keep hearing this, and I'm not sure why there's an issue. It always seems to happen with distributions that I'm not using. I think maybe it's the trendy distributions that have this kind of issue. Over the last 10 years I've been both a SuSE guy and a Debian guy, and both have MP3 players out of the box (mpg123, vlc and xmms are standard packages in both distributions). On Debian Etch, 'apt-cache search mp3' shows hundreds of mp3 related packages. You're spoilt for choice.
I don't do anything that would need the proprietary graphics drivers with my system, so haven't bothered installing them, but I don't suspect Debian will bitch about those either. Seriously... it's your choice of distributions that's fucked up. Sorry.:)
This is on top of various annoyances, like [...] having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes.
Strange. I've been installing desktop linuxes on average once every other year for the last 14 years, and AFAICR the last time I had to do this was when I installed SuSE 6.4 (which would have been in 2000 or so). SuSE 7.0, SuSE 8.0, Debian 3.1 and Debian 4.0 have all handled X installs and set up modelines for me, without me having to know a damned thing about it. SuSE's installer even allowed me to adjust placement and size of the screen to match my monitor, even though that's totally unnecessary because every monitor I've used will match the system's desktop position perfectly adequately.... Debian on the other hand just gives me a list of modes, and I pick & choose which ones I want available.
Yes, I guess if I wanted to run in some peculiar resolution (e.g. 1152x910, which I used to use because it was the highest resolution I could fit with 16 bit colour on my graphic cards memory...) then I'd have to hack around with modelines. But then what I'm talking about isn't possible with any other OS I've ever used anyway.
After all, an inventor of string theory must be an expert on science fiction...
Well, you'd assume that the author of the article (as the NYT science fiction reviewer) would be too, but he catches quite a lot of flack in SF circles for not knowing what he's talking about...
But in the earth coorinate system, were always in the same place.
People are quite happy to accept that we cant travel faster that c, but soon forget that all frames of reverance are all equal. There is no aether, no absolute position, no zero velocity, hell there aint much apart from acceleration!
Unfortunately, the coordinate system you're suggesting we use is not an inertial one: it is accelerating under many influences, the most significant of which is gravity from the sun. Picking an inertial reference frame to use seems essential to me, but I don't see how one can be found that doesn't have the problems parent posts have discussed...
My local supermarkets all supply grapes in bags that are unsealed. I'm not entirely sure why they'd bother sealing them, but I guess some probably do. Back to that stupidity thing.;)
Really ? Can you show me a source for your claim that *that* is the "official" reason ?
Sounds downrigth ludicruos to me, and I've never seen that particular claim before.
I've seen it (or rather something similar) in plenty of places. This one seems official enough to me.
First, it's not true that it's hard to make a can that is sealed well enough that no vapors, certainly not enough to cause visible condensation would escape.
Second, condensation happens on cold surfaces, if the plastic-bag is the same temperature as everything else (I don't see why it wouldn't be) there'd be little condensation even if there *was* a lot of vapor inside the bag.
The variant I've seen is that the bag catches a vapour that's easy to detect, and therefore bottles (which are the primary target, not cans) do not need to be opened to check the contents.
Third, there's no prohibition that I've seen on having a ventilated plastic-bag, say one that has lots of holes in it, or even one made of some breathing membrane.
This page suggests the bag must be zip-topped. I've never seen anybody supply a zip-topped ventilated bag, although I suppose you could make holes in it yourself. This would probably, however, only serve to draw attention to yourself.
Not that being ridicolous is any sort of defence offcourse, lots of downrigth silly things happen anyway.
Strange. I normally find this totally unnecessary, as for practically any subject on which wikipedia has an article, the wikipedia article is ranked on the first page of google results anyway...
A better question is: why would they want anyone believe that ?
As I understand the situation, tax haven banks are allowed to participate in international banking systems on the condition that they do not actively assist tax evasion; that is, they need to avoid the perception that they do so (as much as is possible), or see their access to (for example) automatic international fund transfers withdrawn.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll believe it when I see the drivers working on my Ubuntu system with desktop effects active. I've tried the OpenChrome drivers and other things and nothing works with the UniChrome Pro CN400/PM880 video card that I have. Via has been very disappointing so far.
The amusing thing is, I bought a "Linux PC" with Ubuntu preinstalled not long ago, which came with one of these cards. Couldn't get the damned thing to run in more than 800x600, and had to go out and buy an nvidia card in the end...!
I don't know how it works in the UK, but in the USA, most companies practice "at will" employment. Here, you have little (if any) recourse for being fired, excepting special cases related to race, sex, or disability.
In the UK, this is the case for an initial period of employment (about 3 months, IIRC), but after this the employer must have a good reason for firing you. Of course, such reasons are not normally hard to find, but if you can find good reason to show the employer was discriminating against you, you have a fairly good chance of being awarded compensation by an employment tribunal.
They are very useful for technical or specialized material that has a small audience. It's a way of keeping a book in-print without spending large amounts of money. I'm grateful when I can buy a POD copy of a book at a reasonable price, when a used copy would otherwise be priced at ridiculous levels. Equating POD with vanity publishing is extraordinarily short-sighted.
Well, perhaps. Except for the fact that most POD publishers pretty-much exclusively print the same kind of junk you find in vanity publishing.
One thing that should be remembered about the current regulations for mercury are very strict in contrast to the levels associated with deterministic effects. This is perfectly natural since the natural occurrence of mercury is in such low concentrations. In fact almost all practical problems with mercury and how to deal with it are somehow linked to the inability to accurately measure it at the concentrations it begins to harm organisms.
One thing that gets me about this story is that it refers back to the case of Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, who was apparently told that the "safe level" of atmospheric mercury is "300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter". This figure is utter bullshit. This equates to 3.3ng per litre. Average atmospheric background levels of mercury are 10ng per litre. This woman was panicing because she had levels "6 times the safe level", where the safe level is actually one third the background level. And if you live near a coal-fired power plant, you probably have substantially more than that. Insanity, is what this entire scare is.
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with the environmental movement in the US today, it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress. Fossil fuels are unacceptable because they pollute, but so is wind power because it interferes with migration paths. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient but we can't use CFL's because they contain mercury.
I strongly suspect this article of being astroturf. It recycles the same story that I thought was astroturf about this time last year. As I pointed out at the time, the amount of mercury in the room she was complaining about was about 1% of what you would absorb by eating a fish. The entire story is bullshit.
Microsoft's updates are of the "hey, remember when we fucked up? Oops, paying customers only" variety.
Validation of a genuine copy of Windows isn't required for bug fixes. Only additional features (off the top of my head, I can think of 2: the platform SDK and the javascript debugger) require this.
While I was always a Spectrum guy at heart, I do have fond memories of my school's BBC "B"s. You always got the feeling that they were _real_ computers. I mean, they had operating systems and everything...
Consider just ordering the UK edition from amazon.co.uk. I've found most titles arrive in less than a week, and prices are extremely comparable to buying in a bookshop in the USA.
Really? I've not done the comparison on hardcovers before, but looking at paperback prices suggests to me that the average US edition is about 2/3rds the price of the equivalent UK one. My local bookshop charges $1 -> £1 for US imported books, and still they come out no more expensive than local ones, and often cheaper.
One error I made in this review was to say that Benford's Timescape was published in the 1990s. This is incorrect: it was actually published in 1980
;)
Well, yes, but frankly next to the thesis that Banks's culture novels fit into some kind of 2000s revival of space opera (overlooking the fact that he's been publishing them steadily since 1987), it kind-of fades into insignificance.
Because I have very little time for fiction and so Excession is the only Banks novel I've read so far. I thought it was an absolutely killer story, and one of these days I'm going to make time to read more of him.
:)
My personal recommendation is Player of Games next. Consider Phlebas is good, but doesn't really have the same flavour as the later books.
I'd also recommend The Business, which is published under the name Iain Banks (without the M.) due to not being SF. But it's still incredibly geeky.
Well, yes, if use trivial code, the differences between different languages is trivial.
I'm inclined to agree with the writer of the article, I'm afraid. Next language after mastering the traditional OO languages like C++ and Java should be a dynamic OO language. I'm not a fan of Ruby, but it has its followers. Smalltalk could be an interesting sideline, although it is rarely used in new projects these days. Both of these languages will be somewhat familiar, yet introduce important concept that will be new to a pure C++/Java programmer: duck typing and code as data. This allows some different programming styles that are important to master (e.g. use of continuation functions). Different enough for you?
Does that mean that it MAY not be? Because the story itself and the accompanying graph seem to indicate that it IS, not that it MAY be. Just, like, clarify, you know?
The graph is only a single test of performance with a small cross-section of web sites. Most notably, no AJAX-style sites are included. Using other sites may show different results.
I also left a couple of browser windows open all night last night and was able to navigate pretty well this morning; if I'd done that with FF2 it would have been like viewing the web over dial-up again.
Try that in FF2 with no extensions loaded, and I'm pretty sure you'll find it works fine. I leave FF2 running all the time, and other than occasional restarts due to memory leaks (approximately weekly) or odd behaviour (approximately monthly) I have no issue with it.
That said, FF3 does seem to be significantly more responsive.
Can you fault the methodology employed in the tool?
Yes. The pages loaded by the tool (mostly different language versions of a number of mediawiki-based sites' home pages) are not representative of a broad enough cross section of people's browsing habits.
>> Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
The reason is typically because the process is a Zombie process that no longer 'truly' exists
Actually, in my experience other reasons are much more common. I haven't seen zombie processes around for ages, but I regularly get processes I can't kill. The reason is typically that they're in the middle of a non-interruptible syscall, which means they cannot be terminated. Most frequently this is caused by an NFS server that isn't responding, but I've also seen it because of hard disk failures in the past. Crashed drivers can also cause it (although I've only experienced this while developing my own drivers).
With windows it never makes any sense when a process refuses to die - at least with Linux I know there's a reason (and if you understand the details - they make sense).
Actually, in Windows it's typically the same reason. Either that or the process is running as "LOCAL SYSTEM", which is actually a more priveleged user than Adminstrator. There are hacks to get a task manager instance running as system, at which point you can kill just about anything you want.
How many people use autocad and photoshop? Most photoshop users are on macs anyway.
As a professional web developer, photoshop and Windows are indespensible for my work: I have to use photoshop to communicate with the graphics designers I work alongside, and I have to use Windows for compatibility testing with Internet Exploder.
I'm sure I'm far from alone in these requirements.
What did I notice. I had to mess around for ages to get audio and video working properly in fedora. I know that mp3 isn't 'free', but I've got 100Gb of audio that uses it, so guess what, I want it. On windows mp3 works out of the box.
:)
I'm afraid that a smug, 'oh well, we want to keep things pure with fedora, please use ogg', doesn't help if converting to ogg would take several weeks of 24/7 processing to achieve. It ain't gonna happen..
I keep hearing this, and I'm not sure why there's an issue. It always seems to happen with distributions that I'm not using. I think maybe it's the trendy distributions that have this kind of issue. Over the last 10 years I've been both a SuSE guy and a Debian guy, and both have MP3 players out of the box (mpg123, vlc and xmms are standard packages in both distributions). On Debian Etch, 'apt-cache search mp3' shows hundreds of mp3 related packages. You're spoilt for choice.
I don't do anything that would need the proprietary graphics drivers with my system, so haven't bothered installing them, but I don't suspect Debian will bitch about those either. Seriously... it's your choice of distributions that's fucked up. Sorry.
This is on top of various annoyances, like [...] having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes.
Strange. I've been installing desktop linuxes on average once every other year for the last 14 years, and AFAICR the last time I had to do this was when I installed SuSE 6.4 (which would have been in 2000 or so). SuSE 7.0, SuSE 8.0, Debian 3.1 and Debian 4.0 have all handled X installs and set up modelines for me, without me having to know a damned thing about it. SuSE's installer even allowed me to adjust placement and size of the screen to match my monitor, even though that's totally unnecessary because every monitor I've used will match the system's desktop position perfectly adequately.... Debian on the other hand just gives me a list of modes, and I pick & choose which ones I want available.
Yes, I guess if I wanted to run in some peculiar resolution (e.g. 1152x910, which I used to use because it was the highest resolution I could fit with 16 bit colour on my graphic cards memory...) then I'd have to hack around with modelines. But then what I'm talking about isn't possible with any other OS I've ever used anyway.
After all, an inventor of string theory must be an expert on science fiction...
Well, you'd assume that the author of the article (as the NYT science fiction reviewer) would be too, but he catches quite a lot of flack in SF circles for not knowing what he's talking about...
Maybe our best shot is building something like a dyson killer star
You mean a Nicoll-Dyson laser (yes, xkcd didn't come up with the idea).
But in the earth coorinate system, were always in the same place.
People are quite happy to accept that we cant travel faster that c, but soon forget that all frames of reverance are all equal. There is no aether, no absolute position, no zero velocity, hell there aint much apart from acceleration!
Unfortunately, the coordinate system you're suggesting we use is not an inertial one: it is accelerating under many influences, the most significant of which is gravity from the sun. Picking an inertial reference frame to use seems essential to me, but I don't see how one can be found that doesn't have the problems parent posts have discussed...
Never bought grapes at a supermarket, then?
;)
My local supermarkets all supply grapes in bags that are unsealed. I'm not entirely sure why they'd bother sealing them, but I guess some probably do. Back to that stupidity thing.
Really ? Can you show me a source for your claim that *that* is the "official" reason ?
:)
Sounds downrigth ludicruos to me, and I've never seen that particular claim before.
I've seen it (or rather something similar) in plenty of places. This one seems official enough to me.
First, it's not true that it's hard to make a can that is sealed well enough that no vapors, certainly not enough to cause visible condensation would escape.
Second, condensation happens on cold surfaces, if the plastic-bag is the same temperature as everything else (I don't see why it wouldn't be) there'd be little condensation even if there *was* a lot of vapor inside the bag.
The variant I've seen is that the bag catches a vapour that's easy to detect, and therefore bottles (which are the primary target, not cans) do not need to be opened to check the contents.
Third, there's no prohibition that I've seen on having a ventilated plastic-bag, say one that has lots of holes in it, or even one made of some breathing membrane.
This page suggests the bag must be zip-topped. I've never seen anybody supply a zip-topped ventilated bag, although I suppose you could make holes in it yourself. This would probably, however, only serve to draw attention to yourself.
Not that being ridicolous is any sort of defence offcourse, lots of downrigth silly things happen anyway.
This I don't disagree with.
Strange. I normally find this totally unnecessary, as for practically any subject on which wikipedia has an article, the wikipedia article is ranked on the first page of google results anyway...
A better question is: why would they want anyone believe that ?
As I understand the situation, tax haven banks are allowed to participate in international banking systems on the condition that they do not actively assist tax evasion; that is, they need to avoid the perception that they do so (as much as is possible), or see their access to (for example) automatic international fund transfers withdrawn.