It's not really amazing if you have ever removed the cover from a computer power supply. On desktop systems, most - if not all, of the leads exiting the supply for a given voltage are connected in parallel with no filters between them. If you wanted an electrically clean, electrically quiet power supply, you would need to add filtering in series with each individual output.
Why? Money. The FCC can impose a $10,000 fine per incident. If you were caught broadcasting for several days - say a week that's $70K. You can pay several FCC salaries with that kind of cash. If thousands were doing it, it would only take a little time for the FCC to ramp up staffing to collect that kind of cash.
The licensed broadcasters would most likely kick in some $$ too. (At least they would lobby the political side to protect them.)
You are giving people too much credit. My wife is a kindergarten teacher. Most of here career has been spent in inner-city poverty stricken schools. I assure you, after meeting many of the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and siblings of her students that this level of ignorance of cultural heritage is not astounding in the least.
You used the phrase our cultural heritage. My point is that one cultural heritage is not everyone's cultural heritage. I would say you know nothing of my cultural heritage as you do not know me (at least I don't recognize your userid as one I know).
Than explains a lot. After you've gotten over the idol worship phase of work, you will find that most interaction is social at work. You'll get the occasional helpful work related conversation, but honestly I get more help from IRC than my peers at work.
It takes a minimum of one hour whenever supervisor calls me to his office. Most of that hour is spent with me listening to anything but work related issues.
They claim to have a process that can cram twice the information in the same bandwidth. If I am broadcasting HDTV (MPEG-2 at 19Mb/s) and I switch, I now have two channels available.
If I'm a sat. TV company (DirecTV, Dish, etc.) I have doubled my channel capacity without launching any expensive new sats.
Given that it is free, I'd say they have a good chance of having major players adopt their codec in the near future.
Actually testing, unstable, and stable only change when the system administrator decides to upgrade the boxes. Updates are available for unstable and testing very frequently. Stable is, well, stable.
If you want an OS that upgrades every 6 months, only run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade every six months.
(the above is intended to be slightly serious and slightly humorous)
I'm neither grumpy nor impatient. I've been a Debian Developer for over 7 years. I've been hearing the same thing for 7 years.
Your post suggested you really didn't understand the difference between the different versions. Your follow up suggests you might, but don't understand the various ways provided the package management tools to allow running a mixture of packages from each version. It is possible provided all the dependencies are satisfied.
Your lack of bandwidth argument is a poor excuse. When I started working on Debian I had a 14.4K modem connection to a 16MHz 80386 system with 16 MB of RAM. (insert obligatory "barefoot, uphill both ways in a snow storm and we liked it that way " joke) If you have enough bandwith to read and post on/. you have enought bandwidth to contribute to Debian. You could review documentation, test small packages, etc. Packaging for Debian doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, just the ability to get your upstream source and then send it to the project server once the package is done. The full source is normally only uploaded once for each version number of the upstream source. The real reason you don't contribute directly to Debian is you choose not to. Please notice I said contribute directly. If you loaded Debian and made some comments about it, you are contributing indirectly. If you run a Debian based system you are contributing indirectly.
As anyone who has read any portion of the numerous Debian mailing lists knows, you are always free to voice your opinion.
What, if anything have you done to help Debian release faster? Have you tried the testing or unstable branches? Submitted bug reports? Submitted a patch? Tested the installer?
No, nobody said you had to. Nobody said you needed to. Debian will continue on.
Debian's only release goal has been to release when it is ready. The changes to the Social Contract simple mean it will not be ready for a bit longer because work has to be done to move packages around in the archives, and split out some items from some packages. If you offered to help, instead of moaning about it and jumping ship, the work would get done that much sooner and the release would happen that much quicker.
My company could never have put up with such a slow and unreliable release schedule.
At the risk of intense flames, I would like to point out that most companies do put up with such a slow and unreliable release schedule (can you say Micro$oft).
You don't say what your company uses (only that you personally use Fedora now).
What, if any, contributions to Debian would your company make? Debian is NOT a company. Debian is all VOLUNTEERS. A few companies pay people to work on Debian, but not many.
If you wanted a faster release cycle from Debian, you should have volunteered to help make it so. If you wanted more up to date packages you could have upgraded to testing or unstable. Instead you chose to change to Fedora/Red Hat. That is your right. Please don't malign Debian because you don't agree with the project's goals. I still know of many large organizations that want to be associated with Debian.
I will take this opportunity to bash you with a clue bat. Unstable is unstable because it changes and may be broken. Testing is slightly less volatile than unstable but still changes at a rapid pace for packages that have active upstream development and/or bugs. Stable is just that - stable. Stable only changes for security related issues.
Saying your problem with testing and unstable is the constant updates to them is like saying the problem with your car is that it moves.
Personally I've had it with all the users complaining stable is not bleeding edge and testing or unstable changes too often. You can't have it both ways. Pick one and deal with your choice. Nobody is forcing you to use Debian.
Don't the Debian developers actually work in IT for a living?
Many of us do. Many do not. Many are students. Debian is very diverse.
Some of us who "actually work in IT" view our Debian work as a way to fix what we view as broken in the "mainstream (MS dominated)" IT world. One of those broken things is the lack of accountability, stability, and reliability in all facets of "mainstream/modern" mass produced IT systems.
I compromise my "idealism" with respect to computing systems at the job I get paid for (because I'm not the "big boss"). I am not willing to do so in my volunteer work.
The Debian project will release "when it is ready." It is ready when the software, and all the other bits meet the creiteria set forth in the Debian Social Contract (and the release manager give it their blessing).
NOTE: The opinions expressed are my one and do not necessarily represent those Debian project. I am a Debian Developer.
particular those who want to target punters without a PC
If I didn't have a PC with a wireless lan card, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have a wireless access point. If I didn't have a computer, why would I have a broadband internet connection?
In most of what you said you could replace IT with *any* of the "skilled trades." The first example that came to mind was electricians.
Electricians work for a lot of different companies in most any area.
Electricians are a diverse group. You find some that love pulling 0000 wire and connecting big stuff as well as those who love fixing that broken electrical socket in your bedroom. Neither would claim the same skills are required to do each job.
There are gifted individuals in *every* field. When you witness one of these gifted individuals working, it makes you realize how little talent many "professionals" really have.
DISCLAIMER: I am an IT person, and I am in a union. I do not, however, believe unions are for everyone and strongly believe each individual should be able to decide for themselves if they should join a union. Union membership should not be mandatory for *any* position.
I was going for sensationalism, but since you tool the troll bait:
My laptop uses a Li-ion battery now. Most lithium ion cells have a 3.6V nominal rating with a 4.2V full charge rating ( Panasonic ). This release claims 4V for the new technology. (FYI the new technology uses either a Lithium or graphite anode, and is based off current lithium ion technology.) Most likely both would use the same number of cells.
If they went for the greater number of charge cycles at maximum capacity, they would use a graphite anode. This reduces the voltage to 3.5V and might mean an extra cell is added to the pack.
The proper comparison should be Watt-Hours / kilogram. Then we don't care about the terminal voltage. For the new battery that works out to 3.5V * 70Ah/kg = 245 Wh/kg. For my laptop it is 14.4V * 4Ah / 0.4kg = 144 Wh/kg. A bit less than 2x. (By the way, watt hours / kg is a really weird dimension - it reduces to square meters per second.)
Either way, battery life would be greater for the same total battery weight. A more conservative estimate would be 4-6 hours. Still a big improvement. Add in the expected price to be equal, and the fast recharge time (you are not going to charge the battery in 30 sec - you'd pull way too much current doing it)
Cool - 70Ah per kilogram. Makes all those power hungry mobile devices possible. Now they don't have to worry about processor power consumption, just cooling!!
My laptop battery will go from 0.4 kg and 4Ah to either 28Ah or it will go to 0.06 kg (I think the plastic battery case has more mass than that).
If we go the 28Ah route, the battery will last between 14 and 21 hours.
Actually you can get lots of current (and heat up the battery pretty good) from current NiCd and Nimh cells.
Don't believe me - go ahead and short a fully charged cell. Put one (especially the 9V type) in your pocket with some loose change or keys. You'll feel it in a hurry (if your pants don't catch fire first).
A suggestion: If you have a very successful application, don't look at all that old, messy code as being "stale". Look at it as a living organism that can perhaps be healed, and can evolve. You can refactor, you can rewrite portions of the internals to work better, many things can be accomplished without abandoning all the experience and error correction that went into that codebase. When you rewrite you are abandoning history and condemning yourself to relive it.
Ok, so I can rewrite part of the app and he considers it ok. I can introduce just as many bugs rewriting part of something as rewriting the while thing. Not to mention royally f*&#ing up the API, and existing functions I thought that I remembered didn't touch that variable.
Then there is the issue of new tools, and techniques being available now. Better compilers, better languages, better hardware, better whatever.
If I write the original code, and I choose to rewrite, I am most certainly not abandoning history. If I didn't write it, I must have a reason for wanting to spend my time on the rewrite (better algorithm, new approach, added features, won't compile with gcc-3.0, whatever).
a simple markup language could allow us to divorce document presentation from document structure, and concentrate on how information was related rather than how it should be displayed
Gee, this guy has it backwards. HTML is a markup language that allows you to specify how the document should look: what should be bold, italics, centered, where the pretty picture should appear, etc. HTML has never had anything to do with separating document structure from presentation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really amazing if you have ever removed the cover from a computer power supply. On desktop systems, most - if not all, of the leads exiting the supply for a given voltage are connected in parallel with no filters between them. If you wanted an electrically clean, electrically quiet power supply, you would need to add filtering in series with each individual output.
Why? Money. The FCC can impose a $10,000 fine per incident. If you were caught broadcasting for several days - say a week that's $70K. You can pay several FCC salaries with that kind of cash. If thousands were doing it, it would only take a little time for the FCC to ramp up staffing to collect that kind of cash.
The licensed broadcasters would most likely kick in some $$ too. (At least they would lobby the political side to protect them.)
You are giving people too much credit. My wife is a kindergarten teacher. Most of here career has been spent in inner-city poverty stricken schools. I assure you, after meeting many of the parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and siblings of her students that this level of ignorance of cultural heritage is not astounding in the least.
You used the phrase our cultural heritage. My point is that one cultural heritage is not everyone's cultural heritage. I would say you know nothing of my cultural heritage as you do not know me (at least I don't recognize your userid as one I know).
thus I love my Intel internship
Than explains a lot. After you've gotten over the idol worship phase of work, you will find that most interaction is social at work. You'll get the occasional helpful work related conversation, but honestly I get more help from IRC than my peers at work.
It takes a minimum of one hour whenever supervisor calls me to his office. Most of that hour is spent with me listening to anything but work related issues.
Jonah (We all know who Jonah was and/or you need to back to sunday school....)
Not eveyone comes from a Judeo-Christian background
Looks like Intel got some religion....
I highly doubt it. Well, maybe they worship the $.
MONEY
They claim to have a process that can cram twice the information in the same bandwidth. If I am broadcasting HDTV (MPEG-2 at 19Mb/s) and I switch, I now have two channels available.
If I'm a sat. TV company (DirecTV, Dish, etc.) I have doubled my channel capacity without launching any expensive new sats.
Given that it is free, I'd say they have a good chance of having major players adopt their codec in the near future.
Obviously their arithmatic algorithm was flawed
Actually testing, unstable, and stable only change when the system administrator decides to upgrade the boxes. Updates are available for unstable and testing very frequently. Stable is, well, stable .
If you want an OS that upgrades every 6 months, only run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade every six months.
(the above is intended to be slightly serious and slightly humorous)
I'm neither grumpy nor impatient. I've been a Debian Developer for over 7 years. I've been hearing the same thing for 7 years.
/. you have enought bandwidth to contribute to Debian. You could review documentation, test small packages, etc. Packaging for Debian doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, just the ability to get your upstream source and then send it to the project server once the package is done. The full source is normally only uploaded once for each version number of the upstream source. The real reason you don't contribute directly to Debian is you choose not to. Please notice I said contribute directly. If you loaded Debian and made some comments about it, you are contributing indirectly. If you run a Debian based system you are contributing indirectly.
Your post suggested you really didn't understand the difference between the different versions. Your follow up suggests you might, but don't understand the various ways provided the package management tools to allow running a mixture of packages from each version. It is possible provided all the dependencies are satisfied.
Your lack of bandwidth argument is a poor excuse. When I started working on Debian I had a 14.4K modem connection to a 16MHz 80386 system with 16 MB of RAM. (insert obligatory "barefoot, uphill both ways in a snow storm and we liked it that way " joke) If you have enough bandwith to read and post on
As anyone who has read any portion of the numerous Debian mailing lists knows, you are always free to voice your opinion.
What, if anything have you done to help Debian release faster? Have you tried the testing or unstable branches? Submitted bug reports? Submitted a patch? Tested the installer?
No, nobody said you had to. Nobody said you needed to. Debian will continue on.
Debian's only release goal has been to release when it is ready. The changes to the Social Contract simple mean it will not be ready for a bit longer because work has to be done to move packages around in the archives, and split out some items from some packages. If you offered to help, instead of moaning about it and jumping ship, the work would get done that much sooner and the release would happen that much quicker.
My company could never have put up with such a slow and unreliable release schedule.
At the risk of intense flames, I would like to point out that most companies do put up with such a slow and unreliable release schedule (can you say Micro$oft).
You don't say what your company uses (only that you personally use Fedora now).
What, if any, contributions to Debian would your company make? Debian is NOT a company. Debian is all VOLUNTEERS. A few companies pay people to work on Debian, but not many.
If you wanted a faster release cycle from Debian, you should have volunteered to help make it so. If you wanted more up to date packages you could have upgraded to testing or unstable. Instead you chose to change to Fedora/Red Hat. That is your right. Please don't malign Debian because you don't agree with the project's goals. I still know of many large organizations that want to be associated with Debian.
I will take this opportunity to bash you with a clue bat. Unstable is unstable because it changes and may be broken. Testing is slightly less volatile than unstable but still changes at a rapid pace for packages that have active upstream development and/or bugs. Stable is just that - stable. Stable only changes for security related issues.
Saying your problem with testing and unstable is the constant updates to them is like saying the problem with your car is that it moves.
Personally I've had it with all the users complaining stable is not bleeding edge and testing or unstable changes too often. You can't have it both ways. Pick one and deal with your choice. Nobody is forcing you to use Debian.
Don't the Debian developers actually work in IT for a living?
Many of us do. Many do not. Many are students. Debian is very diverse.
Some of us who "actually work in IT" view our Debian work as a way to fix what we view as broken in the "mainstream (MS dominated)" IT world. One of those broken things is the lack of accountability, stability, and reliability in all facets of "mainstream/modern" mass produced IT systems.
I compromise my "idealism" with respect to computing systems at the job I get paid for (because I'm not the "big boss"). I am not willing to do so in my volunteer work.
The Debian project will release "when it is ready." It is ready when the software, and all the other bits meet the creiteria set forth in the Debian Social Contract (and the release manager give it their blessing).
NOTE: The opinions expressed are my one and do not necessarily represent those Debian project. I am a Debian Developer.
But if you don't have a computer, how can you read all the SPAM???
particular those who want to target punters without a PC
If I didn't have a PC with a wireless lan card, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have a wireless access point. If I didn't have a computer, why would I have a broadband internet connection?
In most of what you said you could replace IT with *any* of the "skilled trades." The first example that came to mind was electricians.
Electricians work for a lot of different companies in most any area.
Electricians are a diverse group. You find some that love pulling 0000 wire and connecting big stuff as well as those who love fixing that broken electrical socket in your bedroom. Neither would claim the same skills are required to do each job.
There are gifted individuals in *every* field. When you witness one of these gifted individuals working, it makes you realize how little talent many "professionals" really have.
DISCLAIMER: I am an IT person, and I am in a union. I do not, however, believe unions are for everyone and strongly believe each individual should be able to decide for themselves if they should join a union. Union membership should not be mandatory for *any* position.
Congratulations - you just designed the CPU powered lava lamp, the newest retro 21st century fad!
I was going for sensationalism, but since you tool the troll bait:
My laptop uses a Li-ion battery now. Most lithium ion cells have a 3.6V nominal rating with a 4.2V full charge rating ( Panasonic ). This release claims 4V for the new technology. (FYI the new technology uses either a Lithium or graphite anode, and is based off current lithium ion technology.) Most likely both would use the same number of cells.
If they went for the greater number of charge cycles at maximum capacity, they would use a graphite anode. This reduces the voltage to 3.5V and might mean an extra cell is added to the pack.
The proper comparison should be Watt-Hours / kilogram. Then we don't care about the terminal voltage. For the new battery that works out to 3.5V * 70Ah/kg = 245 Wh/kg. For my laptop it is 14.4V * 4Ah / 0.4kg = 144 Wh/kg. A bit less than 2x. (By the way, watt hours / kg is a really weird dimension - it reduces to square meters per second.)
Either way, battery life would be greater for the same total battery weight. A more conservative estimate would be 4-6 hours. Still a big improvement. Add in the expected price to be equal, and the fast recharge time (you are not going to charge the battery in 30 sec - you'd pull way too much current doing it)
Cool - 70Ah per kilogram. Makes all those power hungry mobile devices possible. Now they don't have to worry about processor power consumption, just cooling!!
My laptop battery will go from 0.4 kg and 4Ah to either 28Ah or it will go to 0.06 kg (I think the plastic battery case has more mass than that).
If we go the 28Ah route, the battery will last between 14 and 21 hours.
Actually you can get lots of current (and heat up the battery pretty good) from current NiCd and Nimh cells.
Don't believe me - go ahead and short a fully charged cell. Put one (especially the 9V type) in your pocket with some loose change or keys. You'll feel it in a hurry (if your pants don't catch fire first).
MythTV?
Pretty much says it all.....
Ok, so I can rewrite part of the app and he considers it ok. I can introduce just as many bugs rewriting part of something as rewriting the while thing. Not to mention royally f*&#ing up the API, and existing functions I thought that I remembered didn't touch that variable.
Then there is the issue of new tools, and techniques being available now. Better compilers, better languages, better hardware, better whatever.
If I write the original code, and I choose to rewrite, I am most certainly not abandoning history. If I didn't write it, I must have a reason for wanting to spend my time on the rewrite (better algorithm, new approach, added features, won't compile with gcc-3.0, whatever).
Gee, this guy has it backwards. HTML is a markup language that allows you to specify how the document should look: what should be bold, italics, centered, where the pretty picture should appear, etc. HTML has never had anything to do with separating document structure from presentation.
XML, is another story.
Because Sony used to sell pre-recorded mini discs. Best Buy used to carry them in the US.
First of all, it takes however long the track is to transfer it too and from the computer
No, Sony (if you put up with their software) has "fixed" this issue. You can transfer at a 32x speed on the current units.