There are plenty of places in the US with low property taxes. I'm in NYC and my property taxes for the year on my near million dollar home practically non-existent. The main difference between NYC and the places with high property taxes is that we have a local income tax and a local sales tax which pay for the schools. Unlike property taxes, the city needs to ask permission from the state to implement these taxes so we bribe, err "influence", the upstate legislators with a few billion dollars a year in pork for their communities.
You sir have never attempted to opt out of TigerDirect direct marketing.
Think of them as the Typhoid Mary of spammers, they go around spreading your info to all comers but have a sophisticated system of phone call marry go rounds for thwarting all efforts to remove yourself from their claws. I had to move twice and not leave forwarding addresses with the post office before I got them off my tail.
It doesn't matter if GPL is the ideal license structure for open source development. There is a huge amount of "GPLv2 or later" code out there. By licensing my software with a compatible license, I can copy bits of that into my creation without having to rewrite it. When one writes a little utility that doesn't link to anything and when one writes something where it is good practice to rewrite any external code for auditability, like OpenSSH, one is free to choose whatever license one wants. But when building something substantial quickly GPL wins just on the easy incorporation of external code argument alone.
I do realize this same argument could have been made about closed source ten years ago, when you could license helper code easily and cheaply for your closed source project but no open source equivalent existed. But this really means the question is not whether an Apache license is superior to a GPL one, but is it superior enough to go through the enormous effort to redevelop or relicense all that code which exists in the GPL ecosystem now? The people who have answered yes to that question are by and large in the BSD camp. I have great respect for them, but I have to admit that their effort appears more quixotic to me now than it did just a few years ago. Throwing the Apache license in there is silly, it's an outlier and there are good reasons to think that if the project were started today it would be GPL licensed. If you have philosophical objections to forcing sharing either explicitly place the code into the public domain or use a modern variant of the BSD license; using fewer licenses reduces the sharing friction.
As to the value of the GPL's forced sharing, I've also had the experience of having numerous businesses based on software I had a large part in writing. All of them placed their enhancements online, one explicitly contributed back with patches. I believe the one that explicitly contributed back would have done so even if a sharing was not forced, and very little of the code written by the other companies made it back into the project do to low quality. The couple exceptions to that were when one of those less enlightened companies hired a couple of the main contributors to clean up their mess. The only one still in business is the one that explicitly contributed back, those improvements were maintained by the core project lowering the business' maintenance cost, and those improvements were audited and improved as part of the patch submission process. It's hard to draw any conclusions, one might be that smart businesses might contribute back no matter the license and another that one shouldn't care about those that don't because they won't weather the next economic downturn. But reason by anecdote is a weak form of argument and I would really like some scientific studies before I would argue such conclusions be adopted by others.
"The average production worker in Sweden pays no income tax at all to the central government."
The personal exemption is a tenth higher that the average income. So unless you are doing better than most your taxes are in the form of sales tax and other flat taxes or fixed fees.
Oh Boy! You are aware that the Gypsum in any modern gypsum board plant is made from fly ash, right? It doesn't matter what country it is manufactured in. Gypsum board does not last long when exposed to any moisture and it is hard to avoid things looking a bit boxy when it is your primary wall system. I much prefer plaster myself. But it is difficult to argue with the ubiquitous low cost of a product made from fly ash....
"Desktops are not places for icons! You are a BAD person for wanting to clutter up your workspace with them! Can't you see how much BETTER this new way is? WHY DON'T YOU APPRECIATE OUR WORK TO FREE YOU FROM THE DESKTOP PARADIGM!?!?!?!?!"
That is slightly exaggerated:) And in any case the criticism was listened to and the problem is fixable in KDE 4.2. The default is still to have a blank desktop, but if you change the desktop activity to "Folder View" you can get a useful desktop surface again.
And, maybe it might not be popular mentioning Windows 7 on/., but I really like the feature in Windows 7 beta...
Heh, just try comparing Windows 7 unfavorably to KDE or Gnome or even previous versions of the software in a Windows 7 story and you'll get modded a troll like I did.:P
Anyway, the same feature you liked annoyed me yesterday, but that may just be the old fogey in me. KDE4 annoys me similarly when it shrinks all my windows to postage stamp size at half-alpha which I'm guessing is supposed to allow you to choose an app to go to next, but if you're eyes are only 20-20 with glasses all your apps look pretty much the same and contrast. Maybe these really are good things that just aren't for me. This is opposed to bugs like Windows 7 betas leaving chaff behind it from incomplete redraws to the point that you long for the 'ctrl-l' command of yore, or the KDE4 "alt-tab" handler putting the long list of windows _behind_ the fancy animation; so you can't just see at a glance that you need to press the key combo X times to get to the desired window, instead you need to pay attention to the animation and slowly go through the list one application at a time.
They don't. Applications just need to concern themselves with the details of of the APIs they use, and the guarantees those APIs do or don't provide.
Yup, and the problem has existed with KDE startup for years. I remember the startup files getting trashed when Mandrake first came out and I tried KDE for long enough to get hooked, and it's happened to me a few times a year ever since with every filesystem I've used. I just make my own backups of the.kde directory and fix this manually when it happens. I'm pretty good at this restore by now. Hopefully this bug in KDE will get fixed now that it is causing the KDE project such great embarrassment. I had a silent wish Tso would increase the default commit interval to 10 minutes when the first defenders of the KDE bug started squawking, but he's was too gracious for that.
PS I use a lot of experimental graphics drivers for work, hence lockups during startup are common enough that I probably see this KDE bug more than most KDE users. But they really violate every rule of using config files: 1st. open with minimum permission needed, in this case read only, unless a write is absolutely necessary. 2nd. only update a file when it needs updating. 3rd. when updating a config file make a copy, commit it to disk, and then replace the original, making sure file permissions and ownership are unchanged, then commit the rename if necessary.
PS2 Those computer users saying an fsync will kill performance need to get cluebat applied to them by the nearest programmer. 1st. There will be no fsyncs of config files at startup once the KDE startup is fixed. 2nd. fsyncs on modern filesystems are pretty fast, ext3 is the rare exception to that norm; this will be non-noticable when you apply a settings change. 3rd. These types of programming errors are not the norm; I've graded first and second year computer science classes and each of the three major mistakes made would have lost you 20-30% of your score for the assignment.
Credit card, bank transfer, and paypal would all work. There are plenty of ways to transfer money these days.
2\nothing appears in the publicly visible tracker until approved by a moderator
That is a very efficient way to flood the bug tracker service with redundant bug reports as well as stiffling the amount of work that the community (i.e., non-project people) do in areas such as error tracking, support and *ghasp* even posting patches.
The worry of course is whether it would be stifling in any way, and why it was a tounge-in-cheek proposal. I don't really know if it would stifle the amount of work that the community could do. I know there would be fewer duplicate tickets, in my experience there are generally about a couple dozen tickets created for any long lived bug, maybe a quarter remain open even after the bug has been fixed because they were never flagged as duplicates. Also hundreds or thousands of incoherent tickets mean that someone experiencing a problem has to wade through more useless search results before either finding the appropriate ticket or finding that a report is in order. Lots of bad tickets also mean less time to look at patches, so people producing patches produce fewer of them.
I have a nice coherent bug report sitting in the gcc bugtracker over a year now, I'd happily pay $100 just to have one of the devs triage it. Instead it is lost in piles of cr*p. The question is how much do old happy hackers like me contribute to a project vs. a can't afford pizza school-kids? When you make my life as a bug reporter easier you make the lots-of-time-no-money-college-kid's life harder. Is that worth it to make the lives of the more dedicated contributors easier as well? I would assume it depends on the project.
When you run an open to post bug tracker you are inundated with idiots who think a bug tracker is a discussion forum as well outright spambots. Some of the "me too" and "I think this is a major bug" posts could be addressed with a "me too" button and counter in the tracker. But..
I have a modest proposal for what we really need:
1/ cold hard cash
2/ nothing appears in the publicly visible tracker until approved by a moderator
The way this would work is when you file a ticket your credit card should have $50 deducted and the ticket hidden from view until it has been approved, if approved you should get $40 back. So if you report a crash without the backtrace or even a description what you were doing when it happened you are out $50. After paying the CC fees any 'profit' could be burned in trashcans to provide heat for the homeless, just so the moderator can not be accused of being unfair for the cash. Similar fees could be applied to ticket comments, say starting at $10 per inane comment and escalating to $100 for repeat offenders. None of these comments would ever have to make it out to the publicly visible face of the tracker, but there are plenty of people who would still keep posting at $100 a pop just to annoy the devs. Burning thousands of dollars in small bills could warm the hands of many a homeless man, and scaled up to a large number of OSS apps would help keep inflation under control.
To the humor impaired: Ok, this is tongue in cheek. My point is that once a project grows past its first few thousand users a public issue tracker becomes a liability. Real bug reports get lost in the constant barrage of junk tickets, but you can't even close those junk tickets because then you have to deal with some luser with a bee in their bonnet.
I've heard and read this "Windows 7 is a service pack to Windows Vista" meme everywhere and I just don't get it. I've only spent a few hours with Vista, and only a few more with "7", but that should be enough for anyone -- I don't really see a full service pack of differences. What really jumps out at me using both of them is how clunky they are compared to KDE or Gnome. Also both seem to have abysmal driver support and lack of any compelling applications. The Microsoft Media Center is also particularly primitive; MythTV had better stability and more features before I got married and had kids (i.e. years ago). All-in-all both operating systems feel like a total blast from the past, with one exception. When testing both last month I felt they were quite a bit less agile than I remembered Windows 2000 Pro being, so I installed it from an old CD. The first thing I noticed was that the UI really did look better, even in 'classic' mode Vista wasted pixels on uneven margins, those same layouts were obviously hand tuned in 2000 and looked good despite having that same 'blast from the distant past' look and feel as Vista/7. And yes, 2000 feels significantly snappier than Vista/7.
PS 1. All tests were on a recent Lenovo T61p with nVidia graphics and the latest drivers available for each of the three Windows distros.
PS 2. I didn't need to try XP, since that was the abomination that drove me away from the Microsoft franchise in the first place.
I would say "Well trained and hence well paid mechaincs."
I don't think primary care physicians are over trained or over paid, they only make slightly more that Ph.D's in other in demand fields. I don't think specialists are over trained, but I do think many are over-paid. They are over-paid simply because of how our medical system works; I have no hope of paying the $4,000,000 bill if instead of one planned child I end up with twins in the NICU. So I purchase insurance that costs more per year than the $10,000 that a normal pregnancy costs. But now I really don't care if the NICU costs $3,000,000 or $5,000,000, these are my children we're talking about, so I go to the hospital ranked as #1 in NICU care in my area.
Everyone seems to forget the simple fact that we own the spectrum, not the government. What this is essentially doing is making the people pay for something they already own.
Everyone seems to forget that we own the land, not the government. What property rights are essentially doing is making the people pay for something they already own. Umm, no I don't think we have really forgotten the basic idea behind establishing property rights.
The spectrum auctions are a terrible idea, not because private ownership of rivalrous goods is a bad idea, but because there are way too few players for a private property system to be capable of preventing a cabal of owners from cornering the market and charging insane prices like $10-$20 a year (or even more!) for broadband and cell phone service. Until there are at least 1 million market participants with no more than 0.1% of the capital under a single person's control, private property is a very inefficient system. It's better to rent the property in leases that are long enough to allow a private entity to turn a profit 5-10 years, but allow you to increase the rent and split up lots until you reach the market participant count required for private ownership to function efficiently.
With Non-rivalrous "goods" property rights as a concept don't transfer well, see copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. But for spectrum, property rights are a perfect fit. Even if something like ultra-wideband pans out, well that is analogous to airplane overflight over your property (rental or private). We still need commons (parks), like 700 Mhz, 2.6 Ghz, etc. We need wilderness areas, 73Mhz, 608Mhz, 1.4 GHz, etc. But a large portion of the spectrum is set aside for private uses at the highest rate the market will carry.
I've not held one nor seen one update the screen, so I can't speak to those attributes. But I have seen the screen and it is nothing like black text on bright white paper. It's like black text on drab gray paper, it's too low contrast to have any appeal over a printed book. If the reader was priced at $9.99, and a had large selection of $1-$2 books were available (pot-boilers and other commuter fare), I think it would take over the world in short order, but it's just not nearly as user friendly for most people as a book. For blind people and those with the kinds of motor function impairments that make holding a book or turning the pages difficult or impossible it is probably a great improvement, so I wouldn't say it will have no market after the fad fades. And it is of course possible that the display quality and price will improve greatly in the next year or two.
Actually, you should be able to use a standard dimmer switch on these things. Unless someone is doing something I've never seen before, there's no logic in them, just the diode and a resistor. Maybe a capacitor if they were really ambitious.
Nope. LED fixtures on an Edison base incorporate ballasts, just like CFLs, and incandescent dimmers do not work well with any ballast. You are probably making the incorrect assumption that an incandescent dimmer just takes a sine wave with a ~ 170 V peak and outputs a sine wave with a lower peak. It would indeed be easy to create a dimmable ballast if that were the case. But instead these things just cut out portions of the wave creating all kinds of nasties on the house current. This is because it is cheaper to do, and all you need to do to dim an incandescent is to reduce it's average current consumption.
There are a number of solutions to this problem. The one that's most likely to happen is that a new type of dimmer will be created which does something sane for ballasts like reduce the peak voltage, and labeling will be created for both such dimmers and the CFL and LED light bulbs with compatible ballasts. Another solution would be to simply put the dimming entirely within the ballast itself, then the switch would just send a message to the bulb via radio or another out-of-band channel to the bulb circuitry to dim. But while this would be more efficient, this is not going to happen in today's fragmented home automation market without a government mandate, or at least the threat of a government mandate, to standardize.
PS There already are dimmable CFLs and CFL compatible dimmers, I have some in my house. They are not perfect, and both cost 2x as much as conventional CFLs and incandescent only dimmers; and there is no branding to tell the consumer they are compatible. This means you need to do a lot of frustrating web research before you buy the things. I also bought one bright LED Edison base lightbulb to satisfy my curiosity and it was both very expensive and non-dimmable.
PS2 My biggest frustration with buying lighting on the web is that no one shows you a spectral diagram of the light output of the bulbs. If there are any lighting web retailers reading this, please do this and you will win some early adopter business and appear expert in the eyes of even those who don't know what they are looking at. Use, trademark and reasonably license compatibility marks and you will make a killing.
A tea kettle runs at about 1500 watts, and takes a few hundred seconds to heat the water. Google does a search in a few hundreds of a second on a few servers which consume less than 1500 watts in total, so you should get a few thousand Google searches for each tea kettle heated. If the article said you got 1,000 searches or 10,000 searches or 100,000 searches it might have been believable, even if still incorrect. But 2 just doesn't make sense, it's as if the article said driving to the supermarket to buy groceries twice used as much energy as going to Mars once.
Of course there are certain fixed cost to generating the indexes used for searches, but doing fewer searches won't help with that. The biggest environmental cost is all those employees Google has, they eat food, breathe, get on airplanes, and most damagingly live in houses. But you really have to offset those against all the time wasted by the mass of humanity to find information before internet search; when you factor, that my best guess would be that each Google search saves on average 100 tons of CO^2 emissions. Of course I just pulled that number out of nowhere, but it's backed up by more reasoning than the wild and wacky guess in the article.
FYI Water has an enormous heat capacity, it takes 4186 Joules to heat 1 liter of water 1 degree C. 1 Watt == 1 Joule/second so if your 1.5 L and 1500 Watt tea kettle were perfectly insulated and you put the electric heating element within it and heated the water from 10 C to 100 C it would take 1.5 * 90 * 4186 => 565110 Joules of energy and 565110 / 1500 = 378 seconds to heat it. Of course, most tea kettles are metal which is a great heat conductor and a terrible heat insulator, so good deal of energy is also lost to the air.
I subscribed for almost two decades.. but it just got thinner and thinner until there was nothing there. The final straw was when the advertising insert was the same size as the magazine itself. In a similar vein, I canceled Linux Journal last year, it hadn't gotten as bad as Dr. Dobb's did by the end, but had been getting worse for every single issue for over a year under a new editor.
Once venerable magazines tend to circle the bowl for a while before they go under, or "go web only". But after they have lost their mojo, they do tend to disappear within half a decade or so.
A city park is a contrived environment intended to promote feelings of well being and safety. In reality they increase crime on their margins and are the least safe places to be in a city at night. While they have their deleterious effects they are like processed food in another way, every element is there to serve a purpose. The landscape architect believed those elements would help the user relax and as a rule they do.
A walk down a city street is like a walk in actual nature, you need to pay attention to your surroundings. Instead of being mortally wounded by a bear or a snake, you get plowed over by a feckless tourist. A small portion of your mind is at all times dedicated to the task. If you engage in some artificial mental test during or shortly after completing this task you will be a little distracted. Duh!
It goes without saying that this study says nothing about the obvious benefits to the mind of living in a city. These are primarily due to your interaction with other people who share your interest or otherwise are part of your social sphere, but are also due to smaller effects such as better overall health (the pollution is balanced by more exercise than average and much better medical care).
I don't know how it is now, but when I went to NYU for my Ph.D. studies there was nothing like this you had to sign. You retained copyright to anything you did, just like professors and tuition paying students did. It was University policy that they owned any patents they filed for on your behalf, but you would get 50% of the royalties. There was very little pressure to apply for patents on your inventions, those who took the University up on it's offer were dreaming of the royalties. Those who didn't were generally the pulled-up-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps sort who felt that patenting their ideas was an ignoble act after their run of good luck in getting where they were (it takes more than just smarts).
I highly doubt MIT coerced this former graduate student into patenting his invention. He probably just got greedy and now the university is seeking a little cost recovery. The issues concerning whether it when it is good idea to patent your inventions have been well understood among engineering and science graduate students for about a decade now, so I'm fairly confident that he was well aware of them.
Wake up, people! Terrorism is committed and supported by people for whom KILLING PEOPLE IS A DEEPLY SATISFYING ACT, and nothing more.
I think you need to visit some conflict zones and talk to people on both sides. And you need to read a little history. While there may be a larger than average representation of sociopaths in terrorist groups, they are far from the majority within any cohesive, and hence long lasting, terrorist group. Also, no terrorist group can survive long without a support base. Throughout history these have melted away as soon as fairly basic human needs are met. Do you really think George Washington could have operated very long without the 30% of the colonists supporting him in his fight against the government and the rule of law?
I'm not saying the hatred goes away as soon as basic needs are met, just talking to some average Turks and Kurds will quickly convince you of that, but in a generation or two it does. How much do we still hate German Americans, or Irish Americans, or Italian Americans? I think you would have a hard time finding anyone under thirty who has any sort of deep seated hatred in America for those groups. Yet many people were bombing, rioting and subverting the US government because of their hatred for these new groups; and this was within my grandparent's lifetime. Most importantly the hatred does not HAVE to go away for there to be peace, the overwhelming majority of people just want to live ordinary boring lives, once they have seen the horrors of war they will fight to keep the peace if the peace allows them to live ordinary boring lives.
BTW I also disagree with the previous poster that most terrorist wars are purely secular. The underlying reasons for the conflicts come down to the same basic human needs, but almost every war is supported by the local deities. The only exceptions I can think of are the American Anarchists and the Russian Communists. I'm sure there are more, but if only because most people believe in some imaginary being, most wars are supported by one or more of them.
You don't teach 1st graders Pascal, you teach them about the difference between a queue and stack. Then you teach them different sorting algorithm which they execute with their hands on wood blocks. And then in later grades you teach them logic and show them how a CPU could do multiplication like they have been taught and how it really does multiplication, then you ask them to rewrite the real algorithm for base-10 and award an Android phone to the kid whose multiplication speed has improved the largest percentage at the end of the week since the last standardized test.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of places in the US with low property taxes. I'm in NYC and my property taxes for the year on my near million dollar home practically non-existent. The main difference between NYC and the places with high property taxes is that we have a local income tax and a local sales tax which pay for the schools. Unlike property taxes, the city needs to ask permission from the state to implement these taxes so we bribe, err "influence", the upstate legislators with a few billion dollars a year in pork for their communities.
You sir have never attempted to opt out of TigerDirect direct marketing.
Think of them as the Typhoid Mary of spammers, they go around spreading your info to all comers but have a sophisticated system of phone call marry go rounds for thwarting all efforts to remove yourself from their claws. I had to move twice and not leave forwarding addresses with the post office before I got them off my tail.
It doesn't matter if GPL is the ideal license structure for open source development. There is a huge amount of "GPLv2 or later" code out there. By licensing my software with a compatible license, I can copy bits of that into my creation without having to rewrite it. When one writes a little utility that doesn't link to anything and when one writes something where it is good practice to rewrite any external code for auditability, like OpenSSH, one is free to choose whatever license one wants. But when building something substantial quickly GPL wins just on the easy incorporation of external code argument alone.
I do realize this same argument could have been made about closed source ten years ago, when you could license helper code easily and cheaply for your closed source project but no open source equivalent existed. But this really means the question is not whether an Apache license is superior to a GPL one, but is it superior enough to go through the enormous effort to redevelop or relicense all that code which exists in the GPL ecosystem now? The people who have answered yes to that question are by and large in the BSD camp. I have great respect for them, but I have to admit that their effort appears more quixotic to me now than it did just a few years ago. Throwing the Apache license in there is silly, it's an outlier and there are good reasons to think that if the project were started today it would be GPL licensed. If you have philosophical objections to forcing sharing either explicitly place the code into the public domain or use a modern variant of the BSD license; using fewer licenses reduces the sharing friction.
As to the value of the GPL's forced sharing, I've also had the experience of having numerous businesses based on software I had a large part in writing. All of them placed their enhancements online, one explicitly contributed back with patches. I believe the one that explicitly contributed back would have done so even if a sharing was not forced, and very little of the code written by the other companies made it back into the project do to low quality. The couple exceptions to that were when one of those less enlightened companies hired a couple of the main contributors to clean up their mess. The only one still in business is the one that explicitly contributed back, those improvements were maintained by the core project lowering the business' maintenance cost, and those improvements were audited and improved as part of the patch submission process. It's hard to draw any conclusions, one might be that smart businesses might contribute back no matter the license and another that one shouldn't care about those that don't because they won't weather the next economic downturn. But reason by anecdote is a weak form of argument and I would really like some scientific studies before I would argue such conclusions be adopted by others.
Name one - just one - instantly recognizable F/OSS app that hasn't been ported to Windows or began as a native Windows app.
MythTV
There have been attempts to port it, but MS Windows is just so darn primitive.
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/77/The_income_taxes_people_really_pay.html
"The average production worker in Sweden pays no income tax at all to the central government."
The personal exemption is a tenth higher that the average income. So unless you are doing better than most your taxes are in the form of sales tax and other flat taxes or fixed fees.
Boston to Washington corridor, Chicago, LA and Frisco. That's about it. Most people haven't seen it and therefore won't trust it.
You do realize most Americans live in those places and the vast majority of the Federal government's revenue is generated in those places?
"gypsum was replaced with fly ash"
Oh Boy! You are aware that the Gypsum in any modern gypsum board plant is made from fly ash, right? It doesn't matter what country it is manufactured in. Gypsum board does not last long when exposed to any moisture and it is hard to avoid things looking a bit boxy when it is your primary wall system. I much prefer plaster myself. But it is difficult to argue with the ubiquitous low cost of a product made from fly ash....
"Desktops are not places for icons! You are a BAD person for wanting to clutter up your workspace with them! Can't you see how much BETTER this new way is? WHY DON'T YOU APPRECIATE OUR WORK TO FREE YOU FROM THE DESKTOP PARADIGM!?!?!?!?!"
That is slightly exaggerated :) And in any case the criticism was listened to and the problem is fixable in KDE 4.2. The default is still to have a blank desktop, but if you change the desktop activity to "Folder View" you can get a useful desktop surface again.
And, maybe it might not be popular mentioning Windows 7 on /., but I really like the feature in Windows 7 beta...
Heh, just try comparing Windows 7 unfavorably to KDE or Gnome or even previous versions of the software in a Windows 7 story and you'll get modded a troll like I did. :P
Anyway, the same feature you liked annoyed me yesterday, but that may just be the old fogey in me. KDE4 annoys me similarly when it shrinks all my windows to postage stamp size at half-alpha which I'm guessing is supposed to allow you to choose an app to go to next, but if you're eyes are only 20-20 with glasses all your apps look pretty much the same and contrast. Maybe these really are good things that just aren't for me. This is opposed to bugs like Windows 7 betas leaving chaff behind it from incomplete redraws to the point that you long for the 'ctrl-l' command of yore, or the KDE4 "alt-tab" handler putting the long list of windows _behind_ the fancy animation; so you can't just see at a glance that you need to press the key combo X times to get to the desired window, instead you need to pay attention to the animation and slowly go through the list one application at a time.
They don't. Applications just need to concern themselves with the details of of the APIs they use, and the guarantees those APIs do or don't provide.
Yup, and the problem has existed with KDE startup for years. I remember the startup files getting trashed when Mandrake first came out and I tried KDE for long enough to get hooked, and it's happened to me a few times a year ever since with every filesystem I've used. I just make my own backups of the .kde directory and fix this manually when it happens. I'm pretty good at this restore by now. Hopefully this bug in KDE will get fixed now that it is causing the KDE project such great embarrassment. I had a silent wish Tso would increase the default commit interval to 10 minutes when the first defenders of the KDE bug started squawking, but he's was too gracious for that.
PS I use a lot of experimental graphics drivers for work, hence lockups during startup are common enough that I probably see this KDE bug more than most KDE users. But they really violate every rule of using config files: 1st. open with minimum permission needed, in this case read only, unless a write is absolutely necessary. 2nd. only update a file when it needs updating. 3rd. when updating a config file make a copy, commit it to disk, and then replace the original, making sure file permissions and ownership are unchanged, then commit the rename if necessary.
PS2 Those computer users saying an fsync will kill performance need to get cluebat applied to them by the nearest programmer. 1st. There will be no fsyncs of config files at startup once the KDE startup is fixed. 2nd. fsyncs on modern filesystems are pretty fast, ext3 is the rare exception to that norm; this will be non-noticable when you apply a settings change. 3rd. These types of programming errors are not the norm; I've graded first and second year computer science classes and each of the three major mistakes made would have lost you 20-30% of your score for the assignment.
http://www.tcf.org.nz/content/d543212c-ab29-42dc-8fa5-de14710785f6.html
Scroll down to "Google" and click, you can also read any of the other comments, they are overwhelmingly in favor of repealing 92A.
Scoop has extracted some choice quotes: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0903/S00207.htm
Credit card, bank transfer, and paypal would all work. There are plenty of ways to transfer money these days.
The worry of course is whether it would be stifling in any way, and why it was a tounge-in-cheek proposal. I don't really know if it would stifle the amount of work that the community could do. I know there would be fewer duplicate tickets, in my experience there are generally about a couple dozen tickets created for any long lived bug, maybe a quarter remain open even after the bug has been fixed because they were never flagged as duplicates. Also hundreds or thousands of incoherent tickets mean that someone experiencing a problem has to wade through more useless search results before either finding the appropriate ticket or finding that a report is in order. Lots of bad tickets also mean less time to look at patches, so people producing patches produce fewer of them.
I have a nice coherent bug report sitting in the gcc bugtracker over a year now, I'd happily pay $100 just to have one of the devs triage it. Instead it is lost in piles of cr*p. The question is how much do old happy hackers like me contribute to a project vs. a can't afford pizza school-kids? When you make my life as a bug reporter easier you make the lots-of-time-no-money-college-kid's life harder. Is that worth it to make the lives of the more dedicated contributors easier as well? I would assume it depends on the project.
When you run an open to post bug tracker you are inundated with idiots who think a bug tracker is a discussion forum as well outright spambots. Some of the "me too" and "I think this is a major bug" posts could be addressed with a "me too" button and counter in the tracker. But..
I have a modest proposal for what we really need:
1/ cold hard cash
2/ nothing appears in the publicly visible tracker until approved by a moderator
The way this would work is when you file a ticket your credit card should have $50 deducted and the ticket hidden from view until it has been approved, if approved you should get $40 back. So if you report a crash without the backtrace or even a description what you were doing when it happened you are out $50. After paying the CC fees any 'profit' could be burned in trashcans to provide heat for the homeless, just so the moderator can not be accused of being unfair for the cash. Similar fees could be applied to ticket comments, say starting at $10 per inane comment and escalating to $100 for repeat offenders. None of these comments would ever have to make it out to the publicly visible face of the tracker, but there are plenty of people who would still keep posting at $100 a pop just to annoy the devs. Burning thousands of dollars in small bills could warm the hands of many a homeless man, and scaled up to a large number of OSS apps would help keep inflation under control.
To the humor impaired: Ok, this is tongue in cheek. My point is that once a project grows past its first few thousand users a public issue tracker becomes a liability. Real bug reports get lost in the constant barrage of junk tickets, but you can't even close those junk tickets because then you have to deal with some luser with a bee in their bonnet.
I've heard and read this "Windows 7 is a service pack to Windows Vista" meme everywhere and I just don't get it. I've only spent a few hours with Vista, and only a few more with "7", but that should be enough for anyone -- I don't really see a full service pack of differences. What really jumps out at me using both of them is how clunky they are compared to KDE or Gnome. Also both seem to have abysmal driver support and lack of any compelling applications. The Microsoft Media Center is also particularly primitive; MythTV had better stability and more features before I got married and had kids (i.e. years ago). All-in-all both operating systems feel like a total blast from the past, with one exception. When testing both last month I felt they were quite a bit less agile than I remembered Windows 2000 Pro being, so I installed it from an old CD. The first thing I noticed was that the UI really did look better, even in 'classic' mode Vista wasted pixels on uneven margins, those same layouts were obviously hand tuned in 2000 and looked good despite having that same 'blast from the distant past' look and feel as Vista/7. And yes, 2000 feels significantly snappier than Vista/7.
PS 1. All tests were on a recent Lenovo T61p with nVidia graphics and the latest drivers available for each of the three Windows distros.
PS 2. I didn't need to try XP, since that was the abomination that drove me away from the Microsoft franchise in the first place.
Let's face it, most doctors are mechanics.
This I agree with.
Really overtrained and hence overpaid mechanics.
I would say "Well trained and hence well paid mechaincs."
I don't think primary care physicians are over trained or over paid, they only make slightly more that Ph.D's in other in demand fields. I don't think specialists are over trained, but I do think many are over-paid. They are over-paid simply because of how our medical system works; I have no hope of paying the $4,000,000 bill if instead of one planned child I end up with twins in the NICU. So I purchase insurance that costs more per year than the $10,000 that a normal pregnancy costs. But now I really don't care if the NICU costs $3,000,000 or $5,000,000, these are my children we're talking about, so I go to the hospital ranked as #1 in NICU care in my area.
Everyone seems to forget the simple fact that we own the spectrum, not the government. What this is essentially doing is making the people pay for something they already own.
Everyone seems to forget that we own the land, not the government. What property rights are essentially doing is making the people pay for something they already own. Umm, no I don't think we have really forgotten the basic idea behind establishing property rights.
The spectrum auctions are a terrible idea, not because private ownership of rivalrous goods is a bad idea, but because there are way too few players for a private property system to be capable of preventing a cabal of owners from cornering the market and charging insane prices like $10-$20 a year (or even more!) for broadband and cell phone service. Until there are at least 1 million market participants with no more than 0.1% of the capital under a single person's control, private property is a very inefficient system. It's better to rent the property in leases that are long enough to allow a private entity to turn a profit 5-10 years, but allow you to increase the rent and split up lots until you reach the market participant count required for private ownership to function efficiently.
With Non-rivalrous "goods" property rights as a concept don't transfer well, see copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. But for spectrum, property rights are a perfect fit. Even if something like ultra-wideband pans out, well that is analogous to airplane overflight over your property (rental or private). We still need commons (parks), like 700 Mhz, 2.6 Ghz, etc. We need wilderness areas, 73Mhz, 608Mhz, 1.4 GHz, etc. But a large portion of the spectrum is set aside for private uses at the highest rate the market will carry.
I've not held one nor seen one update the screen, so I can't speak to those attributes. But I have seen the screen and it is nothing like black text on bright white paper. It's like black text on drab gray paper, it's too low contrast to have any appeal over a printed book. If the reader was priced at $9.99, and a had large selection of $1-$2 books were available (pot-boilers and other commuter fare), I think it would take over the world in short order, but it's just not nearly as user friendly for most people as a book. For blind people and those with the kinds of motor function impairments that make holding a book or turning the pages difficult or impossible it is probably a great improvement, so I wouldn't say it will have no market after the fad fades. And it is of course possible that the display quality and price will improve greatly in the next year or two.
Actually, you should be able to use a standard dimmer switch on these things. Unless someone is doing something I've never seen before, there's no logic in them, just the diode and a resistor. Maybe a capacitor if they were really ambitious.
Nope. LED fixtures on an Edison base incorporate ballasts, just like CFLs, and incandescent dimmers do not work well with any ballast. You are probably making the incorrect assumption that an incandescent dimmer just takes a sine wave with a ~ 170 V peak and outputs a sine wave with a lower peak. It would indeed be easy to create a dimmable ballast if that were the case. But instead these things just cut out portions of the wave creating all kinds of nasties on the house current. This is because it is cheaper to do, and all you need to do to dim an incandescent is to reduce it's average current consumption.
There are a number of solutions to this problem. The one that's most likely to happen is that a new type of dimmer will be created which does something sane for ballasts like reduce the peak voltage, and labeling will be created for both such dimmers and the CFL and LED light bulbs with compatible ballasts. Another solution would be to simply put the dimming entirely within the ballast itself, then the switch would just send a message to the bulb via radio or another out-of-band channel to the bulb circuitry to dim. But while this would be more efficient, this is not going to happen in today's fragmented home automation market without a government mandate, or at least the threat of a government mandate, to standardize.
PS There already are dimmable CFLs and CFL compatible dimmers, I have some in my house. They are not perfect, and both cost 2x as much as conventional CFLs and incandescent only dimmers; and there is no branding to tell the consumer they are compatible. This means you need to do a lot of frustrating web research before you buy the things. I also bought one bright LED Edison base lightbulb to satisfy my curiosity and it was both very expensive and non-dimmable.
PS2 My biggest frustration with buying lighting on the web is that no one shows you a spectral diagram of the light output of the bulbs. If there are any lighting web retailers reading this, please do this and you will win some early adopter business and appear expert in the eyes of even those who don't know what they are looking at. Use, trademark and reasonably license compatibility marks and you will make a killing.
A tea kettle runs at about 1500 watts, and takes a few hundred seconds to heat the water. Google does a search in a few hundreds of a second on a few servers which consume less than 1500 watts in total, so you should get a few thousand Google searches for each tea kettle heated. If the article said you got 1,000 searches or 10,000 searches or 100,000 searches it might have been believable, even if still incorrect. But 2 just doesn't make sense, it's as if the article said driving to the supermarket to buy groceries twice used as much energy as going to Mars once.
Of course there are certain fixed cost to generating the indexes used for searches, but doing fewer searches won't help with that. The biggest environmental cost is all those employees Google has, they eat food, breathe, get on airplanes, and most damagingly live in houses. But you really have to offset those against all the time wasted by the mass of humanity to find information before internet search; when you factor, that my best guess would be that each Google search saves on average 100 tons of CO^2 emissions. Of course I just pulled that number out of nowhere, but it's backed up by more reasoning than the wild and wacky guess in the article.
FYI Water has an enormous heat capacity, it takes 4186 Joules to heat 1 liter of water 1 degree C. 1 Watt == 1 Joule/second so if your 1.5 L and 1500 Watt tea kettle were perfectly insulated and you put the electric heating element within it and heated the water from 10 C to 100 C it would take 1.5 * 90 * 4186 => 565110 Joules of energy and 565110 / 1500 = 378 seconds to heat it. Of course, most tea kettles are metal which is a great heat conductor and a terrible heat insulator, so good deal of energy is also lost to the air.
I subscribed for almost two decades.. but it just got thinner and thinner until there was nothing there. The final straw was when the advertising insert was the same size as the magazine itself. In a similar vein, I canceled Linux Journal last year, it hadn't gotten as bad as Dr. Dobb's did by the end, but had been getting worse for every single issue for over a year under a new editor.
Once venerable magazines tend to circle the bowl for a while before they go under, or "go web only". But after they have lost their mojo, they do tend to disappear within half a decade or so.
Please no coffee! adjust your joke yes three sugars detection meter.
A city park is a contrived environment intended to promote feelings of well being and safety. In reality they increase crime on their margins and are the least safe places to be in a city at night. While they have their deleterious effects they are like processed food in another way, every element is there to serve a purpose. The landscape architect believed those elements would help the user relax and as a rule they do.
A walk down a city street is like a walk in actual nature, you need to pay attention to your surroundings. Instead of being mortally wounded by a bear or a snake, you get plowed over by a feckless tourist. A small portion of your mind is at all times dedicated to the task. If you engage in some artificial mental test during or shortly after completing this task you will be a little distracted. Duh!
It goes without saying that this study says nothing about the obvious benefits to the mind of living in a city. These are primarily due to your interaction with other people who share your interest or otherwise are part of your social sphere, but are also due to smaller effects such as better overall health (the pollution is balanced by more exercise than average and much better medical care).
I don't know how it is now, but when I went to NYU for my Ph.D. studies there was nothing like this you had to sign. You retained copyright to anything you did, just like professors and tuition paying students did. It was University policy that they owned any patents they filed for on your behalf, but you would get 50% of the royalties. There was very little pressure to apply for patents on your inventions, those who took the University up on it's offer were dreaming of the royalties. Those who didn't were generally the pulled-up-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps sort who felt that patenting their ideas was an ignoble act after their run of good luck in getting where they were (it takes more than just smarts).
I highly doubt MIT coerced this former graduate student into patenting his invention. He probably just got greedy and now the university is seeking a little cost recovery. The issues concerning whether it when it is good idea to patent your inventions have been well understood among engineering and science graduate students for about a decade now, so I'm fairly confident that he was well aware of them.
Wake up, people! Terrorism is committed and supported by people for whom KILLING PEOPLE IS A DEEPLY SATISFYING ACT, and nothing more.
I think you need to visit some conflict zones and talk to people on both sides. And you need to read a little history. While there may be a larger than average representation of sociopaths in terrorist groups, they are far from the majority within any cohesive, and hence long lasting, terrorist group. Also, no terrorist group can survive long without a support base. Throughout history these have melted away as soon as fairly basic human needs are met. Do you really think George Washington could have operated very long without the 30% of the colonists supporting him in his fight against the government and the rule of law?
I'm not saying the hatred goes away as soon as basic needs are met, just talking to some average Turks and Kurds will quickly convince you of that, but in a generation or two it does. How much do we still hate German Americans, or Irish Americans, or Italian Americans? I think you would have a hard time finding anyone under thirty who has any sort of deep seated hatred in America for those groups. Yet many people were bombing, rioting and subverting the US government because of their hatred for these new groups; and this was within my grandparent's lifetime. Most importantly the hatred does not HAVE to go away for there to be peace, the overwhelming majority of people just want to live ordinary boring lives, once they have seen the horrors of war they will fight to keep the peace if the peace allows them to live ordinary boring lives.
BTW I also disagree with the previous poster that most terrorist wars are purely secular. The underlying reasons for the conflicts come down to the same basic human needs, but almost every war is supported by the local deities. The only exceptions I can think of are the American Anarchists and the Russian Communists. I'm sure there are more, but if only because most people believe in some imaginary being, most wars are supported by one or more of them.
You don't teach 1st graders Pascal, you teach them about the difference between a queue and stack. Then you teach them different sorting algorithm which they execute with their hands on wood blocks. And then in later grades you teach them logic and show them how a CPU could do multiplication like they have been taught and how it really does multiplication, then you ask them to rewrite the real algorithm for base-10 and award an Android phone to the kid whose multiplication speed has improved the largest percentage at the end of the week since the last standardized test.