The total output of the sun is 3.827×10^26 Watts, almost four billion times (actually 3,827,000,000 times) as much power as falls on the planet. (if your numbers are correct)
I wouldn't call 1/3827000000th a "significant fraction of the heat of the sun"
As soon as we reach even 1% of the sun's power output, then I'll be impressed.
Switch back and forth between the two, it's kind of spooky. I realize that they're probably the same company but the logo, the layout, everything is the same. It stands to reason though that a chip that can be used for extremely efficient cooling could be used in reverse for extremely efficient power generation.
Then you were failing at something that school is also supposed to teach you along with reading, writing, and 'rithmetic: Self-discipline. If there's one thing that school, both high school and college, taught me, it is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do
Six to eight hours a day, every day for twelve years isn't "sometimes" -- it's all the time, and it's comparable to mental imprisonment for some people.
I agree with just about everything else you said however.
That might be enough pasty white skin to compensate for the melting polar caps and beneficially alter the albedo of the earth, even if only for a few hours.
I always knew that nerds would ensure the end of global warming, just not quite like this...
Anarchy doesn't forbid society, it forbids government. A government is, simply defined, an entity which has a monopoly on force. A government uses this monopoly to restrict freedoms or coerce certain actions from other people. Anarchy is the absence of this entity and its force-monopoly. There is nothing about anarchy that would preclude the formation of social groups, it's just that all of the created groups would be completely consensual and people could join or leave the groups at will, without any harm or artificially imposed repercussions.
Anarchy is not a pipe dream, because anarchy is not chaos. Actually, dictionary.com provides a good definition of anarchy: a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.
Riches could still be generated by societal structures, the innate human psychological "need" for society and organization could still be realized--it would all simply be voluntary instead of forced. Something about that tickles me in a warm, fuzzy kind of way. People cooperating for a common good not because they have to or because they feel obligated to or because they feel frightened into doing so, but because they want to.
It may be the same reason that you can't be bothered to capitalize or use apostrophes.
cant [kant] -noun 1. insincere, esp. conventional expressions of enthusiasm for high ideals, goodness, or piety. 2. the private language of the underworld. 3. the phraseology peculiar to a particular class, party, profession, etc.: the cant of the fashion industry. 4. whining or singsong speech, esp. of beggars. -verb (used without object) 5. to talk hypocritically. 6. to speak in the whining or singsong tone of a beggar; beg.
So the guy who started the Macintosh project at Apple isn't a technocrat? A guy who thinks that computers shouldn't have to boot up doesn't have a good idea?
It is, in fact, only recently that we have had flashmem and the concept of keeping your 'bootfiles' on a seperate flash partition to read from for a quick boot has been a realistic and close to mainstream idea for the desktop.
Oh, really? So those old IBM PCs didn't come with a BASIC environment in the ROM? What about the Commodore 64? Putting an operating environment on a ROM or EEPROM is not a new idea. A PDA doesn't generally need time to boot either, so why does a desktop machine?
"Why should you have to double-click anything? What does Ctrl+D mean one thing in one program and a completely different thing in another? And what's the point of the Yes/No confirmation if the user is in the habit of clicking Yes without thinking about it?" All of those things make sense in the context they are being used in, and they're relatively intuitive. After all, it's not the programmers fault the user is an idiot, especially with something as simple as a yes/no dialog box, as long as the dialog box is written in language comprehensible for the designed userbase.
Is there any way for the user to know what the active context is, though? Do they get a notification that says "In this application, these hotkeys mean X where in the application you were just using they meant Y" ? The yes/no dialog box is an interesting point, and I'll use this as a hypothetical situation: If all of the operating system yes/no dialogs have "Yes" as the default button, should all applications on that operating system follow the same convention? If not, why not? Why is it that there is no conventional standard for applications in this regard? Is it because some Yes/No dialogs have ask a positive question while others ask a negative one? "Do you want to save the changes to this file?" vs "Do you want to discard the changes to this file?"
Computers both can be and should be easy to use. They should be a tool we use to get work done, like a hammer or a shovel. Even a more complicated tool like a multimeter or an oscilliscope is ready to be used at the instant that you turn it on. There is no reason why computers cannot be the same way for the significant majority of tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, instant messaging). Things don't need to be as complicated as they've become.
That way if you see a green unit for sale on E-bay - you (and E-bay) knows it's stolen property.
Do you have any idea what $100 amounts to in some of the countries that are being targeted for deployment? To say that you "know it's stolen property" and not "might be stolen property, but could be a sale by the original owner" is idiotic.
If the information is made publicly available in an easy-to-use format, it isn't inconceivable to hack together an alerter that would notify me by SMS of anything going on within a few blocks of my residence or another area of interest. If the information is obfuscated, such a useful tool could not as easily be created, although it still may be possible.
Maybe it would be nice if they had more adults than just the school staff available to console the children? Maybe it would be nice if I were able to arrive on the scene before the emergency personnel and I could help people to safety. Maybe I could hit up a grocery store and buy hundreds of bottles of water to bring some comfort to those that have met with this terrible situation. The list goes on. People can help each other if they choose to, but they need the right information and they need it in a timely fashion.
Yes, sure, a grief counselor is a better recipient of a child's troubles than a layman, but a layman is better than nobody when the shit hits the fan. I want the option to assist my community when they are in need of my assistance, I don't have the selfish tunnel vision that many people do. I'm not saying that I will drop everything at the hint of an emergency, but I am saying that I want the option to do so, and I want that option immediately.
There's a lag time between when a 911 call is placed and the authorities arrive. If I get a message on my cellphone or PDA that something is going on at my house or my hypothetical child's school when I'm a couple blocks away, I can respond immediately. In a real emergency when emergency personnel have not yet arrived, all we have is each other, and being able to support one another in a time of need is worth a tremendous amount. Even if I'm just helping a burn victim to a comfortable seat or using the available on-site fire extinguishers to put out a flaming pet or human being, I'm contributing towards a good purpose in the absence of those that can.
It would be wonderful if calling 911 resulted in an instantaneous response, but this is not the truth of the situation at all.
Maybe I have materials in my home that can complicate the firefighting process and I should be able to notify the fire department ASAP so they don't walk into an unknown situation. Maybe one of my neighbors has a key to my apartment and I would like them to go inside and grab my pet or wake my girlfriend/wife because the fire department hasn't shown up yet? Maybe I just want to get more details about what's going on to figure out what action I need to take? Maybe my kid's school hasn't yet let out, but I would like to notify the school not to send my child home because said home is on fire? This has nothing to do with porn collections, it has to do with human lives, psyches and damage control.
Also, there's a delay between when a 911 call is placed and the fire/police/whatever are dispatched and the time when they get there. A house in my parents' neighborhood nearly burned to the ground before the fire department showed up, 20 minutes after the call was placed. When time is of the essence, having the information ASAP is of significant importance.
I recommend the Litestep alternative shell. Please see the comment I wrote to another commenter here for details about installers, upgrades, and a little bit of recent news on development.
Litestep is a modular shell composed of many DLLs. There are multiple VWMs available for Litestep, with ckVWM and rabidVWM coming immediately to mind. I use rabidVWM myself, as it has native support for iconified windows in the VWM display (each window is a miniature picture of what the actual window looks like). I run a 2x2 VWM using a heavily modified austerity (the default) theme. I am working on creating a new theme that meets all of my needs, which is something I highly encourage all users of LiteStep to do, even if they start by simply modifying the austerity theme as I have.
As far as piecing together the latest version of Litestep, the installer here gives you 0.24.7 RC1, which you need to update manually to 0.24.7 Final from here, which is as simple as quitting litestep and using a couple explorer windows to drag and drop the updated files into the Litestep folder. As far as setting the shell, the installer gives you a "setshell" utility that modifies the registry and the win.ini file for you, to use whatever executable you specify. If you want your shell to be the World of Warcraft executable (I know somebody who did this, no joke) then that is totally fine and painlessly easy.
As noted here, a lot of the core modules are under heavy development for a 2006 release, and there's a new installer called LOSI (Litestep Open Source Installer) that is also under development.
Why shouldn't the public know what's going on in their city or locale?
If a fire broke out at my apartment complex, I don't want to know five minutes from now, I want to know right fucking now. If there's been a shooting at my (hypothetical) kid's school, I don't want to know five minutes from now, I want to know NOW. What makes "public city officials" more special than the rest of us when it comes to information that could be used to adequately protect our families and friends better than the spread-thin public servants could?
If we have access to information in realtime and there's a number of simultaneous robberies or other police emergencies and the police are all out doing their policey thing and then a riot breaks out on 5th Avenue, don't you want to be able to call your family that lives on 8th Avenue before the rioters get there, to tell them to stay away from the windows and lock the doors? Keeping this information from the public is completely stupid, it's just one more opportunity to mention the wonderful war on terror, something which itself has a more frightening affect on the public than any terrorist act they've ever witnessed or been close to.
If you're hitting 35C ambient temperature, your internal temps shouldn't be much over 55C unless you have inadequate air circulation. Get some SMART monitors on the hard drives to watch their temperature sensors and use an application like Motherboard Monitor to alert you when you approach your CPU's critical temperature. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Speaking only from my own experience, quality hard drives have operating temperatures up to 60 Celsius. A Dual-Core Opteron can operate anywhere from 65C to 83C depending on what chip you have (PDF). A word of advice: larger fans at lower RPMs tend to push more air and are quieter. If noise isn't a concern, then go with larger fans at higher RPMs. Also, if you can maintain a higher total pressure inside the server case it will help prevent dust from settling and limit how often you need to pop the top and clean it out, but it also puts more stress on the intake fans which may lead to more rapid failures. I've never collected statistics on this sort of thing so the increase in failure rate may be negligible.
Developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.
Having developers on a merry-go-round between projects is probably a good reason why their products never make it past the Beta stage (which is terrible).
Developers aren't on a merry-go-round between projects. Developers have the option of changing teams or projects at will--this doesn't mean they will. In my limited (three and a half weeks so far) experience, I don't think that project changes occur that frequently.
One meeting a week should be sufficient. Three meetings a week spells inefficiency and poor process.
Oh, this makes complete sense. Of course there's only one group of people you need to meet with in a week, there couldn't possibly be a reason for you to meet with the development teams and test teams separately, and then the internationalization team separately after that. You're totally right, one meeting a week is all you need, let's herd 20 people into a single conference room and try to accomplish something meaningful in thirty minutes. What the fuck are you smoking? (Can I have some?)
There is tasty food everywhere in this world. Why does it need to be constantly emphasized that Google has tasty food? Google is a software company, not a restaurant. And secondly, the author makes it seem that in crunch periods, companies other than Google do not allow their employees to have lunch and dinner. I somehow suspect (legally, personally, ethically, etc.) that is not the case. Are the employees of EA starving during their crunch periods?:)
Yes, there is tasty food everywhere. There is also traffic, unavailable seating, lines, cash registers, the ordering, the waiting, and an annoying dolt in front of you bumbling with his wallet trying to find some way to pay for what he just ordered. There's the need to spend money to get the tasty food. There's also the concern about whether or not what you're eating is healthy or not. And then there's google's cafeteria, where you walk in, scoop what you want onto your plate (it's all buffet-style at the campus where I work), and have no trouble finding a place to sit and eat because they have more seats than they do employees. The food is also crafted to be reasonably healthy. There are no Big Macs at google. Today, I had sweet mirin-garlic roasted duck, corn on the cob, mixed stir-fried vegetables, white rice and a cup of salmon chowder. I didn't have to think about it at all: I didn't have to make sure I had plenty of money in my wallet, whether or not this restaurant accepts debit cards, how long I'll stand in line at the register, none of it ever transpired. I was in and out in less than five minutes, irregardless of the 20 other people getting food at the time.
You may not think it's that cool, but not having to worry about what I'm going to eat today, not wondering if I'm going to be hungry later (and if I am, there are enough complimentary snacks to sate me over between meals), not having to concern myself with it at all is a huge load off my shoulders. I can focus completely on my work, knowing that other things are already taken care of for me. That is totally fucking cool, as far as I'm concerned.
Using Google as an example to demonstrate how Agile is good, however, is a mistake. Subscribing to Google's use of Agile is a recipe for disaster.
It is a recipe for disaster, especially if the chef following that recipe is uninitiated to the entire mentality behind the recipe. It can be like asking a French chef who makes French foods to cook a Japanese meal, but if done correctly it's more like asking a Japanese chef to make a Japanese meal. Speaking of which, the teriyaki chicken we had the week before last was delicious.
Participating in the census is voluntary, and having your paper stored by TurnItIn is not. If they want to pay the creators of the papers for their intellectual property (say $20 a paper) then I think it would be more legitimate.
To use your census analogy, what's happening here is like the Census Bureau having a deal with your employer (or an organization you're a member of) to receive your demographic information without your awareness or consent, and then retaining that information as well as publishing portions of it for statistical purposes. If their computers get cracked and everyone finds out every last dirty demographic secret about you, oh well!
I read about a great solution some time ago, but I couldn't remember where. It might have been here, it might have been digg. Regardless, I found the link with the google query "power monitoring system"
It's very involved and detailed and it looks like anyone who tried to replicate the system would have to spend quite a bit of money, but then you'd have access to all of the data you could ever want about your power consumption.
I'll include the last page of the linked site here, just for your own edification:
Wisdom
So what did I learn from this project that I can pass on to other folks crazy enough to try this?
* DON'T MESS WITH HOUSE WIRING UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
* While my software was sort of overkill, I've got to say that having high resolution historical data for every circuit in my house has been very informative.
* Keep in mind that when it comes to friends and family, 'informative' is a relative term. Although you might find it very 'informative' to know that your wife left the lights on in the living room three out of four nights last week, she will probably not think so. I've found it better to save my geek points for things like "honey, don't you think we should have a raid server?"
* Just because you know how your electric bill breaks down now, don't expect to see any great savings. In my case most of the power went to my computer stuff. I will say that as a result I've rotated out some older dual cpu servers for lower power single cpu boxes and have tried to consolidate server functionality quite a bit.
* If you know modbus and you don't need something quite as sophisticated as what I put together, the Veris board has a bunch of features built in such as alarm levels, etc. For a simple home system, this can make the software part of things quite a bit easier.
The "color temperature" is the heat to which a blackbody radiator would have to be heated in order to produce a color spectrum similar to the rated source. Somewhat confusingly, the cooler the blackbody, the "warmer" (more infrared/red/orange) the color of light; the hotter the blackbody, the "cooler" the color of light (more blue/uv).
Some approximations: - 2300K to 3000K is the "soft white" range - 3000K to 4000K is the "cool white" range - 4000K to 5000K-5500K is the "daylight" range - 5000K-5500K onwards is often called "super daylight"
There are no official terms to describe these spectrums, unfortunately--there is no standard.
I, personally, prefer 5000K and higher, as they are very similar to noonday sun in terms of their spectral output.
Not even going to read the article
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
I'm not even going to read the article, because the summary tells me that the article is crap.
Here's why: there's a difference between an operating system, and an operating environment. Back in the old days, for example, Windows ran on top of DOS. DOS was the Disk Operating System, and Windows was the operating environment which made it easier to work within that operating system. Adaptive environments have already been attempted with minimal success (read all the other comments about personalized menus). It's very difficult for a computer to "know" what you want it to do at all times, since all it does is compute. It reacts to input, period. Without input, without stimulus, it is able to accomplish nothing.
I suppose that one example of not interrupting you with email is novel, but how would you propose to accomplish this? How does your computer know which emails you do and don't want to be interrupted with, without you telling it? You might want your old college buddy's mail to pop up, no matter how waist-deep in code you are, but if the lady in HR bothers you about your direct deposit one more time, you might snap. How does your computer know that? Without the long, drawn-out process of programming (or "teaching" or whatever you want to call it) the computer, the computer won't intrinsically know how to respond to various conditions. Without explicitly telling it "I don't want to be interrupted unless it's bob" then the computer will never know.
Admittedly, having additional keyboard buttons to conveniently toggle email alert functionality would be a step in the right direction, as I don't think anybody wants to press Contrl+Alt+Shift+NOMAIL at the same time. Email alerts, being global things, should have the innate functionality to be turned on or off globally, whether you're in a full-screen command line or you're browsing the web. Adding more keys to the keyboard may seem a little intimidating, but wouldn't everyone like it if they had some keys on their keyboard that they instantly knew the functionality of? How about a toggle column down the left side, to toggle email alerts, IM alerts, and so on? Move away from the generic "function keys" and move towards "functionality keys." Maybe this would be a decent use for the new Optimus keypad.
I'm just rambling now, but my point is this: There's a difference between an operating environment and an operating system. KDE and Gnome are open-source operating environments which can be altered in any way anyone sees fit. Knock yourself out.
The problem is that the technology isn't safe, nor is it secure.
I highly suggest you watch the documentary Future of Food.
Here's how the documentary starts: "We used to be a nation of farmers, but now it's less than 2% of the population of the united states, so a lot of us don't know what it takes to grow food. Over 12,000 years ago people began planting and saving seed. Agriculture flowered and civilizations were born. In China, thousands of varieties of rice were grown. Over 5,000 kinds of potatoes were cultivated worldwide. In the US alone, more than 7,000 varieties of apples were grown in the 19th century.
In the 20th century, the face of farming underwent a radical change. The manufacture of nitrogen-based bombs in World War I led to the development of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers. Nerve gas, developed during world war II, was slightly modified to make insecticides. DDT was the hero of its generation. New technologies promised higher yields, increased food production, cheaper prices and greater availability. By the mid-20th century, these technologies along with new developments in plant breeding led to the green revolution."
It continues:
"The next several decades saw a remarkable increase in production. Year after year, huge fields were planted with only one variety of crop. These monocultures created an ecological vacuum that insects and disease could exploit. This uniformity has led to some of the greatest agricultural catastrophes of mankind. In the mid 1800's, very few varieties of potato were cultivated in Ireland. When they became diseased, 1 million people died. When the same potato blight attacked Peru, they suffered fewer consequences. Today, only four varieties of potato are widely grown. 97% of the varieties of vegetables grown at the beginning of the 20th century are now extinct. Genetic uniformity leads to an increased vulnerability to insects and disease. Farmers found themselves trapped on the pesticide treadmill. The more they sprayed, the more they had to spray. The increased use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides increased costs, polluted water and created health risks.
Then in the 1970's, Monsanto introduced RoundUp. Because of its ability to kill most weeds, it became one of the most popular herbicides in history. In the mid-1990's, building on technologies that used gene splicing, the green revolution turned into the gene revolution. Capitalizing on the new technology, Monsanto genetically modified its seeds to be RoundUp Ready. Normally RoundUp kills anything green, but if a plant is RoundUp ready, when it is sprayed, it doesn't die. Now the company that sells you the herbicide, also sells you the seed. With Monsanto's BT corn, the corn itself is registered as an insecticide. This is because every cell has been engineered to manufacture BT, a natural bacterial toxin. If a corn borer eats any part of the plant, it will die."
So here's the thing: If a company genetically engineers the "perfect" apple tree, everyone will start to grow that apple tree. Eventually a biological mutation will occur (it's only a matter of time) that will allow some pest or disease to destroy these apple trees. Genetic biodiversity is required in order to have a secure food source for an indefinite period. During the great potato blights of the mid 1800's, it was the regions that preserved genetic biodiversity that were able to survive these catastrophes. Something similar is happening now with Bananas as happened with potatoes before. I quote from wikipedia: "In the past, the banana was a highly sustainable crop with a long plantation life and stable yields year round. However with the arrival of the Black Sigatoka fungus, banana production in eastern Africa has fallen by over 40%."
A lack of genetic diversity is a huge risk. While these GE plants may be resistant to existing pests and diseases, evolution is very good at finding ways to exploit the new system and
Slashdot Mirror
0 parts of 1 is 0.
0 parts of 2 is 0.
0/1 = 0/2 says 0 = 0, not 1=2.
The total output of the sun is 3.827×10^26 Watts, almost four billion times (actually 3,827,000,000 times) as much power as falls on the planet. (if your numbers are correct)
I wouldn't call 1/3827000000th a "significant fraction of the heat of the sun"
As soon as we reach even 1% of the sun's power output, then I'll be impressed.
I thought that website looked familiar to this one: http://www.coolchips.gi/
Switch back and forth between the two, it's kind of spooky. I realize that they're probably the same company but the logo, the layout, everything is the same. It stands to reason though that a chip that can be used for extremely efficient cooling could be used in reverse for extremely efficient power generation.
Then you were failing at something that school is also supposed to teach you along with reading, writing, and 'rithmetic: Self-discipline. If there's one thing that school, both high school and college, taught me, it is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do
Six to eight hours a day, every day for twelve years isn't "sometimes" -- it's all the time, and it's comparable to mental imprisonment for some people.
I agree with just about everything else you said however.
(note: I am one of those "weird exceptions.")
That might be enough pasty white skin to compensate for the melting polar caps and beneficially alter the albedo of the earth, even if only for a few hours.
I always knew that nerds would ensure the end of global warming, just not quite like this...
Anarchy doesn't forbid society, it forbids government. A government is, simply defined, an entity which has a monopoly on force. A government uses this monopoly to restrict freedoms or coerce certain actions from other people. Anarchy is the absence of this entity and its force-monopoly. There is nothing about anarchy that would preclude the formation of social groups, it's just that all of the created groups would be completely consensual and people could join or leave the groups at will, without any harm or artificially imposed repercussions.
Anarchy is not a pipe dream, because anarchy is not chaos. Actually, dictionary.com provides a good definition of anarchy: a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.
Riches could still be generated by societal structures, the innate human psychological "need" for society and organization could still be realized--it would all simply be voluntary instead of forced. Something about that tickles me in a warm, fuzzy kind of way. People cooperating for a common good not because they have to or because they feel obligated to or because they feel frightened into doing so, but because they want to.
It may be the same reason that you can't be bothered to capitalize or use apostrophes.
cant [kant] -noun
1. insincere, esp. conventional expressions of enthusiasm for high ideals, goodness, or piety.
2. the private language of the underworld.
3. the phraseology peculiar to a particular class, party, profession, etc.: the cant of the fashion industry.
4. whining or singsong speech, esp. of beggars.
-verb (used without object)
5. to talk hypocritically.
6. to speak in the whining or singsong tone of a beggar; beg.
can't [kant, kahnt]
1. contraction of cannot.
So the guy who started the Macintosh project at Apple isn't a technocrat?
A guy who thinks that computers shouldn't have to boot up doesn't have a good idea?
It is, in fact, only recently that we have had flashmem and the concept of keeping your 'bootfiles' on a seperate flash partition to read from for a quick boot has been a realistic and close to mainstream idea for the desktop.
Oh, really? So those old IBM PCs didn't come with a BASIC environment in the ROM? What about the Commodore 64? Putting an operating environment on a ROM or EEPROM is not a new idea. A PDA doesn't generally need time to boot either, so why does a desktop machine?
"Why should you have to double-click anything? What does Ctrl+D mean one thing in one program and a completely different thing in another? And what's the point of the Yes/No confirmation if the user is in the habit of clicking Yes without thinking about it?"
All of those things make sense in the context they are being used in, and they're relatively intuitive. After all, it's not the programmers fault the user is an idiot, especially with something as simple as a yes/no dialog box, as long as the dialog box is written in language comprehensible for the designed userbase.
Is there any way for the user to know what the active context is, though? Do they get a notification that says "In this application, these hotkeys mean X where in the application you were just using they meant Y" ? The yes/no dialog box is an interesting point, and I'll use this as a hypothetical situation: If all of the operating system yes/no dialogs have "Yes" as the default button, should all applications on that operating system follow the same convention? If not, why not? Why is it that there is no conventional standard for applications in this regard? Is it because some Yes/No dialogs have ask a positive question while others ask a negative one? "Do you want to save the changes to this file?" vs "Do you want to discard the changes to this file?"
Computers both can be and should be easy to use. They should be a tool we use to get work done, like a hammer or a shovel. Even a more complicated tool like a multimeter or an oscilliscope is ready to be used at the instant that you turn it on. There is no reason why computers cannot be the same way for the significant majority of tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, instant messaging). Things don't need to be as complicated as they've become.
That way if you see a green unit for sale on E-bay - you (and E-bay) knows it's stolen property.
Do you have any idea what $100 amounts to in some of the countries that are being targeted for deployment? To say that you "know it's stolen property" and not "might be stolen property, but could be a sale by the original owner" is idiotic.
--http-user=USER
--http-password=PASS
--referer=URL
If the information is made publicly available in an easy-to-use format, it isn't inconceivable to hack together an alerter that would notify me by SMS of anything going on within a few blocks of my residence or another area of interest. If the information is obfuscated, such a useful tool could not as easily be created, although it still may be possible.
Maybe it would be nice if they had more adults than just the school staff available to console the children? Maybe it would be nice if I were able to arrive on the scene before the emergency personnel and I could help people to safety. Maybe I could hit up a grocery store and buy hundreds of bottles of water to bring some comfort to those that have met with this terrible situation. The list goes on. People can help each other if they choose to, but they need the right information and they need it in a timely fashion.
Yes, sure, a grief counselor is a better recipient of a child's troubles than a layman, but a layman is better than nobody when the shit hits the fan. I want the option to assist my community when they are in need of my assistance, I don't have the selfish tunnel vision that many people do. I'm not saying that I will drop everything at the hint of an emergency, but I am saying that I want the option to do so, and I want that option immediately.
There's a lag time between when a 911 call is placed and the authorities arrive. If I get a message on my cellphone or PDA that something is going on at my house or my hypothetical child's school when I'm a couple blocks away, I can respond immediately. In a real emergency when emergency personnel have not yet arrived, all we have is each other, and being able to support one another in a time of need is worth a tremendous amount. Even if I'm just helping a burn victim to a comfortable seat or using the available on-site fire extinguishers to put out a flaming pet or human being, I'm contributing towards a good purpose in the absence of those that can.
It would be wonderful if calling 911 resulted in an instantaneous response, but this is not the truth of the situation at all.
Maybe I have materials in my home that can complicate the firefighting process and I should be able to notify the fire department ASAP so they don't walk into an unknown situation. Maybe one of my neighbors has a key to my apartment and I would like them to go inside and grab my pet or wake my girlfriend/wife because the fire department hasn't shown up yet? Maybe I just want to get more details about what's going on to figure out what action I need to take? Maybe my kid's school hasn't yet let out, but I would like to notify the school not to send my child home because said home is on fire? This has nothing to do with porn collections, it has to do with human lives, psyches and damage control.
Also, there's a delay between when a 911 call is placed and the fire/police/whatever are dispatched and the time when they get there. A house in my parents' neighborhood nearly burned to the ground before the fire department showed up, 20 minutes after the call was placed. When time is of the essence, having the information ASAP is of significant importance.
I recommend the Litestep alternative shell. Please see the comment I wrote to another commenter here for details about installers, upgrades, and a little bit of recent news on development.
Litestep is a modular shell composed of many DLLs. There are multiple VWMs available for Litestep, with ckVWM and rabidVWM coming immediately to mind. I use rabidVWM myself, as it has native support for iconified windows in the VWM display (each window is a miniature picture of what the actual window looks like). I run a 2x2 VWM using a heavily modified austerity (the default) theme. I am working on creating a new theme that meets all of my needs, which is something I highly encourage all users of LiteStep to do, even if they start by simply modifying the austerity theme as I have.
As far as piecing together the latest version of Litestep, the installer here gives you 0.24.7 RC1, which you need to update manually to 0.24.7 Final from here, which is as simple as quitting litestep and using a couple explorer windows to drag and drop the updated files into the Litestep folder. As far as setting the shell, the installer gives you a "setshell" utility that modifies the registry and the win.ini file for you, to use whatever executable you specify. If you want your shell to be the World of Warcraft executable (I know somebody who did this, no joke) then that is totally fine and painlessly easy.
As noted here, a lot of the core modules are under heavy development for a 2006 release, and there's a new installer called LOSI (Litestep Open Source Installer) that is also under development.
Why shouldn't the public know what's going on in their city or locale?
If a fire broke out at my apartment complex, I don't want to know five minutes from now, I want to know right fucking now. If there's been a shooting at my (hypothetical) kid's school, I don't want to know five minutes from now, I want to know NOW. What makes "public city officials" more special than the rest of us when it comes to information that could be used to adequately protect our families and friends better than the spread-thin public servants could?
If we have access to information in realtime and there's a number of simultaneous robberies or other police emergencies and the police are all out doing their policey thing and then a riot breaks out on 5th Avenue, don't you want to be able to call your family that lives on 8th Avenue before the rioters get there, to tell them to stay away from the windows and lock the doors? Keeping this information from the public is completely stupid, it's just one more opportunity to mention the wonderful war on terror, something which itself has a more frightening affect on the public than any terrorist act they've ever witnessed or been close to.
If you're hitting 35C ambient temperature, your internal temps shouldn't be much over 55C unless you have inadequate air circulation. Get some SMART monitors on the hard drives to watch their temperature sensors and use an application like Motherboard Monitor to alert you when you approach your CPU's critical temperature. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Speaking only from my own experience, quality hard drives have operating temperatures up to 60 Celsius. A Dual-Core Opteron can operate anywhere from 65C to 83C depending on what chip you have (PDF). A word of advice: larger fans at lower RPMs tend to push more air and are quieter. If noise isn't a concern, then go with larger fans at higher RPMs. Also, if you can maintain a higher total pressure inside the server case it will help prevent dust from settling and limit how often you need to pop the top and clean it out, but it also puts more stress on the intake fans which may lead to more rapid failures. I've never collected statistics on this sort of thing so the increase in failure rate may be negligible.
Developers aren't on a merry-go-round between projects. Developers have the option of changing teams or projects at will--this doesn't mean they will. In my limited (three and a half weeks so far) experience, I don't think that project changes occur that frequently.
Oh, this makes complete sense. Of course there's only one group of people you need to meet with in a week, there couldn't possibly be a reason for you to meet with the development teams and test teams separately, and then the internationalization team separately after that. You're totally right, one meeting a week is all you need, let's herd 20 people into a single conference room and try to accomplish something meaningful in thirty minutes. What the fuck are you smoking? (Can I have some?)
Yes, there is tasty food everywhere. There is also traffic, unavailable seating, lines, cash registers, the ordering, the waiting, and an annoying dolt in front of you bumbling with his wallet trying to find some way to pay for what he just ordered. There's the need to spend money to get the tasty food. There's also the concern about whether or not what you're eating is healthy or not. And then there's google's cafeteria, where you walk in, scoop what you want onto your plate (it's all buffet-style at the campus where I work), and have no trouble finding a place to sit and eat because they have more seats than they do employees. The food is also crafted to be reasonably healthy. There are no Big Macs at google. Today, I had sweet mirin-garlic roasted duck, corn on the cob, mixed stir-fried vegetables, white rice and a cup of salmon chowder. I didn't have to think about it at all: I didn't have to make sure I had plenty of money in my wallet, whether or not this restaurant accepts debit cards, how long I'll stand in line at the register, none of it ever transpired. I was in and out in less than five minutes, irregardless of the 20 other people getting food at the time.
You may not think it's that cool, but not having to worry about what I'm going to eat today, not wondering if I'm going to be hungry later (and if I am, there are enough complimentary snacks to sate me over between meals), not having to concern myself with it at all is a huge load off my shoulders. I can focus completely on my work, knowing that other things are already taken care of for me. That is totally fucking cool, as far as I'm concerned.
Using Google as an example to demonstrate how Agile is good, however, is a mistake. Subscribing to Google's use of Agile is a recipe for disaster.
It is a recipe for disaster, especially if the chef following that recipe is uninitiated to the entire mentality behind the recipe. It can be like asking a French chef who makes French foods to cook a Japanese meal, but if done correctly it's more like asking a Japanese chef to make a Japanese meal. Speaking of which, the teriyaki chicken we had the week before last was delicious.
Participating in the census is voluntary, and having your paper stored by TurnItIn is not. If they want to pay the creators of the papers for their intellectual property (say $20 a paper) then I think it would be more legitimate.
To use your census analogy, what's happening here is like the Census Bureau having a deal with your employer (or an organization you're a member of) to receive your demographic information without your awareness or consent, and then retaining that information as well as publishing portions of it for statistical purposes. If their computers get cracked and everyone finds out every last dirty demographic secret about you, oh well!
I read about a great solution some time ago, but I couldn't remember where. It might have been here, it might have been digg. Regardless, I found the link with the google query "power monitoring system"
http://www.kondra.com/circuit/circuit.html
It's very involved and detailed and it looks like anyone who tried to replicate the system would have to spend quite a bit of money, but then you'd have access to all of the data you could ever want about your power consumption.
I'll include the last page of the linked site here, just for your own edification:
Wisdom
So what did I learn from this project that I can pass on to other folks crazy enough to try this?
* DON'T MESS WITH HOUSE WIRING UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
* While my software was sort of overkill, I've got to say that having high resolution historical data for every circuit in my house has been very informative.
* Keep in mind that when it comes to friends and family, 'informative' is a relative term. Although you might find it very 'informative' to know that your wife left the lights on in the living room three out of four nights last week, she will probably not think so. I've found it better to save my geek points for things like "honey, don't you think we should have a raid server?"
* Just because you know how your electric bill breaks down now, don't expect to see any great savings. In my case most of the power went to my computer stuff. I will say that as a result I've rotated out some older dual cpu servers for lower power single cpu boxes and have tried to consolidate server functionality quite a bit.
* If you know modbus and you don't need something quite as sophisticated as what I put together, the Veris board has a bunch of features built in such as alarm levels, etc. For a simple home system, this can make the software part of things quite a bit easier.
CV is short for Curriculum Vitae, which is what a Resumé is called in Europe.
Minor correction: 2700 Kelvin, not 2700 degree.
The "color temperature" is the heat to which a blackbody radiator would have to be heated in order to produce a color spectrum similar to the rated source. Somewhat confusingly, the cooler the blackbody, the "warmer" (more infrared/red/orange) the color of light; the hotter the blackbody, the "cooler" the color of light (more blue/uv).
Some approximations:
- 2300K to 3000K is the "soft white" range
- 3000K to 4000K is the "cool white" range
- 4000K to 5000K-5500K is the "daylight" range
- 5000K-5500K onwards is often called "super daylight"
There are no official terms to describe these spectrums, unfortunately--there is no standard.
I, personally, prefer 5000K and higher, as they are very similar to noonday sun in terms of their spectral output.
I'm not even going to read the article, because the summary tells me that the article is crap.
Here's why: there's a difference between an operating system, and an operating environment. Back in the old days, for example, Windows ran on top of DOS. DOS was the Disk Operating System, and Windows was the operating environment which made it easier to work within that operating system. Adaptive environments have already been attempted with minimal success (read all the other comments about personalized menus). It's very difficult for a computer to "know" what you want it to do at all times, since all it does is compute. It reacts to input, period. Without input, without stimulus, it is able to accomplish nothing.
I suppose that one example of not interrupting you with email is novel, but how would you propose to accomplish this? How does your computer know which emails you do and don't want to be interrupted with, without you telling it? You might want your old college buddy's mail to pop up, no matter how waist-deep in code you are, but if the lady in HR bothers you about your direct deposit one more time, you might snap. How does your computer know that? Without the long, drawn-out process of programming (or "teaching" or whatever you want to call it) the computer, the computer won't intrinsically know how to respond to various conditions. Without explicitly telling it "I don't want to be interrupted unless it's bob" then the computer will never know.
Admittedly, having additional keyboard buttons to conveniently toggle email alert functionality would be a step in the right direction, as I don't think anybody wants to press Contrl+Alt+Shift+NOMAIL at the same time. Email alerts, being global things, should have the innate functionality to be turned on or off globally, whether you're in a full-screen command line or you're browsing the web. Adding more keys to the keyboard may seem a little intimidating, but wouldn't everyone like it if they had some keys on their keyboard that they instantly knew the functionality of? How about a toggle column down the left side, to toggle email alerts, IM alerts, and so on? Move away from the generic "function keys" and move towards "functionality keys." Maybe this would be a decent use for the new Optimus keypad.
I'm just rambling now, but my point is this: There's a difference between an operating environment and an operating system. KDE and Gnome are open-source operating environments which can be altered in any way anyone sees fit. Knock yourself out.
The problem is that the technology isn't safe, nor is it secure.
I highly suggest you watch the documentary Future of Food.
Here's how the documentary starts:
"We used to be a nation of farmers, but now it's less than 2% of the population of the united states, so a lot of us don't know what it takes to grow food. Over 12,000 years ago people began planting and saving seed. Agriculture flowered and civilizations were born. In China, thousands of varieties of rice were grown. Over 5,000 kinds of potatoes were cultivated worldwide. In the US alone, more than 7,000 varieties of apples were grown in the 19th century.
In the 20th century, the face of farming underwent a radical change. The manufacture of nitrogen-based bombs in World War I led to the development of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers. Nerve gas, developed during world war II, was slightly modified to make insecticides. DDT was the hero of its generation. New technologies promised higher yields, increased food production, cheaper prices and greater availability. By the mid-20th century, these technologies along with new developments in plant breeding led to the green revolution."
It continues:
"The next several decades saw a remarkable increase in production. Year after year, huge fields were planted with only one variety of crop. These monocultures created an ecological vacuum that insects and disease could exploit. This uniformity has led to some of the greatest agricultural catastrophes of mankind. In the mid 1800's, very few varieties of potato were cultivated in Ireland. When they became diseased, 1 million people died. When the same potato blight attacked Peru, they suffered fewer consequences. Today, only four varieties of potato are widely grown. 97% of the varieties of vegetables grown at the beginning of the 20th century are now extinct. Genetic uniformity leads to an increased vulnerability to insects and disease. Farmers found themselves trapped on the pesticide treadmill. The more they sprayed, the more they had to spray. The increased use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides increased costs, polluted water and created health risks.
Then in the 1970's, Monsanto introduced RoundUp. Because of its ability to kill most weeds, it became one of the most popular herbicides in history. In the mid-1990's, building on technologies that used gene splicing, the green revolution turned into the gene revolution. Capitalizing on the new technology, Monsanto genetically modified its seeds to be RoundUp Ready. Normally RoundUp kills anything green, but if a plant is RoundUp ready, when it is sprayed, it doesn't die. Now the company that sells you the herbicide, also sells you the seed. With Monsanto's BT corn, the corn itself is registered as an insecticide. This is because every cell has been engineered to manufacture BT, a natural bacterial toxin. If a corn borer eats any part of the plant, it will die."
So here's the thing: If a company genetically engineers the "perfect" apple tree, everyone will start to grow that apple tree. Eventually a biological mutation will occur (it's only a matter of time) that will allow some pest or disease to destroy these apple trees. Genetic biodiversity is required in order to have a secure food source for an indefinite period. During the great potato blights of the mid 1800's, it was the regions that preserved genetic biodiversity that were able to survive these catastrophes. Something similar is happening now with Bananas as happened with potatoes before. I quote from wikipedia: "In the past, the banana was a highly sustainable crop with a long plantation life and stable yields year round. However with the arrival of the Black Sigatoka fungus, banana production in eastern Africa has fallen by over 40%."
A lack of genetic diversity is a huge risk. While these GE plants may be resistant to existing pests and diseases, evolution is very good at finding ways to exploit the new system and