Re:Faithful to Tolkien's writings?
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Ninja Ents: Was is just me or did the Ents ONLY redirect the river Isen in the book? The whole "Ents stomp!" fight was just unnecessary and left the already underexplained race feeling like some cheesy Disney reject. The book builds them up in to stately, dignified, sad characters who act in their own way. The movie abandons all of that. Granted, you have to make cuts for time, but cut the holywood added big Ent fight and leave the depth of character stuff.
Note: I haven't seen the movie yet, but I did just reread the book.
The Ents are a fair amount more destructive. They only redirect the river Isen to clear Isengard AFTER they've already routed Saruman's army and restricted him to Orthanc. They redirect the Isen to wash Isengard clean.
In addition, the Huorns (which Merry and Pippin say look basically like Ents) are extremely violent - they basically eat what's left of the Orc army at Helm's Deep. Treebeard himself just shreds a good portion of Isengard's gates, etc. right away. Men they let live, but Orcs they killed.
I wouldn't say the Ents were that "stately" once they get roused in the book. They just literally shredded Isengard. Merry and Pippin recount it as being terrifying, watching Treebeard rip apart stone as if it was tissue paper. "The Ents are about to wake up, and discover they are strong." Gandalf wasn't kidding when he said that.
I doubt the Eden platform is actually lower power than the Crusoe platform. Running fanless simply means that the processor has a low power dissipation - that is, W/mm^2 - power per area. It doesn't necessarily mean that it actually uses low power.
That, and the Crusoe devkit is basically designed for a laptop. You can't buy a charge controller/keyboard/touchpad interface for the Eden platform.
Not to mention the fact that you get schematics, as well. For $995. That's cheap.
Are you developing a Crusoe based project? No? Then why would you need a DEVELOPMENT KIT? While I appreciate your problems, no one asked you specifically to support them.
Now, if anyone is reading and is developing a low power x86-based solution, they might be encouraged to get this, because Crusoe is an elegant and expandable solution.
Transmeta didn't appeal to the geek masses. They appealed to the embedded/laptop masses. And a $995 dev kit isn't expensive. It's cheap.
Do they play DVDs? Set-top box with integrated DVD and PVR functions.
Crusoes are really tablet/laptop boxes, though. This is intended to allow people to kludge together a laptop rather easily - hence the daughterboard which supports a battery.
Or a server board, to be honest - when you have dozens/hundreds of servers, small power savings add up in a power budget quite quickly.
People here keep suggesting the VIA Eden platform as being "just as low power" - bull. Transmeta processors are extremely power efficient. Just because something runs fanless doesn't mean it uses very little power - it just means that it has a power dissipation that can be handled by a heatsink only.
Development kits separate the programming aspect of bringing something to market from the hardware aspect. If they want to maximize the power usage, they need to figure out how to use LongRun, and also how to use the northbridge aspect of the Crusoe processors.
They will come up with a custom motherboard fab - they'll be developing it at the same time as the software.
In addition, development kits usually include schematics and/or gerbers for the actual board itself, which means you get FAR more than a board - you get the DESIGN, which can save a LOT of time.
In general people will just take the design, and strip off chips they don't need - hence the reason that so many PC boards you buy lack large portions of chips (that, and modularity).
This is actually cheap for a reference design - look at the uCdimm from Arcturus Networks - the dev kit is $1500.
Hugh was on a survey ship that was too far to communicate with the rest of the collective. There were only 5 of them. 5. I doubt 5 is enough to fully function as a whole collective So the only way to function in small units (as you're going to have to from time to time) is to have a "surrogate collective". Something which allows them to function, which Hugh clearly wasn't able to do alone.
In Hugh's case, it could've been an advanced computer in the ship itself. It's a survey mission, it doesn't need to have the whole quick thinking and rapid response of the full collective. But in the sphere's case, they needed the full intentions of the collective, so they needed something which was able to carry the whole collective mind.
Anyway I'm not saying this is why they did it, at all. My point is that it's possible to have both a distributed mind - a collective consciousness - AND a queen-type being.
The Queen in First Contact said it, though I'm misquoting:
While it's true that occasionally there were hand gestures, in general, you actually saw the drones do what the queen wished without her actually doing anything (except her eyes looked in that direction).
I'm not sure that it really was that poor a representation of the Borg. The fact is that this was a unique situation - the Borg were building a collective, rather than part of one already, so there had to be a way to transfer the previous cube collective to a smaller group, and the best way to do that is to have a queen carry the collective along.
Think of it this way. The Borg don't use a queen when dealing with ships with a Cube ship, right? That's because there're thousands of beings on the ship, and they can sustain the "group mind" on their own. However, when the Cube ship is destroyed, and the small sphere escapes, there are only a few Borg - say 4 or 5 - and in those small numbers, the individuality of each Borg becomes a real problem, so the Queen acts as a unifying mind until there are enough Borg again.
As per why the Borg abducted Picard: think about it. Do the Borg know about Q? Probably not - Q probably wouldn't bother with them. They're very single minded (heh). All they saw was the Enterprise arrive out of nowhere, rushed over to see what the hell it was, then poof, disappear away from them. What were the Borg probably thinking? "Holy S***... this race is probably significantly above us." so they planned to kidnap one individual to understand the capabilities better. Once they did, it was a whole new ball game, so even if they did realize that humans weren't that powerful, things had changed.
Consider I Borg: what did Hugh do by himself? Nothing. He fell back on "search for access port" routines, then "search for food" routines, then - nothing. Individual - or few - Borg simply don't have the capability to have the abilities of the full collective, so to function as well as one, you need something else - a queen.
It doesn't make any difference to the argument for gun control. The argument is "less access to guns, less deaths caused by guns." There's no "why" in that statement.
The only problem with Rotten Tomatoes is the low statistics problem - First Contact, Insurrection, all only had 30-50 people reviewing it, and the addition of a few bad reviews can completely tank the rating.
Nemesis has currently dipped to 47%, but the problem is that all of the bad reviews are terrifically biased against it. I can't find one example of a real problem with the film.
I even found one review that basically said "Well, I think the plot of the movie is dumb, but all the actors were really good", gave it three stars, and it still got a "Rotten" rating. What the hell?
Short & sweet: There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Read the reviews, don't generalize. If it seems biased, it probably is.
As for the XBox's unified memory architecture, it's not something games have to "make use of". It's just the way the system works. I'll agree, a huge percentage of XBox games are shovelware from either the PC or the PS2, but I promise you that Halo on a PC of equal system specs to that of an Xbox is going to run like shit even if it's a PC specific port.
Woah. What? The unified memory architecture isn't a benefit of the XBox - it's a drawback - a limitation. The graphics chipset has to access main memory along with the processor. All other modern consoles have segmented memory.
Also, the GC also reads outside in. Main reason is for copy protection, not for speed.
Does it matter? Either way, the child is dead, and it doesn't matter if the shooting was an accident or was intentional.
Yes, it's true that "accidental" shootings could be made to happen less frequently with stricter safeties on guns, but I don't think anyone's really proposing that - they merely propose legal efforts to make it more difficult to own guns. For the purposes of standard gun control statistics, it doesn't matter how the child died. That is, you do a "before/after" comparison between when a certain law was passed, and see if there was a decline.
You are, however, correct that it's important to know that it's lumped-together data.
Space elevators are untethered, by definition: they're in orbit. It just so happens that they happen to be really big and long, so that one end of them nearly touches the ground. You may want to magnetically grab or physically grab the end to try to actively avoid large objects (induced oscillations).
The minimum stable height of a space elevator is center of mass in geosynchronous orbit, by definition. Otherwise it would drift around the planet. Note that the anchor point (the place it's built above) has to be on the equator as well.
There'd be quite a few oscillations: there'd be a natural oscillatory mode depending on the actual length of the elevator cable. These could be damped, however, so no, there doesn't NEED to be oscillations - it's just that there likely will be a few, and probably quite a few that are pretty complicated and difficult to damp.
You think this is a normal thing? Really? No, it's a special-purpose thing, and one that you really should know how to handle doing if you are doing it. Installing to a normal ext2 partition and migrating to RAID partitions is safer (and more robust), in my opinion.
He said a sphere in 1 dimension, not a sphere of one dimension. The "in" there implied embedding. A 1-sphere is a sphere in 2 dimensions, with dimension 1. A "sphere in 1 dimension" is a 0-sphere.
Yes, you don't need to embed the sphere in a space, but if you're going to explain it to someone, it can help.
Configuring for a new service might include modifying tcp wrapper configurations, firewall rules, etc as well as configuring the service. Or maybe you'd like a chance to patch the server before you start enabling services.
Yes. All this should be done when you install telnetd - it's just a "preconfigure" script. My point (that you haven't addressed yet) is that there is no need to actually have telnetd installed without it being activated. It doesn't do anything. At all. Nothing. It is sitting there, taking up space. This is why configuring and installing should be done in one step, not two separate steps.
Why should it be Red Hat's responsibility to train everyone who buys or even downloads their distribution? And how do you propose they do it?
Um, training people who run operating systems is one of the basic functions of the operating system creator. You want to make people more fluent in using the operating system - i.e., the computer. By the logic you're using, it's not Red Hat's responsibility to teach (remind) people to download patches, etc.
If something isn't safe, don't have it even available at the default install. The default install should be to get the system up and running, not to install every piece of software you need. This is good debugging/testing practice - start minimal, and add things from there. That way you know when things break. So when people say "Install everything", okay, install everything that's safe. If you're going to deactivate something don't install it. Heck, that way they can't "accidentally" activate it without specifically knowing what they're doing.
Besides, how many people started calling them "Root Hat" (oh, that is just so witty I can't stand it) when they left more services on by default?
I am not saying they should leave services on. What I am saying is if you are going to turn them off, don't install them. There's no point to it.
And the apt comment was because Red Hat's package management system wasn't always so easy that you could just say "install telnet". If you're going to force users to configure telnet for it to be useful, why not just tack on the added cost of installing it as well? This way it saves them the disk space, and the hassle of not understanding why telnet doesn't work.
"Daemons should remain disabled until such time as the admin has configured them" - if the admin is installing it, obviously he wants to configure it, right? Do both in the same step.
"It is far from uncommon for newbies to install software without knowing what it is" - this isn't intelligent behavior. Retrain them.
Really, what would happen if Red Hat had a package management system as easy as apt, and didn't ship telnetd? Who'd complain?
I definitely agree - but this isn't the default, and most people "complain" that Red Hat's autoconfiguration "doesn't work". If they knew how to actually make the changes, then they would probably say "Oh, wait... this is easy. Why do I need a tool to do this?" instead of complaining that Linux sucks and you can't get anything to work.
Debian doesn't have autoconfiguration tools "by default". By default you have to do everything by hand. If you want a simple tool to configure something, you can get it, but it's not default.
The other thing that bugs me is that the automagic Red Hat tools don't tell you what they're doing. Kudzu doesn't tell me "Oh, I'm going to change this and this and this, is that OK with you? Do you have any better suggestions?" It's too braindead. The Debian tools are a little better, but not terrific - the difference is that they're not the default. So, I know how to add a new network card by hand in Debian (and Red Hat too, but that's because linuxconf never actually worked for me) - and I also know how to automagically do it, too.
Personally I like Debian's splitup of modules.conf into files inside/etc/modules - recently all the charsets, and billions of other small modules have really crowded/etc/modules.conf, so it's nice to split them up and have them be easier to deal with.
(The other thing that ticked me off is when Kudzu used to claim that it was configuring something, when in fact it didn't bloody well do ANYTHING. Sound cards come to mind - if you don't know how to configure it, suggest things for the user. Definitely don't act as if the bloody thing's already configured. Grr.)
If you install telnet server, it disables it by default. Same with ftp - ftpd is currently installed on the one Red Hat machine I deal with, and it's disabled.
What package are you talking about? I've never seen emacs included for any package at all, and vi (actually nvi) is included in the base system by default, because you need SOME editor. nvi is quite small, so it definitely isn't 20 meg.
I've really never seen a Debian package that didn't include a package that it really needs. If you found one, you really should've reported it as a bug. The few screwed up packages I've found were usually fixed within a few days.
Red Hat and Mandrake are the "middle ones" - they're not terrible, but they're still a little strange.
For the direct opposite of Debian, take the "user-friendly" Linuxes - Lycoris, Lindows, etc. They strongly discourage the users using the actual configuration files, and instead have graphical setup programs for each one.
Red Hat is kindof the same - it's got tools which create the configuration files for you, but the worst part is the fact that it doesn't tell you what it's doing. Take kudzu, for instance. Yank an ethernet card, and put a new one in (which I did recently) - it successfully removed the configuration from the old card, and created a new configuration for the new card - except for the fact that it didn't change the alias for the module, so none of the actual changes actually happened. Whoops.
So what's the point of this example? A person who uses Red Hat would complain about kudzu not working correctly, which is correct - but the person is not debugging kudzu. They want to switch ethernet cards. So for Debian, the benefit is that they know directly where to look (well, if they ask around, that is). And there's no chance of ifconfig and route not working, because that's what all the other things use.
I think there's a strong benefit of using a system that's built solidly on the real workings of a Linux system, rather than tool upon tool upon tool. Less chance of things going wrong.
(Yes, this basically means I want Debian to stay user-unfriendly - at least by default. Have user friendly tools be available to install - like etherconf, printtool, etc.)
Anyway, the point is that the previous statement should've been that Debian forces you to take control over your system, whereas the others do not.
Yah, you can apt-get install kudzu. Along with sndconfig, linuxconf, and just about every other Red Hat tool, which is really nice.:) What I'd like to have is a page in the manual which says "You want this? Do this." I still usually use printtool to set up printers on Debian systems (why not? it works).
I completely agree about Debian's customizability though. For crying out loud, if the computer is on the Net constantly (which many of them are), you don't actually NEED software installed on your computer if you're not going to use it. Red Hat ships with bunches of servers disabled - why have them installed if they're disabled?
As per knowing exactly what hardware you have, modules, etc., I still don't see that as a bad thing. It means that the system will always work, as opposed to other distributions where it's magic whether or not things work. Personally, I think Debian's main strength is the fact that it doesn't have those tools - you're only using the programs the way they're supposed to be used.
That being said, there could be tools to set things up, yes, so long as they don't do strange things to the actual configuration files. Take etherconf, for instance - it's not bad.
Hence the beauty of a Debian system. With a little effort, it's pretty easy for a Debian system to be set up to auto-update itself with security patches (it takes a little effort, but not much). Debian puts out security patches just about the fastest of anyone out there, and so a Debian box can basically always be secure, if configured right.
You could do the same with other systems, as well, but there're several benefits for Debian - one, the servers are ungodly fast (at least for me they are...) and setting up mirrors is easy. I know Red Hat and other distros have been creating apt clones (urpmi and up2date) but I don't know how they compare.
To be honest, I would imagine that few if any people use dselect - it's horrible. Synaptic, aptitude, etc. are all much better package managers. But still, I don't know why people would use anything except apt-get. Need to know what packages are available? Why? That's what the Web is for. If you know what program you want, you know the name of it, and you can nine times out of ten apt-get install it.
Debian's main strength is the fact that the systems are all the same, regardless of who's actually running them. Debian stable has basically the same set of libraries and program versions as any other Debian stable version, and so if a program runs on one system, it'll run on another as well. You could say this about Red Hat, but Red Hat packages are simply not of the same quality as Debian packages are. Debian packages just work.
In the other types of black holes, such as the Kerr black hole (uncharged, spinning), Reisnner-Nordstrom (charged, zero angular momentum), and the Kerr-Newman black hole (charged, spinning) it is possible to cross the event horizon without striking the singularity. Instead, you can pass into another universe.
Indeed, it's theoretically possible that you will pass through many universes. This is a one-way trip, however. If you try to get back to where you were, you will encounter the singularity and die.
Ahh, no! This is bad theory, and it constantly gets thrown around. Grr!
Yes, it's true that Kerr-Newmann & Reissner-Nordstrom black holes (along with the mix of the two) can produce wormholes - that is, a "Schwarzschild throat" that's passable - for the Schwarzschild solution, the throat collapses under any perturbation.
Yes, it's true that the two regions of spacetime appear to be distinct, leading to many people to claim that they are "other universes".
However, it is NOT true that this is actually the case: we don't actually know what happens when a black hole forms - if it were true that it would "connect" universes, then this would imply that the black hole "rips" the universe and "joins" it with another one. We don't have the math to handle this kind of thing - it's exactly analogous to the situation where a wave in an ocean crashes and reconnects with the sea - we don't have the math for that, either.
Basically, although the math appears to make them distinct and separate, the math is of course for a region of spacetime, rather than the entirety of it. It's just as likely it could be a bridge connecting two points of our own Universe. But again, it's the same problem - we don't have the math to go from a singly-connected topology to a multiply-connected topology. So, the answer is - you'd go through the throat to another region in spacetime. Don't ask where that region is.
Objects will only pull themselves into a sphere if gravity overcomes the intermolecular forces binding the object together. If it doesn't, they pull themselves into an aggregate sphere - that is, a loose collection of small particles, which is easy enough to distinguish: the density of the object will be less than the density of its composite materials. This is a kind of "inverse Roche limit" for an object. Gaseous objects will easily pull themselves into a sphere, but I didn't say gaseous - I said solid, and in fact, you could simply say "metallo-silicate" and be done. Solar system objects aren't made of "just about anything" - they're made of rock (silicon/iron), gas (hydrogen, etc.), and ice (comets). and even the gas giants have solid cores (most likely). Comets don't have a chance of pulling themselves into a sphere, as the intermolecular forces on ice are quite damned strong.
As per Earth smacked by a large enough body: Earth was smacked by a Mars sized body, and still stayed (mostly) together. If the Earth is smacked by a body much larger, or with much force, and it doesn't stay together, then it wouldn't be a planet anymore, would it? It'd be a big ring of debris orbiting the Sun for a few million years, and then a planet again when it coalesced.
The only rocky objects in the solar system that have pulled themselves into a sphere are the planets, several moons, and Ceres. On every other object in the solar system, intermolecular forces dominate over gravity.
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Ninja Ents: Was is just me or did the Ents ONLY redirect the river Isen in the book? The whole "Ents stomp!" fight was just unnecessary and left the already underexplained race feeling like some cheesy Disney reject. The book builds them up in to stately, dignified, sad characters who act in their own way. The movie abandons all of that. Granted, you have to make cuts for time, but cut the holywood added big Ent fight and leave the depth of character stuff.
Note: I haven't seen the movie yet, but I did just reread the book.
The Ents are a fair amount more destructive. They only redirect the river Isen to clear Isengard AFTER they've already routed Saruman's army and restricted him to Orthanc. They redirect the Isen to wash Isengard clean.
In addition, the Huorns (which Merry and Pippin say look basically like Ents) are extremely violent - they basically eat what's left of the Orc army at Helm's Deep. Treebeard himself just shreds a good portion of Isengard's gates, etc. right away. Men they let live, but Orcs they killed.
I wouldn't say the Ents were that "stately" once they get roused in the book. They just literally shredded Isengard. Merry and Pippin recount it as being terrifying, watching Treebeard rip apart stone as if it was tissue paper. "The Ents are about to wake up, and discover they are strong." Gandalf wasn't kidding when he said that.
I doubt the Eden platform is actually lower power than the Crusoe platform. Running fanless simply means that the processor has a low power dissipation - that is, W/mm^2 - power per area. It doesn't necessarily mean that it actually uses low power.
That, and the Crusoe devkit is basically designed for a laptop. You can't buy a charge controller/keyboard/touchpad interface for the Eden platform.
Not to mention the fact that you get schematics, as well. For $995. That's cheap.
Are you developing a Crusoe based project? No? Then why would you need a DEVELOPMENT KIT? While I appreciate your problems, no one asked you specifically to support them.
Now, if anyone is reading and is developing a low power x86-based solution, they might be encouraged to get this, because Crusoe is an elegant and expandable solution.
Transmeta didn't appeal to the geek masses. They appealed to the embedded/laptop masses. And a $995 dev kit isn't expensive. It's cheap.
Do they play DVDs? Set-top box with integrated DVD and PVR functions.
Crusoes are really tablet/laptop boxes, though. This is intended to allow people to kludge together a laptop rather easily - hence the daughterboard which supports a battery.
Or a server board, to be honest - when you have dozens/hundreds of servers, small power savings add up in a power budget quite quickly.
People here keep suggesting the VIA Eden platform as being "just as low power" - bull. Transmeta processors are extremely power efficient. Just because something runs fanless doesn't mean it uses very little power - it just means that it has a power dissipation that can be handled by a heatsink only.
Development kits separate the programming aspect of bringing something to market from the hardware aspect. If they want to maximize the power usage, they need to figure out how to use LongRun, and also how to use the northbridge aspect of the Crusoe processors.
They will come up with a custom motherboard fab - they'll be developing it at the same time as the software.
In addition, development kits usually include schematics and/or gerbers for the actual board itself, which means you get FAR more than a board - you get the DESIGN, which can save a LOT of time.
In general people will just take the design, and strip off chips they don't need - hence the reason that so many PC boards you buy lack large portions of chips (that, and modularity).
This is actually cheap for a reference design - look at the uCdimm from Arcturus Networks - the dev kit is $1500.
But... but... that's my POINT.
Hugh was on a survey ship that was too far to communicate with the rest of the collective. There were only 5 of them. 5. I doubt 5 is enough to fully function as a whole collective So the only way to function in small units (as you're going to have to from time to time) is to have a "surrogate collective". Something which allows them to function, which Hugh clearly wasn't able to do alone.
In Hugh's case, it could've been an advanced computer in the ship itself. It's a survey mission, it doesn't need to have the whole quick thinking and rapid response of the full collective. But in the sphere's case, they needed the full intentions of the collective, so they needed something which was able to carry the whole collective mind.
Anyway I'm not saying this is why they did it, at all. My point is that it's possible to have both a distributed mind - a collective consciousness - AND a queen-type being.
The Queen in First Contact said it, though I'm misquoting:
"You imply a difference where there is none."
While it's true that occasionally there were hand gestures, in general, you actually saw the drones do what the queen wished without her actually doing anything (except her eyes looked in that direction).
I'm not sure that it really was that poor a representation of the Borg. The fact is that this was a unique situation - the Borg were building a collective, rather than part of one already, so there had to be a way to transfer the previous cube collective to a smaller group, and the best way to do that is to have a queen carry the collective along.
Think of it this way. The Borg don't use a queen when dealing with ships with a Cube ship, right? That's because there're thousands of beings on the ship, and they can sustain the "group mind" on their own. However, when the Cube ship is destroyed, and the small sphere escapes, there are only a few Borg - say 4 or 5 - and in those small numbers, the individuality of each Borg becomes a real problem, so the Queen acts as a unifying mind until there are enough Borg again.
As per why the Borg abducted Picard: think about it. Do the Borg know about Q? Probably not - Q probably wouldn't bother with them. They're very single minded (heh). All they saw was the Enterprise arrive out of nowhere, rushed over to see what the hell it was, then poof, disappear away from them. What were the Borg probably thinking? "Holy S***... this race is probably significantly above us." so they planned to kidnap one individual to understand the capabilities better. Once they did, it was a whole new ball game, so even if they did realize that humans weren't that powerful, things had changed.
Consider I Borg: what did Hugh do by himself? Nothing. He fell back on "search for access port" routines, then "search for food" routines, then - nothing. Individual - or few - Borg simply don't have the capability to have the abilities of the full collective, so to function as well as one, you need something else - a queen.
It doesn't make any difference to the argument for gun control. The argument is "less access to guns, less deaths caused by guns." There's no "why" in that statement.
The only problem with Rotten Tomatoes is the low statistics problem - First Contact, Insurrection, all only had 30-50 people reviewing it, and the addition of a few bad reviews can completely tank the rating.
Nemesis has currently dipped to 47%, but the problem is that all of the bad reviews are terrifically biased against it. I can't find one example of a real problem with the film.
I even found one review that basically said "Well, I think the plot of the movie is dumb, but all the actors were really good", gave it three stars, and it still got a "Rotten" rating. What the hell?
Short & sweet: There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Read the reviews, don't generalize. If it seems biased, it probably is.
As for the XBox's unified memory architecture, it's not something games have to "make use of". It's just the way the system works. I'll agree, a huge percentage of XBox games are shovelware from either the PC or the PS2, but I promise you that Halo on a PC of equal system specs to that of an Xbox is going to run like shit even if it's a PC specific port.
Woah. What? The unified memory architecture isn't a benefit of the XBox - it's a drawback - a limitation. The graphics chipset has to access main memory along with the processor. All other modern consoles have segmented memory.
Also, the GC also reads outside in. Main reason is for copy protection, not for speed.
Does it matter? Either way, the child is dead, and it doesn't matter if the shooting was an accident or was intentional.
Yes, it's true that "accidental" shootings could be made to happen less frequently with stricter safeties on guns, but I don't think anyone's really proposing that - they merely propose legal efforts to make it more difficult to own guns. For the purposes of standard gun control statistics, it doesn't matter how the child died. That is, you do a "before/after" comparison between when a certain law was passed, and see if there was a decline.
You are, however, correct that it's important to know that it's lumped-together data.
Space elevators are untethered, by definition: they're in orbit. It just so happens that they happen to be really big and long, so that one end of them nearly touches the ground. You may want to magnetically grab or physically grab the end to try to actively avoid large objects (induced oscillations).
The minimum stable height of a space elevator is center of mass in geosynchronous orbit, by definition. Otherwise it would drift around the planet. Note that the anchor point (the place it's built above) has to be on the equator as well.
There'd be quite a few oscillations: there'd be a natural oscillatory mode depending on the actual length of the elevator cable. These could be damped, however, so no, there doesn't NEED to be oscillations - it's just that there likely will be a few, and probably quite a few that are pretty complicated and difficult to damp.
You think this is a normal thing? Really? No, it's a special-purpose thing, and one that you really should know how to handle doing if you are doing it. Installing to a normal ext2 partition and migrating to RAID partitions is safer (and more robust), in my opinion.
So can you? Yes.
Here you go.
Wow, that took long.
He said a sphere in 1 dimension, not a sphere of one dimension. The "in" there implied embedding. A 1-sphere is a sphere in 2 dimensions, with dimension 1. A "sphere in 1 dimension" is a 0-sphere.
Yes, you don't need to embed the sphere in a space, but if you're going to explain it to someone, it can help.
Configuring for a new service might include modifying tcp wrapper configurations, firewall rules, etc as well as configuring the service. Or maybe you'd like a chance to patch the server before you start enabling services.
Yes. All this should be done when you install telnetd - it's just a "preconfigure" script. My point (that you haven't addressed yet) is that there is no need to actually have telnetd installed without it being activated. It doesn't do anything. At all. Nothing. It is sitting there, taking up space. This is why configuring and installing should be done in one step, not two separate steps.
Why should it be Red Hat's responsibility to train everyone who buys or even downloads their distribution? And how do you propose they do it?
Um, training people who run operating systems is one of the basic functions of the operating system creator. You want to make people more fluent in using the operating system - i.e., the computer. By the logic you're using, it's not Red Hat's responsibility to teach (remind) people to download patches, etc.
If something isn't safe, don't have it even available at the default install. The default install should be to get the system up and running, not to install every piece of software you need. This is good debugging/testing practice - start minimal, and add things from there. That way you know when things break. So when people say "Install everything", okay, install everything that's safe. If you're going to deactivate something don't install it. Heck, that way they can't "accidentally" activate it without specifically knowing what they're doing.
Besides, how many people started calling them "Root Hat" (oh, that is just so witty I can't stand it) when they left more services on by default?
I am not saying they should leave services on. What I am saying is if you are going to turn them off, don't install them. There's no point to it.
And the apt comment was because Red Hat's package management system wasn't always so easy that you could just say "install telnet". If you're going to force users to configure telnet for it to be useful, why not just tack on the added cost of installing it as well? This way it saves them the disk space, and the hassle of not understanding why telnet doesn't work.
"Daemons should remain disabled until such time as the admin has configured them" - if the admin is installing it, obviously he wants to configure it, right? Do both in the same step.
"It is far from uncommon for newbies to install software without knowing what it is" - this isn't intelligent behavior. Retrain them.
Really, what would happen if Red Hat had a package management system as easy as apt, and didn't ship telnetd? Who'd complain?
I definitely agree - but this isn't the default, and most people "complain" that Red Hat's autoconfiguration "doesn't work". If they knew how to actually make the changes, then they would probably say "Oh, wait... this is easy. Why do I need a tool to do this?" instead of complaining that Linux sucks and you can't get anything to work.
/etc/modules - recently all the charsets, and billions of other small modules have really crowded /etc/modules.conf, so it's nice to split them up and have them be easier to deal with.
Debian doesn't have autoconfiguration tools "by default". By default you have to do everything by hand. If you want a simple tool to configure something, you can get it, but it's not default.
The other thing that bugs me is that the automagic Red Hat tools don't tell you what they're doing. Kudzu doesn't tell me "Oh, I'm going to change this and this and this, is that OK with you? Do you have any better suggestions?" It's too braindead. The Debian tools are a little better, but not terrific - the difference is that they're not the default. So, I know how to add a new network card by hand in Debian (and Red Hat too, but that's because linuxconf never actually worked for me) - and I also know how to automagically do it, too.
Personally I like Debian's splitup of modules.conf into files inside
(The other thing that ticked me off is when Kudzu used to claim that it was configuring something, when in fact it didn't bloody well do ANYTHING. Sound cards come to mind - if you don't know how to configure it, suggest things for the user. Definitely don't act as if the bloody thing's already configured. Grr.)
If you install telnet server, it disables it by default. Same with ftp - ftpd is currently installed on the one Red Hat machine I deal with, and it's disabled.
What package are you talking about? I've never seen emacs included for any package at all, and vi (actually nvi) is included in the base system by default, because you need SOME editor. nvi is quite small, so it definitely isn't 20 meg.
I've really never seen a Debian package that didn't include a package that it really needs. If you found one, you really should've reported it as a bug. The few screwed up packages I've found were usually fixed within a few days.
Red Hat and Mandrake are the "middle ones" - they're not terrible, but they're still a little strange.
For the direct opposite of Debian, take the "user-friendly" Linuxes - Lycoris, Lindows, etc. They strongly discourage the users using the actual configuration files, and instead have graphical setup programs for each one.
Red Hat is kindof the same - it's got tools which create the configuration files for you, but the worst part is the fact that it doesn't tell you what it's doing. Take kudzu, for instance. Yank an ethernet card, and put a new one in (which I did recently) - it successfully removed the configuration from the old card, and created a new configuration for the new card - except for the fact that it didn't change the alias for the module, so none of the actual changes actually happened. Whoops.
So what's the point of this example? A person who uses Red Hat would complain about kudzu not working correctly, which is correct - but the person is not debugging kudzu. They want to switch ethernet cards. So for Debian, the benefit is that they know directly where to look (well, if they ask around, that is). And there's no chance of ifconfig and route not working, because that's what all the other things use.
I think there's a strong benefit of using a system that's built solidly on the real workings of a Linux system, rather than tool upon tool upon tool. Less chance of things going wrong.
(Yes, this basically means I want Debian to stay user-unfriendly - at least by default. Have user friendly tools be available to install - like etherconf, printtool, etc.)
Anyway, the point is that the previous statement should've been that Debian forces you to take control over your system, whereas the others do not.
Yah, you can apt-get install kudzu. Along with sndconfig, linuxconf, and just about every other Red Hat tool, which is really nice. :) What I'd like to have is a page in the manual which says "You want this? Do this." I still usually use printtool to set up printers on Debian systems (why not? it works).
I completely agree about Debian's customizability though. For crying out loud, if the computer is on the Net constantly (which many of them are), you don't actually NEED software installed on your computer if you're not going to use it. Red Hat ships with bunches of servers disabled - why have them installed if they're disabled?
As per knowing exactly what hardware you have, modules, etc., I still don't see that as a bad thing. It means that the system will always work, as opposed to other distributions where it's magic whether or not things work. Personally, I think Debian's main strength is the fact that it doesn't have those tools - you're only using the programs the way they're supposed to be used.
That being said, there could be tools to set things up, yes, so long as they don't do strange things to the actual configuration files. Take etherconf, for instance - it's not bad.
Hence the beauty of a Debian system. With a little effort, it's pretty easy for a Debian system to be set up to auto-update itself with security patches (it takes a little effort, but not much). Debian puts out security patches just about the fastest of anyone out there, and so a Debian box can basically always be secure, if configured right.
You could do the same with other systems, as well, but there're several benefits for Debian - one, the servers are ungodly fast (at least for me they are...) and setting up mirrors is easy. I know Red Hat and other distros have been creating apt clones (urpmi and up2date) but I don't know how they compare.
To be honest, I would imagine that few if any people use dselect - it's horrible. Synaptic, aptitude, etc. are all much better package managers. But still, I don't know why people would use anything except apt-get. Need to know what packages are available? Why? That's what the Web is for. If you know what program you want, you know the name of it, and you can nine times out of ten apt-get install it.
Debian's main strength is the fact that the systems are all the same, regardless of who's actually running them. Debian stable has basically the same set of libraries and program versions as any other Debian stable version, and so if a program runs on one system, it'll run on another as well. You could say this about Red Hat, but Red Hat packages are simply not of the same quality as Debian packages are. Debian packages just work.
In the other types of black holes, such as the Kerr black hole (uncharged, spinning), Reisnner-Nordstrom (charged, zero angular momentum), and the Kerr-Newman black hole (charged, spinning) it is possible to cross the event horizon without striking the singularity. Instead, you can pass into another universe.
Indeed, it's theoretically possible that you will pass through many universes. This is a one-way trip, however. If you try to get back to where you were, you will encounter the singularity and die.
Ahh, no! This is bad theory, and it constantly gets thrown around. Grr!
Yes, it's true that Kerr-Newmann & Reissner-Nordstrom black holes (along with the mix of the two) can produce wormholes - that is, a "Schwarzschild throat" that's passable - for the Schwarzschild solution, the throat collapses under any perturbation.
Yes, it's true that the two regions of spacetime appear to be distinct, leading to many people to claim that they are "other universes".
However, it is NOT true that this is actually the case: we don't actually know what happens when a black hole forms - if it were true that it would "connect" universes, then this would imply that the black hole "rips" the universe and "joins" it with another one. We don't have the math to handle this kind of thing - it's exactly analogous to the situation where a wave in an ocean crashes and reconnects with the sea - we don't have the math for that, either.
Basically, although the math appears to make them distinct and separate, the math is of course for a region of spacetime, rather than the entirety of it. It's just as likely it could be a bridge connecting two points of our own Universe. But again, it's the same problem - we don't have the math to go from a singly-connected topology to a multiply-connected topology. So, the answer is - you'd go through the throat to another region in spacetime. Don't ask where that region is.
Objects will only pull themselves into a sphere if gravity overcomes the intermolecular forces binding the object together. If it doesn't, they pull themselves into an aggregate sphere - that is, a loose collection of small particles, which is easy enough to distinguish: the density of the object will be less than the density of its composite materials. This is a kind of "inverse Roche limit" for an object. Gaseous objects will easily pull themselves into a sphere, but I didn't say gaseous - I said solid, and in fact, you could simply say "metallo-silicate" and be done. Solar system objects aren't made of "just about anything" - they're made of rock (silicon/iron), gas (hydrogen, etc.), and ice (comets). and even the gas giants have solid cores (most likely). Comets don't have a chance of pulling themselves into a sphere, as the intermolecular forces on ice are quite damned strong.
As per Earth smacked by a large enough body: Earth was smacked by a Mars sized body, and still stayed (mostly) together. If the Earth is smacked by a body much larger, or with much force, and it doesn't stay together, then it wouldn't be a planet anymore, would it? It'd be a big ring of debris orbiting the Sun for a few million years, and then a planet again when it coalesced.
The only rocky objects in the solar system that have pulled themselves into a sphere are the planets, several moons, and Ceres. On every other object in the solar system, intermolecular forces dominate over gravity.