There hasn't been a sound card invented yet that has the same quality of output as even mid-grade hi-fi stereo equipment. Sure, you folks that consider your Bose system "audiophile" quality won't understand this, but actual audiophiles will.
Find me a sound card with discrete output stages (an output stage that doesn't use an integrated circuit) and I'll eat the server Slashdot is hosted on with a knife and fork. Sure, I listen to my computer as a media center machine, but I understand what I can expect from it. I run the SPDIF output from my soundcard to an Aragon D/A converter, and I suspect thats probably about as good as its going to get from a PC.
This really needs to be put into perspective. D/A conversion is a digital process It introduces virtually no noise to the signal, and the only nonlinearities are tiny and generally way above the highest frequency humans can hear. Further, they are always pretty much always dwarfed by the ones you get during the A/D conversion, noise from amps, nonlinearities from the speakers, and pretty much any other equipment that you've got.
The only big problem you get from D/A converters are that as soon as the signal leaves the D/A converter, its still on a relatively unshielded path in the middle of a computer. That problem is solved pretty simply by breakout boxes.
I never really understood this whole "audiophile" mentality. Everything done in analog between the signal source and the output introduces noise - it's only a question of how much. The solution is less, not more, and to do absolutely as much processing digitally as possible and as little in analog as possible.
About the best you can do for playing sound (in terms of maximizing frequency response and the S/N ratio) is to be minimalist - to get a pair of high-end in-ear-canal earbuds and a CD player. Is this a part of the audiophile culture? Not really.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
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The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
there is no OS (or even the technologies I just mentioned) that has good hooks into having one updating mechanism for things that come with the OS as well as 3rd party addons.
Gentoo supports pulling updates from pretty much any source - cvs, svn, alternative http from it's normal site, etc.
It also supports overlays - i.e. secondary collections of packages that have their own stuff. If you've configured your system to use one of those it works seamlessly as though its the same as something from the normal package list. There's a way to update the data in that using a library (though mostly this is done using a version control system). They even host a bunch of popular overlays on a gentoo server.
It's also trivial to make your own overlay and update it manually.
There's also a way to do such an overlay system with RRM based distros (Yum), or with Debian-based distros (built-in to package system).
That pretty much covers all Linux distros. Is there something else to which you were referring?
Since the official language of the Googleplex is Googlese, and the original project was developed by the US Census bureau - notorious for their use of no languages except Esperanto, it goes without saying (though I'm saying it anyway), that it will read only Klingon.
Remember kids, there are no stupid questions. Only people who don't RTFA who ask questions.
But accounting for inflation, the retail on this was about five grand. Those buttons and knobs are very costly. It isn't just advances in electronics that make that relative price drop!
Knobs aren't that expensive. As a wild guess, I'd say that each button is going to add maybe $.05 to the production cost, and each knob around $.10. Designing things and setting up a production system is the expensive part. Once you have one, it's not much of a problem. As an example, consider that the price of mixers (audio boards) has dropped dramatically over the last two decades - from about $1000 for a low end 16 channel board to about $150 now. Those are practically made of nothing but knobs and buttons.
I think that with modern receivers, the reason that there aren't a lot of buttons is that you're not supposed to use the device itself as the user interface. You're supposed to use a multipurpose remote that's got a bazillion buttons.
You accounted for the price of inflation, but not the reduction in cost due to improvements in technology. From that I'd say you should actually reduce the price. Probably to somewhere around 1/4 the actual price (well...if this was anything but audio. "Audiofiles" have crazy ideas that old=better.)
You'd do a lot better if you picked a category other than audio to do your comparisons based on. With audio equipment there's a big disconnect between quality of goods and price because almost all listening related comparisons are subjective. It tends to make the prices subjective as well.
Add to that the fact that they deal with factions divided by scarcity, no explosions in space, a concept of a fusion reactor, and no light speed travel, and you're talking about a series that is firmly entrench not only in Sci-Fi, but in pretty involved Sci-fi.
He even considered that the two dominant languages on our planet would end up being the main languages people spoke in the future, and that most people would know some of both.
We can see that this is a possible future with only incremental improvements in our own development.
Does it need to be flashy, filled with technology and very alien to our own experience for it to be Sci-fi for the GP?
I don't disagree with you. I don't agree with you either.:)
I'm not entirely sure that this situation is like the one you're talking about. There is a representative government there. The problem isn't the kind of government, it's the people running it. The corruption is the government. Fixing it means replacing it with a nonlocal government, which means not doing things in the best interest of the local community - working, rather, towards the nation as a whole.
Interesting that you chose to talk about the Romans and the Incans - two cultures that absorbed, but mostly *destroyed* the cultures of the peoples they assimilated in their own interest. Obviously doing that will solve the problem. Along the same lines, brainwashing will get someone to do what you want. To me it's a question of picking the lesser of two evils...unless there's a third option I'm not aware of. Personally, I don't have a clue what the best option is.
This is one of the areas that I had previously not heard about.
My company sees stuff related asset management - including disaster planning, and we've heard that money related to that was also diverted. So nobody locally knew what to do to get the national government involved after the levees burst.
I can't figure this out. The trail is clearly visible. If you look at where the money went you can see what money was wasted; you can see where self-interest superseded the good of everyone.
How should we, as a society deal with this problem? Rebuild the culture of New Orleans so that such a thing is impossible? Ignore it and spend money to make it exactly the same?
Personally, I've got no idea. For that matter, I don't know why this isn't common knowledge. I don't think that just putting money back into the same thing is the way to fix it, though. Removing corruption most likely means taking over a large portion of the government...which means killing a lot of the culture. Should we do that?
I would assume, then, that you have some sort of alternate theory.
No. Lack of alternatives is not sufficient to select an inferior theory. You have the option of saying, "I don't know." This is my choice.
Do you not realize that more-or-less all of modern Biology is based on Evolution? That the technology used to create antibiotic and antiviral drugs is based wholly on the theory of Evolution?
I disagree. Modern antibiotic and antiviral developments are based upon natural selection. Certain limited traits can be developed by breeding to be more advantageous for people. This is one of the first technlogies developed by man and is a well established fact.
I don't believe that you can extrapolate all of evolutionary theory from this. The probabilities of changes in complexity using randomness in cell mutation are not high enough for me to accept improvement by this means. I am very intersted to know about the key points - like how a single celled organism could suddenly become multicelled. There needs to be something else as part of the theory that helps introduce order to change my mind.
Biologists have been directly observing evolution in action for decades.
To my knowledge this is untrue. They've seen natural selection. They've seen characteristics that are designed to allow mutation among a specific selection of possible states change states. I've told that I don't agree and why. Your next step, should you choose to take it, will be to supply supporting arguments that show why I'm wrong. Merely claiming that I'm wrong is just yelling.
If that alternative is, as I would imagine if you are an evangelical Christian, some form of creationism, there is a large difference between that and a scientific theory like Evolution. In science, there is the requirement--in order for something to be considered a natural explanation--that it be disprovable.
I've heard this old chestnut time and again. Didn't I say I don't accept any explaination for how anything began yet? I don't think that "it's not a real scientific theory" is sufficient for me to reject alternatives as false any more than its a reason to accept one as true.
In reality, there are a lot of things that we operate with without the benefit of rigorous science. I continue to accept, for example, that time will continue to function as it has despite the fact that the human race has almost no idea why this has continued to be true - other than overwelming number of times that it has done so. I think that if a big, booming voice saying, "I made the Earth and everything on it through spontaneous creation. Now I'm making some unicorns" was suddenly heard by every man, woman and child on earth, and this was followed by unicorns suddenly popping into existence right in front of millions of witnesses, then I'd forsake the disprovable theory in favor of spontaneous creation.
Similarly, if a scientist in a lab figured out a way to make a puppy out of nothing but some amoebas, and then told everyone that he used evolutionary processes to do it, I'd be totally convinced that evolution is how it all works.
Either case means we've got a theory that's been tested and works in at least one specific case. One case takes a lot less of a leap of faith than no cases at all. Right now we've only got ideas that have no direct evidence - only lots of indirect evidence. I haven't gotten my puppy or my unicorn.
You're inferring things I didn't write. Let me be more clear.
I do not believe in evolution, and I ALSO do not believe in any other mechanisms having to do with life.
Furthermore, I don't believe in any mechanisms explaining how the earth was created, or any mechanisms that explain how the universe was created.
I don't believe that any mechanism that explains these things is good. All the theories I've ever read on any of these subjects are lacking in the supporting facts department. They're just not ready yet.
You're inferring things I didn't write. Let me be more clear.
I do not believe in evolution, and I ALSO do not believe in any other mechanisms having to do with life.
Furthermore, I don't believe in any mechanisms explaining how the earth was created, or any mechanisms that explain how the universe was created.
I don't believe that any mechanism that explains these things is good. They're all lacking in the supporting facts department. I'm willing to accept one of them. But they're not ready yet.
In this entire line of reasoning, the assumption appears to be that these people can't possibly hold one wrong view yet also do anything else right.
Rejecting evolution makes you a gibbering idiot who is unable to govern your own life and hates science? Do you realize how incredibly arrogant that is?
I don't believe in Evolution. I haven't seen enough facts to support it. I hold the same to be true for all mechanisms whereby the earth, life, and the universe were created. Nothing has enough evidence to support any kind of solid conclusion. There's a bit too much guesswork for me to accept it.
So, IMHO, all it takes is a few preconcieved notions to get you to pick one theory over another. Which one is right? Beats me. I, like most of society, have the luxury of not needing to know how things started to function. And not just function - an understanding of virtually all science, technology, culture, art, and search for truth is available to me without being sure about that.
The only thing I have to deal with is a very special kind of ignorance. The ignorance of the halfway educated - of those who believe that they have Learned and now Know the Right Answer and can therefore Show Others the Way. Once you really start to getting into how things work, you realise that you Know Very Little and Always Will.
You're not thinking small enough. It doesn't have enough RAM for either of those programs. Abiword is like 40MB in memory, and Bluebird is still a java IDE.
*Anything* with Java (short of J2ME) is too big to fit the whole program in memory. It doesn't matter how big a CF slot you have - not fitting in memory is the same as not being able to run on the device.
How about Nano+Makefiles? That's the kind of thing that will fit.
Add an IDE (Eclipse) and it could be used in introductory programming classes.
My copy of Eclipse is currently running at 267MB. The install directory is over 1 GB. There's no way that's happening. Also, there's no way that will look okay on the tiny screens they've got on these things.
This is NOT a computer in the traditional sense. It's a PDA in a different form factor.
In the case of personality change you may need to apply such force several times as you may simply trigger alternate personalities instead, but you can repeat until satisfied.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...
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The Coming Uranium Crisis
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· Score: 2, Interesting
you think that Moore's Law applies to anything besides semiconductor production?
I'm going to have to go with yes.
While it is debatable, the generally held belief is that knowledge is increasing at a geometric rate.
That's why Moores law works: knowledge of how to make the changes is really the only barrier to increasing efficiency of silicon production.
Any other industry whose primary factor determining efficiency is knowledge should have similar results. Obviously, the ease of refactoring to meet the more clever ideas can affect the rate, but I don't think that its unreasonable to expect progress to double in constant periods of time.
That said, I doubt that the energy industry falls into this geometric rate category. The oil cartel wants to be the ones making the money, and that governs things more than the increasae in knowledge.
But what about other manufacturing? I'd say that most goods manufacturing is increasing in ability at a geometric rate because of increases posed by increases in knowledge.
Is lead the only metal that 1) Can be made into a paint 2) Conducts radio waves (this is a Faraday Cage for radio waves)?
The answer is no. Most metals conduct radio waves to some degree, just like most can conduct all EM radiation. There are quite a number to choose from that are harmless to humans. Lead is the big choice because its so dense, but we're not talking about nuclear radiation here (and more importantly, we're not talking about nuclear particles, which are stopped by other matter getting in the way, not just by conductive materials). We're not blocking the EM equivalent of a truck - just a series of tubes.
I can see a way around the window/door thing as well.
Put enough conductive material into the Windows and you'll get the same effect. In addition, there are some shapes you can make the entryways (again using principals of a Faraday cage) that will cause the radio waves to tend not to reflect out.
a. We shouldn't have to fiddle with this when it comes to our devices. A quick check of PCI, USB, and IDE controllers should tell us what we have and therefore need to load. The only exception to this is RAID controllers...but loading extra ones of those takes almost no time at all.
Any driver not tied to a device will load extremely fast, so that shouldn't be an issue either. It means that we're talking about less than a second worth of boot time when we've already got minutes of boottime hanging over our heads. b. Less than a tenth of a second if you've got your system behind a router. c. On a good boot system, this happens close to last, and it doesn't affect the running of other systems - i.e. it's already parallelized. d. Are you trying to make it longer rather than shorter? The filesystems we have are designed to have difficulty getting corrupted. The time to do this *far* exceeds the boot time. And it shouldn't be necessary most of the time. I have mine set to check once every 40 boots. e. KDE comes with *lots* of bloat that you don't need and can't easily turn off because its part of KDE. Unlike GAIM, which adds less than a second to the start time of KDE, starting the hardware manager, the window manager, the sound manager, etc. takes a looonnng time. The real solution is to just not use the big WMs that come with lots of stuff. Use FVWM, or IceWM, or something like that. Then it won't be a problem if you start up your favorite programs at bootup. f. While this does make the system more responsive, it has no effect whatsoever on bootup time.
You didn't address at all the fact that people using linux often have *services* running on their computer that can be started in parallel (for example, I don't mind if apache starts the same time as tomcat). Solving this problem is by far more important than any of the things you've mentioned.
It's more like the difference between NetBSD and Linux. While most programs that run on one can be made to run on the other, and the idea behind how they work is a lot the same because both came from the same base, the internals are fundamentally different.
DD-Wrt is *not* OpenWRT with a nice UI. That doesn't do either of them credit. *Both* come with a nice web interface.
The difference today is that OpenWRT is managed by a large group with different goals and ideas. DD-Wrt is done by one guy, and his goal is to make it as useful as possible for what he thinks users want to use it for. They also started different ways - which also leads to the differences in goals. OpenWRT was really the first project of its kind and has always had generally the goal that it does now - whatever people who want to work on it want it to do. DD-Wrt is based on the now-GPL violating commercial WRT distro called Alchemy - mostly because they wanted the project to continue despite the fact that it's owner wanted to start closing the source.
From TFA: Knowing how to secure both Linux and Windows, plus understanding Cisco firewall configurations (or Shorewall/iptables) -- not to mention having a firm grasp of web application security -- is not a realistic expectation of any newly graduated employee, much less a seasoned veteran.
What? I'm guessing that maybe this is because a seasoned veteran would expect for the network to be maintained correctly? Especially the firewall?
Really, this doesn't sound like a level playing field at all. My company support *three* services - IMap, HTTP, and ssh. We keep the programs that offer these services completely updated. There's not a lot to keeping those updated. There's one major player for ssh, two for web, and four or so for mail. Even the minor ones take less than an hour to figure out. We expect that the routers will handle almost everything else. Flaws coming out in IP stacks are a pretty major thing, and get fixed pretty quick, so it should mostly be a nonissue.
If these guys only had to support features that people actually use and lock down everything else, things would be very different.
Whatever decent advancement is made, nothing can compare to raw experience.
Nothing? If I was fighting a war, and was given the choice between 100,000 highly trained hand-to-hand combat experts without weapons, or 100 guys with two weeks training in tanks, I'd take the tanks.
Similarly, if I was betting on a cage match between a 30 year old, 200 pound martial arts expert who's been training all his life and a 12 year old girl with a handgun and two hours of training, I'd bet on the girl winning in the first twenty seconds.
Without our technology, humans are nearly helpless. It's our technology that makes us powerful.
"Overspecialize and you breed in weakness." This doesn't actually have to do with specialization. Technology and specialization aren't the same thing. Getting overheated is a pretty universal problem, and knowing how to use gloves doesn't require a lot of special knowledge.
Except the razr, which looks pretty but has almost no features to speak of and breaks easily.
That ones popular because they've made a dozen pretty version of it. That phone is being treated like an accessory to an outfit rather than something to talk to people with.
If that trend continues, we'll end up with phones that you can't actually use with a plan...because they don't actually do anything except make cool noises (i.e. you can't communicate to other people with 'em).
Yes, all of the mail clients you listed give you the option of using the mbox format to store the mail. This is, however, not the only option for any of the ones you listed and hasn't been for more than half a decade.
this defect has NOTHING to do with how the filesystem works
I misspoke. I was talking about the mail filesystem - i.e. the internal mechanism whereby it stores its folders. The fact that NTFS has to be defragmented shows its low quality, but that's not the point. This has to do with the mail's internal structure.
how the AV handles the detection of viruses in certin "special" places, such as inboxes
Why should an AV program have to handle mail differently than everything else? That's the bug. If the structure of a mail system is the same as the structure of a filesystem, why aren't the filesystem related details relegated to the filesystem so that other programs, like antiviruses, can plug into them?
The term "Defective by Design" was specifically invented to describe products containing DRM, where the usability of the product is intentionally compromised in order to protect the profits of a third party....and to apply to the security policy that's intentionally insecure to accomodate user issues and program writers.
Most of the things that we see this appear in are because we see an exploit. Such exploits in a better written file system wouldn't be an issue at all. So the defect is the design more than the actual flaw.
This case is a similar matter. The virus scanner is scanning a file, finding a virus in it, and quarantining it. The bug isn't with the AV, its in the fact that an entire user's mailbox is stored in a single file, which is a defect in the design of Microsoft's mail system. This wouldn't happen if Microsoft was using a better mechanism for storing mail.
So I say we let the "defectivebydesign" tags keep coming. We can stop when we stop seeing the obvious design defects.
Slashdot Mirror
There hasn't been a sound card invented yet that has the same quality of output as even mid-grade hi-fi stereo equipment. Sure, you folks that consider your Bose system "audiophile" quality won't understand this, but actual audiophiles will.
Find me a sound card with discrete output stages (an output stage that doesn't use an integrated circuit) and I'll eat the server Slashdot is hosted on with a knife and fork. Sure, I listen to my computer as a media center machine, but I understand what I can expect from it. I run the SPDIF output from my soundcard to an Aragon D/A converter, and I suspect thats probably about as good as its going to get from a PC.
This really needs to be put into perspective. D/A conversion is a digital process
It introduces virtually no noise to the signal, and the only nonlinearities are tiny and generally way above the highest frequency humans can hear. Further, they are always pretty much always dwarfed by the ones you get during the A/D conversion, noise from amps, nonlinearities from the speakers, and pretty much any other equipment that you've got.
The only big problem you get from D/A converters are that as soon as the signal leaves the D/A converter, its still on a relatively unshielded path in the middle of a computer. That problem is solved pretty simply by breakout boxes.
I never really understood this whole "audiophile" mentality. Everything done in analog between the signal source and the output introduces noise - it's only a question of how much. The solution is less, not more, and to do absolutely as much processing digitally as possible and as little in analog as possible.
About the best you can do for playing sound (in terms of maximizing frequency response and the S/N ratio) is to be minimalist - to get a pair of high-end in-ear-canal earbuds and a CD player. Is this a part of the audiophile culture? Not really.
there is no OS (or even the technologies I just mentioned) that has good hooks into having one updating mechanism for things that come with the OS as well as 3rd party addons.
Gentoo supports pulling updates from pretty much any source - cvs, svn, alternative http from it's normal site, etc.
It also supports overlays - i.e. secondary collections of packages that have their own stuff. If you've configured your system to use one of those it works seamlessly as though its the same as something from the normal package list. There's a way to update the data in that using a library (though mostly this is done using a version control system). They even host a bunch of popular overlays on a gentoo server.
It's also trivial to make your own overlay and update it manually.
There's also a way to do such an overlay system with RRM based distros (Yum), or with Debian-based distros (built-in to package system).
That pretty much covers all Linux distros. Is there something else to which you were referring?
Since the official language of the Googleplex is Googlese, and the original project was developed by the US Census bureau - notorious for their use of no languages except Esperanto, it goes without saying (though I'm saying it anyway), that it will read only Klingon.
Remember kids, there are no stupid questions.
Only people who don't RTFA who ask questions.
But accounting for inflation, the retail on this was about five grand. Those buttons and knobs are very costly. It isn't just advances in electronics that make that relative price drop!
Knobs aren't that expensive. As a wild guess, I'd say that each button is going to add maybe $.05 to the production cost, and each knob around $.10. Designing things and setting up a production system is the expensive part. Once you have one, it's not much of a problem. As an example, consider that the price of mixers (audio boards) has dropped dramatically over the last two decades - from about $1000 for a low end 16 channel board to about $150 now. Those are practically made of nothing but knobs and buttons.
I think that with modern receivers, the reason that there aren't a lot of buttons is that you're not supposed to use the device itself as the user interface. You're supposed to use a multipurpose remote that's got a bazillion buttons.
You accounted for the price of inflation, but not the reduction in cost due to improvements in technology. From that I'd say you should actually reduce the price. Probably to somewhere around 1/4 the actual price (well...if this was anything but audio. "Audiofiles" have crazy ideas that old=better.)
You'd do a lot better if you picked a category other than audio to do your comparisons based on. With audio equipment there's a big disconnect between quality of goods and price because almost all listening related comparisons are subjective. It tends to make the prices subjective as well.
Add to that the fact that they deal with factions divided by scarcity, no explosions in space, a concept of a fusion reactor, and no light speed travel, and you're talking about a series that is firmly entrench not only in Sci-Fi, but in pretty involved Sci-fi.
He even considered that the two dominant languages on our planet would end up being the main languages people spoke in the future, and that most people would know some of both.
We can see that this is a possible future with only incremental improvements in our own development.
Does it need to be flashy, filled with technology and very alien to our own experience for it to be Sci-fi for the GP?
I don't disagree with you. I don't agree with you either. :)
I'm not entirely sure that this situation is like the one you're talking about. There is a representative government there. The problem isn't the kind of government, it's the people running it. The corruption is the government. Fixing it means replacing it with a nonlocal government, which means not doing things in the best interest of the local community - working, rather, towards the nation as a whole.
Interesting that you chose to talk about the Romans and the Incans - two cultures that absorbed, but mostly *destroyed* the cultures of the peoples they assimilated in their own interest. Obviously doing that will solve the problem. Along the same lines, brainwashing will get someone to do what you want. To me it's a question of picking the lesser of two evils...unless there's a third option I'm not aware of. Personally, I don't have a clue what the best option is.
The problem was corruption. I imagine that it still is, since New Orlean's mayor was reelected.
Money wasn't used right.
This is one of the areas that I had previously not heard about.
My company sees stuff related asset management - including disaster planning, and we've heard that money related to that was also diverted. So nobody locally knew what to do to get the national government involved after the levees burst.
I can't figure this out. The trail is clearly visible. If you look at where the money went you can see what money was wasted; you can see where self-interest superseded the good of everyone.
How should we, as a society deal with this problem? Rebuild the culture of New Orleans so that such a thing is impossible? Ignore it and spend money to make it exactly the same?
Personally, I've got no idea. For that matter, I don't know why this isn't common knowledge. I don't think that just putting money back into the same thing is the way to fix it, though. Removing corruption most likely means taking over a large portion of the government...which means killing a lot of the culture. Should we do that?
I would assume, then, that you have some sort of alternate theory.
No. Lack of alternatives is not sufficient to select an inferior theory. You have the option of saying, "I don't know." This is my choice.
Do you not realize that more-or-less all of modern Biology is based on Evolution? That the technology used to create antibiotic and antiviral drugs is based wholly on the theory of Evolution?
I disagree. Modern antibiotic and antiviral developments are based upon natural selection. Certain limited traits can be developed by breeding to be more advantageous for people. This is one of the first technlogies developed by man and is a well established fact.
I don't believe that you can extrapolate all of evolutionary theory from this. The probabilities of changes in complexity using randomness in cell mutation are not high enough for me to accept improvement by this means. I am very intersted to know about the key points - like how a single celled organism could suddenly become multicelled. There needs to be something else as part of the theory that helps introduce order to change my mind.
Biologists have been directly observing evolution in action for decades.
To my knowledge this is untrue. They've seen natural selection. They've seen characteristics that are designed to allow mutation among a specific selection of possible states change states. I've told that I don't agree and why. Your next step, should you choose to take it, will be to supply supporting arguments that show why I'm wrong. Merely claiming that I'm wrong is just yelling.
If that alternative is, as I would imagine if you are an evangelical Christian, some form of creationism, there is a large difference between that and a scientific theory like Evolution. In science, there is the requirement--in order for something to be considered a natural explanation--that it be disprovable.
I've heard this old chestnut time and again. Didn't I say I don't accept any explaination for how anything began yet? I don't think that "it's not a real scientific theory" is sufficient for me to reject alternatives as false any more than its a reason to accept one as true.
In reality, there are a lot of things that we operate with without the benefit of rigorous science. I continue to accept, for example, that time will continue to function as it has despite the fact that the human race has almost no idea why this has continued to be true - other than overwelming number of times that it has done so. I think that if a big, booming voice saying, "I made the Earth and everything on it through spontaneous creation. Now I'm making some unicorns" was suddenly heard by every man, woman and child on earth, and this was followed by unicorns suddenly popping into existence right in front of millions of witnesses, then I'd forsake the disprovable theory in favor of spontaneous creation.
Similarly, if a scientist in a lab figured out a way to make a puppy out of nothing but some amoebas, and then told everyone that he used evolutionary processes to do it, I'd be totally convinced that evolution is how it all works.
Either case means we've got a theory that's been tested and works in at least one specific case. One case takes a lot less of a leap of faith than no cases at all. Right now we've only got ideas that have no direct evidence - only lots of indirect evidence. I haven't gotten my puppy or my unicorn.
You're inferring things I didn't write. Let me be more clear.
I do not believe in evolution, and I ALSO do not believe in any other mechanisms having to do with life.
Furthermore, I don't believe in any mechanisms explaining how the earth was created, or any mechanisms that explain how the universe was created.
I don't believe that any mechanism that explains these things is good. All the theories I've ever read on any of these subjects are lacking in the supporting facts department. They're just not ready yet.
You're inferring things I didn't write. Let me be more clear.
I do not believe in evolution, and I ALSO do not believe in any other mechanisms having to do with life.
Furthermore, I don't believe in any mechanisms explaining how the earth was created, or any mechanisms that explain how the universe was created.
I don't believe that any mechanism that explains these things is good. They're all lacking in the supporting facts department. I'm willing to accept one of them. But they're not ready yet.
In this entire line of reasoning, the assumption appears to be that these people can't possibly hold one wrong view yet also do anything else right.
Rejecting evolution makes you a gibbering idiot who is unable to govern your own life and hates science? Do you realize how incredibly arrogant that is?
I don't believe in Evolution. I haven't seen enough facts to support it. I hold the same to be true for all mechanisms whereby the earth, life, and the universe were created. Nothing has enough evidence to support any kind of solid conclusion. There's a bit too much guesswork for me to accept it.
So, IMHO, all it takes is a few preconcieved notions to get you to pick one theory over another. Which one is right? Beats me. I, like most of society, have the luxury of not needing to know how things started to function. And not just function - an understanding of virtually all science, technology, culture, art, and search for truth is available to me without being sure about that.
The only thing I have to deal with is a very special kind of ignorance. The ignorance of the halfway educated - of those who believe that they have Learned and now Know the Right Answer and can therefore Show Others the Way. Once you really start to getting into how things work, you realise that you Know Very Little and Always Will.
How can you be so sure?
You're not thinking small enough. It doesn't have enough RAM for either of those programs. Abiword is like 40MB in memory, and Bluebird is still a java IDE.
*Anything* with Java (short of J2ME) is too big to fit the whole program in memory. It doesn't matter how big a CF slot you have - not fitting in memory is the same as not being able to run on the device.
How about Nano+Makefiles? That's the kind of thing that will fit.
without emulation
You notice that a lot of companies that release 360 games also release those games to PC?
They write them in DirectX.
All it would take is Apple support for DirectX and an easy mechanism for video card driver writers to convert Windows drivers to OSX drivers.
Actually, since Apple sells hardware, they can just do that, can't they?
When it takes only a little effort to support both, game designers will support both.
That's why you see so many DVD+-rw drives. Do you think a lot of people care a lot that it supports both?
Add an IDE (Eclipse) and it could be used in introductory programming classes.
My copy of Eclipse is currently running at 267MB. The install directory is over 1 GB. There's no way that's happening. Also, there's no way that will look okay on the tiny screens they've got on these things.
This is NOT a computer in the traditional sense. It's a PDA in a different form factor.
In the case of personality change you may need to apply such force several times as you may simply trigger alternate personalities instead, but you can repeat until satisfied.
This is a well understood phenomenon.
you think that Moore's Law applies to anything besides semiconductor production?
I'm going to have to go with yes.
While it is debatable, the generally held belief is that knowledge is increasing at a geometric rate.
That's why Moores law works: knowledge of how to make the changes is really the only barrier to increasing efficiency of silicon production.
Any other industry whose primary factor determining efficiency is knowledge should have similar results. Obviously, the ease of refactoring to meet the more clever ideas can affect the rate, but I don't think that its unreasonable to expect progress to double in constant periods of time.
That said, I doubt that the energy industry falls into this geometric rate category. The oil cartel wants to be the ones making the money, and that governs things more than the increasae in knowledge.
But what about other manufacturing? I'd say that most goods manufacturing is increasing in ability at a geometric rate because of increases posed by increases in knowledge.
Is lead the only metal that
1) Can be made into a paint
2) Conducts radio waves (this is a Faraday Cage for radio waves)?
The answer is no. Most metals conduct radio waves to some degree, just like most can conduct all EM radiation. There are quite a number to choose from that are harmless to humans. Lead is the big choice because its so dense, but we're not talking about nuclear radiation here (and more importantly, we're not talking about nuclear particles, which are stopped by other matter getting in the way, not just by conductive materials). We're not blocking the EM equivalent of a truck - just a series of tubes.
I can see a way around the window/door thing as well.
Put enough conductive material into the Windows and you'll get the same effect. In addition, there are some shapes you can make the entryways (again using principals of a Faraday cage) that will cause the radio waves to tend not to reflect out.
a. We shouldn't have to fiddle with this when it comes to our devices. A quick check of PCI, USB, and IDE controllers should tell us what we have and therefore need to load. The only exception to this is RAID controllers...but loading extra ones of those takes almost no time at all.
Any driver not tied to a device will load extremely fast, so that shouldn't be an issue either. It means that we're talking about less than a second worth of boot time when we've already got minutes of boottime hanging over our heads.
b. Less than a tenth of a second if you've got your system behind a router.
c. On a good boot system, this happens close to last, and it doesn't affect the running of other systems - i.e. it's already parallelized.
d. Are you trying to make it longer rather than shorter? The filesystems we have are designed to have difficulty getting corrupted. The time to do this *far* exceeds the boot time. And it shouldn't be necessary most of the time. I have mine set to check once every 40 boots.
e. KDE comes with *lots* of bloat that you don't need and can't easily turn off because its part of KDE. Unlike GAIM, which adds less than a second to the start time of KDE, starting the hardware manager, the window manager, the sound manager, etc. takes a looonnng time.
The real solution is to just not use the big WMs that come with lots of stuff. Use FVWM, or IceWM, or something like that. Then it won't be a problem if you start up your favorite programs at bootup.
f. While this does make the system more responsive, it has no effect whatsoever on bootup time.
You didn't address at all the fact that people using linux often have *services* running on their computer that can be started in parallel (for example, I don't mind if apache starts the same time as tomcat). Solving this problem is by far more important than any of the things you've mentioned.
It's more like the difference between NetBSD and Linux. While most programs that run on one can be made to run on the other, and the idea behind how they work is a lot the same because both came from the same base, the internals are fundamentally different.
DD-Wrt is *not* OpenWRT with a nice UI. That doesn't do either of them credit. *Both* come with a nice web interface.
The difference today is that OpenWRT is managed by a large group with different goals and ideas. DD-Wrt is done by one guy, and his goal is to make it as useful as possible for what he thinks users want to use it for.
They also started different ways - which also leads to the differences in goals. OpenWRT was really the first project of its kind and has always had generally the goal that it does now - whatever people who want to work on it want it to do. DD-Wrt is based on the now-GPL violating commercial WRT distro called Alchemy - mostly because they wanted the project to continue despite the fact that it's owner wanted to start closing the source.
From TFA:
Knowing how to secure both Linux and Windows, plus understanding Cisco firewall configurations (or Shorewall/iptables) -- not to mention having a firm grasp of web application security -- is not a realistic expectation of any newly graduated employee, much less a seasoned veteran.
What? I'm guessing that maybe this is because a seasoned veteran would expect for the network to be maintained correctly? Especially the firewall?
Really, this doesn't sound like a level playing field at all. My company support *three* services - IMap, HTTP, and ssh. We keep the programs that offer these services completely updated. There's not a lot to keeping those updated. There's one major player for ssh, two for web, and four or so for mail. Even the minor ones take less than an hour to figure out.
We expect that the routers will handle almost everything else. Flaws coming out in IP stacks are a pretty major thing, and get fixed pretty quick, so it should mostly be a nonissue.
If these guys only had to support features that people actually use and lock down everything else, things would be very different.
Whatever decent advancement is made, nothing can compare to raw experience.
Nothing? If I was fighting a war, and was given the choice between 100,000 highly trained hand-to-hand combat experts without weapons, or 100 guys with two weeks training in tanks, I'd take the tanks.
Similarly, if I was betting on a cage match between a 30 year old, 200 pound martial arts expert who's been training all his life and a 12 year old girl with a handgun and two hours of training, I'd bet on the girl winning in the first twenty seconds.
Without our technology, humans are nearly helpless. It's our technology that makes us powerful.
"Overspecialize and you breed in weakness."
This doesn't actually have to do with specialization. Technology and specialization aren't the same thing. Getting overheated is a pretty universal problem, and knowing how to use gloves doesn't require a lot of special knowledge.
Except the razr, which looks pretty but has almost no features to speak of and breaks easily.
That ones popular because they've made a dozen pretty version of it. That phone is being treated like an accessory to an outfit rather than something to talk to people with.
If that trend continues, we'll end up with phones that you can't actually use with a plan...because they don't actually do anything except make cool noises (i.e. you can't communicate to other people with 'em).
you do realize that most all mail clients use...
Yes, all of the mail clients you listed give you the option of using the mbox format to store the mail. This is, however, not the only option for any of the ones you listed and hasn't been for more than half a decade.
this defect has NOTHING to do with how the filesystem works
I misspoke. I was talking about the mail filesystem - i.e. the internal mechanism whereby it stores its folders. The fact that NTFS has to be defragmented shows its low quality, but that's not the point. This has to do with the mail's internal structure.
how the AV handles the detection of viruses in certin "special" places, such as inboxes
Why should an AV program have to handle mail differently than everything else? That's the bug. If the structure of a mail system is the same as the structure of a filesystem, why aren't the filesystem related details relegated to the filesystem so that other programs, like antiviruses, can plug into them?
The term "Defective by Design" was specifically invented to describe products containing DRM, where the usability of the product is intentionally compromised in order to protect the profits of a third party. ...and to apply to the security policy that's intentionally insecure to accomodate user issues and program writers.
Most of the things that we see this appear in are because we see an exploit. Such exploits in a better written file system wouldn't be an issue at all. So the defect is the design more than the actual flaw.
This case is a similar matter. The virus scanner is scanning a file, finding a virus in it, and quarantining it. The bug isn't with the AV, its in the fact that an entire user's mailbox is stored in a single file, which is a defect in the design of Microsoft's mail system. This wouldn't happen if Microsoft was using a better mechanism for storing mail.
So I say we let the "defectivebydesign" tags keep coming. We can stop when we stop seeing the obvious design defects.
Personally, I'm a lot more concerned for the scallop's smaller cousin. Sure, everybody's all about freeing the scallops, but what about the mallocs?
They get totally ignored and end up leaking toxic stuff all over the place.
So everyone, free the mallocs to stop the leaks!