since government activity is never 100% efficient, there are significant losses. A direct transfer payment (without government meddling) would AT LEAST be 100% efficient.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a new bridge or school or a wind farm than have the same money thrown at Chase or Bank of America. While the government-built bridge or school will probably wind up costing 30% more than originally budgeted and take twice as long to complete, at least at the end of it you have something.
Throw a few billion at a banker and, like David Copperfield, they can make it disappear entirely. Bank lending (not just consumer lending, but also commercial lending) is worse today than it was 6 months ago. And that's with a couple hundred billion of our dollars that was supposed to be spent shoring up bad debt.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan has purchased Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Bank of America has purchased Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust. Wells Fargo has purchased Wachovia. These aren't small players... and that's only the $70 billion tip of the iceberg.
The banking industry is only 100% efficient at enriching themselves. I'll take my chances with the federal government, thanks.
I really liked XFCE initially. It was lean, looked nice, did what I wanted but otherwise stayed out of the way.
But there are a couple of huge, glaring, gaping goatse-sized holes. First is the built-in file manager. Last time I used Xfce it came with Thunar, which was awful. No built-in support for samba file browsing. Or FTP. No built-in file search capability. There were ways you could get around some of the limitations, but in the end I started to hate all the wasted time surfing message boards for solutions to things that "just worked" everywhere else (KDE, Gnome, hell even Windows!)
Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.
This is the fundamental problem when trying to explain why SSDs are so absolutely magically fantastic.
SSDs negate RAID-0. We're talking about drive i/o that is measured in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds. Solid state drives essentially remove i/o from the equation (at least, on the disk). Stacking multiple drives that each have an access time of ~0 isn't going to do you any good.
Just replying to confirm that the ThinkGeek wallets DO, in fact, work as advertised. I realized this after trying to leave my office's parking lot by fruitlessly waiving my newly-acquired RFID-blocking wallet (with parking pass inside) at the entry gate's sensor.
They cannot adapt to the evolutionary pressure caused by us so they must go extinct. Science trying to reverse this process is hypocritical.
You're ignoring one rather important fact: DNA diversity is fundamentally in our best interest. Not because some species are cute, or even because they taste good or make a warm pair of gloves. The reason it's in our best interest to keep even the biological stragglers like the white tiger around is because you never know when that one genetic variance that could lead to the next cure for [insert human ailment here].
I'm not saying we need to repopulate the forests with flightless birds or albino tigers. But it would probably be a good idea to keep a few samples of their DNA around. Just in case.
Can you please explain why Firefox supports innerHTML, considering it is a Microsoft invention
Because (successful) software developers are pragmatic more than they are pedantic. One only has to look at the relative successes of Linus Torvalds versus Richard Stallman as a prime example.
Microsoft also invented Ajax (well, they were the first to implement the XMLHttpRequest). Just because the devil gives you a pony doesn't mean he still isn't evil. And it doesn't make the pony evil by proxy.
no, I know of no one in the photo world (I'm including myself) who uses crt's anymore.
Sorry, but you still can't beat CRTs for color and off-axis accuracy. That's not to say that there aren't some LCD panels that are adequate, like the NEC LCD2690WUXi. But the people who rail against CRTs that have cheap-ass $250 LCDs on their desk make me laugh. You really think a couple of fluorescent back-lights scattered through multiple layers of film can compete with a 22" cathode ray tube and a fine aperture grill? Ha!
The problem is that people have been repeating this mantra for the past 10 years, hoping and wishing and dreaming that if they just repeat it enough it will eventually be true. And in those years, the remaining display manufacturers have either closed up shop, or moved production lines to the far, far more lucrative LCD market.
Lucrative, as in, you (the consumer) is getting something cheaper, of inferior quality, that will operate for less time before you have to buy a new one.
Perhaps when LED monitors come out, I'll finally get rid of my NEC SuperBright Diamondtron. The good news is that my CRT will outlast any LCD panel by at least three lifetimes (something else flat-panel fans quickly forget).
Unfortunately, the laws mandating archival are relics themselves. For a local example, here in Maine they keep lists of campaign contributions made to various local politicians. But they are only required to hold two years of records, which is basically useless for determining any historical patterns of contributions.
The laws need to be updated to reflect changes in technology. With the price of storage these days, there's effectively no reasonable difference between archiving 2 years of data and archiving 20 years. We (the people) simply have to decide it's important enough to update the rules. Because you know the politicians have no incentive to suggest such legislation themselves.
Frankly, I'd rather have a full day off every other week.
Yeah, I don't understand the logic of a half-day of work for a lot of people. If you have a long commute, the actually-working / sitting-in-traffic ratio becomes so ludicrous that you might as well either "call in sick" or just go the full day.
Thanks for replying... I think some people forget just how complicated (and time-consuming) it is to design a vehicle for space travel when you don't have billions of dollars in your budget.
So this is coming out in both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version to further confuse the market[...]
No, you don't understand.
Windows 7 is simply a Vista service pack. That's it. It's a Vista service pack with a few extra spiffy services. That's why your Windows 7 drivers will work with Vista drivers. Because they're the same damned base.
That is why they're releasing a 32-bit version. Because Vista has a 32-bit version. Because they're the goddamned same.
This is no different than Windows 2003 which came out a little while after XP and blew its socks off for performance.
News for you: Windows XP 64 is the 2003 codebase. Without the extra crap. Which is why it's better.
Now, reality check: it took Microsoft how many years to write Vista? And you're telling me that in one single year (a year that year saw hundreds of thousands of users whole-heartedly reject Vista) they manage to write a completely new OS?
Well, ain't that convenient. Anyone who thinks Windows 7 is anything more than a Service Pack for Vista needs to get their head examined. Why do you think your Vista drivers work in Windows 7?
This is just Microsoft's second attempt to shove Vista down everyone's throat. They're betting that because everyone completely rejected one OS, they won't have the balls to reject two releases.
It's like going to a restaurant, ordering a steak, then two hours later you're served a pile of dog crap. Then, when you send the plate back to the kitchen and demand a real meal, they re-heat the pile of dog shit and serve it to you again, thinking you can't possibly refuse the same shit twice, not after waiting so long.
While here, we're paying taxes and consuming locally bought (not locally produced, usually) products just like everyone else...
And being paid the salary that could have gone to an actual citizen. Why does that matter? Because an H1B visa holder operates outside the social contract between government and its citizenry. You can't be drafted into military service, for instance. As long as there are borders, there will be additional responsibilities for citizens and advantages and benefits as reward.
I thought Coral Cache might work, but the only thing cached right now is the "out of business" message. If anyone has any actual links to content they could try Coral Cache themselves.
I'm a bit dumbfounded at the completeness of the stupidity. Let's see...
1. Use RAID mirroring as a backup solution? Check! 2. Don't make a copy of your data files anywhere else, ever? Check! 3. Actively prohibit public, free site mirrors from getting to your sacred content? Check! 4. Practice naked fire juggling in front of server farm? Wouldn't be surprised.
I used an XP x64 workstation at work for two years, as a developer workstation - worked great.
Same here. Using XP64 since it was available as a free download on MS. Stable as hell (and it should be, since it's based on the 2003 codebase but without the cruft).
The biggest hurdle has been specialty drivers. Nikon, for instance, refuses to offer 64-bit drivers for their professional scanners. The *only* option (besides reverting your OS) is to install a 3rd-party program (VueScan). So, a 3rd party software company can somehow figure out how to write 64-bit drivers for hardware that the manufacturer themselves can't write drivers for? Sure, Nikon.
SonicWall tried the same bullshit with their VPN client, at least until their business users cried bloody murder. Took them nearly 5 years to release a driver, and it's still a Beta!
Of course, Vista64 users are in the same boat, so I don't understand why people think XP64 is special in this regard.
So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners?
I don't think the problem is any combination of "insecurity, misogyny or homophobia" but instead stems from the unscientific aspects of the work. If two programmers submitted a solution to a problem, how would you rate the superior solution? Well, computational algorithms can be tested. Performance can be measured.
If two artists submit their solution to an interface problem, how do you rate the superior solution? There certainly are ways to do so, but those tend to involve careful tests with a number of "regular" people. Typically, those kinds of studies cost money.
That doesn't mean there aren't ways to use OSS to help... Maybe someone could come up with a way to leverage social networking to improve interface testing. I dunno. I do know, however, that it often helps to have a singular vision--a Steve Jobs role--someone who is given the ultimate authority to say, "no, that's dreadful." Designs by committee tend to look like it.
The only option for cable based HD right now is the Haupage HD-PVR.... Try a modern Myth setup, it's a LOT easier to deal with than it used to be.
Any "modern" Myth setup that requires the end-user to patch the software just to be able to support the "only option" for cable-based HD is not nearly modern enough.
Presumably if they have the patches already, they could have rolled that into the source and released a point release by now. I mean, the Hauppauge HD-PVR has been available since June. The last MythTV update was in May. The MythTV folks really seem to have a bug up their butt about updating their craptacular software.
(yes, troll-ish & flamebait-ish because MythTV has been such a phenomenal disappointment over the last seven years)
There was a terrific article written for Wired by Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson!) called Mother Earth Mother Board all about the laying of the longest underwater telephony cable in history. He goes into a lot of details as to how the cable is laid, what happens to the cable when it reaches shore, what is the cable made of, how does it work, etc.
Here's an excerpt where he explains how slack affects the process:
The basic problem of slack is akin to a famous question underlying the mathematical field of fractals: How long is the coastline of Great Britain? If I take a wall map of the isle and measure it with a ruler and multiply by the map's scale, I'll get one figure. If I do the same thing using a set of large-scale ordnance survey maps, I'll get a much higher figure because those maps will show zigs and zags in the coastline that are polished to straight lines on the wall map. But if I went all the way around the coast with a tape measure, I'd pick up even smaller variations and get an even larger number. If I did it with calipers, the number would be larger still. This process can be repeated more or less indefinitely, and so it is impossible to answer the original question straightforwardly. The length of the coastline of Great Britain must be defined in terms of fractal geometry.
A cross-section of the seafloor has the same property. The route between the landing station at Songkhla, Thailand, and the one at Lan Tao Island, Hong Kong, might have a certain length when measured on a map, say 2,500 kilometers. But if you attach a 2,500-kilometer cable to Songkhla and, wearing a diving suit, begin manually unrolling it across the seafloor, you will run out of cable before you reach the public beach at Tong Fuk. The reason is that the cable follows the bumpy topography of the seafloor, which ends up being a longer distance than it would be if the seafloor were mirror-flat.
Over long (intercontinental) distances, the difference averages out to about 1 percent, so you might need a 2,525-kilometer cable to go from Songkhla to Lan Tao. The extra 1 percent is slack, in the sense that if you grabbed the ends and pulled the cable infinitely tight (bar tight, as they say in the business), it would theoretically straighten out and you would have an extra 25 kilometers. This slack is ideally molded into the contour of the seafloor as tightly as a shadow, running straight and true along the surveyed course. As little slack as possible is employed, partly because cable costs a lot of money (for the FLAG cable, $16,000 to $28,000 per kilometer, depending on the amount of armoring) and partly because loose coils are just asking for trouble from trawlers and other hazards. In fact, there is so little slack (in the layperson's sense of the word) in a well-laid cable that it cannot be grappled and hauled to the surface without snapping it.
This raises two questions, one simple and one nauseatingly difficult and complex. First, how does one repair a cable if it's too tight to haul up?
The answer is that it must first be pulled slightly off the seafloor by a detrenching grapnel, which is a device, meant to be towed behind a ship, that rolls across the bottom of the ocean on two fat tractor tires. Centered between those tires is a stout, wicked-looking, C-shaped hook, curving forward at the bottom like a stinger. It carves its way through the muck and eventually gets under the cable and lifts it up and holds it steady just above the seafloor. At this point its tow rope is released and buoyed off.
The ship now deploys another towed device called a cutter, which, seen from above, is shaped like a manta ray. On the top and bottom surfaces it carries V-shaped blades. As the ship makes another pass over the detrenching grapnel, one of these blades catches the cable and severs it.
It is now possible to get hold of the cut ends, using other grapnels. A cable repair ship carries many d
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since government activity is never 100% efficient, there are significant losses. A direct transfer payment (without government meddling) would AT LEAST be 100% efficient.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a new bridge or school or a wind farm than have the same money thrown at Chase or Bank of America. While the government-built bridge or school will probably wind up costing 30% more than originally budgeted and take twice as long to complete, at least at the end of it you have something.
Throw a few billion at a banker and, like David Copperfield, they can make it disappear entirely. Bank lending (not just consumer lending, but also commercial lending) is worse today than it was 6 months ago. And that's with a couple hundred billion of our dollars that was supposed to be spent shoring up bad debt.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan has purchased Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Bank of America has purchased Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust. Wells Fargo has purchased Wachovia. These aren't small players... and that's only the $70 billion tip of the iceberg.
The banking industry is only 100% efficient at enriching themselves. I'll take my chances with the federal government, thanks.
I really liked XFCE initially. It was lean, looked nice, did what I wanted but otherwise stayed out of the way.
But there are a couple of huge, glaring, gaping goatse-sized holes. First is the built-in file manager. Last time I used Xfce it came with Thunar, which was awful. No built-in support for samba file browsing. Or FTP. No built-in file search capability. There were ways you could get around some of the limitations, but in the end I started to hate all the wasted time surfing message boards for solutions to things that "just worked" everywhere else (KDE, Gnome, hell even Windows!)
Yes, certainly. But for most end-users, the limiting factor is the access times for traditional media. With SSDs, access time is a non-issue.
Last time I checked, RAID-0 is useless for access times regardless of the media.
Well, last time you checked, you were dead wrong. Here, let me uncomplicate the complicated for you.
Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.
This is the fundamental problem when trying to explain why SSDs are so absolutely magically fantastic.
SSDs negate RAID-0. We're talking about drive i/o that is measured in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds. Solid state drives essentially remove i/o from the equation (at least, on the disk). Stacking multiple drives that each have an access time of ~0 isn't going to do you any good.
Just replying to confirm that the ThinkGeek wallets DO, in fact, work as advertised. I realized this after trying to leave my office's parking lot by fruitlessly waiving my newly-acquired RFID-blocking wallet (with parking pass inside) at the entry gate's sensor.
They cannot adapt to the evolutionary pressure caused by us so they must go extinct. Science trying to reverse this process is hypocritical.
You're ignoring one rather important fact: DNA diversity is fundamentally in our best interest. Not because some species are cute, or even because they taste good or make a warm pair of gloves. The reason it's in our best interest to keep even the biological stragglers like the white tiger around is because you never know when that one genetic variance that could lead to the next cure for [insert human ailment here].
I'm not saying we need to repopulate the forests with flightless birds or albino tigers. But it would probably be a good idea to keep a few samples of their DNA around. Just in case.
Additionally, a lot of people are running hand-me-down systems that are only powerful enough to run under Windows 98SE (which won't run Firefox).
Can you please explain why Firefox supports innerHTML, considering it is a Microsoft invention
Because (successful) software developers are pragmatic more than they are pedantic. One only has to look at the relative successes of Linus Torvalds versus Richard Stallman as a prime example.
Microsoft also invented Ajax (well, they were the first to implement the XMLHttpRequest). Just because the devil gives you a pony doesn't mean he still isn't evil. And it doesn't make the pony evil by proxy.
I think I should probably stick to car analogies.
no, I know of no one in the photo world (I'm including myself) who uses crt's anymore.
Sorry, but you still can't beat CRTs for color and off-axis accuracy. That's not to say that there aren't some LCD panels that are adequate, like the NEC LCD2690WUXi. But the people who rail against CRTs that have cheap-ass $250 LCDs on their desk make me laugh. You really think a couple of fluorescent back-lights scattered through multiple layers of film can compete with a 22" cathode ray tube and a fine aperture grill? Ha!
The problem is that people have been repeating this mantra for the past 10 years, hoping and wishing and dreaming that if they just repeat it enough it will eventually be true. And in those years, the remaining display manufacturers have either closed up shop, or moved production lines to the far, far more lucrative LCD market.
Lucrative, as in, you (the consumer) is getting something cheaper, of inferior quality, that will operate for less time before you have to buy a new one.
Perhaps when LED monitors come out, I'll finally get rid of my NEC SuperBright Diamondtron. The good news is that my CRT will outlast any LCD panel by at least three lifetimes (something else flat-panel fans quickly forget).
Exactly.
They did build the first atomic bomb.
Unfortunately, the laws mandating archival are relics themselves. For a local example, here in Maine they keep lists of campaign contributions made to various local politicians. But they are only required to hold two years of records, which is basically useless for determining any historical patterns of contributions.
The laws need to be updated to reflect changes in technology. With the price of storage these days, there's effectively no reasonable difference between archiving 2 years of data and archiving 20 years. We (the people) simply have to decide it's important enough to update the rules. Because you know the politicians have no incentive to suggest such legislation themselves.
Well if you have money take your telescope and get out to sea somewhere.
Yeah, and you can bring a grandfather clock to keep time. And if you're bored, you can bring along a Jenga set. Everyone loves boat Jenga.
Frankly, I'd rather have a full day off every other week.
Yeah, I don't understand the logic of a half-day of work for a lot of people. If you have a long commute, the actually-working / sitting-in-traffic ratio becomes so ludicrous that you might as well either "call in sick" or just go the full day.
Thanks for replying... I think some people forget just how complicated (and time-consuming) it is to design a vehicle for space travel when you don't have billions of dollars in your budget.
So this is coming out in both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version to further confuse the market[...]
No, you don't understand.
Windows 7 is simply a Vista service pack. That's it. It's a Vista service pack with a few extra spiffy services. That's why your Windows 7 drivers will work with Vista drivers. Because they're the same damned base.
That is why they're releasing a 32-bit version. Because Vista has a 32-bit version. Because they're the goddamned same.
This is no different than Windows 2003 which came out a little while after XP and blew its socks off for performance.
News for you: Windows XP 64 is the 2003 codebase. Without the extra crap. Which is why it's better.
Now, reality check: it took Microsoft how many years to write Vista? And you're telling me that in one single year (a year that year saw hundreds of thousands of users whole-heartedly reject Vista) they manage to write a completely new OS?
Well, ain't that convenient . Anyone who thinks Windows 7 is anything more than a Service Pack for Vista needs to get their head examined. Why do you think your Vista drivers work in Windows 7?
This is just Microsoft's second attempt to shove Vista down everyone's throat. They're betting that because everyone completely rejected one OS, they won't have the balls to reject two releases.
It's like going to a restaurant, ordering a steak, then two hours later you're served a pile of dog crap. Then, when you send the plate back to the kitchen and demand a real meal, they re-heat the pile of dog shit and serve it to you again, thinking you can't possibly refuse the same shit twice, not after waiting so long.
While here, we're paying taxes and consuming locally bought (not locally produced, usually) products just like everyone else ...
And being paid the salary that could have gone to an actual citizen. Why does that matter? Because an H1B visa holder operates outside the social contract between government and its citizenry. You can't be drafted into military service, for instance. As long as there are borders, there will be additional responsibilities for citizens and advantages and benefits as reward.
I thought Coral Cache might work, but the only thing cached right now is the "out of business" message. If anyone has any actual links to content they could try Coral Cache themselves.
I'm a bit dumbfounded at the completeness of the stupidity. Let's see...
1. Use RAID mirroring as a backup solution? Check!
2. Don't make a copy of your data files anywhere else, ever? Check!
3. Actively prohibit public, free site mirrors from getting to your sacred content? Check!
4. Practice naked fire juggling in front of server farm? Wouldn't be surprised.
I used an XP x64 workstation at work for two years, as a developer workstation - worked great.
Same here. Using XP64 since it was available as a free download on MS. Stable as hell (and it should be, since it's based on the 2003 codebase but without the cruft).
The biggest hurdle has been specialty drivers. Nikon, for instance, refuses to offer 64-bit drivers for their professional scanners. The *only* option (besides reverting your OS) is to install a 3rd-party program (VueScan). So, a 3rd party software company can somehow figure out how to write 64-bit drivers for hardware that the manufacturer themselves can't write drivers for? Sure, Nikon.
SonicWall tried the same bullshit with their VPN client, at least until their business users cried bloody murder. Took them nearly 5 years to release a driver, and it's still a Beta!
Of course, Vista64 users are in the same boat, so I don't understand why people think XP64 is special in this regard.
But I digress...
So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners?
I don't think the problem is any combination of "insecurity, misogyny or homophobia" but instead stems from the unscientific aspects of the work. If two programmers submitted a solution to a problem, how would you rate the superior solution? Well, computational algorithms can be tested. Performance can be measured.
If two artists submit their solution to an interface problem, how do you rate the superior solution? There certainly are ways to do so, but those tend to involve careful tests with a number of "regular" people. Typically, those kinds of studies cost money.
That doesn't mean there aren't ways to use OSS to help... Maybe someone could come up with a way to leverage social networking to improve interface testing. I dunno. I do know, however, that it often helps to have a singular vision--a Steve Jobs role--someone who is given the ultimate authority to say, "no, that's dreadful." Designs by committee tend to look like it.
The only option for cable based HD right now is the Haupage HD-PVR. ...
Try a modern Myth setup, it's a LOT easier to deal with than it used to be.
Any "modern" Myth setup that requires the end-user to patch the software just to be able to support the "only option" for cable-based HD is not nearly modern enough.
Presumably if they have the patches already, they could have rolled that into the source and released a point release by now. I mean, the Hauppauge HD-PVR has been available since June. The last MythTV update was in May. The MythTV folks really seem to have a bug up their butt about updating their craptacular software.
(yes, troll-ish & flamebait-ish because MythTV has been such a phenomenal disappointment over the last seven years)
There was a terrific article written for Wired by Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson!) called Mother Earth Mother Board all about the laying of the longest underwater telephony cable in history. He goes into a lot of details as to how the cable is laid, what happens to the cable when it reaches shore, what is the cable made of, how does it work, etc.
Here's an excerpt where he explains how slack affects the process:
The weight is more than twice as light as Lithium Ion ...also known as "less than half the weight"