I was fairly certain that glass prevents most of the harmful radiation in the ultraviolet spectrum from damaging your eyes, so for example, you can watch a nuclear explosion from your car without permanent blindness. Does this work with infrared as well? Because if it does, that would cancel out any problems with aircraft -- or people with glasses.
God, almost all of those references made me crack up... One of my faves that wasn't mentioned already is the Dracula toon where Bugs gets a copy of a magic book and starts changing monsters into other creatures by screwing up the pronounciation of "Abracadabra" and "Hocus-Pocus".
"Adbraca-pocus!" turned into a bat.
"Hocus-cadabra!" turned into half-monster, half-vulture.
It's amazing to see how these cartoons still wow audiences (children and adults alike) compared with the current ilk of crap, throwaway cartoons these days. Many of these toons dealt with current, sometimes controversial issues, and always refrained from dumbing down content just to appeal to the least common denominator. Back in the early days, Daffy Duck really was daffy, and Bugs was almost malicious. The best years for the Looney Tunes had to be the 1940's, particularly the ones that featured Hitler having terrible things happen to him. You think any cartoons these days are going to have the balls to have a toon Osama Bin Laden getting hit over the head with an anvil?
Now this is the kind of thing I love about this place. Congrats to both of you!
Complete land mine information
on
Robot Mine Smasher
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· Score: 5, Informative
Here's probably more than you ever wanted to know about land mines, since this topic has interested me ever since my travels around Laos and Cambodia. Land mines kill or maim between 20 and 30 thousand people each year; men, women and children, since mines clearly don't have distinctions. About 80% of those affected are normal civilians, and about a third are children. Usually land mine victims die by slowly bleeding to death. 85% of all the casualties are in Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia.
You might be surprised to know that while land mines are normally used to fight dirty little wars in third world countries, they are usually manufactured in the first world. A small list of manufacturers of mines are: Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada (yes, really), Chile, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Even Switzerland sells five different models. The US sells 37 different types, and is the world's leader, closely followed by Italy (36), Russia (31), then Sweden (21) and China (21).
Believe it or not, there are international regulations as to how land mines are supposed to be laid out, including having mine fields clearly labeled so your random stray farmer doesn't go getting his leg blown off. These are more suggestions than anything else, since the most effective method of distributing mines over a large area is to drop cluster bombs that can contain almost 250 mines per pod.
Mines are generally not as difficult to disarm as many would think. While we might have the impression of the complex booby-traps laid during the Vietnam war, the reality is thankfully a lot less harrowing. Bombs work by detonating an explosive material that creates a wall of air that expands outwards at about 7,000 meters per second. Different mines also offer different packaging, so if you add small ball-bearings or nails to that mixture you can see how dangerous (even at a distance) they can be.
Here are the major bomb types used around the world:
Scatter Mines
Scatter mines are designed primarily by Russia and were used primarily in Afghanistan. They are specifically designed not to kill their victims, but instead injure them, thus slowing down a larger party. It has the added effect ofd emoralizing the country and creating a strain on its economy to keep them alive. The PFM-1 butterfly bomb is dropped from airplanes or helicopters and their shape helps them to burrow slightly into the ground. They are easy to disarm, which is why the most common victims are now children not yet educated in their harm. The PFM-1 can be modified to detonate with light pressure after being armed (once it hits the ground), or self-detonate after a specified period.
Small Antipersonnel
These are usually manufactured out of plastic, which makes them very difficult to pick up when scanning. They have feather-light contacts and normally have to be hand-set, usually buried in the mud or under a bush. They are also designed to incapacitate rather than kill. The big models are the Chinese Type 72, Italian TS-50 and United States M14.
Large Antipersonnel
Larger mines are generally packed with about 5 times the amount of explosives of their smaller counterparts. They are designed to take out larger parties of people, or even entire platoons, and are the most popular land mine in existance. They are triggered by pressure plate, and normally buried under high-traffic areas. Because of their larger size and higher amount of metal parts, they are easier to find (but much more dangerous to disarm). These mines cost about $3 to make.
Frag Mines
Fragmentation mines are designed to explode with a large payload of high-velocity metal parts. In the United State's Claymore mine, it's ball bearings. The Russian POMZ-2 uses small, sharp metal pieces. These mines are usually designed like glorified grenades, and have pins that can be connected to strings or wires and used as booby traps. There are also Bouncing Betty style frag grenades that, when triggered, project upwards about 5 feet to maximize the kill-zone. The Italian Valmara-69 is the most famous of this design, and can contain 1000 individual pieces of shrapnel. Because of the blast radius, survival rates are usually very low.
Road Mines
These mines have the highest casualty rates of any type. They are very large plate-trigger designs that are easily disarmed (when found), but when they go off, they can take out entire tanks, their occupants, and any soldiers close by. The British L9 and Italian VS-22 were popular models used in the Gulf War. There are two strategies to planting these mines. One is to plant them in the well-worn treads on a mud road (if a vehicle has been over them, it must be safe, right?). The other method takes the opposite approach, and places them in the areas just to the side of major roads (kinda' like reverse psychology.)
The most daunting task to clearing the land mines is the sheer number of them still active around the world. Egypt has the most, at 23 million, but Iran, Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, China and Iraq all have more than 10 million buried in them. About two million new land mines are planted each year (more than 15 million are manufactured). Since only about 100,000 land mines are removed each year, you can easily see that they will be with us for a very, very long time.
Much of this information was gathered at HALO Trust's website (www.halotrust.org). HALO is an agency dedicated to the elimination of land mines. Also, information on land mines was obtained from The World's Most Dangerous Places by Robert Pelton. Pick up a copy if you're a travel buff.
Slightly off-topic, but since the subject has come to the Simpsons, I must say this.
HOMR is from last season, probably the last half-decent season the Simpsons will ever see. While Season 12 had more than the normal share of not-very-good episodes, this season has been truly awful. The reason is simple, and his name is Dana Gould.
For those of you who don't know, Dana Gould is a failed stand-up comic who is now taking his lowest common denominator humor to the Simpsons and is singularly responsible for it's current lackluster -- hell, let's just be honest, god-awful humor. Homer getting raped by a panda? Homer finding a corpse as a child? The constant rehashing of previous plot-lines and characters? Say thank you to Dana.
I now find myself tuning in every Sunday night with my fingers crossed, repeating a mantra of "Please don't suck... please don't suck" and for this entire season I have been disapointed. Certainly there were funny jokes. But the Simpsons has turned into stringing forced "big-laughs" into loosely-woven plotlines than generally tend to revolve around celebrities or Homer being an idiot. If you check the 2/10/02 episode, you'll count almost twenty-five producers. 25 producers. Management is strangling the life out of this wonderful series while Dana Gould stomps on its putrifying corpse with his steel-toed jack-boots.
I think Lisa's hypothetical question at the end of the 1/6/02 episode says it all: "Is this the end of our series"... "of events?"
Now it will only cost me $3.50 to rip it and make a DivX;) movie instead of either shelling out $20 or waiting for it to come out on Usenet/FastTrack/IRC/etc.
I, for one, completely and full-heartedly endorse this product.
I agree completely. While the tests performed are very useful for those people running server processes, the entire article ignores most end-user applications. He didn't even bother installing X on his test systems (though naturally one doesn't need KDE to keep a company running). I would love to see a benchmark comparison for real end-user user applications. And since this is Linux, have a separate section devoted strictly to the stability of these apps.
Sadly, I don't think this question will be answered today, for so many zealots still think you can "sell" Linux without convincing Joe User that open source can answer all their needs just as well as other, more Redmond-based solutions. While I have no gripes with the article, I simply wish Linux gurus would step back from their BASHes and see that there's a whole world of regular people just trying to use computers as tools for their jobs and varied interests. I want to know how GIMP will run. I want to know how good Konquerer is compared to IE. I want to know how the speed of KDE/GNOME's UI is compared to Windows 2000. Unfortunately, I think this will probably be too "beneath" most kernel hackers to address.
Listen, people. The reason that the Evil Empire is doing so well is that thousands of people are buying their software. Thousands of people that have better things to do than trying to keep their computers operating. You like programming? That's fine. You probably make a living in the engineering field. Personally, I make a living doing design and advertising. That means I will take the solution that is reasonably fast and doesn't crash while I'm editing a 600 meg graphic file or a 4 gig video. I love open source software (and wish sourceforge would offer more Win32 app development, but whatever), and will support it in a more knee-jerk way than any MS solution, provided people actually have the guts to compare the two.
If you want to guarantee yourself a job, try specializing in biology-related sciences. I realize that there's may not be a whole lot of overlap with electrical engineering, but there is some, and you should root out those specialties and master them. The medical industry, and in particular health and biotech, is huge and will only get bigger as more baby boomers get close to their deathbeds. I've been looking for IT-related jobs in the health industry, and the salary ranges are unbelievable -- like that of good IT jobs during the boom years.
My father graduated with an EE degree in 1970, and proceeded to do government work -- reliability engineering and whatnot. After becoming extremely dissatisfied with the workings of govt. contracts, he finally got a job designing computer systems for patient monitoring devices (those things that go "beep... beep... beep" in hospitals are now a LOT more sophisticated). He's never been happier.
Anti-aliasing is the process of smoothing the hard, jagged edges of graphics. Graphics can mean images or fonts. Normally this is accomplished by taking the surrounding color values and blending them. In the case of a simple black line on a white background, the edges of the line would be interpolated as an intermediate shade of grey. This gives a softer visual effect that is generally more pleasing to the eye, though too much can render the graphic blurry.
This can best be seen on websites that use GIF images placed over tiled backgrounds. The edges are hard -- you can see exactly where one graphic ends and the other begins. With fonts, which are usually vector based, the problem arises with diagonal lines. For a computer to render a diagonal line on the screen, it makes several smaller lines that are slighly offset. The point where this offset occurs looks like a hard edge. In real-world printing this isn't a problem, because the physical properties of ink bleed edges together. But in the digital world, you need extra software to simulate this softening effect.
As anyone who's ever collected comics knows, it's the scarcity of comics that helps create their demand and popularity over time, not their wide distribution. How many of you have an X-Men #94? Amazing Fantasy #15? Detective Comics #27? But if you did, you'd cherish it like an heirloom, you'd pass it to your children when they got old enough to know the difference between acid-free backing boards and regular cardboard.
Sure, widespread distribution will help if all you want to do is read the comics, but that's not where their value comes from. The important thing is that I have an Avengers #3, and you have an Avengers #16, and if we're going to trade, yours better be in mint condition.
There's just something very visceral and male about holding a rare comic book. What am I gonna do, have a swapable harddrive of Marvel and DC. "Hey, check out KaZaa, they've got the latest Superman story." Bah! There are some things that technology simply cannot improve on.
I'm sorry, I don't have much karma, I generally don't have many new things to add to discussions once they hit the frontpage and people have posted, but I'm sacrificing what I've got.
For the sake of the/. community, and open-source fanatics around the world, please fix the moderation system.
There are a lot of very educated Linux users and developers who post to/., and this seemed like the most appropriate thread to ask this. I sincerely hope this is not construed as flamebait.
I'm currently running Win2k on a Pentium 350 with about 384 megs of RAM. Besides the RAM, the system is fairly standard. For the past two years, I have really, really been interested in using Linux (or *BSD), but it is precisely the nature of these posts that is scaring me off. Win2k runs fast on my system. By fast I mean that the windows manager is quick in responsiveness, that windows can be dragged around quickly and programs load in a "generally" snappy manner, even with all the background tasks and open windows.
My question is, how does this current release compare with Windows on a "basic" system in terms of general application usage? It was mentioned that there were WM problems in 2D display; is that a problem with the WM or with the kernel itself?
I have a hundred other questions but don't want to be any more off-topic. Perhaps I can post it to an Ask Slashdot... anyway, thank you in advance.
Look at the history of the world. How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?
None. Actually, there was one, but it is so historically obscure, was on such a small scale, and had so little historical impact that it obscures the point.
Revolutions are almost always started among the ranks of the middle class. Certainly it helps to have the manpower of the "masses" of proles, but they generally lack the coordinating ability to ever launch a targeted pogram. In a class war, your grunts are the proles, your leiutenants are the middle-class, and your generals are upper-middles who want to be upper-uppers.
If too many of the "elite" start thinking like this, we may all get a hard lesson in class warfare.
I certainly hope so. One of the interesting characteristics of democratic, capitalist systems is their large populations of middle-class individuals. The U.S. right now is a good example. The past decades have shown an increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a decreasing minority. It appears now that the only way to become "made" (by that I mean, having enough income to support yourself and the next generation) are the following:
1. Be very, very clever, and thus seen by those in charge as a tool to further their own agendas. Generally this means you will either be hired at a higher salary, or you will be entrepreneurial enough to create wealth on your own. Of course, the latter rarely lasts for very long before coming to the attention of those who have the economic power to legislate you out of existance (RIAA, MPAA, &c) or simply buy you out (Msoft).
2. Be born into wealth. To a greater extent, this means being born into a family that owns property. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to own your own land/house. You can see this in the glut of ads on television offering to help you get out of debt if you own your own home. Those without property are cursed with the Catch-22 of renting. You rent because you can't afford to buy, but can't save enough to buy because rent prices are generally greater than the cost of financing.
As a fellow YALODCW (Yet Another Laid Off Dot-Com Worker), my sincerest hopes are that the Current Management does all it can to trample the Constitution (it's doing a fine job so far) and lay off more intelligent ("But I've got a college degree!") workers who were conned into thinking that hard work would pay off (and that shelling out $80,000 for a college degree would actually mean anything when the CEO's buddy wants a job). I'm just glad guns are legal in this country.:)
When I use Windows machines, lack of mouse-only copy and paste is the single biggest usability problem I have.
What? Windows has mouse-only cut-and-paste. In fact, I used it when quoting from your original post. Just highlight the text you want, click the right mouse button, choose cut, then go to where you'd like to paste it, click the right mouse button again, and choose paste.
If your post was meant as a joke, I'm sorry for not getting it, but I just wanted to set the record straight for those <sarcasm>occasional Linux users that come here</sarcasm> who might not be familiar with the Windows OS.
Adobe Distiller has the ability to mascarade as a Printer driver, which means you can type up the text in any gosh-darned format in any golly-gee editors, then use the Distiller driver to export it to a file. Don't know if this will help, though there seem to be a lot of suggestions here and I'm sure one will work.
Re:Fight your techno-geek addiction...
on
The Joys of HDTV
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· Score: 1
Wrong on MiniDiscs. Check out your local BestBuy. The only thing lacking is large releases. Who cares, though, when you're just copying friend's CD's or MP3's? At a dollar a disc, it's cheaper than memory sticks (ala MP3 walkmans) and re-recordable, unlike CD's. And they don't skip.
Headcasting not as important as true Dual-Display
on
Talking with Matrox
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· Score: 3
Frankly, I think that the G550's head-casting system is not nearly as important an improvement as their solution to the dual-display problems that were plaguing G400's and G450's. The problem has been that Windows NT and subsequent evolutions (namely, 2000) would not allow for true independent dual displays on a single card without multiple video card processors. I don't know how they got around Microsoft's software limitations with the new G550, but they should be lauded for their achievements. As far as I know, Matrox is the only single-processor card manufacturer that has been able to solve this problem.
On the other hand, headcasting technology seems to be a pretty bad diversionary tactic to the onslaught of far superiour 3D boards (namely nVidia). "Oh yeah, we do 3D, too. But it's business 3D." Sure, whatever guys.
It is rather impressive to think that they've done all this without IPO millions (as they're still a privately owned company).
"...why should I have to keep the delivery media for the music I buy to hand just to listen to it?... These guys need to break free of the concept that the delivery media is the product."
The problem all revolves around this issue. Since you're dealing with a physical product, you can apply old-style laws of ownership to it. From that, you can apply old-style definitions of "theft", or deprivation.
The problem is that there is no real reason why someone with a decent broadband connection should have to deal with the recording industry any longer. They can still be used to produce music, but the actual manufacturing, distribution, and marketing is no longer needed. Unfortunately, as there is no current way to get intellectual ideas directly into the brain, we will be stuck with these parasitic middle-men for the ensuing years.
I believe the "huge, deadly, flu epidemic" you're referring to was in fact the 1918 "Spanish Flu" Influenza epidemic that killed between 25 and 40 million people.
Re:Printing Press Did Not Bring About Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 1
I'd have to agree with heinzkeinz but take it further: the Black Plague, not the printing press, was the single major cause of the Renaissance, killing 1/3 of Europe's population and creating a dire need for skilled workers. Simple supply and demand economics: fewer workers were subsequently paid more, which led to the rise of the middle class. A middle class has money, but not power, and with money you get leisure time as well as discresionary income.
Slashdot Mirror
I was fairly certain that glass prevents most of the harmful radiation in the ultraviolet spectrum from damaging your eyes, so for example, you can watch a nuclear explosion from your car without permanent blindness. Does this work with infrared as well? Because if it does, that would cancel out any problems with aircraft -- or people with glasses.
God, almost all of those references made me crack up... One of my faves that wasn't mentioned already is the Dracula toon where Bugs gets a copy of a magic book and starts changing monsters into other creatures by screwing up the pronounciation of "Abracadabra" and "Hocus-Pocus".
"Adbraca-pocus!" turned into a bat.
"Hocus-cadabra!" turned into half-monster, half-vulture.
It's amazing to see how these cartoons still wow audiences (children and adults alike) compared with the current ilk of crap, throwaway cartoons these days. Many of these toons dealt with current, sometimes controversial issues, and always refrained from dumbing down content just to appeal to the least common denominator. Back in the early days, Daffy Duck really was daffy, and Bugs was almost malicious. The best years for the Looney Tunes had to be the 1940's, particularly the ones that featured Hitler having terrible things happen to him. You think any cartoons these days are going to have the balls to have a toon Osama Bin Laden getting hit over the head with an anvil?
I feel so old now.
The increased risk exceeded 15% for those reporting more than 8.5 hours sleep or less than 3.5 or 4.5 hours
Dammit. I knew this was too good to be true.
Now this is the kind of thing I love about this place. Congrats to both of you!
Here's probably more than you ever wanted to know about land mines, since this topic has interested me ever since my travels around Laos and Cambodia. Land mines kill or maim between 20 and 30 thousand people each year; men, women and children, since mines clearly don't have distinctions. About 80% of those affected are normal civilians, and about a third are children. Usually land mine victims die by slowly bleeding to death. 85% of all the casualties are in Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia.
You might be surprised to know that while land mines are normally used to fight dirty little wars in third world countries, they are usually manufactured in the first world. A small list of manufacturers of mines are: Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada (yes, really), Chile, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Even Switzerland sells five different models. The US sells 37 different types, and is the world's leader, closely followed by Italy (36), Russia (31), then Sweden (21) and China (21).
Believe it or not, there are international regulations as to how land mines are supposed to be laid out, including having mine fields clearly labeled so your random stray farmer doesn't go getting his leg blown off. These are more suggestions than anything else, since the most effective method of distributing mines over a large area is to drop cluster bombs that can contain almost 250 mines per pod.
Mines are generally not as difficult to disarm as many would think. While we might have the impression of the complex booby-traps laid during the Vietnam war, the reality is thankfully a lot less harrowing. Bombs work by detonating an explosive material that creates a wall of air that expands outwards at about 7,000 meters per second. Different mines also offer different packaging, so if you add small ball-bearings or nails to that mixture you can see how dangerous (even at a distance) they can be.
Here are the major bomb types used around the world:
Scatter Mines
Scatter mines are designed primarily by Russia and were used primarily in Afghanistan. They are specifically designed not to kill their victims, but instead injure them, thus slowing down a larger party. It has the added effect ofd emoralizing the country and creating a strain on its economy to keep them alive. The PFM-1 butterfly bomb is dropped from airplanes or helicopters and their shape helps them to burrow slightly into the ground. They are easy to disarm, which is why the most common victims are now children not yet educated in their harm. The PFM-1 can be modified to detonate with light pressure after being armed (once it hits the ground), or self-detonate after a specified period.
Small Antipersonnel
These are usually manufactured out of plastic, which makes them very difficult to pick up when scanning. They have feather-light contacts and normally have to be hand-set, usually buried in the mud or under a bush. They are also designed to incapacitate rather than kill. The big models are the Chinese Type 72, Italian TS-50 and United States M14.
Large Antipersonnel
Larger mines are generally packed with about 5 times the amount of explosives of their smaller counterparts. They are designed to take out larger parties of people, or even entire platoons, and are the most popular land mine in existance. They are triggered by pressure plate, and normally buried under high-traffic areas. Because of their larger size and higher amount of metal parts, they are easier to find (but much more dangerous to disarm). These mines cost about $3 to make.
Frag Mines
Fragmentation mines are designed to explode with a large payload of high-velocity metal parts. In the United State's Claymore mine, it's ball bearings. The Russian POMZ-2 uses small, sharp metal pieces. These mines are usually designed like glorified grenades, and have pins that can be connected to strings or wires and used as booby traps. There are also Bouncing Betty style frag grenades that, when triggered, project upwards about 5 feet to maximize the kill-zone. The Italian Valmara-69 is the most famous of this design, and can contain 1000 individual pieces of shrapnel. Because of the blast radius, survival rates are usually very low.
Road Mines
These mines have the highest casualty rates of any type. They are very large plate-trigger designs that are easily disarmed (when found), but when they go off, they can take out entire tanks, their occupants, and any soldiers close by. The British L9 and Italian VS-22 were popular models used in the Gulf War. There are two strategies to planting these mines. One is to plant them in the well-worn treads on a mud road (if a vehicle has been over them, it must be safe, right?). The other method takes the opposite approach, and places them in the areas just to the side of major roads (kinda' like reverse psychology.)
The most daunting task to clearing the land mines is the sheer number of them still active around the world. Egypt has the most, at 23 million, but Iran, Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, China and Iraq all have more than 10 million buried in them. About two million new land mines are planted each year (more than 15 million are manufactured). Since only about 100,000 land mines are removed each year, you can easily see that they will be with us for a very, very long time.
Much of this information was gathered at HALO Trust's website (www.halotrust.org). HALO is an agency dedicated to the elimination of land mines. Also, information on land mines was obtained from The World's Most Dangerous Places by Robert Pelton. Pick up a copy if you're a travel buff.
Slightly off-topic, but since the subject has come to the Simpsons, I must say this.
... "of events?"
HOMR is from last season, probably the last half-decent season the Simpsons will ever see. While Season 12 had more than the normal share of not-very-good episodes, this season has been truly awful. The reason is simple, and his name is Dana Gould.
For those of you who don't know, Dana Gould is a failed stand-up comic who is now taking his lowest common denominator humor to the Simpsons and is singularly responsible for it's current lackluster -- hell, let's just be honest, god-awful humor. Homer getting raped by a panda? Homer finding a corpse as a child? The constant rehashing of previous plot-lines and characters? Say thank you to Dana.
I now find myself tuning in every Sunday night with my fingers crossed, repeating a mantra of "Please don't suck... please don't suck" and for this entire season I have been disapointed. Certainly there were funny jokes. But the Simpsons has turned into stringing forced "big-laughs" into loosely-woven plotlines than generally tend to revolve around celebrities or Homer being an idiot. If you check the 2/10/02 episode, you'll count almost twenty-five producers. 25 producers. Management is strangling the life out of this wonderful series while Dana Gould stomps on its putrifying corpse with his steel-toed jack-boots.
I think Lisa's hypothetical question at the end of the 1/6/02 episode says it all: "Is this the end of our series"
Now it will only cost me $3.50 to rip it and make a DivX ;) movie instead of either shelling out $20 or waiting for it to come out on Usenet/FastTrack/IRC/etc.
I, for one, completely and full-heartedly endorse this product.
I agree completely. While the tests performed are very useful for those people running server processes, the entire article ignores most end-user applications. He didn't even bother installing X on his test systems (though naturally one doesn't need KDE to keep a company running). I would love to see a benchmark comparison for real end-user user applications. And since this is Linux, have a separate section devoted strictly to the stability of these apps.
Sadly, I don't think this question will be answered today, for so many zealots still think you can "sell" Linux without convincing Joe User that open source can answer all their needs just as well as other, more Redmond-based solutions. While I have no gripes with the article, I simply wish Linux gurus would step back from their BASHes and see that there's a whole world of regular people just trying to use computers as tools for their jobs and varied interests. I want to know how GIMP will run. I want to know how good Konquerer is compared to IE. I want to know how the speed of KDE/GNOME's UI is compared to Windows 2000. Unfortunately, I think this will probably be too "beneath" most kernel hackers to address.
Listen, people. The reason that the Evil Empire is doing so well is that thousands of people are buying their software. Thousands of people that have better things to do than trying to keep their computers operating. You like programming? That's fine. You probably make a living in the engineering field. Personally, I make a living doing design and advertising. That means I will take the solution that is reasonably fast and doesn't crash while I'm editing a 600 meg graphic file or a 4 gig video. I love open source software (and wish sourceforge would offer more Win32 app development, but whatever), and will support it in a more knee-jerk way than any MS solution, provided people actually have the guts to compare the two.
If you want to guarantee yourself a job, try specializing in biology-related sciences. I realize that there's may not be a whole lot of overlap with electrical engineering, but there is some, and you should root out those specialties and master them. The medical industry, and in particular health and biotech, is huge and will only get bigger as more baby boomers get close to their deathbeds. I've been looking for IT-related jobs in the health industry, and the salary ranges are unbelievable -- like that of good IT jobs during the boom years.
My father graduated with an EE degree in 1970, and proceeded to do government work -- reliability engineering and whatnot. After becoming extremely dissatisfied with the workings of govt. contracts, he finally got a job designing computer systems for patient monitoring devices (those things that go "beep... beep... beep" in hospitals are now a LOT more sophisticated). He's never been happier.
Anti-aliasing is the process of smoothing the hard, jagged edges of graphics. Graphics can mean images or fonts. Normally this is accomplished by taking the surrounding color values and blending them. In the case of a simple black line on a white background, the edges of the line would be interpolated as an intermediate shade of grey. This gives a softer visual effect that is generally more pleasing to the eye, though too much can render the graphic blurry.
This can best be seen on websites that use GIF images placed over tiled backgrounds. The edges are hard -- you can see exactly where one graphic ends and the other begins. With fonts, which are usually vector based, the problem arises with diagonal lines. For a computer to render a diagonal line on the screen, it makes several smaller lines that are slighly offset. The point where this offset occurs looks like a hard edge. In real-world printing this isn't a problem, because the physical properties of ink bleed edges together. But in the digital world, you need extra software to simulate this softening effect.
- 8 kilometers of roads. Total.
- No natural fresh water supply. No rivers, no lakes, no wells.
- 1 radio station, AM, and 4,000 radios.
- Arable land: None; Permanent Crops: None; Permanent Pastures: None; Forests and Woodlands: None
- HIGHEST POINT: 5 METERS
Just how long do you think VeriSign's investment will last before a good, stiff wind blows the country off the map?This is not going to work.
As anyone who's ever collected comics knows, it's the scarcity of comics that helps create their demand and popularity over time, not their wide distribution. How many of you have an X-Men #94? Amazing Fantasy #15? Detective Comics #27? But if you did, you'd cherish it like an heirloom, you'd pass it to your children when they got old enough to know the difference between acid-free backing boards and regular cardboard.
Sure, widespread distribution will help if all you want to do is read the comics, but that's not where their value comes from. The important thing is that I have an Avengers #3, and you have an Avengers #16, and if we're going to trade, yours better be in mint condition.
There's just something very visceral and male about holding a rare comic book. What am I gonna do, have a swapable harddrive of Marvel and DC. "Hey, check out KaZaa, they've got the latest Superman story." Bah! There are some things that technology simply cannot improve on.
This entire thread breaks my heart.
/. community, and open-source fanatics around the world, please fix the moderation system.
I'm sorry, I don't have much karma, I generally don't have many new things to add to discussions once they hit the frontpage and people have posted, but I'm sacrificing what I've got.
For the sake of the
There are a lot of very educated Linux users and developers who post to /., and this seemed like the most appropriate thread to ask this. I sincerely hope this is not construed as flamebait.
I'm currently running Win2k on a Pentium 350 with about 384 megs of RAM. Besides the RAM, the system is fairly standard. For the past two years, I have really, really been interested in using Linux (or *BSD), but it is precisely the nature of these posts that is scaring me off. Win2k runs fast on my system. By fast I mean that the windows manager is quick in responsiveness, that windows can be dragged around quickly and programs load in a "generally" snappy manner, even with all the background tasks and open windows.
My question is, how does this current release compare with Windows on a "basic" system in terms of general application usage? It was mentioned that there were WM problems in 2D display; is that a problem with the WM or with the kernel itself?
I have a hundred other questions but don't want to be any more off-topic. Perhaps I can post it to an Ask Slashdot... anyway, thank you in advance.
Look at the history of the world. How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?
:)
None. Actually, there was one, but it is so historically obscure, was on such a small scale, and had so little historical impact that it obscures the point.
Revolutions are almost always started among the ranks of the middle class. Certainly it helps to have the manpower of the "masses" of proles, but they generally lack the coordinating ability to ever launch a targeted pogram. In a class war, your grunts are the proles, your leiutenants are the middle-class, and your generals are upper-middles who want to be upper-uppers.
If too many of the "elite" start thinking like this, we may all get a hard lesson in class warfare.
I certainly hope so. One of the interesting characteristics of democratic, capitalist systems is their large populations of middle-class individuals. The U.S. right now is a good example. The past decades have shown an increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a decreasing minority. It appears now that the only way to become "made" (by that I mean, having enough income to support yourself and the next generation) are the following:
1. Be very, very clever, and thus seen by those in charge as a tool to further their own agendas. Generally this means you will either be hired at a higher salary, or you will be entrepreneurial enough to create wealth on your own. Of course, the latter rarely lasts for very long before coming to the attention of those who have the economic power to legislate you out of existance (RIAA, MPAA, &c) or simply buy you out (Msoft).
2. Be born into wealth. To a greater extent, this means being born into a family that owns property. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to own your own land/house. You can see this in the glut of ads on television offering to help you get out of debt if you own your own home. Those without property are cursed with the Catch-22 of renting. You rent because you can't afford to buy, but can't save enough to buy because rent prices are generally greater than the cost of financing.
3. Con people out of their money. In a way, the entire Internet Boom was a con. Not that the technology isn't fantastic or that it hasn't changed the world. But you don't get large server space and huge bandwidth without convincing someone to invest in you. Enormous trading companies weren't buying and selling stock because they believed in the mantra of the techies, they did it because they thought that, further down the road, they'd have a controlling interest in the flavor-of-the-month Widget©. When they realized their mistake, they bailed, and the house of cards collapsed, but not before some very enterprising individuals were able to increase their economic rank significantly. Unfortunately, most of the cost was passed along to Grandpa and Granny Smith who were conned of their retirement funds, or Mom and Dad Jones who were hoping to save for their daughter's college fund.
As a fellow YALODCW (Yet Another Laid Off Dot-Com Worker), my sincerest hopes are that the Current Management does all it can to trample the Constitution (it's doing a fine job so far) and lay off more intelligent ("But I've got a college degree!") workers who were conned into thinking that hard work would pay off (and that shelling out $80,000 for a college degree would actually mean anything when the CEO's buddy wants a job). I'm just glad guns are legal in this country.
When I use Windows machines, lack of mouse-only copy and paste is the single biggest usability problem I have.
What? Windows has mouse-only cut-and-paste. In fact, I used it when quoting from your original post. Just highlight the text you want, click the right mouse button, choose cut, then go to where you'd like to paste it, click the right mouse button again, and choose paste.
If your post was meant as a joke, I'm sorry for not getting it, but I just wanted to set the record straight for those <sarcasm>occasional Linux users that come here</sarcasm> who might not be familiar with the Windows OS.
Adobe Distiller has the ability to mascarade as a Printer driver, which means you can type up the text in any gosh-darned format in any golly-gee editors, then use the Distiller driver to export it to a file. Don't know if this will help, though there seem to be a lot of suggestions here and I'm sure one will work.
Wrong on MiniDiscs. Check out your local BestBuy. The only thing lacking is large releases. Who cares, though, when you're just copying friend's CD's or MP3's? At a dollar a disc, it's cheaper than memory sticks (ala MP3 walkmans) and re-recordable, unlike CD's. And they don't skip.
Frankly, I think that the G550's head-casting system is not nearly as important an improvement as their solution to the dual-display problems that were plaguing G400's and G450's. The problem has been that Windows NT and subsequent evolutions (namely, 2000) would not allow for true independent dual displays on a single card without multiple video card processors. I don't know how they got around Microsoft's software limitations with the new G550, but they should be lauded for their achievements. As far as I know, Matrox is the only single-processor card manufacturer that has been able to solve this problem.
On the other hand, headcasting technology seems to be a pretty bad diversionary tactic to the onslaught of far superiour 3D boards (namely nVidia). "Oh yeah, we do 3D, too. But it's business 3D." Sure, whatever guys.
It is rather impressive to think that they've done all this without IPO millions (as they're still a privately owned company).
That'll teach me not to check the link before clicking on it!
"...why should I have to keep the delivery media for the music I buy to hand just to listen to it? ... These guys need to break free of the concept that the delivery media is the product."
The problem all revolves around this issue. Since you're dealing with a physical product, you can apply old-style laws of ownership to it. From that, you can apply old-style definitions of "theft", or deprivation.
The problem is that there is no real reason why someone with a decent broadband connection should have to deal with the recording industry any longer. They can still be used to produce music, but the actual manufacturing, distribution, and marketing is no longer needed. Unfortunately, as there is no current way to get intellectual ideas directly into the brain, we will be stuck with these parasitic middle-men for the ensuing years.
I believe the "huge, deadly, flu epidemic" you're referring to was in fact the 1918 "Spanish Flu" Influenza epidemic that killed between 25 and 40 million people.
I'd have to agree with heinzkeinz but take it further: the Black Plague, not the printing press, was the single major cause of the Renaissance, killing 1/3 of Europe's population and creating a dire need for skilled workers. Simple supply and demand economics: fewer workers were subsequently paid more, which led to the rise of the middle class. A middle class has money, but not power, and with money you get leisure time as well as discresionary income.