They don't really improve social welfare for poor people.
There's no net benefit to that.
Making donations to medical universities, libraries, symphonies, etc., is not only providing cultural benefit, but it is giving to people who are working for it.
Housing and medical care for the poor? What's the use? No amount of charity ever done on Earth has left us with any fewer poor people.
No, this is not a nice view. I'm just pointing out the pragmatic side.
A pair of turntables is an instrument just as a guitar is, and a performance using one requires just as much 'musicianship' as with any other instrument.
Hm... Tell that to Christopher Parkening, or Wilhelm Kempff, or...... hell with it. No. Just... no. OMG no. Holy shit.
I have yet to meet the synthesizer that can even remotely duplicate the dulcet noises of the old-fashioned dead trees and metal strings of my grand piano. Or the delightfully analog feel. Or dynamic range. Or imposing presence in the living room. As well the synthesizer completely fails at those little weird harmonics only found in acoustic pianos but which add rich character to the sound.
No thank you sir, you may keep your electro-wizardry, your programmable gewgaws, your artificial noises. I do not wish to play on a computer; working on one is enough. Nay, sir, the music comes from the soul, through the fingers, and sings or roars out from the harmonious combination of iron, steel, copper, and spruce. The pure pitch and harmonic perfection of your electronically generated waveforms only takes away from the music; it adds nothing. Computerized precision has no soul, sir.
I've earned $150 a month sometimes. That's gotta cover gas, cell phone, car insurance, and food.
I just today made a pot of chili that will last me for at least 16 meals... with $6 worth of stew meat and chorizo. Everything else, including beans, herbs, and tomato sauce, I grow and/or make.
Breakfast could be $0.003 worth of red winter wheat, and two eggs at $2/dozen.
Lessee... where can we skimp? Deodorant -- get one of those Thai stones. $3 and lasts for years. Razor blades, use them until they start to cut you; this is a tough one. Shaving cream -- use soap. Brush teeth with baking soda. Mouth wash is a waste of money.
If I sound crazy, hey, blame my Scottish ancestry. But I tell you, sure as politicians lie, I can eat like a *king* on $4 a day.
You mean you took a pill that you thought would make you feel better and you felt better? That's not really evidence that the additional vitamins did anything but give you well fortified urine.
(I am not GP, but...)
Who gives a fuck? It's my money, and if I want to buy vitamins that make me feel good (even if I just feel good because I think I feel good, and really, what's the difference?) then what business is it of yours? Your opinion of the mechanism at work is of no import.
So don't take vitamins. See if I care. I don't suppose you're one of those people who frowns on homegrown organic vegetables, too, eh?
Actually, on a serious note... this article said that the vitamins were no better than (thus equal to) placebo. Quite interesting then, that in double-blind trials of Prozac, placebo worked better than Prozac, without the side effects like suicide.
Oh, you're right; there's no doubt there would be complaints.
So we'll no doubt carry on making hundreds of millions of power cables that will never be used, so as to mollify people who lack the foresight to leave the store with everything they need.
I kicked myself once for getting home with a new printer, only to find the manufacturer didn't include a USB A-B cable. I went back to buy one. Since then, I've been good with one cable for multiple devices over the following years, and if I need another, I can get one.
Eh. All things considered, I don't think it'd be the end of the world, and people with either adjust or not... but what else is new?
This is simply for people who willfully blow through a red light.
Seriously? 99% of red light infractions are simply a result of a brief but minor distraction, and take place within the first 2 seconds of the red -- which is usually before the cross traffic gets a green anyway.
That's not "willful". It's "unintentional". Take a second to change the radio station, or scold a child in the back seat, miss when the light turns yellow, and suddenly you're cutting it a bit too close. Then a camera nails you when you cross into the intersection.003 seconds after the light goes red.
No cop would ever write that ticket.
No camera can tell the difference, either, between deliberate or inadvertent.
Maybe you should take a trip to the brain store, and try one on for size. And ride the damn bus, because you probably can't drive worth a shit anyway.
As if you think forcing you not to run red lights and endangering people's lives is some major attack on your freedom.
Forcing anyone to do anything is the very definition of an attack on freedom, dumbass. If I force you to dunk your head in a toilet, I have taken away your freedom to have a dry head. This is kinda Civics 101, no?
I'm not taking an anarchist position here, mind you, but maybe you should think a little bit about what the words you use actually mean.
what are we supposed to do about the pandemic of red-light-running?
Lengthen the yellows, and lengthen the delay to the cross green.
It's only mentioned several hundred times every time this subject comes up on/. Pull your head out and read the other comments sometime. Do pay attention; we're having what we call a "discussion" here.
Hah. Denver, CO was nailing people for stopping with their bumpers in the crosswalk. So not running reds, but stopping a few inches too late.
You obviously lack imagination. A crook will always find a way with the money-making schemes. And strangely, there will always be sanctimonious fuckwits defending said crooks as long as the crooks sell their scam as safety.
Yes, laptops won't be as cable intensive, but I see these things multiplying over the years.
We could hope that, if such a standard is adopted, the universal laptop bricks would be sold separately, and you'd only buy one if you didn't already have one.
And yeah, it's high time we started doing that with the PC/monitor power cables as well. Almost every computer owner has at least an extra half dozen of them. There's no reason for manufacturers to include something that's been standard forever. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done for the cost savings.
Another person's CNC wood mill is another item. So, those machines are stuck with XP pretty much for good, because who is going to throw out a perfectly functioning mill just because it requires a legacy OS?
There are still options. You'd be surprised how much old oddball hardware *someone out there* has written Linux drivers for.
Failing that, there's Wine. Or XP emulation mode in Win 7.
Or pay a homeless developer some cash & Red Bull to write you some new software. CAM has been around forever and it's not complicated.
It's how I learned to ace written exams on topics I never bothered to study.:) Truly I should have been called on the carpet for it, but the sharpest people do not end up as schoolmarms.
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit!
It is my firm belief that verbal bullshit should be taught in high school as a semester-long subject. It would lead to a less gullible public, a public more skeptical of their politicians -- because, as everyone knows, you can't bullshit a bullshitter.
I think it was called "rhetoric" back in the day, and it was indeed taught in schools. We need it now more than ever.
I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
Yeah? What about nuclear war? EMP? Zombies? Ebola? Solar flares? Mice chewing through wires? I mean, yes, you're right, but it comes down to how many contingencies you can possibly plan for, and how much budget you have to plan for them all. I can't plan for a one in a million event -- but neither can cloud giants, as we've seen even the mighty Amazon go down. Shit just happens sometimes. We want to minimize it of course, but be realistic.
Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers?
I didn't say it was a good idea or that I liked it; just that it can be done... and sadly, I have done it.
That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center.
Sounds like another one of those crazy random events (if that actually happened). Do you have a manual for this stuff? See chapter 5, section 12, for what to do if a transformer blows a hole in the colo? What if Mel Gibson catches fire next to your cage while touring the colo? Although... a week is a long outage for something like that. That sounds like someone isn't prepared, regardless of whether you've got iron or cloud.
1) 200 lawyers can afford some electrical and HVAC costs, not to mention a well-paid IT staff.
2) It pretty much is that simple for those of us who do it. Supporting infrastructure for a few hundred people is child's play nowadays. And hell, if you're setting up AD and Exchange on cloud servers, you can do it on your own hardware.
Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right?
Do you even know what a blade server is? Redundant blades, redundant power supplies... redundant bloody everything.
Firewalling, routing, and load balancing can be handled by VMs running on said ridiculously redundant blade server.
Most businesses don't need geographical redundancy because they don't need 100% uptime. Very few do. I'd say the vast majority of the businesses (small to medium) out there can get by without their servers for a day. They might not like it, but they won't die.
I used to work for a company that sold cloud services. It can be good for some use cases, but not so often as people seem to think.
Well, perhaps some United States citizen can explain this to me?
Umm... nope, doesn't make any sense to me either.
All non-Americans seem to think that all Americans are somehow individually responsible for the actions of our government. In truth, we have about as much control over it as you do.
"Killer" or Africanized honeybees are not as big a problem as the mass media made them out to be. The solution turns out to be rather interesting.
Africanized bees like different dimensions in their hives -- smaller boxes, less space between frames. They're angry in European-sized bee equipment, but give them homes they're comfortable with, and their "killer" behavior goes away. Colonies of Africanized bees can be re-queened with gentler European queens, too.
In Brazil, the Africanized bee is considered to have been re-domesticated this way, and it's only a matter of time before it's the case everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't really improve social welfare for poor people.
There's no net benefit to that.
Making donations to medical universities, libraries, symphonies, etc., is not only providing cultural benefit, but it is giving to people who are working for it.
Housing and medical care for the poor? What's the use? No amount of charity ever done on Earth has left us with any fewer poor people.
No, this is not a nice view. I'm just pointing out the pragmatic side.
I didn't say the synthesizer isn't an instrument. I said it can't fully duplicate the real thing.
I might be a Luddite snob, but you suck at reading comprehension.
I already learned this from George Carlin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo
I'm expecting the next Slashdot headline to read "Will the Sun come up tomorrow? Probably."
A pair of turntables is an instrument just as a guitar is, and a performance using one requires just as much 'musicianship' as with any other instrument.
Hm... Tell that to Christopher Parkening, or Wilhelm Kempff, or... ... hell with it. No. Just... no. OMG no. Holy shit.
Depends on the quality of the recording and of the playback equipment. You can get pretty close.
Those words could only be said by someone who:
* has either never been in a concert hall with a real live orchestra, or
* is tone deaf.
If you're the latter, gods bless you, you'll never be disappointed.
I think you have pretty much described (part of) a world not worth living in.
You're underestimating a synthesizer.
I have yet to meet the synthesizer that can even remotely duplicate the dulcet noises of the old-fashioned dead trees and metal strings of my grand piano. Or the delightfully analog feel. Or dynamic range. Or imposing presence in the living room. As well the synthesizer completely fails at those little weird harmonics only found in acoustic pianos but which add rich character to the sound.
No thank you sir, you may keep your electro-wizardry, your programmable gewgaws, your artificial noises. I do not wish to play on a computer; working on one is enough. Nay, sir, the music comes from the soul, through the fingers, and sings or roars out from the harmonious combination of iron, steel, copper, and spruce. The pure pitch and harmonic perfection of your electronically generated waveforms only takes away from the music; it adds nothing. Computerized precision has no soul, sir.
I've earned $150 a month sometimes. That's gotta cover gas, cell phone, car insurance, and food.
I just today made a pot of chili that will last me for at least 16 meals... with $6 worth of stew meat and chorizo. Everything else, including beans, herbs, and tomato sauce, I grow and/or make.
Breakfast could be $0.003 worth of red winter wheat, and two eggs at $2/dozen.
Lessee... where can we skimp? Deodorant -- get one of those Thai stones. $3 and lasts for years. Razor blades, use them until they start to cut you; this is a tough one. Shaving cream -- use soap. Brush teeth with baking soda. Mouth wash is a waste of money.
If I sound crazy, hey, blame my Scottish ancestry. But I tell you, sure as politicians lie, I can eat like a *king* on $4 a day.
You mean you took a pill that you thought would make you feel better and you felt better? That's not really evidence that the additional vitamins did anything but give you well fortified urine.
(I am not GP, but...)
Who gives a fuck? It's my money, and if I want to buy vitamins that make me feel good (even if I just feel good because I think I feel good, and really, what's the difference?) then what business is it of yours? Your opinion of the mechanism at work is of no import.
So don't take vitamins. See if I care. I don't suppose you're one of those people who frowns on homegrown organic vegetables, too, eh?
Actually, on a serious note... this article said that the vitamins were no better than (thus equal to) placebo. Quite interesting then, that in double-blind trials of Prozac, placebo worked better than Prozac, without the side effects like suicide.
Oh, you're right; there's no doubt there would be complaints.
So we'll no doubt carry on making hundreds of millions of power cables that will never be used, so as to mollify people who lack the foresight to leave the store with everything they need.
I kicked myself once for getting home with a new printer, only to find the manufacturer didn't include a USB A-B cable. I went back to buy one. Since then, I've been good with one cable for multiple devices over the following years, and if I need another, I can get one.
Eh. All things considered, I don't think it'd be the end of the world, and people with either adjust or not... but what else is new?
This is simply for people who willfully blow through a red light.
Seriously? 99% of red light infractions are simply a result of a brief but minor distraction, and take place within the first 2 seconds of the red -- which is usually before the cross traffic gets a green anyway.
That's not "willful". It's "unintentional". Take a second to change the radio station, or scold a child in the back seat, miss when the light turns yellow, and suddenly you're cutting it a bit too close. Then a camera nails you when you cross into the intersection .003 seconds after the light goes red.
No cop would ever write that ticket.
No camera can tell the difference, either, between deliberate or inadvertent.
Maybe you should take a trip to the brain store, and try one on for size. And ride the damn bus, because you probably can't drive worth a shit anyway.
As if you think forcing you not to run red lights and endangering people's lives is some major attack on your freedom.
Forcing anyone to do anything is the very definition of an attack on freedom, dumbass. If I force you to dunk your head in a toilet, I have taken away your freedom to have a dry head. This is kinda Civics 101, no?
I'm not taking an anarchist position here, mind you, but maybe you should think a little bit about what the words you use actually mean.
what are we supposed to do about the pandemic of red-light-running?
Lengthen the yellows, and lengthen the delay to the cross green.
It's only mentioned several hundred times every time this subject comes up on /. Pull your head out and read the other comments sometime. Do pay attention; we're having what we call a "discussion" here.
Hah. Denver, CO was nailing people for stopping with their bumpers in the crosswalk. So not running reds, but stopping a few inches too late.
You obviously lack imagination. A crook will always find a way with the money-making schemes. And strangely, there will always be sanctimonious fuckwits defending said crooks as long as the crooks sell their scam as safety.
^^This!!^^
Mod it up!
Yes, laptops won't be as cable intensive, but I see these things multiplying over the years.
We could hope that, if such a standard is adopted, the universal laptop bricks would be sold separately, and you'd only buy one if you didn't already have one.
And yeah, it's high time we started doing that with the PC/monitor power cables as well. Almost every computer owner has at least an extra half dozen of them. There's no reason for manufacturers to include something that's been standard forever. I'm surprised it hasn't already been done for the cost savings.
A friend's $3000 sewing machine is one example.
Another person's CNC wood mill is another item. So, those machines are stuck with XP pretty much for good, because who is going to throw out a perfectly functioning mill just because it requires a legacy OS?
There are still options. You'd be surprised how much old oddball hardware *someone out there* has written Linux drivers for.
Failing that, there's Wine. Or XP emulation mode in Win 7.
Or pay a homeless developer some cash & Red Bull to write you some new software. CAM has been around forever and it's not complicated.
Well... for one, my 1998 4-banger gets me 38mpg on the highway.
And it has air conditioning... power niceties... and weighs probably twice as much as that '68 Beetle. I don't think we're doing too bad.
We're not doing as good as we could be, on average, because everyone buys automatic transmissions, which still cannot match the efficiency of manuals.
It's how I learned to ace written exams on topics I never bothered to study. :) Truly I should have been called on the carpet for it, but the sharpest people do not end up as schoolmarms.
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit!
It is my firm belief that verbal bullshit should be taught in high school as a semester-long subject. It would lead to a less gullible public, a public more skeptical of their politicians -- because, as everyone knows, you can't bullshit a bullshitter.
I think it was called "rhetoric" back in the day, and it was indeed taught in schools. We need it now more than ever.
I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
Yeah? What about nuclear war? EMP? Zombies? Ebola? Solar flares? Mice chewing through wires? I mean, yes, you're right, but it comes down to how many contingencies you can possibly plan for, and how much budget you have to plan for them all. I can't plan for a one in a million event -- but neither can cloud giants, as we've seen even the mighty Amazon go down. Shit just happens sometimes. We want to minimize it of course, but be realistic.
Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers?
I didn't say it was a good idea or that I liked it; just that it can be done... and sadly, I have done it.
That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center.
Sounds like another one of those crazy random events (if that actually happened). Do you have a manual for this stuff? See chapter 5, section 12, for what to do if a transformer blows a hole in the colo? What if Mel Gibson catches fire next to your cage while touring the colo? Although... a week is a long outage for something like that. That sounds like someone isn't prepared, regardless of whether you've got iron or cloud.
1) 200 lawyers can afford some electrical and HVAC costs, not to mention a well-paid IT staff.
2) It pretty much is that simple for those of us who do it. Supporting infrastructure for a few hundred people is child's play nowadays. And hell, if you're setting up AD and Exchange on cloud servers, you can do it on your own hardware.
Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right?
Do you even know what a blade server is? Redundant blades, redundant power supplies... redundant bloody everything.
Firewalling, routing, and load balancing can be handled by VMs running on said ridiculously redundant blade server.
Most businesses don't need geographical redundancy because they don't need 100% uptime. Very few do. I'd say the vast majority of the businesses (small to medium) out there can get by without their servers for a day. They might not like it, but they won't die.
I used to work for a company that sold cloud services. It can be good for some use cases, but not so often as people seem to think.
Well, perhaps some United States citizen can explain this to me?
Umm... nope, doesn't make any sense to me either.
All non-Americans seem to think that all Americans are somehow individually responsible for the actions of our government. In truth, we have about as much control over it as you do.
All will be fine until 10 years from now, when the Swiss will be accused of hoarding Jewish BitCoin from Holocaust survivors....
"Killer" or Africanized honeybees are not as big a problem as the mass media made them out to be. The solution turns out to be rather interesting.
Africanized bees like different dimensions in their hives -- smaller boxes, less space between frames. They're angry in European-sized bee equipment, but give them homes they're comfortable with, and their "killer" behavior goes away. Colonies of Africanized bees can be re-queened with gentler European queens, too.
In Brazil, the Africanized bee is considered to have been re-domesticated this way, and it's only a matter of time before it's the case everywhere.