Could you also please ask your dad why every one of the six Western Digital hard drives I have purchased over the last three years has died a horrible, agonizing, clicking death? The drives were all either 60GB or 80GB drives, and every single one of them began clunking and clicking painfully within months. Invariably, each drive died a few months after the clunking noises started. What gives?
I don't buy Western Digital drives anymore, unsurprisingly.
I love JEdit, but one major, major thing keeps me from using it: horrible memory management. Like every other Java application, JEdit suffers from obscene memory bloat. It chews upwards of 20 megs right off the line, and eats more and more the longer it stays open. For someone like me, who often leaves an editor open for 20 hours straight while working on absolutely disgusting amounts of code, this is unbearable. After a typical day of coding with JEdit, it often ends up having consumed over 100 megabytes of precious, precious RAM.
Er, nanobots are called nanobots for a reason. These things are tiny, microscopic. They can be small enough to manipulate individual atoms. If you printed out this comment, millions upon millions of nanobots could live in the period at the end of this sentence.
Now imagine these nanobots disassembling space debris into its component atoms and dispersing it. Instead of having, say, an old rocket booster casing that could do massive amounts of damage to an orbiting spacecraft, you now have trillions of individual, unconnected atoms that are being dispersed over a wide area. These dispersed atoms aren't even visible, and they certainly wouldn't do any damage to spacecraft. And that's the goal here.
Who cares if the actual atoms themselves remain in orbit, as long as they're dispersed enough that they can't hurt anything?
The difference here (and this explains what I meant by that statement) is that in terms of nanotechnology, we already know exactly what we need to be able to do in order to build nanobots. The only thing limiting us right now is the difficulty involved in manipulating matter on the small scale required. However, advances in this field are being made at a very quick pace, and I'm confident we'll start seeing nanotechnology used widely within at least the next 25 years.
The biggest problem with this is that there aren't specific "debris-only" orbits. In addition, space is *vast*, even just the immediate area around our planet. Putting this dish in a new orbit for every clump of debris we want to collect would be extremely expensive in terms of energy, which translates directly to expense in terms of money.
This would be a prime application for nanotechnology. Unfortunately, we haven't quite advanced that far yet. Even so, once the technology is available, it wouldn't be hard (or particularly costly) to release clouds of self-propelled (maybe even solar-powered) nanobots into orbit that would target orbital debris and disassemble it on a molecular level, using the resulting extra molecules to build more trash-seeking nanobots or, alternatively, simply dispersing the trash molecules over a large area, thus removing any threat presented to other spacecraft.
There's only one potential problem I can imagine with this scenario. We'd need to figure out how to teach the nanobots the difference between functional satellites and nonfunctional trash. It wouldn't be good at all if we suddenly found that our nanobots had accidentally disassembled all our low-orbit satellites.
Now that I think about it, though, it occurs to me that nanobots would most likely be very susceptible to solar radiation, which they wouldn't be protected from outside Earth's atmosphere. I wonder how hard it would be to construct radiation-shielded nanobots?
This reminds me of the morons who use MySQL for financial transactions (i.e., no transactions, no foreign keys, etc) who justify their ignorance with "well, it works so far!!"
When was the last time you used MySQL? MySQL now supports several table types other than the default MyISAM type, including types with full transaction support.
I'm a skydiver. I never use a parachute. Instead, I just jump out of planes and hope that I land on a large air mattress. It's worked perfectly so far. Why should I switch? All you silly fools using parachutes make me laugh.
You can't play Quake 2 while running Trillian? Are you using a 486?
I play RTCW, Half-Life, Quake 3, MS Flight Sim and other CPU/graphics-intensive games all the time while running Trillian and even Mozilla Mail in the background, and I've never had any problems. Athlon XP 1800, GeForce 2 GTS and 512 MB of RAM on Windows XP.
Trillian runs just fine in Wine under Linux, FreeBSD and (presumably) other Unixes.
It's closed source, yes, but the developers are very active and extremely responsive (i.e., within hours) about fixing major problems.
Jabber sucks.
Major bloat? No. It uses less CPU and RAM on my machine than the AIM client, and far less than ICQ, and those two aren't even skinnable.
Fund-raising: For godssake, it's free software. If you don't want to donate, nobody's forcing you (and it's not like there's a nag screen or anything).
What? No it doesn't. The latest version of Trillian, running a custom skin and connected to all five networks is using 0% CPU time and only 10 megs of memory on my machine. That's less resource usage than ICQ alone, and ICQ isn't even skinnable without a third-party hack.
That's actually my mom's website you linked to. We've had gliders around the house ever since I was a kid, and they're awesome little creatures. If you're worried about them getting lonely, you can get a little drawstring pouch (or just use a shirt pocket if you don't mind it getting pooped in) and carry them around with you.
They're fragile creatures, but as long as you don't squash them or play too roughly with them, they'll be fine. Although yes, they do require a fair amount of commitment (though my mom somehow manages to take care of a house full of parrots and gliders at the same time, as well as several cats and a corn snake).
They're not "incontinent", but like many small animals, they do piss and poop when and where they feel like it. But really, it's not that bad. They're small enough that they don't produce very much at all, so when you get peed or pooped on you can just set the glider down and wash yourself off with some soap and water.
My Subaru WRX certainly is a killer app. Dear god, the number of times I've nearly killed myself in that thing is absolutely insane. I sure do love that car.
Who says you have to give them the refund? If they burned up the processor, it's their own fault. I've done this at least once, and instead of whining and demanding a replacement I just bought a new one from the same store. They got twice the business.
First off, decide what crowd you want to cater to. Do you want to sell things mostly to newbies who think floppy drives are floppy and hard drives are hard? Who think RAM is a type of goat? Then stock things that you'd find in CompUSA and sell that at prices slightly lower than your local stores, if you can.
But here's where I think the real money is (and there's a small shop here in Portland that does this very successfully): geeks. Geeks are impatient, they love tinkering, and they often break things that are vital to their system's health and will do anything to get a replacement in the shortest amount of time possible. So stock what geeks want. Do some research and find out what people are searching for on PriceWatch. Find out what Ars Technica is recommending.
Stock up on motherboards (especially Asus, Abit, and Tyan). Buy OEM processors if you can, because they're cheaper and geeks don't mind. Stock lots of cooling accessories. The latest video cards from NVidia and ATI. That sort of thing. If your prices are within $20-$30 of the average price on PriceWatch, most geeks would rather buy their stuff from you and not have to wait for shipping. And if the attitude of the guys at my local store is any indication, you don't even have to be nice to your geek customers. They don't care about you, they just want their hardware.
I'm not the only one who thinks we may one day have wars in which robotic troops, equipment, ships, etc. are controlled remotely by kids. Orson Scott Card thinks so too. And anyone who plays RTS games online will tell you that, while most players have the strategic ability of an antique doorknob, there are a select few who are absolutely amazing.
In Ender's Game, OSC wrote about children commanding fleets of starships in interstellar war, while thinking they were merely playing a game. This type of scenario is looking more and more plausible every day.
Opera is great and all, but Jesus Christ on a toasted bagel. Why did this review get posted? It was written by a moron who seems to think "Sandskrit" is a language and $62 Canadian is worth more than $39 US. What's more, the review tells us nothing new about Opera and the pageload "benchmarks" seem to have been done by a guy holding a stopwatch.
The review could have just said "BEST BROWSAR EVAR" and that would've accomplished the same thing, only it wouldn't have wasted nearly as much of my time.
I use Opera as my main browser. It is fast, mostly by doing things the smart way, like starting the download of a file you select and downloading in in the background while you figure out where you want to put it on your hard drive.
Mozilla does this too. In fact, I think even IE does this, if I remember correctly.
Oh, really? Then please explain to me just what the hell that big black thing in my living room is. It's got a screen, speakers, and I'll be damned if it doesn't have "HDTV" in big letters on the front. Golly gee willikers, it's an HDTV. And I bought it almost two years ago.
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I don't buy Western Digital drives anymore, unsurprisingly.
Sigh.
Now imagine these nanobots disassembling space debris into its component atoms and dispersing it. Instead of having, say, an old rocket booster casing that could do massive amounts of damage to an orbiting spacecraft, you now have trillions of individual, unconnected atoms that are being dispersed over a wide area. These dispersed atoms aren't even visible, and they certainly wouldn't do any damage to spacecraft. And that's the goal here.
Who cares if the actual atoms themselves remain in orbit, as long as they're dispersed enough that they can't hurt anything?
The difference here (and this explains what I meant by that statement) is that in terms of nanotechnology, we already know exactly what we need to be able to do in order to build nanobots. The only thing limiting us right now is the difficulty involved in manipulating matter on the small scale required. However, advances in this field are being made at a very quick pace, and I'm confident we'll start seeing nanotechnology used widely within at least the next 25 years.
The biggest problem with this is that there aren't specific "debris-only" orbits. In addition, space is *vast*, even just the immediate area around our planet. Putting this dish in a new orbit for every clump of debris we want to collect would be extremely expensive in terms of energy, which translates directly to expense in terms of money.
There's only one potential problem I can imagine with this scenario. We'd need to figure out how to teach the nanobots the difference between functional satellites and nonfunctional trash. It wouldn't be good at all if we suddenly found that our nanobots had accidentally disassembled all our low-orbit satellites.
Now that I think about it, though, it occurs to me that nanobots would most likely be very susceptible to solar radiation, which they wouldn't be protected from outside Earth's atmosphere. I wonder how hard it would be to construct radiation-shielded nanobots?
When was the last time you used MySQL? MySQL now supports several table types other than the default MyISAM type, including types with full transaction support.
I'm a skydiver. I never use a parachute. Instead, I just jump out of planes and hope that I land on a large air mattress. It's worked perfectly so far. Why should I switch? All you silly fools using parachutes make me laugh.
I play RTCW, Half-Life, Quake 3, MS Flight Sim and other CPU/graphics-intensive games all the time while running Trillian and even Mozilla Mail in the background, and I've never had any problems. Athlon XP 1800, GeForce 2 GTS and 512 MB of RAM on Windows XP.
Trillian runs just fine in Wine under Linux, FreeBSD and (presumably) other Unixes.
It's closed source, yes, but the developers are very active and extremely responsive (i.e., within hours) about fixing major problems.
Jabber sucks.
Major bloat? No. It uses less CPU and RAM on my machine than the AIM client, and far less than ICQ, and those two aren't even skinnable.
Fund-raising: For godssake, it's free software. If you don't want to donate, nobody's forcing you (and it's not like there's a nag screen or anything).
What? No it doesn't. The latest version of Trillian, running a custom skin and connected to all five networks is using 0% CPU time and only 10 megs of memory on my machine. That's less resource usage than ICQ alone, and ICQ isn't even skinnable without a third-party hack.
They're fragile creatures, but as long as you don't squash them or play too roughly with them, they'll be fine. Although yes, they do require a fair amount of commitment (though my mom somehow manages to take care of a house full of parrots and gliders at the same time, as well as several cats and a corn snake).
They're not "incontinent", but like many small animals, they do piss and poop when and where they feel like it. But really, it's not that bad. They're small enough that they don't produce very much at all, so when you get peed or pooped on you can just set the glider down and wash yourself off with some soap and water.
My Subaru WRX certainly is a killer app. Dear god, the number of times I've nearly killed myself in that thing is absolutely insane. I sure do love that car.
That may be, but I'm the proud owner of a brain, and my brain can out-think your card any day.
Who says you have to give them the refund? If they burned up the processor, it's their own fault. I've done this at least once, and instead of whining and demanding a replacement I just bought a new one from the same store. They got twice the business.
But here's where I think the real money is (and there's a small shop here in Portland that does this very successfully): geeks. Geeks are impatient, they love tinkering, and they often break things that are vital to their system's health and will do anything to get a replacement in the shortest amount of time possible. So stock what geeks want. Do some research and find out what people are searching for on PriceWatch. Find out what Ars Technica is recommending.
Stock up on motherboards (especially Asus, Abit, and Tyan). Buy OEM processors if you can, because they're cheaper and geeks don't mind. Stock lots of cooling accessories. The latest video cards from NVidia and ATI. That sort of thing. If your prices are within $20-$30 of the average price on PriceWatch, most geeks would rather buy their stuff from you and not have to wait for shipping. And if the attitude of the guys at my local store is any indication, you don't even have to be nice to your geek customers. They don't care about you, they just want their hardware.
Good luck!
In Ender's Game, OSC wrote about children commanding fleets of starships in interstellar war, while thinking they were merely playing a game. This type of scenario is looking more and more plausible every day.
That's great and all, but aren't you forgetting the Win32 port of Apache, which runs under the same SYSTEM user as IIS? Cough, cough.
You don't want a weblog, you want Everything. I think it would suit your purposes perfectly.
Now that I re-read the title, I see that they mentioned that after all. Ignore me.
It should have been pointed out in the article that this is an ALPHA version based on the 4.3.0 tree. This is not 4.3.0.
The review could have just said "BEST BROWSAR EVAR" and that would've accomplished the same thing, only it wouldn't have wasted nearly as much of my time.
Mozilla does this too. In fact, I think even IE does this, if I remember correctly.
Oh, really? Then please explain to me just what the hell that big black thing in my living room is. It's got a screen, speakers, and I'll be damned if it doesn't have "HDTV" in big letters on the front. Golly gee willikers, it's an HDTV. And I bought it almost two years ago.
HDTV has happened already, genius-breath.