Uh, have you ever been to Canada? I'd much rather be in a place where no one carries guns, why? If a criminal has a gun and sticks me up, I know that he is confident that I don't have one. Why is that a good thing? Because, if someone is going to stick me up (and it happens everywhere), I rather they don't decide to not take any chances and shoot me first in case I'm carrying. Up here, if a guy wants to rob someone and has a gun, he knows there is almost no chance of being shot, that possessing a gun IS a level of force above what normal citizenry have, and they don't have to shoot.
No matter where you go, that is what criminals will try to do. There are always people who are going to do that sort of thing, and they're going to try to do it in a way that poses the least threat to themselves. That means they need the upper hand somehow. And they ARE going to get it, one way or another. Whether that means they have to pull a knife, pull a gun, or shoot without warning. And unless you plan on going around shooting people who look at you crosswise, you aren't going to see it coming.
And for the record, I've never been mugged, panhandled is about the worst I've seen and not for lack of trying. I only know one person who has ever experienced an attempted mugging, and that guy though that being 5 inches taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and drunk gave him enough advantage. But he was wrong.
all this crap about looking scruffy, and doing your best to look as if you've got nothing to steal. Fine, don't walk around public streets with your laptop open playing nethack. But man, I don't want to look like something the dog dragged through the trash.
I act as I always have, and never have given a damn about muggers, and you know what? I've never even been approached in that manner.
Wow, and I wonder what you've been subjected too that would make you consider *THAT* as safe?
My permanent home is in Winnipeg, and I've done stints in Waterloo (where I'm writing this from, at school), and Toronto. I have never been mugged. I have never been approached by anything remotely resembling being mugged. I only know one person who has ever been so (unsuccessfully) and the guy was drunk at the time. The closest I've come to that sort of thing is being panhandled by a street person.
Now, I admit I do have a little of the 'starving student' look, so to speak. I carry a backpack fairly often, though I do carry an mp3 player in the open whenever I'm going somewhere. As well I try to keep myself presentable whenever possible, shaved, short hair, untorn clothing, and shoes instead of sneakers.
If you consider that sort of thing in LA safe, well let me tell you that I've walked, more than a few times, through the downtown streets of Toronto at 2 and 3 in the morning, like I described, without the slightest fear of being 'approached'. I am not naiive enough to believe crime does not happen here, but I also know how safe our streets actually are.
With being annoyed at a system that takes some time to load applications back into memory from disk after being idle for some time, despite not having used up available memory and the OS deciding to swap it out anyway. And there is merit in the idea that an OS shouldn't swap something out of memory unless it needs the space.
However, the idea with doing away with swap space entirely, I'm sorry but what are some of these people smoking? "I have 256MB of physical memory, and 256MB swap space, a hard cap of 512, if I add 256MB of new real memory, and could remove the swap space I'd have the same amount of memory and better performance!". No, you're wrong, you'd have MORE memory at the cost of money from your pocket and better performance than you used to, but you won't be able to run any more applications than you could before by having more memory.
I would support the idea of on demand swapping, only sending least used memory to the harddrive when absolutely necessary, instead of when convienient. It would definitely improve performance of bring back up those idle tasks, and degrade slightly the performance of opening new applications when memory is almost full. However, doing away with it entirely would be a BAD design decision for an OS to make. The whole point of swap is to increase the amount of usable memory without having to buy more memory. Just because RAM these days is seen as 'cheap' does not limit either the desirability of that feature, nor the necessity of it for those people who haven't tricked out their systems. Because you consider 4 gigs of physical memory cheap and a necessity, does not mean everyone else can afford it.
Re:Where many people miss the point...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
Ok, well you might not have a use for an OS that swaps, but most of the rest of us don't have three gigs of memory on our systems and run them for months at a time.
Myself? I code for fun and profit, and I know that there are times that I need to push my computer hard, and I do have a gig worth of memory, but even so I've run out of swap space of my system partiton a time or two despite having another gig and a half allocated for that purpose.
True, but what he did, didn't require some special knowledge of the place. Most department stores operate on a very similar basis, and reading his story made me think of a place I used to work. Hell, you wouldn't have had to change a single thing about his story and it very well could have occured at my old store!
Also, a lot of places keep a short list of direct phone numbers at staff phones around a department store. It is trivial to take a look at the name of another store in the same chain in the same city. Often, most stores are simply referred to by where they are located. For example, at the department store where I worked, all the stores were called by the mall they were in.
There you go, now you have all the info you really need to pull off his stunt. Employee turnover was high enough that a strange face was quite common. Just after I started work, as long as I wore my smock, managers who had never seen me before would stop me and ask me to take care of something for them.
Our file-sharing networks are already set up like that... Except with the additional guarantee that the node graph is a single connected component, and that everyone's 'hops' are set by default to the timeout distance of the network's search algorithm.
If that gets changed to a user defined value, with restrictions on the order of nodes, not only will the network become more congested by orders of magnitude, but you will either have a) everyone set their hop limit low so that files will be impossible to find for anyone else, or b) if you place restrictions on downloads as well, everyone will set their hop value to an infinite size and then only make files available for sharing according to their preference (as it is now).
Your idea has merit for small enclosed communities (like a college campus network), however on a network where the size is unbounded, for convienience sake it will degenerate into one of the above conditions, either essentially collapsing the network upon itself, or degenerating into what we already have.
Well, I guess I'll speak for the 'middle' of Canada, being a native Winnipegger. Central Canada for the most part is a wide open, friendly place with a significantly lower cost of living than Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal. Taxes are taxes, and for the most part their national so not much I can say about that. The only hard part is that the weather can be very harsh on the prairies, and its what drives most new immigrants away quickly. If you stick through it though it grows on you.
Central Canada is for the most part very sunny, and summer highs get up into the mid 30s celcius (I don't know farenheit, but its about low 90s to mid 90s I think). The winter will drop as low as -40 (celcius or farenheit) and down to -50 celcius if you factor in the wind.
I don't know if I'd agree with that, I'd say you deal with the most crap from Quebec, but Montreal is an absolutely fantastic place if you're actually there instead of on the outside looking in.:)
The primary aim of the test was to assess the glider potential of the craft. The final version of the vehicle must be able to glide from an altitude of 80000000000000 miles.
Is it just me, or does 80 trillion miles seem to be a bit far to be termed 'gliding'. As well, when you're that far away I don't believe you're talking about 'altitude' any longer either. I mean, Pluto is only 3.6 Billion miles away, I guess gliding from a distance of 20,000 times further than pluto for a landing on earth's surface isn't too much to ask.
"Reverse Brain Drain"? No, when people you've educated tend to move away, its simply 'Brain Drain'. Canada has been suffering its effects for years to the US. It just so happens that it used to be the US was the beneficiary of brain drain in other countries. That would be the 'reverse'.
Re:Self Healing Minefield
on
Robocones
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· Score: 1
True that you can't clear a minefield unless you find every single one, however most commonly what is done are paths are cleared through a minefield and still dangerous areas are roped off so that people know not to go there. It doesn't guarantee areas are safe, but they are much safer than if the mines decided to redistribute in your previously cleared areas.
American laws have no jurisdiction in other countries (unfortunately =P).
Unfortunately? I would say thankfully. And I'm pretty sure most of your countrymen would as well considering that American's complain about bad and ignorant laws that are constantly being passed by the US Congress more than foreigners do. We might sympathize with your situation, but we have our own laws to complain about. But I certainly don't think enforcing the DMCA, or the Patriot Act, or the US Patent Office on the rest of the world would be appreciated.
Yep, you just have to set it up on a circular track so it doesn't go anywhere when it attempts to drive itself home.
Re:Self Healing Minefield
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
Don't give them ideas. We already have problems with tens of thousands of unexploded mines, so much so that most of the developed world has signed anti-landmine treaties (minus the US of course) that we don't need self-repositioning mines. All that would do is we could never clear a safe area from landmines without finding every single one in the field.
It may be a good 'strategic' idea, but it is a despicable one from a humanitarian point of view.
Oh yes, I will pay my taxes on media... but remember, I can still buy a 50 spindle of brand name CD-R discs at 52x write for 21.50 US at my local bestbuy/futureshop (which may I add, is currently cheaper than the equivalent in the states at regular price of 22 US)
And if I don't care so much about quality, I can pick up a 100 spindle of generics for the same price.
Performs a useful function yes, human readable... umm, have you ever written Perl code, left it for awhile, come back later and be able to understand exactly what it does, but not have a clue in the world how it does it?
Not quite, one implication is, can you ever truely prove that such a thing IS in fact the Ark? Is there any possible way to ever be SURE of the fact?
The second implication is, if there was some way to truely be sure, and you could guarantee it was indeed the Ark. Then all these comments about being physically impossible, would have to be reconsidered in light of new evidence. And thus, as is always the case with scientific process, a new explanation would have to be discovered that fit the seemingly condtradictory facts.
And when they reach this structure high on the mountain one of three things will occur. 1) It is not Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and the people who believe in it will say that it doesn't prove anything, they simply have not found it yet. 2) We don't know if its Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and still argue the existance of such a thing. 3) It is Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and the scientists say "Umm... can we have a closer look at that book of yours?"
But in the end... regardless of what happens, I'll go back to playing World of Warcraft.
Well, its not so much the fact that you can talk to someone using it, but think about the interesting light sequences you could create using a keypad? Have those slowly cycling using the chandelier lights would make for interesting and customizable patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, have you ever been to Canada? I'd much rather be in a place where no one carries guns, why? If a criminal has a gun and sticks me up, I know that he is confident that I don't have one. Why is that a good thing? Because, if someone is going to stick me up (and it happens everywhere), I rather they don't decide to not take any chances and shoot me first in case I'm carrying. Up here, if a guy wants to rob someone and has a gun, he knows there is almost no chance of being shot, that possessing a gun IS a level of force above what normal citizenry have, and they don't have to shoot.
No matter where you go, that is what criminals will try to do. There are always people who are going to do that sort of thing, and they're going to try to do it in a way that poses the least threat to themselves. That means they need the upper hand somehow. And they ARE going to get it, one way or another. Whether that means they have to pull a knife, pull a gun, or shoot without warning. And unless you plan on going around shooting people who look at you crosswise, you aren't going to see it coming.
And for the record, I've never been mugged, panhandled is about the worst I've seen and not for lack of trying. I only know one person who has ever experienced an attempted mugging, and that guy though that being 5 inches taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and drunk gave him enough advantage. But he was wrong.
Amen,
all this crap about looking scruffy, and doing your best to look as if you've got nothing to steal. Fine, don't walk around public streets with your laptop open playing nethack. But man, I don't want to look like something the dog dragged through the trash.
I act as I always have, and never have given a damn about muggers, and you know what? I've never even been approached in that manner.
Wow, and I wonder what you've been subjected too that would make you consider *THAT* as safe?
My permanent home is in Winnipeg, and I've done stints in Waterloo (where I'm writing this from, at school), and Toronto. I have never been mugged. I have never been approached by anything remotely resembling being mugged. I only know one person who has ever been so (unsuccessfully) and the guy was drunk at the time. The closest I've come to that sort of thing is being panhandled by a street person.
Now, I admit I do have a little of the 'starving student' look, so to speak. I carry a backpack fairly often, though I do carry an mp3 player in the open whenever I'm going somewhere. As well I try to keep myself presentable whenever possible, shaved, short hair, untorn clothing, and shoes instead of sneakers.
If you consider that sort of thing in LA safe, well let me tell you that I've walked, more than a few times, through the downtown streets of Toronto at 2 and 3 in the morning, like I described, without the slightest fear of being 'approached'. I am not naiive enough to believe crime does not happen here, but I also know how safe our streets actually are.
With being annoyed at a system that takes some time to load applications back into memory from disk after being idle for some time, despite not having used up available memory and the OS deciding to swap it out anyway. And there is merit in the idea that an OS shouldn't swap something out of memory unless it needs the space.
However, the idea with doing away with swap space entirely, I'm sorry but what are some of these people smoking? "I have 256MB of physical memory, and 256MB swap space, a hard cap of 512, if I add 256MB of new real memory, and could remove the swap space I'd have the same amount of memory and better performance!". No, you're wrong, you'd have MORE memory at the cost of money from your pocket and better performance than you used to, but you won't be able to run any more applications than you could before by having more memory.
I would support the idea of on demand swapping, only sending least used memory to the harddrive when absolutely necessary, instead of when convienient. It would definitely improve performance of bring back up those idle tasks, and degrade slightly the performance of opening new applications when memory is almost full. However, doing away with it entirely would be a BAD design decision for an OS to make. The whole point of swap is to increase the amount of usable memory without having to buy more memory. Just because RAM these days is seen as 'cheap' does not limit either the desirability of that feature, nor the necessity of it for those people who haven't tricked out their systems. Because you consider 4 gigs of physical memory cheap and a necessity, does not mean everyone else can afford it.
Ok, well you might not have a use for an OS that swaps, but most of the rest of us don't have three gigs of memory on our systems and run them for months at a time.
Myself? I code for fun and profit, and I know that there are times that I need to push my computer hard, and I do have a gig worth of memory, but even so I've run out of swap space of my system partiton a time or two despite having another gig and a half allocated for that purpose.
True, but what he did, didn't require some special knowledge of the place. Most department stores operate on a very similar basis, and reading his story made me think of a place I used to work. Hell, you wouldn't have had to change a single thing about his story and it very well could have occured at my old store!
Also, a lot of places keep a short list of direct phone numbers at staff phones around a department store. It is trivial to take a look at the name of another store in the same chain in the same city. Often, most stores are simply referred to by where they are located. For example, at the department store where I worked, all the stores were called by the mall they were in.
There you go, now you have all the info you really need to pull off his stunt. Employee turnover was high enough that a strange face was quite common. Just after I started work, as long as I wore my smock, managers who had never seen me before would stop me and ask me to take care of something for them.
Our file-sharing networks are already set up like that... Except with the additional guarantee that the node graph is a single connected component, and that everyone's 'hops' are set by default to the timeout distance of the network's search algorithm.
If that gets changed to a user defined value, with restrictions on the order of nodes, not only will the network become more congested by orders of magnitude, but you will either have a) everyone set their hop limit low so that files will be impossible to find for anyone else, or b) if you place restrictions on downloads as well, everyone will set their hop value to an infinite size and then only make files available for sharing according to their preference (as it is now).
Your idea has merit for small enclosed communities (like a college campus network), however on a network where the size is unbounded, for convienience sake it will degenerate into one of the above conditions, either essentially collapsing the network upon itself, or degenerating into what we already have.
Well, I guess I'll speak for the 'middle' of Canada, being a native Winnipegger. Central Canada for the most part is a wide open, friendly place with a significantly lower cost of living than Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal. Taxes are taxes, and for the most part their national so not much I can say about that. The only hard part is that the weather can be very harsh on the prairies, and its what drives most new immigrants away quickly. If you stick through it though it grows on you.
Central Canada is for the most part very sunny, and summer highs get up into the mid 30s celcius (I don't know farenheit, but its about low 90s to mid 90s I think). The winter will drop as low as -40 (celcius or farenheit) and down to -50 celcius if you factor in the wind.
I don't know if I'd agree with that, I'd say you deal with the most crap from Quebec, but Montreal is an absolutely fantastic place if you're actually there instead of on the outside looking in. :)
The primary aim of the test was to assess the glider potential of the craft. The final version of the vehicle must be able to glide from an altitude of 80000000000000 miles.
Is it just me, or does 80 trillion miles seem to be a bit far to be termed 'gliding'. As well, when you're that far away I don't believe you're talking about 'altitude' any longer either. I mean, Pluto is only 3.6 Billion miles away, I guess gliding from a distance of 20,000 times further than pluto for a landing on earth's surface isn't too much to ask.
"Reverse Brain Drain"? No, when people you've educated tend to move away, its simply 'Brain Drain'. Canada has been suffering its effects for years to the US. It just so happens that it used to be the US was the beneficiary of brain drain in other countries. That would be the 'reverse'.
True that you can't clear a minefield unless you find every single one, however most commonly what is done are paths are cleared through a minefield and still dangerous areas are roped off so that people know not to go there. It doesn't guarantee areas are safe, but they are much safer than if the mines decided to redistribute in your previously cleared areas.
Easy! A fancy set of gloves, and a holigraphic display of course.
Slashdot bias.
American laws have no jurisdiction in other countries (unfortunately =P).
Unfortunately? I would say thankfully. And I'm pretty sure most of your countrymen would as well considering that American's complain about bad and ignorant laws that are constantly being passed by the US Congress more than foreigners do. We might sympathize with your situation, but we have our own laws to complain about. But I certainly don't think enforcing the DMCA, or the Patriot Act, or the US Patent Office on the rest of the world would be appreciated.
Yep, you just have to set it up on a circular track so it doesn't go anywhere when it attempts to drive itself home.
Don't give them ideas. We already have problems with tens of thousands of unexploded mines, so much so that most of the developed world has signed anti-landmine treaties (minus the US of course) that we don't need self-repositioning mines. All that would do is we could never clear a safe area from landmines without finding every single one in the field.
It may be a good 'strategic' idea, but it is a despicable one from a humanitarian point of view.
Oh yes, I will pay my taxes on media... but remember, I can still buy a 50 spindle of brand name CD-R discs at 52x write for 21.50 US at my local bestbuy/futureshop (which may I add, is currently cheaper than the equivalent in the states at regular price of 22 US)
And if I don't care so much about quality, I can pick up a 100 spindle of generics for the same price.
Its Perl.
Yes I comment code, quite emphatically in fact, but for some reason with certain languages, it feels like blasphemy.
Performs a useful function yes, human readable... umm, have you ever written Perl code, left it for awhile, come back later and be able to understand exactly what it does, but not have a clue in the world how it does it?
I got -15683... but I think my counter rolled over.
"Any similarity to persons living or dead is unintentional."
***FBI WARNING***
Not quite, one implication is, can you ever truely prove that such a thing IS in fact the Ark? Is there any possible way to ever be SURE of the fact?
The second implication is, if there was some way to truely be sure, and you could guarantee it was indeed the Ark. Then all these comments about being physically impossible, would have to be reconsidered in light of new evidence. And thus, as is always the case with scientific process, a new explanation would have to be discovered that fit the seemingly condtradictory facts.
And when they reach this structure high on the mountain one of three things will occur.
1) It is not Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and the people who believe in it will say that it doesn't prove anything, they simply have not found it yet.
2) We don't know if its Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and still argue the existance of such a thing.
3) It is Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and the scientists say "Umm... can we have a closer look at that book of yours?"
But in the end... regardless of what happens, I'll go back to playing World of Warcraft.
Well, its not so much the fact that you can talk to someone using it, but think about the interesting light sequences you could create using a keypad? Have those slowly cycling using the chandelier lights would make for interesting and customizable patterns.