Linux on my Libretto subnotebook is a lot slower than the original OS (Win95), because KDE uses more memory and all I've got is 32 MB. Sure, I could run it in console mode, but I like a GUI. Linux programs also seem to be less careful about making sure things fit on the little 640x480 screen.
I imagine any flavour of NT on this machine would be even worse than KDE. But Win95 works, so why change?
To add to the original discussion: replacing the hard drive on a Libretto is very easy and very worthwhile. For about $200 you can upgrade from the original 1.6GB disk to a 20GB disk. You have to watch out because the BIOS was written for 8GB max and writes the hibernation information at the 8GB limit, but disk overlays and careful partitioning solve that. Physical installation is a breeze: unscrew a cover, slip out the old drive, slip in the new one.
I got my disk upgrade from WEESCO; they were helpful and quick.
The original article was wondering why LISP hasn't caught on. That's why readability to outsiders is relevant.
LISP hasn't caught on because non-LISP-users can't see that it provides good solutions to problems that interest them. If a language is going to become popular, then it has to appeal to non-users somehow, not just people who already know it.
Russian and English provide essentially the same expressiveness, so the only real arguments to learn one or the other are based on the existing base of literature and speakers. That's not true of C and LISP: they are very different languages underneath.
But LISP need not be so different on the surface. There are languages with Algol-like notation when written as text, but internal representations that are essentially the same as LISP. The one I've used is muSimp, someone else mentioned that Dylan has lots of the nice things from LISP. (I've never even read any Dylan, so I might have misinterpreted that comment.)
Someone else seemed to think you'd have to lose the ability to have programs write programs if they were presented in Algol-like syntax. That's nonsense: most LISP programs don't work on the text representation of the code, they work on the internal representation as lists. Why would that have to break?
It's a mechanical transformation to convert from one form to the other. Even if you did want your program to work on source code, you'd just make use of a parser to convert the standard-looking code into the internal representation. You have a pretty-printer routine to convert back (or save a copy of the source text if you wanted to preserve non-syntactical things like whitespace). Those sorts of things are not hard to write. LISP already makes use of translators: all those silly parentheses don't need to be stored, they're just there to allow linear text to represent non-linear lists.
All I'm suggesting is that the language would have been much more popular if around 1980, when just about everyone else in the world had settled on Algol-like syntax, LISP had adopted something similar.
One of the main reasons LISP is unreadable to outsiders is because of their choice to stick with such bizarre syntax. All of the nice features of LISP could exist in a language with a more standard (i.e. Algol-like) syntax, but the LISPers insist on sticking with their lambda's and defun's and car's and cdr's.
I know there have been more standard syntaxes put on top of LISP (e.g. muSimp), but LISPers have rejected them, making all of their programs completely unreadable to outsiders.
I don't program in C, but I can read C programs. I can't read LISP, even though at various times in the past I've learned its simple syntax.
Re:Human thrower, and a skeet club
on
Fling-A-Keg
·
· Score: 1
I read your http://www.trebuchet.com/articles/ron/ web page a few years ago. It was great, and motivated me and my son to build a little (18" arm) trebuchet for a school project. It could throw a Hot Wheels car about 30-50 feet. Squash balls were better ammunition - they were reusable.
There is already a free alternative to Delphi for compiling Windows applications (fpc); it's pretty unlikely that there would be a problem porting that to Linux (if it hasn't already been done).
Delphi has a much nicer IDE, but you don't need the IDE. All you need is the compiler/linker.
Yes, it would be inconvenient if for some reason the Kylix you download today is never updated, but it wouldn't be more than that.
Nobody has eyes good enough to utilize this invention.
Why not? It's only about 200 pixels per inch. 128 pixel per inch screens are common on laptops; nobody has been satisfied with 300 dpi printers for years and years.
To help us make e-mails more useful and interesting, we often receive a confirmation when you open e-mail from Amazon.com if your computer supports such capabilities.
Don't like their privacy policy? Just send a note to customer service telling them that you won't buy anything more from them until they change it. Oops, can't do that. There's no customer service email address listed on the web site (at least for people who turn off Javascript and cookies when visiting sites with unsatisfactory privacy policies).
But we can trust them, can't we? After all, they told the FTC that they would never transfer customer information for people who don't want them to do that. It means nothing that their privacy policy says "customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets".
Another part of their "privacy" policy that I really liked was this paragraph, after scrolling down about 100 lines:
With Your Consent: Other than as set out above, you will receive notice when information about you might go to third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to share the information.
I guess they really do have my best interests in mind, at least after the first 100 lines of exceptions.
There's no reason to put up with this kind of BS. Just buy your books somewhere else.
Re:possible confusing part in FAQ
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 1
I assume that this doesn't apply to the case where I put the binaries & source on the Internet, Jane Doe downloads it off of the internet, gives it to her brother John who lives at the north pole without internet access. It's Jane who has the responsibility to get John the source, not me, right?
I think your assumption is wrong. The answer to that FAQ says so:
You are welcome to make the source code for any version of GPL-covered software available by anonymous FTP, but this is not sufficient to satisfy section 3 of the GPL.
When a user says he wants the source, you have to make sure to get the source to that user.
What this means is that you do have an obligation to send the source to the north pole. However, you are allowed to charge reasonable costs for doing so. It shouldn't be a financial burden, but it is an obligation.
MAPS simply has a listing that says "this is a site with a spamming problem".
I don't think it even said that much. It just said "this is a site that we think contributes to mail abuse". Since the RBL is a pretty reliable list of such sites, lots of people go along with that opinion. Above.net does, since some of the bosses there have been involved with the RBL from the beginning.
Occasionally they make mistakes, but those are usually corrected really quickly. Sometimes they make listings according to the principles they publish which turn out to be unpopular, and some people call them Nazis.
Not once have i received unsolicited e-mail from them unless i was stupid enough to leave the 'Send me The Edge newsletter' checkbox checked when you register with macromedia - this is not uncommon to many software sites.
Apparently the problem is that they allowed you to fill in any email address you liked as your own address when you registered. Don't like someone? Register in their name. Maybe register them with a few hundred different newsletters from other sites too, just for fun.
I imagine there are scripts around to do this.
It would be easy for Macromedia to send one email saying "Please confirm your registration by replying to this message." If they did that, the victim would get just one message per forged request, and the problem would go away if ignored.
is what you want (and me too), not an alternative to MAPS/RBL. ORBS and the RBL are okay at what they do, but they are too blunt: Brightmail is much more highly targeted and effective.
Why doesn't someone put together a Paid Brightmail service, modelled on the soon-to-disappear Free Brightmail service?
You probably wouldn't be able to see it move, even though it would be moving about half a meter per second. The trouble is that it wouldn't have a well-defined edge. The blurry section between full sunlight and full shadow would be at least 100 meters across, the size of the half-degree image of the sun that would be projected from a pinhole camera at the top.
One issue is that what comes out of the reactor isn't what goes in. You need the neutron chain reaction to get sufficient energy from the fuel, so it's quite different from the environment it would have been in if it was left in the ground.
I've been trying to find numbers about the relative radioactivity of uranium fuel rods before and after use. The only number I could find in my intensive 15 minutes of research (;-) is that the spent rods are "millions of times more radioactive" than fresh fuel. That site didn't sound terribly reliable from a scientific point of view, but if spent fuel is at all more radioactive than fresh fuel, you couldn't put it back in the same place without raising the levels there. Maybe someone who knows what the numbers really are can chip in here.
Because there isn't a safe and economical way to reduce its radioactivity to background levels, and people living near proposed burial sites of highly radioactive waste are naturally sceptical of the ability to contain it for several thousand years. There's also a tremendous lack of trust
(see this site, for example) of the parties responsible for disposing of the waste. Do you believe that the corporations and bureaucrats disposing of waste wouldn't cheat if they thought they could get away with it?
Don't worry about disposal. The nuclear material exists in nature now and we manage to live with it. There's no reason why we can't put it back with a level of safety equal to background radiation.
Yeah, right. I wonder why the people running current nuclear reactors keep storing all that stuff? Why don't they just put it back underground?
Light and Heat Your Pool for Free!
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 2
Though shielding can be expensive if space or weight is a limiting concern, it is also possible to put the machines at the bottom of a water tank the size of a swimming pool.
This is great! Not only do you get power for your house, but as a by-product, you can use the waste heat to heat your pool, and the Cerenkov radiation will light it at night!
Many posters are confusing this issue of personal information with email. This is not just about email. It's about your credit rating and history, your medical records, tax records, police records.
That's right. In fact, although the authors come out in favour of an opt-in requirement for information sharing, they are also in favour of spam.
Spam is an inexpensive way to obtain opt-in?
on
Opt-in vs. Opt-out
·
· Score: 1
I was kind of worried by this line in the article:
A new entrant, though forced to beseech consumers for information-permission, could do so inexpensively through mass e-mailing.
I consider my email address part of my personal information, and would hope that using it for spam would be a violation of any "opt-in" regulations.
There are plenty of good ways to solicit new customers without spamming them. Put up a web site, advertise in traditional media, etc.
Thanks for explaining what MAPS does, which I knew already.
If you knew what MAPS does, why did you write that DUL blocks you? DUL doesn't block anyone, it just informs people that you're on a dynamically assigned IP address. It's the people you're trying to connect to who don't want connections from dynamic IPs.
I suppose you can blame the people who block you for not liking dynamic IPs, but I still say it's your ISP's fault for giving a dynamic IP address to a 24/7 connection.
And it's pretty stupid to blame MAPS for your problems because it operates an informative service.
I pay for a connection to the Internet. If I can only send mail via to designated servers, then I don't have a proper Internet connection.
...
Who died and made Paul Vixie King of the Internet?
Sounds like you have a problem with your ISP, not with Paul Vixie.
What MAPS does is keep a database of dial-up IPs. These are supposed to be the kinds of IPs that are used by spammers: re-assigned with every new connection, so they're hard to block. If you want off the list, ask your ISP for a fixed IP address, and then (in the unlikely event it's in the DUL), let MAPS know that your address isn't a dial-up.
Your ISP doesn't offer static IPs? Well, that sucks, doesn't it? So relay your mail through their SMTP servers.
Brightmail has an interesting twist on all of this: their free service is still being run, but is no longer accepting subscriptions.
Those of us who signed up a while ago can keep using their filtering (for now, I guess); others have to pay. Actually, they're kicking Earthlink users off the free service, because Earthlink has a paid subscription.
Brightmail works really well, but when I asked about the subscription service, it didn't seem appropriate for small sites. The subscription price is reasonable if spread across a few thousand users, but not for a few dozen; there were also pretty strong limitations on which platforms were supported.
conwstruction of a mirror that effectibely focuses this energy into
the space required is another matter addressed elsewhere . . .
Construction of such a mirror isn't just hard, it's theoretically impossible. You can't focus the sun's image into a 3' circle unless the mirror is within 300'. You just can't.
The people talking about melting things with Fresnel lenses were using much shorter focal length lenses.
Think about the way camera lenses are rated: f/1 is a nice bright lens, able to concentrate a lot of light on the film.
A 3' Fresnel lens with a 3' focal length is an f/1 lens. I don't know the actual dimensions of the solar sail, but if it's an acre in size, it's around 200' in diameter, and it probably needs to be at least 100 miles from its target, so it's going to be like an f/2500 lens. An f/2500 lens is 6 million times dimmer than that Fresnel lens.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux on my Libretto subnotebook is a lot slower than the original OS (Win95), because KDE uses more memory and all I've got is 32 MB. Sure, I could run it in console mode, but I like a GUI. Linux programs also seem to be less careful about making sure things fit on the little 640x480 screen.
I imagine any flavour of NT on this machine would be even worse than KDE. But Win95 works, so why change?
To add to the original discussion: replacing the hard drive on a Libretto is very easy and very worthwhile. For about $200 you can upgrade from the original 1.6GB disk to a 20GB disk. You have to watch out because the BIOS was written for 8GB max and writes the hibernation information at the 8GB limit, but disk overlays and careful partitioning solve that. Physical installation is a breeze: unscrew a cover, slip out the old drive, slip in the new one.
I got my disk upgrade from WEESCO; they were helpful and quick.
I suspect if an effort were made to make it readable to either insiders or outsiders it would end up a lot more readable to the other group, too.
The original article was wondering why LISP hasn't caught on. That's why readability to outsiders is relevant.
LISP hasn't caught on because non-LISP-users can't see that it provides good solutions to problems that interest them. If a language is going to become popular, then it has to appeal to non-users somehow, not just people who already know it.
Russian and English provide essentially the same expressiveness, so the only real arguments to learn one or the other are based on the existing base of literature and speakers. That's not true of C and LISP: they are very different languages underneath.
But LISP need not be so different on the surface. There are languages with Algol-like notation when written as text, but internal representations that are essentially the same as LISP. The one I've used is muSimp, someone else mentioned that Dylan has lots of the nice things from LISP. (I've never even read any Dylan, so I might have misinterpreted that comment.)
Someone else seemed to think you'd have to lose the ability to have programs write programs if they were presented in Algol-like syntax. That's nonsense: most LISP programs don't work on the text representation of the code, they work on the internal representation as lists. Why would that have to break?
It's a mechanical transformation to convert from one form to the other. Even if you did want your program to work on source code, you'd just make use of a parser to convert the standard-looking code into the internal representation. You have a pretty-printer routine to convert back (or save a copy of the source text if you wanted to preserve non-syntactical things like whitespace). Those sorts of things are not hard to write. LISP already makes use of translators: all those silly parentheses don't need to be stored, they're just there to allow linear text to represent non-linear lists.
All I'm suggesting is that the language would have been much more popular if around 1980, when just about everyone else in the world had settled on Algol-like syntax, LISP had adopted something similar.
I know there have been more standard syntaxes put on top of LISP (e.g. muSimp), but LISPers have rejected them, making all of their programs completely unreadable to outsiders.
I don't program in C, but I can read C programs. I can't read LISP, even though at various times in the past I've learned its simple syntax.
I read your http://www.trebuchet.com/articles/ron/ web page a few years ago. It was great, and motivated me and my son to build a little (18" arm) trebuchet for a school project. It could throw a Hot Wheels car about 30-50 feet. Squash balls were better ammunition - they were reusable.
Delphi has a much nicer IDE, but you don't need the IDE. All you need is the compiler/linker.
Yes, it would be inconvenient if for some reason the Kylix you download today is never updated, but it wouldn't be more than that.
Why not? It's only about 200 pixels per inch. 128 pixel per inch screens are common on laptops; nobody has been satisfied with 300 dpi printers for years and years.
To help us make e-mails more useful and interesting, we often receive a confirmation when you open e-mail from Amazon.com if your computer supports such capabilities.
In other words, "we use web bugs".
But we can trust them, can't we? After all, they told the FTC that they would never transfer customer information for people who don't want them to do that. It means nothing that their privacy policy says "customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets".
Another part of their "privacy" policy that I really liked was this paragraph, after scrolling down about 100 lines:
With Your Consent: Other than as set out above, you will receive notice when information about you might go to third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to share the information.
I guess they really do have my best interests in mind, at least after the first 100 lines of exceptions.
There's no reason to put up with this kind of BS. Just buy your books somewhere else.
I think your assumption is wrong. The answer to that FAQ says so:
You are welcome to make the source code for any version of GPL-covered software available by anonymous FTP, but this is not sufficient to satisfy section 3 of the GPL. When a user says he wants the source, you have to make sure to get the source to that user.
What this means is that you do have an obligation to send the source to the north pole. However, you are allowed to charge reasonable costs for doing so. It shouldn't be a financial burden, but it is an obligation.
I don't think it even said that much. It just said "this is a site that we think contributes to mail abuse". Since the RBL is a pretty reliable list of such sites, lots of people go along with that opinion. Above.net does, since some of the bosses there have been involved with the RBL from the beginning.
Occasionally they make mistakes, but those are usually corrected really quickly. Sometimes they make listings according to the principles they publish which turn out to be unpopular, and some people call them Nazis.
I trust the RBL more than I trust their critics.
Apparently the problem is that they allowed you to fill in any email address you liked as your own address when you registered. Don't like someone? Register in their name. Maybe register them with a few hundred different newsletters from other sites too, just for fun.
I imagine there are scripts around to do this.
It would be easy for Macromedia to send one email saying "Please confirm your registration by replying to this message." If they did that, the victim would get just one message per forged request, and the problem would go away if ignored.
Why doesn't someone put together a Paid Brightmail service, modelled on the soon-to-disappear Free Brightmail service?
Uh, shouldn't that be "finally"? I lived through the real 1984 seventeen years ago. It was kind of dull, actually.
Things might be sharper during a partial eclipse.
I've been trying to find numbers about the relative radioactivity of uranium fuel rods before and after use. The only number I could find in my intensive 15 minutes of research (;-) is that the spent rods are "millions of times more radioactive" than fresh fuel. That site didn't sound terribly reliable from a scientific point of view, but if spent fuel is at all more radioactive than fresh fuel, you couldn't put it back in the same place without raising the levels there. Maybe someone who knows what the numbers really are can chip in here.
Yes, why don't they?
Because there isn't a safe and economical way to reduce its radioactivity to background levels, and people living near proposed burial sites of highly radioactive waste are naturally sceptical of the ability to contain it for several thousand years. There's also a tremendous lack of trust (see this site, for example) of the parties responsible for disposing of the waste. Do you believe that the corporations and bureaucrats disposing of waste wouldn't cheat if they thought they could get away with it?
Yeah, right. I wonder why the people running current nuclear reactors keep storing all that stuff? Why don't they just put it back underground?
This is great! Not only do you get power for your house, but as a by-product, you can use the waste heat to heat your pool, and the Cerenkov radiation will light it at night!
That's right. In fact, although the authors come out in favour of an opt-in requirement for information sharing, they are also in favour of spam.
A new entrant, though forced to beseech consumers for information-permission, could do so inexpensively through mass e-mailing.
I consider my email address part of my personal information, and would hope that using it for spam would be a violation of any "opt-in" regulations. There are plenty of good ways to solicit new customers without spamming them. Put up a web site, advertise in traditional media, etc.
If you knew what MAPS does, why did you write that DUL blocks you? DUL doesn't block anyone, it just informs people that you're on a dynamically assigned IP address. It's the people you're trying to connect to who don't want connections from dynamic IPs.
I suppose you can blame the people who block you for not liking dynamic IPs, but I still say it's your ISP's fault for giving a dynamic IP address to a 24/7 connection.
And it's pretty stupid to blame MAPS for your problems because it operates an informative service.
...
Who died and made Paul Vixie King of the Internet?
Sounds like you have a problem with your ISP, not with Paul Vixie.
What MAPS does is keep a database of dial-up IPs. These are supposed to be the kinds of IPs that are used by spammers: re-assigned with every new connection, so they're hard to block. If you want off the list, ask your ISP for a fixed IP address, and then (in the unlikely event it's in the DUL), let MAPS know that your address isn't a dial-up.
Your ISP doesn't offer static IPs? Well, that sucks, doesn't it? So relay your mail through their SMTP servers.
Those of us who signed up a while ago can keep using their filtering (for now, I guess); others have to pay. Actually, they're kicking Earthlink users off the free service, because Earthlink has a paid subscription.
Brightmail works really well, but when I asked about the subscription service, it didn't seem appropriate for small sites. The subscription price is reasonable if spread across a few thousand users, but not for a few dozen; there were also pretty strong limitations on which platforms were supported.
Construction of such a mirror isn't just hard, it's theoretically impossible. You can't focus the sun's image into a 3' circle unless the mirror is within 300'. You just can't.
The people talking about melting things with Fresnel lenses were using much shorter focal length lenses.
Think about the way camera lenses are rated: f/1 is a nice bright lens, able to concentrate a lot of light on the film.
A 3' Fresnel lens with a 3' focal length is an f/1 lens. I don't know the actual dimensions of the solar sail, but if it's an acre in size, it's around 200' in diameter, and it probably needs to be at least 100 miles from its target, so it's going to be like an f/2500 lens. An f/2500 lens is 6 million times dimmer than that Fresnel lens.