They might suck for you, but there are those of us (like one of the people that replied saying they have a LEAF) who would love to be able to buy an electric car today because they perfectly match our requirements.
I'm happy to admit they're not for everyone. I know people that live an hour away from the office and commute every day. One of them is in my office (here in.au), one of them is my uncle who lives in Pacifica, CA. Both of them live where they do because they like the location and don't mind the driving.
However, their ability to have that lifestyle comes from the availability of cheap gasoline. As gasoline gets more expensive, the option to have a 200km round-trip commute starts vanishing.
I live less than ten minutes walk from my office. I have had my (petrol) car since 2003 and have only recently cracked 30,000km. The only place I drive that is far away is to the beach, which is around 100km away - in range of most electric cars, as I understand it.
The cost of petrol for me is basically insignificant but if I could get a nice electric car I would happily do so because my driving requirements more than easily fit into its specs.
If "Democracy" is so good, so perfect, why can't the Indians elect someone with more integrity?
I am not sure if you mean this as a criticism of democracy or not, but - part of the price of democracy is that people are given the power to vote stupid people in who do dumb things. (Assuming we are talking about a "real" democracy with fair elections, not one of the sham ones - I am not sure where India falls here.)
If they have a real democracy, then after this dumb idea is rolled out and fails spectacularly, then they should have the ability to vote in a new politician who promises to remove it.
I understand it doesn't always work that way in practice, even in real democracies, but that is the idea and there's not really a lot of better ones out there. I've always loved that Winston Churchill quote: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
I would argue that if you're going to recommend another site that you prefer because it is better, you do so in a way that doesn't encourage people to strip them of the revenue stream that they presumably count on to stay better.
That is exactly the sort of thing that will lead to more and more desperate advertising tricks to attempt to make more money - for example, the sort of bundling described here!
Ads are sometimes irritating but instead of just looking at them as an irritant, try looking at them as a way to support a service that you like - put up with a bit of a slowdown and maybe even clicking on them will directly support those sites and help ensure they can stay running.
(Disclaimer: I work on a website that is funded by advertising. I know that we will shut down before we resort to doing things like bundleware. But I think we provide a valuable service to users - who get to visit our site and download stuff for free - and I would like to keep being able to do that, and think the "cost" users have to pay of losing some attention space to ads is pretty fair.)
I'd love to know where you're getting regular updates from. My Stanza stopped working months ago when iOS5 came out - along with just about everyone else's:
Stanza does not work in iOS5. I used it almost every day for years for reading ebooks and when I updated to iOS5 on my iPod Touch it immediately stopped working.
Their "support" forum is full of people having the same problem:
My iPod Touch is now a useless lump. I don't take it anywhere anymore because I can't read on it, which turns out to be the only thing I used it for. I now just read on my Android phone while I wait to find an e-ink reader that doesn't have DRM'ed books.
Heh, I rather thought that was the GP's point: noone is capable of rational discussion, so you might as well just yell as loudly as you can, over and over again, until people are simply brainwashed or numbed by the shouting.
No facts, just appeals to emotion and cheap trickery, repeated ad nauseum, to a population that is uninterested, unwilling, or unable to determine the difference.
As I understand it, this organisation's purported plan was to attempt to sue copyright infringers by the innovative idea of actually following due process as required by Australian law - getting a court order to force ISPs to hand over the details of infringing customers and then attempt to extract money.
This is basically the same spectacularly unsuccessful process that the RIAA has been following in the USA.
iiNet, a major ISP over here that has been in the news a lot in copyright battles after getting taken to court by the media industry for bullshit like aiding and abetting copyright infringement (and winning) stated they were completely happy for this group to exist if that was their process, I assume because they knew it would be too expensive to be productive if they weren't able to get ISPs to just hand over customer details.
The whole thing seemed to be a lot of noise about nothing to me. Things like SOPA are much, much scarier to me as an Australian because it sounds like that will short-circuit the entire legal process - and given that we seem to inherit a lot of American IP laws, there's a real chance we'll cop it here.
I don't know how it works in the USA, but I would have thought "hard balls" only encompasses things like baseballs and hockey pucks (and maybe lacross - I can't remember for sure, but I watched my cousin play a few games when I was in CA and I seem to recall I did not want to get hit by the ball).
Here in Australia I would classify cricket balls as hard balls as well. Hockey balls (my g/f plays grass hockey) as well.
Banning hard balls, I could in some way understand - those things can cause some pretty serious injuries. I recall hearing about people getting killed in cricket games when the ball hits them in the chest hard enough to affect their heart. And of course head injuries are pretty common.
I still think it would be complete bullshit, of course - having grown up playing cricket and T-ball here I think it teaches absolutely invaluable skills about risk assessment and management. I would say that having hard balls thrown at you is pretty much a daily occurrence for children in Australia (although it's been a while since I was in school).
But seriously, soccer balls? Footballs? VOLLEY BALLS? Volley balls are practically made of air. American footballs might be dangerous if you cop the pointy end in an eye socket, but the vast, vast, vast majority of injuries you could possibly get from one of those balls are trivial.
This seems like a classic case of being blinded by one statistically insignificant incident, and massively over-reacting in a way that will disadvantage almost everyone to protect almost noone in any meaningful way.
Since record companies realised they could keep getting copyright laws extended over many decades so they have a complete monopoly, take most of the money, and keep the artists content enough with their meagre take
We have been using OCFS (Oracle Cluster File System) for some time in production between a few different servers.
Now, I am not a sysadmin so can't comment on that aspect. I'm like a product manager type, so I only really see two sides of it: 1) when it is working normally and everything is fine 2) when it stops working and everything is broken.
Overall from my perspective, I would rate it as "satisfactory". The "working normally" aspect is most of the time; everything is relatively seamless - we add new content to our servers using a variety of techniques (HTTP uploads, FTP uploads, etc) and they are all magically distributed to the nodes.
Unfortunately we have had several problems where something happens to the node and it seems to lose contact with the filesystem or something. At that point the node pretty much becomes worthless and needs to be rebooted, which seems to fix the problem (there might be other less drastic measures but this seems to be all we have at the moment).
So far this has JUST been not annoying enough for us to look at alternatives. Downtime hasn't been too bad overall; now we know what to look for we have alarming and stuff set up so we can catch failures a little bit sooner before things spiral out of control.
I have very briefly looked at the alternatives listed in the OP and look forward to reading what other reader's experiences are like with them.
I found it interesting a couple months back when YouTube changed to using iframes by default for their embed code.
You can check 'use old embed code' to use the original object code, but I haven't seen anyone do this since they made the change.
I was massively surprised when they made this move because of the security side of things; I'm completely unsurprised that they're blocking iframes, but I'm just as surprised they're using them by default in Youtube.
Do you have a citation for the DOE stuff? I would love to have it handy, because I've definitely heard that before and I'm constantly getting into fights with people who don't believe it and I can never find anything really authoritative about it.
Yes, I noticed the same thing then when I went looking for the change log. I couldn't find a way to navigate to it from the download page at all, which sure is irritating. Eventually I just Googled "Firefox release notes" and found this page, which has them all:
Can't see anyone having posted this, but Mozilla have instructions on how to remove DigiNotar as a trusted CA in your Firefox. I'm sure other browsers have similar processes.
I also note they've just released a new Firefox (and Thunderbird) version that has removed the CA entirely - good response:
Because the extent of the mis-issuance is not clear, we are releasing new versions of Firefox for desktop (3.6.21, 6.0.1, 7, 8, and 9) and mobile (6.0.1, 7, 8, and 9), Thunderbird (3.1.13, and 6.0.1) and SeaMonkey (2.3.2) shortly that will revoke trust in the DigiNotar root and protect users from this attack. We encourage all users to keep their software up-to-date by regularly applying security updates. Users can also manually disable the DigiNotar root through the Firefox preferences.
How is that even possible?! I thought we'd seen the last of them years ago; not even the most pathetic company trying to make a web presence seems to think them relevant enough to use.
Oh right, I guess that's why they've switched into lawsuit mode - it's easier than innovating.
What I find more amazing is the average drug-related content that you guys have on commercial television. When I'm visiting the US I often watch a bunch of television with my (American) relatives, and I have sat through entire commercial breaks that have been nothing but pharma ads.
And we're not talking headache pills here - these are things where the actual symptom list include things like "anal leakage" and "death". They were funny at first but after a while I found them really depressing.
The other thing to do is make sure you check out the full list of nominees (available here).
I've often read the Winning book and thought "meh" and then gone on to read some of the nominees which I really enjoyed. It's a good shortlist of some great recent sci-fi.
Phew, nice to hear some positive feedback - I was worried my post would be taken as just typical random American-bashing which it definitely wasn't (hopefully evident from the subtle Australian-bashing I was doing too).
We have the same thing with the rite of passage as well.
I spent a few weeks in Japan over two trips - my first one I was amazed and stunned that I was able to see almost the whole country through a combination of nothing other than walking and getting on trains. Cheaply and easily.
I often wonder if the big problem with Australia and the US is a function of the size of the two countries and the fact that when they were really exploding, cars were pretty common - so it lead to a lot of cities being designed in such a way that roads/cars were more important than anything else. This was also back before oil cost $100 a barrel, I guess.
We actually have reassssoonable public transport, as long as you live in a city close to a train or bus line. They're pretty extensive but nowhere near as easy to get around different cities, although that is also because they're generally over 1000km apart.
Slashdot Mirror
They might suck for you, but there are those of us (like one of the people that replied saying they have a LEAF) who would love to be able to buy an electric car today because they perfectly match our requirements.
I'm happy to admit they're not for everyone. I know people that live an hour away from the office and commute every day. One of them is in my office (here in .au), one of them is my uncle who lives in Pacifica, CA. Both of them live where they do because they like the location and don't mind the driving.
However, their ability to have that lifestyle comes from the availability of cheap gasoline. As gasoline gets more expensive, the option to have a 200km round-trip commute starts vanishing.
I live less than ten minutes walk from my office. I have had my (petrol) car since 2003 and have only recently cracked 30,000km. The only place I drive that is far away is to the beach, which is around 100km away - in range of most electric cars, as I understand it.
The cost of petrol for me is basically insignificant but if I could get a nice electric car I would happily do so because my driving requirements more than easily fit into its specs.
If "Democracy" is so good, so perfect, why can't the Indians elect someone with more integrity?
I am not sure if you mean this as a criticism of democracy or not, but - part of the price of democracy is that people are given the power to vote stupid people in who do dumb things. (Assuming we are talking about a "real" democracy with fair elections, not one of the sham ones - I am not sure where India falls here.)
If they have a real democracy, then after this dumb idea is rolled out and fails spectacularly, then they should have the ability to vote in a new politician who promises to remove it.
I understand it doesn't always work that way in practice, even in real democracies, but that is the idea and there's not really a lot of better ones out there. I've always loved that Winston Churchill quote: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
I would argue that if you're going to recommend another site that you prefer because it is better, you do so in a way that doesn't encourage people to strip them of the revenue stream that they presumably count on to stay better.
That is exactly the sort of thing that will lead to more and more desperate advertising tricks to attempt to make more money - for example, the sort of bundling described here!
Ads are sometimes irritating but instead of just looking at them as an irritant, try looking at them as a way to support a service that you like - put up with a bit of a slowdown and maybe even clicking on them will directly support those sites and help ensure they can stay running.
(Disclaimer: I work on a website that is funded by advertising. I know that we will shut down before we resort to doing things like bundleware. But I think we provide a valuable service to users - who get to visit our site and download stuff for free - and I would like to keep being able to do that, and think the "cost" users have to pay of losing some attention space to ads is pretty fair.)
I'd love to know where you're getting regular updates from. My Stanza stopped working months ago when iOS5 came out - along with just about everyone else's:
http://getsatisfaction.com/stanza/topics/ios_5_issues
Stanza does not work in iOS5. I used it almost every day for years for reading ebooks and when I updated to iOS5 on my iPod Touch it immediately stopped working.
Their "support" forum is full of people having the same problem:
http://getsatisfaction.com/stanza/topics/ios_5_issues
My iPod Touch is now a useless lump. I don't take it anywhere anymore because I can't read on it, which turns out to be the only thing I used it for. I now just read on my Android phone while I wait to find an e-ink reader that doesn't have DRM'ed books.
Heh, I rather thought that was the GP's point: noone is capable of rational discussion, so you might as well just yell as loudly as you can, over and over again, until people are simply brainwashed or numbed by the shouting.
No facts, just appeals to emotion and cheap trickery, repeated ad nauseum, to a population that is uninterested, unwilling, or unable to determine the difference.
As I understand it, this organisation's purported plan was to attempt to sue copyright infringers by the innovative idea of actually following due process as required by Australian law - getting a court order to force ISPs to hand over the details of infringing customers and then attempt to extract money.
This is basically the same spectacularly unsuccessful process that the RIAA has been following in the USA.
iiNet, a major ISP over here that has been in the news a lot in copyright battles after getting taken to court by the media industry for bullshit like aiding and abetting copyright infringement (and winning) stated they were completely happy for this group to exist if that was their process, I assume because they knew it would be too expensive to be productive if they weren't able to get ISPs to just hand over customer details.
The whole thing seemed to be a lot of noise about nothing to me. Things like SOPA are much, much scarier to me as an Australian because it sounds like that will short-circuit the entire legal process - and given that we seem to inherit a lot of American IP laws, there's a real chance we'll cop it here.
Shit! I missed the part where it said Toronto. So my mention of USA should be replaced with Canada.
I don't know how it works in the USA, but I would have thought "hard balls" only encompasses things like baseballs and hockey pucks (and maybe lacross - I can't remember for sure, but I watched my cousin play a few games when I was in CA and I seem to recall I did not want to get hit by the ball).
Here in Australia I would classify cricket balls as hard balls as well. Hockey balls (my g/f plays grass hockey) as well.
Banning hard balls, I could in some way understand - those things can cause some pretty serious injuries. I recall hearing about people getting killed in cricket games when the ball hits them in the chest hard enough to affect their heart. And of course head injuries are pretty common.
I still think it would be complete bullshit, of course - having grown up playing cricket and T-ball here I think it teaches absolutely invaluable skills about risk assessment and management. I would say that having hard balls thrown at you is pretty much a daily occurrence for children in Australia (although it's been a while since I was in school).
But seriously, soccer balls? Footballs? VOLLEY BALLS? Volley balls are practically made of air. American footballs might be dangerous if you cop the pointy end in an eye socket, but the vast, vast, vast majority of injuries you could possibly get from one of those balls are trivial.
This seems like a classic case of being blinded by one statistically insignificant incident, and massively over-reacting in a way that will disadvantage almost everyone to protect almost noone in any meaningful way.
Hey! That sounds sort of familiar.
Since record companies realised they could keep getting copyright laws extended over many decades so they have a complete monopoly, take most of the money, and keep the artists content enough with their meagre take
Great info dude, thanks!
We have been using OCFS (Oracle Cluster File System) for some time in production between a few different servers.
Now, I am not a sysadmin so can't comment on that aspect. I'm like a product manager type, so I only really see two sides of it: 1) when it is working normally and everything is fine 2) when it stops working and everything is broken.
Overall from my perspective, I would rate it as "satisfactory". The "working normally" aspect is most of the time; everything is relatively seamless - we add new content to our servers using a variety of techniques (HTTP uploads, FTP uploads, etc) and they are all magically distributed to the nodes.
Unfortunately we have had several problems where something happens to the node and it seems to lose contact with the filesystem or something. At that point the node pretty much becomes worthless and needs to be rebooted, which seems to fix the problem (there might be other less drastic measures but this seems to be all we have at the moment).
So far this has JUST been not annoying enough for us to look at alternatives. Downtime hasn't been too bad overall; now we know what to look for we have alarming and stuff set up so we can catch failures a little bit sooner before things spiral out of control.
I have very briefly looked at the alternatives listed in the OP and look forward to reading what other reader's experiences are like with them.
I found it interesting a couple months back when YouTube changed to using iframes by default for their embed code.
You can check 'use old embed code' to use the original object code, but I haven't seen anyone do this since they made the change.
I was massively surprised when they made this move because of the security side of things; I'm completely unsurprised that they're blocking iframes, but I'm just as surprised they're using them by default in Youtube.
Doh, that 404s for me
Do you have a citation for the DOE stuff? I would love to have it handy, because I've definitely heard that before and I'm constantly getting into fights with people who don't believe it and I can never find anything really authoritative about it.
I can see a couple reports here: http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/vehicles/electric_charging.html but haven't had time to read them thoroughly.
And for us in Australia, a price in USD often means as much as 2x as much in AUD. Even recently when the AUD has been worth more than the USD.
Yes, I noticed the same thing then when I went looking for the change log. I couldn't find a way to navigate to it from the download page at all, which sure is irritating. Eventually I just Googled "Firefox release notes" and found this page, which has them all:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/
The actual v7.0 release notes are here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/7.0/releasenotes/
...for them to disclose when they're NOT endorsing? Wouldn't that be the more unusual event that should be brought to our attention?
Surely noone still thinks celebrities are getting up there to extoll the virtues of particular products out of the kindness of their heart, right?!
People need to adjust their defaults if not
Can't see anyone having posted this, but Mozilla have instructions on how to remove DigiNotar as a trusted CA in your Firefox. I'm sure other browsers have similar processes.
I also note they've just released a new Firefox (and Thunderbird) version that has removed the CA entirely - good response:
Because the extent of the mis-issuance is not clear, we are releasing new versions of Firefox for desktop (3.6.21, 6.0.1, 7, 8, and 9) and mobile (6.0.1, 7, 8, and 9), Thunderbird (3.1.13, and 6.0.1) and SeaMonkey (2.3.2) shortly that will revoke trust in the DigiNotar root and protect users from this attack. We encourage all users to keep their software up-to-date by regularly applying security updates. Users can also manually disable the DigiNotar root through the Firefox preferences.
... is that Real still exists as a company.
How is that even possible?! I thought we'd seen the last of them years ago; not even the most pathetic company trying to make a web presence seems to think them relevant enough to use.
Oh right, I guess that's why they've switched into lawsuit mode - it's easier than innovating.
What I find more amazing is the average drug-related content that you guys have on commercial television. When I'm visiting the US I often watch a bunch of television with my (American) relatives, and I have sat through entire commercial breaks that have been nothing but pharma ads.
And we're not talking headache pills here - these are things where the actual symptom list include things like "anal leakage" and "death". They were funny at first but after a while I found them really depressing.
Ctrl-shift-v in Thunderbird. Saved me a lot of pain finding that out.
The other thing to do is make sure you check out the full list of nominees (available here).
I've often read the Winning book and thought "meh" and then gone on to read some of the nominees which I really enjoyed. It's a good shortlist of some great recent sci-fi.
Did Google just "feed" the information to the police? Or did they obtain a warrant from a judge to get them to reveal it?
Phew, nice to hear some positive feedback - I was worried my post would be taken as just typical random American-bashing which it definitely wasn't (hopefully evident from the subtle Australian-bashing I was doing too).
We have the same thing with the rite of passage as well.
I spent a few weeks in Japan over two trips - my first one I was amazed and stunned that I was able to see almost the whole country through a combination of nothing other than walking and getting on trains. Cheaply and easily.
I often wonder if the big problem with Australia and the US is a function of the size of the two countries and the fact that when they were really exploding, cars were pretty common - so it lead to a lot of cities being designed in such a way that roads/cars were more important than anything else. This was also back before oil cost $100 a barrel, I guess.
We actually have reassssoonable public transport, as long as you live in a city close to a train or bus line. They're pretty extensive but nowhere near as easy to get around different cities, although that is also because they're generally over 1000km apart.