Any computer consultant worth his salt won't get drawn into silly squabbles over OS/platform/software/language/etc., and will recommend the *best* solution for the client. Don't ever let bigotry blind you...
I describe myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Unix proponent (24 years now), but I run Windows on my desktop machines, and have recommended Windows on many occasions, including some large-scale Fortune 20 deployments, where it made more sense. (For servers, I avoid Windows unless the app environment really needs it or runs markedly better there, but there are still a good number of those situations. Given my druthers, I design new systems around open source technologies, mostly because of the lifecycle cost savings. Auditing all those licenses is a non-trivial cost and PITA, not to mention acquiring them in the first place - and avoiding licensed software makes leveraging cloud computing *much* easier...)
Windows certainly has its faults, and I'm a big critic, but it also has its place, and for a good number of things (even some server-based things), Windows is the best choice - sometimes by a good margin.
This is a classic case of proposing a completely unworkable fix for a problem that shouldn't even exist in the first place!
The real problem is that most people on the planet have *never* watched a movie on their laptop, and never intend to, but marketdroids aiming for this small demographic (driven by the MPAA, who tell them people actually want to watch DVDs on thier computers) stick the rest of us with increasingly short and wide screens that inhibit all the real work done on laptops. All these things are easier with a portrait screen: Document creation/editing, browsing, reading (especially PDFs, the lingua franca of all kinds of documentation, from datasheets to manuals and books), most (but certainly not all) spreadsheets, graphics/illustration (more like a sketchpad), and many more. Really, a wide screen is best for only three things: Watching widescreen video, working with the occasional really wide spreadsheet, and project planning/flow like Gantt charts. I do the latter two occasionally (I'm finding that Gantt is a poor project management tool anyway, see the many comments on this topic on Edward Tufte's site), and I have never watched a movie on my laptop, not can I imagine wanting to. (Heck, I don't even want to carry the dead weight of an optical drive around in my laptop - Mine gets used maybe once every year or so when I have to upgrade commercial software, or install drivers for newly purchased peripherals. The only thing less useful than a CD/DVD drive on today's laptops is a floppy drive or the still inexplicably-present modem - I know I haven't used dialup in over a decade now.)
My prediction: One of the chief reasons the CrunchPad will be successful, even if it lacks otherwise, is because it has a reasonably-sized screen that can work in portrait mode. That in itself puts it ahead of every laptop on the planet!
...and Python has the advantage of being easy to learn. FORTRAN certainly isn't easy to learn...
Guess it depends on what you're used to. I found FORTRAN to be dead easy, and Python quite a bit harder - enough harder that I've never really gotten fluent at it. I'm mostly convinced that whatever you learn first (a procedural language or an object-oriented language) will warp you for life - and once having learned one, you'll never really master the other. (And yes, it does work both ways - most of the new young OO guys can't do procedural programming to save their butts...)
Although Python is a popular choice, I really think that Tcl is perhaps better in many ways, it's one of the easiest languages on the planet to learn, it's very consistent, and very powerful - enough so that Tcl is very commonly used to provide some pretty hairy astronomical calculations and transformations (look up the Starbase project from Harvard) - interestingly, in addition to being called by Tcl, these are also made available to *shell scripting* for easy integration in to pretty much anything else.
Although FORTRAN is great, and will be around for a long time, there are probably better langauges to learn. I really hate this trend of teaching Java, which is relatively user-hostile, and way too "CS-programmer"-centric. Python is better, and you could make a decent case for Ruby or Erlang, but if I was recommending today, I'd consider languages like Lua, but then there's no gaurantee it'll still be around or used in 20 years either.
It's the "useful in 20 years" criterion that convinces me that the *most practical* language to teach in colleges is Unix shell scripting, which would include the Unix text processing utilities like cut, paste, etc., plus a smattering of more advanced tools like sed and awk. These are somewhat obtuse, but very useful, and my code runs just the same on any Mac (or PC with U/Win or Cygwin) as it did on the $100K workstations where it was written.
A very large number of us posted to/. as ACs until they finally made having a login necessary to avoid being treated badly - sometime around 1999, IIRC. As a result, lots of us were Slashdot regulars, but wound up not getting an ID until years later, so the number isn't necessarily all that indicative of an early Slashdot user. Although I have no idea of the numbers, I'm pretty sure there were a large number of us that didn't sign up for an ID until the crackdown on AC posts.
Interestingly, I and many other Slashdot posters of that era actually signed our "Anonymous Coward" posts at the bottom. Worked for me - I posted everything as AC, but signed everything except the posts I really wanted to keep anonymous (usually the ones with some over-the-top snarky comment.)
"Hybrid vigor" definitely plays a part in dog breeding. This is particularly evident in comparing "show" vs. "field" varieties for sporting breeds such as, for instance, Spaniels. An extreme example of this is the divergence between the still true-to-breed English Cocker Spaniel and its weak, hyper, inbred American Cocker cousin...
Many people claim that the show dogs have been excessively interbred, leading to many of the weaknesses that begin to become associated with the breed. Field dogs, on the other hand, are not bred for consistent conformity to some artificial cosmetic standard, but for actual working performance. (For instance, Springer Spaniels usually have "ticking" or small spots, and although the breed standard says they are allowed in show dogs, no spotty Springer would get past the first round in a show.) IMO, the field dogs are stronger, smarter, and better adjusted in every way.
The speciation of dogs angle was just a humorous mechanism the writer used to mount an attack on intelligent design advocates.
It also proved the very real fact that Darwinian evolution is inherently and necessarily racist: If "science" is justified in declaring dog breeds separate species, surely a similar declaration of speciation based on human races would be appropriate. Darwin, and until fairly recently, most other evolutionists, frequently pointed to the relative development of "higher" and "lower" races as arguments for their theory. Logically, if you believe in Darwinian "survival of the fittest" evolution, you're can't really be against racism.
In all honesty, the thing that mostly comes through the SA article is pure unadulterated hatred and ridicule. Claiming it is "a humorous look" is no defense of indefensible behavior for a "scientific" publication.
Unfortunately, this is a growing trend, and one that is quite one-sided - the "ID folks" are trying (with varying degrees of success) to keep the discussion based on science, while the "evolutionist" argument becomes increasingly ad hominem.
There is NO reason for healthcare to be tied to your employer. But that is NO reason to move to a socialized system. I am free to buy all other insurance products freely - why not healthcare? The LAST thing I want government involved in is healthcare!
In fact, it is the government that can't take your money, your freedom or your life without good reason. Private industry feels no compunction against doing so.
People who made legitimate investments in GM are being cheated by the Gov't and the UAW (through raw Gov't corruption) in ways that would be clearly illegal if the company were in actual bankruptcy!
Modern liberalism *is* statism - and there's no doubt we have two statist parties now, and no one providing any serious opposition.
And I thought when the headline said Specter was changing parties, that maybe he'd decided to become a Republican!
Let's face it, he's the classic poster-child RINO, who voted with "his party" only on exceedingly rare occasions.
Only when it became painfully obvious that he had NO chance of keeping his seat against a GOP challenger did Specter finally realize that the only possible way to stay in power was to change parties. This is a great case for term limits...
I agree, Kyocera's made some absolutely awesome stuff. The 6035 was big, but probably the single best-thought-out phone from a user perspective I've *ever* seen, and that definitely includes the vaunted iPhone! It was also rugged as a tank, and had a battery that lasted long enough that you didn't even need to take the charger with you unless you were going to be gone all week, and planned on talking a lot.
It looks like the new Pre may be the first thing we've seen in years that has as much thinking in its design.
My two favorite phones of all time were both Qualcomm/Kyocera phones (the 6035, in some ways the best SmartPhone ever, and the ThinPhone, which was without question the best phone ever - that big speaker was *awesome*)- nothing else has ever even been in the same league!
Interstate rail simply ceased to be competitive for all but the largest cargo shipments. Without some of the smaller shipping, they took in less money... which led to less maintenance of the rail lines... which meant cutting routes... which led to less income... etc.
I call BS. Freight rail has always been fairly competitive, while passenger rail amost always requires substantial subsidies, and they really can't share the same rails, especially if you want high-speed passenger service.
In fact, America's freight railroad infrastructure and the percentage of total freight it carries is considerably higher than that in most other countries, even Europe and Japan. Here's a relevant excerpt from just one recent posting discussing this::
If you (unlike this author) believe that greenhouses gases are a problem, you DON'T WANT a shared passenger/freight system. One of the reasons why Europe is doing such a wretched job of complying with Kyoto is that it does only 10% of its freight by rail, as opposed to 51% in the U.S. Europe moves more people by rail, and more freight (i.e., heavier stuff) on trucks. Our intermodal system of truck-to-rail container transfer helps account for the fact that freight emissions of greenhouse gases are 155 grams per ton mile in the U.S. compared to 193 grams per ton mile in Europe.
Good enough for Gattaca, maybe? After all, how accurate do you have to be if the only fallout is denying some poor unfortunate soul his rights as a human being?
I'm *really* starting to think maybe Bill Joy was right, and that these technologies are far, far more dangerous than we currently realize. The hearts of men are twisted and dark - technology itself is neither good nor evil, but can be a very effective amplifier of our fallen nature. (Look no further than current events in Iran...)
Smart people do get laid.... They want to give plenty of attention to each child, so they tend to have 1-4 kids rather than 7-12.
I call BS. I know several really smart folks that have roughly a dozen kids each, and many more that have 6-8.
Transportation for family events is the only really hard problem - and one of them bought one of those big Ford rent-a-car-shuttle vans for his family and they go all around at a better per-person fuel economy than any of the rest of us! The thing that really makes me jealous is that college is pretty much a guaranteed full ride in such a situation, so they don't really need to save for that at all...
Tcl is still a *great* option for this, as is JavaScript. Both will teach concepts and practices that will still be relevant 30 years from now.
For sheer lifespan, JavaScript is probably the only thing that can touch shell script, which should NOT be overlooked as a programming language.
Of all the languages I've ever learned, shell is the only one that I've used frequently for over 20 years and is still as useful (and usable) today as it was in 1985.
Wow. Your UID should have a minus sign in front of it.
Newbies don't know it, but UID really has very little to do with how long you've been hanging around here. A great many of us declined to create Slashdot accounts until the restictions on posting as an "Anonymous Coward" became too onerous (around 1999, IIRC). Interestingly, many people (including me) signed their posts with their real names and/or e-mail addresses, but refused to have a Slashdot login until it became effectivley required. Just cranky, I guess...
Wow, you're making *me* feel old. As a college sophomore ('81-'82), I managed to scam an unused ADM-3A terminal from my Dad's company and found a departing grad student to sell me his 300 baud acoustically-coupled modem for the princely sum of $85.00.
For those that have never seen one, they were designed so once any "standard" phone handset (no Trimlines!) was plugged into the two rubber cups, it would happily warble letters onto your screen at the blistering speed of 30 characters/sec. Do the math: to re-fill the screen took just over a minute!
Anyway, this thing was the most popular item in the dorm. In semesters I didn't need it, I rented the terminal/modem setup out for $50/semester, so I actually made a little beer and pizza money.
I ran across the modem and terminal the other day, and I just can't part with either one. I figure if Skynet takes over, the resistance will be using 300 baud modems, since nothing modern will know how to talk to it anymore.;-) Of course, I'll have to find something with an RS-232 interface to plug it into...
There are a LOT of unused and unneeded V4 addresses out there. I think a reasonable effort at ectracting them could easily free up enough V4 addrs to last for another decade or two at current use rates.
Here's how I know: Back in the early 90's, I managed Chevron's transition to TCP/IP. Unfortuantely, it wasn't long before the Chevron Telecommunications Division folks got into the act, and working with Cisco, they managed to get TWENTY-THREE Class B networks assigned. (To be fair, the clueless Cisco SE's had told them they needed that many, so CTD wrote up a long, and presumably persuasive, application explaining how the world would end if they didn't get this completely ridiculous block of IP addresses. When I left the company in 1994, they were using no more than about a dozen Class-C equivalent subnets even at the largest sites, and many had an entire class B to handle only a few dozen nodes. The clueful among us all felt embarrassed and guilty about using that many addresses, but we used them anyway - heck they were assigned, so why not?
Although Chevron's glut of IP addresses isn't the norm, I'd also bet it's not unique - that clueless Cisco engineer designed similar networks for lots of other big companies during that time, too...
I'm not much of a Vista fan, but I think you can argue that power management is the one area where Vista kicks the crap out of every other OS on the planet, including OS X. (Sadly, I've never seen *any* Linux or BSD distro that's even in the hunt...)
Vista's power management is flat *outstanding* and would be a good model for everyone else to try to follow. (And although I'm rusty, I still know a bit more about this topic than the average bear, having formerly been in charge of software for both of Dell's laptop brands.)
I generally dislike Vista, but the two things that keep me from "downgrading" to XP are 1) the excellent power management, and 2) the dramatically improved network detection and configuration, especially for wireless networks. Vista's a pig, but it's actually pretty stable - I just close the lid when it's time to go and only reboot for system updates. That says good things about the stability of Gateway's drivers for this thing, too. Damn fine computer for $800, 18 months ago. (I bought the cheapest thing I could find at the time with 2GB of RAM, since Vista was the only choice then.)
It really makes you wonder how good Vista *could* be if they cleaned out the kernel DRM and other crap...
Which makes one wonder - what would I ever need a web server the size of a business card? I appreciate efficiency and all, but honestly...
Why? Because he could, obviously. He really needs no better reason than that.
Actually, there are lots of better reasons. I know, since I designed, built, produced, and sold something with even more capability than that described in the article back in 2003-2005. The small size was critical to the application, both for size and low-power/ventless benefits.
Yes, it's all possible, if you constrain the design properly for the job you need to do, rather than trying to solve every problem at once. Nicely functional web server and App server platform, check. Sophisticated web user interface that makes really hard things really easy, check. (One government customer configured our system in an hour and a half, instead of the 2-3 weeks usually required, and half of that was spent on the phone with me telling him it really *is* that easy...) Rich Web2.0 API and AJAX interface (before these terms were really even defined), check. Unparalleled standards compliance, check. PoE *or* long life battery-powered WLAN, check. High-performance analog input conditioning and high-precision (24-bit) A/D, check. Card size: slightly larger than a PCMCIA card, check (could be smaller, but there wasn't much point in being smaller than the WiFi card). Ultra Performance for real-time data monitoring and acquisition that exceeds Pentium-class PCs, check. Built-in battery charger circuitry for wireless version, check. Boot time under a quarter second (unoptimized), check. Power consumption so low that our problem was that we pulled significantly LESS than the minimum power in the PoE spec, check. Plus lots of stuff I won't talk about because there are still patents in play.
Oh, and the physical size wasn't even the beginning of the small - All this was done with only single-digit KILObytes of RAM, and the entire OS, web server, app server, and stack/os code fit into 32 KILObytes (Or about 50 KB for a later, more advanced version.)
It's amazing what you can do with a little good design and thought about how to best attack and solve a problem. Some will no doubt call BS, but I have a working PoE temp sensor using one of these boards on my desk right now, and several large government, research, and oilfield service customers have been using them daily for five years.(See http://networkio.com/ for more info...)
The really interesting thing - It's possible to do a lot better using today's technology.
They're not likely to want to do that, but having done it, I can tell you that you can require forwarding in perpetuity. And someone below mentions that international law is a problem.
No it's not. Just specify that the contract is defined by the laws of your local jurisdiction, and that's a non-issue - at least the guys I dealt with in British Columbia had no problem with the contract being defined by the laws of Texas. Of course, if you have to resort to lawyers, you've already lost. It's just a bloody domain, after all. Cut a deal that makes both parties happy and run with it...
I did. Really, this isn't that hard, if you're dealing with a reputable outfit. (and if you're not, then shame on you for not doing enough checking to find that out.)
I sold a domain 11 years ago for what now seems a ridiculously low price, but I only used it for e-mail, and the company in question was Canadian and their customers were constantly confused by them not having the ".com" variant of the name.
I dealt directly with their CFO and CEO over the phone first, and then wrote up a contract letter on my own in perfectly clear and unambiguous English, not legalese, outlining the deal.
Part of the deal was that they forward four e-mail addresses in perpetuity. It's worked for me so far. Every couple of years, some e-mail admin will try to "fix" it, but even after the company folded a while ago, the group that wound up with the domain name agreed that they needed to forward the mail to preserve their ownership of the domain, and it still works.
You don't need lawyers for something this simple, just common sense. My only advice, make sure the agreement specifies what happens if they go bust - that was a grey area in my agreement - it worked out, but it wasn't as clear as it should have been.
FWIW, the latest versions of Puppy are booting much quicker then most distros out there. DSL is pretty fast to boot, too, but if you compare what Pupy gives you vs DSL, you can see there's a LOT of extra functionality crammed into that extra 35 MB or so.
Puppy is usable as a regular OS and app environment for probably half the people on the Net, DSL definitely isn't.
BTW - the only downside for older hardware is that Puppy wants at least 64 MB of RAM, and more is better. (It works very well with 256MB, I haven't tried less than that since v 1.x).
There's some amazing architecture there, especially the way the layering of the filesystems works to transparently allow ROM, RAM, flash, and disk to do what each does best.
As of Version 3 (Puppy 4 is current now), Puppy is compatible with Slackware 12 binaries/packages, but it is NOT based on Slack or any other distro, in the way that most distros are.
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Any computer consultant worth his salt won't get drawn into silly squabbles over OS/platform/software/language/etc., and will recommend the *best* solution for the client. Don't ever let bigotry blind you...
I describe myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Unix proponent (24 years now), but I run Windows on my desktop machines, and have recommended Windows on many occasions, including some large-scale Fortune 20 deployments, where it made more sense. (For servers, I avoid Windows unless the app environment really needs it or runs markedly better there, but there are still a good number of those situations. Given my druthers, I design new systems around open source technologies, mostly because of the lifecycle cost savings. Auditing all those licenses is a non-trivial cost and PITA, not to mention acquiring them in the first place - and avoiding licensed software makes leveraging cloud computing *much* easier...)
Windows certainly has its faults, and I'm a big critic, but it also has its place, and for a good number of things (even some server-based things), Windows is the best choice - sometimes by a good margin.
This is a classic case of proposing a completely unworkable fix for a problem that shouldn't even exist in the first place!
The real problem is that most people on the planet have *never* watched a movie on their laptop, and never intend to, but marketdroids aiming for this small demographic (driven by the MPAA, who tell them people actually want to watch DVDs on thier computers) stick the rest of us with increasingly short and wide screens that inhibit all the real work done on laptops. All these things are easier with a portrait screen: Document creation/editing, browsing, reading (especially PDFs, the lingua franca of all kinds of documentation, from datasheets to manuals and books), most (but certainly not all) spreadsheets, graphics/illustration (more like a sketchpad), and many more. Really, a wide screen is best for only three things: Watching widescreen video, working with the occasional really wide spreadsheet, and project planning/flow like Gantt charts. I do the latter two occasionally (I'm finding that Gantt is a poor project management tool anyway, see the many comments on this topic on Edward Tufte's site), and I have never watched a movie on my laptop, not can I imagine wanting to. (Heck, I don't even want to carry the dead weight of an optical drive around in my laptop - Mine gets used maybe once every year or so when I have to upgrade commercial software, or install drivers for newly purchased peripherals. The only thing less useful than a CD/DVD drive on today's laptops is a floppy drive or the still inexplicably-present modem - I know I haven't used dialup in over a decade now.)
My prediction: One of the chief reasons the CrunchPad will be successful, even if it lacks otherwise, is because it has a reasonably-sized screen that can work in portrait mode. That in itself puts it ahead of every laptop on the planet!
...and Python has the advantage of being easy to learn. FORTRAN certainly isn't easy to learn...
Guess it depends on what you're used to. I found FORTRAN to be dead easy, and Python quite a bit harder - enough harder that I've never really gotten fluent at it. I'm mostly convinced that whatever you learn first (a procedural language or an object-oriented language) will warp you for life - and once having learned one, you'll never really master the other. (And yes, it does work both ways - most of the new young OO guys can't do procedural programming to save their butts...)
Although Python is a popular choice, I really think that Tcl is perhaps better in many ways, it's one of the easiest languages on the planet to learn, it's very consistent, and very powerful - enough so that Tcl is very commonly used to provide some pretty hairy astronomical calculations and transformations (look up the Starbase project from Harvard) - interestingly, in addition to being called by Tcl, these are also made available to *shell scripting* for easy integration in to pretty much anything else.
Although FORTRAN is great, and will be around for a long time, there are probably better langauges to learn. I really hate this trend of teaching Java, which is relatively user-hostile, and way too "CS-programmer"-centric. Python is better, and you could make a decent case for Ruby or Erlang, but if I was recommending today, I'd consider languages like Lua, but then there's no gaurantee it'll still be around or used in 20 years either.
It's the "useful in 20 years" criterion that convinces me that the *most practical* language to teach in colleges is Unix shell scripting, which would include the Unix text processing utilities like cut, paste, etc., plus a smattering of more advanced tools like sed and awk. These are somewhat obtuse, but very useful, and my code runs just the same on any Mac (or PC with U/Win or Cygwin) as it did on the $100K workstations where it was written.
A very large number of us posted to /. as ACs until they finally made having a login necessary to avoid being treated badly - sometime around 1999, IIRC. As a result, lots of us were Slashdot regulars, but wound up not getting an ID until years later, so the number isn't necessarily all that indicative of an early Slashdot user. Although I have no idea of the numbers, I'm pretty sure there were a large number of us that didn't sign up for an ID until the crackdown on AC posts.
Interestingly, I and many other Slashdot posters of that era actually signed our "Anonymous Coward" posts at the bottom. Worked for me - I posted everything as AC, but signed everything except the posts I really wanted to keep anonymous (usually the ones with some over-the-top snarky comment.)
"Hybrid vigor" definitely plays a part in dog breeding. This is particularly evident in comparing "show" vs. "field" varieties for sporting breeds such as, for instance, Spaniels. An extreme example of this is the divergence between the still true-to-breed English Cocker Spaniel and its weak, hyper, inbred American Cocker cousin...
Many people claim that the show dogs have been excessively interbred, leading to many of the weaknesses that begin to become associated with the breed. Field dogs, on the other hand, are not bred for consistent conformity to some artificial cosmetic standard, but for actual working performance. (For instance, Springer Spaniels usually have "ticking" or small spots, and although the breed standard says they are allowed in show dogs, no spotty Springer would get past the first round in a show.) IMO, the field dogs are stronger, smarter, and better adjusted in every way.
The speciation of dogs angle was just a humorous mechanism the writer used to mount an attack on intelligent design advocates.
It also proved the very real fact that Darwinian evolution is inherently and necessarily racist: If "science" is justified in declaring dog breeds separate species, surely a similar declaration of speciation based on human races would be appropriate. Darwin, and until fairly recently, most other evolutionists, frequently pointed to the relative development of "higher" and "lower" races as arguments for their theory. Logically, if you believe in Darwinian "survival of the fittest" evolution, you're can't really be against racism.
In all honesty, the thing that mostly comes through the SA article is pure unadulterated hatred and ridicule. Claiming it is "a humorous look" is no defense of indefensible behavior for a "scientific" publication.
Unfortunately, this is a growing trend, and one that is quite one-sided - the "ID folks" are trying (with varying degrees of success) to keep the discussion based on science, while the "evolutionist" argument becomes increasingly ad hominem.
There is NO reason for healthcare to be tied to your employer. But that is NO reason to move to a socialized system. I am free to buy all other insurance products freely - why not healthcare? The LAST thing I want government involved in is healthcare!
In fact, it is the government that can't take your money, your freedom or your life without good reason. Private industry feels no compunction against doing so.
This comment is laughable in light of what the government is doing RIGHT NOW to illegally take GM's assets.
People who made legitimate investments in GM are being cheated by the Gov't and the UAW (through raw Gov't corruption) in ways that would be clearly illegal if the company were in actual bankruptcy!
Modern liberalism *is* statism - and there's no doubt we have two statist parties now, and no one providing any serious opposition.
And I thought when the headline said Specter was changing parties, that maybe he'd decided to become a Republican!
Let's face it, he's the classic poster-child RINO, who voted with "his party" only on exceedingly rare occasions.
Only when it became painfully obvious that he had NO chance of keeping his seat against a GOP challenger did Specter finally realize that the only possible way to stay in power was to change parties. This is a great case for term limits...
I agree, Kyocera's made some absolutely awesome stuff. The 6035 was big, but probably the single best-thought-out phone from a user perspective I've *ever* seen, and that definitely includes the vaunted iPhone! It was also rugged as a tank, and had a battery that lasted long enough that you didn't even need to take the charger with you unless you were going to be gone all week, and planned on talking a lot.
It looks like the new Pre may be the first thing we've seen in years that has as much thinking in its design.
My two favorite phones of all time were both Qualcomm/Kyocera phones (the 6035, in some ways the best SmartPhone ever, and the ThinPhone, which was without question the best phone ever - that big speaker was *awesome*)- nothing else has ever even been in the same league!
Interstate rail simply ceased to be competitive for all but the largest cargo shipments. Without some of the smaller shipping, they took in less money... which led to less maintenance of the rail lines... which meant cutting routes... which led to less income... etc.
I call BS. Freight rail has always been fairly competitive, while passenger rail amost always requires substantial subsidies, and they really can't share the same rails, especially if you want high-speed passenger service.
In fact, America's freight railroad infrastructure and the percentage of total freight it carries is considerably higher than that in most other countries, even Europe and Japan. Here's a relevant excerpt from just one recent posting discussing this: :
If you (unlike this author) believe that greenhouses gases are a problem, you DON'T WANT a shared passenger/freight system. One of the reasons why Europe is doing such a wretched job of complying with Kyoto is that it does only 10% of its freight by rail, as opposed to 51% in the U.S. Europe moves more people by rail, and more freight (i.e., heavier stuff) on trucks. Our intermodal system of truck-to-rail container transfer helps account for the fact that freight emissions of greenhouse gases are 155 grams per ton mile in the U.S. compared to 193 grams per ton mile in Europe.
Good enough for Gattaca, maybe? After all, how accurate do you have to be if the only fallout is denying some poor unfortunate soul his rights as a human being?
I'm *really* starting to think maybe Bill Joy was right, and that these technologies are far, far more dangerous than we currently realize. The hearts of men are twisted and dark - technology itself is neither good nor evil, but can be a very effective amplifier of our fallen nature. (Look no further than current events in Iran...)
Smart people do get laid. ... They want to give plenty of attention to each child, so they tend to have 1-4 kids rather than 7-12.
I call BS. I know several really smart folks that have roughly a dozen kids each, and many more that have 6-8.
Transportation for family events is the only really hard problem - and one of them bought one of those big Ford rent-a-car-shuttle vans for his family and they go all around at a better per-person fuel economy than any of the rest of us! The thing that really makes me jealous is that college is pretty much a guaranteed full ride in such a situation, so they don't really need to save for that at all...
Tcl is still a *great* option for this, as is JavaScript. Both will teach concepts and practices that will still be relevant 30 years from now.
For sheer lifespan, JavaScript is probably the only thing that can touch shell script, which should NOT be overlooked as a programming language.
Of all the languages I've ever learned, shell is the only one that I've used frequently for over 20 years and is still as useful (and usable) today as it was in 1985.
Wow. Your UID should have a minus sign in front of it.
Newbies don't know it, but UID really has very little to do with how long you've been hanging around here. A great many of us declined to create Slashdot accounts until the restictions on posting as an "Anonymous Coward" became too onerous (around 1999, IIRC). Interestingly, many people (including me) signed their posts with their real names and/or e-mail addresses, but refused to have a Slashdot login until it became effectivley required. Just cranky, I guess...
Surprisingly, I recently used vi's "." command as the easiest way to create a file that had to have exactly 40,000 zeroes in it.
I started out putting a loop around /dev/zero, but quickly realized that was going to take bloody forever. Vi did it in about 10 seconds.
Wow, you're making *me* feel old. As a college sophomore ('81-'82), I managed to scam an unused ADM-3A terminal from my Dad's company and found a departing grad student to sell me his 300 baud acoustically-coupled modem for the princely sum of $85.00.
For those that have never seen one, they were designed so once any "standard" phone handset (no Trimlines!) was plugged into the two rubber cups, it would happily warble letters onto your screen at the blistering speed of 30 characters/sec. Do the math: to re-fill the screen took just over a minute!
Anyway, this thing was the most popular item in the dorm. In semesters I didn't need it, I rented the terminal/modem setup out for $50/semester, so I actually made a little beer and pizza money.
I ran across the modem and terminal the other day, and I just can't part with either one. I figure if Skynet takes over, the resistance will be using 300 baud modems, since nothing modern will know how to talk to it anymore. ;-) Of course, I'll have to find something with an RS-232 interface to plug it into...
There are a LOT of unused and unneeded V4 addresses out there. I think a reasonable effort at ectracting them could easily free up enough V4 addrs to last for another decade or two at current use rates.
Here's how I know: Back in the early 90's, I managed Chevron's transition to TCP/IP. Unfortuantely, it wasn't long before the Chevron Telecommunications Division folks got into the act, and working with Cisco, they managed to get TWENTY-THREE Class B networks assigned. (To be fair, the clueless Cisco SE's had told them they needed that many, so CTD wrote up a long, and presumably persuasive, application explaining how the world would end if they didn't get this completely ridiculous block of IP addresses. When I left the company in 1994, they were using no more than about a dozen Class-C equivalent subnets even at the largest sites, and many had an entire class B to handle only a few dozen nodes. The clueful among us all felt embarrassed and guilty about using that many addresses, but we used them anyway - heck they were assigned, so why not?
Although Chevron's glut of IP addresses isn't the norm, I'd also bet it's not unique - that clueless Cisco engineer designed similar networks for lots of other big companies during that time, too...
I'm not much of a Vista fan, but I think you can argue that power management is the one area where Vista kicks the crap out of every other OS on the planet, including OS X. (Sadly, I've never seen *any* Linux or BSD distro that's even in the hunt...)
Vista's power management is flat *outstanding* and would be a good model for everyone else to try to follow. (And although I'm rusty, I still know a bit more about this topic than the average bear, having formerly been in charge of software for both of Dell's laptop brands.)
I generally dislike Vista, but the two things that keep me from "downgrading" to XP are 1) the excellent power management, and 2) the dramatically improved network detection and configuration, especially for wireless networks. Vista's a pig, but it's actually pretty stable - I just close the lid when it's time to go and only reboot for system updates. That says good things about the stability of Gateway's drivers for this thing, too. Damn fine computer for $800, 18 months ago. (I bought the cheapest thing I could find at the time with 2GB of RAM, since Vista was the only choice then.)
It really makes you wonder how good Vista *could* be if they cleaned out the kernel DRM and other crap...
Why? Because he could, obviously. He really needs no better reason than that.
Actually, there are lots of better reasons. I know, since I designed, built, produced, and sold something with even more capability than that described in the article back in 2003-2005. The small size was critical to the application, both for size and low-power/ventless benefits.
Yes, it's all possible, if you constrain the design properly for the job you need to do, rather than trying to solve every problem at once. Nicely functional web server and App server platform, check. Sophisticated web user interface that makes really hard things really easy, check. (One government customer configured our system in an hour and a half, instead of the 2-3 weeks usually required, and half of that was spent on the phone with me telling him it really *is* that easy...) Rich Web2.0 API and AJAX interface (before these terms were really even defined), check. Unparalleled standards compliance, check. PoE *or* long life battery-powered WLAN, check. High-performance analog input conditioning and high-precision (24-bit) A/D, check. Card size: slightly larger than a PCMCIA card, check (could be smaller, but there wasn't much point in being smaller than the WiFi card). Ultra Performance for real-time data monitoring and acquisition that exceeds Pentium-class PCs, check. Built-in battery charger circuitry for wireless version, check. Boot time under a quarter second (unoptimized), check. Power consumption so low that our problem was that we pulled significantly LESS than the minimum power in the PoE spec, check. Plus lots of stuff I won't talk about because there are still patents in play.
Oh, and the physical size wasn't even the beginning of the small - All this was done with only single-digit KILObytes of RAM, and the entire OS, web server, app server, and stack/os code fit into 32 KILObytes (Or about 50 KB for a later, more advanced version.)
It's amazing what you can do with a little good design and thought about how to best attack and solve a problem. Some will no doubt call BS, but I have a working PoE temp sensor using one of these boards on my desk right now, and several large government, research, and oilfield service customers have been using them daily for five years.(See http://networkio.com/ for more info...)
The really interesting thing - It's possible to do a lot better using today's technology.
They're not likely to want to do that, but having done it, I can tell you that you can require forwarding in perpetuity. And someone below mentions that international law is a problem.
No it's not. Just specify that the contract is defined by the laws of your local jurisdiction, and that's a non-issue - at least the guys I dealt with in British Columbia had no problem with the contract being defined by the laws of Texas. Of course, if you have to resort to lawyers, you've already lost. It's just a bloody domain, after all. Cut a deal that makes both parties happy and run with it...
I did. Really, this isn't that hard, if you're dealing with a reputable outfit. (and if you're not, then shame on you for not doing enough checking to find that out.)
I sold a domain 11 years ago for what now seems a ridiculously low price, but I only used it for e-mail, and the company in question was Canadian and their customers were constantly confused by them not having the ".com" variant of the name.
I dealt directly with their CFO and CEO over the phone first, and then wrote up a contract letter on my own in perfectly clear and unambiguous English, not legalese, outlining the deal.
Part of the deal was that they forward four e-mail addresses in perpetuity. It's worked for me so far. Every couple of years, some e-mail admin will try to "fix" it, but even after the company folded a while ago, the group that wound up with the domain name agreed that they needed to forward the mail to preserve their ownership of the domain, and it still works.
You don't need lawyers for something this simple, just common sense. My only advice, make sure the agreement specifies what happens if they go bust - that was a grey area in my agreement - it worked out, but it wasn't as clear as it should have been.
Forgot to include a link to Barry's post last month on Puppy boot times: http://www.puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00208
FWIW, the latest versions of Puppy are booting much quicker then most distros out there. DSL is pretty fast to boot, too, but if you compare what Pupy gives you vs DSL, you can see there's a LOT of extra functionality crammed into that extra 35 MB or so.
Puppy is usable as a regular OS and app environment for probably half the people on the Net, DSL definitely isn't.
BTW - the only downside for older hardware is that Puppy wants at least 64 MB of RAM, and more is better. (It works very well with 256MB, I haven't tried less than that since v 1.x).
Puppy isn't based on any other distro. Its author, Barry Kauler, built it from scratch, and it's architecture is substantially different from any other distro out there. (See http://www.puppylinux.com/development/howpuppyworks.html and http://puppylinux.com/about.htm for details.
There's some amazing architecture there, especially the way the layering of the filesystems works to transparently allow ROM, RAM, flash, and disk to do what each does best.
As of Version 3 (Puppy 4 is current now), Puppy is compatible with Slackware 12 binaries/packages, but it is NOT based on Slack or any other distro, in the way that most distros are.