Seriously, Debian is the THE zealot distro. They obsess about Free Software. If that's not your thing, go with something else, plenty alternatives around.
Ahh, I get it now. But still there's a vast difference in scale.
Given any chemical, chances are there are organisms that need it to live, and others find it poisonous. Plenty examples around: Some organisms can't stand oxygen, some bacteria live in acidic environments and volcanic vents, dogs find chocolate poisonous...
But IMO, there's a bit difference between say, milk and DDT. While I bet fish don't like milk to much, there's a big difference between that and DDT which can affect whole ecosystems by accumulating, and getting increasingly concentrated up the food chain.
I doubt you can be 100% green, but you can be *greener*
Say, batteries can be made with mercury (very poisonous), nickel-cadmium (also harmful) or nickel-metal hydride (less bad than NiCD). While I imagine that NiMH isn't something you'd want to have in your water either, AFAIK, it's a lot better. Besides, the capacity it has is much better than NiCD, which would mean a further decrease in pollution (you need less NiMH batteries than NiCD for the same capacity).
Kelsey (the FDA scientist that evaluated thalidomide) had an amazing luck: She was given something that was actually very harmful. She was pressured by both the company and her superiors to just approve it, but she didn't give in. She became a hero when the truth was known.
However, if it turned out to have been actually harmless, she'd have very possibly been demoted instead. Very few people would have seen it as a job well done in that case.
That's the problem really, being careful is a very, very good thing as the case of thalidomide shows. But people only understand that when they see an example in action. Had it been harmless, she'd have been seen as annoying and stubborn instead, if she remained with the FDA chances are further objections from her would be ignored, and perhaps something even worse would have been approved without oversight.
The gatorade example is bad, anyway. Gatorade, AFAIK, doesn't contain anything very strange, and an isotonic solution is made of completely normal things (water, salt, sugar, orange juice or banana IIRC). Now if you've got some new ingredient that was made in a lab, I'd rather wait than risk being poisoned.
Let's say you release mercury into a river. By the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late: you'll have poisoned fish, and lots of poisoned people who ate that fish, it'll have had a great effect on the ecology of the area...
So I understand Greenpeace's idea as "Even if we're not sure right now, let's be careful with unknown chemicals now, lest we have to figure it out the hard way".
There are actual examples of why being paranoid is a good thing. For instance, Thalidomide
Load average is all about CPU usage. It's the average number of processes that wanted CPU time during the last N minutes.
So, your load average means that sometimes you could use a 8-way box. Take your load average, round up to the next integer, and that's the number of CPUs your workload could use. If you have less CPUs than that, then you're not getting all the performance possible, if you have more of them then they're going to waste.
My Pentium M can slow down from 1600 MHz to 600, and then there are additional throttling states that seem to be able to bring it down to the performance of a 386. I made mine do that when battery got low, and at the highest levels of slowdown you could easily notice that even routine things like scrolling text in a text editor started becoming slow.
For reference, I'm typing this on a dual Athlon MP 2000+. That means I've got two CPUs available. This is under Linux 112 processes. I've got Second Life taking one CPU, and the load average is 1.42. Meaning, I'm not even effectively using the two CPUs I have. 1.0 of that would be SL, and the 0.42 is a combination of X, browser playing animations, and other stuff like that. A load average of 5 very ocassionally happens on my server, but is also uncommon.
I repeat: With current software, pretty much anything above a dual core will give you about zilch benefit unless you do something uncommon and parallelizable (rendering, encoding, compiling, etc). It's of no use for games, and absolutely useless for common desktop usage (unless you were going to open 80 browser tabs at once).
I don't doubt this will be a neat thing for large webservers, but it's even counterproductive for 99% of normal people.
Actually, human senses have very variable resolution and in some places is very low.
Try an experiment often described in biology books: Ask somebody to poke you with a finger in the back, and try to guess where exactly it was. Now try to determine where they use one finger and when they use two at different separations. You'll notice that resolution on your back is *very* bad. It's very good at the fingertips however.
Same would go for heat/cold/etc sensors. You don't need to determine a burn's location with 0.1mm precision, as that's useless anyway. So long you know the general area it's more than enough.
We can already do that, on single core CPUs. It's called "multitasking", and things like that are usually done by using multiple threads or multiple processes. It's nothing that can't be done already, but coding threads is a huge pain.
Besides, 1 core would be better than several in many respects. Say, if you've got a web server, or a database or whatever this means that each process/thread only can get up to 1/80 of the processor's capabilities, unless the program is coded in such a way it can take advantage of multiple cores in a single operation (and even if it can do that, chances are it can only split the task into a few threads, so it still can't use the whole CPU)
Now, for systems with a huge load of small tasks, like a web server serving a really massive number of clients this will be really nice. But this kind of thing would really suck for a desktop. They rarely have more than a couple processes running at once.
Setting up a business in SL is very, very hard work. You've got to figure it out, make a design within the limits of SL (if your project requires scripting then the constraints are quite similar to what these days would be pretty much a microcontroller. Slow execution and 16K memory). Then you've got to market it, and sell it at prices far below what most goods sell in the real world.
Consider this: You need to make either huge amounts of something, or make it truly amazing. Getting rich at $0.5 per copy requires having *many* customers, many of who will require assistance. Have fun answering IMs all day.
It seems that Luskwood, who have been in SL for 3 years, and are very well known for their high quality avatars ($3 each) aren't getting anywhere near the profit required to make SL pay their RL bills.
If you can manage to earn good money in those conditions, then it would be a sign of genius, dedication or most likely both.
$3 is for a ready made one, for example like this, a custom one will probably cost you several times that.
Well, more complete explanation: You can roll your own (human one) for free by adjusting sliders, but that only goes so far. You can get clothes and stuff for free, and you can buy that too. Now, if you want something truly fancy, you'll need some custom work. Looking like Neo is easy and can be done for free, looking like a dragon is going to take lots of time or paying for it because no slider combination is going to turn you into that. Something like a dragon is done by completely covering yourself with custom attachments.
I don't think SL fashion translates very well to the real world. To begin with, SL is entirely free of real world comfort, realism and materials cost constraints.
Things you see in SL: People carrying katanas and various other weapons, robots, furries, very non-western clothes, people with more jewelry than Mr. T, strange things like a fish that swims circles above your head, hair styles that'd take lots of time and money to do in reality...
It's very hard to be proficient at everything in it. I can think of maybe of one person who I know can build, create avatars, textures and script. Most people will specialize in one of those. So when a scripter wants a fancy home, they go to a builder.
I'd say that making a living in SL is noticeably harder than in real life. If you have decent computer skills you can get SOME kind of job fairly easily. Now, if you wanted to live on a SL business, you'd need to invest quite a lot of time into it, and even then it wouldn't pay very well. Anybody can sell something, but selling enough that the proceeds actually amount to something noticeable is very hard.
Say, creating an avatar that doesn't look like crap is a skill that can easily take weeks to develop. The monetary cost is low (you need to pay for texture uploads, but you could just use free ones), but the time cost is high, so paying $3 for an avatar turns out to make a lot sense.
I'm far from an expert in the area, but my understanding (from things I've heard, etc) is that improvement of MHz was done at the cost of efficiency in other areas. So eventually they bumped into a wall, and ended up with a chip that gets really hot and sucks lots of power.
Another problem is that lots of that research was about clock speed specifically, so they've got lots of techniques and data lying around focused on it that can't be taken further. Also it seems that engineers made their careers based on clock speed improvements as well, so now there are lots of people that became experts in it finding that their knowledge is now a lot less useful.
This seems to be a strange way to approach the problem. Your worry is that your child won't be able to live for long if you can't provide the proper care for her. Then, wouldn't it be better to give her a way of asking for care to be provided?
Assuming she's old enough, and not severely mentally disabled, this would seem to be the better option. After all, you could be perfectly alive and still be in a situation where you can't get to her fast enough.
Because algorithms are 99% of the time invented right while you're solving a problem that could be solved with one. If somebody else is faced with the same problem, chances are they'll reinvent independently the same thing. That makes them obvious.
At a young age, having only heard superficially of what a linked list was I could easily implement one. I also came up on my own with doubly linked lists, deques, etc, without having heard of them at all. I also figured on my own that caching data is a good way to improve performance. This is because those things are obvious. Right when you're staring at the code and thinking "Hmm, searching for the previous element in a singly linked list is a pain", the solution becomes almost blindingly obvious: Add a pointer to the previous element.
The imbeciles aren't so much MS as the users that went with MS technology. It's been many times already that people going with MS tech got completely screwed, and they keep coming back and asking for more.
You're still missing the point. We know perfectly fine the restrictions the GPL imposes. We choose the GPL because we *like* those restrictions, as they impose a level playing field. IBM can't just make a closed fork of Linux, give a bunch of cash to Linus and other big developers, and leave the remains of the team wondering what the heck to do now. That's a good thing.
Yes, of course it means some opportunities will be missed that might have been available otherwise. But I think the loss of Korokaa isn't such a big price to pay. After all, look where's Linux now, and where's BSD.
In May 2006 an unnamed kernel developer sent an email to Christopher Smart, the projects leader, suggesting that packaging the proprietary NVIDIA and ATI drivers was a violation of the GPL as they take GPL code from the kernel and build it into a non-GPL kernel module, qualifying as a derived work. The issue is a grey area and is yet to be resolved. Smart says that he has ceased development of the Xgl Live CD. In August 2006, Smart removed the CD image from his website
Problem here is, it's not really third party software if it takes part of the kernel sources and adds code with incompatible licensing into it. So let's see, take some Windows kernel source, add a third party driver to it, then release as say, BSD. You think the result would be very different?
Under MSSQL, there's no way of reading stuff from a table and not having the possibility of blocking something else or getting blocked. It's a trivial mistake to make, open the Enterprise Manager, load a big view or table and leave it open. The darn thing will keep a lock on the table unless you scroll down to the bottom of the result list.
You can use the WITH(NOLOCK) hint, but that's crap, as now you get uncommitted data in your SELECT.
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So pick another distro.
Seriously, Debian is the THE zealot distro. They obsess about Free Software. If that's not your thing, go with something else, plenty alternatives around.
So use Ubuntu then.
Debian's dedicated to the Free Software ideology, not to capitalism.
Ahh, I get it now. But still there's a vast difference in scale.
Given any chemical, chances are there are organisms that need it to live, and others find it poisonous. Plenty examples around: Some organisms can't stand oxygen, some bacteria live in acidic environments and volcanic vents, dogs find chocolate poisonous...
But IMO, there's a bit difference between say, milk and DDT. While I bet fish don't like milk to much, there's a big difference between that and DDT which can affect whole ecosystems by accumulating, and getting increasingly concentrated up the food chain.
Yes.
Statistics from Wikipedia: $360 million revenue, 1800 employees, estimated 2.8M supporters.
Whatever you think about Greenpeace, the fact is that they're far from being insignificant.
I doubt you can be 100% green, but you can be *greener*
Say, batteries can be made with mercury (very poisonous), nickel-cadmium (also harmful) or nickel-metal hydride (less bad than NiCD). While I imagine that NiMH isn't something you'd want to have in your water either, AFAIK, it's a lot better. Besides, the capacity it has is much better than NiCD, which would mean a further decrease in pollution (you need less NiMH batteries than NiCD for the same capacity).
Ah, but see, that's exactly the problem.
Kelsey (the FDA scientist that evaluated thalidomide) had an amazing luck: She was given something that was actually very harmful. She was pressured by both the company and her superiors to just approve it, but she didn't give in. She became a hero when the truth was known.
However, if it turned out to have been actually harmless, she'd have very possibly been demoted instead. Very few people would have seen it as a job well done in that case.
That's the problem really, being careful is a very, very good thing as the case of thalidomide shows. But people only understand that when they see an example in action. Had it been harmless, she'd have been seen as annoying and stubborn instead, if she remained with the FDA chances are further objections from her would be ignored, and perhaps something even worse would have been approved without oversight.
The gatorade example is bad, anyway. Gatorade, AFAIK, doesn't contain anything very strange, and an isotonic solution is made of completely normal things (water, salt, sugar, orange juice or banana IIRC). Now if you've got some new ingredient that was made in a lab, I'd rather wait than risk being poisoned.
Why bogus?
Let's say you release mercury into a river. By the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late: you'll have poisoned fish, and lots of poisoned people who ate that fish, it'll have had a great effect on the ecology of the area...
So I understand Greenpeace's idea as "Even if we're not sure right now, let's be careful with unknown chemicals now, lest we have to figure it out the hard way".
There are actual examples of why being paranoid is a good thing. For instance, Thalidomide
SDL_image is pretty easy to use. Of course that only works if you use SDL to start with
Pity the library is so annoying though. I was looking at using it in a small game and found this:
http://www.3-t.com/libmng/faq.html#id-1040
It's horribly annoying, I thought "screw it", and went with plain PNG.
Load average is all about CPU usage. It's the average number of processes that wanted CPU time during the last N minutes.
So, your load average means that sometimes you could use a 8-way box. Take your load average, round up to the next integer, and that's the number of CPUs your workload could use. If you have less CPUs than that, then you're not getting all the performance possible, if you have more of them then they're going to waste.
You can do that already as well.
My Pentium M can slow down from 1600 MHz to 600, and then there are additional throttling states that seem to be able to bring it down to the performance of a 386. I made mine do that when battery got low, and at the highest levels of slowdown you could easily notice that even routine things like scrolling text in a text editor started becoming slow.
For reference, I'm typing this on a dual Athlon MP 2000+. That means I've got two CPUs available. This is under Linux 112 processes. I've got Second Life taking one CPU, and the load average is 1.42. Meaning, I'm not even effectively using the two CPUs I have. 1.0 of that would be SL, and the 0.42 is a combination of X, browser playing animations, and other stuff like that. A load average of 5 very ocassionally happens on my server, but is also uncommon.
I repeat: With current software, pretty much anything above a dual core will give you about zilch benefit unless you do something uncommon and parallelizable (rendering, encoding, compiling, etc). It's of no use for games, and absolutely useless for common desktop usage (unless you were going to open 80 browser tabs at once).
I don't doubt this will be a neat thing for large webservers, but it's even counterproductive for 99% of normal people.
Actually, human senses have very variable resolution and in some places is very low.
Try an experiment often described in biology books: Ask somebody to poke you with a finger in the back, and try to guess where exactly it was. Now try to determine where they use one finger and when they use two at different separations. You'll notice that resolution on your back is *very* bad. It's very good at the fingertips however.
Same would go for heat/cold/etc sensors. You don't need to determine a burn's location with 0.1mm precision, as that's useless anyway. So long you know the general area it's more than enough.
We can already do that, on single core CPUs. It's called "multitasking", and things like that are usually done by using multiple threads or multiple processes. It's nothing that can't be done already, but coding threads is a huge pain.
Besides, 1 core would be better than several in many respects. Say, if you've got a web server, or a database or whatever this means that each process/thread only can get up to 1/80 of the processor's capabilities, unless the program is coded in such a way it can take advantage of multiple cores in a single operation (and even if it can do that, chances are it can only split the task into a few threads, so it still can't use the whole CPU)
Now, for systems with a huge load of small tasks, like a web server serving a really massive number of clients this will be really nice. But this kind of thing would really suck for a desktop. They rarely have more than a couple processes running at once.
Have you?
Setting up a business in SL is very, very hard work. You've got to figure it out, make a design within the limits of SL (if your project requires scripting then the constraints are quite similar to what these days would be pretty much a microcontroller. Slow execution and 16K memory). Then you've got to market it, and sell it at prices far below what most goods sell in the real world.
Consider this: You need to make either huge amounts of something, or make it truly amazing. Getting rich at $0.5 per copy requires having *many* customers, many of who will require assistance. Have fun answering IMs all day.
It seems that Luskwood, who have been in SL for 3 years, and are very well known for their high quality avatars ($3 each) aren't getting anywhere near the profit required to make SL pay their RL bills.
If you can manage to earn good money in those conditions, then it would be a sign of genius, dedication or most likely both.
Scary, I didn't need to make any effort to understand that.
$3 is for a ready made one, for example like this, a custom one will probably cost you several times that.
Well, more complete explanation: You can roll your own (human one) for free by adjusting sliders, but that only goes so far. You can get clothes and stuff for free, and you can buy that too. Now, if you want something truly fancy, you'll need some custom work. Looking like Neo is easy and can be done for free, looking like a dragon is going to take lots of time or paying for it because no slider combination is going to turn you into that. Something like a dragon is done by completely covering yourself with custom attachments.
I don't think SL fashion translates very well to the real world. To begin with, SL is entirely free of real world comfort, realism and materials cost constraints.
Things you see in SL: People carrying katanas and various other weapons, robots, furries, very non-western clothes, people with more jewelry than Mr. T, strange things like a fish that swims circles above your head, hair styles that'd take lots of time and money to do in reality...
Creating in Second Life is hard.
It's very hard to be proficient at everything in it. I can think of maybe of one person who I know can build, create avatars, textures and script. Most people will specialize in one of those. So when a scripter wants a fancy home, they go to a builder.
I'd say that making a living in SL is noticeably harder than in real life. If you have decent computer skills you can get SOME kind of job fairly easily. Now, if you wanted to live on a SL business, you'd need to invest quite a lot of time into it, and even then it wouldn't pay very well. Anybody can sell something, but selling enough that the proceeds actually amount to something noticeable is very hard.
Say, creating an avatar that doesn't look like crap is a skill that can easily take weeks to develop. The monetary cost is low (you need to pay for texture uploads, but you could just use free ones), but the time cost is high, so paying $3 for an avatar turns out to make a lot sense.
I'm far from an expert in the area, but my understanding (from things I've heard, etc) is that improvement of MHz was done at the cost of efficiency in other areas. So eventually they bumped into a wall, and ended up with a chip that gets really hot and sucks lots of power.
Another problem is that lots of that research was about clock speed specifically, so they've got lots of techniques and data lying around focused on it that can't be taken further. Also it seems that engineers made their careers based on clock speed improvements as well, so now there are lots of people that became experts in it finding that their knowledge is now a lot less useful.
This seems to be a strange way to approach the problem. Your worry is that your child won't be able to live for long if you can't provide the proper care for her. Then, wouldn't it be better to give her a way of asking for care to be provided?
Assuming she's old enough, and not severely mentally disabled, this would seem to be the better option. After all, you could be perfectly alive and still be in a situation where you can't get to her fast enough.
Because algorithms are 99% of the time invented right while you're solving a problem that could be solved with one. If somebody else is faced with the same problem, chances are they'll reinvent independently the same thing. That makes them obvious.
At a young age, having only heard superficially of what a linked list was I could easily implement one. I also came up on my own with doubly linked lists, deques, etc, without having heard of them at all. I also figured on my own that caching data is a good way to improve performance. This is because those things are obvious. Right when you're staring at the code and thinking "Hmm, searching for the previous element in a singly linked list is a pain", the solution becomes almost blindingly obvious: Add a pointer to the previous element.
The imbeciles aren't so much MS as the users that went with MS technology. It's been many times already that people going with MS tech got completely screwed, and they keep coming back and asking for more.
You're still missing the point. We know perfectly fine the restrictions the GPL imposes. We choose the GPL because we *like* those restrictions, as they impose a level playing field. IBM can't just make a closed fork of Linux, give a bunch of cash to Linus and other big developers, and leave the remains of the team wondering what the heck to do now. That's a good thing.
Yes, of course it means some opportunities will be missed that might have been available otherwise. But I think the loss of Korokaa isn't such a big price to pay. After all, look where's Linux now, and where's BSD.
Problem here is, it's not really third party software if it takes part of the kernel sources and adds code with incompatible licensing into it. So let's see, take some Windows kernel source, add a third party driver to it, then release as say, BSD. You think the result would be very different?
It does, but that's really a different matter.
Under MSSQL, there's no way of reading stuff from a table and not having the possibility of blocking something else or getting blocked. It's a trivial mistake to make, open the Enterprise Manager, load a big view or table and leave it open. The darn thing will keep a lock on the table unless you scroll down to the bottom of the result list.
You can use the WITH(NOLOCK) hint, but that's crap, as now you get uncommitted data in your SELECT.