True. If only the president were the Chief guy in Command of the armed forces and had the power to make policy decisions, such as ending "don't ask, don't tell", with a phone call.
There aren't a lot of white knights becoming cops. Plus, it's pretty well documented that people get excused from being cops for I.Q. test scores that are too high.
I truly think that's the exception rather than the rule, though. I've known a few cops from various social situations and they were all smart, decent guys. For example, my oldest son is in Cub Scouts with the son of a policeman. As one of the Cub Scout meetings, that cop took us on a tour of the police station and showed the boys how to dust for fingerprints and answered a million questions from curious kids. He's a smart, nice guy who's fun to be around.
Now admittedly my selection pool is biased, because I've only dealt with the kind of policeman who wants to spend time with his boy at Cub Scout meetings or take him to swimming lessons, and that alone would weed out the complete assholes from any occupation. I mean, you also won't find the stereotypical self-diagnosed-Asperger geek volunteering to coach a Little League team. But it bothers me when I hear cops described as power-mad, stupid, sociopaths. I know those people are out there, but the policemen I've known have been the guys you like to drink a beer with while flipping steaks on the grill.
German driving statistics would back you up on that.
That might be, but you didn't demonstrate that. What are the number of miles driven per average German and American? How many people drive daily in each country? For instance, if those 5,000 German fatalities are out of a total of 10,000 German drivers, then it's a pretty dangerous place to drive.
While that's clearly an exaggeration, I'd stake money that a higher percentage of Americans than Germans drive themselves to work each day. The number of accidents in each country is meaningless without that sort of context.
So you want governments - specifically, the same corrupted governments who were already over-issuing tickets for financial gain - to be able to impose forced servitude for minor traffic infractions? I'd much rather pay Judge Bumpkin $100 for doing 36 in a 35 than work for his brother-in-law out at the quarry.
You've seen "The Shawshank Redemption", right? Unlimited free labor is the ultimate financial incentive.
Really? In what specific way? We're still in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gitmo. Executive powers are expanding like crazy. Gays still can't serve in the military. Spending is still rising, even in non-military sectors. Look, I think Bush sucked; I'm absolutely not a fan of his. But I fail to see any substantial way in which Obama's policies are different.
Worse still, differences in CPU performance with HTML5 when compared to Flash have been shown to be negligible. (In fact, some of the stats on that page show that Flash 10.1 is more efficient with its CPU utilization.)
And in other studies, spaghetti is faster than purple. HTML5 is a standard, not an implementation. Flash may or may not be faster than a given browser's HTML5 video codec, but I'd be willing to bet you can find a different browser that would demonstrate the opposite results.
it doesn't answer how it helps if an intruder is getting into Apps through a lost or stolen phone.
Nor does it handle lost luggage, traffic jams, or slow-pouring ketchup. Yes, we all bow to your cleverness at identifying situations that it doesn't address, but in the 99.9999% of other situations, it's a nice bonus.
3. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300. If you pay $200 you can later for a payment of $200 turn it into an i7.
I mean, it's so convenient, right? That convenience has value that you should be willing to pay for!
At 200MB/s, you can get about 80 minutes on a $80 1TB hard drive that can sustain 100MB/s writes. Get four of those for $320 and put them in a RAID-0 striping setup that can sustain 400MB/s so you have plenty of headroom.
Alternatively, rip a small number of frames at a time. Hit "play" in software, record until your RAM buffers are full, and hit "pause" in software.
I guess I could, and maybe I'll do that if/when I release another update. I don't want to make a special release just to bump the version number, though. I guess, to me, the "0" is just another digit. I have so many "0.x" programs installed on my desktop and on production servers that it doesn't really mean anything to me:
cacti-0.8.7g
clamav-0.96.2_3
ffmpeg-0.6_3,1
gettext-0.18.1.1
gstreamer-0.10.30
[a huge number of libraries and Perl packages]
x264-0.0.20100624
etc., etc., etc.
It's also a double-edged sword. After using it in production for years, the last thing I want is for people to say, "oh, I'd never use a 1.0 version. I'll wait for the first bugfix to come out." I guess I could jump straight to 1.0.1, but then I'm spending way more thought on marketing my little project than I'm really interested in.
Heh! Thanks. The "happily ever after" part is that my company's actively working to replace the aging FoxPro project with a PostgreSQL-native version, so the plan is for my work to be obsolete in the near(-ish) future.
The nice part is the feedback I've gotten from users who want to use it for the same reason I do: to migrate their data out of an old proprietary app into a modern database. Almost every version I've released has been due to someone who wrote to me because they had some new variant of Xbase table I hadn't seen yet, so I tweaked the program to add support for their data. The requests have tapered off over the last year or so, either because no one uses the program anymore, or because it works for the majority of users and they don't need to ask for help now.
by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.
I have a project on Sourceforge that I haven't updated since March, and the last update before that was in November. It's not abandoned. To the contrary, I use it in an hourly cron job on a production server. The thing is, it works. Unless a user writes to me with a patch or request, I doubt I'll ever have a reason to update it. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, I haven't experienced a bug in several years, and it compiles without warning on every 32- and 64- bit Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X system I have to test it on.
A lot of projects probably have been abandoned, but it's kind of hard to tell. A lack of updates to a project doesn't have to mean to no one cares. It might also mean that it's, well, finished.
Oh sorry, does the population not meet up to your exacting standards of technical literacy?
I wouldn't expect the general population to be technical experts. I would expect a certain high level of competency among people who are willing to download and install their own OS instead of just using whatever came on the computer. If you're the sort of person who would do that, typing a couple of lines into a terminal shouldn't be too traumatic - not that I really believe that's necessary anymore.
4) Look at the memory usage of the Firefox process. Notice that it's totally unreasonable. The resident memory usage will often be greater than 5 or 6 GB, if you have a system with 8 GB of RAM! That's a memory leak, my friend.
I opened my Firefox 3.6.9 window an hour and a half ago when I got to work, and I've opened and closed many tabs since then. It's currently using 391MB of resident memory, so about 1/15th of my RAM. I haven't closed Firefox to free RAM in probably a year.
Could you post your date of birth and mother's maiden name, too? Thanks!
January 1, 1970. Smith, Purple, Tapioca, Unweariness, or Coemptor - depending on which stupid website's security questions I'm answering. Any other question?
That's about as ass-backwards as I'm likely to read today. Until such time as he is convicted of committing a crime, he's innocent. How do you know I didn't commit a crime this morning? Maybe you're a serial killer and we just don't know about it yet.
what's up with doing things their own way, instead of the standard way? On every other apache distribution I've seen httpd.conf is the main config file, but not on Ubuntu... it's apache2.conf. I had to look that up. Ubuntu is full of things like this.
A friend asked me for help setting up Apache2 on a RHEL server. None of the config files were where I expected them to be, the firewall blocked port 80 by default, and changing the firewall rules was an exercise in crack-smokery. Of course, I've been a FreeBSD admin for more than a decade and RHEL administration is barely similar. That doesn't mean that either is better, just that they're different.
I've thought of it myself (given I've had a green card here for a while), but it seems every second week someone is off for jury duty over here.
I've been called exactly once in over 20 years of eligibility. I showed up, the judge came in and told us that the case was postponed, thanked us for doing our civic duty, and sent us all home.
I'm a huge fan of Getting Things Done, and it's directly responsible for a lot of positive changes in my life. One of the core tenets of "GTD" is to habitually, obsessively enter the things you need to remember into a "trusted system" where you can find them again easily. Whether that's a notebook or index cards or a Franklin planner or an iPod (my pick), the important part is that you can trust it to store the things that are important to you.
By some definition, my iPod and its planning software (yay Omnifocus!) has made me dumber. I know longer remember most of the stuff that I need to accomplish. Instead, I check it often to find stuff that I could be working on. I don't have to recall the three unrelated things I need to pick up next time I'm at the local home store; I consult my iPod and check them off as I put them in my cart. Neither do I make an effort to remember that my daughters' piano lessons are at a certain time - my calendar is much better at remembering that stuff. I forget all the things I need to talk to my boss about, but I can pull up that list in about 5 seconds.
The enormous payoff is that instead of spending my mental energy on trying to remember a thousand little things that would be crying for my attention, I can dedicate myself to the one task I'm specifically working on at the moment. I have a lot more free time now and I'm much better at juggling all my responsibilities. If I'm stupid for relying on something other than my mind to track all those things, then so be it. I can live with that.
And there are those who would argue that Doctorow's constant ranting on this one issue makes him a crank, and his willingness to pump out mediocre science fiction novels for free and see if anyone likes them makes him a dilettante.
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Things take time to get done.
True. If only the president were the Chief guy in Command of the armed forces and had the power to make policy decisions, such as ending "don't ask, don't tell", with a phone call.
There aren't a lot of white knights becoming cops. Plus, it's pretty well documented that people get excused from being cops for I.Q. test scores that are too high.
I truly think that's the exception rather than the rule, though. I've known a few cops from various social situations and they were all smart, decent guys. For example, my oldest son is in Cub Scouts with the son of a policeman. As one of the Cub Scout meetings, that cop took us on a tour of the police station and showed the boys how to dust for fingerprints and answered a million questions from curious kids. He's a smart, nice guy who's fun to be around.
Now admittedly my selection pool is biased, because I've only dealt with the kind of policeman who wants to spend time with his boy at Cub Scout meetings or take him to swimming lessons, and that alone would weed out the complete assholes from any occupation. I mean, you also won't find the stereotypical self-diagnosed-Asperger geek volunteering to coach a Little League team. But it bothers me when I hear cops described as power-mad, stupid, sociopaths. I know those people are out there, but the policemen I've known have been the guys you like to drink a beer with while flipping steaks on the grill.
German driving statistics would back you up on that.
That might be, but you didn't demonstrate that. What are the number of miles driven per average German and American? How many people drive daily in each country? For instance, if those 5,000 German fatalities are out of a total of 10,000 German drivers, then it's a pretty dangerous place to drive.
While that's clearly an exaggeration, I'd stake money that a higher percentage of Americans than Germans drive themselves to work each day. The number of accidents in each country is meaningless without that sort of context.
So you want governments - specifically, the same corrupted governments who were already over-issuing tickets for financial gain - to be able to impose forced servitude for minor traffic infractions? I'd much rather pay Judge Bumpkin $100 for doing 36 in a 35 than work for his brother-in-law out at the quarry.
You've seen "The Shawshank Redemption", right? Unlimited free labor is the ultimate financial incentive.
Really? In what specific way? We're still in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gitmo. Executive powers are expanding like crazy. Gays still can't serve in the military. Spending is still rising, even in non-military sectors. Look, I think Bush sucked; I'm absolutely not a fan of his. But I fail to see any substantial way in which Obama's policies are different.
Asking out of sheer ignorance: can't you just embed the thing in a chunk of lead?
The iPod is, of course, an MP3 player.
So is my laptop, but in neither case is that all each device can do. I doubt I use my iPod Touch for playing music more than 5% of the time.
Second, "pod" is an actual word.
So is "coke", but good luck using it as part of the name of your beverage without conjuring a flock of HFCS-fueled Nazgul.
Worse still, differences in CPU performance with HTML5 when compared to Flash have been shown to be negligible. (In fact, some of the stats on that page show that Flash 10.1 is more efficient with its CPU utilization.)
And in other studies, spaghetti is faster than purple. HTML5 is a standard, not an implementation. Flash may or may not be faster than a given browser's HTML5 video codec, but I'd be willing to bet you can find a different browser that would demonstrate the opposite results.
it doesn't answer how it helps if an intruder is getting into Apps through a lost or stolen phone.
Nor does it handle lost luggage, traffic jams, or slow-pouring ketchup. Yes, we all bow to your cleverness at identifying situations that it doesn't address, but in the 99.9999% of other situations, it's a nice bonus.
Was that the "royal we"? I live smack dab in the middle of the US and don't pay anything for incoming texts (or calls).
Ha! If this takes off, it'll be more like:
3. You have a choice of buying an i7 that pretends to be an i5 for $200, or an i7 for $300. If you pay $200 you can later for a payment of $200 turn it into an i7.
I mean, it's so convenient, right? That convenience has value that you should be willing to pay for!
At 200MB/s, you can get about 80 minutes on a $80 1TB hard drive that can sustain 100MB/s writes. Get four of those for $320 and put them in a RAID-0 striping setup that can sustain 400MB/s so you have plenty of headroom.
Alternatively, rip a small number of frames at a time. Hit "play" in software, record until your RAM buffers are full, and hit "pause" in software.
I guess I could, and maybe I'll do that if/when I release another update. I don't want to make a special release just to bump the version number, though. I guess, to me, the "0" is just another digit. I have so many "0.x" programs installed on my desktop and on production servers that it doesn't really mean anything to me:
It's also a double-edged sword. After using it in production for years, the last thing I want is for people to say, "oh, I'd never use a 1.0 version. I'll wait for the first bugfix to come out." I guess I could jump straight to 1.0.1, but then I'm spending way more thought on marketing my little project than I'm really interested in.
Heh! Thanks. The "happily ever after" part is that my company's actively working to replace the aging FoxPro project with a PostgreSQL-native version, so the plan is for my work to be obsolete in the near(-ish) future.
The nice part is the feedback I've gotten from users who want to use it for the same reason I do: to migrate their data out of an old proprietary app into a modern database. Almost every version I've released has been due to someone who wrote to me because they had some new variant of Xbase table I hadn't seen yet, so I tweaked the program to add support for their data. The requests have tapered off over the last year or so, either because no one uses the program anymore, or because it works for the majority of users and they don't need to ask for help now.
by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.
I have a project on Sourceforge that I haven't updated since March, and the last update before that was in November. It's not abandoned. To the contrary, I use it in an hourly cron job on a production server. The thing is, it works. Unless a user writes to me with a patch or request, I doubt I'll ever have a reason to update it. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, I haven't experienced a bug in several years, and it compiles without warning on every 32- and 64- bit Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X system I have to test it on.
A lot of projects probably have been abandoned, but it's kind of hard to tell. A lack of updates to a project doesn't have to mean to no one cares. It might also mean that it's, well, finished.
Oh sorry, does the population not meet up to your exacting standards of technical literacy?
I wouldn't expect the general population to be technical experts. I would expect a certain high level of competency among people who are willing to download and install their own OS instead of just using whatever came on the computer. If you're the sort of person who would do that, typing a couple of lines into a terminal shouldn't be too traumatic - not that I really believe that's necessary anymore.
4) Look at the memory usage of the Firefox process. Notice that it's totally unreasonable. The resident memory usage will often be greater than 5 or 6 GB, if you have a system with 8 GB of RAM! That's a memory leak, my friend.
I opened my Firefox 3.6.9 window an hour and a half ago when I got to work, and I've opened and closed many tabs since then. It's currently using 391MB of resident memory, so about 1/15th of my RAM. I haven't closed Firefox to free RAM in probably a year.
Since you're one of the 1% no one cares about you.
You'd be surprised how many non-geeks I know who rip their DVDs so their kids can watch them on iPods on car trips.
Could you post your date of birth and mother's maiden name, too? Thanks!
January 1, 1970. Smith, Purple, Tapioca, Unweariness, or Coemptor - depending on which stupid website's security questions I'm answering. Any other question?
How do you know he didn't commit a crime?
That's about as ass-backwards as I'm likely to read today. Until such time as he is convicted of committing a crime, he's innocent. How do you know I didn't commit a crime this morning? Maybe you're a serial killer and we just don't know about it yet.
what's up with doing things their own way, instead of the standard way? On every other apache distribution I've seen httpd.conf is the main config file, but not on Ubuntu... it's apache2.conf. I had to look that up. Ubuntu is full of things like this.
A friend asked me for help setting up Apache2 on a RHEL server. None of the config files were where I expected them to be, the firewall blocked port 80 by default, and changing the firewall rules was an exercise in crack-smokery. Of course, I've been a FreeBSD admin for more than a decade and RHEL administration is barely similar. That doesn't mean that either is better, just that they're different.
I've thought of it myself (given I've had a green card here for a while), but it seems every second week someone is off for jury duty over here.
I've been called exactly once in over 20 years of eligibility. I showed up, the judge came in and told us that the case was postponed, thanked us for doing our civic duty, and sent us all home.
I'm a huge fan of Getting Things Done, and it's directly responsible for a lot of positive changes in my life. One of the core tenets of "GTD" is to habitually, obsessively enter the things you need to remember into a "trusted system" where you can find them again easily. Whether that's a notebook or index cards or a Franklin planner or an iPod (my pick), the important part is that you can trust it to store the things that are important to you.
By some definition, my iPod and its planning software (yay Omnifocus!) has made me dumber. I know longer remember most of the stuff that I need to accomplish. Instead, I check it often to find stuff that I could be working on. I don't have to recall the three unrelated things I need to pick up next time I'm at the local home store; I consult my iPod and check them off as I put them in my cart. Neither do I make an effort to remember that my daughters' piano lessons are at a certain time - my calendar is much better at remembering that stuff. I forget all the things I need to talk to my boss about, but I can pull up that list in about 5 seconds.
The enormous payoff is that instead of spending my mental energy on trying to remember a thousand little things that would be crying for my attention, I can dedicate myself to the one task I'm specifically working on at the moment. I have a lot more free time now and I'm much better at juggling all my responsibilities. If I'm stupid for relying on something other than my mind to track all those things, then so be it. I can live with that.
And there are those who would argue that Doctorow's constant ranting on this one issue makes him a crank, and his willingness to pump out mediocre science fiction novels for free and see if anyone likes them makes him a dilettante.
Number 8 on the New York Times bestseller list and a Hugo nomination isn't too shabby for a mediocre dilettante.