"[...] is in a fairly standard path for hurricanes [...] the strongest [hurricane] to hit New Orleans was in 1915."
So this "fairly standard path" will send a strong hurricane once every 90 years?
I'm not sure how many "strong storms" there were in between the two events that struck New Orleans, but keep in mind that it's a rare storm that reaches the strength required to break those levees. Florida is pummeled all the time, but Andrew was a stunning blow. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Cape Cod. They get hit by a major storm very rarely, but every 10 years or so even they get a cat 2 or 3.
My point was that we can't run around saying "look how much worse man has made things" (paraphrase of parent of my original post) when this wasn't the largest storm they've been hit by.
To give you a sense, 2001-2004 there were 9 hurricanes that struck the U.S., of which 3 were "major" (cat 3+). That's well above the norm compared to the 90s, where the whole decade saw 14 storms (5 major) and even moreso for the 80s. However, compare that to the 1941-1950 decade! 24 storms (10 major). See U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade on the NOAA site for details.
Let me quote the NOAA:
"Beginning with 1995 all of the Atlantic hurricane seasons have been above normal, with the exception of two El Niño years (1997 and 2002). This contrasts sharply with the generally below-normal activity observed during the previous 25-year period 1970-1994 (Goldenberg et al. 2001, Science)." -
Now, had the last 10 years been a high-activity period compared to the last 200 years, then I would be inclined to think of this as a "change" in behavior, but it's not, it's simply a return to a periodic swell in activity.
As for the rest of your article, you are misinformed if you think the storm didn't hit New Orleans. See the track on the NOAA site. Buras-Triumph, Louisiana took the first hit, but the storm walked right over the delta and smacked N.O. good and hard!
Also, the predictions that a major storm would hit New Orleans were not of the "perhaps sometime in the next 100 years" sort. Expectations were set every season that a major storm might well hit SOON, and indeed, it did.
I take it you have issues with Monsanto as well, then? Talk about playing with big systems we depend on.
You're refering to food modification? Yes, I'm not thrilled with that, but most of my concerns surround breeding, not engineering of food. I'm far more upset about the idea that most vegetables are bred to be shippable and salable vs. any of their nutritional or taste features. Adding a gene to produce a natural pesticide is minor, compared to that fact that iceberg lettuce used to count as food, and today is right up there with wet cardboard in terms of health benefits.
This is unconscianable. Some facts for anyone interested:
New Orleans, LA has been a known disaster-waiting-to-happen for decades. The city is below sea level; is in a fairly standard path for hurricanes; and is protected only by levees that were known to be insufficient in the face of the harshest storms. One program I saw six months before this hurricane said, "it's not a matter of if New Orleans will be flooded by a hurricane, but when."
Hurricanes have pelted this region in waves of weak and intense years for as long as we are able to determine.
Though this storm had catastrophic effect, it was not the most powerful storm that the area has seen. The strongest hurricane in the Western Hemisphere was Gilbert in 1988. The Florida Keys hurrican of 1935 was the strongest to strike the United States, and the strongest to hit New Orleans was in 1915. This was the most destructive storm to strike the US because of the damage caused to New Orleans, but that has nothing to do with the power of the storm itself (it was quite powerful, make no mistake).
Global warming is a poorly understood phenomenon as evidenced by our inability to predict even major changes on a region-by-region basis. To retroactively say that a single hurricane or hurricane season is the result of warming (as opposed to being part of a normal cycle; being of solar origin; etc.) is merely a stab in the dark. It's not a terrible stab, mind you, but it's important that we keep perspective.
As for controling hurricanes... HORRIBLE idea. First off, you would likely kill the everglades (which depend on periods of intense wind and soaking, tropical rains). Also, the overall impact to global climate would be almost impossible to predict. We have, for example, no idea if the storms of the Atlantic and Pacific are the mechanism that ended the last ice age. If they are (small, but reasonable chance), then disipating storm energy could directy lead to shortening the time to the next ice age. Think global warming is bad? It's a hiccup in temperature change compared to a real ice age!
My rule of thumb is: don't mess with large systems that you depend on for your survival.
You've entirely misread the grandparent (as, I assume, did his moderators). He has a valid and insightful point which does not contradict your rant (which was uncalled for, even if he was making the assertion you thought he was).
He's not speaking of data integrity, but of data validation.
This is a common complaint about MySQL, and I have to agree with the grandparent that it's a spurious one. If you need to guarantee the validity of your data, then your application (perhaps in the form of triggers, perhaps inside your client code) should validate the data. Relying on the database to screen out mistakes in your data gives you a very false sense of security.
More specifically, MySQL will silently insert data that does not match the input in many cases when the input does not match the type's constraints (e.g. a date which cannot exist). I agree that this can be surprising to a neophyte, but I certainly cannot agree that it is on-par with concerns about data integrity (which is what you were responding to).
"He got it right the first time. Why on earth would you want your RDBMS vendor cramming their lousy procedural programming language down your throat?"
Let's just stop right here. The answer to this question was settled sometime around the introduction of the electric lightbulb, and it has little to do with programming paradigm.
Logic in the database is almost always a bad idea. It introduces complexity in source code management, release engineering, application de-centralization, etc. The database's code optimization is also rarely on-par with external langauges. It's also essential at times. There is a fine line to be drawn between performance needs and software engineering needs. As a very, very rough metric, based only on personal experience, I would say that you should place code into the database only when that code reduces the amount of data that must be moved to the application by at least and order of magnitude. This goes for everything from the most complex stored procedure to the simplest sort (though be careful to be aware of when sorts are free because of storage implementation, and don't be afraid to put conditional logic into code based on storage engine).
Absolutely. I share photography, a public domain map archive, some free(ly available) music MP3s, open source software and a number of other useful things to the Gnutella world. It's an amazingly good tool!
Notice that the link you give is to an "early experimental version" circa 2002, and there's no update since. Wondering why? Because Linux (the kernel) is a critical component of a Linux (the OS) system. Why? Because glibc mostly, but also various other components need to understand the kernel's behavior in order to work correctly. While FreeBSD's kernel might be just fine in theory, there would be thousands of assumptions in userspace libraries that would have to be corrected in order to port them raning from timing issues to locking assumptions, etc. ad nauseum. It's a huge project, and not one undertaken lightly (akin to replacing GCC's intermediate language with something else).
Now, that said I agree that Linux (the kernel) has no claim to being the most critical component in a modern Linux (the OS) system, but if we're talking about naming, we have have to go back to the origin of the name. In the early days of Linux, it was a terminal server project that others latched on to because it was easy to use, free, freely modifiable and worked well. X wasn't in the mix, Qt and Gtk+ hadn't been written yet. There was no Web server or browser. It was pretty close to just being the Linux kernel, various GNU utilities, a few non-GNU tools like Perl had been ported to it, and it was distributed via FTP with discussion on USENET.
In those days, I think it is fair to say that the one piece of the puzzle that made Linux and OS and not just a collection of programs was the kernel. It was the single most essential part of the equation. There were other compilers (though most were hardware-specific). There were other C runtimes, though glibc was the obvious best choice, IMHO because it had not yet had an opportunity to become OS-specific. The Kernel was another matter. At the time, BSD was working out some licensing issues, and none of the major vendors were releasing source. A kernel was a difficult beast, and most high-level coders never have to think about the issues a kernel faces. It was hard, and it was essential. Linus did it.
But all of that is moot. Linux is the name of both an OS and a kernel because that's its name, not as a means of giving credit to anyone. People started calling the OS Linux because it was the tool they were focused on, and thus a name was born. You don't go back say, "hey we should call 'New York', 'New Native/Holland/York'". A name is just a name, not a list of credits.
Oh, and since you bring up the Nike logo (which is the pathalogical best case for SVG), that comes to 741 bytes, uncompressed!
There's another space/bandwidth-saving feature of SVG that we haven't considered yet. Very often a Web site will need to show a graphic or stylized text at many resolutions. While you can serve the same image everywhere and set width/height in the HTML, that scaling is usually pretty ugly.
With SVG, you can do this much more reasonably, and it will always look ideal. Thus, you serve up one document everywhere, cutting your bandwidth costs even further!
Again, you're missing the point. *Rendering* my example is kind of useless. I wasn't trying to produce a useful replacement for the Slashdot logo. I was trying to demonstrate that for simple logos the space requirements are quite low. As such, I served up the data in exactly the correct content-type (this allows you to view the XML quite easily and/or just download it using lwp-requet, wget, or whatever you prefer).
The intent was to allow people to download and view the SVG, not the image. You can see the image (with correct fonts, even), by just looking up at the stop of your browser window. This document was interesting for purposes of looking at the (somewhat) equivalent SVG.
Yes, it is. Slashdot has (as another poster pointed out) two primary logos. The other is the slash and the dot, and at your suggested 80-pixes, that's 2744 bytes as a PNG and 2189 as an uncompressed SVG.
Again, SVG is a lot smaller than you think. When you start trying to display very complicated images (like the classic tiger postscript demo), that's where it becomes larger, and that's really not what SVG is best at, and at lower resolutions, I would recommend exporting a bitmap for such applications. For simple logos, stylized text (e.g. anything that's just a bit too much for HTML+CSS), etc, nothing beats SVG for space, flexibility, accessibility, and client-side rendering quality.
It is 3473 bytes. As an SVG, it would be something like this (really awful, off the cuff) example: http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg which is 3255 bytes uncompressed and I'm sure that that's wasteful in several ways because I'm an SVG newbie. Given compressed HTTP bodies by default, the SVG would save Slashot quite a bit in bandwidth every month.
SVG is a lot smaller than you think....
Better, your browser could do the right thing and let you select that text, even though it's rendered as pretty graphics. Accessibility software could READ the text to you (HUGE WIN). etc.
SVG or "Scalable Vector Graphics" is a way of describing visual information (graphics is perhaps misleading, as it can include text) in a way that is independant of parameters like dimensions of your display, type of display device, etc.
Some advantages of SVG:
For the Web, the browser gets to decide how to render graphical information (so for example, client-side anti-aliasing preferences can be used).
because the client has access to the high-level description, you could do something like write a browser that knows how to select text from a graphical logo
Network bandwidth is reduced for many types of graphical data such as logos, emblems, seals, and other types of data that can be described in relatively few drawing commands
For some values of replacement, it's an open replacement for Flash
Because it's XML, you can use any old XML parser to gain high-level information about any SVG document.
All things considered, SVG is a darned nice thing, and I would love to be able to start taking full advantage of it in plugins and extensions.
Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors in a given area, nothing more. Don't confuse Moore's law with clock speed (as you point out), calculations per second, or any other metric. Transistors per square inch. That's what ML is measured in.
I hear the "I avoid products that..." all the time, but the bottom line is that if the market research were wrong, the companies in question would see a drop in sales and stop doing it. This does happen somtimes when an ad really hits the national funny-bone, and people actively avoid the product in large numbers, but it's very rare. More often negative reactions get people talking and make the product seem more important.
I'm also unimpressed by the folks who would tell me that they are not swayed at all by advertising. A friend of mine once made this claim. I looked in his bathroom and asked him why he bought Listerine. His answer: "it kills germs." Ok, so that's fair. Sure, it's in the commercial, but it's true. I asked him if he'd done a comparison between the various alcohol-based liquids that can be used orally in order to reach a product decision. For example, had he investigated the various drinking alcohols? He paused... "um, no."
In essence this friend of mine had simply gone to the store and bought Listerine because it "kills germs," which he learned on an ad. Now there are good reasons to use Listerine instead of, say, whiskey (mostly having to do with the substances in whiskey that the remaining bacteria will thrive on; and the fact that having booze-breath first thing in the morning goes over poorly at the office). However, he had not thought of them. He was simply doing what an ad told him to without thinking about it.
"The Morris worm was a flash in the pan compared to the neverending parade of WinDOS remote exploits"
That's very nice, but has nothing to do with the point at hand, which was recalling that the coming of Netscape's browser did not portent a sea change in the quality of the Internet experience. That process began and continued from the mid-80s on, as more and more people became aware of the Internet. With every new (and larger) influx of users, the signal-to-noise ratio of the Net dropped. Only recently has that ratio begun to swing in the other direction as technology has begun to catch up and allow for collaboration modes where noise is reduced in a decnetralized way (e.g. Slashdot's user-moderation (it's hard to think of Slashdot as low-noise, but compare browsing at 3 on Slashdot to your average Yahoo Messageboard without user-moderation), MediaWiki's user-watchlist / reversion / admin features, etc).
I live the US, but I think you'll find that Australia separates civil and criminal law the same way we do. That is, he's not "guilty" of anything, he's simply "in violation of a copyright". That's a very different thing, here in the US, and is closely related to contract law, not criminal law.
Of course, the RIAA and MPAA would love to blur / remove that line....
It's news because the average tech geek still likes to think that they are an indispensible commodity, and that their skills are above question because among their local circle of friends, they are considered 1337.
I work for a company that interviews some of the best and the brightest, and every day I see people -- who would have landed a job in my previous companies without breaking a sweat -- leave, never to return. We turn down really good people, because we prefer even better people.
"If the Russian court agrees to let this case proceed, it opens the door for all kinds of inane, utterly frivolous lawsuits from astrologers, witch doctors, faith healers, and every other kind of kook out there who wants to make a quick buck by accusing actual scientists of violating some crackpot principle."
Absolutely. This is why most civilized countries have rules where losers in civil suits pay the winners' expenses (with the judge waiving in special cases). In this case, you have someone whose contention is that there are certain bodies in space which are important religious and/or cultural locations, and moving one out of its normal path is a desecration of sorts. That sounds fair, and while the court might find in NASA's favor, I don't see why we should feel free (or more to the point that the Russians should) to slam the door on this case prematurely.
Of course, astrology is crackpot mysticism, but so is any supernatural belief and if we, as a world, wish to allow for free religious expression, then we need to allow for it, not pick and choose.
"Water vapour is a "reactive" GHG with a short atmospheric lifetime of about 1 week. If you pump out a whole load of extra water vapour it won't stay in the atmosphere; it would condense as rain/snow and we'd be back to where we started. If you sucked the atmosphere dry of moisture, more would evaporate from the oceans. The balance is dynamic of course: humidity of the air varies by place and time, but its a stable balance."
This is an obscenely simplistic response, which does not take into account the dangers of producing vastly more water vapor on an ongoing basis, and makes wild assumptions about the stability of the system.
Water vapor does not simply rise into the atmosphere, hover for 10 days and condense as rain or snow. The two phenomenon are related, but not directly, and other factors such as location, time of year, storm systems, etc. all play in.
If your assertion is that dumping water vapor into the atmosphere as fast as we can will have zero impact on the climate, then I'm sorry, I will have to respectfully disagree.
Keep in mind, that we're talking about a substance (friendly though it may be to our daily lives) which is far, far more potennt as a greenhouse gas than CO2, and we're ALREADY increasing its levels through irregation (even if it all drops out of the air like a stone after its 10 days are up, the overall vapor-cover on the areas that are irregated must have increased between the time when no agriculture was occuring there and now!)
My take? Save the planet: shut down a bath house;-)
Seriously though, arm-wave all you like, but I remain unconvinced. Is there a good study of world-wide relative humidity and cloud-cover that takes into account city, wild and agricultural areas over the last century or two? If so, I'd be happy to look at its results and learn from them. After all, the goal here is not for me to convince you or you me, but to actually understand the reality, no?
Arguments require two parties. I was simply pointing out the flaws in the assertion offered.
Are you for or against reducing pollution caused by fossil fuels?
I've got no problem with reducing pollution. My problem is with masking the desire to breath easier with scare tactics.
After all, INSANE reliance on fossil fuels got us into this mess, not?
Insane reliance, eh? And you propose what as a replacement? We still don't have any scalable, safe solutions for burning hydrogen (not to mention that burning (e.g. oxydizing) hydrogen creates water vapor, which is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2); wind power isn't sufficient on its own (but not a bad start); coal still isn't all that clean, though it's better than it was; nuclear waste would be fairly reasonable to deal with, but no one wants it in their back-yard; fusion isn't practical yet; solar panels require MASSIVE footprint and are weather-sensitive....
Please, let me know what we're going to switch to.
There has been an attempt to engage people for the last 25 years in a reasonable debate on what to do about the pollution problem it causes
And that has produced drastically lowered emissions, energy-conservation programs that have prevented the burning of billions of barrels of oil, etc., etc.
Just try this exersise whenever someone tries to tell you that humans are destroying the galaxy: Ask, "what is the delta between all natural factors and observed effect?"
If the answer isn't "we don't know" and doesn't involve units, you're probably being lied to. If it does involve units ask to see the math, and when you see some amazing fudge-factor that humans cannot possibly have a concrete measure for, ask solid questions about it.
You see, it's easy to construct a model in which you plug in a bunch of knowns, balance them out with a guess at the value of an unknown and then tweak that unknown to produce any answer you like.
My answer? We don't know.
I have no argument. I'm just tired of the same old re-run misinformation. You propose a workable plan, and I'll get on board.
"pf supports routing of traffic based upon OS fingerprinting."
It's a module in iptables called "osf", but I don't recommend it. Anything that relies on information (even passively gathered information) provided by the remote host is fundamentally unreliable. Worse, by filtering based on OS you open yourself up to all sorts of confusing problems when proxies (transparent or otherwise) are involved.
"When compared to setting up an IPtables firewall, pf is surprising simple and it's howto at openbsd.org cannot be beat."
Howto?! Ew. I know how to configure a firewall, but if I'm going to point newbies at a firewall solution, it's going to be one that's configured out of the box. I'd recommend Fedora's default install for on-server firewalling, and any of the CD-based firewall-specific distributions for centralized firewalling.
Still, I've set up many an iptables firewall, and unless you're doing something REALLY hairy, there's nothing all that complex about it. One config. One command to load the config. Next problem.
I've been a bit hard on you here, and honestly I have no interest in "my OS is bigger than your OS" debates. My point was simply to demonstrate that you're showing off the features of a system you know, and ignoring the fact that a system you don't know might have those features too. What's more, that other system might have other feautres that you would find just as useful or moreso once you got used to them.
This is an amazing straw-man. Propose an INSANE idea for preventing the warming of the planet (hint: figure out the mechanism that causes ice ages before you go reducing the light that reaches the Earth), and then you can argue that major changes need to be made in the way humans live in order to prevent such madness. I bow in frustrated awe at the genius of that ploy.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just have a sane debate about how we treat our back-yard?
Oh bother, go ahead. Do whatever you want. I'll watch. It's going to be fun watching the next 20 years of wild arm-waving at least.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how many "strong storms" there were in between the two events that struck New Orleans, but keep in mind that it's a rare storm that reaches the strength required to break those levees. Florida is pummeled all the time, but Andrew was a stunning blow. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Cape Cod. They get hit by a major storm very rarely, but every 10 years or so even they get a cat 2 or 3.
My point was that we can't run around saying "look how much worse man has made things" (paraphrase of parent of my original post) when this wasn't the largest storm they've been hit by.
To give you a sense, 2001-2004 there were 9 hurricanes that struck the U.S., of which 3 were "major" (cat 3+). That's well above the norm compared to the 90s, where the whole decade saw 14 storms (5 major) and even moreso for the 80s. However, compare that to the 1941-1950 decade! 24 storms (10 major). See U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade on the NOAA site for details.
Let me quote the NOAA:Now, had the last 10 years been a high-activity period compared to the last 200 years, then I would be inclined to think of this as a "change" in behavior, but it's not, it's simply a return to a periodic swell in activity.
As for the rest of your article, you are misinformed if you think the storm didn't hit New Orleans. See the track on the NOAA site. Buras-Triumph, Louisiana took the first hit, but the storm walked right over the delta and smacked N.O. good and hard!
Also, the predictions that a major storm would hit New Orleans were not of the "perhaps sometime in the next 100 years" sort. Expectations were set every season that a major storm might well hit SOON, and indeed, it did.
I take it you have issues with Monsanto as well, then? Talk about playing with big systems we depend on.
You're refering to food modification? Yes, I'm not thrilled with that, but most of my concerns surround breeding, not engineering of food. I'm far more upset about the idea that most vegetables are bred to be shippable and salable vs. any of their nutritional or taste features. Adding a gene to produce a natural pesticide is minor, compared to that fact that iceberg lettuce used to count as food, and today is right up there with wet cardboard in terms of health benefits.
As for controling hurricanes... HORRIBLE idea. First off, you would likely kill the everglades (which depend on periods of intense wind and soaking, tropical rains). Also, the overall impact to global climate would be almost impossible to predict. We have, for example, no idea if the storms of the Atlantic and Pacific are the mechanism that ended the last ice age. If they are (small, but reasonable chance), then disipating storm energy could directy lead to shortening the time to the next ice age. Think global warming is bad? It's a hiccup in temperature change compared to a real ice age!
My rule of thumb is: don't mess with large systems that you depend on for your survival.
You've entirely misread the grandparent (as, I assume, did his moderators). He has a valid and insightful point which does not contradict your rant (which was uncalled for, even if he was making the assertion you thought he was).
He's not speaking of data integrity, but of data validation.
This is a common complaint about MySQL, and I have to agree with the grandparent that it's a spurious one. If you need to guarantee the validity of your data, then your application (perhaps in the form of triggers, perhaps inside your client code) should validate the data. Relying on the database to screen out mistakes in your data gives you a very false sense of security.
More specifically, MySQL will silently insert data that does not match the input in many cases when the input does not match the type's constraints (e.g. a date which cannot exist). I agree that this can be surprising to a neophyte, but I certainly cannot agree that it is on-par with concerns about data integrity (which is what you were responding to).
"He got it right the first time. Why on earth would you want your RDBMS vendor cramming their lousy procedural programming language down your throat?"
Let's just stop right here. The answer to this question was settled sometime around the introduction of the electric lightbulb, and it has little to do with programming paradigm.
Logic in the database is almost always a bad idea. It introduces complexity in source code management, release engineering, application de-centralization, etc. The database's code optimization is also rarely on-par with external langauges. It's also essential at times. There is a fine line to be drawn between performance needs and software engineering needs. As a very, very rough metric, based only on personal experience, I would say that you should place code into the database only when that code reduces the amount of data that must be moved to the application by at least and order of magnitude. This goes for everything from the most complex stored procedure to the simplest sort (though be careful to be aware of when sorts are free because of storage implementation, and don't be afraid to put conditional logic into code based on storage engine).
"what's the point in taking the NetBSD kernel and wedging it into a big sloppy Linux userland?"
l ibc-bsd-devel
Actually, it seems like there's so much of a point that I was wrong about the project's demise. Here's the mailing list:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/g
and here's the page for a live CD project, released just this month, called "Ging":
http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/ging/
If you're really still confused about the value of the Linux runtime, try it out sometime....
Absolutely. I share photography, a public domain map archive, some free(ly available) music MP3s, open source software and a number of other useful things to the Gnutella world. It's an amazingly good tool!
Notice that the link you give is to an "early experimental version" circa 2002, and there's no update since. Wondering why? Because Linux (the kernel) is a critical component of a Linux (the OS) system. Why? Because glibc mostly, but also various other components need to understand the kernel's behavior in order to work correctly. While FreeBSD's kernel might be just fine in theory, there would be thousands of assumptions in userspace libraries that would have to be corrected in order to port them raning from timing issues to locking assumptions, etc. ad nauseum. It's a huge project, and not one undertaken lightly (akin to replacing GCC's intermediate language with something else).
Now, that said I agree that Linux (the kernel) has no claim to being the most critical component in a modern Linux (the OS) system, but if we're talking about naming, we have have to go back to the origin of the name. In the early days of Linux, it was a terminal server project that others latched on to because it was easy to use, free, freely modifiable and worked well. X wasn't in the mix, Qt and Gtk+ hadn't been written yet. There was no Web server or browser. It was pretty close to just being the Linux kernel, various GNU utilities, a few non-GNU tools like Perl had been ported to it, and it was distributed via FTP with discussion on USENET.
In those days, I think it is fair to say that the one piece of the puzzle that made Linux and OS and not just a collection of programs was the kernel. It was the single most essential part of the equation. There were other compilers (though most were hardware-specific). There were other C runtimes, though glibc was the obvious best choice, IMHO because it had not yet had an opportunity to become OS-specific. The Kernel was another matter. At the time, BSD was working out some licensing issues, and none of the major vendors were releasing source. A kernel was a difficult beast, and most high-level coders never have to think about the issues a kernel faces. It was hard, and it was essential. Linus did it.
But all of that is moot. Linux is the name of both an OS and a kernel because that's its name, not as a means of giving credit to anyone. People started calling the OS Linux because it was the tool they were focused on, and thus a name was born. You don't go back say, "hey we should call 'New York', 'New Native/Holland/York'". A name is just a name, not a list of credits.
Oh, and since you bring up the Nike logo (which is the pathalogical best case for SVG), that comes to 741 bytes, uncompressed!
There's another space/bandwidth-saving feature of SVG that we haven't considered yet. Very often a Web site will need to show a graphic or stylized text at many resolutions. While you can serve the same image everywhere and set width/height in the HTML, that scaling is usually pretty ugly.
With SVG, you can do this much more reasonably, and it will always look ideal. Thus, you serve up one document everywhere, cutting your bandwidth costs even further!
Again, you're missing the point. *Rendering* my example is kind of useless. I wasn't trying to produce a useful replacement for the Slashdot logo. I was trying to demonstrate that for simple logos the space requirements are quite low. As such, I served up the data in exactly the correct content-type (this allows you to view the XML quite easily and/or just download it using lwp-requet, wget, or whatever you prefer).
The intent was to allow people to download and view the SVG, not the image. You can see the image (with correct fonts, even), by just looking up at the stop of your browser window. This document was interesting for purposes of looking at the (somewhat) equivalent SVG.
Again, SVG is a lot smaller than you think. When you start trying to display very complicated images (like the classic tiger postscript demo), that's where it becomes larger, and that's really not what SVG is best at, and at lower resolutions, I would recommend exporting a bitmap for such applications. For simple logos, stylized text (e.g. anything that's just a bit too much for HTML+CSS), etc, nothing beats SVG for space, flexibility, accessibility, and client-side rendering quality.
The logo at the top of your screen is here: http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif.
It is 3473 bytes. As an SVG, it would be something like this (really awful, off the cuff) example: http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg which is 3255 bytes uncompressed and I'm sure that that's wasteful in several ways because I'm an SVG newbie. Given compressed HTTP bodies by default, the SVG would save Slashot quite a bit in bandwidth every month.
SVG is a lot smaller than you think....
Better, your browser could do the right thing and let you select that text, even though it's rendered as pretty graphics. Accessibility software could READ the text to you (HUGE WIN). etc.
Some advantages of SVG:
- For the Web, the browser gets to decide how to render graphical information (so for example, client-side anti-aliasing preferences can be used).
- because the client has access to the high-level description, you could do something like write a browser that knows how to select text from a graphical logo
- Network bandwidth is reduced for many types of graphical data such as logos, emblems, seals, and other types of data that can be described in relatively few drawing commands
- For some values of replacement, it's an open replacement for Flash
- Because it's XML, you can use any old XML parser to gain high-level information about any SVG document.
All things considered, SVG is a darned nice thing, and I would love to be able to start taking full advantage of it in plugins and extensions.Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors in a given area, nothing more. Don't confuse Moore's law with clock speed (as you point out), calculations per second, or any other metric. Transistors per square inch. That's what ML is measured in.
I hear the "I avoid products that..." all the time, but the bottom line is that if the market research were wrong, the companies in question would see a drop in sales and stop doing it. This does happen somtimes when an ad really hits the national funny-bone, and people actively avoid the product in large numbers, but it's very rare. More often negative reactions get people talking and make the product seem more important.
;-)
I'm also unimpressed by the folks who would tell me that they are not swayed at all by advertising. A friend of mine once made this claim. I looked in his bathroom and asked him why he bought Listerine. His answer: "it kills germs." Ok, so that's fair. Sure, it's in the commercial, but it's true. I asked him if he'd done a comparison between the various alcohol-based liquids that can be used orally in order to reach a product decision. For example, had he investigated the various drinking alcohols? He paused... "um, no."
In essence this friend of mine had simply gone to the store and bought Listerine because it "kills germs," which he learned on an ad. Now there are good reasons to use Listerine instead of, say, whiskey (mostly having to do with the substances in whiskey that the remaining bacteria will thrive on; and the fact that having booze-breath first thing in the morning goes over poorly at the office). However, he had not thought of them. He was simply doing what an ad told him to without thinking about it.
Good little cosumer
"The Morris worm was a flash in the pan compared to the neverending parade of WinDOS remote exploits"
That's very nice, but has nothing to do with the point at hand, which was recalling that the coming of Netscape's browser did not portent a sea change in the quality of the Internet experience. That process began and continued from the mid-80s on, as more and more people became aware of the Internet. With every new (and larger) influx of users, the signal-to-noise ratio of the Net dropped. Only recently has that ratio begun to swing in the other direction as technology has begun to catch up and allow for collaboration modes where noise is reduced in a decnetralized way (e.g. Slashdot's user-moderation (it's hard to think of Slashdot as low-noise, but compare browsing at 3 on Slashdot to your average Yahoo Messageboard without user-moderation), MediaWiki's user-watchlist / reversion / admin features, etc).
"If he was found guilty"
I live the US, but I think you'll find that Australia separates civil and criminal law the same way we do. That is, he's not "guilty" of anything, he's simply "in violation of a copyright". That's a very different thing, here in the US, and is closely related to contract law, not criminal law.
Of course, the RIAA and MPAA would love to blur / remove that line....
*sniff* The good ole days."
And lots of rose-tinted glasses....
Do you recall:
- Eternal September
- The Morris Worm, which probably infected more machines as a percentage of the net than your average worm / virus today.
- The first computer virus in 1982
If you don't then you're either young or deluding yourself into thinking the world got ugly all of a sudden.It's news because the average tech geek still likes to think that they are an indispensible commodity, and that their skills are above question because among their local circle of friends, they are considered 1337.
I work for a company that interviews some of the best and the brightest, and every day I see people -- who would have landed a job in my previous companies without breaking a sweat -- leave, never to return. We turn down really good people, because we prefer even better people.
The market has changed. Get over it.
"If the Russian court agrees to let this case proceed, it opens the door for all kinds of inane, utterly frivolous lawsuits from astrologers, witch doctors, faith healers, and every other kind of kook out there who wants to make a quick buck by accusing actual scientists of violating some crackpot principle."
Absolutely. This is why most civilized countries have rules where losers in civil suits pay the winners' expenses (with the judge waiving in special cases). In this case, you have someone whose contention is that there are certain bodies in space which are important religious and/or cultural locations, and moving one out of its normal path is a desecration of sorts. That sounds fair, and while the court might find in NASA's favor, I don't see why we should feel free (or more to the point that the Russians should) to slam the door on this case prematurely.
Of course, astrology is crackpot mysticism, but so is any supernatural belief and if we, as a world, wish to allow for free religious expression, then we need to allow for it, not pick and choose.
"Water vapour is a "reactive" GHG with a short atmospheric lifetime of about 1 week. If you pump out a whole load of extra water vapour it won't stay in the atmosphere; it would condense as rain/snow and we'd be back to where we started. If you sucked the atmosphere dry of moisture, more would evaporate from the oceans. The balance is dynamic of course: humidity of the air varies by place and time, but its a stable balance."
;-)
This is an obscenely simplistic response, which does not take into account the dangers of producing vastly more water vapor on an ongoing basis, and makes wild assumptions about the stability of the system.
Water vapor does not simply rise into the atmosphere, hover for 10 days and condense as rain or snow. The two phenomenon are related, but not directly, and other factors such as location, time of year, storm systems, etc. all play in.
If your assertion is that dumping water vapor into the atmosphere as fast as we can will have zero impact on the climate, then I'm sorry, I will have to respectfully disagree.
Keep in mind, that we're talking about a substance (friendly though it may be to our daily lives) which is far, far more potennt as a greenhouse gas than CO2, and we're ALREADY increasing its levels through irregation (even if it all drops out of the air like a stone after its 10 days are up, the overall vapor-cover on the areas that are irregated must have increased between the time when no agriculture was occuring there and now!)
My take? Save the planet: shut down a bath house
Seriously though, arm-wave all you like, but I remain unconvinced. Is there a good study of world-wide relative humidity and cloud-cover that takes into account city, wild and agricultural areas over the last century or two? If so, I'd be happy to look at its results and learn from them. After all, the goal here is not for me to convince you or you me, but to actually understand the reality, no?
I don't understand your argument.
Arguments require two parties. I was simply pointing out the flaws in the assertion offered.
Are you for or against reducing pollution caused by fossil fuels?
I've got no problem with reducing pollution. My problem is with masking the desire to breath easier with scare tactics.
After all, INSANE reliance on fossil fuels got us into this mess, not?
Insane reliance, eh? And you propose what as a replacement? We still don't have any scalable, safe solutions for burning hydrogen (not to mention that burning (e.g. oxydizing) hydrogen creates water vapor, which is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2); wind power isn't sufficient on its own (but not a bad start); coal still isn't all that clean, though it's better than it was; nuclear waste would be fairly reasonable to deal with, but no one wants it in their back-yard; fusion isn't practical yet; solar panels require MASSIVE footprint and are weather-sensitive....
Please, let me know what we're going to switch to.
There has been an attempt to engage people for the last 25 years in a reasonable debate on what to do about the pollution problem it causes
And that has produced drastically lowered emissions, energy-conservation programs that have prevented the burning of billions of barrels of oil, etc., etc.
Just try this exersise whenever someone tries to tell you that humans are destroying the galaxy: Ask, "what is the delta between all natural factors and observed effect?"
If the answer isn't "we don't know" and doesn't involve units, you're probably being lied to. If it does involve units ask to see the math, and when you see some amazing fudge-factor that humans cannot possibly have a concrete measure for, ask solid questions about it.
You see, it's easy to construct a model in which you plug in a bunch of knowns, balance them out with a guess at the value of an unknown and then tweak that unknown to produce any answer you like.
My answer? We don't know.
I have no argument. I'm just tired of the same old re-run misinformation. You propose a workable plan, and I'll get on board.
"pf supports redundant parallel firewalls with automatic failover via CARP. This is a rare feature unless you're willing to go buy a Pix."
Linux-HA fails firewalls just fine.
"pf supports routing of traffic based upon OS fingerprinting."
It's a module in iptables called "osf", but I don't recommend it. Anything that relies on information (even passively gathered information) provided by the remote host is fundamentally unreliable. Worse, by filtering based on OS you open yourself up to all sorts of confusing problems when proxies (transparent or otherwise) are involved.
"When compared to setting up an IPtables firewall, pf is surprising simple and it's howto at openbsd.org cannot be beat."
Howto?! Ew. I know how to configure a firewall, but if I'm going to point newbies at a firewall solution, it's going to be one that's configured out of the box. I'd recommend Fedora's default install for on-server firewalling, and any of the CD-based firewall-specific distributions for centralized firewalling.
Still, I've set up many an iptables firewall, and unless you're doing something REALLY hairy, there's nothing all that complex about it. One config. One command to load the config. Next problem.
I've been a bit hard on you here, and honestly I have no interest in "my OS is bigger than your OS" debates. My point was simply to demonstrate that you're showing off the features of a system you know, and ignoring the fact that a system you don't know might have those features too. What's more, that other system might have other feautres that you would find just as useful or moreso once you got used to them.
This is an amazing straw-man. Propose an INSANE idea for preventing the warming of the planet (hint: figure out the mechanism that causes ice ages before you go reducing the light that reaches the Earth), and then you can argue that major changes need to be made in the way humans live in order to prevent such madness. I bow in frustrated awe at the genius of that ploy.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just have a sane debate about how we treat our back-yard?
Oh bother, go ahead. Do whatever you want. I'll watch. It's going to be fun watching the next 20 years of wild arm-waving at least.