I didn't lose any drives to it or anything, but after install, the updates listed are like 200MB, which is a ridiculous amount of patching, IMO.
Further, those patches misfired badly on both of the machines I installed it on, completely hosing the menus and the icons in the KDE taskbar. I was able to recover the menus by just running menudrake, but I had to add a specific new button to the taskbar to run it, since there was no way to run a shell off the start menu anymore. There's no way a normal desktop user is going to know how to do this; I'm an old hand and I still had to think for a minute to figure out how to fix it. And I had to fix all my buttons by hand, which sucked.
Now, to be fair, it may be my fault. I mount my/var partition as noexec and my/tmp partition as nosuid, so it's possible that this could have bugged the installers. (I'm not sure whether I adjusted that before or after I patched.) I might be unfairly blaming Mandrake when I'm not running a stock system. So, consider this a warning: there's at LEAST a problem with noexec/var or nosuid/tmp, so don't do that. (or remount before running patches.)
Re:A nit on the "dead white males" section...
on
Human Accomplishment
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That's just a correlation, there's no provable cause-effect there without more data. Never confuse correlation with causation; they are very different things.
"There's more crime in the summertime, and a great deal more ice cream is eaten then, so we're cracking down on ice cream production to prevent crime!"
And your "produces better kids" line is just amazingly loaded. Defined by whom?
It just occurred to me, with the "10 mbit Ethernet" reference in the title, that it would be harder than hell (impossible?) to push that much data on one of those 8 bit computers.
Assuming you're using only the processor, on an 8-bit machine the data speed ought to be very close to the clock speed; a 1Mhz machine probably could copy no more than 1 megabit, and that's assuming that it was doing NOTHING else, like interacting with the user.
Now, the Ataris have early versions of the some of the custom chips that were in the Amiga, so it's likely that at least some of the load might be able to be offset, but I'd be pretty amazwd if the machines could exceed 2 megabits.
Honestly, everything past a modem is probably overkill on these old machines; it's like putting tires and shocks to do 200mph on a Model T. No matter how hard you push down the pedal, it's just not going to go much faster.:-)
It really puts things in perspective, though; I'm sitting here typing on my Web browser, downloading a TV episode off Usenet at about 3 megabits, and streaming Doll Revolution off the Mac via iTunes, playing it on a (kinda crummy) 5.1 surround sound system. And with all that going on, probably 95% of my processor time is going to Folding@Home.
Who, me? You mean I'm supposed to WANT to go stand in line with hundreds of people and stand around for an hour while everyone froths with praise for St. Jobs and The One True Way of Apple?
Sure, I might do that for a Linux gathering, but Apple? No way.:-)
I liked Fry's for one major reason; convenience. They had *everything* there; you could literally walk out, in one trip, with everything you needed to build a good-sized network. (although now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing any Cisco gear there.) Their prices weren't particularly good, and their salesdroids were clueless, but I didn't care about that. I wasn't there for the uneducated opinions.:-)
If you gotta have it today, it's tough to beat Fry's. (although, with the lines, it may be *late* today....:-) )
I use Evolution under Linux at work -- I don't know where you're getting 1+ minute startup times, but mine takes about, oh, 15 seconds, and I have A LOT of mail. I upgraded to a P4 1.8ghz, but my old P3/733 ran it at almost exactly the same speed.
My big gripe with Evolution is that the key management for SSL totally sucks -- it keeps forgetting my mail server's SSL cert, and when I tell it "go ahead and accept", it then forgets the password on the account, so I constantly have to go in and reset the (random) passwords I use. That is REALLY annoying.
But the mail client is good enough that I've tried to give Ximian some money, only to be told that they don't have a program for donations. They suggested I buy some t-shirts, but I don't WANT the bloody T-shirts, and I don't WANT the bloody Red Carpet thing, I just want to give them $25 or $30 for the mail client I use. No way to do that.
Geeze. I saw the crowd last year at Lenox Mall in Atlanta for the Jaguar release, so I cleverly waited one entire day.
The Lenox Mall Apple store is a bit of a drive, so I went to the Micro Center not far from where I live. They're sort of a baby Fry's, but more expensive and nowhere near as good. This is, unfortunately, the South, and you take what you can get here. It beats Bosnia.
I walked into the Apple department, grabbed a copy of Panther, and asked if I needed to ring it up there or if I could keep shopping. The salesman put a sticker on it and told me to buy it up front, and then tossed a couple of freebies on the pile... a mousepad and a 64MB USB flash drive.
So I got a much shorter drive, no parking hassles, and a free USB drive in exchange for waiting a day. Calling this a no-brainer seems an understatement.
No impressions yet, I'm backing up before installing. Ok, one impression: the box is cool. Big silver X on a black background. Box upgrades are very important, you know.:-)
First, realize that I'm a privacy nut and very libertarian.
That said, I have no problem with these black boxes. They can't be accessed randomly; they are only looked at *after an accident*. Further, the data stored is only a few seconds' worth, it's not like your entire driving history is in there. (If it were, I"d have a big problem with it.)
Because it's only accessed after an accident, I think it falls under the definition of "search with probable cause". If you don't have an accident, it will never be looked at. A neutral recorder of facts is hardly intrusive surveillance if it's only looked at when someone was injured from your actions.
If you REALLY ARE good enough to drive 100mph on the freeway, having the recording device will never matter, since you won't ever hit anyone.
It would fit, but I won't use the "black-box overlords" line here.:-) I really do welcome the neutral record, however.
What really struck me about San Quentin Prison was how much like a high school it was: high walls, lines on the ground showing you where you could walk and stand, very regimented schedule. The biggest difference was that wherever you were, someone with a gun had line of sight on you.
What triggered this memory was two words near the start of page two: where it said "picture tags", I misread it as "prison tags". I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something.
It was interesting watching my own prejudices while reading the article as well; I started out with a "this is terrible!" preconception, but then that conception wavered quite a bit when the article carefully emphasized "inner-city school". I went to one of those for awhile; I don't know about all of them, but the one I was in was pretty awful, and that was almost thirty years ago.
Regardless of how bad the school is, I don't think there is any excuse for surveillance technology on everyone, whether or not they've been convicted of anything. Perhaps putting that kind of dog collar on kids with discipline problems would be ok, but on EVERYONE? Isn't school already enough like prison?
"Each morning at 7:30 AM, check your free will at the door. We'll return it to you, only slightly tarnished, in the afternoon. "
If you insist on putting a dog collar on children, you've got no gripe if you end up with dogs.
Well, personally, I don't mind paying for updates, but I strongly feel that they charge too much. There would be a lot less grousing if they were more reasonable; I think $75 would be much fairer.
The Microsoft updates from 95 to 98 to ME (blech) were MUCH larger than the Apple point releases, and even Mr. Monopoly only charged about a hundred bucks for its updates. And the upgrade from 98/ME to XP is absolutely enormous, WAY more than what Apple is offering here, and I think it's about $140.
Well, SCO loses the right to distribute software under the GPL by requiring the license of their code, but they don't lose the right to sue.
If their IP claim were actually valid, they could still extort money from people for using Linux. They just couldn't distribute Linux themselves. It seems unlikely to me that they have any interest in distributing Linux any more; they just want to impose a tax on it.
We've been over and over and over why this won't work. That hasn't changed. All I'm trying to point out is that your argument doesn't quite hold up. The GPL alone isn't enough protection. You could get a copy from Red Hat and still be liable to SCO.
In the Sun Solaris versus Linux article a day or so ago, they mentioned that turning logging on for UFS filesystems makes it A LOT faster. If you haven't done that, it might be worth reading that article for the quick little blurb on how to turn it on. Three days seems, um, excessive. I'm not sure if 2.7 does logging, though.
He tested a 40gb IDE drive versus a 9gb SCSI drive, both 7200 RPM. The SCSI drive was a lot faster, but this isn't any particular shock; this is pretty old hardware.
Basically he just told us that circa 2001, SCSI was faster. I think we mostly knew that already.
It would be a lot more interesting to see the test run with one of the 36gb WD Raptors. They are 10K RPM and are *very* fast drives. I use a pair of them striped as RAID 0 in my main desktop; they're faster than anything I've ever used before, including 10KRPM SCSI. (I haven't used 15KRPM SCSI, which I imagine is probably faster still, but very noisy, which is why I went with the Raptors. )
Note also that IDE drives in general are "tuned for desktop usage patterns". I'm not entirely sure what that entails, but I suspect it involves a lot of read-ahead caching; single-user systems tend to be actively reading only one or two things at a time. SCSI is tuned for server performance, and the test of "read lots of small files" is probably much closer to a "server" load than to a "desktop" load.
What I'd like to see is testing of streaming performance in working with really big files. That's something I do fairly frequently. How fast can you extract, say, a 500MB RAR file back to the same disk? How fast is it if you're reading from one and writing to a second? On a personal basis, I do that a lot more than putting 50,000 files in a directory and then reading every single one of them.
However, if I ever DO plan on putting 50,000 files in a directory and then reading all of them on a frequent basis, I'll be sure to choose SCSI.:-)
There's such an overwhelming body of evidence in favor of evolution that outright disproving it is essentially impossible. There will probably be some modifications made to details of the theory, but it's essentially impossible that it would ever be overturned.
I am quite certain that, a hundred years from now, evolution will remain a bedrock of science. Overturning it would require a discovery of impossible magnitude.
Anyone who argues that the Earth was created 8,000 years ago (or whatever their pet number of the day is), and that all the fossils are there "to make us question our faith", well.... that is almost exactly like claiming the Sun goes around the Earth, and just as valid.
We may even be able to tell when humans started wearing clothes, because there are particular strains of lice that can only live in clothing. (Lice are very specialized; humans have head lice, public lice, and body lice, which live in clothing, and each species seems to have its own variety.) We can tell when clothing lice diverged, approximately; it happened sometime between 42 and 72,000 years ago.
They also ran sequences on the differences between chimpanzee and human lice, and found that their divergence (about 5.5 million years ago) exactly matches the divergence between human and chimpanzee DNA.
All this genetic sequencing is a final stake in the heart of Creationism. The creationists have been once and forever disproven. Those passionate arguments I used to have as a kid are now over. We did evolve from chimpanzees; that is not in doubt. We were not created out of whole cloth. Monkeys are indeed our uncles. Like it or not, that's the TRUTH. The creation myths in the Bible have been, finally, conclusively shown to be no more true than any other culture's creation myth. Worthy of study and interest, but NOT TRUE.
Science is a constant succession of "why?" and "how?". Each answer prompts more questions; as those questions are answered, yet more come forth.
Some people desperately wish to posit a Deity either creating man or at least starting the process of evolution. One answer happens to be a lot more removed from recent history, but they're essentially the same thing. As soon as the answer to a "why?" becomes "because that's what God did", then all further questioning stops. There is no more learning.
Evolution is as well-accepted as anything in science. We can see it happen live, with short-lived critters like bacteria. We can see it in the fossil record. It was pretty much certain even when I was in school.
Since then, even more data has been added to the equation, that of genetic sequencing. We can see precisely how closely related different species are, and even tell how long ago they diverged. We have literally been handed an instruction book that absolutely proves not only that evolution happens, but also that it has been happening for millions of years. Evolution is not even remotely questionable anymore; it is FACT.
Creationism, at this point, is simply mental masturbation. Evolution has been proven absolutely to exist. Refusal to accept evolutionary science is like claiming the sky isn't blue. It is no longer open to argument.
And that's why you won't ever see creationism in a mainstream scientific journal.
I was thinking the same thing. I can't imagine that it would be good for you. Electricity and magnetism are interrelated; if you push one, the other bobbles.
Normally your body produces a magnetic field due to the small amount of electricity your nerves generate. If you start modulating that field externally, you ABSOLUTELY are going to have some kind of an effect on the current flows in the body.
It's possible the signal may be modulated at too high a rate for the nervous system to detect, but I personally wouldn't count on that, and don't plan to expose myself to such a network knowingly, now or ever.
As far as I can tell, factorial is not related to this problem in ANY way, in ANY base. The base you express a number in doesn't change the number.
Factorial of a given number is multiplying that number with all the numbers preceding it. If you were trying to simulate this with switches, each new switch you added would have to have one more position than the switch before it. Switch 4 would have 4 positions, switch 5 would have 5, and so on. That would produce a factorial result.
If all the switches have the same number of positions, then the formula is (number of switch positions) ^ (number of switches). It's really very simple.
That's not how it works at all. Those are bits, on or off. A four-switch case would have four bits, or 16 values; 5 switches would be 32, and so on. At 8 you'd be at 256.
If they were 3-position switches, then it would be 3^number of switches. At four switches you'd have 81 permutations, at 5 you'd have 243. 8 switches would give you 6,561 possibilities. But anything over 4 switches is probably overkill anyway; if it's slower than a screwdriver, it's a waste of time.
I have NO idea where you got the factorial thing from.
Most likely, he's just reporting what he's being told. And most likely, it's being mis-measured by someone.
Microsoft is a big company, and Windows is a very complex beast. My initial thought is that perhaps the security developers do indeed code and submit a patch within 24 hours.
But then the patch has to wend its way through the labyrinth of QA and regression testing. Because Windows is so highly integrated, even small changes can have big unforeseen consequences, so they can't rush patches out the door without breaking things. I believe Microsoft makes patches available via their support pages well before it hits Windows Update. What *we* are measuring is the time from bug report to being in Windows Update; what *they* are probably measuring is time to patch submittal or time to initial availability via support.
I really, really prefer the improved code separation in the Unix environment; if, say, BIND has a problem or exploit, it's highly unlikely that a patch it will break Postfix or Apache. Because things are better-separated, the developers understand their packages better and can more confidently push patches into their stable branches.
I worry a little about the way the Unix desktops are becoming increasingly interdependent, with lots of libraries and lots of integration... are we going to end up in the same place, eventually? Microsoft doesn't employ idiots, and considering the amount of trouble they've had scaling, well.... I just hope the free software developers are thinking about this.
You are used to being insured and seem to have trouble imagining that it affects your behavior.
Let me turn the question around backward; if you were unable to get insurance for your home, don't you imagine that you'd be a little more careful about protecting it? Likewise, if you didn't have auto insurance, wouldn't you be exceptionally careful while driving? I sure as hell would be; a single accident, even a relatively minor one, could cost me everything.
If there were no such thing as insurance, it seems obvious that people in general would be much more careful, because the outcome of an accident would be so much worse. Thus, there would be fewer accidents. In other words, in exchange for reducing individual risk, we have probably increased the overall risk/cost of accidents.
I'm not arguing that this is a bad outcome, just that it is true. I'm not saying that insurance is inherently bad, as long as it is voluntary on everyone's part. What I am trying to point out is that the existence of insurance has an impact on society that is not necessarily obvious, is almost never thought about, and should absolutely be taken into consideration.
Very simply, they're using their government-granted monopoly power to illegally leverage themselves into a new market, that of search engines.
It seems very unlikely to me that any SiteFinder service will ever happen unless NetSol manages to convince ICANN and, presumably, Congress to change their charter. I suspect Google and Yahoo are likely to have a few things to say about that.
There's another side effect to insurance that people don't often get; having insurance encourages risky behavior. If you know that your house will be replaced if it burns down, you're probably going to be less cautious with fire. Insurance can thus have the effect of actually INCREASING the net cost to society.
In real life, you see this with flood insurance and people building houses on flood plains. Without insurance, hardly anyone would be stupid enough to build there, or at worst would build very flood-proof houses. With insurance being available, people know they are covered and build (or rebuild) houses in places that houses simply shouldn't exist. And in really bad floods, the Feds even step in and declare a case of emergency, and reward the stupid behavior even MORE.
I'm not saying insurance is wrong, but I AM trying to point out that it's often a feel-good palliative with a high hidden price tag.
Insuring against the consequences of stupidity encourages stupid behavior.
Although it sounds good on the surface, "no discrimination based on genetic code!", it's a disaster that will have enormous ramifications for health care.
Fundamentally, insurance is about spreading risk. Insurance companies take on risk in exchange for premium; the chance of any individual making a claim is small, and thus the premiums charged to that individual are also small. People with, say, bad driving records, are more likely to file claims and are thus charged more money.
It's not widely known, but most insurance companies pay out more in claims than they receive in premium. People talk about "the gouging insurance companies" and how evil and selfish they are (and some almost certainly are), but the vast majority of insurance companies don't make money on what they charge you. I don't know the industry average, but it's not all that unusual for an insurance company to pay out $1.05 in claims for every $1 in premium it collects.
So how do they make money? Because there is generally a lag between when the premium is collected and when the claims are paid out. During that period of time, the insurance company is free to use the money to try to make a profit. This money is called "float". The amount that claims exceed premium is called 'cost of float", and an insurance company has to make more than their cost of float to be profitable.
As you can imagine, in an environment where stocks aren't performing very well and interest rates are close to zero, it is VERY hard for insurance companies to make money. I don't know how they're actually reacting to the problem, but I know that, for instance, homeowner's insurance is going through the roof... this is blamed on mold claims, but at least part of it is due to the fact that float isn't very profitable right now. And my car insurance went up a pretty good chunk last time, even though I don't have any tickets.
What this all boils down to is that insurance is a very, very competitive business, one with razor-thin margins, and it's very dependent on accurate risk analysis.
The problem with a genetic testing ban is simply this: the insurance companies are forbidden from using them, but their clients are not. This gives the clients an unfair advantage over the insurance companies; they know more about their own need for insurance than the company does. This will inevitably mean that people who really NEED the insurance will always buy it, and people who DON'T need the insurance may or may not. This will throw the risk equations all out of whack, and it will mean that A) insurance companies will be in danger of going out of business, and B) if they don't, insurance premiusm are going to go sky-high. And as premiums go up, more and more people who know that they have a pretty good chance of staying healthy will drop coverage, *increasing* loss exposure to insurance companies and sending rates still further skyward.
If genetic testing becomes a very reliable barometer of future health, and if insurance comapnies aren't allowed to use that data as a factor in their decisions, then insurance as we know it will essentially cease to exist, unless it becomes mandatory and encompasses the entire population.
It would become, in effect, socialized medicine.
If you want to retain your freedom to choose your own insurance plan and carrier (or to opt out of paying for insurance at all), it is very important that insurance companies be allowed access to the same data their customers have.
Yes, some people will find coverage hard to get in that system, but the alternatives are pretty much one of:
A) insurance companies can use genetic screening when writing insurance, making insurance more expensive for some people and, presumably, less expensive for most;
B) insurance becomes a LOT more expensive for anyone who wants to get it, or
This is such stupid thinking. There is wealth beyond our imaginations sitting right above our heads, if only we'd have the gumption to go get it.
By your way of thinking, Old Europe should have "waited to solve all its problems" instead of sending Columbus westward. Spending all that money on exploration was an obvious waste when there were hungry people to feed.
Expansion will give us the wealth we need to fix our old problems. It will also gives us new ones, but that's just the nature of life. The better we do at the solving problems game, the bigger problems we get. When we fail to solve problems, we die. That's how it works.
I, for one, am quite glad that our ancestors chose to ignore hungry people and explored westward; the new resources we brought online allowed us to feed a larger percentage of the population than ever before, and raise the average standard of living to such a degree that medieval kings would have been jealous of average first-world citizens.
If we try to curl into our little shells and ignore the resources overhead, we will, as a species, die out.
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I didn't lose any drives to it or anything, but after install, the updates listed are like 200MB, which is a ridiculous amount of patching, IMO.
/var partition as noexec and my /tmp partition as nosuid, so it's possible that this could have bugged the installers. (I'm not sure whether I adjusted that before or after I patched.) I might be unfairly blaming Mandrake when I'm not running a stock system. So, consider this a warning: there's at LEAST a problem with noexec /var or nosuid /tmp, so don't do that. (or remount before running patches.)
Further, those patches misfired badly on both of the machines I installed it on, completely hosing the menus and the icons in the KDE taskbar. I was able to recover the menus by just running menudrake, but I had to add a specific new button to the taskbar to run it, since there was no way to run a shell off the start menu anymore. There's no way a normal desktop user is going to know how to do this; I'm an old hand and I still had to think for a minute to figure out how to fix it. And I had to fix all my buttons by hand, which sucked.
Now, to be fair, it may be my fault. I mount my
That's just a correlation, there's no provable cause-effect there without more data. Never confuse correlation with causation; they are very different things.
"There's more crime in the summertime, and a great deal more ice cream is eaten then, so we're cracking down on ice cream production to prevent crime!"
And your "produces better kids" line is just amazingly loaded. Defined by whom?
And then sit around staring at each other, since there weren't any networked games yet. :-)
It just occurred to me, with the "10 mbit Ethernet" reference in the title, that it would be harder than hell (impossible?) to push that much data on one of those 8 bit computers.
:-)
:-)
Assuming you're using only the processor, on an 8-bit machine the data speed ought to be very close to the clock speed; a 1Mhz machine probably could copy no more than 1 megabit, and that's assuming that it was doing NOTHING else, like interacting with the user.
Now, the Ataris have early versions of the some of the custom chips that were in the Amiga, so it's likely that at least some of the load might be able to be offset, but I'd be pretty amazwd if the machines could exceed 2 megabits.
Honestly, everything past a modem is probably overkill on these old machines; it's like putting tires and shocks to do 200mph on a Model T. No matter how hard you push down the pedal, it's just not going to go much faster.
It really puts things in perspective, though; I'm sitting here typing on my Web browser, downloading a TV episode off Usenet at about 3 megabits, and streaming Doll Revolution off the Mac via iTunes, playing it on a (kinda crummy) 5.1 surround sound system. And with all that going on, probably 95% of my processor time is going to Folding@Home.
Goddamn, what a difference a few decades make.
Who, me? You mean I'm supposed to WANT to go stand in line with hundreds of people and stand around for an hour while everyone froths with praise for St. Jobs and The One True Way of Apple?
:-)
Sure, I might do that for a Linux gathering, but Apple? No way.
lol!
:-)
:-) )
I liked Fry's for one major reason; convenience. They had *everything* there; you could literally walk out, in one trip, with everything you needed to build a good-sized network. (although now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing any Cisco gear there.) Their prices weren't particularly good, and their salesdroids were clueless, but I didn't care about that. I wasn't there for the uneducated opinions.
If you gotta have it today, it's tough to beat Fry's. (although, with the lines, it may be *late* today....
I use Evolution under Linux at work -- I don't know where you're getting 1+ minute startup times, but mine takes about, oh, 15 seconds, and I have A LOT of mail. I upgraded to a P4 1.8ghz, but my old P3/733 ran it at almost exactly the same speed.
My big gripe with Evolution is that the key management for SSL totally sucks -- it keeps forgetting my mail server's SSL cert, and when I tell it "go ahead and accept", it then forgets the password on the account, so I constantly have to go in and reset the (random) passwords I use. That is REALLY annoying.
But the mail client is good enough that I've tried to give Ximian some money, only to be told that they don't have a program for donations. They suggested I buy some t-shirts, but I don't WANT the bloody T-shirts, and I don't WANT the bloody Red Carpet thing, I just want to give them $25 or $30 for the mail client I use. No way to do that.
Argh.
Geeze. I saw the crowd last year at Lenox Mall in Atlanta for the Jaguar release, so I cleverly waited one entire day.
:-)
The Lenox Mall Apple store is a bit of a drive, so I went to the Micro Center not far from where I live. They're sort of a baby Fry's, but more expensive and nowhere near as good. This is, unfortunately, the South, and you take what you can get here. It beats Bosnia.
I walked into the Apple department, grabbed a copy of Panther, and asked if I needed to ring it up there or if I could keep shopping. The salesman put a sticker on it and told me to buy it up front, and then tossed a couple of freebies on the pile... a mousepad and a 64MB USB flash drive.
So I got a much shorter drive, no parking hassles, and a free USB drive in exchange for waiting a day. Calling this a no-brainer seems an understatement.
No impressions yet, I'm backing up before installing. Ok, one impression: the box is cool. Big silver X on a black background. Box upgrades are very important, you know.
First, realize that I'm a privacy nut and very libertarian.
:-) I really do welcome the neutral record, however.
That said, I have no problem with these black boxes. They can't be accessed randomly; they are only looked at *after an accident*. Further, the data stored is only a few seconds' worth, it's not like your entire driving history is in there. (If it were, I"d have a big problem with it.)
Because it's only accessed after an accident, I think it falls under the definition of "search with probable cause". If you don't have an accident, it will never be looked at. A neutral recorder of facts is hardly intrusive surveillance if it's only looked at when someone was injured from your actions.
If you REALLY ARE good enough to drive 100mph on the freeway, having the recording device will never matter, since you won't ever hit anyone.
It would fit, but I won't use the "black-box overlords" line here.
What triggered this memory was two words near the start of page two: where it said "picture tags", I misread it as "prison tags". I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something.
It was interesting watching my own prejudices while reading the article as well; I started out with a "this is terrible!" preconception, but then that conception wavered quite a bit when the article carefully emphasized "inner-city school". I went to one of those for awhile; I don't know about all of them, but the one I was in was pretty awful, and that was almost thirty years ago.
Regardless of how bad the school is, I don't think there is any excuse for surveillance technology on everyone, whether or not they've been convicted of anything. Perhaps putting that kind of dog collar on kids with discipline problems would be ok, but on EVERYONE? Isn't school already enough like prison?
"Each morning at 7:30 AM, check your free will at the door. We'll return it to you, only slightly tarnished, in the afternoon. "
If you insist on putting a dog collar on children, you've got no gripe if you end up with dogs.
Well, personally, I don't mind paying for updates, but I strongly feel that they charge too much. There would be a lot less grousing if they were more reasonable; I think $75 would be much fairer.
The Microsoft updates from 95 to 98 to ME (blech) were MUCH larger than the Apple point releases, and even Mr. Monopoly only charged about a hundred bucks for its updates. And the upgrade from 98/ME to XP is absolutely enormous, WAY more than what Apple is offering here, and I think it's about $140.
Well, SCO loses the right to distribute software under the GPL by requiring the license of their code, but they don't lose the right to sue.
If their IP claim were actually valid, they could still extort money from people for using Linux. They just couldn't distribute Linux themselves. It seems unlikely to me that they have any interest in distributing Linux any more; they just want to impose a tax on it.
We've been over and over and over why this won't work. That hasn't changed. All I'm trying to point out is that your argument doesn't quite hold up. The GPL alone isn't enough protection. You could get a copy from Red Hat and still be liable to SCO.
In the Sun Solaris versus Linux article a day or so ago, they mentioned that turning logging on for UFS filesystems makes it A LOT faster. If you haven't done that, it might be worth reading that article for the quick little blurb on how to turn it on. Three days seems, um, excessive. I'm not sure if 2.7 does logging, though.
Just a thought.
He tested a 40gb IDE drive versus a 9gb SCSI drive, both 7200 RPM. The SCSI drive was a lot faster, but this isn't any particular shock; this is pretty old hardware.
:-)
Basically he just told us that circa 2001, SCSI was faster. I think we mostly knew that already.
It would be a lot more interesting to see the test run with one of the 36gb WD Raptors. They are 10K RPM and are *very* fast drives. I use a pair of them striped as RAID 0 in my main desktop; they're faster than anything I've ever used before, including 10KRPM SCSI. (I haven't used 15KRPM SCSI, which I imagine is probably faster still, but very noisy, which is why I went with the Raptors. )
Note also that IDE drives in general are "tuned for desktop usage patterns". I'm not entirely sure what that entails, but I suspect it involves a lot of read-ahead caching; single-user systems tend to be actively reading only one or two things at a time. SCSI is tuned for server performance, and the test of "read lots of small files" is probably much closer to a "server" load than to a "desktop" load.
What I'd like to see is testing of streaming performance in working with really big files. That's something I do fairly frequently. How fast can you extract, say, a 500MB RAR file back to the same disk? How fast is it if you're reading from one and writing to a second? On a personal basis, I do that a lot more than putting 50,000 files in a directory and then reading every single one of them.
However, if I ever DO plan on putting 50,000 files in a directory and then reading all of them on a frequent basis, I'll be sure to choose SCSI.
There's such an overwhelming body of evidence in favor of evolution that outright disproving it is essentially impossible. There will probably be some modifications made to details of the theory, but it's essentially impossible that it would ever be overturned.
I am quite certain that, a hundred years from now, evolution will remain a bedrock of science. Overturning it would require a discovery of impossible magnitude.
Anyone who argues that the Earth was created 8,000 years ago (or whatever their pet number of the day is), and that all the fossils are there "to make us question our faith", well.... that is almost exactly like claiming the Sun goes around the Earth, and just as valid.
We may even be able to tell when humans started wearing clothes, because there are particular strains of lice that can only live in clothing. (Lice are very specialized; humans have head lice, public lice, and body lice, which live in clothing, and each species seems to have its own variety.) We can tell when clothing lice diverged, approximately; it happened sometime between 42 and 72,000 years ago.
They also ran sequences on the differences between chimpanzee and human lice, and found that their divergence (about 5.5 million years ago) exactly matches the divergence between human and chimpanzee DNA.
All this genetic sequencing is a final stake in the heart of Creationism. The creationists have been once and forever disproven. Those passionate arguments I used to have as a kid are now over. We did evolve from chimpanzees; that is not in doubt. We were not created out of whole cloth. Monkeys are indeed our uncles. Like it or not, that's the TRUTH. The creation myths in the Bible have been, finally, conclusively shown to be no more true than any other culture's creation myth. Worthy of study and interest, but NOT TRUE.
Science is a constant succession of "why?" and "how?". Each answer prompts more questions; as those questions are answered, yet more come forth.
Some people desperately wish to posit a Deity either creating man or at least starting the process of evolution. One answer happens to be a lot more removed from recent history, but they're essentially the same thing. As soon as the answer to a "why?" becomes "because that's what God did", then all further questioning stops. There is no more learning.
Evolution is as well-accepted as anything in science. We can see it happen live, with short-lived critters like bacteria. We can see it in the fossil record. It was pretty much certain even when I was in school.
Since then, even more data has been added to the equation, that of genetic sequencing. We can see precisely how closely related different species are, and even tell how long ago they diverged. We have literally been handed an instruction book that absolutely proves not only that evolution happens, but also that it has been happening for millions of years. Evolution is not even remotely questionable anymore; it is FACT.
Creationism, at this point, is simply mental masturbation. Evolution has been proven absolutely to exist. Refusal to accept evolutionary science is like claiming the sky isn't blue. It is no longer open to argument.
And that's why you won't ever see creationism in a mainstream scientific journal.
I was thinking the same thing. I can't imagine that it would be good for you. Electricity and magnetism are interrelated; if you push one, the other bobbles.
Normally your body produces a magnetic field due to the small amount of electricity your nerves generate. If you start modulating that field externally, you ABSOLUTELY are going to have some kind of an effect on the current flows in the body.
It's possible the signal may be modulated at too high a rate for the nervous system to detect, but I personally wouldn't count on that, and don't plan to expose myself to such a network knowingly, now or ever.
As far as I can tell, factorial is not related to this problem in ANY way, in ANY base. The base you express a number in doesn't change the number.
Factorial of a given number is multiplying that number with all the numbers preceding it. If you were trying to simulate this with switches, each new switch you added would have to have one more position than the switch before it. Switch 4 would have 4 positions, switch 5 would have 5, and so on. That would produce a factorial result.
If all the switches have the same number of positions, then the formula is (number of switch positions) ^ (number of switches). It's really very simple.
That's not how it works at all. Those are bits, on or off. A four-switch case would have four bits, or 16 values; 5 switches would be 32, and so on. At 8 you'd be at 256.
If they were 3-position switches, then it would be 3^number of switches. At four switches you'd have 81 permutations, at 5 you'd have 243. 8 switches would give you 6,561 possibilities. But anything over 4 switches is probably overkill anyway; if it's slower than a screwdriver, it's a waste of time.
I have NO idea where you got the factorial thing from.
Most likely, he's just reporting what he's being told. And most likely, it's being mis-measured by someone.
Microsoft is a big company, and Windows is a very complex beast. My initial thought is that perhaps the security developers do indeed code and submit a patch within 24 hours.
But then the patch has to wend its way through the labyrinth of QA and regression testing. Because Windows is so highly integrated, even small changes can have big unforeseen consequences, so they can't rush patches out the door without breaking things. I believe Microsoft makes patches available via their support pages well before it hits Windows Update. What *we* are measuring is the time from bug report to being in Windows Update; what *they* are probably measuring is time to patch submittal or time to initial availability via support.
I really, really prefer the improved code separation in the Unix environment; if, say, BIND has a problem or exploit, it's highly unlikely that a patch it will break Postfix or Apache. Because things are better-separated, the developers understand their packages better and can more confidently push patches into their stable branches.
I worry a little about the way the Unix desktops are becoming increasingly interdependent, with lots of libraries and lots of integration... are we going to end up in the same place, eventually? Microsoft doesn't employ idiots, and considering the amount of trouble they've had scaling, well.... I just hope the free software developers are thinking about this.
You are used to being insured and seem to have trouble imagining that it affects your behavior.
Let me turn the question around backward; if you were unable to get insurance for your home, don't you imagine that you'd be a little more careful about protecting it? Likewise, if you didn't have auto insurance, wouldn't you be exceptionally careful while driving? I sure as hell would be; a single accident, even a relatively minor one, could cost me everything.
If there were no such thing as insurance, it seems obvious that people in general would be much more careful, because the outcome of an accident would be so much worse. Thus, there would be fewer accidents. In other words, in exchange for reducing individual risk, we have probably increased the overall risk/cost of accidents.
I'm not arguing that this is a bad outcome, just that it is true. I'm not saying that insurance is inherently bad, as long as it is voluntary on everyone's part. What I am trying to point out is that the existence of insurance has an impact on society that is not necessarily obvious, is almost never thought about, and should absolutely be taken into consideration.
Very simply, they're using their government-granted monopoly power to illegally leverage themselves into a new market, that of search engines.
It seems very unlikely to me that any SiteFinder service will ever happen unless NetSol manages to convince ICANN and, presumably, Congress to change their charter. I suspect Google and Yahoo are likely to have a few things to say about that.
There's another side effect to insurance that people don't often get; having insurance encourages risky behavior. If you know that your house will be replaced if it burns down, you're probably going to be less cautious with fire. Insurance can thus have the effect of actually INCREASING the net cost to society.
In real life, you see this with flood insurance and people building houses on flood plains. Without insurance, hardly anyone would be stupid enough to build there, or at worst would build very flood-proof houses. With insurance being available, people know they are covered and build (or rebuild) houses in places that houses simply shouldn't exist. And in really bad floods, the Feds even step in and declare a case of emergency, and reward the stupid behavior even MORE.
I'm not saying insurance is wrong, but I AM trying to point out that it's often a feel-good palliative with a high hidden price tag.
Insuring against the consequences of stupidity encourages stupid behavior.
Fundamentally, insurance is about spreading risk. Insurance companies take on risk in exchange for premium; the chance of any individual making a claim is small, and thus the premiums charged to that individual are also small. People with, say, bad driving records, are more likely to file claims and are thus charged more money.
It's not widely known, but most insurance companies pay out more in claims than they receive in premium. People talk about "the gouging insurance companies" and how evil and selfish they are (and some almost certainly are), but the vast majority of insurance companies don't make money on what they charge you. I don't know the industry average, but it's not all that unusual for an insurance company to pay out $1.05 in claims for every $1 in premium it collects.
So how do they make money? Because there is generally a lag between when the premium is collected and when the claims are paid out. During that period of time, the insurance company is free to use the money to try to make a profit. This money is called "float". The amount that claims exceed premium is called 'cost of float", and an insurance company has to make more than their cost of float to be profitable.
As you can imagine, in an environment where stocks aren't performing very well and interest rates are close to zero, it is VERY hard for insurance companies to make money. I don't know how they're actually reacting to the problem, but I know that, for instance, homeowner's insurance is going through the roof... this is blamed on mold claims, but at least part of it is due to the fact that float isn't very profitable right now. And my car insurance went up a pretty good chunk last time, even though I don't have any tickets.
What this all boils down to is that insurance is a very, very competitive business, one with razor-thin margins, and it's very dependent on accurate risk analysis.
The problem with a genetic testing ban is simply this: the insurance companies are forbidden from using them, but their clients are not. This gives the clients an unfair advantage over the insurance companies; they know more about their own need for insurance than the company does. This will inevitably mean that people who really NEED the insurance will always buy it, and people who DON'T need the insurance may or may not. This will throw the risk equations all out of whack, and it will mean that A) insurance companies will be in danger of going out of business, and B) if they don't, insurance premiusm are going to go sky-high. And as premiums go up, more and more people who know that they have a pretty good chance of staying healthy will drop coverage, *increasing* loss exposure to insurance companies and sending rates still further skyward.
If genetic testing becomes a very reliable barometer of future health, and if insurance comapnies aren't allowed to use that data as a factor in their decisions, then insurance as we know it will essentially cease to exist, unless it becomes mandatory and encompasses the entire population.
It would become, in effect, socialized medicine.
If you want to retain your freedom to choose your own insurance plan and carrier (or to opt out of paying for insurance at all), it is very important that insurance companies be allowed access to the same data their customers have.
Yes, some people will find coverage hard to get in that system, but the alternatives are pretty much one of:
A) insurance companies can use genetic screening when writing insurance, making insurance more expensive for some people and, presumably, less expensive for most;
B) insurance becomes a LOT more expensive for anyone who wants to get it, or
C) we go to socialized medicine.
Given those alternatives, I vote for A.
This is such stupid thinking. There is wealth beyond our imaginations sitting right above our heads, if only we'd have the gumption to go get it.
By your way of thinking, Old Europe should have "waited to solve all its problems" instead of sending Columbus westward. Spending all that money on exploration was an obvious waste when there were hungry people to feed.
Expansion will give us the wealth we need to fix our old problems. It will also gives us new ones, but that's just the nature of life. The better we do at the solving problems game, the bigger problems we get. When we fail to solve problems, we die. That's how it works.
I, for one, am quite glad that our ancestors chose to ignore hungry people and explored westward; the new resources we brought online allowed us to feed a larger percentage of the population than ever before, and raise the average standard of living to such a degree that medieval kings would have been jealous of average first-world citizens.
If we try to curl into our little shells and ignore the resources overhead, we will, as a species, die out.