I wonder what the threshold is, where people stop going to theaters? When is the technology good enough, and how many people have to have it, that theaters can no longer do business?
I mean, given a 40 or 50 inch flat-screen HDTV (whether LCD, Plasma, DLP, or whatever), a decent dolby-supporting sound system, and HDTV-quality DVDs... is it enough to give a theater-quality experience? If not, how much higher resolution do the DVDs, and how much bigger do the TVs, have to get before this happens? And then, will it be enough to kill theaters?
I'm not a proponent of eliminating theaters, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for them, either; I go to the theater for the immersive qualities. I'm mostly curious how much better this sort of technology needs to get before Regal Cinemas starts getting nervous.
Sure, IE has some quirks (did you know that you can turn most of these off using the proper DOCTYPE?). But it's not a "pain in the ass" to develop for.
I beg to differ. It is a royal pain in the ass, especially if you're trying to support different versions of IE.
Frankly, unless you're building some fancy site with the absolute latest CSS and Javascript features, IE will render your page *just fine*.
Hardly! IE barely renders straight HTML fine, and heaven forbid if you want to do anything as advanced as -- GASP! -- DHTML.
The biggest consumer for IE -- the biggest, most inflexible consumer for IE -- is corporate... and who the hell is developing web pages without CSS or Javascript anymore? Not corporations, that's for sure. They can barely get by without rendering each page entirely in Flash -- mostly, because IE is so broken and it is such a pain in the ass to write pages for that it is easier to use Flash.
Much of what CSS IE doesn't outright ignore, it renders incorrectly, and it can't handle much of the Javascript DOM API consistently. It'd be one thing if it was at least broken consistently, but it isn't. Javascript is enough of a pain in the ass to develop in without IE's quirks causing more confusion.
So, what's your problem with IE. Name the areas where IE doesn't conform to standards *in standards compliance mode* and tell me why they play such an integral part of your development process that you cannot find a way around them.
You're serious? Read what you just wrote. You're trying to tell me that me being forced to code around bugs in IE isn't a pain in the ass? How do you define "pain in the ass", in your world?
There is simply no excuse for how poorly IE complies to W3C standards, and it isn't even funny to try.
About six months ago, I decided I needed to re-learn functional programming, so I did a project in Haskell and learned that. More or less. I still find Modads awkward, and IO is a total pain in the ass, but all in all, I really like Haskell. However, at some point, I noticed the performance issues; Haskell is pretty slow -- slower than some scripting languages, like Ruby, for a lot of tasks.
So then I looked at OCaml, because OCaml has a reputation for being fast, and it is also a functional programming language that compiles to native executables.
I have to say, my first (and lasting) impression was: WTF? Look at this:
1 + 1 (* Add two ints *) 1. +. 1. (* Add two floats. WTF? Why? Is the compiler so stupid that it can't recognise floats? *) 1 + 1.0 (* Error! *) 1 +. 1.0 (* Error! *) let f x y = x + y (* Define a function *) let rec f x y = f (x-1) y (* Define a recursive function. Again, why? *)
Why do I have to *tell* the compiler that the function is recursive? The compiler is able to do inferrence type checking; why can't it tell that a function is going to recurse? In fact, why is there "let" anyway? Seriously, the compiler should be able to figure these things out. Haskell's compilers do. And did they decide to end lines with two semi-colons just to add keystrokes? Why? Why? Why?
The simple fact is that Ocaml requires the programmer to do a lot of the compiler's work for it. I find this to be the most annoying feature of any programming language. Ocaml gets rid of some stupidities, like variable type declarations, but it adds all of this other stupid syntactic cruft that shouldn't be necessary.
OCaml is popular. It is efficient (lines of code), and it creates fast executables (second only to C). There are a lot of reasons to love it, and I feel obligated to learn it, but I'm having a hard time getting over what superficially appear to be poor language design decisions. So, is there a good reason for the extra syntactic oddness in OCaml, or is it just there because it always has been?
An individual sector on a quality flash card will last for 100,000 writes.
You're entirely correct. A couple of points, though:
The key phrase is "quality". By "quality", you mean SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND based cards, which do have a rating of 100,000. They're also more rare, and about twice as expensive as the most common type, MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND cards. MLC cards only have a rated life of 10,000 cycles, are slower than SLC, and require larger write block sizes, but the odds are that if you're not specifically looking for SLC, you won't get it.
Wear leveling helps, especially in some applications which only use a fraction of any card at a given time, like embedded devices that need to write small amounts of information. In this case, even an MLC card can expect to get millions of write cycles. However, if you're doing a lot of full-card writing, you can exceed the life of the card.
I've had an MLC 256MB SD card for about a year and a half, and I'd consider the amount of use I've given it to be "moderate". It has been used to store MP3s, data files, and photos, with the bulk of the write cycle filling the card to 80% capacity or more, and in the past month it has started to die. If you extrapolate this out with an SLC, that's about 10 years of life for moderate use.
The Trilobite can vacuum around a glass of water (or other beverage) on the floor, whereas the Roomba will mostly just drive over it.
It is debateable whether this is an important feature. Some other aspects of the Trilobite may be less subjective: the Trilobite can recharge itself. The Trilobite is about 5kg; the Roomba is about half the weight at 2.7kg. In my experience with regular, upright vacuum cleaners, heavier generally reflects more power and sturdier construction.
Other than that, both sites are weak on details about bin size, vacuum power, etc. I'd probably shell out extra money for the Trilobite... but $1,800?
That would be a departure from what I see happening in softare development today. There seem to be three dominant camps:
Low level developers. People programming in C; the ones writing Linux and KDE.
Quasi-low level developers. People programming in Java; the one writing much of the business software right now.
High level developers. People programming in scripting languages, like Ruby, Python, PHP, JSP, Javascript.
The second group is the most visible, because business loves them. The first group is the second most visible, because -- while it isn't as "hot" a technology in Monster -- most of the software we use is written at this level. I suspect that the third group is the one that will goose the business community in the future, and will probably eclipse the second group. I'd guess that this is a submarine technology; you don't see many job postings for Ruby programmers, but a heck of a lot of software is being written in it. Even more is being written in PHP, JSP, and Python.
I imagine something like Python or Ruby, or some other high-level language that's easy to write software with, coupled with a decent compiler will be the real winner in the near future. Get some type inferrence for one of these languages, and the ability to compile it (as with Parrot), and group two will mostly go away. Java claims to be a more productive language than C because of higher level features; modern scripting languages are even better at increasing productivity, and their only real limitation is their speed, or lack of it. Just as Java eventually overcame the speed issue, so, too, do I expect some future version of a scripting language.
But, maybe Java will hang in there. If you look at Java 1.5, you see a lot of increased syntactic sugar that has usually been only available in languages like Ruby -- I've heard that this was motivated by similar constructions in C#. Perhaps Java or C# will evolve enough syntactic sugar that hacking out code will be as easy as doing so in Ruby. IMO, it'll take a more radical language change than that provided by 1.5; my biggest complaint about Java these days is that it gets in your way; a large chunk of the code you write for any application is infrastructure, and you write it over, and over, and over (anybody else sick of ActionListeners yet?). I'd like to see the typing system changed to type inferrence... but it is possible.
I doubt, however, that software development is going to evolve into choosing black boxes from a set of tools and plugging them into each other, mostly because to do cover all possible jobs, the framework would have to have access to a huge amount of fine-grained tools, and by that point, you might as well just write the code yourself. Look at the size of the Java APIs. How many packages are there? How many classes? How many methods? This is making our lives, as programmers, easier... how?
That report was bogus. My wife and I have had our Honda hybrid for almost two years now, have 30k miles on it, and our average mileage -- since we bought it -- hovers around 42MPG. Sometimes it dips to 38MPG on the short haul, if we're doing only city driving and running the air conditioner a lot.
One other factor that I don't think gets factored into a lot of these "MPG" reports is the fact that both the Civic hybrid and the Prius shut their engines off at stop lights.
You can't fault the RIAA for trying to soak the maximum value out of everything they do, that's just plain the nature of greed and we all have it to some degree.
My recomendation is to look on ebay for a first or second generation Windows CE devices
A first or second generation PalmOS device with a keyboard would be better for travel. The PalmOS devices could run literally for months without a recharge and some took AAA batteries, which are easily replaced while on the road. WinCE devices -- especially the first and second generation devices -- were notorious battery hogs, and that's bad news when you're on vacation.
Having a built-in keyboard, rather than a foldable external one, is nice, but I'd trade it for extended battery life if I were using on vacation. I'd also rather have a more normal-size, foldable keyboard than a thumb-pad if my primary use of the device is writing a log.
one of the reasons that the Imperial system is moderately convenient for building is that base 12 is divisible by 2,3,4 and 6
I agree, by and large, ternary based systems are moreefficient, and can be more convinient. As you said, there are reasons why these systems are in use; they're used in nautical environments (which is, I believe, where we got our hours, minutes, and seconds from) because 12 and 60 are divisible by three, which allows them to be divided into more equal, integer parts than base-2 systems. However, since our basic numbering system is base-10, base-10 measurements tend to be more practical in day-to-day use because they're easier for humans to multiply and divide.
By the way, I think we agree about the paper issue; I just thought of a couple of other things I wanted to mention, and they aren't in response to your post.
In the case of metric paper measurements, the focus isn't on the fact that it is base-10 -- because it isn't -- but is on the fact that dividing and multiplying is easier. Half an A4 is A5, double a B2 is B1, etc. Because the ratio is the "golden ratio", papers of all sizes share the same proportions, and given sufficient numbers of *any* single size paper, you can create *any* other size of the metric paper. Metric paper is fractal; metric paper is scalable.
Numerous people have mentioned that you can perform the same doubling trick with 8.5x11 and 11x17 paper -- but the proportions aren't the same. 8.5x11 has an ~.77 width-to-height ration; 11x17 has an ~.64. Imperial paper isn't scalable. Imperial paper sizes really have no advantage over metric paper sizes, except for arguable aesthetic values, or for compatability with who you're trading paper with. I'm not arguing that compatability isn't important; I'm merely saying that, objectively, metric paper sizes are superior to imperial sizes.
Yes, but the metric system is designed so that this ratio applies all the way from the smallest size up to the largest. So, two A4 is one A3, two A3 is one A2, two A2 is one A1.
Putting them side-by-side isn't as interesting as cutting them in half, though. I discovered this when I started printing photos from my inkjet. Photo paper is generally available in the stores in limited sizes. I can buy a bunch of A4, and cut it in half, and I have two A5s. Do it again, and I have A6s, which is nearly a 4x6. Best of all, these paper sizes are all standard, which is good, because my printer doesn't like me to define my own paper sizes. With the American system, I have to measure and cut, which is more difficult.
When you discuss the advantages of metric, it really is about convenience[1]. There's nothing that you can do with metric that you can't with the English system; it is just, generally, more difficult to do with the English system. If you don't care about convenience, and you live in the USA, then you probably don't have any reason to use metric.
[1] Of course, using metric in the US imposes a certain amount of inconvenience from compatability issues, but that's another argument.
We have a Honda Civic Hybrid that we bought about 18 months ago. We don't get the 48MPG the EPA tests claim, but our average mileage since we bought the car -- and we've got about 30k on it -- is 43MPG. We have a lot of highway miles on this car; if we were doing mostly city driving, we'd be getting closer to 40MPG.
The mileage you get depends a lot on how you drive it. I doubt that most cars get what their EPA tests claim -- the only difference is that with the hybrids, you know what your mileage is, because all hybrids come with a gas mileage meter, so it is easier to notice that you're not getting the advertised results.
In any case, despite the hyperventalation about hybrids "not living up" to their claims, we've been very happy with ours, and with the gas mileage that we get.
As a rule, zealots aren't worth much when it comes to software development. You're better off with them generating rants and raves than submitting patches.
I will give you that it takes a long time to compile most things, but in my book, it's time well spent.
I wouldn't say "most" things. Certainly, you won't find instant gratification upgrading KDE, but "most" software compiles and installs in just a few minutes. On a fast machine, the significant latency factor is the network, not the compile.
Gentoo supports binary packages as well as source packages. I use the Mozilla and OpenOffice binaries myself. Usually, though, I just run "emerge -Uu world" before I go to bed and don't notice compile times.
The two best things about Gentoo, though, is the ability to have multiple versions of the same package at the same time and the lack of dependancy nightmare. On my headless servers, I use the "-X" USE flag and can install packages like ImageMagick without having X installed. Binary distributions have to provide O(N*N) different packages to support all of the different compile time options and dependancies, or you end up either (a) installing a bunch of software you don't really want, or (b) end up compiling it yourself anyway.
Actually, I was hoping that people would read below the headline. I'd also hope that people would read the other links, rather than picking at the most ambiguous one.
Democrats made a number of mistakes in 2000; the first was running Al Gore as their candidate, but the second was in how they pursued the Florida issue. They should have demanded a recount of the entire state; it would have reeked less of Gerrymandering, and it would have resulted in a win. The NYT was right in saying that the mistakes were more wide-spread than just the counties that the Democrats picked out.
However, if you poke around even a little bit, you find numerousarticles talking about this issue. Sure, it is always "BUSH WOULD HAVE WON IF GORE'S RECOUNT HAD BET ALLOWED!!!! (but he might have lost if they'd have recounted the entire state)", but the studies are still there saying that he probably (which is the same as "maybe" if you don't like the results) would have lost.
I have a little more faith that people will read the content, not just the headlines.
By the way, you didn't "dig" at all, much less "any further". Four links down from the headline you chose to focus on was a link to the consortium study that showed that Gore won. Just so you don't miss it againhere are some more links to various sources. Much of that is raw data of the research, but some of the links I originally provided reported the results of the research. At least one of the links provide a number of different interpretations of the data, all of which show that Al Gore would have won.
Aw, what the heck... since some people are incapable of following links more than one deep:
This is exactly the tactic used in Florida, where Republican-rich areas were tallied accurately (with hanging and dimpled chads being counted), while in poorer, minority-rich areas hanging and dimpled chad ballots were discarded.
Oh, yes, he was elected. As spelled in the Constitution, by representatives sent to Electorate College by all of the States of the Union.
This is a commonly believed lie.
He was not elected. The election results in Florida were miscounted, as has been reported by a number of independant (as well as biased but detailed and cross-referenced) sources.
This isn't about theGore winning the popular vote by over a half million votes. It isn't even about the 11,000 individual complaints to the Justice Department about voting rights violations in Florida.
This is about the fact that Al Gore legally won Florida, and therefore the 2000 presidential election.
The last five computers I've installed Linux on (four of which being laptops, for christsake) have had no problems configuring either the soundcard or the video card. Or anything else, for that matter (except ACPI on the newer laptops). In fact, the sound card is the one device that I haven't had to "configure" in the past three years.
Yes, it can be hard to install hardware on Linux, I'm sure. I spent a good two hours trying to get a PocketPC device to connect to a Windows95 machine about six months ago; it was a nightmare of install, reboot, and reinstall -- and they were both Microsoft products! I certainly hope that Linux never becomes as "easy" to install hardware on as Windows.
Oh, better yet... maybe I should write a long tirade for an online news agency about how bad Windows is at doing things that Linux has been cabable of since kernel version 2.2, and there'll be someone who'll comment that it is a wake-up call for Microsoft to freeze development on Longhorn and fix these problems.
Man, I wish more people had boarded the clue-train when it rolled through.
But don't make decisions like that for the rest of us.
You've got it backward, buck-o. When you apply censorship, you're making the decision for "the rest of us".
"When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution;
when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order,
and morals."
The other advantage of the CLI in Unix specifically is that a *lot* of stuff is scriptable, since it's designed around command line arguments and pipes.
And there, my friend, is the magic part of it all. This is well known about the Unix CLI tools, and GUI proponents always seem to either ignore, forget, or fail to grasp the importance of this.
With the CLI we can tell application A to do something and send the output to application B, which does something, and sends the output to application C... and so on. You can do a little of this with dcop under KDE, and that feature alone makes KDE my favorite desktop.
What exactly is the difference between 1) using a CLI and then writing "for x in..." or 2) using a GUI and then writing a short script?
None, and that's my point. For any GUI to be sufficiently flexible that you can do things as easily as you can with a shell, it must include a scripting language. That's all an XTerm is, BTW. A GUI app running (and only running) a script interpreter.
GUIs are insufficient except for the most basic tasks. Any sufficiently complex task either requires (a) scripting, or (b) a lot of time.
I agree with your sentiment that Bash (or CSH, or their derivatives) aren't the best scripting languages. They're useful mainly because they're entrenched. Most serious CLI users have a favorite, more advanced, scripting language they prefer to use, such as Ruby, Perl, or Python. Take a look at Bean Shell (BSH). It is a Java-ish scripting language and shell environment, and you have access to the full Java API (including Swing). This makes it handy to script together GUIs. Personally, I don't like the language much, but a lot of people do, and you might, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, given a 40 or 50 inch flat-screen HDTV (whether LCD, Plasma, DLP, or whatever), a decent dolby-supporting sound system, and HDTV-quality DVDs... is it enough to give a theater-quality experience? If not, how much higher resolution do the DVDs, and how much bigger do the TVs, have to get before this happens? And then, will it be enough to kill theaters?
I'm not a proponent of eliminating theaters, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for them, either; I go to the theater for the immersive qualities. I'm mostly curious how much better this sort of technology needs to get before Regal Cinemas starts getting nervous.
I beg to differ. It is a royal pain in the ass, especially if you're trying to support different versions of IE.
Hardly! IE barely renders straight HTML fine, and heaven forbid if you want to do anything as advanced as -- GASP! -- DHTML.
The biggest consumer for IE -- the biggest, most inflexible consumer for IE -- is corporate ... and who the hell is developing web pages without CSS or Javascript anymore? Not corporations, that's for sure. They can barely get by without rendering each page entirely in Flash -- mostly, because IE is so broken and it is such a pain in the ass to write pages for that it is easier to use Flash.
Much of what CSS IE doesn't outright ignore, it renders incorrectly, and it can't handle much of the Javascript DOM API consistently. It'd be one thing if it was at least broken consistently, but it isn't. Javascript is enough of a pain in the ass to develop in without IE's quirks causing more confusion.
You're serious? Read what you just wrote. You're trying to tell me that me being forced to code around bugs in IE isn't a pain in the ass? How do you define "pain in the ass", in your world?
There is simply no excuse for how poorly IE complies to W3C standards, and it isn't even funny to try.
About six months ago, I decided I needed to re-learn functional programming, so I did a project in Haskell and learned that. More or less. I still find Modads awkward, and IO is a total pain in the ass, but all in all, I really like Haskell. However, at some point, I noticed the performance issues; Haskell is pretty slow -- slower than some scripting languages, like Ruby, for a lot of tasks.
So then I looked at OCaml, because OCaml has a reputation for being fast, and it is also a functional programming language that compiles to native executables.
I have to say, my first (and lasting) impression was: WTF? Look at this:
Why do I have to *tell* the compiler that the function is recursive? The compiler is able to do inferrence type checking; why can't it tell that a function is going to recurse? In fact, why is there "let" anyway? Seriously, the compiler should be able to figure these things out. Haskell's compilers do. And did they decide to end lines with two semi-colons just to add keystrokes? Why? Why? Why?
The simple fact is that Ocaml requires the programmer to do a lot of the compiler's work for it. I find this to be the most annoying feature of any programming language. Ocaml gets rid of some stupidities, like variable type declarations, but it adds all of this other stupid syntactic cruft that shouldn't be necessary.
OCaml is popular. It is efficient (lines of code), and it creates fast executables (second only to C). There are a lot of reasons to love it, and I feel obligated to learn it, but I'm having a hard time getting over what superficially appear to be poor language design decisions. So, is there a good reason for the extra syntactic oddness in OCaml, or is it just there because it always has been?
You're entirely correct. A couple of points, though:
- The key phrase is "quality". By "quality", you mean SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND based cards, which do have a rating of 100,000. They're also more rare, and about twice as expensive as the most common type, MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND cards. MLC cards only have a rated life of 10,000 cycles, are slower than SLC, and require larger write block sizes, but the odds are that if you're not specifically looking for SLC, you won't get it.
- Wear leveling helps, especially in some applications which only use a fraction of any card at a given time, like embedded devices that need to write small amounts of information. In this case, even an MLC card can expect to get millions of write cycles. However, if you're doing a lot of full-card writing, you can exceed the life of the card.
I've had an MLC 256MB SD card for about a year and a half, and I'd consider the amount of use I've given it to be "moderate". It has been used to store MP3s, data files, and photos, with the bulk of the write cycle filling the card to 80% capacity or more, and in the past month it has started to die. If you extrapolate this out with an SLC, that's about 10 years of life for moderate use.It is debateable whether this is an important feature. Some other aspects of the Trilobite may be less subjective: the Trilobite can recharge itself. The Trilobite is about 5kg; the Roomba is about half the weight at 2.7kg. In my experience with regular, upright vacuum cleaners, heavier generally reflects more power and sturdier construction.
Other than that, both sites are weak on details about bin size, vacuum power, etc. I'd probably shell out extra money for the Trilobite... but $1,800?
- Low level developers. People programming in C; the ones writing Linux and KDE.
- Quasi-low level developers. People programming in Java; the one writing much of the business software right now.
- High level developers. People programming in scripting languages, like Ruby, Python, PHP, JSP, Javascript.
The second group is the most visible, because business loves them. The first group is the second most visible, because -- while it isn't as "hot" a technology in Monster -- most of the software we use is written at this level. I suspect that the third group is the one that will goose the business community in the future, and will probably eclipse the second group. I'd guess that this is a submarine technology; you don't see many job postings for Ruby programmers, but a heck of a lot of software is being written in it. Even more is being written in PHP, JSP, and Python.I imagine something like Python or Ruby, or some other high-level language that's easy to write software with, coupled with a decent compiler will be the real winner in the near future. Get some type inferrence for one of these languages, and the ability to compile it (as with Parrot), and group two will mostly go away. Java claims to be a more productive language than C because of higher level features; modern scripting languages are even better at increasing productivity, and their only real limitation is their speed, or lack of it. Just as Java eventually overcame the speed issue, so, too, do I expect some future version of a scripting language.
But, maybe Java will hang in there. If you look at Java 1.5, you see a lot of increased syntactic sugar that has usually been only available in languages like Ruby -- I've heard that this was motivated by similar constructions in C#. Perhaps Java or C# will evolve enough syntactic sugar that hacking out code will be as easy as doing so in Ruby. IMO, it'll take a more radical language change than that provided by 1.5; my biggest complaint about Java these days is that it gets in your way; a large chunk of the code you write for any application is infrastructure, and you write it over, and over, and over (anybody else sick of ActionListeners yet?). I'd like to see the typing system changed to type inferrence... but it is possible.
I doubt, however, that software development is going to evolve into choosing black boxes from a set of tools and plugging them into each other, mostly because to do cover all possible jobs, the framework would have to have access to a huge amount of fine-grained tools, and by that point, you might as well just write the code yourself. Look at the size of the Java APIs. How many packages are there? How many classes? How many methods? This is making our lives, as programmers, easier... how?
One other factor that I don't think gets factored into a lot of these "MPG" reports is the fact that both the Civic hybrid and the Prius shut their engines off at stop lights.
Hey, that's my idea. Gimme 5 cents.
A first or second generation PalmOS device with a keyboard would be better for travel. The PalmOS devices could run literally for months without a recharge and some took AAA batteries, which are easily replaced while on the road. WinCE devices -- especially the first and second generation devices -- were notorious battery hogs, and that's bad news when you're on vacation.
Having a built-in keyboard, rather than a foldable external one, is nice, but I'd trade it for extended battery life if I were using on vacation. I'd also rather have a more normal-size, foldable keyboard than a thumb-pad if my primary use of the device is writing a log.
I agree, by and large, ternary based systems are more efficient, and can be more convinient. As you said, there are reasons why these systems are in use; they're used in nautical environments (which is, I believe, where we got our hours, minutes, and seconds from) because 12 and 60 are divisible by three, which allows them to be divided into more equal, integer parts than base-2 systems. However, since our basic numbering system is base-10, base-10 measurements tend to be more practical in day-to-day use because they're easier for humans to multiply and divide.
By the way, I think we agree about the paper issue; I just thought of a couple of other things I wanted to mention, and they aren't in response to your post.
In the case of metric paper measurements, the focus isn't on the fact that it is base-10 -- because it isn't -- but is on the fact that dividing and multiplying is easier. Half an A4 is A5, double a B2 is B1, etc. Because the ratio is the "golden ratio", papers of all sizes share the same proportions, and given sufficient numbers of *any* single size paper, you can create *any* other size of the metric paper. Metric paper is fractal; metric paper is scalable.
Numerous people have mentioned that you can perform the same doubling trick with 8.5x11 and 11x17 paper -- but the proportions aren't the same. 8.5x11 has an ~.77 width-to-height ration; 11x17 has an ~.64. Imperial paper isn't scalable. Imperial paper sizes really have no advantage over metric paper sizes, except for arguable aesthetic values, or for compatability with who you're trading paper with. I'm not arguing that compatability isn't important; I'm merely saying that, objectively, metric paper sizes are superior to imperial sizes.
Putting them side-by-side isn't as interesting as cutting them in half, though. I discovered this when I started printing photos from my inkjet. Photo paper is generally available in the stores in limited sizes. I can buy a bunch of A4, and cut it in half, and I have two A5s. Do it again, and I have A6s, which is nearly a 4x6. Best of all, these paper sizes are all standard, which is good, because my printer doesn't like me to define my own paper sizes. With the American system, I have to measure and cut, which is more difficult.
When you discuss the advantages of metric, it really is about convenience[1]. There's nothing that you can do with metric that you can't with the English system; it is just, generally, more difficult to do with the English system. If you don't care about convenience, and you live in the USA, then you probably don't have any reason to use metric.
[1] Of course, using metric in the US imposes a certain amount of inconvenience from compatability issues, but that's another argument.
The mileage you get depends a lot on how you drive it. I doubt that most cars get what their EPA tests claim -- the only difference is that with the hybrids, you know what your mileage is, because all hybrids come with a gas mileage meter, so it is easier to notice that you're not getting the advertised results.
In any case, despite the hyperventalation about hybrids "not living up" to their claims, we've been very happy with ours, and with the gas mileage that we get.
As a rule, zealots aren't worth much when it comes to software development. You're better off with them generating rants and raves than submitting patches.
That's because they've learned that if they report any rumor that is even close to true, Apple will smack them with a cease-and-desist.
Well, Gentoo zealots can rant and rave like children, too, and Debian zealots assume that Gentoo doesn't support binary packages :-)
I wouldn't say "most" things. Certainly, you won't find instant gratification upgrading KDE, but "most" software compiles and installs in just a few minutes. On a fast machine, the significant latency factor is the network, not the compile.
Gentoo supports binary packages as well as source packages. I use the Mozilla and OpenOffice binaries myself. Usually, though, I just run "emerge -Uu world" before I go to bed and don't notice compile times.
The two best things about Gentoo, though, is the ability to have multiple versions of the same package at the same time and the lack of dependancy nightmare. On my headless servers, I use the "-X" USE flag and can install packages like ImageMagick without having X installed. Binary distributions have to provide O(N*N) different packages to support all of the different compile time options and dependancies, or you end up either (a) installing a bunch of software you don't really want, or (b) end up compiling it yourself anyway.
--- SER
A really big comet passes close to Earth, creating one really big tide lasting 40 days and 40 nights, peaking on Ararat.
Theory #2:
A bunch of ancient Israelites were sitting around bored one day, and one of them says: "You know what would be really funny?"
Theory #3:
Noah was already hearing voices; how much more crazy do you need to be to build a boat on the top of a mountain?
Democrats made a number of mistakes in 2000; the first was running Al Gore as their candidate, but the second was in how they pursued the Florida issue. They should have demanded a recount of the entire state; it would have reeked less of Gerrymandering, and it would have resulted in a win. The NYT was right in saying that the mistakes were more wide-spread than just the counties that the Democrats picked out.
However, if you poke around even a little bit, you find numerous articles talking about this issue. Sure, it is always "BUSH WOULD HAVE WON IF GORE'S RECOUNT HAD BET ALLOWED!!!! (but he might have lost if they'd have recounted the entire state)", but the studies are still there saying that he probably (which is the same as "maybe" if you don't like the results) would have lost.
I have a little more faith that people will read the content, not just the headlines.
By the way, you didn't "dig" at all, much less "any further". Four links down from the headline you chose to focus on was a link to the consortium study that showed that Gore won. Just so you don't miss it again here are some more links to various sources. Much of that is raw data of the research, but some of the links I originally provided reported the results of the research. At least one of the links provide a number of different interpretations of the data, all of which show that Al Gore would have won.
Aw, what the heck... since some people are incapable of following links more than one deep:
- Slate
- Washington Post
- Common Dreams
Plus an entire slew of articles from the NYT about the discrepancies in the Florida vote.This is exactly the tactic used in Florida, where Republican-rich areas were tallied accurately (with hanging and dimpled chads being counted), while in poorer, minority-rich areas hanging and dimpled chad ballots were discarded.
Don't stop there!
He's going to have to stop using computers with Intel CPUs in them, because the US military is using them too.
Crap... he's going to have to stop using cotton; I hear the US soldiers currently in Iraq are wearing it!
Augh! US military breath air! The only thing is for him to stop breathing. Well, it was all wasted oxygen anyway.
This is a commonly believed lie.
He was not elected. The election results in Florida were miscounted, as has been reported by a number of independant (as well as biased but detailed and cross-referenced) sources.
This isn't about theGore winning the popular vote by over a half million votes. It isn't even about the 11,000 individual complaints to the Justice Department about voting rights violations in Florida.
This is about the fact that Al Gore legally won Florida, and therefore the 2000 presidential election.
The last five computers I've installed Linux on (four of which being laptops, for christsake) have had no problems configuring either the soundcard or the video card. Or anything else, for that matter (except ACPI on the newer laptops). In fact, the sound card is the one device that I haven't had to "configure" in the past three years.
Yes, it can be hard to install hardware on Linux, I'm sure. I spent a good two hours trying to get a PocketPC device to connect to a Windows95 machine about six months ago; it was a nightmare of install, reboot, and reinstall -- and they were both Microsoft products! I certainly hope that Linux never becomes as "easy" to install hardware on as Windows.
Oh, better yet... maybe I should write a long tirade for an online news agency about how bad Windows is at doing things that Linux has been cabable of since kernel version 2.2, and there'll be someone who'll comment that it is a wake-up call for Microsoft to freeze development on Longhorn and fix these problems.
Man, I wish more people had boarded the clue-train when it rolled through.
You've got it backward, buck-o. When you apply censorship, you're making the decision for "the rest of us".
And there, my friend, is the magic part of it all. This is well known about the Unix CLI tools, and GUI proponents always seem to either ignore, forget, or fail to grasp the importance of this.
With the CLI we can tell application A to do something and send the output to application B, which does something, and sends the output to application C... and so on. You can do a little of this with dcop under KDE, and that feature alone makes KDE my favorite desktop.
None, and that's my point. For any GUI to be sufficiently flexible that you can do things as easily as you can with a shell, it must include a scripting language. That's all an XTerm is, BTW. A GUI app running (and only running) a script interpreter.
GUIs are insufficient except for the most basic tasks. Any sufficiently complex task either requires (a) scripting, or (b) a lot of time.
I agree with your sentiment that Bash (or CSH, or their derivatives) aren't the best scripting languages. They're useful mainly because they're entrenched. Most serious CLI users have a favorite, more advanced, scripting language they prefer to use, such as Ruby, Perl, or Python. Take a look at Bean Shell (BSH). It is a Java-ish scripting language and shell environment, and you have access to the full Java API (including Swing). This makes it handy to script together GUIs. Personally, I don't like the language much, but a lot of people do, and you might, too.