The US government is largely responsible for the myth of how dangerous hydrogen is. It was pretty easy to hype up the accident, because we had good footage of it, and it was a fairly spectacular event. The US made a big stir about the "disaster" primarily because it was trying to discredit hydrogen; at the time, political tensions were high (WWII started two years later), and, more importantly, the USA had a monopoly on helium, the only alternative to hydrogen. Everybody had hydrogen, but you could only get helium in large quantities from the US. They did such a good job that, even today, 66 years later, whenever anybody talks about using hydrogen in consumer devices, the common reaction is some remark about the Hindenburg.
Sorry... I'm not anti-HAM. If I were 30 or 40 years older, I'd probably be one myself.
My only, admittedly, passing intererest in this topic is where HAM radio intersects with improved broadband services. Being a person who always, somehow, manages to live somewhere without broadband, I'm keenly sensitive to not being able to get it. The suggestion that we should hold back new technologies with broad appeal and usefulness simply to allow old technologies with niche usefulness to be used triggers my sarcasm reflex.
I'm herding cows, you're herding sheep, and we want the same land.
And when the Axis of Evil detonates a series of EMP devices that fries all of your delicate, fragile electronics, all you damned HAM radio operators will be pretty sorry that you drove the telegraph operators out of business. You'll be whining because we don't have a network of telegraph lines and volunteers who can understand morse code and coordinate emergency services.
Durned upstarts.
(Speaking as someone who doesn't know any HAM operators, doesn't use HAM radios, and who's perfectly capable of taking care of myself in any short-term power outage.)
To paint this as some sort of republican vendetta is absolutely idiotic, and if this guy doesn't understand that when he's actually running, then obviously he's too stupid to be governor.
This would be more compelling if it came from someone who could tell the difference between a woman and a man.
I briefly ventured into Sony land, with the purchase of a Clie PEG T665C. After six months, I gave it to my wife and went back to Palm.
Sony gets points for innovation, and for forcing Palm off their lazy butts. But I find Sony products to be poorly designed, compared to their competitors, and their insistance on using their own proprietary formats really pisses me off. I wasn't that impressed with the memory sticks, either -- they're comparitively expensive, and (almost) nobody uses them but Sony.
That said, I didn't have any technical problems with memory sticks.
And, the more pictures you take, the higher your chances of snapping a gem by sheer luck (I know skill plays no part in my photography).
Hear, hear! Everybody in my extended family thinks I'm a great photographer. What they don't realize is that I burn through film at an unbelievable rate, and one shot in a couple of rolls is worth blowing up. Thank god for the Canon EOS 10D; now I'm doing it even more, and less expensively.
Someday, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to achieve good shots through skill, rather than volume. Until then, I embrace my new CCD overloards, and...
SSH is indeed secure shell; it is a replacement (among other things) for telnet. It creates encrypted connections between two machines.
The neat thing, in this case, is that SSH is more or less ubiquitous on servers. Konqueror has a KIO plugin that uses SSH to simulate a shared filesystem, so you can have a secure, encrypted, browsable connection to practically any server that is running SSHD and that you have an account on.
The way this recently saved my onions is this: at the office, I'm behind a corporate firewall. Due to the usual PHB shenanigans, almost every port is closed except 80 (http) and, perversely, 23 (telnet). This means that I had no way, short of writing a custom CGI for my web server, of transfering my files. I set a flag in my outside SSH server config telling it to also listen on port 23 (we don't even install telnet anymore, for security reasons, so the port is free); then at work, I told konqueror to browse to:
fish://me@myserver.com:23/
and, voila... I was browsing my server's filesystem.
Incidentally, I can also plug in my digital camera, and browse the images on the camera with:
camera:/
or browse an audio CD with:
audiocd:/
-- which also allows me to rip songs from the CD by dragging them out of the Konqueror window onto the desktop, or wherever.
KIO plugins are extremely nice. They turn any supported protocol into a URL. They also allow any KDE application to do the same thing, no special tricks required. I haven't tried actually editing an image directly on the camera yet, but I expect it would work.
Jabber is to email as IRC is to usenet. Usenet is non-realtime and has message persistance on the server. IRC is realtime, and no server-side persistance.
IANAJE (Jabber Expert), but I believe that Jabber is missing the metaphors that would make it suitable for email. Like IRC, Jabber messages are ephemeral -- you get one from the server, and the server is done with it. Your client may cache the history, but there's no server-side persistence, per se. There are also no mechanisms for organizing, fetching parts of messages, or other message organizing stuff that you get with, say IMAP.
That said, there is a Jabber-SMTP gateway that translates from SMTP -> Jabber and vice versa, but this basically just lets you use your Jabber IM client as an interface to email. It doesn't address the issues that people want a new SMTP protocol for.
Jabber is extensible, and I don't know if it is extensible enough to provide more control over how the server stores messages -- which is what it would need to replace a mail server. However, if it did have these extensions, then Jabber would be a great solution. It would blur the lines between IM and email to the point where email might just disappear.
Note that when I talk about Jabber messages, I'm speaking of that category of messages which most resemble email: they have subjects as well as content, and can also have attachments.
Hm. Well, I served in the active duty military -- US Army, Infantry -- and have lived overseas while not in the military. My younger brother is currently stationed in Iraq. And unless you've lived in Iran yourself, then you're in no position to foam at the mouth about how oppressive it is over there. Furthermore, it doesn't matter what freedoms the Iranians don't have (except to the Iranians) -- if I kick you in the nuts, is it OK as long as I kick someone else harder?
Patriotism does not equate to blindly following a moron, just because the supreme court elected him president. I really hope you don't honestly believe that you have to agree with the president to qualify as a patriot.
One good thing about Bush: he's the first president we've had that empowered me to believe that I could be president too. I used to think that you had to be specially qualified to be president; now, I think: "If that idiot could do the job, so could I."
In the United States a Corporation has the rights of an individual.
And yet, corporations don't have the responsibilities of an individual. We have the death penalty for individuals, but not for corporations.
This has always seemed rather backwards to me. A single individual can cause a lot of trouble and damage, especially in an age of nuclear and biological weapons. However, the amount of damage that can be caused by a corporation is much greater, yet the punishments for corporations in America are effectively limited to fines.
Survival of the fittest seems to be fine for businesses, but individuals are much more limited in their behavior.
... and yet you force candidates that criticize America's president to resign. While this still makes your country less of a loser than we who elected the idiot in the first place, I'm still rather baffled that a bunch of liberal Canadian democrats (as your post implies) would supplicate themselves so prostrately before our American dictator.
Any adult who believes that children won't find a way to circumvent these technologies faster than you can say "Wozniac" is deluding themselves. I don't know about the rest of you, but in high-school, my friends and I spent amazing amounts of time finding work-arounds for adult-imposed restrictions.
Pause a moment, and reflect. I'm not saying that this is a good thing; children certainly need privacy, too. Children don't have the same rights as adults, and often for very good reasons. The problem is that most people, IMHO, can't balance their checkbooks let alone raise a child reasonably well.
To your claims of "severe reliability" issue, I say "Pah". I've running multiple heavily used Subversion repositories for about two years now, and haven't lost the first bit of data.
As I've said before, elsewhere, Subversion is an excellent, robust tool for environments where centralized servers are desired (read: corporate environments). It is not (currently) the ideal tool for projects such as Linux, which is highly branched and has numerous servers that cross-pollinate each other. darcs, and arch, are better tools for projects such as these, although they tend to lack much of the elegance of the Subversion design.
Furthermore, I'm going to nebulously claim that darcs is better than arch. When in Rome...
I can't (or won't) comment on his mistakes with other file formats, but he's apparently pretty ignorant about.tgz.
First off, the entire "metadata" section is FUBAR. tgz isn't a package management system; it is a packaging system. Something like portage is needed on top of it; comparing tgz to rpm is like comparing yaml to jabber. Therefore, entire sections in this "comparison" should be marked N/A, not "no".
What this with "documentation file specially marked?" tar tzf | grep. Duh.
Does this mean that, after 48 hours, you can keep using it at 78% efficiency forever (or until your 60,000 mile check-up -- whatever)? Or does this mean that after 48 hours of use, you have to have the thing replaced?
I'm wondering what the implications of this 48 hour degredation are. Is 78% enough to keep using it? Could you put two of these inline and get 95% efficiency?
Oh, and I can confirm that you don't need a subscription to view the article, but having rudimentary knowledge of chemistry (which I don't) would help. Otherwise, the article makes a good somnulant.
Most people are dumb, and want to stay dumb. If you make it easy for them to stay dumb, they will pay you money for it.
I agree with you. Really, I do. I had a friend who was fond of adding the addendum that, if you assume that the average person is dumb, then it is implied that about 50% of them are even more stupid than that.
However: do you know how to repair your car? How about the electrical wiring in your house? Your plumbing? Garbage disposal or washing machine? How about the central air, or the oil heater? If you do, then you're a better woman/man than I. If you don't then you are, by your own logic, dumb. You're paying someone else what are most probably obscene prices to fix something that you could easily fix yourself, if you simply weren't too lazy to go figure it out. A lot of these things aren't rocket science.
That's me in a nutshell. Some things, I have enough interest in to invest the time to do research and make sure I have enough information to make an informed decision. For everything else, I choose that which is most convenient (within reason). I use telephones a lot, but I'd honestly rather spend the few hours it would take to research a new phone purchase doing something -- almost anything else. Heck, I paid someone to paint my house one summer, and I've painted houses before.
However, this, in itself, is not sufficient to prove the theory that people are dumb, or even lazy. Myself, I rely on empirical evidence for proof of that.
Ugh. I wish I had the time to learn more about this stuff.
Relative to other catalysts, the Raney-NiSn can perform for long time periods (at least 48 hours) and at lower temperatures (roughly 225 degrees Celsius).
Raney-NiSn can perform for at least 48 hours... before what? Before it has to be replaced? Before it has to rested? What happens after 48 hours?
I read Zach's article, and was vaguely disturbed. I really like Gentoo, primarily because of the easy systems-administration, but also in large part because Gentoo penguins are cool.
Anyway, by the end of the article, I had started wondering whether my "investment" in Gentoo was mislead; I contribute ebuilds, and not an insignificant amount of time submitting bug reports, and so on. What if the leaders of Gentoo were sitting in a dark, smoky room somewhere, secretly making hoards of cash off my labors and contributions?? Yegods! I could be being ripped off!
After the initial wave of panic, I got to thinking about it: I don't really care what people are doing with Gentoo. I use Gentoo because I believe it is the best distribution; they keep my most important packages up-to-date, Gentoo is easy to administer, and they have at least the illusion of being an open community. Nothing they're doing is hurting me, I'm running Gentoo on three or four machines, and I don't pay anything to use it. In fact, I consider my contributions to the project to be my "payment". If "they" can figure out a way of making money off their efforts, and it doesn't impact my use of Gentoo, then more power to them.
Now, if I were Zach, and I'd contributed that much time and effort, I'd probably be pissed too. At some level of contribution, you sort of expect to be included in the reaping of whatever nebulous profits are being gleaned. I think it is probable that Daniel, et al, are acting unethically -- being unwilling to acknowledge someone else's significant contributions is bad form (old chap) -- so at this point I wouldn't trust Daniel as far as I could throw him, but ultimately, it has little bearing on my use of Gentoo.
Personally, I think commercial software is doomed; software engineering will still be profitable, but it'll be more as service/support/specialized solutions providers. That's not very germane to the discussion, except that in my hypothetical future, throwing away the talent of a willing, and proven, contributor is like throwing away money.
Linux is a much better learning environment than Windows, simply because of how open it is.
I learned on an Apple II, starting with Basic. Basic had a low cost of entry, so it sucked me in pretty quickly. Soon, I was coding in 6502 assembly, optimizing critical pieces of code. The memory map was fixed, and the entire machine was easy to dig into and poke around it. In fact, 'peek' and 'poke' were the terms for mucking about with the guts of the machine. This was an amazingly useful learning process in a number of ways. First, I learned a lot about how computers work, pretty close to the metal. It also gave me a huge appreciation of high level languages.
Today, I'd recommend starting coders with a high level language, such as Ruby, and encourage them to recode critical sections in assembly as a linked library. This isn't much different than how I'd program commercially, only I'd only drop down one level to a compiled language, such as Haskell or C for the critical sections; most compilers can do a better job at optimization than I could coding the assembly by hand, anyway.
It is easier to do this with Linux than Windows. There's less OS overhead, and more variety in tools. It is still a much more complex system than an Apple II, but is much more open than Windows.
I read a review of this in which the reviewer wasn't impressed with the camera. He had the feeling that, while the technology is going in the right direction, Kodak rushed the job; the camera is big, heavy, lacking features, and the photos aren't as good as you'd expect them to be.
Despite this, I was tempted by that Kodak, until I saw the price. It is definitely in the pro price range.
Ah. Well, I think I spent more than many would, but not as much as some. The price was less than double the price of my last two cameras, so I don't consider that extreme. Maybe a bit excessive, although the 10D is worth much more than I paid for it, so I'm not complaining.;-)
In any case, I'm not the only person buying these 10Ds. They're consistently back-ordered for 4-8 weeks, and you can't find them on store shelves. But I agree with your sentiment; my mom isn't going to be buying one of these any time soon.
The CF2 spec rates the interface up to 16MB/s, which is half of the USB2/Firewire spec, but is much faster than the 3MB/s that you report for the Cornice drives. CNet reports transfer rates of 13.3Mbps for IBM's 1GB MicroDrive, which is about 1.5MB/s -- about half that of the Cornice drives. So, it looks as if the CF interface won't be a bottleneck for the drives, for a while, at least.
I'd say that the fact that the Cornice drives don't use a standard interface is a serious limitation, since it doesn't gain them anything in speed and keeps the drives from being used in a huge array of CF-capable devices. 3GB MicroDrives are available, so the density of the Cornice drives isn't anything special. The drives themselves are about twice as fast as the current crop of microdrives, but the real selling point of the Cornice drives appears to be the price point.
Slashdot Mirror
The US government is largely responsible for the myth of how dangerous hydrogen is. It was pretty easy to hype up the accident, because we had good footage of it, and it was a fairly spectacular event. The US made a big stir about the "disaster" primarily because it was trying to discredit hydrogen; at the time, political tensions were high (WWII started two years later), and, more importantly, the USA had a monopoly on helium, the only alternative to hydrogen. Everybody had hydrogen, but you could only get helium in large quantities from the US. They did such a good job that, even today, 66 years later, whenever anybody talks about using hydrogen in consumer devices, the common reaction is some remark about the Hindenburg.
My only, admittedly, passing intererest in this topic is where HAM radio intersects with improved broadband services. Being a person who always, somehow, manages to live somewhere without broadband, I'm keenly sensitive to not being able to get it. The suggestion that we should hold back new technologies with broad appeal and usefulness simply to allow old technologies with niche usefulness to be used triggers my sarcasm reflex.
I'm herding cows, you're herding sheep, and we want the same land.
Durned upstarts.
(Speaking as someone who doesn't know any HAM operators, doesn't use HAM radios, and who's perfectly capable of taking care of myself in any short-term power outage.)
This would be more compelling if it came from someone who could tell the difference between a woman and a man.
Sony gets points for innovation, and for forcing Palm off their lazy butts. But I find Sony products to be poorly designed, compared to their competitors, and their insistance on using their own proprietary formats really pisses me off. I wasn't that impressed with the memory sticks, either -- they're comparitively expensive, and (almost) nobody uses them but Sony.
That said, I didn't have any technical problems with memory sticks.
To each his own.
Hear, hear! Everybody in my extended family thinks I'm a great photographer. What they don't realize is that I burn through film at an unbelievable rate, and one shot in a couple of rolls is worth blowing up. Thank god for the Canon EOS 10D; now I'm doing it even more, and less expensively.
Someday, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to achieve good shots through skill, rather than volume. Until then, I embrace my new CCD overloards, and...
Oh, sorry.
SSH is indeed secure shell; it is a replacement (among other things) for telnet. It creates encrypted connections between two machines.
The neat thing, in this case, is that SSH is more or less ubiquitous on servers. Konqueror has a KIO plugin that uses SSH to simulate a shared filesystem, so you can have a secure, encrypted, browsable connection to practically any server that is running SSHD and that you have an account on.
The way this recently saved my onions is this: at the office, I'm behind a corporate firewall. Due to the usual PHB shenanigans, almost every port is closed except 80 (http) and, perversely, 23 (telnet). This means that I had no way, short of writing a custom CGI for my web server, of transfering my files. I set a flag in my outside SSH server config telling it to also listen on port 23 (we don't even install telnet anymore, for security reasons, so the port is free); then at work, I told konqueror to browse to:
fish://me@myserver.com:23/
and, voila... I was browsing my server's filesystem.
Incidentally, I can also plug in my digital camera, and browse the images on the camera with:
camera:/
or browse an audio CD with:
audiocd:/-- which also allows me to rip songs from the CD by dragging them out of the Konqueror window onto the desktop, or wherever.
KIO plugins are extremely nice. They turn any supported protocol into a URL. They also allow any KDE application to do the same thing, no special tricks required. I haven't tried actually editing an image directly on the camera yet, but I expect it would work.
IANAJE (Jabber Expert), but I believe that Jabber is missing the metaphors that would make it suitable for email. Like IRC, Jabber messages are ephemeral -- you get one from the server, and the server is done with it. Your client may cache the history, but there's no server-side persistence, per se. There are also no mechanisms for organizing, fetching parts of messages, or other message organizing stuff that you get with, say IMAP.
That said, there is a Jabber-SMTP gateway that translates from SMTP -> Jabber and vice versa, but this basically just lets you use your Jabber IM client as an interface to email. It doesn't address the issues that people want a new SMTP protocol for.
Jabber is extensible, and I don't know if it is extensible enough to provide more control over how the server stores messages -- which is what it would need to replace a mail server. However, if it did have these extensions, then Jabber would be a great solution. It would blur the lines between IM and email to the point where email might just disappear.
Note that when I talk about Jabber messages, I'm speaking of that category of messages which most resemble email: they have subjects as well as content, and can also have attachments.
KDE can. Mmmm. KIO plugins. Yum!
Patriotism does not equate to blindly following a moron, just because the supreme court elected him president. I really hope you don't honestly believe that you have to agree with the president to qualify as a patriot.
One good thing about Bush: he's the first president we've had that empowered me to believe that I could be president too. I used to think that you had to be specially qualified to be president; now, I think: "If that idiot could do the job, so could I."
And yet, corporations don't have the responsibilities of an individual. We have the death penalty for individuals, but not for corporations.
This has always seemed rather backwards to me. A single individual can cause a lot of trouble and damage, especially in an age of nuclear and biological weapons. However, the amount of damage that can be caused by a corporation is much greater, yet the punishments for corporations in America are effectively limited to fines.
Survival of the fittest seems to be fine for businesses, but individuals are much more limited in their behavior.
... and yet you force candidates that criticize America's president to resign. While this still makes your country less of a loser than we who elected the idiot in the first place, I'm still rather baffled that a bunch of liberal Canadian democrats (as your post implies) would supplicate themselves so prostrately before our American dictator.
Pause a moment, and reflect. I'm not saying that this is a good thing; children certainly need privacy, too. Children don't have the same rights as adults, and often for very good reasons. The problem is that most people, IMHO, can't balance their checkbooks let alone raise a child reasonably well.
As I've said before, elsewhere, Subversion is an excellent, robust tool for environments where centralized servers are desired (read: corporate environments). It is not (currently) the ideal tool for projects such as Linux, which is highly branched and has numerous servers that cross-pollinate each other. darcs, and arch, are better tools for projects such as these, although they tend to lack much of the elegance of the Subversion design.
Furthermore, I'm going to nebulously claim that darcs is better than arch. When in Rome...
First off, the entire "metadata" section is FUBAR. tgz isn't a package management system; it is a packaging system. Something like portage is needed on top of it; comparing tgz to rpm is like comparing yaml to jabber. Therefore, entire sections in this "comparison" should be marked N/A, not "no".
What this with "documentation file specially marked?" tar tzf | grep. Duh.
Oh, and tgz files are indeed recognized by file.
I'm wondering what the implications of this 48 hour degredation are. Is 78% enough to keep using it? Could you put two of these inline and get 95% efficiency?
Oh, and I can confirm that you don't need a subscription to view the article, but having rudimentary knowledge of chemistry (which I don't) would help. Otherwise, the article makes a good somnulant.
I agree with you. Really, I do. I had a friend who was fond of adding the addendum that, if you assume that the average person is dumb, then it is implied that about 50% of them are even more stupid than that.
However: do you know how to repair your car? How about the electrical wiring in your house? Your plumbing? Garbage disposal or washing machine? How about the central air, or the oil heater? If you do, then you're a better woman/man than I. If you don't then you are, by your own logic, dumb. You're paying someone else what are most probably obscene prices to fix something that you could easily fix yourself, if you simply weren't too lazy to go figure it out. A lot of these things aren't rocket science.
That's me in a nutshell. Some things, I have enough interest in to invest the time to do research and make sure I have enough information to make an informed decision. For everything else, I choose that which is most convenient (within reason). I use telephones a lot, but I'd honestly rather spend the few hours it would take to research a new phone purchase doing something -- almost anything else. Heck, I paid someone to paint my house one summer, and I've painted houses before.
However, this, in itself, is not sufficient to prove the theory that people are dumb, or even lazy. Myself, I rely on empirical evidence for proof of that.
Isn't the benefit of hydrogen, rather than methane, reduced pollutive byproducts?
Raney-NiSn can perform for at least 48 hours... before what? Before it has to be replaced? Before it has to rested? What happens after 48 hours?
Anyway, by the end of the article, I had started wondering whether my "investment" in Gentoo was mislead; I contribute ebuilds, and not an insignificant amount of time submitting bug reports, and so on. What if the leaders of Gentoo were sitting in a dark, smoky room somewhere, secretly making hoards of cash off my labors and contributions?? Yegods! I could be being ripped off!
After the initial wave of panic, I got to thinking about it: I don't really care what people are doing with Gentoo. I use Gentoo because I believe it is the best distribution; they keep my most important packages up-to-date, Gentoo is easy to administer, and they have at least the illusion of being an open community. Nothing they're doing is hurting me, I'm running Gentoo on three or four machines, and I don't pay anything to use it. In fact, I consider my contributions to the project to be my "payment". If "they" can figure out a way of making money off their efforts, and it doesn't impact my use of Gentoo, then more power to them.
Now, if I were Zach, and I'd contributed that much time and effort, I'd probably be pissed too. At some level of contribution, you sort of expect to be included in the reaping of whatever nebulous profits are being gleaned. I think it is probable that Daniel, et al, are acting unethically -- being unwilling to acknowledge someone else's significant contributions is bad form (old chap) -- so at this point I wouldn't trust Daniel as far as I could throw him, but ultimately, it has little bearing on my use of Gentoo.
Personally, I think commercial software is doomed; software engineering will still be profitable, but it'll be more as service/support/specialized solutions providers. That's not very germane to the discussion, except that in my hypothetical future, throwing away the talent of a willing, and proven, contributor is like throwing away money.
I wish Zach luck.
I learned on an Apple II, starting with Basic. Basic had a low cost of entry, so it sucked me in pretty quickly. Soon, I was coding in 6502 assembly, optimizing critical pieces of code. The memory map was fixed, and the entire machine was easy to dig into and poke around it. In fact, 'peek' and 'poke' were the terms for mucking about with the guts of the machine. This was an amazingly useful learning process in a number of ways. First, I learned a lot about how computers work, pretty close to the metal. It also gave me a huge appreciation of high level languages.
Today, I'd recommend starting coders with a high level language, such as Ruby, and encourage them to recode critical sections in assembly as a linked library. This isn't much different than how I'd program commercially, only I'd only drop down one level to a compiled language, such as Haskell or C for the critical sections; most compilers can do a better job at optimization than I could coding the assembly by hand, anyway.
It is easier to do this with Linux than Windows. There's less OS overhead, and more variety in tools. It is still a much more complex system than an Apple II, but is much more open than Windows.
Despite this, I was tempted by that Kodak, until I saw the price. It is definitely in the pro price range.
In any case, I'm not the only person buying these 10Ds. They're consistently back-ordered for 4-8 weeks, and you can't find them on store shelves. But I agree with your sentiment; my mom isn't going to be buying one of these any time soon.
I'd say that the fact that the Cornice drives don't use a standard interface is a serious limitation, since it doesn't gain them anything in speed and keeps the drives from being used in a huge array of CF-capable devices. 3GB MicroDrives are available, so the density of the Cornice drives isn't anything special. The drives themselves are about twice as fast as the current crop of microdrives, but the real selling point of the Cornice drives appears to be the price point.
I've had a 6MP camera for over a month.