Metric is a heck of a lot easier to explain than imperial.
Lets see, 2.5 cm per inch, 12 inches per foot, 5 foot per fathom, but its also 5280 feet per mile...and its 3 feet to a yard, which is kind of like a meter, but not quite...
As opposed to simple powers of 10 for metric. If we could today snap our fingers and have everything switched over, with no conversion costs, it would be a no brainer.
The only advantage to base 10 is that you've been forced to learn the multiplication tables in it. That's the only advantage.
However, there are provable mathematical advantages to base 12; mainly, that it's highly composite and is the smallest such number to include the numbers between 1 and 4 as factors. We use it in our clocks, in counting our eggs, in dividing feet into inches, in the zodiak, and in dividing a year into months. We see it in nature in the number of full moons in a year and in the platonic solids -- there is a dodecahedron (and tetrahedron and cube, and 3 and 4 both divide evenly into 12), but there are no platonic solids with either 5 or 10 sides. The only thing 10 has going for it -- the only reason why you count in base 10 -- is that you have 10 fingers. However, you do have 12 segments in your fingers (excluding those in your thumb, which you'd use for place-holding), which means that you can count up to 12 * 12 = 144 on your two hands.
The logical thing to do would be to retrain everybody to count in base-12, re-calibrate metric to use base 12, and then use that. Failing that, I'd suggest that leaving things in the US in imperial is preferable: it's not perfect, but it's superior to metric.
It hasn't failed me yet, and has the additional advantage of providing a sort of upgradability that's sorely lacking from most devices these days. I can swap out my carrier, or my cellular technology, without having to buy a whole new tablet. I just wish the rest of the components were as easily upgradable.
IMO, CDMA's biggest disadvantage is that the US is the only country in the world that uses it. I've never had a problem roaming internationally with my GSM (and now UMTS) phones, and that's important to me. This is no reflection on the technical merits of CDMA, obviously. Just an observation.
Not because I wanted to buy Android instead of a dedicated GPS, but because I've already got four Android phones in the house and didn't want to buy anything.
In my case, I'm going back-packing for 5 days; we have paper maps and compasses, but I want to bring my phone along and see how it does. I have a small, portable solar charger that I'm bringing as well. Here's what I've discovered:
First, I'm taking my Nexus One. I have to take the phone with me anyway; I just won't leave it in the car when we hit the trail. With the screen off most of the time, but with the GPS on and a tracking application running, I got about 7 hours of continuous running before the battery hit critical. All wireless was off; theoretically, the only things running during that time were the CPU and the GPS chip. I used the display for maybe 20 minutes during that whole time. I expect that, with some coddling, this amount of time would be serviceable -- and it'd certainly be a fair emergency device.
The Nexus One compass -- the magnetic one -- is way accurate! I walked around a bunch with a Suunto Global magnetic compass, and the Nexus kept up admirably!
I think I tried every free or demo GPS map program in the market, and the one I settled on was OruxMaps. RMaps and Maveric are interesting and have useful features, but OruxMaps turned out to be the easiest to build up maps of my destination with, and it provided all of the basic features that I wanted. It has a built-in map builder which takes a little fiddling to figure out, but is pretty easy to use once you do. I did this all over Wifi (which is going to be faster than cell data, anyway), so no cell plan is required (although a WAP and internet access still is).
The display is the biggest battery drain, obviously. With that on constantly, you're not going to get more than an hour of battery out of it. However, the Nexus is smaller than any GPS with a color screen that I've seen; attach enough external battery pack (through USB cable) to make it as big as your average Garmin, and I think the battery life would be comparable. As others have said, the quickest and easiest thing to do is just buy a dedicated GPS; you'll get less for your money, but if that's all he wants to use it for, I don't think it's worth the extra effort to set an Android device up as a dedicated GPS.
Ditto. Actually, I was using ShapeWriter until Swype came out... they both have their nice points, but both of them are nice, and a lot of the time, I actually prefer them to hard keyboards.
ShapeWriter has a really clever capitalization mechanism that I miss in Swype. Often. Swype has slightly better matching. ShapeWriter will insert a space between a period and the next word; Swype doesn't (grrr!). ShapeWriter has an annoying feature where, if the text entry ends with punctuation, the editing of misspelled words doesn't work. Swype requires you to actually swipe over apostrophes to get them (it doesn't recognize "its" as potentially being "it's"). They both have "alternate" keyboards, but ShapeWriter's alternate is much more useful (bigger keys, focused on numeric entry) -- although, both make getting to some common keys (:,/) uncommonly difficult. For some reason, I find Swype much easier to use if I'm tap-typing -- and ShapeWriter is almost impossible to use for password entry (if you're like me and use mixed-case passwords), whereas Swype is useful.
They're both good. I don't know about Swype, but I get regular updates from ShapeWriter. I've been using Swype for the past couple of weeks; I think it annoys me less, but they're pretty darned close.
It doesn't get any better than that. But feeding the trolls is fun!
I don't know about other people with 4 year CS degrees, but I took three years of calculus (in addition to numerous other math classes); is the poster suggesting that either vocational schools cram four years of math into a two year program, or that math isn't an important part of computer science? Probably the latter. Which would explain a lot of things I've seen in industry over the years, actually.
I've been running a Transcend 64GB SSD (ca. $200, PATA -- not high-end, definitely) in my laptop for 10 months. It's on all the time, except when I suspend it for transportation. It is running Ubuntu, and I've got a current uptime of 30 days. I'm a software developer; I download and install betas of OpenOffice, I upgrade Netbeans and Eclipse regularly, update and build software (including one work project that's over 1GB built), and generally trash the hard drive. I haven't had any trouble with it, at all.
I also installed an OCZ 64GB SATA SSD in my wife's laptop since mid-June (so, 4.5 months). Hers is more often in sleep mode than in use, since she has a separate, work, laptop. She uses it for writing, homework, browsing, and so on -- light duty. No problems there, either.
Neither laptop is configured to run/var/log or/tmp in RAM, or anything fancy. Both are configured with ext3 (although mine has a BTRFS partition, for play) with normal journalling.
I'm happy with mine. I don't notice the speed increase, if there is any; I mostly went this route to (a) reduce the heat, (b) reduce power consumption, and (c) reduce noise. My wife's Acer Timeline is particularly silent, as the CPU fan never comes on. I don't know if I'd put SSDs in my server; HDs are too ridiculously cheap, and I don't need extra speed for my modest music/file/web server uses. But, so far, I've been entirely satisfied with their reliability.
I keep seeing this "good enough" meme going around. At a company meeting, recently, management was espousing the same crap.
I can only hope that these people are plagued with "50%-good" products. 50%-good tires, that blow out ocassionally, causing an accident. Maybe Joel would like some 50%-good surgery, or a 50%-good pacemaker. How about getting to fly in 50% good airplanes for the rest of his life?
I'm not surprised that most of this bullshit is coming out a culture in which Walmart was able to become the success it has. We needed something for a weekend project recently and bought the materials from Walmart, because it was closest. What poor quality crap. It'll all need to be replaced in a year, contributing to landfill and wasted resources. I'm not going purchase from Walmart any more, and I'm not going to spend money on half-baked, crap-quality software, either.
Word gets around about quality. It's the American auto-maker's nightmare right now. Ford, Chrystler, Chevrolet... they're all struggling to reverse decades of built-up public perception about poor quality, even when some of them are actually making fairly decent cars right now. It isn't quite the same with software; Microsoft has been making crap software for, well, ever, and they're still dominant. But I think that if you take the monopoly factor out of it, software companies *do* suffer from delivering half-assed product to their customers.
Netbeans has a decent collaboration editor. The only limitations that bother me is the inability to interactively diff (which makes code reviews more difficult), and the fact that there's no cursor tracking. This means that you can't, for example, highlight some code you're talking about and have the other person see it.
GNU Screen is, of course, always an option if you can use a command line text editor like vim or emacs.
Gobby is pretty decent, although it's a bit more limited as an IDE.
I've always preferred NetBeans for this sort of thing, although nothing yet satisfies all of my peer programming requirements. I need an editor that lets one person follow another, and take turns editing, not something that just lets two people edit the same file at the same time. I'd argue whether the latter is of any use at all.
There's a lot of truth in what you say, although it isn't limited to environmentalists. You could more accurately have said:
Reasonable people:... Unreasonable people:...
There are many reasonable environmentalists, and alarmist technologists. I'm not sure that it's fair to claim that environmentalists are opposed to testing; do you have examples?
And, while I do agree that the gainsayers, in this case, are very likely being alarmist, I'd also like to remind you that history is just as full of things that go:
(supposedly) Reasonable people: Let's use this wonderful new "Asbestos" technology! Environmentalists: No way! It's dangerous! (supposedly) Reasonable people: Err, no it's not
(supposedly) Reasonable people: Let's use this wonderful new "chlorofluorocarbons" technology! Environmentalists: No way! It's dangerous! (supposedly) Reasonable people: Err, no it's not.
In many cases, we find many years that the "alarmists" were right, after all.
Now, 5 years later I have a large collection of ogg files that are essentially useless. No one in the mainstream uses ogg, despite the superiority and price.
Weird. I started out the same, but I'm still ripping to Vorbis ogg. When I first started, I easily found the Cowon D2, which supported ogg. When I bought my Android G1, hey! Guess what? The native media player supported ogg, too. A quick Google search turns up this page, which lists no fewer than 59 flash based portable media players that will play oggs, and 38 hard-drive based portable media players that do, too. There are 5 smartphone platforms that support it (some of those through third-party apps for the phones). The last two DVD players I've bought have come with support for... what? Playing oggs off data CDs.
There are many mainstream companies that support ogg. Some don't. "No one," however, is simply incorrect.
even in those respects you listed, we're still not as bad as other countries around the world
Nice. Yes, no matter how bad we are, there still exists, somewhere in the world, other countries that are worse than us. It's OK to be evil, as long as there's somebody more evil than us! Go us!
And really...'illegal war'? What the hell is a LEGAL war?
Dude... seriously... are you too lazy to look things up, or was that just a troll?
Bush's excessive spending is such a problem, how is spending 3 times as much making an improvement at all? So if Bush left a $700 billion dollar deficit, that makes it okay to expand it to a $1.8 trillion dollar deficit? This just all sounds like childish excuses and finger-pointing to me.
Bush's deficit was a result of unnecessary spending designed to keep him in office. His re-election prospects were vastly smaller without an on-going war. I can't count the number of moderates who were considering voting for him only because they thought that it was dangerous to change commander in chiefs in the middle of a war. It's clear that there was no justifiable reason to invade Iraq; therefore, the Iraq war was unnecessary, and therefore the billions of dollars spent on that war were needless waste.
Furthermore, we weren't in an economic crisis for most of the wild spending that the Bush administration was involved in. It was only in the last 8th of his presidency that he can claim that the spending bills were related to the financial crisis.
Don't try to blame the other 7 years of fiscal irresponsibility on the last year of crisis.
Nobody's blaming the current financial crisis on Bush. I'll happily blame it on conservatives, and excessive laisse-faire economics and deregulation, but Clinton was just as guilty there. However, Bush's borrow-and-spend economics put the country in a really bad position to deal with this crisis. The car's tires blowing out isn't his fault, but the crazy driving at high speeds near the edge of the cliff is.
He might not have been in the black sedan with the two soldiers who knocked on the door at each family's house (worst job in the army), but it's clear he counted the cost.
Your zealotry makes you look like a real ass in the face of the facts.
He didn't care enough to not get them needlessly killed in the first place.
Hm. According to the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, Ruby is 140 times slower than C (the median, across all tests). Ruby 1.9 is "only" 52 times slower than C. Three times faster than that means that MacRuby is only 17 times slower than C. Which makes it only twice as slow as Lua and only three times as slow as Lisp. I wouldn't classify that as "quite fast", although that's a bit more than twice as fast than Python, which is pretty good.
God, I love the CLBG (which used to be the GCPLS).
In any case, I love Ruby for what it is good at -- one-off scripts that grow gracefully. I've grown distrustful of languages that don't support any form of pre-runtime type checking for non-trivial application development. That's not a failing that is particular to Ruby, though.
My response was that it doesn't matter, if you want to run on oddball hardware, you could run pretty much the same OS on all the same oddball hardware.
I'm taking you out of context, but I want what you say to be true so badly that I need to respond.
Sadly, not all OSes are fungible. In fact, that's the exception rather than the rule. BSD, Windows, and Linux might be fungible, but Minix, Mac OSX, and OpenSolaris aren't. I don't run Minix on my laptop only because it would render half of the hardware features unusable (sleep mode, touch screen, etc.); this is the same situation with most of the other non-mainstream OSes out there. I can't run OSX mostly because of the Apple hardware department's death-grip on Apple's (the company) testicles. In fact, even within Linux, I've had varying degrees of success with hardware support with different distributions.
In my experience, the fungability of which you speak is a myth.
Don't denigrate our men and women in uniform by suggesting they would willingly trample on the rights of the American people.
Riiiiight...
Ever heard of:
The Waco siege (FBI)
Ruby Ridge (FBI, again)
The Kent State massacre (National Guard)
The Orangeburg massacre (Police)
Jackson State killings (The police, again)
The 1992 LA riots (US Army deployed with Abrams tanks and APCs to quell the anti-police riots)
The Wounded Knee siege in 1973 (Feds vs. some Lakota Indians -- directed by the Army)
1967, 1968, and 1943 (Army vs. uppity equal-rights protesters)
1920, West Virginia Coal Wars (Troops vs coal miners over the right to organize)
1914 miner's strike in Colorado (Troops break up another strike)
1892, 1894 -- more suppression of strikes
And, oh, hey... howz about that civil war? No, I'm pretty sure that most troops would "trample the rights of the American people" -- perhaps not willingly, but they'd do it. You can debate how many rights the people in the above incidents actually had, and how many of them were simply criminal nutjobs, but in general I suspect that it isn't too hard to sell troops the idea that they're keeping the peace and maintaining law and order. Especially if you're shooting at them.
I heard that the source of this was the prophet Mohammed, but damned if I know. In any case, as I remember it, there's a polygamy rule-of-thumb that goes like this:
Four wives is the ideal number, because:
One wife will bicker at you
Two wives will bicker at each other
With three wives, two will always gang up on the third
but a fourth wife will always side with the one that's being picked on.
Except it's odourless, stored at extremely high pressure (dangerous enough with non-explosives), ignites easier, spreads out from leaks quicker and at higher volumes than petrol vapour.
It's also the lightest element -- lighter than anything except a vacuum -- and disperses extremely quickly. It is also non-toxic and non-corrosive, so I'm not sure what the "odourless" fear-mongering is about.
In 1937, America controlled most of the world's helium reserves, and helium was in direct competition with hydrogen, which was readily available to everybody. When the Hindenburg went down, there was a lot of FUD spread in the US about the dangers of hydrogen, which is obviously still be propagated.
Slightly off-topic, but in support of the statement that there was a determined FUD campaign against hydrogen in the 30's, is the fact that in the Hindenburg incident, only 30% of the passengers and crew were killed. Most of those deaths were from people jumping from the Hindenburg. All of the passengers who rode the Hindenburg to the ground survived. By contrast, nearly 50% of the helium-buoyed Akron were killed in its disaster, and 100% of nearly all airline accidents of this scale perish. The fear around hydrogen is entirely out of proportion.
Yes, hydrogen is flammable. So is gasoline, propane, and natural gas. Propane is heavier than air, meaning the risk for asphyxiation is greater than that of hydrogen. Some 6,700 propane explosions, from barbecues alone, injure Americans annually, and industrial-level explosions killing people occur every year (2005 Toronto, 2006 Falk Industries in Milwaukee, 2007 Atlas Castings in Takoma, etc). And yet there are Americans driving around in propane-powered cars (around 190,000 of them, not counting the 450,000 propane-powered forklifts in use in the US). I won't go into the number of natural gas explosions that occur, which tend to affect whole neighborhoods.
The universe doesn't tend towards entropy. It tends towards life. We are walking, talking evidence of this fact.
Life is just another way of increasing entropy. Pound for pound, you (directly or indirectly) produce far more waste heat than almost anything other than a good fusion reaction.
I wouldn't be adverse to new technology that replaces the mouse, as long as it was better.
Most posts here focus on interfaces which replace the mouse but still require people moving their arms around. I'm waiting for the input device that's two buttons below your space bar, and a camera that can tell where you're looking. Look at a link, tap the button. Look at an icon, hold the button and look where you want to put the icon. If it is accurate enough, you don't even need a pointer.
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Metric is a heck of a lot easier to explain than imperial.
Lets see, 2.5 cm per inch, 12 inches per foot, 5 foot per fathom, but its also 5280 feet per mile...and its 3 feet to a yard, which is kind of like a meter, but not quite...
As opposed to simple powers of 10 for metric. If we could today snap our fingers and have everything switched over, with no conversion costs, it would be a no brainer.
The only advantage to base 10 is that you've been forced to learn the multiplication tables in it. That's the only advantage.
However, there are provable mathematical advantages to base 12; mainly, that it's highly composite and is the smallest such number to include the numbers between 1 and 4 as factors. We use it in our clocks, in counting our eggs, in dividing feet into inches, in the zodiak, and in dividing a year into months. We see it in nature in the number of full moons in a year and in the platonic solids -- there is a dodecahedron (and tetrahedron and cube, and 3 and 4 both divide evenly into 12), but there are no platonic solids with either 5 or 10 sides. The only thing 10 has going for it -- the only reason why you count in base 10 -- is that you have 10 fingers. However, you do have 12 segments in your fingers (excluding those in your thumb, which you'd use for place-holding), which means that you can count up to 12 * 12 = 144 on your two hands.
The logical thing to do would be to retrain everybody to count in base-12, re-calibrate metric to use base 12, and then use that. Failing that, I'd suggest that leaving things in the US in imperial is preferable: it's not perfect, but it's superior to metric.
It hasn't failed me yet, and has the additional advantage of providing a sort of upgradability that's sorely lacking from most devices these days. I can swap out my carrier, or my cellular technology, without having to buy a whole new tablet. I just wish the rest of the components were as easily upgradable.
IMO, CDMA's biggest disadvantage is that the US is the only country in the world that uses it. I've never had a problem roaming internationally with my GSM (and now UMTS) phones, and that's important to me. This is no reflection on the technical merits of CDMA, obviously. Just an observation.
In my case, I'm going back-packing for 5 days; we have paper maps and compasses, but I want to bring my phone along and see how it does. I have a small, portable solar charger that I'm bringing as well. Here's what I've discovered:
First, I'm taking my Nexus One. I have to take the phone with me anyway; I just won't leave it in the car when we hit the trail. With the screen off most of the time, but with the GPS on and a tracking application running, I got about 7 hours of continuous running before the battery hit critical. All wireless was off; theoretically, the only things running during that time were the CPU and the GPS chip. I used the display for maybe 20 minutes during that whole time. I expect that, with some coddling, this amount of time would be serviceable -- and it'd certainly be a fair emergency device.
The Nexus One compass -- the magnetic one -- is way accurate! I walked around a bunch with a Suunto Global magnetic compass, and the Nexus kept up admirably!
I think I tried every free or demo GPS map program in the market, and the one I settled on was OruxMaps. RMaps and Maveric are interesting and have useful features, but OruxMaps turned out to be the easiest to build up maps of my destination with, and it provided all of the basic features that I wanted. It has a built-in map builder which takes a little fiddling to figure out, but is pretty easy to use once you do. I did this all over Wifi (which is going to be faster than cell data, anyway), so no cell plan is required (although a WAP and internet access still is).
The display is the biggest battery drain, obviously. With that on constantly, you're not going to get more than an hour of battery out of it. However, the Nexus is smaller than any GPS with a color screen that I've seen; attach enough external battery pack (through USB cable) to make it as big as your average Garmin, and I think the battery life would be comparable. As others have said, the quickest and easiest thing to do is just buy a dedicated GPS; you'll get less for your money, but if that's all he wants to use it for, I don't think it's worth the extra effort to set an Android device up as a dedicated GPS.
Ditto. Actually, I was using ShapeWriter until Swype came out... they both have their nice points, but both of them are nice, and a lot of the time, I actually prefer them to hard keyboards.
/) uncommonly difficult. For some reason, I find Swype much easier to use if I'm tap-typing -- and ShapeWriter is almost impossible to use for password entry (if you're like me and use mixed-case passwords), whereas Swype is useful.
ShapeWriter has a really clever capitalization mechanism that I miss in Swype. Often. Swype has slightly better matching. ShapeWriter will insert a space between a period and the next word; Swype doesn't (grrr!). ShapeWriter has an annoying feature where, if the text entry ends with punctuation, the editing of misspelled words doesn't work. Swype requires you to actually swipe over apostrophes to get them (it doesn't recognize "its" as potentially being "it's"). They both have "alternate" keyboards, but ShapeWriter's alternate is much more useful (bigger keys, focused on numeric entry) -- although, both make getting to some common keys (:,
They're both good. I don't know about Swype, but I get regular updates from ShapeWriter. I've been using Swype for the past couple of weeks; I think it annoys me less, but they're pretty darned close.
I don't know about other people with 4 year CS degrees, but I took three years of calculus (in addition to numerous other math classes); is the poster suggesting that either vocational schools cram four years of math into a two year program, or that math isn't an important part of computer science? Probably the latter. Which would explain a lot of things I've seen in industry over the years, actually.
--- SER
I've been running a Transcend 64GB SSD (ca. $200, PATA -- not high-end, definitely) in my laptop for 10 months. It's on all the time, except when I suspend it for transportation. It is running Ubuntu, and I've got a current uptime of 30 days. I'm a software developer; I download and install betas of OpenOffice, I upgrade Netbeans and Eclipse regularly, update and build software (including one work project that's over 1GB built), and generally trash the hard drive. I haven't had any trouble with it, at all.
I also installed an OCZ 64GB SATA SSD in my wife's laptop since mid-June (so, 4.5 months). Hers is more often in sleep mode than in use, since she has a separate, work, laptop. She uses it for writing, homework, browsing, and so on -- light duty. No problems there, either.
Neither laptop is configured to run /var/log or /tmp in RAM, or anything fancy. Both are configured with ext3 (although mine has a BTRFS partition, for play) with normal journalling.
I'm happy with mine. I don't notice the speed increase, if there is any; I mostly went this route to (a) reduce the heat, (b) reduce power consumption, and (c) reduce noise. My wife's Acer Timeline is particularly silent, as the CPU fan never comes on. I don't know if I'd put SSDs in my server; HDs are too ridiculously cheap, and I don't need extra speed for my modest music/file/web server uses. But, so far, I've been entirely satisfied with their reliability.
I do back both machines up nightly, just in case.
You installed Girlfriend 1.0 after Wife 1.0? What, was Wife 1.0 mail-order? No wonder you have problems.
I keep seeing this "good enough" meme going around. At a company meeting, recently, management was espousing the same crap.
I can only hope that these people are plagued with "50%-good" products. 50%-good tires, that blow out ocassionally, causing an accident. Maybe Joel would like some 50%-good surgery, or a 50%-good pacemaker. How about getting to fly in 50% good airplanes for the rest of his life?
I'm not surprised that most of this bullshit is coming out a culture in which Walmart was able to become the success it has. We needed something for a weekend project recently and bought the materials from Walmart, because it was closest. What poor quality crap. It'll all need to be replaced in a year, contributing to landfill and wasted resources. I'm not going purchase from Walmart any more, and I'm not going to spend money on half-baked, crap-quality software, either.
Word gets around about quality. It's the American auto-maker's nightmare right now. Ford, Chrystler, Chevrolet... they're all struggling to reverse decades of built-up public perception about poor quality, even when some of them are actually making fairly decent cars right now. It isn't quite the same with software; Microsoft has been making crap software for, well, ever, and they're still dominant. But I think that if you take the monopoly factor out of it, software companies *do* suffer from delivering half-assed product to their customers.
GNU Screen is, of course, always an option if you can use a command line text editor like vim or emacs.
Gobby is pretty decent, although it's a bit more limited as an IDE.
I've always preferred NetBeans for this sort of thing, although nothing yet satisfies all of my peer programming requirements. I need an editor that lets one person follow another, and take turns editing, not something that just lets two people edit the same file at the same time. I'd argue whether the latter is of any use at all.
--- SER
There's a lot of truth in what you say, although it isn't limited to environmentalists. You could more accurately have said:
... ...
Reasonable people:
Unreasonable people:
There are many reasonable environmentalists, and alarmist technologists. I'm not sure that it's fair to claim that environmentalists are opposed to testing; do you have examples?
And, while I do agree that the gainsayers, in this case, are very likely being alarmist, I'd also like to remind you that history is just as full of things that go:
(supposedly) Reasonable people: Let's use this wonderful new "Asbestos" technology!
Environmentalists: No way! It's dangerous!
(supposedly) Reasonable people: Err, no it's not
(supposedly) Reasonable people: Let's use this wonderful new "chlorofluorocarbons" technology!
Environmentalists: No way! It's dangerous!
(supposedly) Reasonable people: Err, no it's not.
In many cases, we find many years that the "alarmists" were right, after all.
--- SER
Weird. I started out the same, but I'm still ripping to Vorbis ogg. When I first started, I easily found the Cowon D2, which supported ogg. When I bought my Android G1, hey! Guess what? The native media player supported ogg, too. A quick Google search turns up this page, which lists no fewer than 59 flash based portable media players that will play oggs, and 38 hard-drive based portable media players that do, too. There are 5 smartphone platforms that support it (some of those through third-party apps for the phones). The last two DVD players I've bought have come with support for ... what? Playing oggs off data CDs.
There are many mainstream companies that support ogg. Some don't. "No one," however, is simply incorrect.
--- SER
Nice. Yes, no matter how bad we are, there still exists, somewhere in the world, other countries that are worse than us. It's OK to be evil, as long as there's somebody more evil than us! Go us!
Dude... seriously... are you too lazy to look things up, or was that just a troll?
--- SER
Bush's excessive spending is such a problem, how is spending 3 times as much making an improvement at all? So if Bush left a $700 billion dollar deficit, that makes it okay to expand it to a $1.8 trillion dollar deficit? This just all sounds like childish excuses and finger-pointing to me.
Bush's deficit was a result of unnecessary spending designed to keep him in office. His re-election prospects were vastly smaller without an on-going war. I can't count the number of moderates who were considering voting for him only because they thought that it was dangerous to change commander in chiefs in the middle of a war. It's clear that there was no justifiable reason to invade Iraq; therefore, the Iraq war was unnecessary, and therefore the billions of dollars spent on that war were needless waste.
Furthermore, we weren't in an economic crisis for most of the wild spending that the Bush administration was involved in. It was only in the last 8th of his presidency that he can claim that the spending bills were related to the financial crisis.
Don't try to blame the other 7 years of fiscal irresponsibility on the last year of crisis.
Nobody's blaming the current financial crisis on Bush. I'll happily blame it on conservatives, and excessive laisse-faire economics and deregulation, but Clinton was just as guilty there. However, Bush's borrow-and-spend economics put the country in a really bad position to deal with this crisis. The car's tires blowing out isn't his fault, but the crazy driving at high speeds near the edge of the cliff is.
--- SER
He might not have been in the black sedan with the two soldiers who knocked on the door at each family's house (worst job in the army), but it's clear he counted the cost.
Your zealotry makes you look like a real ass in the face of the facts.
He didn't care enough to not get them needlessly killed in the first place.
--- SER
Hm. According to the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, Ruby is 140 times slower than C (the median, across all tests). Ruby 1.9 is "only" 52 times slower than C. Three times faster than that means that MacRuby is only 17 times slower than C. Which makes it only twice as slow as Lua and only three times as slow as Lisp. I wouldn't classify that as "quite fast", although that's a bit more than twice as fast than Python, which is pretty good.
God, I love the CLBG (which used to be the GCPLS).
In any case, I love Ruby for what it is good at -- one-off scripts that grow gracefully. I've grown distrustful of languages that don't support any form of pre-runtime type checking for non-trivial application development. That's not a failing that is particular to Ruby, though.
I'm taking you out of context, but I want what you say to be true so badly that I need to respond.
Sadly, not all OSes are fungible. In fact, that's the exception rather than the rule. BSD, Windows, and Linux might be fungible, but Minix, Mac OSX, and OpenSolaris aren't. I don't run Minix on my laptop only because it would render half of the hardware features unusable (sleep mode, touch screen, etc.); this is the same situation with most of the other non-mainstream OSes out there. I can't run OSX mostly because of the Apple hardware department's death-grip on Apple's (the company) testicles. In fact, even within Linux, I've had varying degrees of success with hardware support with different distributions.
In my experience, the fungability of which you speak is a myth.
--- SER
I'm still waiting for it to show up for the Android chat client, but it is still early days...
--- SER
Riiiiight...
Ever heard of:
And, oh, hey... howz about that civil war? No, I'm pretty sure that most troops would "trample the rights of the American people" -- perhaps not willingly, but they'd do it. You can debate how many rights the people in the above incidents actually had, and how many of them were simply criminal nutjobs, but in general I suspect that it isn't too hard to sell troops the idea that they're keeping the peace and maintaining law and order. Especially if you're shooting at them.
--- SER
I heard that the source of this was the prophet Mohammed, but damned if I know. In any case, as I remember it, there's a polygamy rule-of-thumb that goes like this:
Four wives is the ideal number, because:
--- SER
It's also the lightest element -- lighter than anything except a vacuum -- and disperses extremely quickly. It is also non-toxic and non-corrosive, so I'm not sure what the "odourless" fear-mongering is about.
In 1937, America controlled most of the world's helium reserves, and helium was in direct competition with hydrogen, which was readily available to everybody. When the Hindenburg went down, there was a lot of FUD spread in the US about the dangers of hydrogen, which is obviously still be propagated.
Slightly off-topic, but in support of the statement that there was a determined FUD campaign against hydrogen in the 30's, is the fact that in the Hindenburg incident, only 30% of the passengers and crew were killed. Most of those deaths were from people jumping from the Hindenburg. All of the passengers who rode the Hindenburg to the ground survived. By contrast, nearly 50% of the helium-buoyed Akron were killed in its disaster, and 100% of nearly all airline accidents of this scale perish. The fear around hydrogen is entirely out of proportion.
Yes, hydrogen is flammable. So is gasoline, propane, and natural gas. Propane is heavier than air, meaning the risk for asphyxiation is greater than that of hydrogen. Some 6,700 propane explosions, from barbecues alone, injure Americans annually, and industrial-level explosions killing people occur every year (2005 Toronto, 2006 Falk Industries in Milwaukee, 2007 Atlas Castings in Takoma, etc). And yet there are Americans driving around in propane-powered cars (around 190,000 of them, not counting the 450,000 propane-powered forklifts in use in the US). I won't go into the number of natural gas explosions that occur, which tend to affect whole neighborhoods.
--- SER
Life is just another way of increasing entropy. Pound for pound, you (directly or indirectly) produce far more waste heat than almost anything other than a good fusion reaction.
--- SER
Psh. America is proof that that isn't true.
--- SER
Most posts here focus on interfaces which replace the mouse but still require people moving their arms around. I'm waiting for the input device that's two buttons below your space bar, and a camera that can tell where you're looking. Look at a link, tap the button. Look at an icon, hold the button and look where you want to put the icon. If it is accurate enough, you don't even need a pointer.
--- SER