dmix can work, but it is a bear to setup. I have stuff to do, I don't want to learn the internal workings of ALSA to listen to an MP3 while using a video editor. It should be on by default, and it should be smart enough to do hardware mixing when it can, and software mixing when it can't do hardware. Windows does this, there is no reason Linux cannot.
While you can use a sound daemon, it doesn't solve it by a long shot. Any program that doesn't use the daemon can lock/dev/dsp, preventing the daemon from using it. Plus, ESD sounds like complete shit.
Actually, none do. This includes Mandrake and Suse, and I believe but am not sure about FC3. Debian and Gentoo certainly don't help at all here, although it is much easier IMHO to modify those distros.
In addition, even if you want to "configure ALSA to do software mixing" you cannot. This has not been implemented in ALSA and won't be for probably more than a year or two. Your only option is to use something else to do the mixing, which then feeds the output to ALSA. Every program which does this is pretty lame, difficult to set up, and sounds terrible.
Alot use the KDE Sound Server "Arts" to do this. This works, as you can call a program as an argument to "artsdsp" to force it to use arts if it doesn't support it, and many applications have an Arts plugin. However, this does not add the functionality to ALSA, as you can see by running any sound program with the output set to "ALSA". Either ARTS will block the program from outputting tot he sound card, or the program will monopolize the sound card, causing ARTS to be unable to work for the duration of the programs runtime. This is a pain in the ass to deal with, and forced me to go buy a Mac Mini for my wife, so I could keep my laptop as a linux test computer.
In the end, there isn't a good solution to this. Each solution either 1. Fails alot forcing you to intervene manually, or 2. does such a poor job of mixing sound it makes you want to chuck the computer.
Of course, on a desktop I would just stop crying and go buy a soundcard that isn't shitty, one with an actual DSP that does hardware mixing. At that point it would work just fine, and does on my Fortissimo II. In fact, everything works beautifully.
On my laptop I have no such luxury. I suppose I could find a USB sound dongle that supports linux. But that would be an inconvenience as I would have to find external speakers as well, or pipe the music back to the line in which would sound terrible.
Eventually ALSA will support software mixing at a low enough level, with a good enough algorithm, that it will leave Windows in the dust.
Whenever Linux finally gets around to supporting something it usually does it in a fantastic way. So anybody out there with a PHD in CS doing your thesis on audio processing, feel free to implement the ALSA sound mixing level. I would, but I'm far to stupid.
Actually, only the installation part of my example gets better if it is included. The problems with audio are in the linux kernel.
Right now ALSA does not support software mixing of two or more streams of audio. You can use additional software to do this, but every implementation is difficult to set up properly, and no distro sets it up for you. That, and every software mixing implementation in linux sounds like shit. This is a major defect when switching to a linux desktop (if you, like most people, have a cheap sound card.)
I don't buy it. When discussing things which can be counted infinite means not finite, which is to say no number corresponds to it.
From dictionary.com: Immeasurably great or large; boundless: infinite patience; a discovery of infinite importance.
Notice that it only applies to Immeasurably great or large, not quantity. Besides which, this would not apply to humans. This is the answer to questions like "how much is the human sense of humor worth?" A: "It is infinitely valuable." and other such twaddle.
The other non-math definition from dictionary.com: Having no boundaries or limits.
Again, does not apply. In fact, this is contradictory to your usage to refer to "an infinite number of humans", since the number of humans has clear boundaries and limits, besides the fact that the total number has a well known upper bound, since we can in fact, at least approximately, count them all.
And, of course, even infinite as you define it does not apply to humans, as I explained above.
Now, as for people discerning between the same word which can be used in two ways, I explained in the first 3 words of my post that I was being pedantic.
Pedantic: 1. academic, donnish, pedantic -- (marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects)
Pedant: 1. pedant, bookworm, scholastic -- (a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit)
Now, as I was saying: Just because you personally can't count something doesn't qualify it as infinite in any sense. Otherwise you would count like this: 1, 2, 3, 4... infinite. Of course, you never quite get to the point where you can't figure out what comes next, I hope. Then there is the question of time. Maybe you'll never finish counting something because it would simply take too long. "There are an infinite number of books down at the bookmobile."
(Note as well that we're talking about countable in the "I can physically count these things" sense,
Then there is the question of availability. "Pluto has infinitely many 7-11's." Of course, using your sense of the word, this is true, since we have no way to count the number of 7-11's on Pluto.
Ahh, but you mean in some way that you can't count them because there are too many to count. Well, back to the time constraint then. Are there too many because you can't physically count them if you were dedicated? or are there too many because you don't care to spend that much time?
Finally, the coup de grace. Your 'definition' of infinite is completely dependent on the amount of organization your set of things has. If you take grains of sand on the beach, then by your definition it is infinite. However, if those grains were lined up in a grid so that they were in neat rows and columns, you would only have to count the rows and columns and then multiply. Now, you just arrange them in a bunch of separate squares, each with the same numbers of rows and columns. You count one side of one square, then you count the total number of squares, and viola! you now know the number of grains of sand on the beach. (of course, you don't actually do this, but suppose you came upon it already done. It's a thought experiment.) But how can this be? The same number of grains is infinite or not, depending on how you lay them out?
So now I've shown that infinite doesn't even refer to quantity in your sense, it refers to difficulty in counting. So really when you say "infinite" you are saying "disorganized". I think you would have difficulty convincing a large number of people that 'infinite' means 'disorganized'.
Sure. Of course, if the computer doesn't have a floppy drive you can always plug one in using USB.
The problem is, when Linux doesn't support something out of the box, which is often enough, the solution is usually to get different hardware, or perform some kind of magic like the NDIS wrapper.
I'm not saying Linux or Windows are good or bad. Both do work, and both will get the job done. For alot of stuff Linux is alot better and more secure.
What I was mainly saying is that there is no reason to complain about this stuff. If you know you have to do some task, you plan for it, get hardware that will do the job, etc. Not being able to get a driver off a server for Windows is pretty low on my list of things that might cause me a problem. This is only an issue when you sit down at a computer at a friends house, start to install windows, realize you don't have the driver, and the friend doesn't have another computer where you can download it. Of course, if you plan ahead 5 minutes (like the two of us, and everyone else who likes to not get fired) just pull out your knoppix cd, download the driver, and roll right along, using each tool for the task that it is intended, and is good at.
Windows is easy to setup if everything goes right.
This is a fucking tautology. What, is Linux easy to set up when shit goes terribly wrong?
I too run Gentoo but it's a geeks distro and isn't as easy to setup as the more mainstream distros.
Have you heard of Debian? It is about as hard to set up as Gentoo, although it is more consistant in how it does things.
Of course, by "mainstream" you mean "red hat, suse, mandrake", so I'll give this one to you. Those distro's are much easier as long as you just want to use default setup, don't want to upgrade the kernel/software, and don't mind reinstalling for every release. Oh, and you should probably not expect software that isn't bundled on the CD to integrate properly with the packaging system. So by "easy" you mean "easy to get it to boot and show a pretty KDE desktop without knowing a damn thing" and not "easy to accomplish something".
The package selection you pointed out is primarly because Linux tends to install a lot of apps along with the OS.
What do you think Linux is? Is BASH part of linux? What about libc? What is an app? Is open office an app? What about mount?
I'm not going to argue that Linux is easier, but it's hardly more difficult either in the mainstream distros.
Bull. Find your aunt. Install windows on one computer, and install Linux on another, any distro.
Now have her install Realplayer so she can listen to NPR while she knits sweaters. Oh, it seems that there isn't an RPM for your version/distro. Looks like a command line install. So, aunty, just do a chmod +x RealPlayer34-322.bin and then type./RealPlayer34-322.bin, and then install it in your home folder. No, in the terminal. Or maybe the console. Oh, click on the box that looks like a black box with a white bit of text in it. Ahh, finally installed.
Oh, you wanted an icon to click on? Ok, we can do this. Just.. Oh, wait. Gnome doesn't have a menu-editor that works yet. Hmm.... Well, just press alt-F2 and then type RealPlayer... no, capital R and capital P...Oh, you have to put it in your path... Hmm, the sound doesn't work? oh, kill the KDE sound server, ALSA doesn't do the software mixing that 90% of AC97 sound cards use, so you can only play from one program at once, and that program might not release it properly, so you have to do fuser/dev/dsp, then kill the process of the program that it returns. Hmm, it still isn't working? Ok, just make sure the kernel module is loaded for your soundcard.........And Aunt Oldy never touches her computer again.
Or windows: go to realplayer website. click download. double click the realplayer icon that magically appears. Wait, this isn't the program!? Oh, it just wants me to keep clicking next for like 30 times. Let's see, oh, here we go, click on the link on the website and it loads the program and starts playing it. It works! Back to knitting socks!
Now, of course the fact that her computer is on a zombie network is more bothersome than not getting RealPlayer to work, but getting her to care is more difficult. Linux isn't remotely there as a desktop except for geeks who love to hack around on it. For these people it is fantastic. For everyone else, make them, force them, cajole them, beat them into buying a Mac.
Oh, except when there isn't a driver. Which is alot. Oh, and when there is a driver, most of the time the driver won't have full functionality. So you feel free to boot gentoo off a usb key plugged into a network server connected to your pda via AFS over a Ham Radio link to use a barely-accelerated X without open-gl support if you need to.
Meanwhile those of us with the ability to plan more than 5 minutes in advance will just "put the driver on a floppy" and "use that floppy to install it" and "never think about it again" because "it is very easy" and "a monkey could do it".
I realize this is hotly contested. But Linus has made it very hard to produce binary drivers on intentionally, for better or worse, and thus turned it into a holy war.
But you can't say that linux has better driver support than windows, because it just doesn't. Not for x86 hardware. That doesn't mean that windows contains less suckage. Clearly, Windows excels at suck. Someday Linux will have market share that convinces people to write drivers to go with their hardware. We aren't even close to that day.
No, this is completely false. I have installed windows on such a computer. Completely plug and play. No drivers were necessary. The SATA controller was much newer than Windows XP, so it is highly unlikely it just happened to have the correct driver on the installation Cd.
That is to say, you are talking directly out of your ass. Don't make stupid predictions that you don't know anything about. Don't be an asshole just because this is slashdot and you want to seem like you know what is what.
Oh, if there was any doubt, you don't know. What is what. You don't know what is what.
This may seem pedantic, but as a pedant it is my duty to point out that there are not and will never (can never) be an infinite number of anything which is made of matter. Specifically, there is not an infinite number of people. You can see this by noting that "infinity" is not a number in the usual sense. So having an "infinite number" is a contradiction on it's face. (don't try to bring set theory into this, it isn't applicable smart guy)
In fact, there are only a finite number of quantum states for the universe, and this is the largest number which describes "things". This means that there are only a finite number of objects in the universe (no matter how small you would care to make them) and that all the possible configurations, positions, energy levels, spin, color, taste, french-fryness or whatever of these objects is finite as well. There is nothing anywhere in the physical universe that qualifies as being infinite in any sense. It is purely an abstraction, often used to describe purely theoretical limit cases. What I am saying here is that if you aren't doing theoretical physics or mathematics, then you will never have to use the word infinite to say what you mean. In fact, you are always misusing it in that case.
Oh, just as an aside, statements like "God is infinite" are not only silly, they are totally void of meaning. It is just something people say to get that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing that God isn't going to burn you forever like those crazy people in Competing Religion (TM).
People like to say "infinite" when they mean "a lot". This grates just as much as hearing someone say "nucular" instead of "nuclear", at least to people who are in the know.
I know, offtopic to the extreme. But this article is complete crap anyway. Who are they going to pay? Imagine the headlines: "IBM forced to pay 2 million for free software." "When asked why they were forced to pay for free software, IBM CEO Chester Whosits replied "Free software isn't free." and went back to depositing his giant novelty salary check." "Microsoft releases press release, "Free software costs 1 million dollars, MS Windows Longjohn XLTK Extreme Server Cluster Computing edition is only $399, and it comes with a free wordpad template to print out your MCSE, which will get you a job starting at 70,000 with no computer experience, just like you heard on that commercial on the radio." Just the sort of thing newspapers like to print.
I would guess that most trickle chargers use about 500mA - 1A at the high end.
I suppose your numbers aren't so silly as I had made them out to be. Of course, that is due to the innefficency of the wall wart.
What I think is silly is the idea that rechargable batteries might be less efficient than toss aways. Even with the energy wasted at the 5W * 1 year level, it isn't nearly as bad as the energy used in the production of the batteries.
First you have to consider that if you completely switched to rechargable batteries, you aren't charging the same batteries all the time. You might have 1 set in the charger for ready use, but every now and again you'll switch them for a set that is completely dead. So you are likely to have at a minimum 2x the capacity of your charger in batteries, but this could really go as high as 10x if you use alot of batteries and have a 1 hour charger, say.
Now, the energy use is basically constant due to the wall wart pulling roughly the same load regardless of the activity of the charger. So, if you use about 3x the number of batteries in the charger, and it holds 4, then you have 12 batteries going. Let's say you use your digital camera alot, just to make things easy. You might go through 12 batteries in two weeks of moderate use. 12 * 26 = 312. 312 batteries saved.
This would cost at least $10/20 * 312 = $156, which isn't the issue, but is interesting.
I'm fairly sure 312 batteries would take more than 5 gallons of oil to produce and deliver. (YOU might use 5 gallons of GAS just going to the store to get them. You would have to drive about 5 * 30 = 120 miles, and if you live 15 miles from the costco where you can get them at a reasonable price, you would have to make 120/(15 * 2) = 4 trips all year)
Kodak cameras don't use Alkaline because Alkaline batteries quickly decrease in voltage. NiMH die off very little, then suddenly lose all voltage at the very end of their charge.
So with Alkaline batteries you only get like 15% of the life of the battery used when the camera thinks it is dead.
Plus Alkaline have poor characteristics for high current loads, which is due to low internal resistance I believe.
Let's say your fridge uses 1 billion watts of AC power at all times. That's (shitload) of power would take (ocean) of oil to produce. Who knows? That might be worse for the environment than running your own personal hog farm so you can have bacon.
If your trickle charger is using 5W it is broke as fuck.
That is what I am saying. If there are regular trips out of the dome or whatever, build the suits to dock with the dome. Then there is no way sand can get in, since the suit itself is never inside.
This is such a stupid concern. As for breathing it, do the same thing moms have done for 2000 years, don't let people wear dirty stuff inside.
There is no reason you would need to expose the INSIDE of the structure you live in to the OUTSIDE of the suit. Design the suit so that getting into the suit is the same as leaving the dust-free area. That means sort of 'docking' it. That way you are only exposed to the inside of the suit, never the outside.
Obviously you will have to repair and maintain the suit. When this comes up you'll have to clean it before bringing it in. At least you won't have to clean it after every use, and you won't need complicated (heavy, thus expensive) equipment to dedust people who go outside for 10 minutes to check something. Plus, no deduster means no failing deduster, which means you won't have to let dusty ass people inside because the vaccum broke.
The real question is why do you have a suit. It will only be necessary to go outside very rarely I would imagine, so the dust becomes less of an issue. Just suck it off anybody coming in and forget about it. You will have to be running some serious hepa/ultraviolet air cleaners anyway, because dust from human skin and abrasion between objects will just build up without limit otherwise. You'll have to ultraviolet the air somehow, or you risk things like legionairs disease, and nitrous oxide buildup.
I would be more worried about wear due to abrasion. Unless parts can be fashioned easily on the moon this could be a serious problem. Perhaps parts exposed to dust could be made out of a polymer that can be melted and remolded, so that the only loss is the small amount of plastic that is actually abraded off, instead of the entire part being ruined.
Gravity increases as stuff gets sucked in. An Electric Field black hole would quickly dissipate, as it would ONLY suck in things that were of opposite charge, and so it would quickly end up being neutrally charged, and then it would suck less.
Either that or you have the 20 bucks to get the a new battery. This is slashdot, 90% of the people here can handle popping open an ipod and plugging in a battery. Some of the people here even know how to do dorky things like soldering! Imagine that, actually melting metal onto electronics! They must be Rocket Scientists.
Batteries don't last forever? Holy crap Anita Coney!
What's next? HD's that eventually fail? (does that mean I have to 'back up' my data to something besides my HD? Like, what a hassle!) Computers where you have to swap out the power supply every 10 years because it's dead? (Uhm, like, it's powered by plugging it in, why does it need a power supply?)
Christ. If you are so ignorant that you expect any rechargeable battery to last more than a few years then you really could have nothing to say here that isn't obvious or stupid.
Of course! We should stick with inefficient crappy technology, because the alternative would be updating the tax code.
OTOH, it makes alot of sense to tax by the mile. But only if they also deregulate public transportation. The reason nobody rides the bus in the US is because it sucks to ride it. It doesn't go where YOU want to go, it goes where some moron at the METRO headquarters set it up on the map. Meanwhile there are state-imposed restrictions on the prices taxi's charge, so they can't compete even if they want to. This means that it costs 30 dollars to take a 20 minute cab ride.
When I lived in Arizona there was no regulation of taxis. We rode from Sierra Vista to Tombstone for about 5 dollars, round trip. Often, they would take you to lunch for under a dollar just to get more business later, when you would be going to the bar during a peak hour. During the peak hours it would cost a whopping 2-3 dollars for a 10-15 minute ride, at most about 5 bucks.
Plus, there was direct competition. Once I was at burger king during lunch and called for a cab. Apparently a competing cab company was listening in on the radio, and they got there guy there first. We saw the cab we called initially pull in as we pulled out.
Most cars would be plugged in when people are at home, so usually at night.
Timers could be used easily, causing cars to only charge in very off peak hours, unless you had somewhere to go before that.
Charging batteries does not take alot of power at once. If you put it on an eight hour charger, it would use less electricity at any instant than powering a few lightbulbs.
Compare the off-peak charging of cars to air conditioners. Power plants have to be able to handle the load of millions of air conditioners during PEAK hours in the summer, in warm areas. Air conditioners are in the thousands of watts. There is no conceivable way that charging cars will even begin to cause off peak electrical transmission quantity to rival peak hours.
Electric companies would be the first ones to champion this idea. Right now, during off peak hours, all those wires and plants are sitting mostly idle. That means that the investment in wires and transmission is only collecting money half the time. If there were comparable demand all day, electricity would actually go down significantly per kwh, since the ratio of power sold to cost of transmission would be much much higher.
I agree, but this only applies to the entire system taken as a whole. Obviously some people will benefit from destructive acts. Braking a window doesn't boost the economy because of increased demand for glass, etc. It sure as hell benefits the glass manufacturers though.
So while Blaster might have caused damage, it certainly was good for virus scanner makers.
Plus, even this is a simplification.
When you look at the "Broken Window Fallacy" it is not a general case. When a window breaks, that is taken as the worst thing that can happen to a window owner.
A better analogy is that of a business which has a window. They consider the window to be adequate protection against theft, since it is strong glass. One day a kid throws a brick at it and breaks it. Now, if that is the end of the story the fallacy applies here.
However, the rest of the story might be that the store owner realizes the window wasn't strong, and installs a security system which saves him $50,000 later, when his store gets robbed. So now the breaking of the window actually has benefited the economy as a whole as long as the cost of the window + security system was much lower than the potential loss (whether insurance would pay for it or not).
Of course, it would be better if the owner just figured this out and didn't have the window broken, but that is not what is in question.
This story is much closer to that of virii than the one to which the "Broken Window Fallacy" applies.
If they don't care about grammar in this class then screw it, turn in whatever drivel you spit onto the page. Since they don't care there is no point in worrying about it, and you are wasting time.
If they do care then they should have forced you into taking grammar 101, and you are cheating, since you are using the computer to correct your work. This is no different than typing math homework into Mathematica and copying down the answer, or using a spell checker on a spelling test.
The point is that you might not be there to learn grammar, but that is because they assume you know it. If you don't know it they should still dock you points.
Back to math: If you can't do algebra they shouldn't let you write down half the work, then write "Apply algebra", instead of writing the solution.
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dmix can work, but it is a bear to setup. I have stuff to do, I don't want to learn the internal workings of ALSA to listen to an MP3 while using a video editor. It should be on by default, and it should be smart enough to do hardware mixing when it can, and software mixing when it can't do hardware. Windows does this, there is no reason Linux cannot.
While you can use a sound daemon, it doesn't solve it by a long shot. Any program that doesn't use the daemon can lock /dev/dsp, preventing the daemon from using it. Plus, ESD sounds like complete shit.
Actually, none do. This includes Mandrake and Suse, and I believe but am not sure about FC3. Debian and Gentoo certainly don't help at all here, although it is much easier IMHO to modify those distros.
In addition, even if you want to "configure ALSA to do software mixing" you cannot. This has not been implemented in ALSA and won't be for probably more than a year or two. Your only option is to use something else to do the mixing, which then feeds the output to ALSA. Every program which does this is pretty lame, difficult to set up, and sounds terrible.
Alot use the KDE Sound Server "Arts" to do this. This works, as you can call a program as an argument to "artsdsp" to force it to use arts if it doesn't support it, and many applications have an Arts plugin. However, this does not add the functionality to ALSA, as you can see by running any sound program with the output set to "ALSA". Either ARTS will block the program from outputting tot he sound card, or the program will monopolize the sound card, causing ARTS to be unable to work for the duration of the programs runtime. This is a pain in the ass to deal with, and forced me to go buy a Mac Mini for my wife, so I could keep my laptop as a linux test computer.
In the end, there isn't a good solution to this. Each solution either 1. Fails alot forcing you to intervene manually, or 2. does such a poor job of mixing sound it makes you want to chuck the computer.
Of course, on a desktop I would just stop crying and go buy a soundcard that isn't shitty, one with an actual DSP that does hardware mixing. At that point it would work just fine, and does on my Fortissimo II. In fact, everything works beautifully.
On my laptop I have no such luxury. I suppose I could find a USB sound dongle that supports linux. But that would be an inconvenience as I would have to find external speakers as well, or pipe the music back to the line in which would sound terrible.
Eventually ALSA will support software mixing at a low enough level, with a good enough algorithm, that it will leave Windows in the dust.
Whenever Linux finally gets around to supporting something it usually does it in a fantastic way. So anybody out there with a PHD in CS doing your thesis on audio processing, feel free to implement the ALSA sound mixing level. I would, but I'm far to stupid.
Actually, only the installation part of my example gets better if it is included. The problems with audio are in the linux kernel.
Right now ALSA does not support software mixing of two or more streams of audio. You can use additional software to do this, but every implementation is difficult to set up properly, and no distro sets it up for you. That, and every software mixing implementation in linux sounds like shit. This is a major defect when switching to a linux desktop (if you, like most people, have a cheap sound card.)
I don't buy it. When discussing things which can be counted infinite means not finite, which is to say no number corresponds to it.
... infinite. Of course, you never quite get to the point where you can't figure out what comes next, I hope. Then there is the question of time. Maybe you'll never finish counting something because it would simply take too long. "There are an infinite number of books down at the bookmobile."
From dictionary.com: Immeasurably great or large; boundless: infinite patience; a discovery of infinite importance.
Notice that it only applies to Immeasurably great or large, not quantity. Besides which, this would not apply to humans. This is the answer to questions like "how much is the human sense of humor worth?" A: "It is infinitely valuable." and other such twaddle.
The other non-math definition from dictionary.com: Having no boundaries or limits.
Again, does not apply. In fact, this is contradictory to your usage to refer to "an infinite number of humans", since the number of humans has clear boundaries and limits, besides the fact that the total number has a well known upper bound, since we can in fact, at least approximately, count them all.
And, of course, even infinite as you define it does not apply to humans, as I explained above.
Now, as for people discerning between the same word which can be used in two ways, I explained in the first 3 words of my post that I was being pedantic.
Pedantic: 1. academic, donnish, pedantic -- (marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects)
Pedant: 1. pedant, bookworm, scholastic -- (a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit)
Now, as I was saying: Just because you personally can't count something doesn't qualify it as infinite in any sense. Otherwise you would count like this: 1, 2, 3, 4
(Note as well that we're talking about countable in the "I can physically count these things" sense,
Then there is the question of availability. "Pluto has infinitely many 7-11's." Of course, using your sense of the word, this is true, since we have no way to count the number of 7-11's on Pluto.
Ahh, but you mean in some way that you can't count them because there are too many to count. Well, back to the time constraint then. Are there too many because you can't physically count them if you were dedicated? or are there too many because you don't care to spend that much time?
Finally, the coup de grace. Your 'definition' of infinite is completely dependent on the amount of organization your set of things has. If you take grains of sand on the beach, then by your definition it is infinite. However, if those grains were lined up in a grid so that they were in neat rows and columns, you would only have to count the rows and columns and then multiply. Now, you just arrange them in a bunch of separate squares, each with the same numbers of rows and columns. You count one side of one square, then you count the total number of squares, and viola! you now know the number of grains of sand on the beach. (of course, you don't actually do this, but suppose you came upon it already done. It's a thought experiment.) But how can this be? The same number of grains is infinite or not, depending on how you lay them out?
So now I've shown that infinite doesn't even refer to quantity in your sense, it refers to difficulty in counting. So really when you say "infinite" you are saying "disorganized". I think you would have difficulty convincing a large number of people that 'infinite' means 'disorganized'.
Sure. Of course, if the computer doesn't have a floppy drive you can always plug one in using USB.
The problem is, when Linux doesn't support something out of the box, which is often enough, the solution is usually to get different hardware, or perform some kind of magic like the NDIS wrapper.
I'm not saying Linux or Windows are good or bad. Both do work, and both will get the job done. For alot of stuff Linux is alot better and more secure.
What I was mainly saying is that there is no reason to complain about this stuff. If you know you have to do some task, you plan for it, get hardware that will do the job, etc. Not being able to get a driver off a server for Windows is pretty low on my list of things that might cause me a problem. This is only an issue when you sit down at a computer at a friends house, start to install windows, realize you don't have the driver, and the friend doesn't have another computer where you can download it. Of course, if you plan ahead 5 minutes (like the two of us, and everyone else who likes to not get fired) just pull out your knoppix cd, download the driver, and roll right along, using each tool for the task that it is intended, and is good at.
Windows is easy to setup if everything goes right.
./RealPlayer34-322.bin, and then install it in your home folder. No, in the terminal. Or maybe the console. Oh, click on the box that looks like a black box with a white bit of text in it. Ahh, finally installed.
.. Oh, wait. Gnome doesn't have a menu-editor that works yet. Hmm.... Well, just press alt-F2 and then type RealPlayer... no, capital R and capital P...Oh, you have to put it in your path... Hmm, the sound doesn't work? oh, kill the KDE sound server, ALSA doesn't do the software mixing that 90% of AC97 sound cards use, so you can only play from one program at once, and that program might not release it properly, so you have to do fuser /dev/dsp, then kill the process of the program that it returns. Hmm, it still isn't working? Ok, just make sure the kernel module is loaded for your soundcard... ... ...And Aunt Oldy never touches her computer again.
This is a fucking tautology. What, is Linux easy to set up when shit goes terribly wrong?
I too run Gentoo but it's a geeks distro and isn't as easy to setup as the more mainstream distros.
Have you heard of Debian? It is about as hard to set up as Gentoo, although it is more consistant in how it does things.
Of course, by "mainstream" you mean "red hat, suse, mandrake", so I'll give this one to you. Those distro's are much easier as long as you just want to use default setup, don't want to upgrade the kernel/software, and don't mind reinstalling for every release. Oh, and you should probably not expect software that isn't bundled on the CD to integrate properly with the packaging system. So by "easy" you mean "easy to get it to boot and show a pretty KDE desktop without knowing a damn thing" and not "easy to accomplish something".
The package selection you pointed out is primarly because Linux tends to install a lot of apps along with the OS.
What do you think Linux is? Is BASH part of linux? What about libc? What is an app? Is open office an app? What about mount?
I'm not going to argue that Linux is easier, but it's hardly more difficult either in the mainstream distros.
Bull. Find your aunt. Install windows on one computer, and install Linux on another, any distro.
Now have her install Realplayer so she can listen to NPR while she knits sweaters. Oh, it seems that there isn't an RPM for your version/distro. Looks like a command line install. So, aunty, just do a chmod +x RealPlayer34-322.bin and then type
Oh, you wanted an icon to click on? Ok, we can do this. Just
Or windows: go to realplayer website. click download. double click the realplayer icon that magically appears. Wait, this isn't the program!? Oh, it just wants me to keep clicking next for like 30 times. Let's see, oh, here we go, click on the link on the website and it loads the program and starts playing it. It works! Back to knitting socks!
Now, of course the fact that her computer is on a zombie network is more bothersome than not getting RealPlayer to work, but getting her to care is more difficult. Linux isn't remotely there as a desktop except for geeks who love to hack around on it. For these people it is fantastic. For everyone else, make them, force them, cajole them, beat them into buying a Mac.
Oh, except when there isn't a driver. Which is alot. Oh, and when there is a driver, most of the time the driver won't have full functionality. So you feel free to boot gentoo off a usb key plugged into a network server connected to your pda via AFS over a Ham Radio link to use a barely-accelerated X without open-gl support if you need to.
Meanwhile those of us with the ability to plan more than 5 minutes in advance will just "put the driver on a floppy" and "use that floppy to install it" and "never think about it again" because "it is very easy" and "a monkey could do it".
I realize this is hotly contested. But Linus has made it very hard to produce binary drivers on intentionally, for better or worse, and thus turned it into a holy war.
But you can't say that linux has better driver support than windows, because it just doesn't. Not for x86 hardware. That doesn't mean that windows contains less suckage. Clearly, Windows excels at suck. Someday Linux will have market share that convinces people to write drivers to go with their hardware. We aren't even close to that day.
No, this is completely false. I have installed windows on such a computer. Completely plug and play. No drivers were necessary. The SATA controller was much newer than Windows XP, so it is highly unlikely it just happened to have the correct driver on the installation Cd.
That is to say, you are talking directly out of your ass. Don't make stupid predictions that you don't know anything about. Don't be an asshole just because this is slashdot and you want to seem like you know what is what.
Oh, if there was any doubt, you don't know. What is what. You don't know what is what.
This may seem pedantic, but as a pedant it is my duty to point out that there are not and will never (can never) be an infinite number of anything which is made of matter. Specifically, there is not an infinite number of people. You can see this by noting that "infinity" is not a number in the usual sense. So having an "infinite number" is a contradiction on it's face. (don't try to bring set theory into this, it isn't applicable smart guy)
In fact, there are only a finite number of quantum states for the universe, and this is the largest number which describes "things". This means that there are only a finite number of objects in the universe (no matter how small you would care to make them) and that all the possible configurations, positions, energy levels, spin, color, taste, french-fryness or whatever of these objects is finite as well. There is nothing anywhere in the physical universe that qualifies as being infinite in any sense. It is purely an abstraction, often used to describe purely theoretical limit cases. What I am saying here is that if you aren't doing theoretical physics or mathematics, then you will never have to use the word infinite to say what you mean. In fact, you are always misusing it in that case.
Oh, just as an aside, statements like "God is infinite" are not only silly, they are totally void of meaning. It is just something people say to get that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing that God isn't going to burn you forever like those crazy people in Competing Religion (TM).
People like to say "infinite" when they mean "a lot". This grates just as much as hearing someone say "nucular" instead of "nuclear", at least to people who are in the know.
I know, offtopic to the extreme. But this article is complete crap anyway. Who are they going to pay? Imagine the headlines: "IBM forced to pay 2 million for free software." "When asked why they were forced to pay for free software, IBM CEO Chester Whosits replied "Free software isn't free." and went back to depositing his giant novelty salary check." "Microsoft releases press release, "Free software costs 1 million dollars, MS Windows Longjohn XLTK Extreme Server Cluster Computing edition is only $399, and it comes with a free wordpad template to print out your MCSE, which will get you a job starting at 70,000 with no computer experience, just like you heard on that commercial on the radio." Just the sort of thing newspapers like to print.
Come on, this is an obvious dupe. The editors are truly asleep at the switch here.
I would guess that most trickle chargers use about 500mA - 1A at the high end.
I suppose your numbers aren't so silly as I had made them out to be. Of course, that is due to the innefficency of the wall wart.
What I think is silly is the idea that rechargable batteries might be less efficient than toss aways. Even with the energy wasted at the 5W * 1 year level, it isn't nearly as bad as the energy used in the production of the batteries.
First you have to consider that if you completely switched to rechargable batteries, you aren't charging the same batteries all the time. You might have 1 set in the charger for ready use, but every now and again you'll switch them for a set that is completely dead. So you are likely to have at a minimum 2x the capacity of your charger in batteries, but this could really go as high as 10x if you use alot of batteries and have a 1 hour charger, say.
Now, the energy use is basically constant due to the wall wart pulling roughly the same load regardless of the activity of the charger. So, if you use about 3x the number of batteries in the charger, and it holds 4, then you have 12 batteries going. Let's say you use your digital camera alot, just to make things easy. You might go through 12 batteries in two weeks of moderate use. 12 * 26 = 312. 312 batteries saved.
This would cost at least $10/20 * 312 = $156, which isn't the issue, but is interesting.
I'm fairly sure 312 batteries would take more than 5 gallons of oil to produce and deliver. (YOU might use 5 gallons of GAS just going to the store to get them. You would have to drive about 5 * 30 = 120 miles, and if you live 15 miles from the costco where you can get them at a reasonable price, you would have to make 120/(15 * 2) = 4 trips all year)
False...
Kodak cameras don't use Alkaline because Alkaline batteries quickly decrease in voltage. NiMH die off very little, then suddenly lose all voltage at the very end of their charge.
So with Alkaline batteries you only get like 15% of the life of the battery used when the camera thinks it is dead.
Plus Alkaline have poor characteristics for high current loads, which is due to low internal resistance I believe.
Let's say your fridge uses 1 billion watts of AC power at all times. That's (shitload) of power would take (ocean) of oil to produce. Who knows? That might be worse for the environment than running your own personal hog farm so you can have bacon.
If your trickle charger is using 5W it is broke as fuck.
Yea,
besides, the technology has to be there already.
As far as contamination, just do whatever they do at nuclear power plants. Assuming that that works I mean.
That is what I am saying. If there are regular trips out of the dome or whatever, build the suits to dock with the dome. Then there is no way sand can get in, since the suit itself is never inside.
I made this clear.
This is such a stupid concern. As for breathing it, do the same thing moms have done for 2000 years, don't let people wear dirty stuff inside.
There is no reason you would need to expose the INSIDE of the structure you live in to the OUTSIDE of the suit. Design the suit so that getting into the suit is the same as leaving the dust-free area. That means sort of 'docking' it. That way you are only exposed to the inside of the suit, never the outside.
Obviously you will have to repair and maintain the suit. When this comes up you'll have to clean it before bringing it in. At least you won't have to clean it after every use, and you won't need complicated (heavy, thus expensive) equipment to dedust people who go outside for 10 minutes to check something. Plus, no deduster means no failing deduster, which means you won't have to let dusty ass people inside because the vaccum broke.
The real question is why do you have a suit. It will only be necessary to go outside very rarely I would imagine, so the dust becomes less of an issue. Just suck it off anybody coming in and forget about it. You will have to be running some serious hepa/ultraviolet air cleaners anyway, because dust from human skin and abrasion between objects will just build up without limit otherwise. You'll have to ultraviolet the air somehow, or you risk things like legionairs disease, and nitrous oxide buildup.
I would be more worried about wear due to abrasion. Unless parts can be fashioned easily on the moon this could be a serious problem. Perhaps parts exposed to dust could be made out of a polymer that can be melted and remolded, so that the only loss is the small amount of plastic that is actually abraded off, instead of the entire part being ruined.
Naw, because it would balance out.
Gravity increases as stuff gets sucked in. An Electric Field black hole would quickly dissipate, as it would ONLY suck in things that were of opposite charge, and so it would quickly end up being neutrally charged, and then it would suck less.
non-non-non-non-heinous
Oh, they exist. Some of my best friends are fairies, though that isn't what they prefer to be called, IIRC.
"I'm not stupid, I just play stupid on TV"
Either that or you have the 20 bucks to get the a new battery. This is slashdot, 90% of the people here can handle popping open an ipod and plugging in a battery. Some of the people here even know how to do dorky things like soldering! Imagine that, actually melting metal onto electronics! They must be Rocket Scientists.
Batteries don't last forever? Holy crap Anita Coney!
What's next? HD's that eventually fail? (does that mean I have to 'back up' my data to something besides my HD? Like, what a hassle!) Computers where you have to swap out the power supply every 10 years because it's dead? (Uhm, like, it's powered by plugging it in, why does it need a power supply?)
Christ. If you are so ignorant that you expect any rechargeable battery to last more than a few years then you really could have nothing to say here that isn't obvious or stupid.
Flame On!
Of course! We should stick with inefficient crappy technology, because the alternative would be updating the tax code.
OTOH, it makes alot of sense to tax by the mile. But only if they also deregulate public transportation. The reason nobody rides the bus in the US is because it sucks to ride it. It doesn't go where YOU want to go, it goes where some moron at the METRO headquarters set it up on the map. Meanwhile there are state-imposed restrictions on the prices taxi's charge, so they can't compete even if they want to. This means that it costs 30 dollars to take a 20 minute cab ride.
When I lived in Arizona there was no regulation of taxis. We rode from Sierra Vista to Tombstone for about 5 dollars, round trip. Often, they would take you to lunch for under a dollar just to get more business later, when you would be going to the bar during a peak hour. During the peak hours it would cost a whopping 2-3 dollars for a 10-15 minute ride, at most about 5 bucks.
Plus, there was direct competition. Once I was at burger king during lunch and called for a cab. Apparently a competing cab company was listening in on the radio, and they got there guy there first. We saw the cab we called initially pull in as we pulled out.
I call BS.
Most cars would be plugged in when people are at home, so usually at night.
Timers could be used easily, causing cars to only charge in very off peak hours, unless you had somewhere to go before that.
Charging batteries does not take alot of power at once. If you put it on an eight hour charger, it would use less electricity at any instant than powering a few lightbulbs.
Compare the off-peak charging of cars to air conditioners. Power plants have to be able to handle the load of millions of air conditioners during PEAK hours in the summer, in warm areas. Air conditioners are in the thousands of watts. There is no conceivable way that charging cars will even begin to cause off peak electrical transmission quantity to rival peak hours.
Electric companies would be the first ones to champion this idea. Right now, during off peak hours, all those wires and plants are sitting mostly idle. That means that the investment in wires and transmission is only collecting money half the time. If there were comparable demand all day, electricity would actually go down significantly per kwh, since the ratio of power sold to cost of transmission would be much much higher.
I agree, but this only applies to the entire system taken as a whole. Obviously some people will benefit from destructive acts. Braking a window doesn't boost the economy because of increased demand for glass, etc. It sure as hell benefits the glass manufacturers though.
So while Blaster might have caused damage, it certainly was good for virus scanner makers.
Plus, even this is a simplification.
When you look at the "Broken Window Fallacy" it is not a general case. When a window breaks, that is taken as the worst thing that can happen to a window owner.
A better analogy is that of a business which has a window. They consider the window to be adequate protection against theft, since it is strong glass. One day a kid throws a brick at it and breaks it. Now, if that is the end of the story the fallacy applies here.
However, the rest of the story might be that the store owner realizes the window wasn't strong, and installs a security system which saves him $50,000 later, when his store gets robbed. So now the breaking of the window actually has benefited the economy as a whole as long as the cost of the window + security system was much lower than the potential loss (whether insurance would pay for it or not).
Of course, it would be better if the owner just figured this out and didn't have the window broken, but that is not what is in question.
This story is much closer to that of virii than the one to which the "Broken Window Fallacy" applies.
No no no.
If they don't care about grammar in this class then screw it, turn in whatever drivel you spit onto the page. Since they don't care there is no point in worrying about it, and you are wasting time.
If they do care then they should have forced you into taking grammar 101, and you are cheating, since you are using the computer to correct your work. This is no different than typing math homework into Mathematica and copying down the answer, or using a spell checker on a spelling test.
The point is that you might not be there to learn grammar, but that is because they assume you know it. If you don't know it they should still dock you points.
Back to math: If you can't do algebra they shouldn't let you write down half the work, then write "Apply algebra", instead of writing the solution.