I can't believe someone modded this up. Which volcano? Which eruption? Where's the study? Do you have reference to any study or article suggesting this?
Pinatubo did release large amounts of sulfer dioxide, but sulfer dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. In fact, it's believed that Mount Pinatubo masked global warming in the years following the eruption.
Subversion definitely looks interesting. It's under active development and is making fast progress. But I doubt the authors would recommend it yet for production use; it's still in pre-Alpha.
But one important feature that they don't intend to tackle is the ability to have distributed repositories. The idea is that if there are 40 developers working on a shared code tree, but a team of 6 people who are going to making major changes to the code. These 6 developers should be able to easily checkin their code to a local repository until it is ready to atomically merged into the main repository.
There's a good description of this on the BitKeeper web page.
It looks like arch is intending something similar, but the project seems to be progressing fairly slowly.
All check-ins are atomic, and committing files from all over your source tree is easy with something like WinCVS' "flat mode".
Each file's checkin may be atomic, but if you got an error halfway through checking in a set of files, the first files will remain checked in and the code tree is in a invalid state.
This is one of the problems that Subversion intends to fix.
1. GSM -> GSM specifications -> SIM cards + Mobile phone (or pcmcia card or whatever) in order to have a mobile terminal
Is that true in the US or is a SIM card equivalent hardwired into the phone?
3. For the USA, well, you'll have to find a GSM network, prior to do that;)
Using a tri-band phone there is a reasonable GSM network in the US which allows international roaming. But is it possible to buy SIM cards there or get temporary service (without a contract)?
I have heard that SIM cards don't exist in the phones in the US. Is that the case for the GSM phones as well?
I'm considering buying a tri-band phone here in Australia, so that I can use it when I am in the US. But I don't want to use roaming and pay the huge $$$/minute. If I was going to Europe, I could buy a $20 prepaid SIM card at the airport and get a temporary phone number, with reasonable call rates.
Is this possible in the US using a tri-band phone? Is there any way to get short-term local service?
It has a lot of information on font rendering in X11 and following its advice can really make a big difference in improving the look of the fonts, (especially in Netscape I found).
No US aid went to the Taliban, as the US (and the rest of the world except for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the UAE) did not recognize it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
It's amazing how such concerns disappear when it comes to the War on Drugs. The US gave the Taliban a $43 million grant in exchange for their cracking down on the cultivation of opium poppies.
By the way, they refer to themselves as Muslims, not Moslems. While not necessarily offensive, Moslem is a bit like the word Negro in that it was commonly used in the past without any negative connotation, but has fallen out of use. These jackasses in the fezes seem to be the main group who uses the term now.
well written/bin/sh code is going to work pretty much anywhere.
Ugh, I've needed to write cross platform/bin/sh scripts and I'm amazed at how limited the set of common capabilities are. Or perhaps it would have helped if I had found a good reference to what will *definitely* work on which platforms. Is/bin/sh POSIX on all major platforms? Or do some have it in an alternate location like/bin/posix/sh?
I've had much better luck going with perl which is very common, though I admitted that has required some trouble on some older installs of unixes which don't ship with perl standard. But it doesn't have nearly the version incompatibilities that sh has (even if you have to write code that works on perl4 and perl5, it's pretty easy and the differences are well documented.)
The one area when I do still use sh instead of perl is when I want the output from sub programs to be show to the screen progressively instead of after completion. Such as:
#!/bin/perl
print `echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar`;
This won't print anything until the after the entire program completes, unlike sh. Is there a way to do that in perl?
But to do anything at all complex, sh is a pain in the ass.
Expect.pm is great because you can use all those excellent perl modules (and you don't have to use tcl.)
One use I found for it is to put bash-like command-line editing on tools with lack command-line editing like Oracle's sqlplus. Just use it in conjunction with Term::ReadLine::Gnu and have ReadLine send commands to an Expect-controlled process. Sqlplus is finally usable!
-Bruce
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
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To my knowledge there were no christians in India prior to British arrival and they are a small minority right now.
Most conversion to Christianity in India happened by the Portuguese prior to the arrival of the British. They make up 2-3% of the population, somewhere around 30 million people.
Also, I have no knowledge of "Arab Jews". There were Jews in Palestine before Israel was founded but these people were not Arab.
Arabs and the Jews from the middle east are virtually identical genetically. The distinction is mainly political and religious.
The best telecommuting I've done was spending 3 months working remotely from Guatemala for a Silicon Valley company. I had quit my job to go study Spanish there and realized I had a fair amount of time on my hands. My former company agreed to let me work come back as a contractor from down there. I didn't need a laptop or anything. I just went to internet cafes and used telnet and a web browser. I also worked remotely from Turkey for about a month in the same manner.
It's worked well for me, but the main thing to realize is that it's *not* as good as being in the office. I don't care what anyone says about being able to concentrate without distractions. People are reluctant to contact you. There may be timezone lags reducing communication to one email back-and-forth per day. What can be drawn quickly on a whiteboard takes time on to draw in some tool or a web-whiteboard.
I think it can work, but only if there is already good communication between the worker and the rest of the team. It's very difficult to build a good working rapport with people you've never met face-to-face.
I've been working remotely for almost a year now from Australia for the same company and now I'm opening a small development office over here. We're trying to take advantage of the better availability of developers compared to Silicon Valley and also take advantage of the good exchange rate.
But I won't tell you the name of the company because it's still viewed with a bit of suspicion. Investors might see it as an inability to recruit locally. Lawyers worry about intellectual property laws of foreign countries. Executives might be concerned about whether the isolate groups are properly focused on the company goals.
I think it's an area which is slowly growing, but probably won't change the world overnight. Most of the major offshore outsourcing is in labor-intensive areas such as support call centers and regional areas such as localization. I expect sending core development overseas will remain on the periphery for a while.
almost all o fthose poor conditions did not exist until industrialized European countries and the United States decided to change them into colonies
This is true in a sense because poverty is only relative. When the Europeans came to Africa, they created poverty by introducing superior wealth.
The same thing happens today in developing countries resulting in families leaving rural life for the cities in order to earn more to save up to buy the new necessities: a motorbike, tv, factory-made clothing, etc. Even bringing education to a country creates poverty in those who miss out on it and creates illiterates out of formerly normal people.
But I'd never advocate trying to keep people isolated or to discourage them from taking advantage of the products of the modern world. I'd like our wealthier countries to help people to live the way they want, whether it's being left alone in their mountain tribe or saving up to buy a telephone.
MySQL, like many open source packages, accepts a lot of very nonstandard SQL constructs.
This is true with most of the commercial databases as well. Unfortunately the portability of SQL is mostly a myth. Try to write nontrivial SQL that runs on both Oracle and anything else and you'll see what I mean.
A few months ago we were told there is no God because we didn't have many more genes than most animals.
Who the hell said that? How could the number of genes in a human have any relation to religion?
So, yes, nothing is remotely firm, yet. How many textbooks has this "fact" made its way into while the truth awaited to be discovered?
What "fact" are you talking about? The article and the post refer to the number of genes in a human. Are you disputing the number? Is this number really included in textbooks as a fact?
Or are you disputing the whole theory of how genetic makeup relates to biology?
And remember that even the big boys sometimes have to play by the rules. Microsoft ended up paying a defunct company called SyNet $5 million for violating their trademark on "Internet Explorer."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you're right. Amnesty International is a bunch of whiners. Let's see what they're bringing attention to today:
- Endemic rape of women in Kenya
- Undemocratic elections in Zimbabwe.
- Curtailed freedom of expression in Jordan.
What a pack of losers.
-Bruce
I can't believe someone modded this up. Which volcano? Which eruption? Where's the study? Do you have reference to any study or article suggesting this?
Pinatubo did release large amounts of sulfer dioxide, but sulfer dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. In fact, it's believed that Mount Pinatubo masked global warming in the years following the eruption.
-Bruce
Subversion definitely looks interesting. It's under active development and is making fast progress. But I doubt the authors would recommend it yet for production use; it's still in pre-Alpha.
But one important feature that they don't intend to tackle is the ability to have distributed repositories. The idea is that if there are 40 developers working on a shared code tree, but a team of 6 people who are going to making major changes to the code. These 6 developers should be able to easily checkin their code to a local repository until it is ready to atomically merged into the main repository.
There's a good description of this on the BitKeeper web page.
It looks like arch is intending something similar, but the project seems to be progressing fairly slowly.
-Bruce
All check-ins are atomic, and committing files from all over your source tree is easy with something like WinCVS' "flat mode".
Each file's checkin may be atomic, but if you got an error halfway through checking in a set of files, the first files will remain checked in and the code tree is in a invalid state.
This is one of the problems that Subversion intends to fix.
-Bruce
1. GSM -> GSM specifications -> SIM cards + Mobile phone (or pcmcia card or whatever) in order to have a mobile terminal
;)
Is that true in the US or is a SIM card equivalent hardwired into the phone?
3. For the USA, well, you'll have to find a GSM network, prior to do that
Using a tri-band phone there is a reasonable GSM network in the US which allows international roaming. But is it possible to buy SIM cards there or get temporary service (without a contract)?
Thanks,
-Bruce
I have heard that SIM cards don't exist in the phones in the US. Is that the case for the GSM phones as well?
I'm considering buying a tri-band phone here in Australia, so that I can use it when I am in the US. But I don't want to use roaming and pay the huge $$$/minute. If I was going to Europe, I could buy a $20 prepaid SIM card at the airport and get a temporary phone number, with reasonable call rates.
Is this possible in the US using a tri-band phone? Is there any way to get short-term local service?
-Bruce
Let's see, US has different
- Electricity voltage and frequency, the latter being major PITA as it is hard to convert
- TV broadcasting standard
The ~110 voltage and NTSC broadcasting standards are shared by Japan and much of the Americas. (but that doesn't make it less of a pain in the ass.)
-Bruce
Linux alone actually runs quite well, though not doing much of interest.
How well does Linux run without libc?
-Bruce
Check out the XFree86 Font De-uglification HOWTO.
It has a lot of information on font rendering in X11 and following its advice can really make a big difference in improving the look of the fonts, (especially in Netscape I found).
-Bruce
No US aid went to the Taliban, as the US (and the rest of the world except for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the UAE) did not recognize it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
It's amazing how such concerns disappear when it comes to the War on Drugs. The US gave the Taliban a $43 million grant in exchange for their cracking down on the cultivation of opium poppies.
By the way, they refer to themselves as Muslims, not Moslems. While not necessarily offensive, Moslem is a bit like the word Negro in that it was commonly used in the past without any negative connotation, but has fallen out of use. These jackasses in the fezes seem to be the main group who uses the term now.
-Bruce
Ah ha, thanks! I didn't realize that 'system' would pass the output through.
Good-bye
-Bruce
Apparently, Microsoft doesn't even use VSS for its larger internal projects, they use something called SLM (Source Library Manager.)
-Bruce
well written /bin/sh code is going to work pretty much anywhere.
/bin/sh scripts and I'm amazed at how limited the set of common capabilities are. Or perhaps it would have helped if I had found a good reference to what will *definitely* work on which platforms. Is /bin/sh POSIX on all major platforms? Or do some have it in an alternate location like /bin/posix/sh?
Ugh, I've needed to write cross platform
I've had much better luck going with perl which is very common, though I admitted that has required some trouble on some older installs of unixes which don't ship with perl standard. But it doesn't have nearly the version incompatibilities that sh has (even if you have to write code that works on perl4 and perl5, it's pretty easy and the differences are well documented.)
The one area when I do still use sh instead of perl is when I want the output from sub programs to be show to the screen progressively instead of after completion. Such as:
#!/bin/perl
print `echo foo; sleep 5; echo bar`;
This won't print anything until the after the entire program completes, unlike sh. Is there a way to do that in perl?
But to do anything at all complex, sh is a pain in the ass.
-Bruce
Expect.pm is great because you can use all those excellent perl modules (and you don't have to use tcl.)
One use I found for it is to put bash-like command-line editing on tools with lack command-line editing like Oracle's sqlplus. Just use it in conjunction with Term::ReadLine::Gnu and have ReadLine send commands to an Expect-controlled process. Sqlplus is finally usable!
-Bruce
To my knowledge there were no christians in India prior to British arrival and they are a small minority right now.
Most conversion to Christianity in India happened by the Portuguese prior to the arrival of the British. They make up 2-3% of the population, somewhere around 30 million people.
Also, I have no knowledge of "Arab Jews". There were Jews in Palestine before Israel was founded but these people were not Arab.
Arabs and the Jews from the middle east are virtually identical genetically. The distinction is mainly political and religious.
-Bruce
The best telecommuting I've done was spending 3 months working remotely from Guatemala for a Silicon Valley company. I had quit my job to go study Spanish there and realized I had a fair amount of time on my hands. My former company agreed to let me work come back as a contractor from down there. I didn't need a laptop or anything. I just went to internet cafes and used telnet and a web browser. I also worked remotely from Turkey for about a month in the same manner.
It's worked well for me, but the main thing to realize is that it's *not* as good as being in the office. I don't care what anyone says about being able to concentrate without distractions. People are reluctant to contact you. There may be timezone lags reducing communication to one email back-and-forth per day. What can be drawn quickly on a whiteboard takes time on to draw in some tool or a web-whiteboard.
I think it can work, but only if there is already good communication between the worker and the rest of the team. It's very difficult to build a good working rapport with people you've never met face-to-face.
I've been working remotely for almost a year now from Australia for the same company and now I'm opening a small development office over here. We're trying to take advantage of the better availability of developers compared to Silicon Valley and also take advantage of the good exchange rate.
But I won't tell you the name of the company because it's still viewed with a bit of suspicion. Investors might see it as an inability to recruit locally. Lawyers worry about intellectual property laws of foreign countries. Executives might be concerned about whether the isolate groups are properly focused on the company goals.
I think it's an area which is slowly growing, but probably won't change the world overnight. Most of the major offshore outsourcing is in labor-intensive areas such as support call centers and regional areas such as localization. I expect sending core development overseas will remain on the periphery for a while.
-Bruce
almost all o fthose poor conditions did not exist until industrialized European countries and the United States decided to change them into colonies
This is true in a sense because poverty is only relative. When the Europeans came to Africa, they created poverty by introducing superior wealth.
The same thing happens today in developing countries resulting in families leaving rural life for the cities in order to earn more to save up to buy the new necessities: a motorbike, tv, factory-made clothing, etc. Even bringing education to a country creates poverty in those who miss out on it and creates illiterates out of formerly normal people.
But I'd never advocate trying to keep people isolated or to discourage them from taking advantage of the products of the modern world. I'd like our wealthier countries to help people to live the way they want, whether it's being left alone in their mountain tribe or saving up to buy a telephone.
-Bruce
Couldn't you just export the mail folders to a csv flat file and slap together a little perl script to change it to mbox format?
Or is there not enough info in the export file?
-Bruce
MySQL, like many open source packages, accepts a lot of very nonstandard SQL constructs.
This is true with most of the commercial databases as well. Unfortunately the portability of SQL is mostly a myth. Try to write nontrivial SQL that runs on both Oracle and anything else and you'll see what I mean.
-Bruce
A few months ago we were told there is no God because we didn't have many more genes than most animals.
Who the hell said that? How could the number of genes in a human have any relation to religion?
So, yes, nothing is remotely firm, yet. How many textbooks has this "fact" made its way into while the truth awaited to be discovered?
What "fact" are you talking about? The article and the post refer to the number of genes in a human. Are you disputing the number? Is this number really included in textbooks as a fact?
Or are you disputing the whole theory of how genetic makeup relates to biology?
-Bruce
And remember that even the big boys sometimes have to play by the rules. Microsoft ended up paying a defunct company called SyNet $5 million for violating their trademark on "Internet Explorer."
-Bruce
yes, the fact that I don't own a TV set *does* make me a better person.
Ahh, straight out of one of my favorites from The Onion: Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television
Maybe not having a TV makes you a better person, but being a smug prick does not.
-Bruce
I hope iToke's WAP weed delivery service can adapt to the new technology!
-Bruce
I'm shopping for a small business ADSL provider in Sydney. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Are there other options for business users? (T1, etc.?)
Thanks,
-Bruce
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose? Sounds like a folk rock song from the 60's.
-Bruce