Where would the solar power be coming from, given that the only water that's there is buried in permanent shadow?
You'd need a heck of a tower, or a pump. Or a huge orbital mirror array to shine light where the sun don't normally shine. But then the ice would melt and there'd be no point to settling those craters again. drats!
Someone will patent these ideas anyway, and maybe be foolish enough to implement. Same ones with all of these carbon sequestration schemes... they've got it all wrong! If they REALLY want to secure the one-world government, they should sequester all the oxygen and sell it back to all the people who didn't care about environmental regulation:-P
Lots of stories about high-power ground-based aircraft and weather radar cooking geese and homeless people who nestled up to them for warmth. But that's about it for adverse effects.
Once you know the power level, you can pretty much gauge the impact in terms of energy emissions... comparing it to, say, a 100W light bulb. But for the most part I'd expect you would get higher doses of gigahertz radiation from your microwave or holding your own cell phone by your head.
Same here... we went camping in Maine and got drenched on a hike. Threw our soaking jackets into the dryer at the laundromat and set it on high. 20 minutes later, I remark... "hey, there's a whole lot of racket coming from that industrial dryer." Open it up and collect the pieces of her old Nokia 6xxx phone.. the faceplate was warped and melted.
In the car I tossed the battery back in on a whim, and it turned right back on. We ordered a replacement faceplate a few weeks later and it's been fine ever since:P
Also got out of my car in the parking lot once, and saw someone's blackberry lying submerged in an inch-deep puddle. Thought "ha, some idiot dropped their phone" just before I involuntarily reached down to feel my empty holster. Took it to the bathroom in Microcenter and took it apart and ran it under the hand dryer for a minute or two; worked fine ever after. That was the old black Curve model... for some reason I doubt the newer one I eventually got could take the abuse.
Yeah, some of them are a little bit funny. This would make a good humor post. But it's hard enough to stay on good terms with your neighbors as it is, so consider saying something nice. Like in driving, it's often stupid and dangerous to fight *ssholes by acting like one yourself, thinking you're going to teach them a lesson.
I run an open AP named "nohup", since it's on a UPS and is often the only one still running when the power goes out. (Unfortunately, Verizon FIOS's upstream UPS goes out after 5-10 minutes nowadays -- not the ONI in my house, which can putter along for a few hours, but something upstream of that)
If you still really want to dick with people, at least do something more technically interesting with transparent proxy hacks, such as https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upside-Down-TernetHowTo or running it through a Swedish Chef filter or the ilk.
It is certainly possible that some manufacturers may opt not to release updates to their devices. Maybe they don't want to dedicate resources to "old" products, maybe they want to drive people to buy the new ones. Can't really fault Google for that... I think they've actually been pretty good with backporting things to their older Android releases (like GMM 4 for Android 1.6 with just about everything except maybe voice navigation), but can't force all developers to support the older releases.
Heck, it doesn't exactly even need to be a 1st world country. And you don't even need to move. Google "Health Care Tourism" and you'll find several places you can go (such as Thailand) with first-rate doctors and facilities that pretty much charge market rates for care.
You'll get a vacation, decent care with staff that probably speak english just as well, and it will probably cost you less than insurance in the US even including travel expenses. You don't get to sue if something goes terribly awry, but hey, all that money would just go to the lawyers anyway.
Medicine is sort of turning into a service industry nowadays, so minus while go somewhere that prides themselves on providing service.
The past two big corporations that I worked for still deploy standard workstation images based on WinXP + IE6. They generally have their IT sh*t together, but it still takes them about a year to create and test and deploy images throughout the company. And since Vista was broadly decried as "skippable", that's exactly what they did. Now that Win7 is finally out and has better acceptance, I'd say it'll take about a year to get everything packaged and tested and documented and deployed.
Also, both companies had plenty of intranet timecard and expense and training systems that required IE6. Yes, they didn't adhere to standards back in the day, and they're paying for it now. But that's sort of the price of being on the bleeding edge of technology most of the time... you get locked into immature tech. Heck, Boeing even still uses a mainframe for all its employee timecards! The current web-based front-end is merely a thin front-end to the old mainframe timekeeping terminal. But it works... even despite managers griping about not being able to submit timecards from their blackberries.
I don't think they'll be under much pressure to fix all their old legacy "IE6-only" webapps, since win7 should include the old XP-compatiblity mode that will hopefully allow them to still run their old but tested crap under IE6. So at least their's a way forward, even though it's not ideal.
I've long dreamed about a vehicle like this while walking to school. Well, except mine was hybrid pedal powered, but nonetheless, the form factor looks roughly the same as what I had envisioned. I became a mechanical engineer in order to work on stuff like this; however in the DC area the only jobs I've been able to snag were relatively boring defense programming drivel. Someday... when I move far away and can have a garage and setup a shop...
I'll throw in my lot with Linux Mint. I'm a technical Debian user myself, so I may be a bit biased. But it looks like the easiest to install and get running. There's a pretty good LiveCD of it, so you can try it out before installing.
It's based on Ubuntu, but they're not too shy to include more of the non-free stuff pre-installed and configured, such as Flash and proprietary nVidia drivers. So you won't have to go look up howtos to get those "mainstream essentials" stuff working.
Also St. Patrick's day is coming up, so it would be a nice opportunity to drink and run an appropriately Irish Linux.
That said, I think an automated pat-on-the-back system would do wonders for motivation in education... but more from the perspective of unlocking the tech tree / curriculum, and showing what new abilities a student might have after mastering second-order differential equations or the Level IV history of Mesopotamia analytical text.
But it may just as well breed more precious coddled snowflakes that can't cope with actual mistakes and failures in life. But I guess it just depends on how well it's implemented.
I've tried several times to "move on" to the next WM, be it compiz or e17, or maybe even lxde, but I keep coming back to e16 because, well, it works. It's the only compositing WM I know that updates the pager with the actual contents of the screen using, well, compositing (compiz doesn't really have a pager, and awn, gnome-panel, etc. use polling instead of compositing). Compiz is nice, but still crashes often and unexpectedly, and still runs noticeably slower even when I have most of the plugins turned off.
The only other WMs I fall back to on occasion are WindowMaker, which is beautifully simple, functional, but old with respect to features like compositing (gotta have truly transparent gnome-terminals:P ) and I miss not having a nice pager or sane panel or fullscreen handling. The other is icewm, which works great for VNC sessions from small devices, though I suppose lxde might be a good replacement for it eventually.
Thanks for the responses... I'd played with atop and htop before, but not enough to find their useful bits.
I forgot to mention iotop, which does show which processes are using disk I/O.
Also just found a nifty thing called smem, which does a pretty nice job showing and sorting which apps have memory swapped out, and how much is shared and unique.
Barely related to the topic (except that the Sysinternals monitors did a lot of this first), but I've had limited success googling...
The Windows 7 Performance Monitor is very very nice... what utilities under Linux would give it similar abilities to show per-process cpu/mem/disk/network/file/I/O usage?
So far I've managed to scrape together a variety of disparate tools to report on most of those things, but it would be nice if it could all be builtin to e.g. gkrellm or gnome-system-monitor or something.
* (the venerable) top: for sorting by CPU / mem virtual/reserved/shared, but not much else. * iftop, ntop : to show realtime network activity per host:port (not just an aggregate for the interface). It would be nice to also be able to see net activity per process, though. * dstat, sar : can print out some disk I/O related numbers at intervals, suitable for plotting. But "dstat --top-bio" only lists the process using the most disk I/O. And other than running "lsof" and trying to manually correlate PIDs, is there a way to actually figure out what file is being written / read? * ltrace, strace, and dtrace : can tap into a running program and show library and sys.os function calls, (such as files being opened, etc.) but they put in some execution overhead. * pmap : for digging into memory mapped to processes; would be neat to be able to visualize this... e.g. to see what apps have how much memory swapped to disk, or if something is still mapped to an older version of a shared library after an upgrade, etc.
Anyway, what got me past bullying in middle school was not so much picking on the "delicate social cues", but by taking martial arts classes (in a good school... mostly adults and their kids in a nice supportive environment, not one of those testosterone camps) and getting good at it.
This kid once puffed up his feathers at me and made some threatening challenge, and I just put my foot right next to his temple. He was pretty tall... taller than me. Word got around that I could kick people in the face if I wanted to, and I didn't really have any more trouble any time after that.
Later in high school some grunt who didn't get the word got pissed off during volleyball practice and came over and shoved me. I made some verbal retort, and he came back and tried to punch me in the face. But maybe thanks to years of training but probably just his bad aim, I ducked and he just smacked me lightly in the forehead. Things maybe could have escalated from there, but I just kept my cool and no one got suspended or anything. So.
Oh, there was also this one time, at biology lab, some dork kept pushing my books off my desk. So at some point I made some big display and grabbed the entire desk and swung it over my head at him. Then I quickly put it down, grabbed my books off the floor and went on like nothing happened.
So yes, dealing with bullies requires the recognition of subtle social cues indeed. I'd call BS, it's all just a display of feathers, and how you react to their plumage:-P
I've been playing with android-x86 on my eeepc. It's nice, but doesn't seem to have any applications.
Mostly I'm interested in getting Google Maps Mobile running on it... it's the only thing I really miss from having a Blackberry. Is there any way of getting Google Maps Mobile on a laptop / netbook?
I don't really care for an Android / iPhone / Blackberry / Symbian device and accompanying data plan just to get gmm going... it would be nice to get gmm running on a larger netbook running it and tether it to my existing data plan.
I've tried using Google Earth Plus in the past, and had it hooked up to a GPS... but it wasn't quite as useful... for one thing the zoom level was fixed to something inconvenient after each 1second GPS marker update:-/
It's funny because as a kid, I remember reading the Hardy Boys mystery about an electronic car rigged to malfunction.
Of course, as far as electronic vs. hydraulic goes, you haven't lived until you're zipping down a little country road and you discover air bubbles in your brake lines just as a school bus comes to a stop in front of you.
Pushed that brake pedal all the way down to the floor I did, and nothing happened. This was in my old Saturn Wagon2. I was able to downshift to slow down a bit, but fortunately was clear to just steer around the bus, probably to the consternation of the driver:-P . Could never get the brake to do that again... which I suppose was a good thing.
I have mixed feelings about this. But basically the manned space program is: a) more political than scientific. People can plant flags on moons. Doesn't mean so much when bots do it. b) manned space travel is virtually privatized already, in that it's essentially run like a big corporate welfare program for the big defense contractors who make shuttle parts. As I see it, pretty much the main reason that the Constellation parts are being fashioned from modified Shuttle parts, even though the original purpose was to go back to Saturn V - style launch vehicle configurations. c) sucking all of the funding out of NASA's other science work
So by becoming privatized, manned space travel will hopefully become/less/ political, since NASA would not have to answer as much to congress when it comes to keeping jobs in their jurisdictions. And manned space travel will become riskier and more rewarding again, leading to faster technological advances, whereas NASA had been seen as holding progress back with conservative designs and high safety factors.
Hopefully this will be a win for science and robotic space exploration, as well as for the fledgling private space industry.
Yes, I'm glad these new options should push the prices of other pieces down. But I'll be saving my money for the extra two cores in the Phenom II X4 955, which still has better performance + W / $ ratios compared to the new Phenom II X2 555 from the article.
aptitude install denyhosts should give you some relief by adding firewall rules against hosts that blatantly try to brute-force your machine for weak ssh passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
Where would the solar power be coming from, given that the only water that's there is buried in permanent shadow?
You'd need a heck of a tower, or a pump. Or a huge orbital mirror array to shine light where the sun don't normally shine. But then the ice would melt and there'd be no point to settling those craters again. drats!
Someone will patent these ideas anyway, and maybe be foolish enough to implement. Same ones with all of these carbon sequestration schemes... they've got it all wrong! If they REALLY want to secure the one-world government, they should sequester all the oxygen and sell it back to all the people who didn't care about environmental regulation :-P
I dunno, people import bottled water from some pretty darned remote places.
I, for one, would take a sip. 8-D
But then again, I also drink from most public water fountains.
How old is the tower? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site has power numbers ranging from 3000W for old towers to under 100W for newer ones.
Lots of stories about high-power ground-based aircraft and weather radar cooking geese and homeless people who nestled up to them for warmth. But that's about it for adverse effects.
Once you know the power level, you can pretty much gauge the impact in terms of energy emissions... comparing it to, say, a 100W light bulb. But for the most part I'd expect you would get higher doses of gigahertz radiation from your microwave or holding your own cell phone by your head.
You may or may not want to worry about terahertz radiation: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/30/1216230/How-Terahertz-Waves-Tear-Apart-DNA http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19154093 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19051324 . But you wouldn't be getting those from the cell tower. Supposedly terahertz radiation can have some effect on metabolism, maybe, which might be why they put different types of rocks in saunas and ascribe some kind of wanky "healing powers" to them.
So there you have it.
Same here... we went camping in Maine and got drenched on a hike. Threw our soaking jackets into the dryer at the laundromat and set it on high. 20 minutes later, I remark... "hey, there's a whole lot of racket coming from that industrial dryer." Open it up and collect the pieces of her old Nokia 6xxx phone.. the faceplate was warped and melted.
In the car I tossed the battery back in on a whim, and it turned right back on. We ordered a replacement faceplate a few weeks later and it's been fine ever since :P
Also got out of my car in the parking lot once, and saw someone's blackberry lying submerged in an inch-deep puddle. Thought "ha, some idiot dropped their phone" just before I involuntarily reached down to feel my empty holster. Took it to the bathroom in Microcenter and took it apart and ran it under the hand dryer for a minute or two; worked fine ever after. That was the old black Curve model... for some reason I doubt the newer one I eventually got could take the abuse.
Well, nohup pretty much means "never hangup" so I've more or less rickroll'd them already.
Yeah, some of them are a little bit funny. This would make a good humor post. But it's hard enough to stay on good terms with your neighbors as it is, so consider saying something nice. Like in driving, it's often stupid and dangerous to fight *ssholes by acting like one yourself, thinking you're going to teach them a lesson.
I run an open AP named "nohup", since it's on a UPS and is often the only one still running when the power goes out. (Unfortunately, Verizon FIOS's upstream UPS goes out after 5-10 minutes nowadays -- not the ONI in my house, which can putter along for a few hours, but something upstream of that)
Work with your neighbors to get a wifi mesh going: http://www.olsr.org/
If you still really want to dick with people, at least do something more technically interesting with transparent proxy hacks, such as https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upside-Down-TernetHowTo or running it through a Swedish Chef filter or the ilk.
lol... Just skip down all the way to the end of the article and scale the last image 50%:
http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma-1.0-or-2.2.png
Most devices (except maybe the G1, due to hardware limitations) should be able to get upgraded to android 2.1 ... maybe even as soon as next month.
http://androidandme.com/2010/01/phones/t-mobile-mytouch-3g-users-to-get-android-2-1-this-spring/
It is certainly possible that some manufacturers may opt not to release updates to their devices. Maybe they don't want to dedicate resources to "old" products, maybe they want to drive people to buy the new ones. Can't really fault Google for that... I think they've actually been pretty good with backporting things to their older Android releases (like GMM 4 for Android 1.6 with just about everything except maybe voice navigation), but can't force all developers to support the older releases.
Heck, it doesn't exactly even need to be a 1st world country. And you don't even need to move. Google "Health Care Tourism" and you'll find several places you can go (such as Thailand) with first-rate doctors and facilities that pretty much charge market rates for care.
You'll get a vacation, decent care with staff that probably speak english just as well, and it will probably cost you less than insurance in the US even including travel expenses. You don't get to sue if something goes terribly awry, but hey, all that money would just go to the lawyers anyway.
Medicine is sort of turning into a service industry nowadays, so minus while go somewhere that prides themselves on providing service.
The past two big corporations that I worked for still deploy standard workstation images based on WinXP + IE6. They generally have their IT sh*t together, but it still takes them about a year to create and test and deploy images throughout the company. And since Vista was broadly decried as "skippable", that's exactly what they did. Now that Win7 is finally out and has better acceptance, I'd say it'll take about a year to get everything packaged and tested and documented and deployed.
Also, both companies had plenty of intranet timecard and expense and training systems that required IE6. Yes, they didn't adhere to standards back in the day, and they're paying for it now. But that's sort of the price of being on the bleeding edge of technology most of the time... you get locked into immature tech. Heck, Boeing even still uses a mainframe for all its employee timecards! The current web-based front-end is merely a thin front-end to the old mainframe timekeeping terminal. But it works... even despite managers griping about not being able to submit timecards from their blackberries.
I don't think they'll be under much pressure to fix all their old legacy "IE6-only" webapps, since win7 should include the old XP-compatiblity mode that will hopefully allow them to still run their old but tested crap under IE6. So at least their's a way forward, even though it's not ideal.
I've long dreamed about a vehicle like this while walking to school. Well, except mine was hybrid pedal powered, but nonetheless, the form factor looks roughly the same as what I had envisioned. I became a mechanical engineer in order to work on stuff like this; however in the DC area the only jobs I've been able to snag were relatively boring defense programming drivel. Someday... when I move far away and can have a garage and setup a shop...
I'll throw in my lot with Linux Mint. I'm a technical Debian user myself, so I may be a bit biased. But it looks like the easiest to install and get running. There's a pretty good LiveCD of it, so you can try it out before installing.
It's based on Ubuntu, but they're not too shy to include more of the non-free stuff pre-installed and configured, such as Flash and proprietary nVidia drivers. So you won't have to go look up howtos to get those "mainstream essentials" stuff working.
Also St. Patrick's day is coming up, so it would be a nice opportunity to drink and run an appropriately Irish Linux.
I like this article:
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html
That said, I think an automated pat-on-the-back system would do wonders for motivation in education... but more from the perspective of unlocking the tech tree / curriculum, and showing what new abilities a student might have after mastering second-order differential equations or the Level IV history of Mesopotamia analytical text.
But it may just as well breed more precious coddled snowflakes that can't cope with actual mistakes and failures in life. But I guess it just depends on how well it's implemented.
I've tried several times to "move on" to the next WM, be it compiz or e17, or maybe even lxde, but I keep coming back to e16 because, well, it works. It's the only compositing WM I know that updates the pager with the actual contents of the screen using, well, compositing (compiz doesn't really have a pager, and awn, gnome-panel, etc. use polling instead of compositing). Compiz is nice, but still crashes often and unexpectedly, and still runs noticeably slower even when I have most of the plugins turned off.
The only other WMs I fall back to on occasion are WindowMaker, which is beautifully simple, functional, but old with respect to features like compositing (gotta have truly transparent gnome-terminals :P ) and I miss not having a nice pager or sane panel or fullscreen handling. The other is icewm, which works great for VNC sessions from small devices, though I suppose lxde might be a good replacement for it eventually.
Thanks for the responses... I'd played with atop and htop before, but not enough to find their useful bits.
I forgot to mention iotop, which does show which processes are using disk I/O.
Also just found a nifty thing called smem, which does a pretty nice job showing and sorting which apps have memory swapped out, and how much is shared and unique.
Barely related to the topic (except that the Sysinternals monitors did a lot of this first), but I've had limited success googling...
The Windows 7 Performance Monitor is very very nice... what utilities under Linux would give it similar abilities to show per-process cpu/mem/disk/network/file/I/O usage?
So far I've managed to scrape together a variety of disparate tools to report on most of those things, but it would be nice if it could all be builtin to e.g. gkrellm or gnome-system-monitor or something.
* (the venerable) top: for sorting by CPU / mem virtual/reserved/shared, but not much else.
* iftop, ntop : to show realtime network activity per host:port (not just an aggregate for the interface). It would be nice to also be able to see net activity per process, though.
* dstat, sar : can print out some disk I/O related numbers at intervals, suitable for plotting. But "dstat --top-bio" only lists the process using the most disk I/O. And other than running "lsof" and trying to manually correlate PIDs, is there a way to actually figure out what file is being written / read?
* ltrace, strace, and dtrace : can tap into a running program and show library and sys.os function calls, (such as files being opened, etc.) but they put in some execution overhead.
* pmap : for digging into memory mapped to processes; would be neat to be able to visualize this... e.g. to see what apps have how much memory swapped to disk, or if something is still mapped to an older version of a shared library after an upgrade, etc.
Are you fishing for a master debater pun?
Anyway, what got me past bullying in middle school was not so much picking on the "delicate social cues", but by taking martial arts classes (in a good school... mostly adults and their kids in a nice supportive environment, not one of those testosterone camps) and getting good at it.
This kid once puffed up his feathers at me and made some threatening challenge, and I just put my foot right next to his temple. He was pretty tall... taller than me. Word got around that I could kick people in the face if I wanted to, and I didn't really have any more trouble any time after that.
Later in high school some grunt who didn't get the word got pissed off during volleyball practice and came over and shoved me. I made some verbal retort, and he came back and tried to punch me in the face. But maybe thanks to years of training but probably just his bad aim, I ducked and he just smacked me lightly in the forehead. Things maybe could have escalated from there, but I just kept my cool and no one got suspended or anything. So.
Oh, there was also this one time, at biology lab, some dork kept pushing my books off my desk. So at some point I made some big display and grabbed the entire desk and swung it over my head at him. Then I quickly put it down, grabbed my books off the floor and went on like nothing happened.
So yes, dealing with bullies requires the recognition of subtle social cues indeed. I'd call BS, it's all just a display of feathers, and how you react to their plumage :-P
I've been playing with android-x86 on my eeepc. It's nice, but doesn't seem to have any applications.
Mostly I'm interested in getting Google Maps Mobile running on it... it's the only thing I really miss from having a Blackberry. Is there any way of getting Google Maps Mobile on a laptop / netbook?
I don't really care for an Android / iPhone / Blackberry / Symbian device and accompanying data plan just to get gmm going... it would be nice to get gmm running on a larger netbook running it and tether it to my existing data plan.
I've tried using Google Earth Plus in the past, and had it hooked up to a GPS... but it wasn't quite as useful... for one thing the zoom level was fixed to something inconvenient after each 1second GPS marker update :-/
It's funny because as a kid, I remember reading the Hardy Boys mystery about an electronic car rigged to malfunction.
Of course, as far as electronic vs. hydraulic goes, you haven't lived until you're zipping down a little country road and you discover air bubbles in your brake lines just as a school bus comes to a stop in front of you.
Pushed that brake pedal all the way down to the floor I did, and nothing happened. This was in my old Saturn Wagon2. I was able to downshift to slow down a bit, but fortunately was clear to just steer around the bus, probably to the consternation of the driver :-P . Could never get the brake to do that again... which I suppose was a good thing.
I have mixed feelings about this. But basically the manned space program is:
a) more political than scientific. People can plant flags on moons. Doesn't mean so much when bots do it.
b) manned space travel is virtually privatized already, in that it's essentially run like a big corporate welfare program for the big defense contractors who make shuttle parts. As I see it, pretty much the main reason that the Constellation parts are being fashioned from modified Shuttle parts, even though the original purpose was to go back to Saturn V - style launch vehicle configurations.
c) sucking all of the funding out of NASA's other science work
So by becoming privatized, manned space travel will hopefully become /less/ political, since NASA would not have to answer as much to congress when it comes to keeping jobs in their jurisdictions. And manned space travel will become riskier and more rewarding again, leading to faster technological advances, whereas NASA had been seen as holding progress back with conservative designs and high safety factors.
Hopefully this will be a win for science and robotic space exploration, as well as for the fledgling private space industry.
Yes, I'm glad these new options should push the prices of other pieces down. But I'll be saving my money for the extra two cores in the Phenom II X4 955, which still has better performance + W / $ ratios compared to the new Phenom II X2 555 from the article.
My father taught me that computers were a tool, not a trade. That perspective has always helped me guide my path as far as how to invest my time.
Wow, pretty cool stuff. Where can I read more? Google got me to one blog, but it might as well be yours? :>
I would be pretty happy with sending out a fleet of rovers to explore other planets and moons... what's the roadmap for that?
That's pretty normal...
aptitude install denyhosts
should give you some relief by adding firewall rules against hosts that blatantly try to brute-force your machine for weak ssh passwords.