People keep talking about this, but I have not seen any evidence on the Dell website that I can select Linux as an OS when I'm buying a computer. I haven't checked in the past few days or anything, but I did play around a few months ago and the only options under "OS" for their consumer machines was "Windows XP Home Edition" and "Windows XP Professional."
It'll be a big step forward when Linux is available there as well, just because--even if people don't order it--the fact that it's on the list right next to Windows makes it seem more 'official.'
The only place I've seen Linux as an option for a preinstalled OS from a major vendor is HP's "Workstation" line (which are really nice computers, and certainly better than the shit they foist on consumers, but not something average people are likely to see). I keep hearing that Dell offers Linux as some sort of option: can anyone explain where it's offered, or what the secret is?
Of course there are the small companies that offer preinstalled Linux systems, but sadly they seem to be charging a price premium that's really the wrong direction to be going in. Looking only at them versus at Windows boxes, you'd assume that the "Linux tax" is a few hundred dollars more than the Redmond one.
That's pretty slick; that basically goes the other way, from a LiveCD to a Virtual Machine. I wonder if there's an easy way to save the disk image plus the state of the running machine to a file, so that you can insert a BootCD, start it in a VM, and then save that VM to a file and have it, even after the CD is ejected.
Anyway, it's a lot of stuff like that, which really makes me think that virtualization is neat technology, even for the home/enthuasiast user. Its advantages in the datacenter are obvious, but I think there are more than enough applications for home uses that it'll become an essential part of computing, as soon as it gets built into mainstream OSes. (Much to the detriment of VMWare perhaps, although they do give away an edition right now, so maybe that's not their bread and butter as it is.)
The solution is not to make work on speculation; make it on commission.
We've become attached to the speculative/at-risk work model of art production, even though I'm not convinced that it's really all that beneficial to artists. It results in many more artists and much more art than the market really demands at any given time, and many more failures than would otherwise happen, if artists waited for a demand to exist, and then created for that demand, rather than the other way around.
If you are a sculptor, and someone pays you to make a sculpture, then you negotiate a price for your time based on how long it will take you to make the sculpture, and how much energy you're going to put into it. At the end of the time, they get the sculpture, and you move on to a new project. You get paid for your labor, they get a product.
The idea that someone should be able to create something and then derive income from it, over and over and over, for hundreds of years, is a very new economic invention. Ultimately, as technology improves and the cost of reproduction becomes less and less, and the stopgap methods we use to make reproduction artificially expensive fail, both the cost and the value of the marginal copy fall to zero. The only things which have any value, are those which actually take skilled work to create. In other words, only unique works of art, new originals, are valuable when you have a world full of cheap copies.
This means that there will always be a demand for artistic output. Even with the entire recorded output of human society on tap, people will want new stuff created. Rather than trying to monetize things which have already been created, artists need to concentrate on getting the value of their time paid for up front; rather than trying to amortize the cost of creation over multiple copies, demand that payment in advance.
A large problem, however, is that the market for "art" is significantly smaller than the people currently trying to make a living producing it. There simply isn't room for that much of an industry; right now they only exist by selling copies -- things that have little or no inherent value, because they take little labor to produce. A transition to a more sustainable model would necessarily involve a fairly ugly "contraction" period. However this is a necessary consequence of the elimination of the parasitic industry which currently flourishes by selling things whose value in labor terms is fictitious and based on artificial scarcity.
Skilled labor has value, copies don't. That's really the future; any model that attempts to impose a value on a copy which can be made by a machine in a few seconds, has to either depend on a monopoly (control of the means of production), or is eventually bound to fail.
I don't think it's that you "can't get people to convert," it's that the designers haven't come up with a compelling reason to get people to abandon what they know. Someone who's worked with a mouse+keyboard, desktop-style GUI for (in some cases) 20 years or more, isn't going to completely retrain themselves without a darn good reason. Right now, there aren't many compelling reasons to switch.
In essence I'm agreeing with you; there certainly haven't been very many really radical designs, and because of that, there haven't been many designs that really offer the average user that much more benefit over what they're using now.
Offer something significantly better -- enough to cover the retraining cost -- and people will flock to it. There's nothing particularly enjoyable for most people about using a QWERTY keyboard and mouse, it's just what they're used to because it's "good enough." Come up with an interface that lets people enter data as quickly and accurately as they can with a keyboard, and move objects as easily as they can with a mouse, and view and comprehend data as quickly as they can on a monitor, and -- like my grandmother used to say about building a better mousetrap -- people will beat a path to your door. It's just that to date, nobody has really built that better system; at least not that I've ever seen.
Designers seem hesitant to go 'outside the box' because they percieve users as being tame, but really it's the users who are cynical about new designs, because most of them are nothing but lame rehashes; "difference for the sake of difference," which throw away optimizations painstakingly made over years (or in some cases decades) without offering much new. It's not until designers really go outside the box that they'll stand a chance of finding a Better Way, and when they do, the users will follow.
I had actually thought about doing something similar a while back. Actually I didn't want to do wireless transmit at all, I just wanted to mail a GPS receiver around and see if it picked up any sort of a trail.
My main question is whether it would ever get much of a GPS signal. You could spend an awful lot of time and money putting together a project like that, only to have it spend its entire journey in steel-roofed buildings and metal trucks where it can't hear the satellites and not get any position fixes.
I've never done any research on the topic, but I wonder if it's illegal to send an amateur radio beacon station (e.g. an APRS beacon) through the mail. Those are pretty simple to assemble and robust, and the range is a lot longer than 802.11. (They use a designated frequency on the 2m -- that's 144MHz -- band to report position to various fixed stations; the results can be seen on the internet among other places.)
It would be pretty neat to watch the progress of a package through the mail system in real time. Even UPS's admittedly slick tracking system can't hold a candle to that.
Well some of them might, if you had a Linux machine. By encapsulating them inside a minimalist VM image, you can make them run on any host OS. So that even if I'm running Windows, I can run a bunch of Linux network monitoring and debugging tools, without creating a Linux system and installing them. (And configuring, etc.)
If you want to do one of the tasks that one of the VMs perform, and nothing else, downloading and launching a VM is probably a lot easier than downloading a piece of software and installing it. Plus, it doesn't leave crap all over your system or risk compromising your security (as much -- obviously you're still running code, but a VMWare image can be run as a user process, I think).
Plus when you're done, you just shut the VM down and either delete the image or save it for next time.
In effect, what they do could easily be replaced with a bootable CD or DVD image (in fact, I'd be surprised if someone didn't have a VM-to-BootCD converter), with the advantage as a VM that you don't need to take down a running system in order to run them.
Plus, adding a minimalist OS like LEAF only adds 3MB or so to the program binaries, apparently -- and I don't think that the VM image format overhead is that much more than a comparable disk-image format (ISO). The downsides are less than you're making them out to be, and the convenience factors are definitely in their favor.
Does it make sense for every application to come with an entire default-install of CentOS? Certainly not; but might it be worth the overhead for some specialized, configuration-intensive application to come with its own preconfigured OS? Definitely. There are a lot of people who are capable of running a VM, who don't have the ability or the interest to set up something like Apache2/modPHP/Perl, Smoothwall, or Squid themselves. (All of which I've seen or heard talked about as VMs.) To be able to just download and run something, and have it act like a distinct server on their network? That's pretty slick.
Actually I think it's a Good Thing to always have somebody copy/paste the article into the discussion, so that it becomes part of the thread's permanent archive.
If you go back and read Slashdot stories from more than a year or two ago (always amusing, I strongly recommend it), most of the links to articles are dead. The only threads where you can really read TFA are the ones where somebody pasted it in as a comment.
You do have a point though, it doesn't really deserve a +5 moderation; as long as the person puts "ARTICLE TEXT" in their subject line (which is also a good thing to do!) it's easy enough to find in the the thread if you want to read it, even if it's down at +1 or +2. The only reason to mod it up would be if somebody posted it AC and you wanted to make sure it was readable to people who browse at +1.
So in general, it's definitely karma-whorish, but on the other hand it's also rather useful...so who cares if people get some free points?
Unfortunately not so simple. As long as web developers keep targeting their sites towards IE, it's a de-facto standard, regardless of its actual standards compliance. There are far too many sites out there which are broken when used on other browsers, because they are designed to work with the braindead way that IE wants things to be.
As long as one browser has such an overwhelming amount of marketshare, there will always be the temptation for the developers of that browser to do things differently than anybody else, and developers will neglect standards in order to make their site look a little better / flashier / faster than the competition, when viewed on that browser, by (ab)using its idiosyncrasies.
Microsoft is particularly bad at this, and has a history of being a poor citizen with almost every product that they've made, but ultimately I think you'd have the same problem with any browser that had 90+% marketshare. Since no piece of software is perfect, even a browser designed to be standards-compliant that was used that heavily, would have bugs in its rendering/interpretation of pages, which developers would begin to target, at the expense of other browsers.
Part of the problem is the developers who sacrifice standards compatibility, but the bigger problem is just one of having a monoculture to begin with. I'd prefer that Firefox have 90% marketshare than IE, because FF has a better security and compliance record, but I'd prefer that four browsers each have 25% than any single one have more than that.
I would probably use Caps Lock a lot more, if it actually acted like a shift modifier on all the keys, and not just on letters. Or at least acted like a shift as far as the understore/hyphen key is concerned.
I write quite a bit of SQL from time to time, and generally write the commands in caps, although it's case insensitive. Our table names are all written with underscores, so I'm constantly going for that key.
One of these days I should really just do a registry hack or something and swap the behavior of the hyphen and the underscore...although if anyone else ever had to use my workstation, that would really mess with them. (And vice versa, which is why I haven't done it; there's something to be said for being used to the "universal" setup.)
Yes I think they map those to FN-modified F-keys; or at least they used to on older PowerBook models, and I'd be surprised if they took them off, since quite a few people do use them. If they did remove them, I'm sure you could probably remap them to your least-favorite four F-keys.
Although, I guess people said the same thing about Serial Ports...I wouldn't put anything past Mr Jobs: when he decides something's going to go, it goes.
Well assumedly they'd get a court order allowing them to dig, which is a pretty good defense. Plus, I'm not sure AOL is very worried. Although the deep pockets make them a target, it also makes them tough to sue unless you also have an abundance of resources. How long do you think an average person would last in court against AOL's laywers? They'd just outspend you, if they really wanted to.
Plus I doubt AOL would do the digging themselves; if they get a court order, they'll probably have the searching done by teams of "recovery experts" who can demonstrate in court that whatever method they choose to use to search is the best-and-only way to do it, etc., etc.
In other words, they'd have to be monumentally stupid not to CYA, and although AOL has never been exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, public-relations-wise, I don't think that their laywers are that stupid. They do, after all, cover people's asses for a living.
True, but assuming AOL gets permission from a court to search the area, they really have no motivation to be less destructive than they're allowed to be. If they can demonstrate to a judge that there's reasonable cause to believe that the couple are protecting a cache of misbegotten goods, and one of their goals is also to make a point to the world/public about spamming and how it's not a good thing to do, then it would make sense that they would try and argue for the most destructive method of searching available.
I'd say that the best way to do it would be to go in there with heavy equipment, and just run all the dirt on the property down to a depth of about six feet or so through a sifter. It's probably reasonably cheap from AOL's perspective (all you need is a backhoe and a separator/sifter -- that's probably not the right term for it, but you've probably seen the machines that do this), and it creates a nice TV image if what you want to show is a spammer/family-of-spammer getting their lives trashed.
A whole lot of people out there really hate spammers; it's one of those things that pretty much everybody hates and has to deal with, and the idea that people who profited (potentially) from spam are getting their lives turned upside down isn't necessarily a bad PR move. Of course, it could easily backfire if the people in question can portray themselves as the victims, but if they're sufficiently uncharismatic, don't think for a moment that the American public won't be beside themselves with glee seeing their lawn get trashed. Public opinion in this country has a bit of a vengeful streak -- there's nothing we like better than seeing karma come around and bite someone in the ass.
All depends on who can make themselves look like the good guy.
An old Italian man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his tomato garden, but it was very hard work as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.
Dear Vincent,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot for me.
Love Dad
A few days later he received a letter from his son.
Dear Dad,
Not for nothing, but don't dig up that garden. That's where I buried the BODIES.
Love Vinnie
At 4 a.m., the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.
Dear Dad,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love Vinnie
Just make sure you tell them that you think the bars are buried under those big rocks you've been wanting to remove from the garden... free landscaping. I think I'll have to call the Feds right now!
Your first mistake was trusting the spelling of a bunch of EEs...;-)
Although more seriously, I've never heard of anyone calling multiple dies "dice." It just sounds strange to me. But the context I've used the word has always been with the bigger sort of "die"; the kind used to stamp out parts, for instance. I've always heard them referred to as "dies." I think anyone who said "dice" would have been understood, but treated as a bit of a rookie; it's like walking into a gun store and calling that thing you stick into the bottom of your 1911 a "clip." Would everyone understand you? Sure. Would people think you're out of your league? Maybe.
I think the phrase referred to in times past, when the design for a chip was literally made into masks for the photo-etching process by taping patterns onto plates.
Now you'd probably have to go to a museum to actually see this being done (or to somebody who was doing it as a hobby or project, which is where I've seen it), but the language has stuck.
When a design has been "taped out," it's basically ready for production; it's ready to be actually etched into the silicon and for the manufacturing process to begin.
I think that you are vastly oversimplifying the mainstream "thinking Christian" (compatible with science) position. They are not mutually exclusive.
The only way that you arrive at a situation where religion and science are incompatible is when you take one too literally, or the other too figuratively, or both. If you try to sit down with a Bible and actually figure out how many times the earth has gone around the sun since Adam and Eve walked out of Eden, and then attempt to force this date as some sort of an epoch for actual phenomena, you are of course bound to fail. Rejecting the Big Bang theory or cosmology in general because you insist that the world was created in 168 hours, is similarly ridiculous. I think it is only in the United States that these points of view have become significantly mainstream, and even then I'm not sure that I would say that they are representative of the official positions of many major churches (although they may be held by people who belong to churches whose official positions and doctrine are more well thought-out).
Likewise, it is a mistake to try to extend any particular scientific discovery or theory past where it is designed to go. Trying to develop a moral philosophy from the interaction of various subatomic particles seems quite bizarre, and would probably produce a philosophy that had little bearing on actual life.
There will always be room for religion in science, as there will always be an unknown. There will always be room for God, because there will always be the question of an ultimate Creator -- what happened before the first Bang? And there will always be room for faith more generally, as there will always be uncertainty.
The problem that some religions have had, both today and in the past, is that they do not cope with the varying needs of people over time. Two thousand years ago, what people wanted from religion and God was an assurance that their crops would grow; today, people have different needs, perhaps more metaphysical than whether or not they'll starve during the winter, but acute spiritual needs nonetheless. It would be a sorry religion -- and a very sorry God -- that wasn't able to cope with that difference in needs (or, if you prefer, the different forms that the same universal spiritual needs take).
"Out of what's left of our meager and withered sensitivity..."
Or, in other words, "our wives finally threatened to leave our sorry asses."
(I was really disappointed that this photo didn't get more publicity. It really sums up the kind of soulless, hardened criminals the RIAA is out there every day, defending us all against.)
This is definitely true -- there are quite a few older games which do screen-sharing or splitting in order to provide multiplayer, and could be moved to a separate-system multiplayer pretty easily, if the games run in a sandbox or emulator. All that would be needed would be to get rid of the actual screen-splitting (so that in multiplayer, the player only sees his own screen) and then use the network to send the "Controller B" commands to each system.
I assume you'd have to do something to make sure that the games stayed in sync -- obviously you wouldn't want each system to be running a separate instance of the game, where the only connection between the two of them was the other player's controller signal, because it could concievably happen that one system would run a little faster than the other, and a move made locally would have different results than on the remote system. (E.g., on your local system, you make that jump over the fireball, but by the time the command gets to your buddy's system, it's too late and you hit it -- thus your character on his system dies, and your character on your system lives; thus the game is out of sync.)
However it certainly doesn't seem like it would be hard, and I really think that the market for some of the "classic" games is undervalued right now.
It can be a significant pain in the rear if you want to play a classic NES game anymore. A lot of players aren't savvy enough to mess around with computer emulators and ROMS (plus, playing them on the computer is a very different experience), and getting an actual NES console that's in good working order -- doesn't have a flaky edge connector or require a lot of blowing/tapping/praying -- can be tough.
I think there could be a demand for a repackaged version of some of those old games: for Nintendo, Super Mario 1-3; for Sega, the original Sonic ones. The major risk is that the companies won't be able to resist "updating" them, and will pull a George Lucas and ruin things that really didn't need changing.
I've used a new, non-locked phone with TMobile just by dropping my SIM card into it. They don't do any validation (apparently) based on the IMEI/handset number. So you can buy a European "retail box" cellphone off of eBay for instance, and use it with your cellular GSM plan here in the US just fine. I know several people that are doing this, because they are on special "promotional" plans and if they got a subsidized upgrade through the cell company, would have to give up their rate plan and recontract.
The whole "vendor-locked" phones are a purely U.S. abomination, as far as I can tell. The trick if you don't want to hassle with unlocking a phone, is to get one from Europe. The cellular companies are much more eager to keep you from taking one of "their" phones (even though it's *yours* after your contract is done!) onto another network, then they are to keep you from bringing a 3rd party phone onto their network. That doesn't mean they make it easy, but I've never seen them make it hard on purpose.
In the GP's (GGP's?) story, the bullet didn't go down the other sniper's barrel, it went into his scope, presumably traveling through the scope, and into his eye, and from there into his brain. While it's possible that the optics and other parts of the mechanism in the scope might deflect the bullet's trajectory slightly, it probably wouldn't do so enough to prevent it from being fatal.
Now that I think about it, wasn't there a scene in Saving Private Ryan that was like this? Two snipers, and one guy shoots the other guy in the eye through his scope? Or was that in Stalingrad? Either way, I'm almost sure I've seen something like this in a movie. It smells a little of cliche.
Not that it would be impossible (I suppose if you're shooting at somebody's head, because that's the biggest exposed mass) and the other person is shooting back at you, sooner or later you're going to put a round through their scope) but it just seems a little hard to swallow. I guess I'll accept it as a 'good story,' though.
True, but on the other hand, on a golf course there is a high chance that the person who gets killed is a lawyer... so maybe they are doing the right thing.;-)
More seriously, I agree -- I'm sure we could probably go around all day with the ridiculous "liability tales" that seem to be nothing less than pervasive. The point is that our legal system is obviously out of whack and is encouraging what I'd say is antisocial behavior. If it weren't for the entrenchment of the legal system (and in particular, certain special interests who profit handsomely from tort litigation) I think this would have been corrected long ago. You don't see too many other cases where such obviously detrimental behavior is encouraged, and where it is, there tends to be a public outcry. Here, we seem to have simply accepted this as a way of life, and that's wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
People keep talking about this, but I have not seen any evidence on the Dell website that I can select Linux as an OS when I'm buying a computer. I haven't checked in the past few days or anything, but I did play around a few months ago and the only options under "OS" for their consumer machines was "Windows XP Home Edition" and "Windows XP Professional."
It'll be a big step forward when Linux is available there as well, just because--even if people don't order it--the fact that it's on the list right next to Windows makes it seem more 'official.'
The only place I've seen Linux as an option for a preinstalled OS from a major vendor is HP's "Workstation" line (which are really nice computers, and certainly better than the shit they foist on consumers, but not something average people are likely to see). I keep hearing that Dell offers Linux as some sort of option: can anyone explain where it's offered, or what the secret is?
Of course there are the small companies that offer preinstalled Linux systems, but sadly they seem to be charging a price premium that's really the wrong direction to be going in. Looking only at them versus at Windows boxes, you'd assume that the "Linux tax" is a few hundred dollars more than the Redmond one.
Not so much a converter as a "runner":
8 4
LiveCD Virtual Appliance
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/2
That's pretty slick; that basically goes the other way, from a LiveCD to a Virtual Machine. I wonder if there's an easy way to save the disk image plus the state of the running machine to a file, so that you can insert a BootCD, start it in a VM, and then save that VM to a file and have it, even after the CD is ejected.
Anyway, it's a lot of stuff like that, which really makes me think that virtualization is neat technology, even for the home/enthuasiast user. Its advantages in the datacenter are obvious, but I think there are more than enough applications for home uses that it'll become an essential part of computing, as soon as it gets built into mainstream OSes. (Much to the detriment of VMWare perhaps, although they do give away an edition right now, so maybe that's not their bread and butter as it is.)
But wouldn't you rather watch pr0^wcontent made by people you know?
... that's what XTube is for.
Duh
The solution is not to make work on speculation; make it on commission.
We've become attached to the speculative/at-risk work model of art production, even though I'm not convinced that it's really all that beneficial to artists. It results in many more artists and much more art than the market really demands at any given time, and many more failures than would otherwise happen, if artists waited for a demand to exist, and then created for that demand, rather than the other way around.
If you are a sculptor, and someone pays you to make a sculpture, then you negotiate a price for your time based on how long it will take you to make the sculpture, and how much energy you're going to put into it. At the end of the time, they get the sculpture, and you move on to a new project. You get paid for your labor, they get a product.
The idea that someone should be able to create something and then derive income from it, over and over and over, for hundreds of years, is a very new economic invention. Ultimately, as technology improves and the cost of reproduction becomes less and less, and the stopgap methods we use to make reproduction artificially expensive fail, both the cost and the value of the marginal copy fall to zero. The only things which have any value, are those which actually take skilled work to create. In other words, only unique works of art, new originals, are valuable when you have a world full of cheap copies.
This means that there will always be a demand for artistic output. Even with the entire recorded output of human society on tap, people will want new stuff created. Rather than trying to monetize things which have already been created, artists need to concentrate on getting the value of their time paid for up front; rather than trying to amortize the cost of creation over multiple copies, demand that payment in advance.
A large problem, however, is that the market for "art" is significantly smaller than the people currently trying to make a living producing it. There simply isn't room for that much of an industry; right now they only exist by selling copies -- things that have little or no inherent value, because they take little labor to produce. A transition to a more sustainable model would necessarily involve a fairly ugly "contraction" period. However this is a necessary consequence of the elimination of the parasitic industry which currently flourishes by selling things whose value in labor terms is fictitious and based on artificial scarcity.
Skilled labor has value, copies don't. That's really the future; any model that attempts to impose a value on a copy which can be made by a machine in a few seconds, has to either depend on a monopoly (control of the means of production), or is eventually bound to fail.
I don't think it's that you "can't get people to convert," it's that the designers haven't come up with a compelling reason to get people to abandon what they know. Someone who's worked with a mouse+keyboard, desktop-style GUI for (in some cases) 20 years or more, isn't going to completely retrain themselves without a darn good reason. Right now, there aren't many compelling reasons to switch.
In essence I'm agreeing with you; there certainly haven't been very many really radical designs, and because of that, there haven't been many designs that really offer the average user that much more benefit over what they're using now.
Offer something significantly better -- enough to cover the retraining cost -- and people will flock to it. There's nothing particularly enjoyable for most people about using a QWERTY keyboard and mouse, it's just what they're used to because it's "good enough." Come up with an interface that lets people enter data as quickly and accurately as they can with a keyboard, and move objects as easily as they can with a mouse, and view and comprehend data as quickly as they can on a monitor, and -- like my grandmother used to say about building a better mousetrap -- people will beat a path to your door. It's just that to date, nobody has really built that better system; at least not that I've ever seen.
Designers seem hesitant to go 'outside the box' because they percieve users as being tame, but really it's the users who are cynical about new designs, because most of them are nothing but lame rehashes; "difference for the sake of difference," which throw away optimizations painstakingly made over years (or in some cases decades) without offering much new. It's not until designers really go outside the box that they'll stand a chance of finding a Better Way, and when they do, the users will follow.
I had actually thought about doing something similar a while back. Actually I didn't want to do wireless transmit at all, I just wanted to mail a GPS receiver around and see if it picked up any sort of a trail.
My main question is whether it would ever get much of a GPS signal. You could spend an awful lot of time and money putting together a project like that, only to have it spend its entire journey in steel-roofed buildings and metal trucks where it can't hear the satellites and not get any position fixes.
I've never done any research on the topic, but I wonder if it's illegal to send an amateur radio beacon station (e.g. an APRS beacon) through the mail. Those are pretty simple to assemble and robust, and the range is a lot longer than 802.11. (They use a designated frequency on the 2m -- that's 144MHz -- band to report position to various fixed stations; the results can be seen on the internet among other places.)
It would be pretty neat to watch the progress of a package through the mail system in real time. Even UPS's admittedly slick tracking system can't hold a candle to that.
Well some of them might, if you had a Linux machine. By encapsulating them inside a minimalist VM image, you can make them run on any host OS. So that even if I'm running Windows, I can run a bunch of Linux network monitoring and debugging tools, without creating a Linux system and installing them. (And configuring, etc.)
If you want to do one of the tasks that one of the VMs perform, and nothing else, downloading and launching a VM is probably a lot easier than downloading a piece of software and installing it. Plus, it doesn't leave crap all over your system or risk compromising your security (as much -- obviously you're still running code, but a VMWare image can be run as a user process, I think).
Plus when you're done, you just shut the VM down and either delete the image or save it for next time.
In effect, what they do could easily be replaced with a bootable CD or DVD image (in fact, I'd be surprised if someone didn't have a VM-to-BootCD converter), with the advantage as a VM that you don't need to take down a running system in order to run them.
Plus, adding a minimalist OS like LEAF only adds 3MB or so to the program binaries, apparently -- and I don't think that the VM image format overhead is that much more than a comparable disk-image format (ISO). The downsides are less than you're making them out to be, and the convenience factors are definitely in their favor.
Does it make sense for every application to come with an entire default-install of CentOS? Certainly not; but might it be worth the overhead for some specialized, configuration-intensive application to come with its own preconfigured OS? Definitely. There are a lot of people who are capable of running a VM, who don't have the ability or the interest to set up something like Apache2/modPHP/Perl, Smoothwall, or Squid themselves. (All of which I've seen or heard talked about as VMs.) To be able to just download and run something, and have it act like a distinct server on their network? That's pretty slick.
Actually I think it's a Good Thing to always have somebody copy/paste the article into the discussion, so that it becomes part of the thread's permanent archive.
If you go back and read Slashdot stories from more than a year or two ago (always amusing, I strongly recommend it), most of the links to articles are dead. The only threads where you can really read TFA are the ones where somebody pasted it in as a comment.
You do have a point though, it doesn't really deserve a +5 moderation; as long as the person puts "ARTICLE TEXT" in their subject line (which is also a good thing to do!) it's easy enough to find in the the thread if you want to read it, even if it's down at +1 or +2. The only reason to mod it up would be if somebody posted it AC and you wanted to make sure it was readable to people who browse at +1.
So in general, it's definitely karma-whorish, but on the other hand it's also rather useful...so who cares if people get some free points?
Marylin Manson caused Bowling for Columbine
Manson was responsible for that travesty of a film?
Okay boys, find me a tree and a rope...
Unfortunately not so simple. As long as web developers keep targeting their sites towards IE, it's a de-facto standard, regardless of its actual standards compliance. There are far too many sites out there which are broken when used on other browsers, because they are designed to work with the braindead way that IE wants things to be.
As long as one browser has such an overwhelming amount of marketshare, there will always be the temptation for the developers of that browser to do things differently than anybody else, and developers will neglect standards in order to make their site look a little better / flashier / faster than the competition, when viewed on that browser, by (ab)using its idiosyncrasies.
Microsoft is particularly bad at this, and has a history of being a poor citizen with almost every product that they've made, but ultimately I think you'd have the same problem with any browser that had 90+% marketshare. Since no piece of software is perfect, even a browser designed to be standards-compliant that was used that heavily, would have bugs in its rendering/interpretation of pages, which developers would begin to target, at the expense of other browsers.
Part of the problem is the developers who sacrifice standards compatibility, but the bigger problem is just one of having a monoculture to begin with. I'd prefer that Firefox have 90% marketshare than IE, because FF has a better security and compliance record, but I'd prefer that four browsers each have 25% than any single one have more than that.
I would probably use Caps Lock a lot more, if it actually acted like a shift modifier on all the keys, and not just on letters. Or at least acted like a shift as far as the understore/hyphen key is concerned.
I write quite a bit of SQL from time to time, and generally write the commands in caps, although it's case insensitive. Our table names are all written with underscores, so I'm constantly going for that key.
One of these days I should really just do a registry hack or something and swap the behavior of the hyphen and the underscore...although if anyone else ever had to use my workstation, that would really mess with them. (And vice versa, which is why I haven't done it; there's something to be said for being used to the "universal" setup.)
Yes I think they map those to FN-modified F-keys; or at least they used to on older PowerBook models, and I'd be surprised if they took them off, since quite a few people do use them. If they did remove them, I'm sure you could probably remap them to your least-favorite four F-keys.
Although, I guess people said the same thing about Serial Ports...I wouldn't put anything past Mr Jobs: when he decides something's going to go, it goes.
Java is like C++ on viagra and sleeping pills combined
... what? So, Java just lies there and lets you ... nevermind. I don't want to know.
Wait
Okay, I do. What do you mean?
Well assumedly they'd get a court order allowing them to dig, which is a pretty good defense. Plus, I'm not sure AOL is very worried. Although the deep pockets make them a target, it also makes them tough to sue unless you also have an abundance of resources. How long do you think an average person would last in court against AOL's laywers? They'd just outspend you, if they really wanted to.
Plus I doubt AOL would do the digging themselves; if they get a court order, they'll probably have the searching done by teams of "recovery experts" who can demonstrate in court that whatever method they choose to use to search is the best-and-only way to do it, etc., etc.
In other words, they'd have to be monumentally stupid not to CYA, and although AOL has never been exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, public-relations-wise, I don't think that their laywers are that stupid. They do, after all, cover people's asses for a living.
True, but assuming AOL gets permission from a court to search the area, they really have no motivation to be less destructive than they're allowed to be. If they can demonstrate to a judge that there's reasonable cause to believe that the couple are protecting a cache of misbegotten goods, and one of their goals is also to make a point to the world/public about spamming and how it's not a good thing to do, then it would make sense that they would try and argue for the most destructive method of searching available.
I'd say that the best way to do it would be to go in there with heavy equipment, and just run all the dirt on the property down to a depth of about six feet or so through a sifter. It's probably reasonably cheap from AOL's perspective (all you need is a backhoe and a separator/sifter -- that's probably not the right term for it, but you've probably seen the machines that do this), and it creates a nice TV image if what you want to show is a spammer/family-of-spammer getting their lives trashed.
A whole lot of people out there really hate spammers; it's one of those things that pretty much everybody hates and has to deal with, and the idea that people who profited (potentially) from spam are getting their lives turned upside down isn't necessarily a bad PR move. Of course, it could easily backfire if the people in question can portray themselves as the victims, but if they're sufficiently uncharismatic, don't think for a moment that the American public won't be beside themselves with glee seeing their lawn get trashed. Public opinion in this country has a bit of a vengeful streak -- there's nothing we like better than seeing karma come around and bite someone in the ass.
All depends on who can make themselves look like the good guy.
(Found here)
Just make sure you tell them that you think the bars are buried under those big rocks you've been wanting to remove from the garden
Your first mistake was trusting the spelling of a bunch of EEs... ;-)
Although more seriously, I've never heard of anyone calling multiple dies "dice." It just sounds strange to me. But the context I've used the word has always been with the bigger sort of "die"; the kind used to stamp out parts, for instance. I've always heard them referred to as "dies." I think anyone who said "dice" would have been understood, but treated as a bit of a rookie; it's like walking into a gun store and calling that thing you stick into the bottom of your 1911 a "clip." Would everyone understand you? Sure. Would people think you're out of your league? Maybe.
I think the phrase referred to in times past, when the design for a chip was literally made into masks for the photo-etching process by taping patterns onto plates.
Now you'd probably have to go to a museum to actually see this being done (or to somebody who was doing it as a hobby or project, which is where I've seen it), but the language has stuck.
When a design has been "taped out," it's basically ready for production; it's ready to be actually etched into the silicon and for the manufacturing process to begin.
I think that you are vastly oversimplifying the mainstream "thinking Christian" (compatible with science) position. They are not mutually exclusive.
The only way that you arrive at a situation where religion and science are incompatible is when you take one too literally, or the other too figuratively, or both. If you try to sit down with a Bible and actually figure out how many times the earth has gone around the sun since Adam and Eve walked out of Eden, and then attempt to force this date as some sort of an epoch for actual phenomena, you are of course bound to fail. Rejecting the Big Bang theory or cosmology in general because you insist that the world was created in 168 hours, is similarly ridiculous. I think it is only in the United States that these points of view have become significantly mainstream, and even then I'm not sure that I would say that they are representative of the official positions of many major churches (although they may be held by people who belong to churches whose official positions and doctrine are more well thought-out).
Likewise, it is a mistake to try to extend any particular scientific discovery or theory past where it is designed to go. Trying to develop a moral philosophy from the interaction of various subatomic particles seems quite bizarre, and would probably produce a philosophy that had little bearing on actual life.
There will always be room for religion in science, as there will always be an unknown. There will always be room for God, because there will always be the question of an ultimate Creator -- what happened before the first Bang? And there will always be room for faith more generally, as there will always be uncertainty.
The problem that some religions have had, both today and in the past, is that they do not cope with the varying needs of people over time. Two thousand years ago, what people wanted from religion and God was an assurance that their crops would grow; today, people have different needs, perhaps more metaphysical than whether or not they'll starve during the winter, but acute spiritual needs nonetheless. It would be a sorry religion -- and a very sorry God -- that wasn't able to cope with that difference in needs (or, if you prefer, the different forms that the same universal spiritual needs take).
"Out of what's left of our meager and withered sensitivity..."
Or, in other words, "our wives finally threatened to leave our sorry asses."
(I was really disappointed that this photo didn't get more publicity. It really sums up the kind of soulless, hardened criminals the RIAA is out there every day, defending us all against.)
This is definitely true -- there are quite a few older games which do screen-sharing or splitting in order to provide multiplayer, and could be moved to a separate-system multiplayer pretty easily, if the games run in a sandbox or emulator. All that would be needed would be to get rid of the actual screen-splitting (so that in multiplayer, the player only sees his own screen) and then use the network to send the "Controller B" commands to each system.
I assume you'd have to do something to make sure that the games stayed in sync -- obviously you wouldn't want each system to be running a separate instance of the game, where the only connection between the two of them was the other player's controller signal, because it could concievably happen that one system would run a little faster than the other, and a move made locally would have different results than on the remote system. (E.g., on your local system, you make that jump over the fireball, but by the time the command gets to your buddy's system, it's too late and you hit it -- thus your character on his system dies, and your character on your system lives; thus the game is out of sync.)
However it certainly doesn't seem like it would be hard, and I really think that the market for some of the "classic" games is undervalued right now.
It can be a significant pain in the rear if you want to play a classic NES game anymore. A lot of players aren't savvy enough to mess around with computer emulators and ROMS (plus, playing them on the computer is a very different experience), and getting an actual NES console that's in good working order -- doesn't have a flaky edge connector or require a lot of blowing/tapping/praying -- can be tough.
I think there could be a demand for a repackaged version of some of those old games: for Nintendo, Super Mario 1-3; for Sega, the original Sonic ones. The major risk is that the companies won't be able to resist "updating" them, and will pull a George Lucas and ruin things that really didn't need changing.
I've used a new, non-locked phone with TMobile just by dropping my SIM card into it. They don't do any validation (apparently) based on the IMEI/handset number. So you can buy a European "retail box" cellphone off of eBay for instance, and use it with your cellular GSM plan here in the US just fine. I know several people that are doing this, because they are on special "promotional" plans and if they got a subsidized upgrade through the cell company, would have to give up their rate plan and recontract.
The whole "vendor-locked" phones are a purely U.S. abomination, as far as I can tell. The trick if you don't want to hassle with unlocking a phone, is to get one from Europe. The cellular companies are much more eager to keep you from taking one of "their" phones (even though it's *yours* after your contract is done!) onto another network, then they are to keep you from bringing a 3rd party phone onto their network. That doesn't mean they make it easy, but I've never seen them make it hard on purpose.
But what's going to happen when enthusiasts get hold of it? They'll start developing cool, open source applications for the benefit of the masses.
Which will then never work on the crippled, vendor-locked models that are actually produced for mass consumption. Lovely.
Where's that guy with the "I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient" sig when you need him?
In the GP's (GGP's?) story, the bullet didn't go down the other sniper's barrel, it went into his scope, presumably traveling through the scope, and into his eye, and from there into his brain. While it's possible that the optics and other parts of the mechanism in the scope might deflect the bullet's trajectory slightly, it probably wouldn't do so enough to prevent it from being fatal.
Now that I think about it, wasn't there a scene in Saving Private Ryan that was like this? Two snipers, and one guy shoots the other guy in the eye through his scope? Or was that in Stalingrad? Either way, I'm almost sure I've seen something like this in a movie. It smells a little of cliche.
Not that it would be impossible (I suppose if you're shooting at somebody's head, because that's the biggest exposed mass) and the other person is shooting back at you, sooner or later you're going to put a round through their scope) but it just seems a little hard to swallow. I guess I'll accept it as a 'good story,' though.
True, but on the other hand, on a golf course there is a high chance that the person who gets killed is a lawyer ... so maybe they are doing the right thing. ;-)
More seriously, I agree -- I'm sure we could probably go around all day with the ridiculous "liability tales" that seem to be nothing less than pervasive. The point is that our legal system is obviously out of whack and is encouraging what I'd say is antisocial behavior. If it weren't for the entrenchment of the legal system (and in particular, certain special interests who profit handsomely from tort litigation) I think this would have been corrected long ago. You don't see too many other cases where such obviously detrimental behavior is encouraged, and where it is, there tends to be a public outcry. Here, we seem to have simply accepted this as a way of life, and that's wrong.