You're in the wrong forum, spineboy. This is "Ask Slashdot," not "Ask a Freaking Expert." If he had wanted expert advice, he would have gone elsewhere. Post again when you have some groundless conjecture or a conspiracy theory to share.
Goodbye Science
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What this prediction does is to make Global Warming completely unfalsifiable. If things get a little warmer, it proves that Global Warming is imminent. If things get a little colder, it's because Global Warming is imminent. If things stay the same (which they generally never do) then that just proves that we are at an unstable tipping point. Goodbye science, hello politics.
A perfectly good technical definition -- depending on one's purposes, no one would have agreed with it in 1990 -- yet a perfectly useless market or legal definition.
I recently invented just such an engine that taps into new unexplained laws of physics. I think that you are just the sort of investor I need to have this project take off. Please send your bank account number.
Henry
P.S. There may be some scoffers, but what is to say that I'm wrong? After all you are reading this on the internet. It must be true.
It is silly to try to look for functional distinction between "OS" and "application" when examining them as consumer products. The two words have little meaning to the consumer or supplier. The judge's ruling in the DOJ case was silly on more than one level. Studying the subject will reveal to you that anti-trust cases have historically tended towards farce in America.
A good parallel may be the separation of software from hardware on embedded systems. There is a good technical definition, of course. But is meaningless to talk to a user about an ATM, for instance, as anything but a whole.
In the end, the only realistic definition of "OS" is that an "OS" is whatever Microsoft, Apple, Redhat, SUSE, or whoever, include as their basic system. "Applications" are anything that must be obtained separately.
If it makes you feel better, stop talking about the Microsoft Operating System, and start talking about the Microsoft Distribution, like you would talk about a Linux Distribution.
the OS by definition is the supervisor of the computer's ressources
By whose definition? Certainly not mine. Certainly not Microsoft's, the makers of the most successful OS in the world. Certainly not the majority of users. I do know the definition of OS as used in a CS course. But please realize that it has only the barest relation to the real world, a place that you may someday encounter once outside the campus.
Is there anything that Microsoft has been sued for "illegally integrating" that a Linux distribution or Mac would be caught dead without? Monopoly or no monopoly, a modern OS requires an internet browser and a video player.
Anti-trust law is not supposed to be government or corporate welfare project.
I don't believe that we need to worry about running out of oil any time soon. As oil becomes scarcer, prices will rise and consumption will decrease, that's a fundamental economic law. The real question is when we're going to reach peak oil production. Industry reports seem to be saying 10-30 years for that (it's not at all a certain guess, because they are factoring in things like predicted consumption and predicted discoveries and such). And once peak oil is reached, prices have nowhere to go but up. Whether the tail stretches out 75 years or a couple hundred past that, it won't be pretty.
Energy expense is the thing. Especially once the cost of mining rises due to the increasing expense of oil. (All that heavy equipment runs on gasoline, not electricity.)
The calculated efficiency of a single-junction solar cell made with this material would be a remarkable 57 percent. But while the single-junction architecture is elegantly simple, many questions have to be answered before ZnMnOTe or any of its highly mismatched cousins prove they can do the job.
So not only does it not work yet, but any article that starts off with the words "besides cost..." is obviously talking about an economic impossibility.
We're stuck with cheap oil until it runs out in a few decades. And then we're stuck trying to rebuild civilization with coal.
I disagree. Go back to the first thing you learn in Economics 101. Supply and demand curves. If you raise the price, you make more money per sale, but you sell fewer widgets. If you lower it, you sell more widgets, but make less per sale. There is an optimum price on the curve that creates optimum profit.
There are good reasons to suppose that DVDs and CDs may have pretty similar supply demand characteristics. When a man walks into a store with $20 dollars, he is probably just as likely to buy one as the other. Since I'm the only data point that I've got, I'll mention that I have about as many DVDs as I have CDs. And if they do have similar supply demand curves, then one or the other has a price set sub-optimally.
If CDs halved in price tomorrow, I, for one, would probably spend twice as much money on them. (Buying 4x as many.) That is a whole lot more profit for the music companies.
Does anybody know of a case where someone has been attacked through a Microsoft vulnerability between the time of its going public and the release of the patch? The most often encountered scenario seems to be people who never upgrade getting attacked because hackers have reverse engineered the patches.
So sad to see that the parent is yet another victim of the megahertz myth.
Imagine for a moment that a CPU maker created a chip that performed 10 times the number of operations per cycle that either Intel or AMD could achieve. But also imagine that because of the complexity, they could only get the chip to run at 50MHz. Not very useful, huh?
Intel has gone with a design that allows them to ramp up clock speed. AMD has gone with a design that allows them to use clock cycles more efficiently.
Both of those approaches are a perfectly good way to do things. All that matters is how fast the user's applications run in the end.
No, I'm someone who doesn't want to get murdered by a criminal who lied his way into the States. Seems rational enough to me. Do you know what the murder rate is in the border towns just a few miles south of where I live? And that's mainly because the border is so permeable that murderers don't have to worry about being caught. I don't even want to think about terrorists.
I can think of lots of good reasons for fingerprinting visitors to the United States. It is generally a bad thing when people lie about who they are to get in. This will put up certain obstacles to that. In fact, I can think of good reasons to fingerprint all citizens. The arguments in favor are far stronger than the weak and emotional arguments against.
I am far more worried about realistic fears of a Nanny State than silly fears of a Police State.
There can be some issues with the bigger drives. I just got a 200 Gig hard drive and it turns out that the default Debian installer won't work on it. Apparently kernels before 2.4.19 can't recognize drives bigger than 137 gigs. (Not this drive anyway). I had to install Debian through Knoppix. Even Windows XP won't recognize it unless you've got SP1.
"The hysteria over pedophilia is indicative of a society that has come to the brink of self-destruction and stands there accusing the void." -- Bring Back Stigma by Roger Scruton
Pornographic images of children are no different from images of other illegal acts. I am sure that a Google search for murder victims will reveal a number of them for those whose perverse tastes lie in that direction. I find all such things repellant, and would be happy to put publishers of all such material in jail. In fact, I find the US Supreme Court's current interpretation of the 1st Amendment to be overbroad by far.
But I also advocate a balanced view of such things. We are talking about images, not the acts themselves. When the police can identify such people, I am all for having them arrested. I am not, on the other hand, in favor of closing down forums for uncensored communication in order to create some sort of utopia where all such people are caught.
Slashdot Mirror
You're in the wrong forum, spineboy. This is "Ask Slashdot," not "Ask a Freaking Expert." If he had wanted expert advice, he would have gone elsewhere. Post again when you have some groundless conjecture or a conspiracy theory to share.
What this prediction does is to make Global Warming completely unfalsifiable. If things get a little warmer, it proves that Global Warming is imminent. If things get a little colder, it's because Global Warming is imminent. If things stay the same (which they generally never do) then that just proves that we are at an unstable tipping point. Goodbye science, hello politics.
Oh come on, at least try a suggestion that could be accomplished with current technology. Your fancy schemes are obviously science fiction.
A perfectly good technical definition -- depending on one's purposes, no one would have agreed with it in 1990 -- yet a perfectly useless market or legal definition.
So any operating system without a Hardware Abstraction Layer is not an operating system? I'm afraid that you'll have to try again.
Dear Svartalf,
I recently invented just such an engine that taps into new unexplained laws of physics. I think that you are just the sort of investor I need to have this project take off. Please send your bank account number.
Henry
P.S. There may be some scoffers, but what is to say that I'm wrong? After all you are reading this on the internet. It must be true.
It is silly to try to look for functional distinction between "OS" and "application" when examining them as consumer products. The two words have little meaning to the consumer or supplier. The judge's ruling in the DOJ case was silly on more than one level. Studying the subject will reveal to you that anti-trust cases have historically tended towards farce in America.
A good parallel may be the separation of software from hardware on embedded systems. There is a good technical definition, of course. But is meaningless to talk to a user about an ATM, for instance, as anything but a whole.
In the end, the only realistic definition of "OS" is that an "OS" is whatever Microsoft, Apple, Redhat, SUSE, or whoever, include as their basic system. "Applications" are anything that must be obtained separately.
If it makes you feel better, stop talking about the Microsoft Operating System, and start talking about the Microsoft Distribution, like you would talk about a Linux Distribution.
the OS by definition is the supervisor of the computer's ressources
By whose definition? Certainly not mine. Certainly not Microsoft's, the makers of the most successful OS in the world. Certainly not the majority of users. I do know the definition of OS as used in a CS course. But please realize that it has only the barest relation to the real world, a place that you may someday encounter once outside the campus.
The download worked for me. Is the size on disk really 120 KB? I don't feel safe about running it.
Is there anything that Microsoft has been sued for "illegally integrating" that a Linux distribution or Mac would be caught dead without? Monopoly or no monopoly, a modern OS requires an internet browser and a video player.
Anti-trust law is not supposed to be government or corporate welfare project.
You can be sure that once the price of oil gets high enough, they'll go back for the expensive to extract stuff. Still doesn't get us cheap oil.
I don't believe that we need to worry about running out of oil any time soon. As oil becomes scarcer, prices will rise and consumption will decrease, that's a fundamental economic law. The real question is when we're going to reach peak oil production. Industry reports seem to be saying 10-30 years for that (it's not at all a certain guess, because they are factoring in things like predicted consumption and predicted discoveries and such). And once peak oil is reached, prices have nowhere to go but up. Whether the tail stretches out 75 years or a couple hundred past that, it won't be pretty.
Energy expense is the thing. Especially once the cost of mining rises due to the increasing expense of oil. (All that heavy equipment runs on gasoline, not electricity.)
The calculated efficiency of a single-junction solar cell made with this material would be a remarkable 57 percent. But while the single-junction architecture is elegantly simple, many questions have to be answered before ZnMnOTe or any of its highly mismatched cousins prove they can do the job.
So not only does it not work yet, but any article that starts off with the words "besides cost..." is obviously talking about an economic impossibility.
We're stuck with cheap oil until it runs out in a few decades. And then we're stuck trying to rebuild civilization with coal.
I disagree. Go back to the first thing you learn in Economics 101. Supply and demand curves. If you raise the price, you make more money per sale, but you sell fewer widgets. If you lower it, you sell more widgets, but make less per sale. There is an optimum price on the curve that creates optimum profit.
There are good reasons to suppose that DVDs and CDs may have pretty similar supply demand characteristics. When a man walks into a store with $20 dollars, he is probably just as likely to buy one as the other. Since I'm the only data point that I've got, I'll mention that I have about as many DVDs as I have CDs. And if they do have similar supply demand curves, then one or the other has a price set sub-optimally.
If CDs halved in price tomorrow, I, for one, would probably spend twice as much money on them. (Buying 4x as many.) That is a whole lot more profit for the music companies.
Or better yet, open the source, and let us do it.
Does anybody know of a case where someone has been attacked through a Microsoft vulnerability between the time of its going public and the release of the patch? The most often encountered scenario seems to be people who never upgrade getting attacked because hackers have reverse engineered the patches.
So sad to see that the parent is yet another victim of the megahertz myth.
Imagine for a moment that a CPU maker created a chip that performed 10 times the number of operations per cycle that either Intel or AMD could achieve. But also imagine that because of the complexity, they could only get the chip to run at 50MHz. Not very useful, huh?
Intel has gone with a design that allows them to ramp up clock speed. AMD has gone with a design that allows them to use clock cycles more efficiently.
Both of those approaches are a perfectly good way to do things. All that matters is how fast the user's applications run in the end.
No, I'm someone who doesn't want to get murdered by a criminal who lied his way into the States. Seems rational enough to me. Do you know what the murder rate is in the border towns just a few miles south of where I live? And that's mainly because the border is so permeable that murderers don't have to worry about being caught. I don't even want to think about terrorists.
I can think of lots of good reasons for fingerprinting visitors to the United States. It is generally a bad thing when people lie about who they are to get in. This will put up certain obstacles to that. In fact, I can think of good reasons to fingerprint all citizens. The arguments in favor are far stronger than the weak and emotional arguments against.
I am far more worried about realistic fears of a Nanny State than silly fears of a Police State.
Could you be more explicit about how exactly anybody is hurt by this? Or is it all "emotional distress"?
I'm not how exactly the Framers intended our country to be, but I don't think they meant for us to be a nation of sissies and whiners.
There can be some issues with the bigger drives. I just got a 200 Gig hard drive and it turns out that the default Debian installer won't work on it. Apparently kernels before 2.4.19 can't recognize drives bigger than 137 gigs. (Not this drive anyway). I had to install Debian through Knoppix. Even Windows XP won't recognize it unless you've got SP1.
I did that in high school. It's pretty easy.
"The hysteria over pedophilia is indicative of a society that has come to the brink of self-destruction and stands there accusing the void." -- Bring Back Stigma by Roger Scruton
Pornographic images of children are no different from images of other illegal acts. I am sure that a Google search for murder victims will reveal a number of them for those whose perverse tastes lie in that direction. I find all such things repellant, and would be happy to put publishers of all such material in jail. In fact, I find the US Supreme Court's current interpretation of the 1st Amendment to be overbroad by far.
But I also advocate a balanced view of such things. We are talking about images, not the acts themselves. When the police can identify such people, I am all for having them arrested. I am not, on the other hand, in favor of closing down forums for uncensored communication in order to create some sort of utopia where all such people are caught.
Leave Freenet alone.