It may really be the case that the launch was 'frickin fantastic', but just having finished reading Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age I don't put a lot of faith in what the media gets wind of with regard to space technology. This stuff is really complicated, and the general public doesn't understand that test flights going awry is not necessarily a bad thing-- so officials often put a nice veneer on the results.
I hope it really was fantastic. A lot of people put a lot of time into this thing. But this thing is so politicized, I'm not holding my breath.
You have to upgrade to Outlook 2007 to get sane behavior, though. For some odd reason, Outlook 2003 refuses to use the 2k3 PST format when doing anything BUT Exchange. If, e.g., you are communicating with an IMAP server, it still uses the old Outlook 97 format for its cache file. This means that if you're say, the kind of person who might like to move large amounts of email around (e.g., IT person or other mail administrator), you cannot use Outlook 2003 unless you want to remove and re-add the IMAP account to Outlook every few minutes. Outlook 2007 fixes that one, but it took, what, 10 years to fix it?
In Outlook 2007, you still can't select an entire mail folder (where message count exceeds something like 300 messages) and expect to move that mail to another folder. Outlook complains that it is out of memory. This bug has been in Outlook forever. This is a joke-- a freshman CS student should know how to solve that one.
Outlook 2007 made my machine grind to a halt. So I'm back on 2003, because I HAVE to use Outlook at work.
Are opcodes still hardwired in ARM, or are they using microcode now? I know a little ARM assembly from hacking my ARM7TDMI (iPod mini), and found that ARM was really and interesting and weird (coming from MASM on IA-32) architecture, and quite a bit easier to use. But I remember seeing product documentation claiming that hardwired instructions were one of the reasons why they were able to keep their transistor counts (and thus price) down.
How did you boot NetBSD on the Quadra 605? I was under the impression that the lack of an FPU was a dealbreaker. Did you replace the CPU?
I have one of these sitting in my closet. I bought it when I was in high school, new, and so it has a lot of sentimental value to me even though I can't run anything on it. Also-- 250GB? Is that SCSI? I had no idea that the Mac's BIOS could support such a large disk. And-- how did you fit so much RAM in there? Did you use a riser card or something?
Soekris Engineering makes some great low-power hardware in your price range. They use AMD Geode processors. I have a net4526 as a home router, and according to my Kill-A-Watt, it uses about 1W on average, in a "diskless" setup (boots from CF card, and runs most things from RAMdisk). They're designed to operate primarily over the serial port. The net5501, which we have at few of at work, are basically the speed of a Pentium II. Not bad for such a low-power device. I run OpenBSD on mine, and we have FreeBSD on a couple at work (FreeBSD has drivers for the Sangoma E1/T1 card), but according to their website you can run Linux on it as well. The newer ones even have temperature and voltage sensors.
No, but someone might be surprised to discover that the data on their collection of thumb drives is no longer good. I had someone come to me recently because she couldn't read her WordPerfect files from her 3.5" floppies. She was quite surprised when I said that floppies were not a good archival medium.
Which brings up an important point: what is a good archival medium for typical users? It's not like they're going to rush out and buy tape systems. Compared to an SSD, a floppy disk ain't so bad (aside from capacity).
Furthermore, Seagate and other MFRs publish the latent error rate for their disks. So far I haven't seen anything like that for SSDs. I doubt that it is zero.
We built a few server machines with SSDs, but we found that for many applications, they're not quite ready yet. E.g., SSDs seemed like the perfect application for the machines that run our backup jobs off of our SAN. Unfortunately, the heavy emphasis on writing large catalog files made SSDs unacceptably slow as compared with RAID arrays (to the tune of doubling or tripling running time). The SSDs looked good on paper, but it turns out that the actual performance was more complicated than the datasheets let on. For those machines, we moved them back to RAIDs.
OTOH, we have been using CF cards with single-board computers in certain applications for a very long time, and with these machines, reliability is far more important than disk performance. SATA SSDs are very competitive with CF now, especially since it will ease a number of constraints that CF imposes on us, and so the next round of these machines that I roll out will probably have SSDs instead. We're very much looking forward to replacing disks in workstations with SSDs, but we'll see which thing happens first: virtualization and thin clients or cheap SSDs.
As for the failure-mode part of SSDs-- I've heard this repeated numerous times, but I've never managed to locate a reference. Do you have one?
That's interesting because on my Blackberry 8830 (and indeed, my last two BBs-- a 7350 I think and before that... something old) I typically get 2+ days on a charge. I browse the web, do email, listen to music, and watch the occasional movie clip (stored on my microSD card). I find that when I use it lightly, and I'm in areas of good reception, I've been able to get up to 4 days on a charge. My original Blackberry got a week at a time.
Maybe I just don't use mine as heavily as you guys...
BTW, I'm not saying that BBs are great phones (there are many things that drive me crazy) but in my experience, they do have pretty good battery life. Good enough that I rarely think about it.
As other people have mentioned, coatings on glass have been around for a long time. Almost all new glass for homes has a low-e coating, and photographic lenses and eyewear have had coatings (UV coating, AR coating, etc) for a long time.
Eh, it's like when my legal studies professor brought a Worcester attorney into our classroom to talk about his experiences. The prof told him to be totally honest. The lawyer was, like, "Really? Well... OK." and proceeded to tell the class all about the bribery, secret handshakes, personal agendas, and legal gimmicks that actually make the world (or, Worcester anyway) go round. As a student, it was very enlightening. It also totally crushed my desire to ever be an attorney.
I am no government scholar, but I was under the distinct impression that legislation was required to be made public. Am I wrong about this? Or is it the fact that ACTA is a 'treaty' make it substantially different? People signing NDAs to participate in the legislative process is not a good thing. Whose eyes are they shielding this from? Us?
Software is held to the same standards, but you're comparing apples and oranges. Bridges and gadgets catching fire can kill you. Your wife losing a few photos is regrettable, but... come on.
There is software which can kill you if it malfunctions. Avionics software (which spawned all kinds of guidelines, laws, and specialized programming languages), industrial control software, power network software, and so on. I assure you that people can be sued over poor design in these areas.
Interesting point, and it brings up something I've been thinking about in the back of my mind for a long time. When is a feminist simply sexist? When are advocates for affirmative action simply racist? I am, admittedly, not terribly familiar with each group's philosophy or literature, but it seems to me that when one goes past "raising awareness" and "eliminating discrimination" to "actively trying to disadvantage another group", one is just as bad as the problem they're decrying.
As you point out, these tactics don't actually solve the problem. They make them worse for people who play fair. What is truly unfortunate is that you might actually have a better chance at getting ahead if you, too, became a "sexist asshat". The pressure is toward NOT doing the right thing.
Yeah, but let's be fair-- some of those things on that page are a stretch. For example, Lawrence Summers. I'll get to that momentarily.
Conversations about race and gender inequality are highly politicized, and many people are very sensitive-- I'd say overly sensitive-- to these issues. Heck, many people have a right to be sensitive. Gender and race discrimination was openly accepted and practiced for a long time.
But there are two problems with the continued antagonism on with these issues:
For people like myself, who were born into a country where overt gender and race discrimination are on the decline, people who continue to press these issues as if nothing have changed look to me like they're pressing for "special treatment".
What are these people looking for? Recognition of a problem or special treatment? Special treatment is the antithesis of the political philosophy of this country, where "equal standing before the law" is what we mean by "equality". I understand that there are now and have been injustices against certain groups of people, and that those things affect the prosperity of future generations, but does giving one group of people preference over another actually solve the underlying problem? My opinion is that affirmative action merely drives long-standing conflict even deeper.
Getting back to Lawrence Summers-- if you're not familiar with the story, he was essentially pushed out of the Harvard presidency for openly speculating about the causes of the small number of women in science. His mistake was speaking to a gathering of academics as if they were, in fact, scientists. Reading this article makes it clear that he was saying: here are some possible causes; we need further research to establish a link. He mentions an anecdote with his daughter-- they gave her trucks, but she ended up playing with the trucks as if they were dolls, calling them "daddy truck" and "baby truck". Any scientist worth their salt would be intrigued by this behavior. Of course, this incident cannot be generalized, but it should make you ask "why?". Is it really unreasonable to think that men and women, who served in certain specific capacities for millennia of human history, might actually be better suited toward those roles? The answer may be 'no', but science must be allowed to ask the question. Nancy Hopkins, who walked out on Summers' talk, later said that ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up" had she not left. That sounds like hyperbole to me. The appropriate response as a career scientist would have been to counter Summers with evidence and scientific argument.
With regard to the 54 incidents you mention, this is a classic case of finding problems when you're looking for them. As other people have pointed out, the number of incidents that can be called "sexist" in FOSS mailing lists appears to be vanishingly small. 54 incidents out of how many millions of conversation threads? Come on. The rational thing to do is to give us hard data, and then make your case. The link above is a laundry list of grievances; not science. But if you can make the case scientifically, showing us good evidence, we'll listen. That's the rational approach.
Slashdot Mirror
"Entscheidungsproblem". You'd think a professor of CS at MIT would have heard of it.
It may really be the case that the launch was 'frickin fantastic', but just having finished reading Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age I don't put a lot of faith in what the media gets wind of with regard to space technology. This stuff is really complicated, and the general public doesn't understand that test flights going awry is not necessarily a bad thing-- so officials often put a nice veneer on the results.
I hope it really was fantastic. A lot of people put a lot of time into this thing. But this thing is so politicized, I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, you mean the part where they kill off Steven Seagal? The movie took a surprising turn for the better at that point.
You have to upgrade to Outlook 2007 to get sane behavior, though. For some odd reason, Outlook 2003 refuses to use the 2k3 PST format when doing anything BUT Exchange. If, e.g., you are communicating with an IMAP server, it still uses the old Outlook 97 format for its cache file. This means that if you're say, the kind of person who might like to move large amounts of email around (e.g., IT person or other mail administrator), you cannot use Outlook 2003 unless you want to remove and re-add the IMAP account to Outlook every few minutes. Outlook 2007 fixes that one, but it took, what, 10 years to fix it?
In Outlook 2007, you still can't select an entire mail folder (where message count exceeds something like 300 messages) and expect to move that mail to another folder. Outlook complains that it is out of memory. This bug has been in Outlook forever. This is a joke-- a freshman CS student should know how to solve that one.
Outlook 2007 made my machine grind to a halt. So I'm back on 2003, because I HAVE to use Outlook at work.
Are opcodes still hardwired in ARM, or are they using microcode now? I know a little ARM assembly from hacking my ARM7TDMI (iPod mini), and found that ARM was really and interesting and weird (coming from MASM on IA-32) architecture, and quite a bit easier to use. But I remember seeing product documentation claiming that hardwired instructions were one of the reasons why they were able to keep their transistor counts (and thus price) down.
How did you boot NetBSD on the Quadra 605? I was under the impression that the lack of an FPU was a dealbreaker. Did you replace the CPU?
I have one of these sitting in my closet. I bought it when I was in high school, new, and so it has a lot of sentimental value to me even though I can't run anything on it. Also-- 250GB? Is that SCSI? I had no idea that the Mac's BIOS could support such a large disk. And-- how did you fit so much RAM in there? Did you use a riser card or something?
Soekris Engineering makes some great low-power hardware in your price range. They use AMD Geode processors. I have a net4526 as a home router, and according to my Kill-A-Watt, it uses about 1W on average, in a "diskless" setup (boots from CF card, and runs most things from RAMdisk). They're designed to operate primarily over the serial port. The net5501, which we have at few of at work, are basically the speed of a Pentium II. Not bad for such a low-power device. I run OpenBSD on mine, and we have FreeBSD on a couple at work (FreeBSD has drivers for the Sangoma E1/T1 card), but according to their website you can run Linux on it as well. The newer ones even have temperature and voltage sensors.
No, but someone might be surprised to discover that the data on their collection of thumb drives is no longer good. I had someone come to me recently because she couldn't read her WordPerfect files from her 3.5" floppies. She was quite surprised when I said that floppies were not a good archival medium.
Which brings up an important point: what is a good archival medium for typical users? It's not like they're going to rush out and buy tape systems. Compared to an SSD, a floppy disk ain't so bad (aside from capacity).
Furthermore, Seagate and other MFRs publish the latent error rate for their disks. So far I haven't seen anything like that for SSDs. I doubt that it is zero.
We built a few server machines with SSDs, but we found that for many applications, they're not quite ready yet. E.g., SSDs seemed like the perfect application for the machines that run our backup jobs off of our SAN. Unfortunately, the heavy emphasis on writing large catalog files made SSDs unacceptably slow as compared with RAID arrays (to the tune of doubling or tripling running time). The SSDs looked good on paper, but it turns out that the actual performance was more complicated than the datasheets let on. For those machines, we moved them back to RAIDs.
OTOH, we have been using CF cards with single-board computers in certain applications for a very long time, and with these machines, reliability is far more important than disk performance. SATA SSDs are very competitive with CF now, especially since it will ease a number of constraints that CF imposes on us, and so the next round of these machines that I roll out will probably have SSDs instead. We're very much looking forward to replacing disks in workstations with SSDs, but we'll see which thing happens first: virtualization and thin clients or cheap SSDs.
As for the failure-mode part of SSDs-- I've heard this repeated numerous times, but I've never managed to locate a reference. Do you have one?
Some people apparently can't believe that a decentralized, peer network can run itself.
We have got to get this thing under control, people!
On the other hand, it is precisely this property that makes the web such a success.
That's interesting because on my Blackberry 8830 (and indeed, my last two BBs-- a 7350 I think and before that... something old) I typically get 2+ days on a charge. I browse the web, do email, listen to music, and watch the occasional movie clip (stored on my microSD card). I find that when I use it lightly, and I'm in areas of good reception, I've been able to get up to 4 days on a charge. My original Blackberry got a week at a time.
Maybe I just don't use mine as heavily as you guys...
BTW, I'm not saying that BBs are great phones (there are many things that drive me crazy) but in my experience, they do have pretty good battery life. Good enough that I rarely think about it.
And I suppose that PulseAudio is just exposing flaws in Linux, right? Lame.
Yeah, I don't think that's see-through.
As other people have mentioned, coatings on glass have been around for a long time. Almost all new glass for homes has a low-e coating, and photographic lenses and eyewear have had coatings (UV coating, AR coating, etc) for a long time.
Why can't you stick an analog filter in there? Simply remove the undesirable frequencies.
If you have pgrep, you probably also have pkill. Just:
pkill -9 darl_mc_bride
Wow. That link is just disgusting.
Eh, it's like when my legal studies professor brought a Worcester attorney into our classroom to talk about his experiences. The prof told him to be totally honest. The lawyer was, like, "Really? Well... OK." and proceeded to tell the class all about the bribery, secret handshakes, personal agendas, and legal gimmicks that actually make the world (or, Worcester anyway) go round. As a student, it was very enlightening. It also totally crushed my desire to ever be an attorney.
I am no government scholar, but I was under the distinct impression that legislation was required to be made public. Am I wrong about this? Or is it the fact that ACTA is a 'treaty' make it substantially different? People signing NDAs to participate in the legislative process is not a good thing. Whose eyes are they shielding this from? Us?
I hope you were very vocal about the bank, and switched to another. People, what a bunch of bastards.
Software is held to the same standards, but you're comparing apples and oranges. Bridges and gadgets catching fire can kill you. Your wife losing a few photos is regrettable, but... come on.
There is software which can kill you if it malfunctions. Avionics software (which spawned all kinds of guidelines, laws, and specialized programming languages), industrial control software, power network software, and so on. I assure you that people can be sued over poor design in these areas.
"brownfield" is not doublespeak-- it's a technical term. It means "a site that is contaminated but that has potential for redevelopment." This is to distinguish it from sites that are highly toxic and/or not re-developable.
Equality before the law may not be a sufficient condition for a society to be just or equitable, but is a necessary one.
Interesting point, and it brings up something I've been thinking about in the back of my mind for a long time. When is a feminist simply sexist? When are advocates for affirmative action simply racist? I am, admittedly, not terribly familiar with each group's philosophy or literature, but it seems to me that when one goes past "raising awareness" and "eliminating discrimination" to "actively trying to disadvantage another group", one is just as bad as the problem they're decrying.
As you point out, these tactics don't actually solve the problem. They make them worse for people who play fair. What is truly unfortunate is that you might actually have a better chance at getting ahead if you, too, became a "sexist asshat". The pressure is toward NOT doing the right thing.
Conversations about race and gender inequality are highly politicized, and many people are very sensitive-- I'd say overly sensitive-- to these issues. Heck, many people have a right to be sensitive. Gender and race discrimination was openly accepted and practiced for a long time.
But there are two problems with the continued antagonism on with these issues:
Getting back to Lawrence Summers-- if you're not familiar with the story, he was essentially pushed out of the Harvard presidency for openly speculating about the causes of the small number of women in science. His mistake was speaking to a gathering of academics as if they were, in fact, scientists. Reading this article makes it clear that he was saying: here are some possible causes; we need further research to establish a link. He mentions an anecdote with his daughter-- they gave her trucks, but she ended up playing with the trucks as if they were dolls, calling them "daddy truck" and "baby truck". Any scientist worth their salt would be intrigued by this behavior. Of course, this incident cannot be generalized, but it should make you ask "why?". Is it really unreasonable to think that men and women, who served in certain specific capacities for millennia of human history, might actually be better suited toward those roles? The answer may be 'no', but science must be allowed to ask the question. Nancy Hopkins, who walked out on Summers' talk, later said that ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up" had she not left. That sounds like hyperbole to me. The appropriate response as a career scientist would have been to counter Summers with evidence and scientific argument.
With regard to the 54 incidents you mention, this is a classic case of finding problems when you're looking for them. As other people have pointed out, the number of incidents that can be called "sexist" in FOSS mailing lists appears to be vanishingly small. 54 incidents out of how many millions of conversation threads? Come on. The rational thing to do is to give us hard data, and then make your case. The link above is a laundry list of grievances; not science. But if you can make the case scientifically, showing us good evidence, we'll listen. That's the rational approach.