I was easily upset when I was very young-- we're talking 4-5 years old. It didn't take much to set me off, like a simple request to clean my room. Anyway, sometimes I'd get so upset that I would just vomit.
Obviously my parents were concerned about this behavior, and I think, for awhile, they made the mistake that many present-day helicopter parents make: they tried to prevent me from getting upset. But then one day, when my father* asked me to do something, and noticed my vomit-maneuver about to happen, he shouted "Throw up again and I'll make you eat it!" This is one of my first memories-- I was horrified-- and never did it again.
Now, this experience clearly was a consciousness-expanding moment for my parents, because after that, they didn't put up with my shit again (or my brother's). Aside from the vomit-eating nightmares (kidding), I think I've turned out pretty well.
* in case you think poorly of my father-- he was working on his Ph.D. in physics at the time, and under a lot of stress. I think many people here can relate.
Do what I did and simply dump your entire Windows partition into a Parallels VM. I recently discovered that Parallels has a VM product for Linux, and I am running it as we speak on an Ubuntu box. 8.04 is not officially supported, but it seems to run fine. For me, my day job requires a UNIX-like machine, but my night classes often require a Windows machine (specifically, Visual Studio). I find it ironic that I've been moved to Linux *by necessity*, but people keep repeating the "Linux is not ready for the desktop" mantra. I didn't even *want* to use Linux (I prefer OpenBSD), but it fits, so I use it. I suppose if you need access to the new shiny, then go ahead and run a very expensive version of Windows for your machine, but XP works just fine for my purposes. Ubuntu has plenty of shiny for my own tastes.
The interesting thing about that interview is that they say that their major restriction is no dynamic memory allocation. This obviously makes C a lot safer, but it also makes it much less flexible. I would have liked to hear more about why they moved from Ada, because I was under the impression that Ada was specifically designed to deal with these kinds of issues-- so if Ada isn't working, why? At the very least, we could use that information to inform future safe-language development.
Sure, you can get onto one box, but what about the NOS? It is much more difficult to pwn a Kerberos-based system. Arguably the single machine is not very important.
we already have a distribution network built for doing so.
Liquid fuels in general are therefore worth looking at, because we can easily convert a pump or two at a gas station to the new liquid fuel. Even if this requires some modification of the pump itself, like it would for ethanol, it's still fairly easy to do. This is not to be taken as saying that electric cars are not a real possibility, just that liquid fueled-vehicles are probably the path of least resistance.
I can second that. OpenBSD on my non-stripped OS (frequently-written directories mounted as ramdisks, the rest on CF) ran for 4 years straight-- the only time it ever went down was when the power went out. This is a Soekris 4526, which is overkill for this particular application (home wireless router), but I can't complain-- got it on eBay for $50 and it typically consumes about a Watt according to my Kill-a-Watt.
We run the exact same software (OpenBSD that is) on our server-grade hardware at work. These are on much more stable power supplies (UPS-protected, of course), and they almost never go down. The last time I did a reboot (to install memory; was hitting state table limits on a very busy router), our uptime on our main router was 344 days.
And that's why as cool as the iPhone is, I won't be getting one anytime soon. I can do SSH just fine on my Blackberry and with my Sprint AirCard, so that's what I stick with. Ideally, I would simply have a general-purpose computer running linux that also served as a cellphone. Something that I could just jack into a monitor and keyboard when I wanted the full desktop experience-- a real mobile computer-- would be the best.
The Northeast Corridor (and actually, points north of that as well) has fairly good train service. I can travel from Boston to see my brother in Baltimore, for only marginally more time than it takes to fly, and it costs much less. For shorter trips, like my daily commute to work, I ride the MBTA Commuter Rail, which nowadays is pretty reliable and relatively comfortable. And with the exceptions of where the tracks venture out into the salt marsh, I have a cell signal the entire way. If you want to travel west, though, forget it-- fly, drive, or take a bus.
3G is pretty hot shit-- I've been using one of Sprint's cards for the last couple of months. OK, maybe the US is ass-backward compared to the rest of the mobile world, but it's still pretty damn cool to have an SSH session open while I'm on the train. I'm presently looking into OpenAFS as that should deal with occasional dead spots better than SSH, but in general, the experience is much better than I was expecting. Not quite up to Hulu-watching speeds, but it's definitely making me depend more on my laptop-- and I pretty much hate laptops.
That's a long way of saying that the 3G is worth it even if you have to deal with the outrageous SMS pricing.
I am not a chemist, but I am a backpacker, I can verify what you say is true. I have made several of these stoves (PDF warning), and they work amazingly well. Better, in fact, on most counts than my commercially-made and comparatively expensive backpacking stoves. They are also very lightweight. The main thing for me is: I can buy fuel damn near anywhere. That was a problem for my butane and white gas stoves.
Anyhow, the interesting thing about these is yes, sometimes it's hard to tell if they're lit-- until you burn yourself. I have done it many times. Also, the bottom of the stove gets very cold-- cold enough that if you run them during the winter they actually extinguish themselves. But butane stoves have the same problem and are actually worse in this regard, in my experience-- they actually condense water vapor into frost on the sides of the bottle, and when this gets bad enough, they just stop working. Boil times for a liter of water are nearly identical for my butane and alcohol stoves, which makes me think that vast amounts of energy is being wasted with conventional stove designs despite the fact that butane (27.7 MJ/L) has a higher energy density than ethanol (23.5 MJ/L).
Which part of "there are inadequate data to inform quantitative risk assessments" do you not understand? Saying "be careful, we don't know what this can do" is quite different from saying "omg teh goo!" Would you rather these people experiment on the general population first?
which has been shown, by an objective scale developed by Stanford and UCLA researchers, to be massively left-biased
This implies that UCLA has actually developed an objective measure of political bias, which I have a hard time accepting, particularly since you failed to cite a source.
but it's pretty complex to do anything interesting, and the world ends up filled with penises.
Virtual worlds naturally mimic the real world, and so I can see why they would fill with penises. The real world is filled with penises. The question is when we'll be sufficiently advanced for the real world to mimic virtual worlds, at which point we will have flying attack-penises.
is that, when I was a kid, this is exactly the kind of world I dreamt of building-- I'd say it was the #1 reason I sat in front of my computer as a kid, plowing through my ANSI C book and spending my paper route money on long distance bills so I could play on MUDs, instead of doing all of the other things that normal children did. Now that I've:
had lots of contact with real humans, and found that to be very satisfying, and
am actually capable of designing such an application,
I don't give a shit anymore. I'm glad that somebody was interested enough to do this, and that other people find it interesting, but I will be staying away. My workplace, which fancies itself as hip and smart, will probably make this mandatory, like they have with Facebook, which will simply be another pointless drain on my otherwise interesting day. Bah humbug!
Oh, and I almost forgot-- The Chronicles of Narnia are pretty much mandatory for any kid. They're still favorites of mine, and I still periodically reread them. You can throw the Harry Potter series in there as well, which were not available to me as a child, but I think I would have enjoyed them immensely.
I'm going to second that. The best thing to do would be to lead them into the library and help them choose their own books. I had a voracious appetite for reading when I was a kid, and it was fueled by pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I was especially fond of Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury, but I also read the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Shel Silverstein, Judy Blume books, Discover Magazine, Popular Science, and so on. I also had some juvenile illustrated editions of classics like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my favorite reads was an old set of science encyclopedias I acquired for $1 during a library book sale.
I often didn't really understand the things I was reading (as I've frequently rediscovered when I went back and reread stories I read as a kid), but that's fine-- developing the joy of reading is the important part. Unfortunately, I did not discover Heinlein until I was an adult, but his books would be good additions (especially Have Spacesuit, Will Travel), too. Oh, and make sure you discuss the books with your kids-- they'll probably generate a lot of questions during their reading, which is a habit you want to promote, especially if you want them interested in science and mathematics when they get older.
Yeah, go waaaay beyond "papers please" and treat *all* of your citizens as animals when they travel.
Heck, if we're talking about putting shock collars on people, why only put them on when they travel? Seems like it would be waaay more convenient for everyone involved if we just left them on all the time. Think of the children!
Actually, I think I found them the other day. Now, I need to preface this by saying that I grew up in a rural area near a college town-- I now live in a city. The girlfriend and I went for a weekend in the mountains. It was mostly peaceful, except for when we went for a jog. 10 minutes into the run, and we discovered that the dirt road we chose was basically un-runnable. Every hundred yards or so, some person's big, snarling guard dog would race out of a no-trespassing-staked-yard, barking like mad, with every intention of tearing us limb from limb, until the owner, invariably some person holding some kind of weapon, noticed that we were just runners and called off the dog. It got to the point where we just turned around.
Now, I believe that people have the right to live however they want, within reason, and that if people feel the need to barricade themselves up, well, power to them. But it left me with the impression that these people were deeply paranoid, and clearly hostile to outsiders. Despite the fact that this place was probably vastly safer than the city I spend most of my time in.
YMMV, of course. Best to take the above experience with a grain of salt and treat as probably apocryphal. But, for me, it was food for thought.
Linux and the Mac OS aren't even remotely your only choices. It's very desktop-centric to think that they are, because there are literally hundreds of alternatives, many of which function just fine (often better) for many tasks, and as desktop operating systems as well. What many of them can't do, and as far as I can tell, this is your only objection, is run Windows software. Big deal. If Microsoft disappeared today, it would be painful for some people for a few years, but I'm sure we'd make it through just fine.
I don't understand why people think we need a software monoculture anymore. When people walked into a store and bought a shrinkwrapped box of software, it was convenient. Now a large number of applications are developed using platform-independent toolkits (with, I might add, extremely liberal licenses) or with web technologies. Arguably, platform matters even less nowadays than it did one or two decades ago.
but the fact that they *still* haven't supplanted Windows in any meaningful way means that it must not be as good a solution as advocates have made it out to be.
This reminds me of something Eric Raymond talked about in The Art of UNIX Programming
[T]he most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
I think that's what you're seeing here in the Windows world. Because the cost of the operating system is hidden (bundled with PC), most people don't really feel the impact of having to pay for it-- i.e., they don't need to evaluate it against the alternatives. And, as long as it works for them, there are no issues. Raymond's quote specifically refers to the Plan 9 operating system vs UNIX. But the same thing applies to Windows vs Linux.
I think what you're starting to see, and the reason why this topic is coming up with more and more frequency, is that for a lot of people, Windows is not "good enough" anymore. Obviously, the "good enough" threshold is much higher if you're a technical user, and I think that's why a lot of technical users have made the switch to Linux-- the added cost of switching, mainly in terms of retraining time, is worth the effort. But for most people, who simply need a web browser, an email client, and a text editor, Windows works fine for them-- most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Terry? They let you post on /. from jail?
Heh. My funny-parent story:
I was easily upset when I was very young-- we're talking 4-5 years old. It didn't take much to set me off, like a simple request to clean my room. Anyway, sometimes I'd get so upset that I would just vomit.
Obviously my parents were concerned about this behavior, and I think, for awhile, they made the mistake that many present-day helicopter parents make: they tried to prevent me from getting upset. But then one day, when my father* asked me to do something, and noticed my vomit-maneuver about to happen, he shouted "Throw up again and I'll make you eat it!" This is one of my first memories-- I was horrified-- and never did it again.
Now, this experience clearly was a consciousness-expanding moment for my parents, because after that, they didn't put up with my shit again (or my brother's). Aside from the vomit-eating nightmares (kidding), I think I've turned out pretty well.
* in case you think poorly of my father-- he was working on his Ph.D. in physics at the time, and under a lot of stress. I think many people here can relate.
Do what I did and simply dump your entire Windows partition into a Parallels VM. I recently discovered that Parallels has a VM product for Linux, and I am running it as we speak on an Ubuntu box. 8.04 is not officially supported, but it seems to run fine. For me, my day job requires a UNIX-like machine, but my night classes often require a Windows machine (specifically, Visual Studio). I find it ironic that I've been moved to Linux *by necessity*, but people keep repeating the "Linux is not ready for the desktop" mantra. I didn't even *want* to use Linux (I prefer OpenBSD), but it fits, so I use it. I suppose if you need access to the new shiny, then go ahead and run a very expensive version of Windows for your machine, but XP works just fine for my purposes. Ubuntu has plenty of shiny for my own tastes.
The interesting thing about that interview is that they say that their major restriction is no dynamic memory allocation. This obviously makes C a lot safer, but it also makes it much less flexible. I would have liked to hear more about why they moved from Ada, because I was under the impression that Ada was specifically designed to deal with these kinds of issues-- so if Ada isn't working, why? At the very least, we could use that information to inform future safe-language development.
Sure, you can get onto one box, but what about the NOS? It is much more difficult to pwn a Kerberos-based system. Arguably the single machine is not very important.
Why should gasoline be used?
Easy:
Liquid fuels in general are therefore worth looking at, because we can easily convert a pump or two at a gas station to the new liquid fuel. Even if this requires some modification of the pump itself, like it would for ethanol, it's still fairly easy to do. This is not to be taken as saying that electric cars are not a real possibility, just that liquid fueled-vehicles are probably the path of least resistance.
I don't specifically know about the concept of number, but it appears that the concept of arithmetic was driven by the needs of farmers, apparently predating even the Babylonians. There is an interesting account of this in Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, which I just started reading.
I can second that. OpenBSD on my non-stripped OS (frequently-written directories mounted as ramdisks, the rest on CF) ran for 4 years straight-- the only time it ever went down was when the power went out. This is a Soekris 4526, which is overkill for this particular application (home wireless router), but I can't complain-- got it on eBay for $50 and it typically consumes about a Watt according to my Kill-a-Watt.
We run the exact same software (OpenBSD that is) on our server-grade hardware at work. These are on much more stable power supplies (UPS-protected, of course), and they almost never go down. The last time I did a reboot (to install memory; was hitting state table limits on a very busy router), our uptime on our main router was 344 days.
And that's why as cool as the iPhone is, I won't be getting one anytime soon. I can do SSH just fine on my Blackberry and with my Sprint AirCard, so that's what I stick with. Ideally, I would simply have a general-purpose computer running linux that also served as a cellphone. Something that I could just jack into a monitor and keyboard when I wanted the full desktop experience-- a real mobile computer-- would be the best.
The Northeast Corridor (and actually, points north of that as well) has fairly good train service. I can travel from Boston to see my brother in Baltimore, for only marginally more time than it takes to fly, and it costs much less. For shorter trips, like my daily commute to work, I ride the MBTA Commuter Rail, which nowadays is pretty reliable and relatively comfortable. And with the exceptions of where the tracks venture out into the salt marsh, I have a cell signal the entire way. If you want to travel west, though, forget it-- fly, drive, or take a bus.
3G is pretty hot shit-- I've been using one of Sprint's cards for the last couple of months. OK, maybe the US is ass-backward compared to the rest of the mobile world, but it's still pretty damn cool to have an SSH session open while I'm on the train. I'm presently looking into OpenAFS as that should deal with occasional dead spots better than SSH, but in general, the experience is much better than I was expecting. Not quite up to Hulu-watching speeds, but it's definitely making me depend more on my laptop-- and I pretty much hate laptops.
That's a long way of saying that the 3G is worth it even if you have to deal with the outrageous SMS pricing.
I am not a chemist, but I am a backpacker, I can verify what you say is true. I have made several of these stoves (PDF warning), and they work amazingly well. Better, in fact, on most counts than my commercially-made and comparatively expensive backpacking stoves. They are also very lightweight. The main thing for me is: I can buy fuel damn near anywhere. That was a problem for my butane and white gas stoves.
Anyhow, the interesting thing about these is yes, sometimes it's hard to tell if they're lit-- until you burn yourself. I have done it many times. Also, the bottom of the stove gets very cold-- cold enough that if you run them during the winter they actually extinguish themselves. But butane stoves have the same problem and are actually worse in this regard, in my experience-- they actually condense water vapor into frost on the sides of the bottle, and when this gets bad enough, they just stop working. Boil times for a liter of water are nearly identical for my butane and alcohol stoves, which makes me think that vast amounts of energy is being wasted with conventional stove designs despite the fact that butane (27.7 MJ/L) has a higher energy density than ethanol (23.5 MJ/L).
Which part of "there are inadequate data to inform quantitative risk assessments" do you not understand? Saying "be careful, we don't know what this can do" is quite different from saying "omg teh goo!" Would you rather these people experiment on the general population first?
When robots start using telekinesis, let me know.
which has been shown, by an objective scale developed by Stanford and UCLA researchers, to be massively left-biased
This implies that UCLA has actually developed an objective measure of political bias, which I have a hard time accepting, particularly since you failed to cite a source.
He painted his room pink.
The problem with dell.com is that the Lawnmower Man can't kill you while you shop.
but it's pretty complex to do anything interesting, and the world ends up filled with penises.
Virtual worlds naturally mimic the real world, and so I can see why they would fill with penises. The real world is filled with penises. The question is when we'll be sufficiently advanced for the real world to mimic virtual worlds, at which point we will have flying attack-penises.
I don't give a shit anymore. I'm glad that somebody was interested enough to do this, and that other people find it interesting, but I will be staying away. My workplace, which fancies itself as hip and smart, will probably make this mandatory, like they have with Facebook, which will simply be another pointless drain on my otherwise interesting day. Bah humbug!
Oh, and I almost forgot-- The Chronicles of Narnia are pretty much mandatory for any kid. They're still favorites of mine, and I still periodically reread them. You can throw the Harry Potter series in there as well, which were not available to me as a child, but I think I would have enjoyed them immensely.
My advice would be, don't hold back.
I'm going to second that. The best thing to do would be to lead them into the library and help them choose their own books. I had a voracious appetite for reading when I was a kid, and it was fueled by pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I was especially fond of Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury, but I also read the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Shel Silverstein, Judy Blume books, Discover Magazine, Popular Science, and so on. I also had some juvenile illustrated editions of classics like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my favorite reads was an old set of science encyclopedias I acquired for $1 during a library book sale.
I often didn't really understand the things I was reading (as I've frequently rediscovered when I went back and reread stories I read as a kid), but that's fine-- developing the joy of reading is the important part. Unfortunately, I did not discover Heinlein until I was an adult, but his books would be good additions (especially Have Spacesuit, Will Travel), too. Oh, and make sure you discuss the books with your kids-- they'll probably generate a lot of questions during their reading, which is a habit you want to promote, especially if you want them interested in science and mathematics when they get older.
Yeah, go waaaay beyond "papers please" and treat *all* of your citizens as animals when they travel.
Heck, if we're talking about putting shock collars on people, why only put them on when they travel? Seems like it would be waaay more convenient for everyone involved if we just left them on all the time. Think of the children!
Where are all of these scared people?
Actually, I think I found them the other day. Now, I need to preface this by saying that I grew up in a rural area near a college town-- I now live in a city. The girlfriend and I went for a weekend in the mountains. It was mostly peaceful, except for when we went for a jog. 10 minutes into the run, and we discovered that the dirt road we chose was basically un-runnable. Every hundred yards or so, some person's big, snarling guard dog would race out of a no-trespassing-staked-yard, barking like mad, with every intention of tearing us limb from limb, until the owner, invariably some person holding some kind of weapon, noticed that we were just runners and called off the dog. It got to the point where we just turned around.
Now, I believe that people have the right to live however they want, within reason, and that if people feel the need to barricade themselves up, well, power to them. But it left me with the impression that these people were deeply paranoid, and clearly hostile to outsiders. Despite the fact that this place was probably vastly safer than the city I spend most of my time in.
YMMV, of course. Best to take the above experience with a grain of salt and treat as probably apocryphal. But, for me, it was food for thought.
Linux and the Mac OS aren't even remotely your only choices. It's very desktop-centric to think that they are, because there are literally hundreds of alternatives, many of which function just fine (often better) for many tasks, and as desktop operating systems as well. What many of them can't do, and as far as I can tell, this is your only objection, is run Windows software. Big deal. If Microsoft disappeared today, it would be painful for some people for a few years, but I'm sure we'd make it through just fine.
I don't understand why people think we need a software monoculture anymore. When people walked into a store and bought a shrinkwrapped box of software, it was convenient. Now a large number of applications are developed using platform-independent toolkits (with, I might add, extremely liberal licenses) or with web technologies. Arguably, platform matters even less nowadays than it did one or two decades ago.
but the fact that they *still* haven't supplanted Windows in any meaningful way means that it must not be as good a solution as advocates have made it out to be.
This reminds me of something Eric Raymond talked about in The Art of UNIX Programming
[T]he most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
I think that's what you're seeing here in the Windows world. Because the cost of the operating system is hidden (bundled with PC), most people don't really feel the impact of having to pay for it-- i.e., they don't need to evaluate it against the alternatives. And, as long as it works for them, there are no issues. Raymond's quote specifically refers to the Plan 9 operating system vs UNIX. But the same thing applies to Windows vs Linux.
I think what you're starting to see, and the reason why this topic is coming up with more and more frequency, is that for a lot of people, Windows is not "good enough" anymore. Obviously, the "good enough" threshold is much higher if you're a technical user, and I think that's why a lot of technical users have made the switch to Linux-- the added cost of switching, mainly in terms of retraining time, is worth the effort. But for most people, who simply need a web browser, an email client, and a text editor, Windows works fine for them-- most of the time.