Which reminds me, deep in the recesses of my brain-- there was a Kirk-fistfight-with-a-Klingon module in the video game adaptation of the 5th Trek movie. Most of the game sucked, and not because I only had a 286 to play it on. Once you beat the game, though, you could go back and play any module you wanted. There was a wireframe 3D starship battle (with a Klingon cruiser) that I remember thinking was the only redeeming part of the game, and was actually pretty good. This must have been around 1990... my disappointment ran so deep that I haven't played another trek game since. If only there were green women in short skirts!
There was this one CGA Trek game that I remember playing (c. 1987?) and absolutely loving. Or it might have been a Commodore game-- I can't remember. It had a unique 3D map of the universe that you could "spin". Anyone have any idea where I can find that one again?
In case you're looking for a good wireless solution for Linux/BSD, I've recently discovered that Ralink RT2500 chipset based wireless cards work really well. Ralink even has a GPL'ed driver for Linux! I've since replaced all of the POS Intel PRO/2200BG adapters in my house with these, at an amazing $18 a pop.
Ubuntu 6.10 has the RT2x00 driver built-in, and so does OpenBSD. Setting it up in BSD was a breeze; just configure it with ifconfig like any other card. Ubuntu was a little more work-- I tried a number of different GUIs until I found one that addressed all of my issues, and it's probably the best one I've seen so far. RutilT is, unfortunately, not in any of Ubuntu's repos, but compiling it was not difficult. In case you're interested, I./configure'd it not to use the rutilt_helper, and I just amended my panel shortcut to run it with sudo. Works great, but it only works with Ralink cards.
the reality is that the reason Firefox and Opera are "more secure" is that there are less people using them
I'm getting tired of people parroting this argument. Sure-- if you're in the business of building botnets, you're going to look for the most bang for your buck. Windows + IE has a large install base, and so this fits your needs.
But this argument implies that there aren't architectural differences between things like IE and Firefox, or Windows and Linux, and there most certainly are.
I suspect that the reality is that the problems plaguing the Windows platform are a combination of large installations and bad code. Having worked with a number of ex-Microsoft people, and hearing their development stories, I suspect there's a lot of bad code in there as the result of design-by-committee, bureaucracy, micromanagement, and so on...
IE really is a piece of shit. If Microsoft responded half as fast to critical bugs as the Firefox team, I might be more inclined to buy your argument.
My experience with Edgy (since late betas) and Feisty have been that it was not required to sudo to burn anything.
Same here. In fact, I was pleased to discover that in Ubuntu 6.10, all I needed to to was right-click on a disc and select "Copy disc" to make an ISO. Cool!
But if you do need to run a program with elevated permissions in GNOME, the right way to do it is with gksudo. You will get a prompt in the GUI to enter your password. If you add the NOPASSWD option to your/etc/sudoers file (remember to use visudo, folks), then gksudo will run without prompting you. A working permissions model is a feature, not a bug! And unless I'm confusing Linuxisms with BSDisms, you should also be able to specify in/etc/fstab which block devices require permissions or not. But, like I said, I didn't need to do any of this with Ubuntu.
My only complaint is that getting wireless going in Linux can be a PITA when things go wrong. The GUI tools lack the verbosity needed when there are problems, but the command-line tools are extremely complex. Windows XPSP2 is much better in this regard (SP1 blows), but even Windows can be a major headache-- ever try to find the right wireless drivers in Windows? IBM often has 3-4 different wireless chipsets for each 'machine type' (what is the f'ing point of having different machine types, then?), and it's up to you to find the right one. OpenBSD's config utility is the best in this regard; drivers are automatically loaded and you can easily configure them with ifconfig, which should be familiar to most Unix users.
That said, we're looking at Ubuntu as a serious alternative to Windows for our next round of desktop upgrades here at work. My impression is that there will be less of a learning curve than with Vista or the Mac OS, and we will get the additional benefit of being able to eek out a couple more years of life from our existing hardware.
It would help to cut down on the standing waves if people applied the 'join slowly, leave quickly' rule.
This is true. And you can see this principle in use by truck drivers, who are forced to act this way due to the sheer mass of their vehicles. What originally got me thinking about this were the long lines of traffic into Boston before the Central Artery tunnel was finished. Four lanes of traffic would narrow into one, not just causing a bottleneck, but also making the entire road serial, thus amplifying the 'elasticity' of the traffic. But anytime there was a truck in front of you, like a giant 16-wheeler, traffic would be a much more tolerable slow crawl. Drivers with standard transmissions also help to limit these standing waves somewhat, since it is a lot of work (and damaging to your clutch) to continually stop and go again.
As another poster mentioned, what defeats this technique somewhat are the impatient drivers in adjacent lanes who accelerate into the gap that you just created. The one-lane example above was unique in that the road was a single lane on an elevated highway, which made 'accelerating into the gap' impossible.
Anyhow, this phenomena would completely disappear if we could remove humans from the job of actually piloting the vehicle. I'd love to see something like personal rapid transit, but I think the American public would complain too loudly about their loss of 'freedom', even if it meant that traffic delays and traffic fatalities would virtually disappear.
Which is ironic, because they actually have a page on handling strings safely. So are they lazy, stupid, or both? Lemme guess-- they couldn't use their own API because someone wrote the MessageBox API in assembly...?
The stuff you mention is all anecdotal. I am not a chemist (but I am a homebrewer), and here's what I understand to be the difference between various alcoholic beverages. In the form that humans consume, there are basically two types of alcohol: ethyl and methyl. Yeast produce both, with ethyl alcohol in the greater quantity. Both forms of alchol are 'poisonous', but of the two ethyl is definitely preferable. Methyl breaks down to formaldehyde in your liver, which, among many nasty things, will cause you to go blind. In normal fermented beverages-- i.e., ones that have not been subject to distillation-- the quantity of methyl alcohol is a non-issue. Distilled beverages need to have the additional step of removing the methyl alcohol (or by engineering the distillation process so that methyl alcohol is not captured).
There are basically two types of yeast (a fungus) that are responsible for all alcohol that we drink: ale yeasts (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), and lager yeasts (Saccharomyces pastorianus). Ale yeasts ferment at a higher temperature range than do lager yeasts. Lager yeasts are also capable of breaking down dextrose, which is a type of sugar that contributes 'mouthfeel' (like 'fullness') to a beverage. This is why lagers tend to be lighter in body than ales. Various strains exists among these two types that produce a variety of esters, fusel alcohols, sulphur compounds, and so on, but in general these byproducts are kept to a minimum as they produce a whole variety of 'off flavors'-- fusels in particular make something taste 'hot' or 'spicy'.
Anyhow-- the point being that the real difference between your choices for alcoholic beverages are: 1) alcoholic content (by weight/volume) and 2) the other kinds of things that are mixed in with those alcohols, (eg., sugars, tannins, and so on). A strong drink (like wine as compared to a typical beer) affects you differently because there's more alcohol. Tannins also tend to make that hangover last a bit longer, although it should be said that hangovers are mostly caused by dehydration and/or vitamin B deficiency (vitamin B is utilized in alcohol metabolization).
Yeast, by itself, has little or nothing to do with those other compounds. They're just there because they existed in the yeast's food (like grapes, barley, rice, etc), and the yeast had nothing to do with them, so they stuck around. Other organisms (molds, bacteria, and other 'wild yeasts') may affect them somewhat, but modern breweries (Belgians excepted) go to great lengths to make sure that these contaminants do not enter the product, as they make quality control extremely difficult.
No, the point of these studies really is to try and isolate the benefits of consuming alcohol-- ethyl alcohol. Not the other things. We already know that, e.g., grapes are good for you, and if you really want a good source of antioxidants, try eating fresh fruits and veggies.
According to my mother, who was in the Navy (my mother wears Navy boots, er... flippers!), military personnel were allowed to drink on-base, regardless of age. I don't know if this meant that they were explicitly allowed, or if it was just kept quiet, but she said it was common practice at all of the bases she was stationed at. Once someone left the base, however, they were subject to local law, although I got the impression from some of her stories that most purveyors were flexible on this point (at least, during the 1970's).
One reason to equate density with goodness is that the number of bugs per line (I don't recall the exact number) has been shown to be relatively constant. Therefore, if your programming language allows you to get more work done in fewer lines of code, you will have fewer bugs for a given application, and you can spend more time refining the application rather than bug-hunting. Obviously, there are other factors at work here, but it is an important factor, and it's why things like server-side web applications tend to be done in PHP/ASP/Perl/yadayada as opposed to C. C will happily run your server-side applications, but do you really want to reimplement the libraries and tools that web programming languages give you for free? Time is money.
You can get liquid fabric softener, which you throw in near the end of the wash cycle. If you're not keen on sticking around your washing machine for the right moment, there's a kind of time-release capsule (looks like a ball) that you fill with the liquid and then throw in. I had some limited success with it. Not quite as soft as the dryer, but not too bad. But I have extremely hard water-- that may be a factor, too. It's worth the money to experiment a little.
I also noticed that cotton shirts tend to be more irritating than synthetic ones if you don't dry them. Polar fleece actually benefits from not being put in a hot dryer, and Patagonia makes a fabric called Capilene which is quite soft even when air-dried. Patagonia offsets the environmental cost of producing fabrics from petroleum products (like nylon) bu accepting back your old, ratty, stinky stuff to be recycled into future clothing. That said, none of my Patagonia stuff has worn out yet after many years of use, and I think it was worth the premium Patagonia charges for clothing (like $50 for a shirt).
Forgot to mention-- the dryer was electric. The gas leak was in the water heater. Unfortunately, neither the old man nor his wife picked up on the sulfur odor that is supposed to accompany natural gas. That's one of the things that makes it so tragic-- he wasn't even messing around with things he shouldn't have been.
No, it's just [possibly] a bad method. In fact, he doesn't even mention the method he used to come to that conclusion. So what is this "American style science" shit? Lemme guess, your comment about "American style science" is... er, based in fact? I think it's based in stupid shit.
The original article was not written by a scientist, nor does he expect you to believe he's an authority on the matter (e.g., "Beyond my mathematical incompetence, some caveats...", and so on). His point is this: look, I'm a journalist, this isn't my specialty, but here are some simple things I discovered to save money on electricity. Might be useful to you. Maybe he guessed the cost of the dryer after he gained some intuition about the costs of other appliances around the house. Or maybe he figured the cost out deductively, by measuring the cost of the other appliances and then subtracting that amount from his total electricity bill. Who knows? Method aside, as I mention in a previous post, his estimate of the cost of his dryer accurately matches what I actually measured it to be.
Regardless, he makes some good points in the article. I'd rather see the WSJ run a slightly fact-challenged article on the benefits of conserving power than on the benefits of owning that new BMW, because the last thing we need is one more asshole on the roads throwing away gasoline.
I think safety issues are the prime concern, these days. Cooking on an open flame just seems risky.
Safety is definitely the concern with natural gas. My brother is both an EMS first responder and part-time firefighter. He has pictures of what can happen when your house fills with gas. There was an elderly couple who were killed recently (unfortunately they died after much suffering from the burns, weeks later) when their house filled with natural gas-- the old man happened to be working on his dryer at the time. He finished, plugged it in, and BANG. They found their front door about 50 yards from the building, and all of the condo units in the building ended up being condemned-- the explosion actually cracked the foundation of the building. The fire was so intense that the firefighters spent most of their time putting out the blaze on the building next door which was caused from the heat of the original building. It was a real tragedy.
Our dryer died one day, and since it did not belong to us (it belonged to the landlord; he did not want to fix it; long story), we just left it there and started hanging our clothes instead. We were a little irritated by the inconvenice at first, but after that first electric bill we were sold. $25/mo less per month. I made sure to compare all the transmission/generation charges just to be sure it was all from the dryer.
Now this was in 2003. We've noticed that the generation charge has been going up, so that, compared to 2003, we are paying roughly $10 more a month for the same number of kWh (roughly 180 kWh/mo). So you'll even save a bit more now.
Anyhow, that prompted us to walk around and replace all of our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and so on (saving us another $10/mo). Considering that none of these bulb have died (save the one that our landlord dropped), I think the $40 or so we put into bulbs has paid us back quite a bit.
I did the same experiment with the power meter. I was quite surprised to discover that under normal load, my Soekris router consumed less than 1W. Very cool. The same can't be said about the laser printer (LaserJet 4M Plus), though. 700W peak, ~30W at idle. We leave that one off most of the time.
You can also drop the whole Applications folder on the Dock, on the same side of the divider as the Trash can. In fact, you can put all kinds of filesystem objects on that side. I like to drop disk images onto the Dock so that I can mount them quickly, but don't have to deal with the automounter which would do it every time I log in.
FSF's "long-term" perspective has also given you GCC, among other things. The failure of one project does not mean that their philosophy is flawed. Like there haven't been a few dead ends in Linux kernel development?
Right, because we don't think the following things are important:
An operating system that runs on an extremely wide variety of hardware
A stable and mature TCP/IP stack, transparently integrated into the system via Berkeley sockets
Thousands of programmers who submit patches and/or modify the system to do exactly what they want it to do
Full POSIX compatibility
Real separation of mechanism from policy-- tools can be used in a variety of ways, often in ways not foreseen by the original author
A system that doesn't require specialized tools to customize-- every system comes with a text editor and development tools
A real, working permissions model-- for some uses, THIS is a dealbreaker, as the GP mentions
Multiprocessing is easy
Pipes and powerful shell scripting capabilities
And so on...
Linux and other UNIXen are the culmination of years of thought about what makes a good operating system. It's not perfect, but when you reach the point, like I did, when you realize that the only boundary between you and what you want to do in the system is you own knowledge, you realize that an OS like Linux is priceless. I wouldn't hesitate to shell out a thousand bucks for software like that if I had to, and back before "UNIX" wasn't Free, many people did. And even though they are f/Free, I still make a point of donating to my favoriteprojects on a regular basis, because I want to make sure that they stick around.
(The above points are ripped straight out of ESR's The Art of UNIX Programming, which was well-worth the $40 for the dead-tree version)
Mozart wasn't exactly the paragon of conservatism. From Wikipedia:
Shaffer's play [Amadeus] attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated, but in fact frequently confirmed by the composer's letters and other memorabilia. For example, Mozart wrote canons on the words "Leck mich im Arsch" ("Lick my arse") and "Leck mich im Arsch recht fein schön sauber" ("Lick my arse nice and clean") as party pieces for his friends.
And if you believe that Amadeus is representative of fact (which it probably is not, but is an entertaining play/movie in any event), then Mozart serves as more of a model for Paris Hilton's and Brittney Spears' current behavior than anything else. A genius... and a party animal!
BTW, totally OT, but Underworld's Second Toughest in the Infants is a great "dance" album to run to. I save it for the speed workouts. I'm always on the lookout for music to run to that's rhythmic, but is more than just kick-drum-and-some-squealy-noise. I've been happily playing this one since '96. Never seems to get old to me.
One thing that can help make spamming less profitable for spammers is tarpitting. I personally think that this should be standard behavior for an MTA-- it would raise the profitability bar considerably.
I dropped spamd in front of my MX pool and watched in amazement as our spam level dropped to next to nothing. I'm not even being very aggressive-- I don't use any DNS-based blacklists. The beauty of this setup is that 1) if a spammer wants to make money, he's gotta drop the connection from me, because I'm sending packets to him slowly and wasting his resources (one per second with a window size of 1 byte), but 2) if he *does* drop that connection and does not retry, he gets blacklisted automatically. This obviously isn't a cure-all, but it's doing wonders for us.
I, too, feel your pain. Spam causes big problems-- one being that it is becoming increasingly difficult to use telnet as a diagnostic tool for SMTP. Sender callbacks mess with that whole thing. Obviously, my tarpit/greylist will as well. But we have to forget about the good old days and move forward, keeping in mind that in the good old days we only had thousands of users to worry about-- now we have billions. There are probably even billions of well-behaved people. SMTP simply doesn't scale when you factor in the bad people.
You're right about home users-- a subscription model wouldn't be very popular. I suspect that most home users aren't even aware that they're paying for an OS. It "just comes with the computer."
But I bet this would be a big hit with business. We already buy site-licenses for our OSes. Management wants to go out of its way to make sure we're in compliance when it comes to software licenses, since site licenses are easier to deal with when you use imaging tools like Ghost. So we end up with two copies of XP Pro for each desktop, because the lease already includes a license. What a waste of money!
Anyway, for us, Vista doesn't offer anything we need. Users just need to do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, and web. We've spent the money on XP, and XP does that job well on the hardware we have. In order to use Vista, we'd need to upgrade our hardware AND our OS-- and we'd still be doing the same things. No thanks!
The point is not that we have to update every six months, but that Microsoft could make its own job easier by switching to a different release schedule. Instead of promising the world, and releasing one or two major operating system updates per decade, they could simply provide incremental updates to their codebase. I think Vista's frequent delays are a good indicator that management overreached when it came time to write up a feature set. Windows XP isn't perfect, but it was a lot better than previous revisions before that-- why they feel they have to do a complete rewrite every time is beyond me.
On our end, we wouldn't necessarily have to install those updates, but if they were compelling and bug-free improvements, there would definitely be a big incentive to do so.
We just finished upgrading everyone from Windows 98 to Windows XP last year. We're in the middle of an Office 2003 rollout (with mixed reviews-- a lot of people like Office XP better-- me included). XP is certainly a big improvement over 98, and we'll probably stick with it for awhile. But, looking forward, we're probably going to depend on virtualization a bit more for clients. Products like Parallels and VMWare give us enough flexibility that we can keep everyone running on their current software, but with a more flexible (and cheaper!) backend for a long time. Not to mention-- software like WINE is starting to show some promise. If we can run IE (stupid ActiveX intranet sites) and MS Office on another platform, with a minimum of user moaning, we'll do it.
Not to mention-- early adopters get bitten. I was a frequent early adopter when I was younger, but now that I'm a grumpy sysadmin who people rely on to make things work-- no thanks. Even Apple's 10.4 Server, which is the 5th generation of that piece of software, blew in certain significant ways for us at first (like Apple's crummy AD plugin failing under any important load). So I'll take "running" over "features" any day. Folks who are familiar with the BOFH can guess how I handle users who ask for shiny new things for the sake of having shiny new things.
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Which reminds me, deep in the recesses of my brain-- there was a Kirk-fistfight-with-a-Klingon module in the video game adaptation of the 5th Trek movie. Most of the game sucked, and not because I only had a 286 to play it on. Once you beat the game, though, you could go back and play any module you wanted. There was a wireframe 3D starship battle (with a Klingon cruiser) that I remember thinking was the only redeeming part of the game, and was actually pretty good. This must have been around 1990... my disappointment ran so deep that I haven't played another trek game since. If only there were green women in short skirts!
There was this one CGA Trek game that I remember playing (c. 1987?) and absolutely loving. Or it might have been a Commodore game-- I can't remember. It had a unique 3D map of the universe that you could "spin". Anyone have any idea where I can find that one again?
In case you're looking for a good wireless solution for Linux/BSD, I've recently discovered that Ralink RT2500 chipset based wireless cards work really well. Ralink even has a GPL'ed driver for Linux! I've since replaced all of the POS Intel PRO/2200BG adapters in my house with these, at an amazing $18 a pop.
./configure'd it not to use the rutilt_helper, and I just amended my panel shortcut to run it with sudo. Works great, but it only works with Ralink cards.
Ubuntu 6.10 has the RT2x00 driver built-in, and so does OpenBSD. Setting it up in BSD was a breeze; just configure it with ifconfig like any other card. Ubuntu was a little more work-- I tried a number of different GUIs until I found one that addressed all of my issues, and it's probably the best one I've seen so far. RutilT is, unfortunately, not in any of Ubuntu's repos, but compiling it was not difficult. In case you're interested, I
the reality is that the reason Firefox and Opera are "more secure" is that there are less people using them
I'm getting tired of people parroting this argument. Sure-- if you're in the business of building botnets, you're going to look for the most bang for your buck. Windows + IE has a large install base, and so this fits your needs.
But this argument implies that there aren't architectural differences between things like IE and Firefox, or Windows and Linux, and there most certainly are.
I suspect that the reality is that the problems plaguing the Windows platform are a combination of large installations and bad code. Having worked with a number of ex-Microsoft people, and hearing their development stories, I suspect there's a lot of bad code in there as the result of design-by-committee, bureaucracy, micromanagement, and so on...
IE really is a piece of shit. If Microsoft responded half as fast to critical bugs as the Firefox team, I might be more inclined to buy your argument.
My experience with Edgy (since late betas) and Feisty have been that it was not required to sudo to burn anything.
/etc/sudoers file (remember to use visudo, folks), then gksudo will run without prompting you. A working permissions model is a feature, not a bug! And unless I'm confusing Linuxisms with BSDisms, you should also be able to specify in /etc/fstab which block devices require permissions or not. But, like I said, I didn't need to do any of this with Ubuntu.
Same here. In fact, I was pleased to discover that in Ubuntu 6.10, all I needed to to was right-click on a disc and select "Copy disc" to make an ISO. Cool!
But if you do need to run a program with elevated permissions in GNOME, the right way to do it is with gksudo. You will get a prompt in the GUI to enter your password. If you add the NOPASSWD option to your
My only complaint is that getting wireless going in Linux can be a PITA when things go wrong. The GUI tools lack the verbosity needed when there are problems, but the command-line tools are extremely complex. Windows XPSP2 is much better in this regard (SP1 blows), but even Windows can be a major headache-- ever try to find the right wireless drivers in Windows? IBM often has 3-4 different wireless chipsets for each 'machine type' (what is the f'ing point of having different machine types, then?), and it's up to you to find the right one. OpenBSD's config utility is the best in this regard; drivers are automatically loaded and you can easily configure them with ifconfig, which should be familiar to most Unix users.
That said, we're looking at Ubuntu as a serious alternative to Windows for our next round of desktop upgrades here at work. My impression is that there will be less of a learning curve than with Vista or the Mac OS, and we will get the additional benefit of being able to eek out a couple more years of life from our existing hardware.
It would help to cut down on the standing waves if people applied the 'join slowly, leave quickly' rule.
This is true. And you can see this principle in use by truck drivers, who are forced to act this way due to the sheer mass of their vehicles. What originally got me thinking about this were the long lines of traffic into Boston before the Central Artery tunnel was finished. Four lanes of traffic would narrow into one, not just causing a bottleneck, but also making the entire road serial, thus amplifying the 'elasticity' of the traffic. But anytime there was a truck in front of you, like a giant 16-wheeler, traffic would be a much more tolerable slow crawl. Drivers with standard transmissions also help to limit these standing waves somewhat, since it is a lot of work (and damaging to your clutch) to continually stop and go again.
As another poster mentioned, what defeats this technique somewhat are the impatient drivers in adjacent lanes who accelerate into the gap that you just created. The one-lane example above was unique in that the road was a single lane on an elevated highway, which made 'accelerating into the gap' impossible.
Anyhow, this phenomena would completely disappear if we could remove humans from the job of actually piloting the vehicle. I'd love to see something like personal rapid transit, but I think the American public would complain too loudly about their loss of 'freedom', even if it meant that traffic delays and traffic fatalities would virtually disappear.
Which is ironic, because they actually have a page on handling strings safely. So are they lazy, stupid, or both? Lemme guess-- they couldn't use their own API because someone wrote the MessageBox API in assembly...?
The stuff you mention is all anecdotal. I am not a chemist (but I am a homebrewer), and here's what I understand to be the difference between various alcoholic beverages. In the form that humans consume, there are basically two types of alcohol: ethyl and methyl. Yeast produce both, with ethyl alcohol in the greater quantity. Both forms of alchol are 'poisonous', but of the two ethyl is definitely preferable. Methyl breaks down to formaldehyde in your liver, which, among many nasty things, will cause you to go blind. In normal fermented beverages-- i.e., ones that have not been subject to distillation-- the quantity of methyl alcohol is a non-issue. Distilled beverages need to have the additional step of removing the methyl alcohol (or by engineering the distillation process so that methyl alcohol is not captured).
There are basically two types of yeast (a fungus) that are responsible for all alcohol that we drink: ale yeasts (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), and lager yeasts (Saccharomyces pastorianus). Ale yeasts ferment at a higher temperature range than do lager yeasts. Lager yeasts are also capable of breaking down dextrose, which is a type of sugar that contributes 'mouthfeel' (like 'fullness') to a beverage. This is why lagers tend to be lighter in body than ales. Various strains exists among these two types that produce a variety of esters, fusel alcohols, sulphur compounds, and so on, but in general these byproducts are kept to a minimum as they produce a whole variety of 'off flavors'-- fusels in particular make something taste 'hot' or 'spicy'.
Anyhow-- the point being that the real difference between your choices for alcoholic beverages are: 1) alcoholic content (by weight/volume) and 2) the other kinds of things that are mixed in with those alcohols, (eg., sugars, tannins, and so on). A strong drink (like wine as compared to a typical beer) affects you differently because there's more alcohol. Tannins also tend to make that hangover last a bit longer, although it should be said that hangovers are mostly caused by dehydration and/or vitamin B deficiency (vitamin B is utilized in alcohol metabolization).
Yeast, by itself, has little or nothing to do with those other compounds. They're just there because they existed in the yeast's food (like grapes, barley, rice, etc), and the yeast had nothing to do with them, so they stuck around. Other organisms (molds, bacteria, and other 'wild yeasts') may affect them somewhat, but modern breweries (Belgians excepted) go to great lengths to make sure that these contaminants do not enter the product, as they make quality control extremely difficult.
No, the point of these studies really is to try and isolate the benefits of consuming alcohol-- ethyl alcohol. Not the other things. We already know that, e.g., grapes are good for you, and if you really want a good source of antioxidants, try eating fresh fruits and veggies.
According to my mother, who was in the Navy (my mother wears Navy boots, er... flippers!), military personnel were allowed to drink on-base, regardless of age. I don't know if this meant that they were explicitly allowed, or if it was just kept quiet, but she said it was common practice at all of the bases she was stationed at. Once someone left the base, however, they were subject to local law, although I got the impression from some of her stories that most purveyors were flexible on this point (at least, during the 1970's).
One reason to equate density with goodness is that the number of bugs per line (I don't recall the exact number) has been shown to be relatively constant. Therefore, if your programming language allows you to get more work done in fewer lines of code, you will have fewer bugs for a given application, and you can spend more time refining the application rather than bug-hunting. Obviously, there are other factors at work here, but it is an important factor, and it's why things like server-side web applications tend to be done in PHP/ASP/Perl/yadayada as opposed to C. C will happily run your server-side applications, but do you really want to reimplement the libraries and tools that web programming languages give you for free? Time is money.
Hate to break it to you (actually, no, I don't), but here you go:
0 5/
http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/825003320
You can get liquid fabric softener, which you throw in near the end of the wash cycle. If you're not keen on sticking around your washing machine for the right moment, there's a kind of time-release capsule (looks like a ball) that you fill with the liquid and then throw in. I had some limited success with it. Not quite as soft as the dryer, but not too bad. But I have extremely hard water-- that may be a factor, too. It's worth the money to experiment a little.
I also noticed that cotton shirts tend to be more irritating than synthetic ones if you don't dry them. Polar fleece actually benefits from not being put in a hot dryer, and Patagonia makes a fabric called Capilene which is quite soft even when air-dried. Patagonia offsets the environmental cost of producing fabrics from petroleum products (like nylon) bu accepting back your old, ratty, stinky stuff to be recycled into future clothing. That said, none of my Patagonia stuff has worn out yet after many years of use, and I think it was worth the premium Patagonia charges for clothing (like $50 for a shirt).
Forgot to mention-- the dryer was electric. The gas leak was in the water heater. Unfortunately, neither the old man nor his wife picked up on the sulfur odor that is supposed to accompany natural gas. That's one of the things that makes it so tragic-- he wasn't even messing around with things he shouldn't have been.
No, it's just [possibly] a bad method. In fact, he doesn't even mention the method he used to come to that conclusion. So what is this "American style science" shit? Lemme guess, your comment about "American style science" is... er, based in fact? I think it's based in stupid shit.
The original article was not written by a scientist, nor does he expect you to believe he's an authority on the matter (e.g., "Beyond my mathematical incompetence, some caveats...", and so on). His point is this: look, I'm a journalist, this isn't my specialty, but here are some simple things I discovered to save money on electricity. Might be useful to you. Maybe he guessed the cost of the dryer after he gained some intuition about the costs of other appliances around the house. Or maybe he figured the cost out deductively, by measuring the cost of the other appliances and then subtracting that amount from his total electricity bill. Who knows? Method aside, as I mention in a previous post, his estimate of the cost of his dryer accurately matches what I actually measured it to be.
Regardless, he makes some good points in the article. I'd rather see the WSJ run a slightly fact-challenged article on the benefits of conserving power than on the benefits of owning that new BMW, because the last thing we need is one more asshole on the roads throwing away gasoline.
I think safety issues are the prime concern, these days. Cooking on an open flame just seems risky.
Safety is definitely the concern with natural gas. My brother is both an EMS first responder and part-time firefighter. He has pictures of what can happen when your house fills with gas. There was an elderly couple who were killed recently (unfortunately they died after much suffering from the burns, weeks later) when their house filled with natural gas-- the old man happened to be working on his dryer at the time. He finished, plugged it in, and BANG. They found their front door about 50 yards from the building, and all of the condo units in the building ended up being condemned-- the explosion actually cracked the foundation of the building. The fire was so intense that the firefighters spent most of their time putting out the blaze on the building next door which was caused from the heat of the original building. It was a real tragedy.
Our dryer died one day, and since it did not belong to us (it belonged to the landlord; he did not want to fix it; long story), we just left it there and started hanging our clothes instead. We were a little irritated by the inconvenice at first, but after that first electric bill we were sold. $25/mo less per month. I made sure to compare all the transmission/generation charges just to be sure it was all from the dryer.
Now this was in 2003. We've noticed that the generation charge has been going up, so that, compared to 2003, we are paying roughly $10 more a month for the same number of kWh (roughly 180 kWh/mo). So you'll even save a bit more now.
Anyhow, that prompted us to walk around and replace all of our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and so on (saving us another $10/mo). Considering that none of these bulb have died (save the one that our landlord dropped), I think the $40 or so we put into bulbs has paid us back quite a bit.
I did the same experiment with the power meter. I was quite surprised to discover that under normal load, my Soekris router consumed less than 1W. Very cool. The same can't be said about the laser printer (LaserJet 4M Plus), though. 700W peak, ~30W at idle. We leave that one off most of the time.
You can also drop the whole Applications folder on the Dock, on the same side of the divider as the Trash can. In fact, you can put all kinds of filesystem objects on that side. I like to drop disk images onto the Dock so that I can mount them quickly, but don't have to deal with the automounter which would do it every time I log in.
FSF's "long-term" perspective has also given you GCC, among other things. The failure of one project does not mean that their philosophy is flawed. Like there haven't been a few dead ends in Linux kernel development?
Right, because we don't think the following things are important:
- An operating system that runs on an extremely wide variety of hardware
- A stable and mature TCP/IP stack, transparently integrated into the system via Berkeley sockets
- Thousands of programmers who submit patches and/or modify the system to do exactly what they want it to do
- Full POSIX compatibility
- Real separation of mechanism from policy-- tools can be used in a variety of ways, often in ways not foreseen by the original author
- A system that doesn't require specialized tools to customize-- every system comes with a text editor and development tools
- A real, working permissions model-- for some uses, THIS is a dealbreaker, as the GP mentions
- Multiprocessing is easy
- Pipes and powerful shell scripting capabilities
- And so on...
Linux and other UNIXen are the culmination of years of thought about what makes a good operating system. It's not perfect, but when you reach the point, like I did, when you realize that the only boundary between you and what you want to do in the system is you own knowledge, you realize that an OS like Linux is priceless. I wouldn't hesitate to shell out a thousand bucks for software like that if I had to, and back before "UNIX" wasn't Free, many people did. And even though they are f/Free, I still make a point of donating to my favorite projects on a regular basis, because I want to make sure that they stick around.(The above points are ripped straight out of ESR's The Art of UNIX Programming, which was well-worth the $40 for the dead-tree version)
And if you believe that Amadeus is representative of fact (which it probably is not, but is an entertaining play/movie in any event), then Mozart serves as more of a model for Paris Hilton's and Brittney Spears' current behavior than anything else. A genius... and a party animal!
BTW, totally OT, but Underworld's Second Toughest in the Infants is a great "dance" album to run to. I save it for the speed workouts. I'm always on the lookout for music to run to that's rhythmic, but is more than just kick-drum-and-some-squealy-noise. I've been happily playing this one since '96. Never seems to get old to me.
One thing that can help make spamming less profitable for spammers is tarpitting. I personally think that this should be standard behavior for an MTA-- it would raise the profitability bar considerably.
I dropped spamd in front of my MX pool and watched in amazement as our spam level dropped to next to nothing. I'm not even being very aggressive-- I don't use any DNS-based blacklists. The beauty of this setup is that 1) if a spammer wants to make money, he's gotta drop the connection from me, because I'm sending packets to him slowly and wasting his resources (one per second with a window size of 1 byte), but 2) if he *does* drop that connection and does not retry, he gets blacklisted automatically. This obviously isn't a cure-all, but it's doing wonders for us.
I, too, feel your pain. Spam causes big problems-- one being that it is becoming increasingly difficult to use telnet as a diagnostic tool for SMTP. Sender callbacks mess with that whole thing. Obviously, my tarpit/greylist will as well. But we have to forget about the good old days and move forward, keeping in mind that in the good old days we only had thousands of users to worry about-- now we have billions. There are probably even billions of well-behaved people. SMTP simply doesn't scale when you factor in the bad people.
You're right about home users-- a subscription model wouldn't be very popular. I suspect that most home users aren't even aware that they're paying for an OS. It "just comes with the computer."
But I bet this would be a big hit with business. We already buy site-licenses for our OSes. Management wants to go out of its way to make sure we're in compliance when it comes to software licenses, since site licenses are easier to deal with when you use imaging tools like Ghost. So we end up with two copies of XP Pro for each desktop, because the lease already includes a license. What a waste of money!
Anyway, for us, Vista doesn't offer anything we need. Users just need to do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, and web. We've spent the money on XP, and XP does that job well on the hardware we have. In order to use Vista, we'd need to upgrade our hardware AND our OS-- and we'd still be doing the same things. No thanks!
On our end, we wouldn't necessarily have to install those updates, but if they were compelling and bug-free improvements, there would definitely be a big incentive to do so.
We just finished upgrading everyone from Windows 98 to Windows XP last year. We're in the middle of an Office 2003 rollout (with mixed reviews-- a lot of people like Office XP better-- me included). XP is certainly a big improvement over 98, and we'll probably stick with it for awhile. But, looking forward, we're probably going to depend on virtualization a bit more for clients. Products like Parallels and VMWare give us enough flexibility that we can keep everyone running on their current software, but with a more flexible (and cheaper!) backend for a long time. Not to mention-- software like WINE is starting to show some promise. If we can run IE (stupid ActiveX intranet sites) and MS Office on another platform, with a minimum of user moaning, we'll do it.
Not to mention-- early adopters get bitten. I was a frequent early adopter when I was younger, but now that I'm a grumpy sysadmin who people rely on to make things work-- no thanks. Even Apple's 10.4 Server, which is the 5th generation of that piece of software, blew in certain significant ways for us at first (like Apple's crummy AD plugin failing under any important load). So I'll take "running" over "features" any day. Folks who are familiar with the BOFH can guess how I handle users who ask for shiny new things for the sake of having shiny new things.
As defined by whom?
The judge. That's what they're there for. Not that I think they're infallible, but that is certainly their role.