I've heard another downside to Mini-ITX is that the throughput of the gigabit Ethernet ports is not up to speed with the ports on full-size computers. Has the situation improved? Will it be better with Mini-ITX 2.0? That's the first thing I looked for in TFA and the "more information" link it provided, but all they say is it has a gig-E port.
In addition to a JVM, you need compilers. If there's any part of Java that is complex or that there are incomplete specifications for, it may be those huge standard libraries. But doesn't Sun ship the source code to those with every JDK?
And not only are users downloading it, they're installing and using it. Usage of Firefox 3 has gone from under 1% to over 4% in less than 24 hours. That's a quarter of all Firefox users already using the latest version, or many million new Firefox users.
I believe that something like the singularity will come to pass, in the sense that super-smart machines will quickly develop. On the other hand, the whole idea of copying human brains just strikes me as silly. I'm really not sure what the interaction between humans and super-smart machines will be. That's one of the key points of the singularity; things will change so much so rapidly that we cannot predict what will happen.
You're not understanding what the singularity is about. What you're describing is a dumb extrapolation. The singularity, in contrast, is the idea that once we develop artificial intelligence that is as smart as the smartest scientists, there is the possibility that the AI could design an improved (i.e. smarter, faster) version of itself. Then that version could design a yet more improved version, even more quickly, and so on. That will mean the rate of scientific progress could be faster than humans are capable of, and we could find ourselves surrounded by technology we do not understand, or perhaps we cannot possibly understand. The idea behind the singularity is feedback, such as the recursion that can be created by the Y combinator in your sig.
The list is sorted by total number of crashes. Because Windows is the most used operating system, crashes that are common on Windows dominate the list. If you look down the list some, you can find a Linux crash that occurs 94 times, and one that occurs 79 times. Of course, these show up on the list only because they also happen on Windows. There may be crashes on Linux that have occurred hundreds of times that do not appear on the list. My conclusion is that crashes for Linux and Solaris are low simply because those operating systems are not popular on desktop computers used for web browsing.
That top crashers report is generated from Breakpad reports, which are sent automatically. The user does have to agree to send the report, but this is as easy as clicking OK. The list also shows only the most common 100 crashes. So let's say that instead of the 177561 reports of crashes over the past two weeks, there were 500000 crashes over the past two weeks. With 2 million active daily users, that comes out to an average of one crash every two months for each daily user. Checking my about:crashes info, I see my last Firefox 3 crash was in March and the one before that was in January. I have been an active daily user since last year, so my frequency of crashes seems typical. My conclusion is that your experience of "multiple daily crashes" is very unusual, not typical of the experience most get with Firefox 3. Crashing once every two months for the most active users doesn't seem too bad for a point-oh release to me.
Plowing up new land creates *lots* of CO2 via soil oxidation too, and quite possibly at a faster rate than the fossil fuels they are "replacing."
I think you're referring to this article which you link to in a later post. When that article refers to "organic matter oxidation," I think that's a polite way of saying burning down rainforests. Of course, I don't think we should burn down rainforests and grow switchgrass there instead. Everyone agrees that that releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. And I don't think environmentalists or climate scientists have been calling for burning down rainforests, either, unless I'm mistaken.
Soil oxidation/erosion contributes an order of magnitude more CO2 to the atmosphere each year than the burning of *all fossil fuels* combined. Don't let any inconvenient truth stand in your way though.
I think you somehow misread that article. It states "Now, fossil fuel burning is the greatest factor in atmospheric carbon fluctuations." If we can grow switchgrass in areas that currently do not have much vegetation, that could help reduce the price of fossil fuels. That would mean oil companies would be less likely to go to extreme measures to extract oil, so our oil will last longer and less CO2 will be pumped into the atmosphere. Our fuel supply will last longer and be cheaper, with no reduction in food supply. Sounds like a good idea to me. Maybe you can point out a flaw in my reasoning.
Feel free to make any predictions you want. My bet is on the people that have advanced degrees in relevant areas of science, who spend their careers collecting and interpreting the data, who build detailed climate models and run them on multimillion dollar supercomputers, who have made predictions in the past that have been verified. Their conclusions are quite different from yours, which are based on... wishful thinking, I guess?
Yeah, I've taken several statistics classes. There is most definitely a significant correlation between the year and the global mean temperature. You don't need to do a regression analysis to see it. Just a glance at a graph, and the increase in temperature is obvious.
Have you ever heard a lecture by a climate scientist? I have, and the predictions are quite dire. For one, in the western US severe drought will be the norm in several decades. Most people in the US will be okay, although I'm sure there will tend to be more deaths during extreme heat spells. In less developed parts of the world that experience extreme drought, possibly millions could die. I suppose a few degrees Celsius doesn't sound like much, but millions of lives are in the balance.
No, data can't be made to look anyway you want. If that were true, then there would be no such thing as science, as anyone could see anything they wanted in the data. Simply take a look at any graph of global mean temperature. It will help if you look at a graph of the five-year average, as the short-term fluctuations will be smoothed out so as not to confuse you. You will see that it is increasing over the long term (meaning over the past several decades) and is continuing to increase. As I've said before, denying that global warming is occurring is as silly as saying you can't possibly make money in the stock market.
Blow 45 trillion dollars and knock the temp down 1/10th of a degree by living in the stone ages? Can you say straw man? Say it with me... straw... man. Straw man. Wasn't that easy? Now go look it up.
But really, the prediction is pretty simple. For the last six months, the earth's temperature has fallen, according to satellite measurements.
During summer in the Northern hemisphere, the Earth is farther from the sun due to its elliptical orbit. Of course it's been getting colder during the period that the Earth is getting farther from the sun. Try looking at the long-term trend of global temperatures, say, over the past twenty years. I think you'll see temperatures have been increasing.
I can see the increase in global mean temperature from 2000 to 2007 is not as steep as in the 1990s, but it's not flat. From 2000 to 2007, it went up 0.1 degrees Celsius. It's not as much as the 0.2 degree increase from 1990 to 2000, but it's not "flat" by any means. Are you looking at the correct graph?
In addition to the long-term overall global warming trend, there is also natural variability in global temperatures. It just so happens that due to that variability, 1998 was an unusually warm year. You may as well point to records that the stock market hit in 2000 and claim that it's impossible to make money on stocks now, as they have not been increasing in eight years. I still have nearly all my money in the stock market, because I understand that over the long term, they will increase in value far faster than other investments. Similarly, the Earth is getting warming over the long term, despite 1998 being the warmest year on record.
Let me explain again:
a) They did not "sit on" the bug. They tried to fix it. The patch did not make the release because it caused a regression.
b) Name any major open source package with an open bug database that has been around for ten years, and I can point to a "major bug" that has remained unfixed for four years. That doesn't mean developers don't care. That just means that large projects ship with major bugs. That's just a fact of life for software engineering. You can delay release until every single "major bug" is fixed, or nothing would ever ship.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard another downside to Mini-ITX is that the throughput of the gigabit Ethernet ports is not up to speed with the ports on full-size computers. Has the situation improved? Will it be better with Mini-ITX 2.0? That's the first thing I looked for in TFA and the "more information" link it provided, but all they say is it has a gig-E port.
In addition to a JVM, you need compilers. If there's any part of Java that is complex or that there are incomplete specifications for, it may be those huge standard libraries. But doesn't Sun ship the source code to those with every JDK?
Gaping security hole? You mean this? Sounds like a dupe of this hoax.
And not only are users downloading it, they're installing and using it. Usage of Firefox 3 has gone from under 1% to over 4% in less than 24 hours. That's a quarter of all Firefox users already using the latest version, or many million new Firefox users.
I believe that something like the singularity will come to pass, in the sense that super-smart machines will quickly develop. On the other hand, the whole idea of copying human brains just strikes me as silly. I'm really not sure what the interaction between humans and super-smart machines will be. That's one of the key points of the singularity; things will change so much so rapidly that we cannot predict what will happen.
You're not understanding what the singularity is about. What you're describing is a dumb extrapolation. The singularity, in contrast, is the idea that once we develop artificial intelligence that is as smart as the smartest scientists, there is the possibility that the AI could design an improved (i.e. smarter, faster) version of itself. Then that version could design a yet more improved version, even more quickly, and so on. That will mean the rate of scientific progress could be faster than humans are capable of, and we could find ourselves surrounded by technology we do not understand, or perhaps we cannot possibly understand. The idea behind the singularity is feedback, such as the recursion that can be created by the Y combinator in your sig.
According to the Download Day FAQ, they will discard duplicate downloads.
The list is sorted by total number of crashes. Because Windows is the most used operating system, crashes that are common on Windows dominate the list. If you look down the list some, you can find a Linux crash that occurs 94 times, and one that occurs 79 times. Of course, these show up on the list only because they also happen on Windows. There may be crashes on Linux that have occurred hundreds of times that do not appear on the list. My conclusion is that crashes for Linux and Solaris are low simply because those operating systems are not popular on desktop computers used for web browsing.
That top crashers report is generated from Breakpad reports, which are sent automatically. The user does have to agree to send the report, but this is as easy as clicking OK. The list also shows only the most common 100 crashes. So let's say that instead of the 177561 reports of crashes over the past two weeks, there were 500000 crashes over the past two weeks. With 2 million active daily users, that comes out to an average of one crash every two months for each daily user. Checking my about:crashes info, I see my last Firefox 3 crash was in March and the one before that was in January. I have been an active daily user since last year, so my frequency of crashes seems typical. My conclusion is that your experience of "multiple daily crashes" is very unusual, not typical of the experience most get with Firefox 3. Crashing once every two months for the most active users doesn't seem too bad for a point-oh release to me.
Feel free to make any predictions you want. My bet is on the people that have advanced degrees in relevant areas of science, who spend their careers collecting and interpreting the data, who build detailed climate models and run them on multimillion dollar supercomputers, who have made predictions in the past that have been verified. Their conclusions are quite different from yours, which are based on... wishful thinking, I guess?
Yeah, I've taken several statistics classes. There is most definitely a significant correlation between the year and the global mean temperature. You don't need to do a regression analysis to see it. Just a glance at a graph, and the increase in temperature is obvious.
Have you ever heard a lecture by a climate scientist? I have, and the predictions are quite dire. For one, in the western US severe drought will be the norm in several decades. Most people in the US will be okay, although I'm sure there will tend to be more deaths during extreme heat spells. In less developed parts of the world that experience extreme drought, possibly millions could die. I suppose a few degrees Celsius doesn't sound like much, but millions of lives are in the balance.
Blow 45 trillion dollars and knock the temp down 1/10th of a degree by living in the stone ages? Can you say straw man? Say it with me... straw... man. Straw man. Wasn't that easy? Now go look it up.
I can see the increase in global mean temperature from 2000 to 2007 is not as steep as in the 1990s, but it's not flat. From 2000 to 2007, it went up 0.1 degrees Celsius. It's not as much as the 0.2 degree increase from 1990 to 2000, but it's not "flat" by any means. Are you looking at the correct graph?
In addition to the long-term overall global warming trend, there is also natural variability in global temperatures. It just so happens that due to that variability, 1998 was an unusually warm year. You may as well point to records that the stock market hit in 2000 and claim that it's impossible to make money on stocks now, as they have not been increasing in eight years. I still have nearly all my money in the stock market, because I understand that over the long term, they will increase in value far faster than other investments. Similarly, the Earth is getting warming over the long term, despite 1998 being the warmest year on record.
You mean like these graphs from the IPCC which show an increase in global temperatures from 2000 to 2007?
No discernible warming since 2000? Then this article from NASA must be all wrong then. Thanks for letting us know! *rolleyes*
You mean I can't believe everything I read on Slashdot? What's next, I can't believe everything I read on the rest of the Internet, too?
Some great philosopher once succinctly summed your situation up in a few choice words: "Shit happens".
The "normal usage" for Firefox is using less memory than other browsers. This has been repeatably verified, not just by Mozilla developers:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html
http://www.thebrowserworld.com/2008/03/29/firefox-30-beta-4-vs-opera-950-beta-vs-safari-31-beta-multiple-sites-opening-test/
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/03/26/cybernotes-browser-performance-comparisons/
Now, again, if you see any memory problem, you'll have to be specific about what it is. The rest of us don't see it. It's not "denial," it's just the truth.
Let me explain again:
a) They did not "sit on" the bug. They tried to fix it. The patch did not make the release because it caused a regression.
b) Name any major open source package with an open bug database that has been around for ten years, and I can point to a "major bug" that has remained unfixed for four years. That doesn't mean developers don't care. That just means that large projects ship with major bugs. That's just a fact of life for software engineering. You can delay release until every single "major bug" is fixed, or nothing would ever ship.