Not sure how the battery comment ties in with the rest of your comment, but it's probably a good idea to run real equipment on a generator instead of batteries... It'd be very nice to have a number of cell phone towers be somewhat disaster resistant, if they aren't already. Especially since this might mean having a somewhat working cell phone network when the normal phone network is down. Also I wonder how well the current generation of cell phone protocols deal with a surge in people trying to make calls. I mean, obviously lots and lots of people get service busy errors, but are the resources that exist put to good use, ie are some people actually getting through? Or is everyone just sort of DOS-ing each other. Also: is it possible to decline service by default unless an emergency number is called? Another interesting idea would be to just disallow all phone calls, limiting usage to the resource efficient text messaging.
Yes, I also have a problem with a lack of alternatives. There is no lack of other sites that post news for nerds, but there is no site with anywhere near the readership that Slashdot has - Slashdot is a real institution, everbody knows it. Not that the Slashdot readership is all good, hell no; it's just really really large and this quantity entails the existance of a certain degree of quality, if you're willing to look for it or if moderation works as advertised.
That said, one of the sites that always gets mentioned when people ask for alternatives to Slashdot - and rightly so, I guess - is kuro5hin (also known simply as k5). It's really, really different though, different readership (maybe smarter, but only on average), different topics, different moderation system. K5 and Slashdot readers have an odd sort of relationship, you can see remarks about each other regularly on both sides. Maybe somebody else can say more, I always think it's fairly strange. Personally, I've tried to get into K5 a couple of times, never worked out. Apart from K5, what's left? Recently I bookmarked digg, but I haven't gotten into it, and I doubt I will for reasons outlined in the first paragraph. There have been attempts of explicitly creating an alternative "better" Slashdot, most notably Technocrat by none other than Bruce Perens, which was pretty much a failure, although I am surprised to see there still are lots of news items and between 1 and 5 comments on each (hah!). Oh and of course there's Fark which to me is pretty much like a reverse-K5 from Slashdot's point of view - take from that what you will.
Heh, this has gotten a bit out of hand considering I only wanted to drop a few links to K5 and digg.
See also: Slashdot on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unfortunately I lack your superior skills in creating a logically sound argument and had to go the long route of explaining my reasoning, including intermediary steps.
Oh don't hit me with the prescriptive linguistics debate, I've heard that one to death. It's just easier to refer to "proper terminology" instead of "terminology a more or less vast majority of people even across languages adheres to". I was just genuinely surprised that there are language communities where referring to it as expresso is regarded proper, ie shared by a majority of speakers. If you're from one of those communities, more power to you, have fun drinking expresso.
Heh. I googled and landed on a web site that came up earlier today or yesterday in the context of "begging the question". Anyway, here's what their article says: "The mute spelling is a development that has come about because moot is now a fossil word, usually encountered only in this phrase; there is an understandable tendency to convert the unknown into the known, and mute seems to fit the new meaning rather better. But its wrong." But read the whole article for an amusing ethymological note.
Of course as an adherent of descriptive linguistics, far be it from me to agree with the author that any usage is either right or wrong, but a quick Google test seems to indicate that "mute point" is certainly less commonly used than "moot point".
Google is your friend, all the top links for "expresso" are in Portugal and Brasil.
Not for me they aren't, I checked before posting my comment. I get mostly software related stuff, development tools. Personalized search in action, I guess. Though now that you mention it there are a couple of portuguese sites, as well.
(ps. where I'm from they call it expresso. my bad for an imperfect translation...)
Are you serious? What's the source language you're translating from, if you don't mind me asking. I've never heard about the stuff being properly referred to as expresso in any language. It's a somewhat common mistake though, I thought it was expresso, too - when I was twelve...;)
I didn't miss anything, I just don't believe that you - or the original poster - really need 1 minute per spam mail you get, but if you do, you're doing something wrong. Or maybe you're... thinking... very... slow, if mental context switching takes that long for you, I don't know.
And like I said earlier, I'm certainly not defending him, all I'm trying is to inch towards a reasonable estimation of the damages. And the original posters estimation was just way off - or at least badly reasoned. I don't want to get into any debate whether spamming can or should be considered theft.
My Opera mail filters catch maybe 20 spam mails a day. Occasionally one slips through - maybe once a day on average. It takes me approximately half a second to notice that it's spam (cyrillic writing is a give away) and click the large button that moves it accordingly, and maybe half a second to open up the email window in the first place. If you really take a whole freaking minute per spam mail to tweak your mail filters, you might want to improve your spam "workflow". Modern mail filters don't need anywhere near as much manual tweaking to deliver good results, Opera's built-in filter certainly doesn't and I'm sure there are still better ones.
That's not a conservative guess. Maybe for the number of recipients it is, I don't know. Keep in mind that the actual number of recipients is lower than the number of mails he sent out, because not every address spammers use actually exist. Then the number of mails that actually reached people without being caught by spam filters is still lower, a LOT lower most likely. Those relatively (!) few mails that reached actual people still wouldn't have caused them to lose 1 minute of their lives. How long does it take you to dismiss a mail as spam? Not more than a few seconds, maybe not even that.
Hey, not that I'm defending this guy. Just trying to help in making a reasonable guess about the lost time due to him.
And when you realize that in a 350W computer, at least 70W of pure heat have to be disipated, every little bit (conduction or convection) helps.
Well, yes and no. Very few computers actually draw 350W even under load. 250W under load is a good guess for a fairly high-end PC, occasional peaks nonwithstanding. Less than 200W idling. That said, maybe every little bit helps, but as far as I know, the bit convection cooling adds in a standard case is really so little that it simply is irrelevant, and laughable if used a reason for buying an aluminum case. (Hey, everybody knows you do it for the looks.)
Well, you're right, the material itself is not that much lighter. But usually cases need to be made out of 1cm thick steel, while aluminum can be much thinner (0.7cm) while maintaining structural integrity.
Eh. You got it all backwards. Aluminum IS much lighter than steel. But it's also way easier to bend, which means that given an otherwise exactly equal design, the steel case will be more robust and way heavier than the aluminum one. It's not much of an issue, though, a computer enclosure doesn't need to be all that robust to work, anyway. Some manufacturers have opted for thicker aluminum sheets all the same. But yeah, aluminum cases are a lot lighter than steel cases of the same size, no doubt about it.
Ah, but if they have to use thicker material and more support structure?
Well, they just don't. That is, some do, but many just use thin aluminum sheets and let the user deal with the reduces "structural integrity". It's really not much of a problem, except that it might not be a good idea to sit or stand on an all-Aluminum case. I'm not sure what the actual weight tolerance is, this is just what I've read (on Dan's Data IIRC).
Stick to steel. Aluminum looks snazzy, but steel cases are typically less prone to vibration noise (because they're way more heavy). And I say that having bought a Lian Li case - I still think it looks great, but I shouldn't have bought it anyway.
They might as well sell the full version for Intel. As far as I know, every compulsory Mac OS EULA includes something about only being licensed for usage on Apple hardware.
A plethora of disks? On a fresh install I don't use any driver disks; downloading and installing the drivers over the net takes all of, oh, 15 minutes. And this is pretty much only for performance, everything except perhabs games pretty much works with the drivers available with XP SP2.
I'm well aware. Obviously date fields would have to auto-update to reflect that the refered moment in space has actually changed it's AUT (or RET). The time is absolute in so much as that it refers to moments by their relation to the absolute beginning of all time (relative to now). And I know it's not a practical way to deal with time (for many reasons), it's meant as a sort of humorous thought experiment...
I once figured that we should just use Absolute Universe Time. Universe time starts at Zero (no unit)--the time when the universe started to exist--and the current moment AUT always is 100% (or just One). All other dates are given as a percentage relative to this. Dates in the past are between 0 and 1, moments in the future are larger than 1. Of course, this introduces a number of minor inconveniences. First off, since the universe started to exist, as far as we can tell, some 16 billion years ago but our typical time needs are in the manner of hours and days, this leads to extremely minor fractions: "I'll meet you at 100.00000000009%" or "I was born at 99.99999999999983%." Second, the refence to a given moment in time changes, ie 50% AUT isn't the same in 5 minutes or 5 seconds, since the total time between 0% and 100% AUT always increases. So you'd have to take that into consideration when using AUT.
Good thing that I'm often listening to trance music, which some of the extremely pretentious people who sadly also listen to it herald as the "new classical music". Morons.
Hm. I agree that Wifi is an incredibly dumb name, but I don't mind the -gate naming convention to indicate a scandal. Obviously it's not logical, but from what I gathered in 4 years of studying linguistics, language isn't logical very often. And with -gate at least I can see where it's coming from, also typically the usage is at least somewhat humorous (as in "Coffeegate" for the recent GTA "issue"). Wifi is just nonsensical, or worse a result from an odd ignorance about the term Hi-Fi.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure how the battery comment ties in with the rest of your comment, but it's probably a good idea to run real equipment on a generator instead of batteries... It'd be very nice to have a number of cell phone towers be somewhat disaster resistant, if they aren't already. Especially since this might mean having a somewhat working cell phone network when the normal phone network is down.
Also I wonder how well the current generation of cell phone protocols deal with a surge in people trying to make calls. I mean, obviously lots and lots of people get service busy errors, but are the resources that exist put to good use, ie are some people actually getting through? Or is everyone just sort of DOS-ing each other. Also: is it possible to decline service by default unless an emergency number is called? Another interesting idea would be to just disallow all phone calls, limiting usage to the resource efficient text messaging.
What's so difficult to understand? Microsoft has a market dominating position, Apple doesn't. Special rules apply.
It's coaxing, btw. Coxing just sounds... wrong.
Yes, I also have a problem with a lack of alternatives. There is no lack of other sites that post news for nerds, but there is no site with anywhere near the readership that Slashdot has - Slashdot is a real institution, everbody knows it. Not that the Slashdot readership is all good, hell no; it's just really really large and this quantity entails the existance of a certain degree of quality, if you're willing to look for it or if moderation works as advertised.
That said, one of the sites that always gets mentioned when people ask for alternatives to Slashdot - and rightly so, I guess - is kuro5hin (also known simply as k5). It's really, really different though, different readership (maybe smarter, but only on average), different topics, different moderation system. K5 and Slashdot readers have an odd sort of relationship, you can see remarks about each other regularly on both sides. Maybe somebody else can say more, I always think it's fairly strange. Personally, I've tried to get into K5 a couple of times, never worked out.
Apart from K5, what's left? Recently I bookmarked digg, but I haven't gotten into it, and I doubt I will for reasons outlined in the first paragraph. There have been attempts of explicitly creating an alternative "better" Slashdot, most notably Technocrat by none other than Bruce Perens, which was pretty much a failure, although I am surprised to see there still are lots of news items and between 1 and 5 comments on each (hah!). Oh and of course there's Fark which to me is pretty much like a reverse-K5 from Slashdot's point of view - take from that what you will.
Heh, this has gotten a bit out of hand considering I only wanted to drop a few links to K5 and digg.
See also: Slashdot on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unfortunately I lack your superior skills in creating a logically sound argument and had to go the long route of explaining my reasoning, including intermediary steps.
Oh don't hit me with the prescriptive linguistics debate, I've heard that one to death. It's just easier to refer to "proper terminology" instead of "terminology a more or less vast majority of people even across languages adheres to". I was just genuinely surprised that there are language communities where referring to it as expresso is regarded proper, ie shared by a majority of speakers. If you're from one of those communities, more power to you, have fun drinking expresso.
Heh. I googled and landed on a web site that came up earlier today or yesterday in the context of "begging the question". Anyway, here's what their article says: "The mute spelling is a development that has come about because moot is now a fossil word, usually encountered only in this phrase; there is an understandable tendency to convert the unknown into the known, and mute seems to fit the new meaning rather better. But its wrong." But read the whole article for an amusing ethymological note.
Of course as an adherent of descriptive linguistics, far be it from me to agree with the author that any usage is either right or wrong, but a quick Google test seems to indicate that "mute point" is certainly less commonly used than "moot point".
Google is your friend, all the top links for "expresso" are in Portugal and Brasil.
Not for me they aren't, I checked before posting my comment. I get mostly software related stuff, development tools. Personalized search in action, I guess. Though now that you mention it there are a couple of portuguese sites, as well.
(ps. where I'm from they call it expresso. my bad for an imperfect translation...)
;)
Are you serious? What's the source language you're translating from, if you don't mind me asking. I've never heard about the stuff being properly referred to as expresso in any language. It's a somewhat common mistake though, I thought it was expresso, too - when I was twelve...
I didn't miss anything, I just don't believe that you - or the original poster - really need 1 minute per spam mail you get, but if you do, you're doing something wrong. Or maybe you're ... thinking ... very ... slow, if mental context switching takes that long for you, I don't know.
And like I said earlier, I'm certainly not defending him, all I'm trying is to inch towards a reasonable estimation of the damages. And the original posters estimation was just way off - or at least badly reasoned. I don't want to get into any debate whether spamming can or should be considered theft.
My Opera mail filters catch maybe 20 spam mails a day. Occasionally one slips through - maybe once a day on average. It takes me approximately half a second to notice that it's spam (cyrillic writing is a give away) and click the large button that moves it accordingly, and maybe half a second to open up the email window in the first place.
If you really take a whole freaking minute per spam mail to tweak your mail filters, you might want to improve your spam "workflow". Modern mail filters don't need anywhere near as much manual tweaking to deliver good results, Opera's built-in filter certainly doesn't and I'm sure there are still better ones.
That's not a conservative guess. Maybe for the number of recipients it is, I don't know. Keep in mind that the actual number of recipients is lower than the number of mails he sent out, because not every address spammers use actually exist. Then the number of mails that actually reached people without being caught by spam filters is still lower, a LOT lower most likely. Those relatively (!) few mails that reached actual people still wouldn't have caused them to lose 1 minute of their lives. How long does it take you to dismiss a mail as spam? Not more than a few seconds, maybe not even that.
Hey, not that I'm defending this guy. Just trying to help in making a reasonable guess about the lost time due to him.
And when you realize that in a 350W computer, at least 70W of pure heat have to be disipated, every little bit (conduction or convection) helps.
Well, yes and no. Very few computers actually draw 350W even under load. 250W under load is a good guess for a fairly high-end PC, occasional peaks nonwithstanding. Less than 200W idling.
That said, maybe every little bit helps, but as far as I know, the bit convection cooling adds in a standard case is really so little that it simply is irrelevant, and laughable if used a reason for buying an aluminum case. (Hey, everybody knows you do it for the looks.)
Well, you're right, the material itself is not that much lighter. But usually cases need to be made out of 1cm thick steel, while aluminum can be much thinner (0.7cm) while maintaining structural integrity.
Eh. You got it all backwards. Aluminum IS much lighter than steel. But it's also way easier to bend, which means that given an otherwise exactly equal design, the steel case will be more robust and way heavier than the aluminum one. It's not much of an issue, though, a computer enclosure doesn't need to be all that robust to work, anyway. Some manufacturers have opted for thicker aluminum sheets all the same. But yeah, aluminum cases are a lot lighter than steel cases of the same size, no doubt about it.
Ah, but if they have to use thicker material and more support structure?
Well, they just don't. That is, some do, but many just use thin aluminum sheets and let the user deal with the reduces "structural integrity". It's really not much of a problem, except that it might not be a good idea to sit or stand on an all-Aluminum case. I'm not sure what the actual weight tolerance is, this is just what I've read (on Dan's Data IIRC).
Stick to steel. Aluminum looks snazzy, but steel cases are typically less prone to vibration noise (because they're way more heavy). And I say that having bought a Lian Li case - I still think it looks great, but I shouldn't have bought it anyway.
They might as well sell the full version for Intel. As far as I know, every compulsory Mac OS EULA includes something about only being licensed for usage on Apple hardware.
A plethora of disks? On a fresh install I don't use any driver disks; downloading and installing the drivers over the net takes all of, oh, 15 minutes. And this is pretty much only for performance, everything except perhabs games pretty much works with the drivers available with XP SP2.
Not only that, it's also certainly not a Wikipedia article. Not every Wiki is Wikipedia, for crying out loud.
I'm well aware. Obviously date fields would have to auto-update to reflect that the refered moment in space has actually changed it's AUT (or RET). The time is absolute in so much as that it refers to moments by their relation to the absolute beginning of all time (relative to now). And I know it's not a practical way to deal with time (for many reasons), it's meant as a sort of humorous thought experiment...
That has never stopped him before...
It's still a conspiracy theory, it's just that what's happening is a conspiracy. (Okay, not in the legal sense.)
I once figured that we should just use Absolute Universe Time. Universe time starts at Zero (no unit)--the time when the universe started to exist--and the current moment AUT always is 100% (or just One). All other dates are given as a percentage relative to this. Dates in the past are between 0 and 1, moments in the future are larger than 1.
Of course, this introduces a number of minor inconveniences. First off, since the universe started to exist, as far as we can tell, some 16 billion years ago but our typical time needs are in the manner of hours and days, this leads to extremely minor fractions: "I'll meet you at 100.00000000009%" or "I was born at 99.99999999999983%." Second, the refence to a given moment in time changes, ie 50% AUT isn't the same in 5 minutes or 5 seconds, since the total time between 0% and 100% AUT always increases. So you'd have to take that into consideration when using AUT.
Why would your stove break down when you said that?
Good thing that I'm often listening to trance music, which some of the extremely pretentious people who sadly also listen to it herald as the "new classical music". Morons.
Hm. I agree that Wifi is an incredibly dumb name, but I don't mind the -gate naming convention to indicate a scandal. Obviously it's not logical, but from what I gathered in 4 years of studying linguistics, language isn't logical very often. And with -gate at least I can see where it's coming from, also typically the usage is at least somewhat humorous (as in "Coffeegate" for the recent GTA "issue"). Wifi is just nonsensical, or worse a result from an odd ignorance about the term Hi-Fi.