Yeah, one of those obvious types, like Seinfeld. Doesn't everyone hate the french?
Not as much as they hate the British... but anyway, I believe you are only qualified to say you hate a nation of 60 million if you've been there a long time and met more that you dislike than like.
Of course, I'm married to a French-Moroccan and have a number of great friends in France, so maybe I'm biased. But I reckon that the average young French person (forget their bullshit government) is amongst the cooler peoples in Europe. They don't give a shit about petty authority, smoke good dope, and have great wine.
It doesn't matter whether you treat mathematics as a plural. That's why we say maths in Britain. Because it feels right, because the abbreviation keeps the trailing s.
In Latin it wasn't plural either (mathematica?) nor in Greek... but usually when abbreviating a long word that ends in s, you still keep the s at the end in the abbreviation.
Taking that much trouble to write a hoax deserves publication. I always remember my uncle, an epistemologist, telling me how hard it was to come up with the kind of language that is "acceptable" for that field. He was probably right, but reading back over his PhD thesis he had trouble understanding it himself! Perhaps that is the whole point: somewhere the barrier between thought and language, at high academic levels, becomes very fuzzy, and a lot of the terminology serves to obfuscate.
Fair enough, good point. Can you confirm that the idle task in question makes the CPU heat up as much, and uses as much energy as a floating point operation continuously looping? I have a hunch that it doesn't...
Still, we need to use all that idle time buring away across the world.
Do we? Idle time means the CPU is using less power, and generating less heat. I suppose that theoretically you are also making your processor transistors life slightly shorter, although there are probably arguments that a constant 50% CPU utilisation is not a bad thing because it will be more likely to maintain a constant temperature...
In any case, multiplied up by many millions of installed PCs, using that idle time means increasing energy consumption by a not insignificant amount. We need to use less energy, not more! Indeed, saying that idle time is "buring(sic)" away is quite the opposite of the truth.
It is true that Home Cinema fuelled by DVD is better than VHS, and that more of the moviegoing market have the means to buy the hardware.
However, the cinema as an experience is still different, no matter what. I think they need to look at how much it costs for theaters to rent the celluloid versions to work out where it's going wrong. Cinema places are too expensive, popcorn etc is too expensive and poor quality, and a lot of this is because theaters can't make money on all the duff crap that comes out of Hollywood these days.
Therefore, several things need to be taken into account:
Better theater pricing and user-friendliness of theaters
Better, fairer movie distribution to independent cinemas
Less movies per year, with emphasis on quality not quantity
Taxing high movie star salaries - they are the only stars that have little overhead on what they earn. Pop stars get screwed by record companies, TV stars have nasty contracts binding them, but movie stars are free agents more or less
More time before DVD release?
Of course, DVD itself should be a massive growth market for Hollywood... why are they complaining if DVD sales are so good? Why aren't they asking themselves why people are swapping so much - why is the cinema theater unpopular? It's not just because of DVD, far from it!
Well the problem in the beginning is everyone using Office to start with. Better products still exist for doing what most people need from Word, but they insist on using it.
If you all converted to Open Office it wouldn't be such a problem would it? Here in Morocco all the French schools had a course recently, absolutely fantastic title: "How to uninstall Microsoft Office and install Open Office". Now that they're all using it, it is no longer an issue!
Unfortunately, you are mistaken about RealOne. With the release of RealOne, Real has dropped support for Linux.
Real never supported their player, but RealOne is available. I have it running here. The support is not there, but at least there is a binary that kinda works for most RealOne content.
The same is true for the latest version of Flash
I can live without the latest Flash improvements. It's the streaming I want. I'm sure Microsoft is paying these people to support Media Player above all. Arrrgh!
So many content providers using custom consoles that don't work in Linux. It's a shame. Just like those that only stream in Windows Media.
But what gets me here is that it is Real Player content, and Real One is available for Linux, but they add a console and bang! it won't work in Linux:(
I made the switch to Linux a long time ago as my main desktop OS, and I can say that the main thing I go back to Windows for is for streamed content. Not because Linux doesn't support it, but because there is too much obfuscation on the part of streaming providers, they virtually want you to be running Windows XP with the latest media player in order to let you see their content. I can handle Office files, I can handle any email you throw at me, I can do VPN and SSL and all that, I can even get reasonable HTML rendering with Opera or Mozilla, but why no sensible Real Player content available? Why oh why is there always loads of javascript bullshit?
In the countries where Diesel is prevalent as mentioned, no sufficient laws exist to reduce emissions. Diesel sold at pumps is low grade, low quality government subsidised shit. And as for particle filters, I've never heard of one on any car here in Morocco and rarely over in France.
The question is therefore how long it will take. I do agree that organic diesels from crop leftovers is a great idea but it doesn't scale.
Diesel is a dirty fuel. In France they keep the price down artificially and have too high a percentage of diesel cars. And the soot it produces makes Parisian walls black. Sickening.
Morocco is worse. Diesel is subsidised by the government and costs half what regular gasoline costs. Everyone buys diesel cars, same story. Casablancan walls are black.
A lot of people would run cleaner fuels, but it's not in oil company interests to let us. Pure and simple. And let us not forget that George Bush has oil interests. Do not think that the coming war in Iraq has everything to do with this. Because Americans need cheap gas because the government has kept prices down for them, not given them alternatives, and therefore let them all buy huge engines over 3 litres just to run around town. At least in Europe we realise that for a second car you only need between 1.3 and 1.6 litre engines. With efficient injectors and good chassis they are even OK to do long haul drives.
Oil and energy issues... the scourge of 21st century America
WE have aincent P-III 866's here with a paltry 128 meg of ram... I know... I should be killed and eaten for using such old and outdated hardware
I look around me here... PI 133Mhz still going strong, couple of PIIs, some Celerons at just under a Mhz for those whose PCs broke recently and that was the lowest spec we could get to replace.
YOu are infected with the gottaupgrade virus. If you think 128M RAM is paltry and PIII866 is ancient, you got a bad case. See a doctor.
Half the features and productivity with Linux? Compared to Windows?
Linux is a kit car. And parts are all free. All it costs is skill to build it. Microsoft is a pre-built car which will guzzle gas at the same rate no matter how fast you drive.
Re:I want to grow up a Blogger just like you!
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 1
I kinda read it, but I didn't fully. I tried to be funny by linking your journals, when in fact you can't really be got at for it, since there are only 2 entries and one is a PHP release copy...:)
Re:I want to grow up a Blogger just like you!
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 1
Outperforming Seti@home's 3,000,000 users would require $10,000,000.
Bet you couldn't make up the dumb team names and stats with that budget though. Or get so many screens to display dumb meaningless graphs (more or less)... and let's not even get started on the Seti Forums and fansites;)
You can still buy these things here in Morocco on a lot of junk stalls.
So true what you say though. Kids can't believe toys didn't have batteries and kept me amused for hours. And stuff like the ZX81 with 1Kb of Ram and an addon 15Kb extra was like the ultimate thing to get
Who said that this is the big question? This is not the "big question"; it has already been determined that "terrorists" did not and generally dont use crypto for communication, so thats just a lame excuse to keep the tools crippled (see A5).
Exactly. Indeed, the real criminals (corrupt bankers, high wealth people, etc) are those that use crypto because they have the money and paranoia sufficient. Terrorists use simple stuff like codes, languages that only the top spies can get translated, and other tactics like human silence policies and any number of other things. As for organised crime, well using PGP / crypto etc is just going to get the FBI to prick up their ears a bit more so is generally avoided.
People should not be paranoid about cryptography, it should be openly available. It should be used primarily for signatures, and yet most people just think it's there for protecting data transmissions. *Sigh*
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them? (Score:1, Redundant)
That's what I just saw. How is this redundant? I posted as soon as I saw the article, and so whoever modded it must not be sorting by date. I take my time making posts so some short post got up on me. Oh well. At least the replies to this thread are interesting.
Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Reasons you don't need a recycle bin:
Because rm doesn't take -f by default
Because delete means delete, not put somewhere until I decide I really don't need it
Because you're a Linux user and have a clue
Because you're sick of people who restore files from the recycle bin because they think it's some kind of temporary folder
Because you don't want anything to do with "recycling", you have/dev/null and you put everything there
Because you have a poor machine with less than 4Gb of disk and you need all the space you can get
I can't believe how many Windows users get caught out when they dual boot my machine into Windows (have to have it for the office because others use my workstation) and find I have disabled the Recycle bin. Haha, more fool them.
Disclaimer: take with a pinch of salt. If you have sodium issues, take with a pinch of Lo-Salt instead.
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Not as much as they hate the British... but anyway, I believe you are only qualified to say you hate a nation of 60 million if you've been there a long time and met more that you dislike than like.
Of course, I'm married to a French-Moroccan and have a number of great friends in France, so maybe I'm biased. But I reckon that the average young French person (forget their bullshit government) is amongst the cooler peoples in Europe. They don't give a shit about petty authority, smoke good dope, and have great wine.
In Latin it wasn't plural either (mathematica?) nor in Greek... but usually when abbreviating a long word that ends in s, you still keep the s at the end in the abbreviation.
I hope that's a joke.
Taking that much trouble to write a hoax deserves publication. I always remember my uncle, an epistemologist, telling me how hard it was to come up with the kind of language that is "acceptable" for that field. He was probably right, but reading back over his PhD thesis he had trouble understanding it himself! Perhaps that is the whole point: somewhere the barrier between thought and language, at high academic levels, becomes very fuzzy, and a lot of the terminology serves to obfuscate.
Fair enough, good point. Can you confirm that the idle task in question makes the CPU heat up as much, and uses as much energy as a floating point operation continuously looping? I have a hunch that it doesn't...
Do we? Idle time means the CPU is using less power, and generating less heat. I suppose that theoretically you are also making your processor transistors life slightly shorter, although there are probably arguments that a constant 50% CPU utilisation is not a bad thing because it will be more likely to maintain a constant temperature...
In any case, multiplied up by many millions of installed PCs, using that idle time means increasing energy consumption by a not insignificant amount. We need to use less energy, not more! Indeed, saying that idle time is "buring(sic)" away is quite the opposite of the truth.
However, the cinema as an experience is still different, no matter what. I think they need to look at how much it costs for theaters to rent the celluloid versions to work out where it's going wrong. Cinema places are too expensive, popcorn etc is too expensive and poor quality, and a lot of this is because theaters can't make money on all the duff crap that comes out of Hollywood these days.
Therefore, several things need to be taken into account:
Of course, DVD itself should be a massive growth market for Hollywood... why are they complaining if DVD sales are so good? Why aren't they asking themselves why people are swapping so much - why is the cinema theater unpopular? It's not just because of DVD, far from it!
Feel free to reply for more info if needed
Now will I see "how do I set up Passport" in all my favorite mailing lists? Hardly. People get flamed enough for Active Directory postings :)
If you all converted to Open Office it wouldn't be such a problem would it? Here in Morocco all the French schools had a course recently, absolutely fantastic title: "How to uninstall Microsoft Office and install Open Office". Now that they're all using it, it is no longer an issue!
Real never supported their player, but RealOne is available. I have it running here. The support is not there, but at least there is a binary that kinda works for most RealOne content.
The same is true for the latest version of Flash
I can live without the latest Flash improvements. It's the streaming I want. I'm sure Microsoft is paying these people to support Media Player above all. Arrrgh!
Is there a choice, or is QuickTime just the *default* transport?
But what gets me here is that it is Real Player content, and Real One is available for Linux, but they add a console and bang! it won't work in Linux :(
I made the switch to Linux a long time ago as my main desktop OS, and I can say that the main thing I go back to Windows for is for streamed content. Not because Linux doesn't support it, but because there is too much obfuscation on the part of streaming providers, they virtually want you to be running Windows XP with the latest media player in order to let you see their content. I can handle Office files, I can handle any email you throw at me, I can do VPN and SSL and all that, I can even get reasonable HTML rendering with Opera or Mozilla, but why no sensible Real Player content available? Why oh why is there always loads of javascript bullshit?
The question is therefore how long it will take. I do agree that organic diesels from crop leftovers is a great idea but it doesn't scale.
Morocco is worse. Diesel is subsidised by the government and costs half what regular gasoline costs. Everyone buys diesel cars, same story. Casablancan walls are black.
A lot of people would run cleaner fuels, but it's not in oil company interests to let us. Pure and simple. And let us not forget that George Bush has oil interests. Do not think that the coming war in Iraq has everything to do with this. Because Americans need cheap gas because the government has kept prices down for them, not given them alternatives, and therefore let them all buy huge engines over 3 litres just to run around town. At least in Europe we realise that for a second car you only need between 1.3 and 1.6 litre engines. With efficient injectors and good chassis they are even OK to do long haul drives.
Oil and energy issues ... the scourge of 21st century America
I look around me here... PI 133Mhz still going strong, couple of PIIs, some Celerons at just under a Mhz for those whose PCs broke recently and that was the lowest spec we could get to replace.
YOu are infected with the gottaupgrade virus. If you think 128M RAM is paltry and PIII866 is ancient, you got a bad case. See a doctor.
Linux is a kit car. And parts are all free. All it costs is skill to build it. Microsoft is a pre-built car which will guzzle gas at the same rate no matter how fast you drive.
I kinda read it, but I didn't fully. I tried to be funny by linking your journals, when in fact you can't really be got at for it, since there are only 2 entries and one is a PHP release copy... :)
What about your journal entries then?
Bet you couldn't make up the dumb team names and stats with that budget though. Or get so many screens to display dumb meaningless graphs (more or less)... and let's not even get started on the Seti Forums and fansites ;)
So true what you say though. Kids can't believe toys didn't have batteries and kept me amused for hours. And stuff like the ZX81 with 1Kb of Ram and an addon 15Kb extra was like the ultimate thing to get
Exactly. Indeed, the real criminals (corrupt bankers, high wealth people, etc) are those that use crypto because they have the money and paranoia sufficient. Terrorists use simple stuff like codes, languages that only the top spies can get translated, and other tactics like human silence policies and any number of other things. As for organised crime, well using PGP / crypto etc is just going to get the FBI to prick up their ears a bit more so is generally avoided.
People should not be paranoid about cryptography, it should be openly available. It should be used primarily for signatures, and yet most people just think it's there for protecting data transmissions. *Sigh*
That's what I just saw. How is this redundant? I posted as soon as I saw the article, and so whoever modded it must not be sorting by date. I take my time making posts so some short post got up on me. Oh well. At least the replies to this thread are interesting.
I can't believe how many Windows users get caught out when they dual boot my machine into Windows (have to have it for the office because others use my workstation) and find I have disabled the Recycle bin. Haha, more fool them.
Disclaimer: take with a pinch of salt. If you have sodium issues, take with a pinch of Lo-Salt instead.
It would have been nice to remote control my PC DVD player from further away when I get my TV-Out card, of course.