However, protectionist policies that don't allow the world to stabilize will only make things worse. Providing people with a legislated fantasy that all is well will lead to an overpopulated and ruined nation in the long run. Also, the best way to prevent war is to help keep other nations grow in their wealth. The USA has already bred a politically-indifferent idle middle class, just wait until the rest of the world becomes like that, too. "Jihad? But I don't want to miss tonight's Friends episode, and my pizza will get cold."
My eyes don't have to spend the entire day trying to focus the pixels on the screen, because they're already in focus. And, unlike CRT's, they don't go out of focus over time.
You must have been using a pretty crappy CRT. Moving to a 22" Apple display from a crap CRT would be like getting a magical BJ from three angelic succubus hookers, simultaneously. If you had been using a really nice (and expensive) Trinitron CRT or similar, you might not have had those headaches.
I don't consider LCDs to be expensive, because I'm not in the market for cheap crap monitors. I'm beginning to see really good LCDs in the $700 to $900 range, which is where really good monitors were seven years ago. BTW, I'm still using a seven-year-old $700 17" CRT monitor--it's still bright, crisp, runs at high frequencies, and is very very usable. When my CRT finally dies off, I'll go get a $700 LCD for the next seven or more years.
Evolution (that organisms change with time as a result of alterations in genotype) is a simple and elegant fact that anyone can observe by picking up rocks and looking at the fossils.
It can also be observed by visiting very rural areas--sometimes only a few hours away from a city--and seeing different traits among the people there relative to more familiar urban people. Humans have noticibly evolved even in recent history.
The reality of "faith" is that most people are believing in things that really are absurd: cities of gold, angels, God "watching" everything we do. For instance, how can any human, after death, expect to really be in their same physical form to attend a golden city in the sky with all their relatives and Spot the dog? There are simply many many many things about this universe that we have no notion of, and we have absolutely no idea what the real Heaven would be like. All the descriptions in the Bible can be taken only to be approximations or comparative descriptions of what reality really and truly might be, but taking any of it literally is irresponsible. So, being faithful isn't a problem at all; rather, the problem is people believing that their beliefs are fact. These are the people that the "anti-religion" people are up against--they really aren't up against religion itself.
1 MB is simply too large for the L1 to have a reasonable access time.
At first I was thinking this was a troll, but my better senses prevailed. CPUs really do have small L1 caches (like 32KB). The grandparent post was thinking of the big L2 caches in the higher end CPUs, leading to a confusion of terms. I often drool over the 8MB put into "big iron" CPUs, but then I look into my wallet and decide otherwise (sigh).
Make everyone "technically" a criminal in some manner (draconian laws), and ensure they don't 1) know any better (lousy public education) and 2) don't have time to change things even if they did understand (increasing work hours without compensation).
The irony in the current presidential races is that all the canidates are representing parties that support such a situation. Republicans have their corporate buddy-buddy shenanigans and labor issues, while Democrats have their war on drugs, the war on the environment, and the war on the rich (thicker irony in the fact that all the canidates are wealthy). November 2004 is a lose-lose race for everyone. I don't even have to get into secret society theories about Kerry and Bush, either--the problems are transparent right on the surface for all to see.
Considering the growing disparity between the wealthy and those in poverty today
In most cases, poor people today would appear pretty damn well off compared to a 1890 US texile mill worker or a hooker in Paris in 1810. Just citing a difference between different groups of people without citing that the poor aren't as poor as they used to be is misleading. People keep complaining woe-is-me-this and woe-is-me-that without realizing just how bad it used to be (e.g., the whole Charles-Dickens-type stuff from yesteryear). Also, how much of our current problems could be resolved by simply ending the war on drugs, for example? Or, how about teaching our children about finance, credit, and birth control?
Before people point so many fingers to the rich, look around and make sure those fingers shouldn't be pointing to the public schools and draconian laws that make poor people struggle so much just to stay out of freakin' jail.
If you bring up top in a terminal window sorting by memory usage, it's the program that fills the the whole terminal window from top to bottom left to right.
I know that people are calling the grandparent post a troll, but the poster's complaint about GNOME's configuration has some merit to it. GNOME is very complex from a software configuration management point of view, and compiling software against all the various libraries can really be a PITA. I have to admit that it is easier to build Qt and KDE from source than GTK and GNOME.
In this case, it would be really good to see record labels demostrate good faith by providing this metadata for their customers. If I buy a very tactful Britney Spears "Where's the Beef, Bangalore?" live concert album, and I want to legitimately make a copy on my hard drive, then it would be great to go to the label's website to obtain well-done and correct metadata for that album.
Who actually goes through all the files they ripped from their CDs and enters all the meta-data? I certainly don't, I just name a directory for the composer/artist and some subdirectories for individual works, and stuff the files in there. I can't see how anyone would want to spend a whole day or more organizing a database that probably will get deleted anyway (it's pretty hard to back up all ripped files in a large collection).
how many times have you had to search using the "containing text" features of Windows (or some other OS)?
E.g, find and grep on UNIX. There is no sin in using this search method. Also, real applications, such as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, use human readable file formats when possible. It's crap like Microsoft produces that forces people into relying on unreliable metadata for finding things in a pile of Word and Excel documents. This only application domains that absolutely must have binary file formats might be graphics and databases, but only for performance reasons (who would want to wait for Oracle to parse 100 gigs of XML?).
I think the guys at Microsoft are under the impression that it is easier for a user to add metadata to a file than change its filename and put it in a logical place.
I think they are wrong.
I agree. One other problem is Microsoft's history of using absolute pathnames in their metadata. Who remembers web pages and registry entrys with things like "<where_this_page_is_stored>C:\hard-coded-director y\filename<\where_this_page_is_stored>" Once, I wanted to do a simple thing like move Microsoft Office's install directory to my D: drive...holy shit what a nightmare that was no thanks to the hell that is the Registry.
Also, how many people will be tempted to enter all sorts of metadata to only find it is all lost when they try to use another application or migrate to another computer. People stick to ultra-simple things like UFS inodes and file extension conventions for a reason.
One other point: even Free Software isn't immune to the succubus of metadata. I've seen some pretty dirty stuff in GNOME files, such as hard-coded pathnames. Just try to move stuff around on the filesystem and see what breaks in spite of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. A real pain in the ass.
Even easier than putting into directories is using a portfolio type application, like Picasa (the original version of Apple's iPhoto btw) which allows simple drag and drop library creation.
Would an application like this still allow filesystem-level access? Sometimes, once hundreds or thousands of photos pile up, a little shell script is really and truly necessary to make some types of changes practical in any reasonable amount of time (i.e., I don't want to spend hours selecting "properties" on each image, if all I want to do is change my naming convention, such as using underscores instead of spaces--enter tr and sed to the rescue).
The nation was no better off in the late 18th century than it is now, at least in that respect.
There was no federal income tax in the USA in the late 18th century. The income tax is the most abused method of arbitrarily moving money from one group to a more politically favored one, creating a syndrome of denial and fantasy for those receiving that favortism. It creates a fragile society of people who take for granted the resource needed to keep them living where they are. This applies to both the poor receiving social welfare because of the minimum wage and drug laws and to the wealthy receiving corporate welfare because of their excessive greed and lack of foresight.
This is why Democrats and Republicans are equally bad for the USA. They all do welfare, but only to those people they choose. There is no equity in a system that steals from any group to give it to another whether rich or poor or black or whatever. There is no justice in such a system. There were no Democrats nor Republicans when the USA was founded, look how little time it took for us to forget our roots in this country.
the fundamental simple fact is that politics will not ever allow the government to pay for all the pipe dreams the People think the government should take responsibility for
BTW, nationalized healthcare is the biggest pipe dream of them all. Whose going to pay for all the people who take their damn kid to the ER every week for a runny nose (it's "free" so why the hell not?). Even in countries like the UK and Canada, people have to resort to the private sector to get needed care that the government refuses to them.
As voters you chose bush and must live with that untill Novemember.
Devil's Advocate: vote for a Democrat, so we can have education and welfare programs the government won't pay for, either!
I challenge anyone out there to list three large-scale government programs that actually get adequate funding and have achieved what they aimed to.
People try so damn hard to make this a Democrats vs. Republicans issue, when the fundamental simple fact is that politics will not ever allow the government to pay for all the pipe dreams the People think the government should take responsibility for. If people really and truly want to save the Hubble, form your own company, buy Hubble, send up your own Rutan spaceship, and fix it yourself. Relying on an organization as complex and divided as the US Government to do these things is pretty much a waste of time and energy. The only thing the US Government can do really really well is dealing with national interests on a global scale (1960's race to the moon, beat the damn commies type stuff). Reality is, the Hubble telescope is a speck of sand in the the whole USA-Russia-China-EU love quadrangle, and people whining about it to their national congressmen is really not what the federal government should be listening to at all.
Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM...
Your problem is the inadequate RAM or a truly crappy hard drive, not the CPU. You should properly configure your systems before complaining about performance (256MB and 5400RPM, at least). I've seen Windows XP run perfectly well on a <500MHz CPU with 256MB RAM (even with OpenOffice and Mozilla!).
When they finally get to a machine that it doesn't work...
The problem is that there really is no point where it doesn't work, unless virtual memory is completely exhausted (providing RAM limits, at least). The point where perceived speed becomes intolerable is highly subjective. I don't own any GHz+ computers, but I get by every day just fine. It gets to a point, where all a faster CPU does is speed up compiling, ray tracing, and scientific simulations, until application bloatware catches up to renew the playing field. I think that the bloatware takes a good seven years to catch up. Whether Linux, Solaris, or Windows XP, I really wouldn't want to use anything slower than a 200MHz-class computer now-a-days (even classic RISC CPUs become somewhat unwieldy much slower than this).
Be careful about forming too strong an ideology about post-college life while still in high school. For example, there are lots of kids who after watching one too many shows on the Discovery Channel think they want to be great engineers or marine biologists or whatever, then choose their school based on this dream, go to that school, and burn out after the fifth semester of calculus or find they really wanted to be a musician all along but are now at the wrong school for that. It is perfectly fine to seek a major like Network Engineering, but keep an open mind and don't be at all discouraged if you find it isn't what you expected. One aspect of college is learning about yourself, too.
Also, make sure you can afford the school you choose. School loans are not how kids are supposed to pay for school! If you plan on being in debt for more than just a very few years after school, you need to make a different choice. Once college ends, your priorities suddenly change to think about other debt, such as car loans or mortgages, and school loans are just a big dark cloud that makes these things much less practical. In college, however, do focus on building good credit by paying off credit cards every month and tackling small things like a used car. Also, do get internships or co-ops early on to see beyond the limited scope of a university. Choose a job over summer classes, unless you have no other way to graduate on time. Also, don't go further in school than necessary to get the type of job you want. Graduate school is a romantic notion but not always a good thing in the "real world."
Also, keep things as simple as you can and don't fall for the temptation to take extra classes beyond the regular curriculum unless you have a rediculous IQ and a knack for getting by without sleep. Also, Computer Science, networking, etc. get super-thick in the buzzwords quickly, most of which are little more than passing fashion or marketing hype. Don't let that stress you, as no humans on earth really know them all or even really care. Focus on core competencies, like programming in your school's environment, and then consider certification training or relying on summer work experience if you really need to know Cisco IOS or setting up LDAP/DNS/NIS/whatever under Solaris, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
"The US" is not benefiting from cheap labor....
However, protectionist policies that don't allow the world to stabilize will only make things worse. Providing people with a legislated fantasy that all is well will lead to an overpopulated and ruined nation in the long run. Also, the best way to prevent war is to help keep other nations grow in their wealth. The USA has already bred a politically-indifferent idle middle class, just wait until the rest of the world becomes like that, too. "Jihad? But I don't want to miss tonight's Friends episode, and my pizza will get cold."
My eyes don't have to spend the entire day trying to focus the pixels on the screen, because they're already in focus. And, unlike CRT's, they don't go out of focus over time.
You must have been using a pretty crappy CRT. Moving to a 22" Apple display from a crap CRT would be like getting a magical BJ from three angelic succubus hookers, simultaneously. If you had been using a really nice (and expensive) Trinitron CRT or similar, you might not have had those headaches.
Fuji Film is made in America.
What makes Kodak look even worse is that a lot of Fuji Film is made in South Carolina. Kodak couldn't compete with that?!?
soon LCDs will be cheap
I don't consider LCDs to be expensive, because I'm not in the market for cheap crap monitors. I'm beginning to see really good LCDs in the $700 to $900 range, which is where really good monitors were seven years ago. BTW, I'm still using a seven-year-old $700 17" CRT monitor--it's still bright, crisp, runs at high frequencies, and is very very usable. When my CRT finally dies off, I'll go get a $700 LCD for the next seven or more years.
Evolution (that organisms change with time as a result of alterations in genotype) is a simple and elegant fact that anyone can observe by picking up rocks and looking at the fossils.
It can also be observed by visiting very rural areas--sometimes only a few hours away from a city--and seeing different traits among the people there relative to more familiar urban people. Humans have noticibly evolved even in recent history.
What happens if you live your live believing in the christian god, and it turns out that in fact the gods are norse?
Actually, God is a Bhuddist.
The reality of "faith" is that most people are believing in things that really are absurd: cities of gold, angels, God "watching" everything we do. For instance, how can any human, after death, expect to really be in their same physical form to attend a golden city in the sky with all their relatives and Spot the dog? There are simply many many many things about this universe that we have no notion of, and we have absolutely no idea what the real Heaven would be like. All the descriptions in the Bible can be taken only to be approximations or comparative descriptions of what reality really and truly might be, but taking any of it literally is irresponsible. So, being faithful isn't a problem at all; rather, the problem is people believing that their beliefs are fact. These are the people that the "anti-religion" people are up against--they really aren't up against religion itself.
1 MB is simply too large for the L1 to have a reasonable access time.
At first I was thinking this was a troll, but my better senses prevailed. CPUs really do have small L1 caches (like 32KB). The grandparent post was thinking of the big L2 caches in the higher end CPUs, leading to a confusion of terms. I often drool over the 8MB put into "big iron" CPUs, but then I look into my wallet and decide otherwise (sigh).
Make everyone "technically" a criminal in some manner (draconian laws), and ensure they don't 1) know any better (lousy public education) and 2) don't have time to change things even if they did understand (increasing work hours without compensation).
The irony in the current presidential races is that all the canidates are representing parties that support such a situation. Republicans have their corporate buddy-buddy shenanigans and labor issues, while Democrats have their war on drugs, the war on the environment, and the war on the rich (thicker irony in the fact that all the canidates are wealthy). November 2004 is a lose-lose race for everyone. I don't even have to get into secret society theories about Kerry and Bush, either--the problems are transparent right on the surface for all to see.
Considering the growing disparity between the wealthy and those in poverty today
In most cases, poor people today would appear pretty damn well off compared to a 1890 US texile mill worker or a hooker in Paris in 1810. Just citing a difference between different groups of people without citing that the poor aren't as poor as they used to be is misleading. People keep complaining woe-is-me-this and woe-is-me-that without realizing just how bad it used to be (e.g., the whole Charles-Dickens-type stuff from yesteryear). Also, how much of our current problems could be resolved by simply ending the war on drugs, for example? Or, how about teaching our children about finance, credit, and birth control?
Before people point so many fingers to the rich, look around and make sure those fingers shouldn't be pointing to the public schools and draconian laws that make poor people struggle so much just to stay out of freakin' jail.
What Nautilus?
If you bring up top in a terminal window sorting by memory usage, it's the program that fills the the whole terminal window from top to bottom left to right.
I know that people are calling the grandparent post a troll, but the poster's complaint about GNOME's configuration has some merit to it. GNOME is very complex from a software configuration management point of view, and compiling software against all the various libraries can really be a PITA. I have to admit that it is easier to build Qt and KDE from source than GTK and GNOME.
This is where metadata sharing comes in.
In this case, it would be really good to see record labels demostrate good faith by providing this metadata for their customers. If I buy a very tactful Britney Spears "Where's the Beef, Bangalore?" live concert album, and I want to legitimately make a copy on my hard drive, then it would be great to go to the label's website to obtain well-done and correct metadata for that album.
Who actually goes through all the files they ripped from their CDs and enters all the meta-data? I certainly don't, I just name a directory for the composer/artist and some subdirectories for individual works, and stuff the files in there. I can't see how anyone would want to spend a whole day or more organizing a database that probably will get deleted anyway (it's pretty hard to back up all ripped files in a large collection).
how many times have you had to search using the "containing text" features of Windows (or some other OS)?
E.g, find and grep on UNIX. There is no sin in using this search method. Also, real applications, such as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, use human readable file formats when possible. It's crap like Microsoft produces that forces people into relying on unreliable metadata for finding things in a pile of Word and Excel documents. This only application domains that absolutely must have binary file formats might be graphics and databases, but only for performance reasons (who would want to wait for Oracle to parse 100 gigs of XML?).
I think the guys at Microsoft are under the impression that it is easier for a user to add metadata to a file than change its filename and put it in a logical place.
r y\filename<\where_this_page_is_stored>"
I think they are wrong.
I agree. One other problem is Microsoft's history of using absolute pathnames in their metadata. Who remembers web pages and registry entrys with things like "<where_this_page_is_stored>C:\hard-coded-directo
Once, I wanted to do a simple thing like move Microsoft Office's install directory to my D: drive...holy shit what a nightmare that was no thanks to the hell that is the Registry.
Also, how many people will be tempted to enter all sorts of metadata to only find it is all lost when they try to use another application or migrate to another computer. People stick to ultra-simple things like UFS inodes and file extension conventions for a reason.
One other point: even Free Software isn't immune to the succubus of metadata. I've seen some pretty dirty stuff in GNOME files, such as hard-coded pathnames. Just try to move stuff around on the filesystem and see what breaks in spite of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. A real pain in the ass.
Even easier than putting into directories is using a portfolio type application, like Picasa (the original version of Apple's iPhoto btw) which allows simple drag and drop library creation.
Would an application like this still allow filesystem-level access? Sometimes, once hundreds or thousands of photos pile up, a little shell script is really and truly necessary to make some types of changes practical in any reasonable amount of time (i.e., I don't want to spend hours selecting "properties" on each image, if all I want to do is change my naming convention, such as using underscores instead of spaces--enter tr and sed to the rescue).
The nation was no better off in the late 18th century than it is now, at least in that respect.
There was no federal income tax in the USA in the late 18th century. The income tax is the most abused method of arbitrarily moving money from one group to a more politically favored one, creating a syndrome of denial and fantasy for those receiving that favortism. It creates a fragile society of people who take for granted the resource needed to keep them living where they are. This applies to both the poor receiving social welfare because of the minimum wage and drug laws and to the wealthy receiving corporate welfare because of their excessive greed and lack of foresight.
This is why Democrats and Republicans are equally bad for the USA. They all do welfare, but only to those people they choose. There is no equity in a system that steals from any group to give it to another whether rich or poor or black or whatever. There is no justice in such a system. There were no Democrats nor Republicans when the USA was founded, look how little time it took for us to forget our roots in this country.
the fundamental simple fact is that politics will not ever allow the government to pay for all the pipe dreams the People think the government should take responsibility for
BTW, nationalized healthcare is the biggest pipe dream of them all. Whose going to pay for all the people who take their damn kid to the ER every week for a runny nose (it's "free" so why the hell not?). Even in countries like the UK and Canada, people have to resort to the private sector to get needed care that the government refuses to them.
As voters you chose bush and must live with that untill Novemember.
Devil's Advocate: vote for a Democrat, so we can have education and welfare programs the government won't pay for, either!
I challenge anyone out there to list three large-scale government programs that actually get adequate funding and have achieved what they aimed to.
People try so damn hard to make this a Democrats vs. Republicans issue, when the fundamental simple fact is that politics will not ever allow the government to pay for all the pipe dreams the People think the government should take responsibility for. If people really and truly want to save the Hubble, form your own company, buy Hubble, send up your own Rutan spaceship, and fix it yourself. Relying on an organization as complex and divided as the US Government to do these things is pretty much a waste of time and energy. The only thing the US Government can do really really well is dealing with national interests on a global scale (1960's race to the moon, beat the damn commies type stuff). Reality is, the Hubble telescope is a speck of sand in the the whole USA-Russia-China-EU love quadrangle, and people whining about it to their national congressmen is really not what the federal government should be listening to at all.
I'm outraged, let's just spend 10 Billion USD on football because apparently people care more about that than learning about our universe.
Space Football. You can have your cake and eat it, too!
Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM...
Your problem is the inadequate RAM or a truly crappy hard drive, not the CPU. You should properly configure your systems before complaining about performance (256MB and 5400RPM, at least). I've seen Windows XP run perfectly well on a <500MHz CPU with 256MB RAM (even with OpenOffice and Mozilla!).
When they finally get to a machine that it doesn't work...
The problem is that there really is no point where it doesn't work, unless virtual memory is completely exhausted (providing RAM limits, at least). The point where perceived speed becomes intolerable is highly subjective. I don't own any GHz+ computers, but I get by every day just fine. It gets to a point, where all a faster CPU does is speed up compiling, ray tracing, and scientific simulations, until application bloatware catches up to renew the playing field. I think that the bloatware takes a good seven years to catch up. Whether Linux, Solaris, or Windows XP, I really wouldn't want to use anything slower than a 200MHz-class computer now-a-days (even classic RISC CPUs become somewhat unwieldy much slower than this).
Be careful about forming too strong an ideology about post-college life while still in high school. For example, there are lots of kids who after watching one too many shows on the Discovery Channel think they want to be great engineers or marine biologists or whatever, then choose their school based on this dream, go to that school, and burn out after the fifth semester of calculus or find they really wanted to be a musician all along but are now at the wrong school for that. It is perfectly fine to seek a major like Network Engineering, but keep an open mind and don't be at all discouraged if you find it isn't what you expected. One aspect of college is learning about yourself, too.
Also, make sure you can afford the school you choose. School loans are not how kids are supposed to pay for school! If you plan on being in debt for more than just a very few years after school, you need to make a different choice. Once college ends, your priorities suddenly change to think about other debt, such as car loans or mortgages, and school loans are just a big dark cloud that makes these things much less practical. In college, however, do focus on building good credit by paying off credit cards every month and tackling small things like a used car. Also, do get internships or co-ops early on to see beyond the limited scope of a university. Choose a job over summer classes, unless you have no other way to graduate on time. Also, don't go further in school than necessary to get the type of job you want. Graduate school is a romantic notion but not always a good thing in the "real world."
Also, keep things as simple as you can and don't fall for the temptation to take extra classes beyond the regular curriculum unless you have a rediculous IQ and a knack for getting by without sleep. Also, Computer Science, networking, etc. get super-thick in the buzzwords quickly, most of which are little more than passing fashion or marketing hype. Don't let that stress you, as no humans on earth really know them all or even really care. Focus on core competencies, like programming in your school's environment, and then consider certification training or relying on summer work experience if you really need to know Cisco IOS or setting up LDAP/DNS/NIS/whatever under Solaris, for example.