And the last time I did Upgrade Version on Ubuntu, it took an hour just to download the new files.
Perhaps, but did you have to intervene while it did that? How long the computer takes to do its stuff is less important: the question is how long the human job takes, and that is indeed only a few minutes.
I can't believe sueing people like the RIAA does is a viable business model. The costs must outweigh the benefits by far. Even if the RIAA manages to win a case against a poor grandmother who has never heard of P2P and the like, she won't be able to pay the fine because the costs of defending herself have bankrupted her for good.
It's a terror campaign. The idea is to intimidate the public so that they're afraid to pirate. It doesn't matter if they lose money suing one victim, if a thousand others are thereby frightened away from piracy.
I just read an article yesterday stating that legal music downloads are growing faster than illegal ones. The only explanation is that priacy is just not as rampant as it's being made out to be. In reality, most people (read: average consumer) would sooner go out and pay for a physical disc instead of figuring out how to pirate the movie/music.
Not necessarily. It may be that the pirate market is completely saturated. Utterly rampant, beyond all recognition. Maybe everyone in the world who might ever have become a pirate is now a pirate. Growth is now tied to bandwidth and storage capacity, and to the natural limit on how much music and movies any given pirate can actually ever consume. These people are a lost generation - they've lost the sense that music is something that's worth buying. £10+ for an album? One album? Not even an entire discography of a band's 30-year career? Please! Oh, they'll buy tickets and T-shirts and hoodies and merchandise, but the music itself? What a bizarre notion that would be!
But there is still a large market of people who still think of music as a product that is to be paid for. These people are moving away from picking up a CD single in Woolworths and towards downloading. But they'd never think of going to TPB. So legal downloading is attracting new punters, while piracy already attracted its entire market.
The relative sizes of these groups I don't know. Pirates would be the tech early adopters - they've been at it since the Napster heyday and the first mp3 portables. Legit customers would be coming late to the party - less tech savvy, more trusting of the propaganda about viruses and terrorism, more likely to think they should pay. They'd be the baby boomers, so there's a lot of room to grow the market... but those guys either have huge music collections already, and don't want to buy Sgt. Pepper again, or don't have much music because they never cared much for it in the first place and aren't about to start buying now.
Myself, I think recorded music is doomed as a product and has a future only as marketing for tours and merchandise and for an image.
That's exactly how the slave trade was abolished. Peaceful campaigners working lawfully and within the system. Slavery was abolished throughout the Empire in 1834 and the Royal Navy sent after any ship of any nation that dared continue the trade.
It is a shame that current physicists are using valuable resources to search for "life" within such a limited framework. When we have available concepts of non-water-staged life and post-water-staged life upon which we can draw.
We have available concepts of exotic forms of life, yes. Speculation on paper. Science fiction. Who knows, they might work out. On the other hand, we have a working example of water-based life. We know that plan works.
If exotic life exists in the Galaxy, what should we be looking for? We know how Earth chemistry works, so we know what chemicals to look for in the spectrum of a planet's atmosphere - we'll know such a living planet when we see one. But let there be a planet bearing replicating structures - life - so alien that they don't use water or oxygen or carbon dioxide. How will we recognise its signature in the sky? Where do we even begin?
As for any Kardashev 2+ civilisation: they should be obvious. They're capturing the full power of their sun, so they have a star's worth of heat to radiate away. Then you're looking for something with the luminosity of a main sequence star, but in the infrared, diffused around the outer radiating surface of whatever megastructure that civilisation uses, and lacking the distinctive spectroscopic fingerprint of a stellar atmosphere. As a matter of fact, there's a whole lot of infrared astronomy going on at the moment; lot of data being gathered, mass surveys of large slices of sky. I wonder if it might be worth programming something to troll through all the raw images for such an object, if only as a cool hacker project?
BitTorrent was created by one man. If he had created a system that included some way to prevent piracy, it would have been a straightforward job for another man to remove that defect, and create a BitTorrent 2 without it. Then BitTorrent 2 would have become popular worldwide. It's not that techies are all hard at work filling the world with villainous P2P apps - it's just that whenever one does create such a thing, the great masses of the public begin using it with enormous gusto.
You ask that nobody, anywhere in the world, ever, should write any software that transmits data over networks, without seeing to it that the media cartels have power of veto over what it transmits. I wish you all the worst of luck in achieving this.
Both socialism and capitalism have their places. Capitalism wouldn't have gotten us to the Moon in the 60s.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the capitalists who reached the Moon? The Socialists were the first in orbit, but could never get the N1 rocket working right so they never sent cosmonauts beyond LEO.
I might consider upgrading from my 2MB VGA after seeing it in action...:)
And what exactly is wrong with 1024x768x24bpp?
(No, seriously. I used that very setup from 1995 to 2001. Then I got a PCI Voodoo4 cheap because 3dfx had just gone bust, and then got drunk one night and bought a 19" CRT on an auction site, and discovered the joy of 1600x1200.)
particularly given the number of devout Christians who contributed to science: Mendel, Newton, etc.
Newton was in fact a heretic: he denied the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He kept this pretty quiet, but it's thought he may well have been a Socinian - he certainly owned several volumes of their philosophy.
sorry, but that's stupid -how many pop culture references from 1923 are relevant to TODAY's pop culture
More than you'd think. In 1923, Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan and the Golden Lion, A. A. Milne published The House at Pooh Corner, Felix Salten published Bambi, A Life in the Woods, and P. G. Wodehouse published The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith. Pretty much everyone recorded one version or another of Yes, We Have No Bananas, and the year also saw the Charleston dance craze. Charlie Chaplin ate his shoe in The Gold Rush. And to the delight of brewers and distillers everywhere, Brendan Behan was born.
I wonder whether this how-to will enable me build a cluster consisting of PIIs. I have 11 lying around.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
Then build one.
I doubt the performance will be awfully impressive by today's standards - you'll be outdone by pretty much any 2008 desktop machine - but it'll be an interesting project anyway. Let us know how you get on.
I mean, when was the last major revolution in the Western world? The French Revolution?
Depends what you call 'Western'. The French Revolution ended in 1799. Since then, a large part of the USA broke away and fought its own unsuccessful war of independence from 1861-65. The Irish Free State was established in 1922, after violent revolts on and off since 1916 culminating in a downright vicious terrorist campaign. Mussolini came to power in Italy in the same year, at the head of an armed coup d'etat by his Fascist party, with substantial popular support. In 1932 an army of war veterans marched on Washington to demand payments they were owed; there they were defeated by the military and failed to achieve their aims. In 1956 Hungary revolted against the Soviets, to little avail. Cuba revolted against the US-dominated gangster regime of Batista and installed a Communist state in 1959. Czechoslovakia revolted, unsuccessfully, against Soviet domination in 1968; in the same year Socialist strikes and sit-ins in Paris came close to bringing down the French state. In 1989 the success of Solidarity in achieving reform in Poland triggered a wave of revolt across eastern Europe and ultimately brought down the Soviet Union; many of these nations are now full EU members. Finally, bit by bit during the 1990s, Yugoslavia was torn apart by a series of ethnic secessionist movements and a long saga of bloody warfare.
That's just off the top of my head, cheating a little with Wikipedia to get the dates right. I'm sure a little research would turn up a whole lot more. Really, the twentieth century is one long saga of revolts and revolutions.
That's why there is a theory of gravity. But there's a law of gravity also. The law of gravity has been observed since the beginning of time, correct? What exactly causes gravity is still a mystery.
Actually, the 'law of universal gravitation' is F = GMm / r^2. Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity. It's wrong. Close enough for interplanetary navigation, but a little off for the orbit of Mercury, and way off for the gravitational field near collapsed stars. For those we use the General Theory of Relativity.
There are other 'laws' in science. Ohm's Law, for instance, V = IR. When did you last lay your hands on a perfectly Ohmic resistor? Or how about the ideal gas law, PV = nRT? Great, if you've got an ideal gas handy. Shame there's no such thing.
A 'law' is usually a simple mathematical statement holding under certain idealised circumstances. It doesn't mean it's any more accurate than something called a 'theory'.
we were asked to identify our "ethnicity," whereever the "ethnicity" was a quarter or more of our ancestry - as part of the initial efforts at "affirmative action" I think. Anyway the choices were "White, Black, Native American, Iberian, and Other." Since my mother was half Portugese, I put down Iberian.
You only put down one? If they're asking for ethnicity where it's a quarter or more, shouldn't they put space on the form for up to four answers? Otherwise someone's going to come along who's Indian/Irish/Black/Chinese and cause all kinds of confusion.
As should saying creationism is false should. Neither can be proved by the ways of science and anyone trying to push a political or religious agenda under the cover of science should be written out of the profession. Current science is only even believed to be valid back to the big bang and can say zero about anything before that...
Creationists typically claim that the universe was created over a six day period some six thousand years ago. If we are in agreement that current science is valid back to the epoch of the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago, then we are in agreement that creationism is false.
There are plenty of people who think that the scientific account of the history of the Earth and the Universe is broadly correct, but that perhaps God programmed the laws of physics and set up the physical constants, pressed the detonator for the Big Bang, and then sat back to watch the show. But that's not what we typically mean by 'creationism'.
In the winter I leave my computers on. I don't think I am "loosing" any energy that way since it's used to heat my house.
That's valid but inefficient. Consider: you could heat your house by running your PC. Then the PC is consuming electricity, which is generated by a power station burning fossil fuels many miles away. Energy is wasted in the furnace, wasted in the turbine, wasted in the transformers and in the high-voltage cables - you're burning a whole lot of fuel to get that heat. Whereas if you go and switch on the boiler for the central heating you're burning fuel on site and getting heat with near-perfect efficiency.
If you're going to be using your PC anyway, then its waste heat is well and good - it means your thermostat eases off on the boiler and you save on the gas bill. But don't just leave the computer on because you want the heat.
I'm confident that it's 'toeing' - the expression implies conformity and obedience, standing strictly in order, not out forward from the group nor behind, toes exactly on the line. But there's a case occasionally made for 'towing' - a man towing a canal barge would walk in a straight line along the bank, pulling the boat behind him. I disagree with this, since it would seem to make the phrase refer to hard work rather than to conformity, but it's an argument often made.
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Perhaps, but did you have to intervene while it did that? How long the computer takes to do its stuff is less important: the question is how long the human job takes, and that is indeed only a few minutes.
I thought Windows didn't have virtual desktops?
It's a terror campaign. The idea is to intimidate the public so that they're afraid to pirate. It doesn't matter if they lose money suing one victim, if a thousand others are thereby frightened away from piracy.
The RIAA may walk a rocky road if it wishes, but such journeys typically end badly. They'll be robbed blind in Dublin and then beaten up by Scousers.
Is there that much recorded music in the world?
Not necessarily. It may be that the pirate market is completely saturated. Utterly rampant, beyond all recognition. Maybe everyone in the world who might ever have become a pirate is now a pirate. Growth is now tied to bandwidth and storage capacity, and to the natural limit on how much music and movies any given pirate can actually ever consume. These people are a lost generation - they've lost the sense that music is something that's worth buying. £10+ for an album? One album? Not even an entire discography of a band's 30-year career? Please! Oh, they'll buy tickets and T-shirts and hoodies and merchandise, but the music itself? What a bizarre notion that would be!
But there is still a large market of people who still think of music as a product that is to be paid for. These people are moving away from picking up a CD single in Woolworths and towards downloading. But they'd never think of going to TPB. So legal downloading is attracting new punters, while piracy already attracted its entire market.
The relative sizes of these groups I don't know. Pirates would be the tech early adopters - they've been at it since the Napster heyday and the first mp3 portables. Legit customers would be coming late to the party - less tech savvy, more trusting of the propaganda about viruses and terrorism, more likely to think they should pay. They'd be the baby boomers, so there's a lot of room to grow the market... but those guys either have huge music collections already, and don't want to buy Sgt. Pepper again, or don't have much music because they never cared much for it in the first place and aren't about to start buying now.
Myself, I think recorded music is doomed as a product and has a future only as marketing for tours and merchandise and for an image.
That's exactly how the slave trade was abolished. Peaceful campaigners working lawfully and within the system. Slavery was abolished throughout the Empire in 1834 and the Royal Navy sent after any ship of any nation that dared continue the trade.
We have available concepts of exotic forms of life, yes. Speculation on paper. Science fiction. Who knows, they might work out. On the other hand, we have a working example of water-based life. We know that plan works.
If exotic life exists in the Galaxy, what should we be looking for? We know how Earth chemistry works, so we know what chemicals to look for in the spectrum of a planet's atmosphere - we'll know such a living planet when we see one. But let there be a planet bearing replicating structures - life - so alien that they don't use water or oxygen or carbon dioxide. How will we recognise its signature in the sky? Where do we even begin?
As for any Kardashev 2+ civilisation: they should be obvious. They're capturing the full power of their sun, so they have a star's worth of heat to radiate away. Then you're looking for something with the luminosity of a main sequence star, but in the infrared, diffused around the outer radiating surface of whatever megastructure that civilisation uses, and lacking the distinctive spectroscopic fingerprint of a stellar atmosphere. As a matter of fact, there's a whole lot of infrared astronomy going on at the moment; lot of data being gathered, mass surveys of large slices of sky. I wonder if it might be worth programming something to troll through all the raw images for such an object, if only as a cool hacker project?
Good luck with that, Cnut.
BitTorrent was created by one man. If he had created a system that included some way to prevent piracy, it would have been a straightforward job for another man to remove that defect, and create a BitTorrent 2 without it. Then BitTorrent 2 would have become popular worldwide. It's not that techies are all hard at work filling the world with villainous P2P apps - it's just that whenever one does create such a thing, the great masses of the public begin using it with enormous gusto.
You ask that nobody, anywhere in the world, ever, should write any software that transmits data over networks, without seeing to it that the media cartels have power of veto over what it transmits. I wish you all the worst of luck in achieving this.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the capitalists who reached the Moon? The Socialists were the first in orbit, but could never get the N1 rocket working right so they never sent cosmonauts beyond LEO.
That would be why it gives rules on how they should treat their slaves.
Oh, well that's all right then.
And what exactly is wrong with 1024x768x24bpp?
(No, seriously. I used that very setup from 1995 to 2001. Then I got a PCI Voodoo4 cheap because 3dfx had just gone bust, and then got drunk one night and bought a 19" CRT on an auction site, and discovered the joy of 1600x1200.)
Newton was in fact a heretic: he denied the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He kept this pretty quiet, but it's thought he may well have been a Socinian - he certainly owned several volumes of their philosophy.
Smallpox would beg to differ.
More than you'd think. In 1923, Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan and the Golden Lion, A. A. Milne published The House at Pooh Corner, Felix Salten published Bambi, A Life in the Woods, and P. G. Wodehouse published The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith. Pretty much everyone recorded one version or another of Yes, We Have No Bananas, and the year also saw the Charleston dance craze. Charlie Chaplin ate his shoe in The Gold Rush. And to the delight of brewers and distillers everywhere, Brendan Behan was born.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
Then build one.
I doubt the performance will be awfully impressive by today's standards - you'll be outdone by pretty much any 2008 desktop machine - but it'll be an interesting project anyway. Let us know how you get on.
Depends what you call 'Western'. The French Revolution ended in 1799. Since then, a large part of the USA broke away and fought its own unsuccessful war of independence from 1861-65. The Irish Free State was established in 1922, after violent revolts on and off since 1916 culminating in a downright vicious terrorist campaign. Mussolini came to power in Italy in the same year, at the head of an armed coup d'etat by his Fascist party, with substantial popular support. In 1932 an army of war veterans marched on Washington to demand payments they were owed; there they were defeated by the military and failed to achieve their aims. In 1956 Hungary revolted against the Soviets, to little avail. Cuba revolted against the US-dominated gangster regime of Batista and installed a Communist state in 1959. Czechoslovakia revolted, unsuccessfully, against Soviet domination in 1968; in the same year Socialist strikes and sit-ins in Paris came close to bringing down the French state. In 1989 the success of Solidarity in achieving reform in Poland triggered a wave of revolt across eastern Europe and ultimately brought down the Soviet Union; many of these nations are now full EU members. Finally, bit by bit during the 1990s, Yugoslavia was torn apart by a series of ethnic secessionist movements and a long saga of bloody warfare.
That's just off the top of my head, cheating a little with Wikipedia to get the dates right. I'm sure a little research would turn up a whole lot more. Really, the twentieth century is one long saga of revolts and revolutions.
Balrog was a ponce with a big claw. The boxer was M. Bison. Because his character design was a blatant rip-off of, well, M. Tyson.
After?
If half the world is gone, what possible benefit is there to obliterating the other half as well? In that situation your deterrent has already failed.
Actually, the 'law of universal gravitation' is F = GMm / r^2. Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity. It's wrong. Close enough for interplanetary navigation, but a little off for the orbit of Mercury, and way off for the gravitational field near collapsed stars. For those we use the General Theory of Relativity.
There are other 'laws' in science. Ohm's Law, for instance, V = IR. When did you last lay your hands on a perfectly Ohmic resistor? Or how about the ideal gas law, PV = nRT? Great, if you've got an ideal gas handy. Shame there's no such thing.
A 'law' is usually a simple mathematical statement holding under certain idealised circumstances. It doesn't mean it's any more accurate than something called a 'theory'.
You only put down one? If they're asking for ethnicity where it's a quarter or more, shouldn't they put space on the form for up to four answers? Otherwise someone's going to come along who's Indian/Irish/Black/Chinese and cause all kinds of confusion.
Creationists typically claim that the universe was created over a six day period some six thousand years ago. If we are in agreement that current science is valid back to the epoch of the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago, then we are in agreement that creationism is false.
There are plenty of people who think that the scientific account of the history of the Earth and the Universe is broadly correct, but that perhaps God programmed the laws of physics and set up the physical constants, pressed the detonator for the Big Bang, and then sat back to watch the show. But that's not what we typically mean by 'creationism'.
That's valid but inefficient. Consider: you could heat your house by running your PC. Then the PC is consuming electricity, which is generated by a power station burning fossil fuels many miles away. Energy is wasted in the furnace, wasted in the turbine, wasted in the transformers and in the high-voltage cables - you're burning a whole lot of fuel to get that heat. Whereas if you go and switch on the boiler for the central heating you're burning fuel on site and getting heat with near-perfect efficiency.
If you're going to be using your PC anyway, then its waste heat is well and good - it means your thermostat eases off on the boiler and you save on the gas bill. But don't just leave the computer on because you want the heat.
I'm confident that it's 'toeing' - the expression implies conformity and obedience, standing strictly in order, not out forward from the group nor behind, toes exactly on the line. But there's a case occasionally made for 'towing' - a man towing a canal barge would walk in a straight line along the bank, pulling the boat behind him. I disagree with this, since it would seem to make the phrase refer to hard work rather than to conformity, but it's an argument often made.