Without preservatives (including ones with some unfortunate problematic effects like nitrates), thousands of people would die in food poisoning each year in US alone. Without preservatives, much more food would be lost, meaning that current world population could not be fed
You statement is true in the general case, for the entire world population. All well and good for the 3rd world nations of the world where there's food shortages. I however live in the United States where there's a food glut. Spoiled food doesn't concern me as I just won't eat it. I have a nose that's pretty damn good at detecting spoilage. I also have this invention called fire, which produces heat which kills bacteria. For when I do want to preserve food, freezing is cheap and available as a preservation method.
I'm not trying to write a scientific paper on the ill effects of preservatives, just avoid risk. I don't have time to research every new food additive that comes along, and I sure as hell don't have ultimate faith in the FDA. Why should I take that risk, however small and unknown when it doesn't provide me with ANYTHING? Nutrasweet, olestra, christ, I'd rather eat the sugar and fat in reasonable amounts than eat something that degrades into formaldyhyde in-vivo (nutrasweet), and robs me of fat soluable vitamins (olestra).
The testing on laptops was terrible. I had a lot of problems getting the synaptics touchpad to work properly, but eventually I got it to work like it should. There were also some strange problems with compiling the linux-wlan module, but they were solved after re-installing the kernel source. I also had a couple minor problems with the changeover from XFree86 to Xorg (naming problems), and ACPI loading where APM should have (both are competing power management standards).
Everything is fixed now, and FC2 even solved two annoying problems I had with FC1. Those being namely a nasty sound playing the first time a sound played, and the whole machine locking up every time I took out my wireless PCMCIA card. I will say that FC2 isn't for a beginner linux user as they'd probbably never be able to solve all the problems I had to.
The minor 2.6 kernel incompatibilities still are being shaken out a bit, but if you're willing to read through bugzilla a bit you should be able to fix all the problems and come out with a nicer system.
I say it's just food, and life is too short to spend hours a day on shopping, preparing, and cleaning for a single meal that only feeds two people.
Sadly this statement is the way the majority of the population thinks about eating. Food is what goes into your body, and eventually becomes the stuff you're made of. You may not value the taste, but you certainly should value the nutritional value of it. Most processed food like TV dinners contains a huge of amount of saturated fat and/or trans-fat, both major contributors to heart disease. Not to mention all the preservatives and other crap that's likely not very good for you.
The value in cooking and making your own food is an investment in your own health. What's more important than your, and your wifes health?
I can tell you the way the music died... It died when the musicians became the money-grubbing motherfuckers that most of them were told to become. They want to make millions of dollars and they have the conglomerates brainwash their fans into thinking that it is acceptable!
I don't know about all that... I think there's certainly some musicians that became money-grubbing scum, the problem is the music industry latched onto the ones that did what they told them. I put the blame for the decline of music squarely on the industry who's interested in short term profits at the cost of the long term. They market everything toward 15-19 year olds, and aren't willing to take any risks. The radio is just an extension of the same "play it safe, stick to the format" media giants.
Personally, I think the most effective solution is to convince people that if they break such-and-such a law, they will get caught. Presently, most ways to back up that threat involve trampling on civil liberties.
Except in the case of virus and worm writers, unless you're amazingly stupid there's almost no chance you're going to get caught. The situtation is as if anyone with a small amount of knowledge could walk up to a payphone and wreak havoc on the phone network.
In this case the only way you're going to stop people doing damage from releasing viruses is to change the computing environment. The OS shouldn't run apps unless they've been signed by an administrator. For business computing the administrator isn't the user. People will bitch and moan about not being able to run their weather app, but too bad. If you're not capable not spreading viruses, you're not capable of administrating your machine. Do we let general users mess with the inner workings of tools they don't understand like a typewriter? No, of course not. Why then do we let users install apps, run cutesey executables that were sent by Mom, etc? Until this practice stops, you're not going to stop the massive email spreading worms.
Except the patent covers recording it onto a "event capture module" edited live, and then put onto media. Unless someone was recording concerts to some media, editing them, and then distributing them just after the concert the Grateful Dead prior art wouldn't apply.
I'm certain there's other prior art though as this patent was only filed in 2001. This is also an obvious invention, so it all adds up to a very shaky patent.
That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that's a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast
What goes up fast must come down fast? Unless I'm missing something, low earth orbit still means going several thousand miles an hour. The rate you ascend at has nothing to do with how quickly you'd come down at.
DVD is too mature for a competing standard to take over, even in China. The non-Asian movie industry isn't going to stand for two standards, and just won't re-release perfectly good DVDs on EVD. It's not as if DVD was released yesterday and it hasn't gained a foothold.
Chinese consumers will see DVD players, EVD players, and DVD+EVD players and will choose either the DVD or dual standard players because the price difference will be minimal and they'll want to play DVD movies. EVD might be somewhat accepted as a second rung standard for Chinese movies, but as a replacement for DVD (and manufacturers wanting to avoid royalties) it'll fail.
I wasn't exactly clear since I thought the conclusion was obvious, but none of those distributions has any real nationalism in it at all. The company that collected the software and put it together is Chinese, American, French, etc. But the software itself is about as national as the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of all the effort put into any Linux distribution is entirely international. China picking Linux isn't a nationalistic choice at all, it's one of embracing the international software development community.
I suppose I wasn't explicit, but the whole point was that the article implied that "Red Flag Linux" was a Chinese invention, while the truth is it's an invention that's about 98% foreign, and 2% China.
Home users don't program nor do they have legacy code. Obviously the movement towards the linux desktop is making the linux environment similar enough to windows that the home user doesn't care.
Umm.. uh. Where did I get into the whole rant about the failings of linux? I'm talking about the possibility of building a supercomputer that runs Windows, not about linux vs windows. Try to keep your criticisms based upon what is said, not on what you imagine.
It has been promoting as more secure the homegrown Red Flag Linux, based on an open-code operating system.
First Linux was invented by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and now Linus is Chinese. Methinks the article author doesn't get it with respect to linux.
As far as the other technolgies, I think the EVD standard is doomed to failure. People are going to want DVDs from abroad, and a player that only does EVD isn't going to sell. The mobile phone standard doesn't matter. The US has gone its own way with cell phone standards and the sky hasn't fallen yet. There's not a lot of compelling reasons why mobile phone standards have to be compatible with the rest of the world, and China is definately big enough to set their own standard.
As far as this cry of "nationalism", that just sounds like posturing to justify this to a certain communist segment of the Chinese populace. Setting your own standards and avoiding patent fees sounds like capitalism to me.
I'm sure ties can carry nasty bugs, but there are worse things in the wards.
I guess, but that's hardly the point. Not wearing a necktie is a one time change that's very easy to implement and easy to verify. Getting doctors to wash their hands more is something that requires constant vigilance and is very hard to verify. The fact that there are other things that will reduce hospital disease spreading more effectively is beside the point. It's not as if you can't do both.
Also everyone knows that hands spread disease, so more education is going to have minimal impact. The necktie disease vector is far less known I'm sure, so educating doctors about this would go a long way.
Sounds like a hardware problem to me. 2000 is a fairly well designed OS with memory protection, pre-emptive multi-tasking, etc. It's also possible it's a driver issue. You can very easily have a mostly working system that crashes when stressed. The same thing applies to linux as well.
A lot of people seem to be concentrating on the "windows crashes a lot" idea. That's not quite a fair judgement of windows anymore. The only time I've had problems with Windows 2000 and above is poorly written drivers, or anti-virus software. As long as you choose hardware with proven drivers and don't run anti-virus software (firewall it and run minimal services and no IE) Windows should be very stable.
With that said, I think there's other problems with windows as a supercomputing cluster. The first I can think of is lack of a low-bandwidth interface. Linux you can ssh into and get results, control processes, etc. Windows requires a high bandwidth terminal services. In other words it's harder to control remotely.
Other people have brought up the licensing costs, but I'm sure MS would offer huge deals just to get their foot in the door.
I think the biggest problem is just historical and cultural though. The scientific community has a 30 year history with Unix, is familiar with programming in that environment, and has a lot of legacy code that's written for it. They just aren't going to take to a windows environment easily at all.
I can't speak for the UK, but since gas prices have gone up in the US for the past few months, SUV sales have dropped considerably. I also just heard a story about how the price of the criminally large and gas guzzling Hummer dropped recently because of low sales.
With gas prices so high in the UK I could see how increased prices wouldn't affect the very wealthy. In the US, however it's the middle class that own these evil, gas guzzling, more-likely-to-kill-people vehicles.
I listened to many of the blind tests. I have a decent sound card (Nvidia n-force), a high quality receiver, and decent, but not excellent quality speakers (i.e. $200 bookshelf speakers I bought a few years ago). I had a very hard time telling most of the samples from the reference implementation. Even the ones I thought I could tell a difference I wasn't sure.
I do remember a few years ago listening to really crappy implementations of mp3 codecs and hearing seriously awful artifacts. Considering that most samples scored far above 4, with 5 being imperceptible and 4 being perceptible but not annoying I think the results of this test mean that your choice of codec doesn't make much difference. Don't choose WMA or Altrac3 and you'll likely never notice a difference, or the slight differences aren't annoying. The worst score among the decent codecs was lame mp3 for Kraftwerk, and even that scored a 3.32 where 3 is slightly annoying.
I would question quietly deleting such mails. Most of the worm/virus ridden mails that I get come from people who have infected systems and where I am in their address book. They need to know they have an infected system.
I quarantine all the worms/viruses sent to my system. I look through the quarantine directory about once a week. On ONE occacion (out of a few hundred virus laden messages) I was able to determine who was sending the virus. The vast majority of the time the viruses don't leak any information about the system, and they come from dynamic IP addreses. Delivering the virus, or a "user X sent you a virus" message to the user is useless. I've never once had a false positive (and I believe the chance of false positives is about zero).
Delivering the virus laden email is just stupid. The reasons deleting it, or quarantining it far outweigh the reasons for delivering it. I'm pretty good about being able to track where a virus came from and I was only able to track down one virus origin. End users are going to have zero ability, and zero interest in doing do. They'll actually send out false "you've got a virus" reports to their friends (who don't actually have a virus, the from address was just forged).
The Beagle II piggybacked on the Mars Express spacecraft. It could have been a rock and would have gotten to mars. That in itself is just not an accomplishment.
If it actually would have worked, sure that would have been a great accomplishment. I don't know about being doomed to failure, but given the money and limited testing it should be fairly obvious that it's not highly likely it'll succeed. That's fine, not everything has to suceed. For only 50 million, you try again later from what you've learned.
What's more surprising is that they haven't been able to do this before. drop a LOG line in iptables and you can have a complete log of every packet, live.
Except where's the machine with the huge hard-drive that's intercepting all the packets and logging them? You can't run iptables on the cable modem.
The interesting part is just that they've got some kind of device to sniff cable or DSL modems and send them somewhere to be analysed. Then you'd have to put everything back together again into meaningfull data (including intercepting binary transmissions). It's _far_ more complicated than a simple tap of a voice line.
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For the record, I never limited my objections on food additives to preservatives:
and other crap that's likely not very good for you.
Without preservatives (including ones with some unfortunate problematic effects like nitrates), thousands of people would die in food poisoning each year in US alone. Without preservatives, much more food would be lost, meaning that current world population could not be fed
You statement is true in the general case, for the entire world population. All well and good for the 3rd world nations of the world where there's food shortages. I however live in the United States where there's a food glut. Spoiled food doesn't concern me as I just won't eat it. I have a nose that's pretty damn good at detecting spoilage. I also have this invention called fire, which produces heat which kills bacteria. For when I do want to preserve food, freezing is cheap and available as a preservation method.
I'm not trying to write a scientific paper on the ill effects of preservatives, just avoid risk. I don't have time to research every new food additive that comes along, and I sure as hell don't have ultimate faith in the FDA. Why should I take that risk, however small and unknown when it doesn't provide me with ANYTHING? Nutrasweet, olestra, christ, I'd rather eat the sugar and fat in reasonable amounts than eat something that degrades into formaldyhyde in-vivo (nutrasweet), and robs me of fat soluable vitamins (olestra).
The testing on laptops was terrible. I had a lot of problems getting the synaptics touchpad to work properly, but eventually I got it to work like it should. There were also some strange problems with compiling the linux-wlan module, but they were solved after re-installing the kernel source. I also had a couple minor problems with the changeover from XFree86 to Xorg (naming problems), and ACPI loading where APM should have (both are competing power management standards).
Everything is fixed now, and FC2 even solved two annoying problems I had with FC1. Those being namely a nasty sound playing the first time a sound played, and the whole machine locking up every time I took out my wireless PCMCIA card. I will say that FC2 isn't for a beginner linux user as they'd probbably never be able to solve all the problems I had to.
The minor 2.6 kernel incompatibilities still are being shaken out a bit, but if you're willing to read through bugzilla a bit you should be able to fix all the problems and come out with a nicer system.
I say it's just food, and life is too short to spend hours a day on shopping, preparing, and cleaning for a single meal that only feeds two people.
Sadly this statement is the way the majority of the population thinks about eating. Food is what goes into your body, and eventually becomes the stuff you're made of. You may not value the taste, but you certainly should value the nutritional value of it. Most processed food like TV dinners contains a huge of amount of saturated fat and/or trans-fat, both major contributors to heart disease. Not to mention all the preservatives and other crap that's likely not very good for you.
The value in cooking and making your own food is an investment in your own health. What's more important than your, and your wifes health?
After it hits someone? "He's dead, Jim" of course.
Sorry, it had to be said.
Huh? So recording killed music, it just took 114 years to do it?
I can tell you the way the music died... It died when the musicians became the money-grubbing motherfuckers that most of them were told to become. They want to make millions of dollars and they have the conglomerates brainwash their fans into thinking that it is acceptable!
I don't know about all that... I think there's certainly some musicians that became money-grubbing scum, the problem is the music industry latched onto the ones that did what they told them. I put the blame for the decline of music squarely on the industry who's interested in short term profits at the cost of the long term. They market everything toward 15-19 year olds, and aren't willing to take any risks. The radio is just an extension of the same "play it safe, stick to the format" media giants.
Personally, I think the most effective solution is to convince people that if they break such-and-such a law, they will get caught. Presently, most ways to back up that threat involve trampling on civil liberties.
Except in the case of virus and worm writers, unless you're amazingly stupid there's almost no chance you're going to get caught. The situtation is as if anyone with a small amount of knowledge could walk up to a payphone and wreak havoc on the phone network.
In this case the only way you're going to stop people doing damage from releasing viruses is to change the computing environment. The OS shouldn't run apps unless they've been signed by an administrator. For business computing the administrator isn't the user. People will bitch and moan about not being able to run their weather app, but too bad. If you're not capable not spreading viruses, you're not capable of administrating your machine. Do we let general users mess with the inner workings of tools they don't understand like a typewriter? No, of course not. Why then do we let users install apps, run cutesey executables that were sent by Mom, etc? Until this practice stops, you're not going to stop the massive email spreading worms.
Except the patent covers recording it onto a "event capture module" edited live, and then put onto media. Unless someone was recording concerts to some media, editing them, and then distributing them just after the concert the Grateful Dead prior art wouldn't apply.
I'm certain there's other prior art though as this patent was only filed in 2001. This is also an obvious invention, so it all adds up to a very shaky patent.
That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that's a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast
What goes up fast must come down fast? Unless I'm missing something, low earth orbit still means going several thousand miles an hour. The rate you ascend at has nothing to do with how quickly you'd come down at.
DVD is too mature for a competing standard to take over, even in China. The non-Asian movie industry isn't going to stand for two standards, and just won't re-release perfectly good DVDs on EVD. It's not as if DVD was released yesterday and it hasn't gained a foothold.
Chinese consumers will see DVD players, EVD players, and DVD+EVD players and will choose either the DVD or dual standard players because the price difference will be minimal and they'll want to play DVD movies. EVD might be somewhat accepted as a second rung standard for Chinese movies, but as a replacement for DVD (and manufacturers wanting to avoid royalties) it'll fail.
I wasn't exactly clear since I thought the conclusion was obvious, but none of those distributions has any real nationalism in it at all. The company that collected the software and put it together is Chinese, American, French, etc. But the software itself is about as national as the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of all the effort put into any Linux distribution is entirely international. China picking Linux isn't a nationalistic choice at all, it's one of embracing the international software development community.
I suppose I wasn't explicit, but the whole point was that the article implied that "Red Flag Linux" was a Chinese invention, while the truth is it's an invention that's about 98% foreign, and 2% China.
Home users don't program nor do they have legacy code. Obviously the movement towards the linux desktop is making the linux environment similar enough to windows that the home user doesn't care.
Umm.. uh. Where did I get into the whole rant about the failings of linux? I'm talking about the possibility of building a supercomputer that runs Windows, not about linux vs windows. Try to keep your criticisms based upon what is said, not on what you imagine.
It has been promoting as more secure the homegrown Red Flag Linux, based on an open-code operating system.
First Linux was invented by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and now Linus is Chinese. Methinks the article author doesn't get it with respect to linux.
As far as the other technolgies, I think the EVD standard is doomed to failure. People are going to want DVDs from abroad, and a player that only does EVD isn't going to sell. The mobile phone standard doesn't matter. The US has gone its own way with cell phone standards and the sky hasn't fallen yet. There's not a lot of compelling reasons why mobile phone standards have to be compatible with the rest of the world, and China is definately big enough to set their own standard.
As far as this cry of "nationalism", that just sounds like posturing to justify this to a certain communist segment of the Chinese populace. Setting your own standards and avoiding patent fees sounds like capitalism to me.
I'm sure ties can carry nasty bugs, but there are worse things in the wards.
I guess, but that's hardly the point. Not wearing a necktie is a one time change that's very easy to implement and easy to verify. Getting doctors to wash their hands more is something that requires constant vigilance and is very hard to verify. The fact that there are other things that will reduce hospital disease spreading more effectively is beside the point. It's not as if you can't do both.
Also everyone knows that hands spread disease, so more education is going to have minimal impact. The necktie disease vector is far less known I'm sure, so educating doctors about this would go a long way.
Sounds like a hardware problem to me. 2000 is a fairly well designed OS with memory protection, pre-emptive multi-tasking, etc. It's also possible it's a driver issue. You can very easily have a mostly working system that crashes when stressed. The same thing applies to linux as well.
A lot of people seem to be concentrating on the "windows crashes a lot" idea. That's not quite a fair judgement of windows anymore. The only time I've had problems with Windows 2000 and above is poorly written drivers, or anti-virus software. As long as you choose hardware with proven drivers and don't run anti-virus software (firewall it and run minimal services and no IE) Windows should be very stable.
With that said, I think there's other problems with windows as a supercomputing cluster. The first I can think of is lack of a low-bandwidth interface. Linux you can ssh into and get results, control processes, etc. Windows requires a high bandwidth terminal services. In other words it's harder to control remotely.
Other people have brought up the licensing costs, but I'm sure MS would offer huge deals just to get their foot in the door.
I think the biggest problem is just historical and cultural though. The scientific community has a 30 year history with Unix, is familiar with programming in that environment, and has a lot of legacy code that's written for it. They just aren't going to take to a windows environment easily at all.
I can't speak for the UK, but since gas prices have gone up in the US for the past few months, SUV sales have dropped considerably. I also just heard a story about how the price of the criminally large and gas guzzling Hummer dropped recently because of low sales.
With gas prices so high in the UK I could see how increased prices wouldn't affect the very wealthy. In the US, however it's the middle class that own these evil, gas guzzling, more-likely-to-kill-people vehicles.
I listened to many of the blind tests. I have a decent sound card (Nvidia n-force), a high quality receiver, and decent, but not excellent quality speakers (i.e. $200 bookshelf speakers I bought a few years ago). I had a very hard time telling most of the samples from the reference implementation. Even the ones I thought I could tell a difference I wasn't sure.
I do remember a few years ago listening to really crappy implementations of mp3 codecs and hearing seriously awful artifacts. Considering that most samples scored far above 4, with 5 being imperceptible and 4 being perceptible but not annoying I think the results of this test mean that your choice of codec doesn't make much difference. Don't choose WMA or Altrac3 and you'll likely never notice a difference, or the slight differences aren't annoying. The worst score among the decent codecs was lame mp3 for Kraftwerk, and even that scored a 3.32 where 3 is slightly annoying.
I would question quietly deleting such mails. Most of the worm/virus ridden mails that I get come from people who have infected systems and where I am in their address book. They need to know they have an infected system.
I quarantine all the worms/viruses sent to my system. I look through the quarantine directory about once a week. On ONE occacion (out of a few hundred virus laden messages) I was able to determine who was sending the virus. The vast majority of the time the viruses don't leak any information about the system, and they come from dynamic IP addreses. Delivering the virus, or a "user X sent you a virus" message to the user is useless. I've never once had a false positive (and I believe the chance of false positives is about zero).
Delivering the virus laden email is just stupid. The reasons deleting it, or quarantining it far outweigh the reasons for delivering it. I'm pretty good about being able to track where a virus came from and I was only able to track down one virus origin. End users are going to have zero ability, and zero interest in doing do. They'll actually send out false "you've got a virus" reports to their friends (who don't actually have a virus, the from address was just forged).
The Beagle II piggybacked on the Mars Express spacecraft. It could have been a rock and would have gotten to mars. That in itself is just not an accomplishment.
If it actually would have worked, sure that would have been a great accomplishment. I don't know about being doomed to failure, but given the money and limited testing it should be fairly obvious that it's not highly likely it'll succeed. That's fine, not everything has to suceed. For only 50 million, you try again later from what you've learned.
What's more surprising is that they haven't been able to do this before. drop a LOG line in iptables and you can have a complete log of every packet, live.
Except where's the machine with the huge hard-drive that's intercepting all the packets and logging them? You can't run iptables on the cable modem.
The interesting part is just that they've got some kind of device to sniff cable or DSL modems and send them somewhere to be analysed. Then you'd have to put everything back together again into meaningfull data (including intercepting binary transmissions). It's _far_ more complicated than a simple tap of a voice line.
Ah yes, taking statements too literally. You know what I meant, you're just being picky.