If a computer was fast enough in 1990, it should theoretically be fast enough today
For home users, I see little overlap between what computers were used for in 1990 vs now. Most people who own a home computer now did not even own one then - adoption was about 15% at the time.
Even since 2000, although Internet was catching on, the main application of the Internet - video - had barely started catching on.
This story has nothing in particular to do with newspaper. They just spun it that way because if you want to use cellulose for biofuel, the first question is where to get the cellulose? Slash and burn the rainforests to make farmland? Take over land that was producing food for hungry people? So, starting with examples of waste cellulose is a tactic to head off those questions. How much waste cellulose is actually available, I don't know.
The VGA interface itself is well standardized, so you can use old cards if you just need the basic 2d capability. But unfortunately we still aren't there with 3d.
Yes, but on Linux anyways, you'll have a very hard time finding any kind of modern browser packaged for a distro more than a few years old. To be fair, you can probably go back a few more years using a binary installer (no package manager), although in my experience the OS install will start to fall apart after a while if you start trying to juggle more than a couple unmanaged packages.
Seriously. If your using 13-year old cards in your system, you're probably not running the latest software anyway.
In today's networked world there unfortunately isn't much choice but to stay on the software upgrade treadmill. I could imagine using an unpatched box as an X terminal with no direct link to the internet (not even running a browser locally), but nothing more.
As for maintaining your own graphics driver, keeping up with the evolution of Xorg and OpenGL and the kernel, good luck with that. (Which is why I can't blame mesa for dropping it either).
Yup, maintaining model-specific driver support for the mountain of old graphics cards out there seems to be a job nobody is up to. I just had to retire a T60 thinkpad, which is a pretty good computer, because the manufacturer orphaned the graphics card so I can't get DVI output from the docking station any more. And open source 3d drivers, frankly, I have never found worth using on any card. 3d cards have been around for quite a while now, it's a shame they still require model-specific drivers.
Umm, we managed to avoid giving bailouts for the first couple centuries of our existence just fine, thank you.
It wasn't "just fine," after the end of agrarianism it was pretty awful for most people, until it reached the point in the 1920's where a few people owned everything, and by the 1930's millions of families couldn't put food on the table. At that point the system was doomed, and the choice was between peaceful, incremental change (which is fortunately what happened), or a turbulent, risky lurch in some other direction which is what happened to many other important nations around the time.
It's simply wishful thinking that a failed banking system wouldn't have destroyed the economy again, just like it did in the 1930's when everybody assumed the invisible hand of the markets could do no wrong.
GM is a little different. What would have happened there is the US would have lost its automotive sector and Korea, China, Japan, and Germany would have picked up the slack. That may well have been the most efficient solution to the overall global market. But it would have been terrible for the US.
It does surprise me that we still can't repeatably get into space over 50 years after first doing so. Not that I blame anybody; apparently it's just very, very hard to do.
On the other other hand, how often are the 38 pounds of paper manuals updated and re-printed?
I saw Steve Martin's bluegrass concert the other night and he got some comedic mileage out of using an iPad for the set list. "And now for our next number, Angry Birds Level 7." Good show btw.
To save $50,000 a year, they make an already bad education system worse.
With the federal stimulus program now ending, we're going to see a lot more of this type of thing. I think it's a mistake. Yes, the growth in the deficit is alarming, but the recession will end sooner or later and state/local tax revenues will come back. But these kids will never go through grade school again.
Meanwhile, many of their parents will now pay extra for child care on fridays, reducing (or even negating) any savings on taxes from this.
While we're talking about Photoshop and its cost, as a longtime gimp user I recently bought photoshop elements (having switched to Mac, where I found gimp's UI has a number of glitches, and it was almost a freebie with Premiere Elements, which I was buying anyways). I find Elements very wimpy.
For example, in gimp I normally level the image by selecting preview with grid, reverse rotation (correction), crop to result, then line up the grid with something vertical in the image. But in PE I can't find anything like that - it's rotate freehand, specify degrees, or let it guess for you.
Moreover, it's really hard to find any information about Elements on the Web. I have the feeling everybody either buys or pirates Photoshop, and photoshop elements only exists to be bundled with flatbed scanners or something? It hasn't lured me away from gimp, even though gimp has annoying windowing issues on OSX.
Well, I didn't call him a conspiracy theorist, did I? I don't follow him all that closely, and I would be surprised if he hasn't said some indefensible things occasionally over the years, but it's evident he's not motivated by narrow self-interest. I was kind of disgusted watching how little voters cared about what we did to Iraq, vs how we exploded when our finances took a dump.
In the beginning, Khadafi himself was a well-meaning rebel with real credibility. Same old story. The US really owes a great debt to George Washington, rarely do you find a powerful man who doesn't think he'd make a fine benevolent dictator.
There's a fine line between staging a revolution and looting an electronics store, my friend.
But not that much. Most political political discontent (beyond a few radicals like Noam Chomsky) is really just about pain in the pocketbook. (Perhaps you've hard of the Boston Tea Party, or have even noticed that "it's the economy, stupid" in US presidential politics lately.) When people's quality of life goes down, they get angry. When enough people can no longer afford food, it's game over. That's what happened in the Middle East. In the US the system failed more gracefully, and morphed into modern Big Government (the New Deal).
Don't get me wrong, the poor in Britain are relatively well off. But not as well as they used to be, and, more importantly, their prospects of a life beyond being kept like a house pet are shrinking fast. None of which justifies what they did. Let's just not confuse righteous disapproval with actual solutions.
Blindly injecting stem cells into your body in the hopes they'll do something useful is quackery. Did you RTFA? "Daley, who is the previous president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, added: "I would never in a million years accept for one of my family members to undergo this."
Focusing concern on possible copycats instead of Perry himself is just a way to avoid accusations of taking sides politically. As a voter representing only myself, I don't have that concern. Perry's "treatment" is little different than Nancy Reagan's practice of astrology.
"The cloud" isn't a data center sitting in a particular place. The cloud needs to be a distributed system that is close (enough) to you wherever you are, giving users the appearance of a centralized resource, but that's actually intelligently replicating and synchronizing data continuously to ensure reliability and reduce latency. Consider Google Live Search (that searches the web repeatedly as you enter your search terms), that's a good example of low latency if ever there was one. How do they do it? For one thing, google has over a dozen datacenters in the US alone. Which one is closest to you? You don't know.
It seems you and the judge agree, so what's the problem?
I am not that surprised that the case occurred. I can see why people might be annoyed at being compelled to pay the salary of somebody who denigrates their beliefs, and there's a difference between freely expressing a personal opinion vs one's responsibilities in acting as an agent/employee of the state. But, like the judge said, it is important for education to challenge beliefs, especially when known facts contract those beliefs.
Whew, I hope you (and whoever modded you up) is being sarcastic.
Population growth is the one thing that looks like it won't do us in, because global reproduction rates have been falling quite rapidly. Everywhere in the world where women's rights and contraception have become available, reproduction has taken a big nose dive. I don't know of any exception to that rule. And globalization is causing this to occur perhaps faster than expected.
One other thing: "If people were responsible they would limit themselves to 2 children or less. I have. But most people aren't responsible."
Don't get me wrong, I am plenty worried about global warming, fossil fuel depletion, and fresh water shortages leading to food price increases and mass starvation. I don't think most Americans know how close to reality this already is in poor nations where people spend a huge proportion of their money on food. I think it would be great if, long term, we could stabilize at about 1/4 of today's population (through natural attrition after long, healthy lives of course). But population growth is one area where it looks like it might turn out OK.
It's a battle of titans, as Oklahoma and New Mexico square off in the ultimate spaceport showdown! Who will triumph, and who will be vanquished, in this mortal struggle for supremacy in the under-4-million-residents and 40th-place-or-worse-in-4th-grade-reading-skills division! In one corner: the flat, wide open, lands of New Mexico free of rivers and freshly cleared by raging forest fires. In the other conrner, the flat, wide open lands of Oklahoma, where tornadoes keep the proliferation of double-wides at bay. Hang on to your seats, boys and girls, we're about to blast into spaaaaace!
They might not know the keyboard shortcuts for copy and past, but I doubt they're erasing large chunks of text in one place only to re-type it somewhere else... at least I hope not!
Everybody here is focusing keyboard commands, but that isn't the main problem. People would be almost as well served by using the "Edit... Find" GUI menu option, but don't even know about that. It's the concept of searching within the current page they need, more than the finger habits to do it a bit faster.
I'm always reminded of the Sony Clie TH55 from 2004. It had WiFi, an SD slot, a camera... it always drove me nuts how they simply refused to harness all the potential of that hardware. Sony, you were Apple 20 years ago, and now look at you. What happened?
Read the article. Linus has accepted both KVM and Xen into the kernel, it talks about why he and some other guru think KVM was managed better and is a better implementation.
Let's not confuse two completely different things: if Richard Stallman said something was "evil," it would mean he was morally opposed to it and wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. But Linus calling hypervisor virtualization "evil" just means he'd rather work on hardware, but hey, you want virtualization, go ahead and take your pick of the ones Linux provides.
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For home users, I see little overlap between what computers were used for in 1990 vs now. Most people who own a home computer now did not even own one then - adoption was about 15% at the time.
Even since 2000, although Internet was catching on, the main application of the Internet - video - had barely started catching on.
This story has nothing in particular to do with newspaper. They just spun it that way because if you want to use cellulose for biofuel, the first question is where to get the cellulose? Slash and burn the rainforests to make farmland? Take over land that was producing food for hungry people? So, starting with examples of waste cellulose is a tactic to head off those questions. How much waste cellulose is actually available, I don't know.
How in the heck did they make it freeze when it gets hot and melt when it cools off?
The VGA interface itself is well standardized, so you can use old cards if you just need the basic 2d capability. But unfortunately we still aren't there with 3d.
Yes, but on Linux anyways, you'll have a very hard time finding any kind of modern browser packaged for a distro more than a few years old. To be fair, you can probably go back a few more years using a binary installer (no package manager), although in my experience the OS install will start to fall apart after a while if you start trying to juggle more than a couple unmanaged packages.
In today's networked world there unfortunately isn't much choice but to stay on the software upgrade treadmill. I could imagine using an unpatched box as an X terminal with no direct link to the internet (not even running a browser locally), but nothing more.
As for maintaining your own graphics driver, keeping up with the evolution of Xorg and OpenGL and the kernel, good luck with that. (Which is why I can't blame mesa for dropping it either).
Yup, maintaining model-specific driver support for the mountain of old graphics cards out there seems to be a job nobody is up to. I just had to retire a T60 thinkpad, which is a pretty good computer, because the manufacturer orphaned the graphics card so I can't get DVI output from the docking station any more. And open source 3d drivers, frankly, I have never found worth using on any card. 3d cards have been around for quite a while now, it's a shame they still require model-specific drivers.
It wasn't "just fine," after the end of agrarianism it was pretty awful for most people, until it reached the point in the 1920's where a few people owned everything, and by the 1930's millions of families couldn't put food on the table. At that point the system was doomed, and the choice was between peaceful, incremental change (which is fortunately what happened), or a turbulent, risky lurch in some other direction which is what happened to many other important nations around the time.
It's simply wishful thinking that a failed banking system wouldn't have destroyed the economy again, just like it did in the 1930's when everybody assumed the invisible hand of the markets could do no wrong.
GM is a little different. What would have happened there is the US would have lost its automotive sector and Korea, China, Japan, and Germany would have picked up the slack. That may well have been the most efficient solution to the overall global market. But it would have been terrible for the US.
It does surprise me that we still can't repeatably get into space over 50 years after first doing so. Not that I blame anybody; apparently it's just very, very hard to do.
I saw Steve Martin's bluegrass concert the other night and he got some comedic mileage out of using an iPad for the set list. "And now for our next number, Angry Birds Level 7." Good show btw.
With the federal stimulus program now ending, we're going to see a lot more of this type of thing. I think it's a mistake. Yes, the growth in the deficit is alarming, but the recession will end sooner or later and state/local tax revenues will come back. But these kids will never go through grade school again.
Meanwhile, many of their parents will now pay extra for child care on fridays, reducing (or even negating) any savings on taxes from this.
For example, in gimp I normally level the image by selecting preview with grid, reverse rotation (correction), crop to result, then line up the grid with something vertical in the image. But in PE I can't find anything like that - it's rotate freehand, specify degrees, or let it guess for you.
Moreover, it's really hard to find any information about Elements on the Web. I have the feeling everybody either buys or pirates Photoshop, and photoshop elements only exists to be bundled with flatbed scanners or something? It hasn't lured me away from gimp, even though gimp has annoying windowing issues on OSX.
Well, I didn't call him a conspiracy theorist, did I? I don't follow him all that closely, and I would be surprised if he hasn't said some indefensible things occasionally over the years, but it's evident he's not motivated by narrow self-interest. I was kind of disgusted watching how little voters cared about what we did to Iraq, vs how we exploded when our finances took a dump.
In the beginning, Khadafi himself was a well-meaning rebel with real credibility. Same old story. The US really owes a great debt to George Washington, rarely do you find a powerful man who doesn't think he'd make a fine benevolent dictator.
But not that much. Most political political discontent (beyond a few radicals like Noam Chomsky) is really just about pain in the pocketbook. (Perhaps you've hard of the Boston Tea Party, or have even noticed that "it's the economy, stupid" in US presidential politics lately.) When people's quality of life goes down, they get angry. When enough people can no longer afford food, it's game over. That's what happened in the Middle East. In the US the system failed more gracefully, and morphed into modern Big Government (the New Deal).
Don't get me wrong, the poor in Britain are relatively well off. But not as well as they used to be, and, more importantly, their prospects of a life beyond being kept like a house pet are shrinking fast. None of which justifies what they did. Let's just not confuse righteous disapproval with actual solutions.
At what point does the lack of finding it where the models predict it "should" be become news in itself?
Focusing concern on possible copycats instead of Perry himself is just a way to avoid accusations of taking sides politically. As a voter representing only myself, I don't have that concern. Perry's "treatment" is little different than Nancy Reagan's practice of astrology.
Sorry, but being gullible to quacks does not speak well of one's suitability to hold perhaps the world's most powerful office.
"The cloud" isn't a data center sitting in a particular place. The cloud needs to be a distributed system that is close (enough) to you wherever you are, giving users the appearance of a centralized resource, but that's actually intelligently replicating and synchronizing data continuously to ensure reliability and reduce latency. Consider Google Live Search (that searches the web repeatedly as you enter your search terms), that's a good example of low latency if ever there was one. How do they do it? For one thing, google has over a dozen datacenters in the US alone. Which one is closest to you? You don't know.
I am not that surprised that the case occurred. I can see why people might be annoyed at being compelled to pay the salary of somebody who denigrates their beliefs, and there's a difference between freely expressing a personal opinion vs one's responsibilities in acting as an agent/employee of the state. But, like the judge said, it is important for education to challenge beliefs, especially when known facts contract those beliefs.
Population growth is the one thing that looks like it won't do us in, because global reproduction rates have been falling quite rapidly. Everywhere in the world where women's rights and contraception have become available, reproduction has taken a big nose dive. I don't know of any exception to that rule. And globalization is causing this to occur perhaps faster than expected.
One other thing: "If people were responsible they would limit themselves to 2 children or less. I have. But most people aren't responsible."
Aren't they? The US has a higher birth rate than most industrialized nations, yet it's 2.05, right at that magic number. Without immigration, we'd be headed for stability right now. Also, keep in mind, it's not necessary for everybody to have 2 or fewer kids, only that the average is 2. Some don't want any, or just 1. Also the birth rate is quite sensitive to economic hardship, which means the carrying capacity will impose itself somewhat gradually as incomes drop relative to prices.
Don't get me wrong, I am plenty worried about global warming, fossil fuel depletion, and fresh water shortages leading to food price increases and mass starvation. I don't think most Americans know how close to reality this already is in poor nations where people spend a huge proportion of their money on food. I think it would be great if, long term, we could stabilize at about 1/4 of today's population (through natural attrition after long, healthy lives of course). But population growth is one area where it looks like it might turn out OK.
It's a battle of titans, as Oklahoma and New Mexico square off in the ultimate spaceport showdown! Who will triumph, and who will be vanquished, in this mortal struggle for supremacy in the under-4-million-residents and 40th-place-or-worse-in-4th-grade-reading-skills division! In one corner: the flat, wide open, lands of New Mexico free of rivers and freshly cleared by raging forest fires. In the other conrner, the flat, wide open lands of Oklahoma, where tornadoes keep the proliferation of double-wides at bay. Hang on to your seats, boys and girls, we're about to blast into spaaaaace!
Everybody here is focusing keyboard commands, but that isn't the main problem. People would be almost as well served by using the "Edit... Find" GUI menu option, but don't even know about that. It's the concept of searching within the current page they need, more than the finger habits to do it a bit faster.
I'm always reminded of the Sony Clie TH55 from 2004. It had WiFi, an SD slot, a camera... it always drove me nuts how they simply refused to harness all the potential of that hardware. Sony, you were Apple 20 years ago, and now look at you. What happened?
Let's not confuse two completely different things: if Richard Stallman said something was "evil," it would mean he was morally opposed to it and wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. But Linus calling hypervisor virtualization "evil" just means he'd rather work on hardware, but hey, you want virtualization, go ahead and take your pick of the ones Linux provides.