Or we could make doing business with a spammer a felony, with a minimum sentence of 15000 hours of community service working for spam-fighting organizations.
You know, I could have sworn Hangul was a writing system used for the Korean langauge, and that various word processors supported it. I seem to recall knowing a guy in college who had the Hangul version of Word Perfect, for instance.
Is there really also a word processor _called_ "Hangul", or is the article writer just deeply confused?
Oh, sure, such an index can be interesting and even useful. I don't dispute that. However, the slashdot headline implied that it provides "a means of tracking international currency values". That is the claim I was disputing.
You really can't calculate a meaninful exchange rate based on the price of a single product, unless the economies of the two nations are inherently similar. Yes, MKs in Africa figure exchange rates based on the price of Coca-Cola, but that's between countries with more-or-less the same economy, and it's inherently an informal calculation anyhow. You can't meaninfully compare the currencies of the US and Australia that way, much less the US and Brasil.
The problem is that different kinds of goods and services are more or less expensive in different economies. You can get VERY different ideas about the exchange rate, depending on which product you look at. In one country, technology is cheap but labor is expensive. In another, technology is unaffordable but labor is cheap. In another, both technology and labor are expensive but food is cheap. If you compare currencies based on one product, you can get yourself quite seriously confused.
Exchange rates are also driven by trade balances, and just because one US dollar can be exchanged for eight billion Ubledubgongian Frankls does not mean that a product worth one dollar in the US will cost F8 billion in Ubledubgong. It may only cost 250 Frankls. Going the other direction, just because exchanging one US dollar only gets you 50p in England does not necessarily mean that 50p has the same purchasing power as $1 would have in the US. People who don't understand economics tend to assume it works that way, but it doesn't.
> When the party in power in the state or county wins it is the > will of the people.
I don't think there's any question about the outcome in this case. From TFA:
# Candidates for president from the Green and Libertarian parties requested # the Ohio recount. State laws and regulations specify how a recount works.
In other words, the Democrats, who lost by a narrow margin, did not request the recount. If there'd been any real question about the outcome, they would have done so. So that's not what's at stake.
What *is* at stake is that we CANNOT have election officials violating election laws and getting away with it. They acted to avoid a painful and expensive recount process that would not change anything, but they did not have the authority to do that, and we cannot let them off with a stern lecture and a slap on the wrist, because if we do, it'll happen again, and again, and again, and at some point it'll happen when it matters. I hope the courts rake them over the coals but *good*. Make an example out of them: we will not tolerate election law violations.
The 2004 election isn't what's at stake here. The 2008 and 2012 and 2016 elections, and every one that follows, are what's at stake.
> Censorship - Look at the things your government does eg censorship of games,
Violent games are not political speech in any meaninful way.
> trying to prevent flag burning,
When has the US ever tried to prevent flag burning. That would be very dangerous ground -- flag burning, although repugnant, is inherently an essential form of protected political speech, and MUST be permitted -- but I must have missed that news item, because I was not aware of its having happened. Can you cite an example?
> monitoring citizens/bloggers etc
Okay, monitoring is a privacy issue. Granted. Although comparing it with China's vigorous political censorship program is a bit... over the top. Nonetheless, it *is* an issue.
> Product safety - Right...
Agreed, the OP was being stupid on that one.
> Military issues - Whose government is an international joke for the wars it starts?
Germany, but I don't see how that's relevant here.
> Global warming
A stupid complaint also, yes.
> Forcing their government what to do - They are a soverign nation, not the 51st State of the USA
Agreed. We can't force anything. All we can do, at most, is break off relations. Which even at that could be construed as a little extreme.
We *should* be a little less timid about publically saying what we think about some of their more inane policies, however. The One China policy springs immediately to mind.
> while you can get 768 Kbps down DSL from Verizon for $20/month.
Why would I want to buy DSL from Verizon, when they can't (or won't) even keep a standard phone line in sufficiently good working order for a dialup connection to work, and every time it rains the land lines sound like cellphones? You call them, and they say nothing's wrong. You insist, and they send somebody out to your house to tell you nothing's wrong. Their repair guys will look at you with a straight face and tell you that they can't hear any noise on the line, when the noise is louder than your voice. Nope, nothing's wrong with that line. Silent line, that's what that is.
> We pay $45 a month for 512Kbps down, 256 kbps up DSL
And you actually _get_ it? Be happy. I would love to have a local telco that actually delivers what they're being paid to provide. Instead I have Verizon.
> many of them believe, because it says so in the bible, that the end > will eb accompanied by a warming of the earth.
Actually, what the Bible predicts is rather a lot scarrier than even the most dire global warming predictions. Even the weather predictions alone make global warming look like child's play.
Try global multi-year drought on for starters -- no rain, anywhere in the world, for over three years. Imagine the price of food.
Then there's the hail. Hundred-pound hailstones, yo. It doesn't mention this, but I guess all the world's insurance companies would go bankrupt.
And that's all nothing compared to the seismic activity.
I'm not sure what any of that has to do with some melting polar ice, though. I certainly can't see any serious Christians claiming global warming fulfills these prophesies. For one thing, all of that stuff is said to take place during the tribulation period, so there wouldn't *be* any Christians on the Earth at that point.
> They said global warming didn't exist! They said there was nothing to > worry about! Lets see all these "experts" debunk this!
I think you misunderstood. The point that was under dispute was never whether warming ever occurs at all, but whether we can confidently say, based on the scant climatological data that we have (scarcely half a millennium worth of it) that warming is a long-term trend that will continue indefinitely.
The people who say global warming isn't a problem aren't saying it isn't happening, in the short term. They're saying that it's normal, or within the normal range of climatic activity, and that after it warms up for a bit, it'll very likely cool off again. And then probably warm up again. And cool off again.
Sure, we're experiencing currently a warm winter. I don't know of anyone who seriously disputes this. And yes, the polar ice caps have at some times been rather larger than now. In the seventeenth century, for instance. I don't know of anyone who seriously disputes this, either.
But the polar ice caps have also been rather *smaller* than now (possibly even entirely absent), at some point in Earth's past. I don't know of anyone who seriously disputes *that* either. The people who are all worried about global warming are convinced that it was a very, very long time ago and not relevant to today's ecology. Not everyone is so sure about that, however.
Recorded history gives so little information about the polar ice caps, we don't really have any idea what the coasts of Norway and Greenland looked like in the first millennium. Climatologists claim to be able to extrapolate it, or determine it based on circumstantial evidence (e.g., levels of oxygen in the antarctic ice), but if you ask ten experts you'll get ten different maps, so the truth is we don't actually know. We do know that in the sixteenth century people started to really notice how much colder it was getting, and it is suspected that the arctic ice had been growing for a while already then. How much, and for how long? How big was it in 1000? In 500?
In the twentieth century, a consensus was reached that the rewarming had been completed in the middle of the nineteenth century, and that Earth's temperature was now back to "normal". I'm not convinced, however, that there's such a thing as a single "normal" temperature. I think the temperature goes up and down, normally, as a matter of course, and we just haven't been watching it long enough to know what the usual limits are.
I would dearly love to have the option to buy local phone service from a company that isn't Verizon. The phone service around here has really gone into the toilet ever since GTE North was bought out by Verizon. I don't like the games Verizon plays with customer service. According to the Verizon repair dude that came out to my house, the static sounds we have been hearing on all the phone lines around here, which get worse with every passing rainstorm, are not "noise". Those are "silent line", and are what a phone line is normally supposed to sound like. "Noise" is another variety of sound, which we don't hear on our phone lines, because they are in perfect working order.
Then there's the question of billing. Verizon takes their sweet time getting the bill to you, up to three weeks after the end of the month, and then expects it to be paid by the end of the following month -- just a few days after you finally get the bill. That's just not right.
And then of course there are the hoops you have to go through when you call them for any reason (whether for customer support of the fix-my-line variety, or for billing support, or to cancel an account, whatever). A lot of large companies have that, but still, that doesn't mean customers like it.
I don't know much about FairPoint, but if they're *not* Verizon, then that's a point in their favor as far as I'm concerned.
I actually had to discontinue use of a local phone line (which I was using for dialup) because it got so bad it was unusable, and I couldn't get Verizon to fix it. I had to go out and buy cable modem service from Time Warner, which wasn't a comfortable thing for me to do, given my views of them as a company and of their television business in particular. Granted, I've not been dissatisfied with their cable internet service. On the contrary, it's been great. Still, I'd like to have another option available, just in case I should ever _become_ dissatisfied for any reason. Currently, I don't have any other option at all; if I want internet access, it's Time Warner or nothing, or I can move to a different community.
So I'd be very excited to see Verizon sell our area to a smaller company.
> The story is that people aren't "upgrading" from Firefox 2 to IE7.
Okay, but I would have predicted that too.
What I really want to know is, are people moving from IE7 to Firefox, and are they doing it in numbers comparable to what the IE6-to-Firefox numbers looked like? I think it's probably too early to measure this, but I consider this to be the more interesting question.
Because if IE7 doesn't slow the migration, then a significant market share will leak before IE8 comes out. Because I can't imagine a credible IE8 release arriving much sooner than late 2008 at the earliest, and by then IE market share, at the rates IE6 was starting to lose it, could be down below 80%. Which would be good for webmasters, but Microsoft wouldn't be so pleased.
> The Navy keeps nuclear power on submarines because the air independence is too valuable
Quite.
> and on carriers because it makes for a ready source of steam
They keep nuclear power on carriers for more reasons than that. Carriers are large and expensive, not just to build but to operate. There are a limited number of them, and their time is valuable. Just as a submarine needs to be independent of the surface, the carrier needs to be independent of the coast.
The Navy does not want to have to pull a carrier back into port for, frankly, anything. Other ships come and go, attaching to the fleet for a few weeks and then detaching for other duties, to return to port, to attach to another fleet, or whatever -- but the carrier generally stays with the fleet and anchors it. Sometimes they do bring them to port, of course, but they don't want the ship's own needs to necessitate that at a potentially inconvenient time. If they could design them so that they could receive drydock-style repairs at sea, they would.
Also, the carriers are by far the largest ships, with the largest power requirements, and the largest infrastructure. The economics of running a nuclear reactor strongly favor deployment on the largest ships. A nuclear reactor certain overhead costs: the political cost of having a nuclear reactor, the physical requirements of maintaining it, and so forth. These costs do not increase much when you're using the reactor to produce a larger amount of power. So the cost of running a small destroyer on a nuclear reactor is almost as great as the cost of running an enormous supercarrier on one (in terms of the costs associated with the reactor -- obviously a supercarrier costs much more than a destroyer to run, for other reasons, notably staffing).
So it is much more "worth it" to use nuclear power on a very large ship than on a medium or small ship.
Except, as you note, for submarines, which have their own special considerations that make the nuclear power a more attractive option than it would otherwise be.
A true believer in personal and independent defense capabilities would want to know how to _build_ his own, not where to buy one. Only when you can design and manufacture the weapons and ammunition for your own defense can you be truly independent of external controlling influences. NRA? Bah, a bunch of wannabees. Most of them don't even make their own gunpowder. Lamers. Sheesh.
> The contract is awarded to a nuclear shop so I suspect that the thing will have > an integrated reactor
Maybe not in all cases. If you're mounting it on a nuclear carrier, for instance, you wouldn't want the extra reactor, because it'd be more efficient to pull extra power from the ship's reactor. (Nuclear reactors have substantial overhead costs that don't increase linearly with higher power production rates. On a ship, the space they take up is not the least of these.) I'd expect the first deployments to be in this category. If the program is successful, then they can talk about integrating a reactor and deploying on non-nuclear ships later, if that's practicable.
Of course, I'm speculating. It could also turn out that the military decides it's strategically important to deploy on ships X, Y, and Z, for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the weapon.
> I'd actually venture that FORTRAN has more jokes about it than C.
The main reason for this is that Fortran is actually a pretty good langauge. Sure, it has some foibles we can make fun of, but they are minor enough to be funny. The problems with C are not funny, because they are painful to talk about. Cracking a joke about malloc/free is like making fun of Crohn's Disease: nobody laughs.
> Given that DeCSS can be written in six lines of illegible Perl, I shudder > to think of what a Perl coder could accomplish with 57 lines...
Probably not very much more, unless the coder is somebody whose mind can keep track of an infinite number of details simultaneously (e.g., Damian Conway).
The problem with golfing is exactly what you say: it's fairly illegible. So you have to keep track of some of the less obvious aspects of what's going on, and most of us can only keep track of so much of that at any one time. With really densely golfed code, six or eight lines (at 80 columns) is just about the limit in my experience.
Clear and well-written Perl code is another matter entirely, of course. If it's written correctly, you can understand about a screenful of code at a time (which even nicely formatted with comments will still represent a fair amount of logic in Perl, much more than the same number of lines of C for instance). A well-designed program tries to limit each logical unit (e.g., a subroutine) to about that length, so that you can easily understand the section of code you're working with at any given moment.
As I said, there *are* people who can keep track in their heads of a large number of obscure details all at once, but those people are scary.
Still, 57 lines of Perl is far more than enough to print out a calendar.
> I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a > banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound > PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.
Umm. The program you just described could be golfed down to about thirty characters in Perl. The long version, with expansive comments to explain what's going on and why, would still be considerably less than 57 lines.
This is not to disparage Fortran. Printing out calendars is not really its designed purpose, and terseness is not usually given as one of its key strengths anyway. I'm just saying that your example isn't a very good one.
Re:Can Linux Virtualization Get Any More Fragmente
on
Virtualbox Goes OSS
·
· Score: 1
There's also VirtualPC running in a DOS-based Mac emulator within dosemu. HTH.HAND.
> Do you have a technical reason why this is? I don't see why this should happend.
My first guess would be that the hospital IT staff consists of a former nurse who got tired of working on the floor, thought she might like sitting behind a desk, took a couple of computer classes at a local community college, and applied for the position, thus becomming an internal candidate who consequently had automatic priority over any prospective new hire.
It is scary to me the levels of incompetence many of the services-oriented fields (hospitals, schools, libraries, law enforcement,...) are willing to tolerate in their IT staff. This is not to say that *all* IT staff at all such institutions are incompetent, but the minimum standards are positively frightening.
What scares me the most, though, is this nagging idea in the back of my head that perhaps I particularly notice this phenomenon in information technology staff because that is my field, and that in fact other professions may be in similar condition, and I simply don't know enough to see it. I try not to think about this much.
Porting userland is only trivial if your code is fairly portable in the first place.
However, OS X already runs on PPC and x86, and those are fairly different architectures. Not as different as, say, Vax and PIC, but still different enough. If the code is portable enough that it runs on both of those without a lot of #IFDEF and processor-specific code branches, then it is easily plausible that a port to another architecture might not have been very hard.
> The problem is How long does someone have to be ashamed for
Until you grow up.
Somewhere around age 25, most people wise up a bit and realize that it doesn't actually matter that much if somebody, somewhere, thinks you're a dork (or whatever) and that you will not, in fact, die of terminal embarrassment. This used to be called adulthood, before people started thinking of eighteen-year-olds as adults.
> This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards.
Oh, yeah, sure, because if Outlook doesn't support a standard, then we obviously can't use it on the web, since Outlook is one of the most popular web browsers.
Idiot.
The preferred way to handle HTML mail is for the SMTP server to respond with 554 unacceptable content type. Barring that, it can be filtered out after receipt. 100.0003% of HTML mail is unsolicited junkmail. Occasionally a misguided user with a misconfigured newsreader posts something on usenet that is otherwise legitimate and posts in HTML format by mistake, but I am not aware of a single documented instance of this happening in email.
Even if you don't trust this and are afraid that you might someday get a piece of important mail in HTML format and want to check each and every one, you wouldn't want the HTML rendered. That would be totally unnecessary, not to mention risky. You'd want the HTML markup stripped out, leaving just the text.
> Thing this will follow the form of BTX formfactor?
Unlikely. If it does, it's doomed.
> I know in the summary it says to be compatible with as much hardware as it can - > so I sure hope that includes the Case.
To be compatible with as much hardware as possible, it would shoot for maximum ATX (or MicroATX) compatibility, not BTX. I know Intel wanted BTX to be the new standard, but the rest of the industry has pretty well ignored it to death and thereby consigned it to footnote status in the history books alongside MCA. If DTX follows in its path, we'll all still be using ATX or MicroATX in five years.
Slashdot Mirror
Or we could make doing business with a spammer a felony, with a minimum sentence of 15000 hours of community service working for spam-fighting organizations.
You know, I could have sworn Hangul was a writing system used for the Korean langauge, and that various word processors supported it. I seem to recall knowing a guy in college who had the Hangul version of Word Perfect, for instance.
Is there really also a word processor _called_ "Hangul", or is the article writer just deeply confused?
> interesting and useful datum to an economist.
Oh, sure, such an index can be interesting and even useful. I don't dispute that. However, the slashdot headline implied that it provides "a means of tracking international currency values". That is the claim I was disputing.
You really can't calculate a meaninful exchange rate based on the price of a single product, unless the economies of the two nations are inherently similar. Yes, MKs in Africa figure exchange rates based on the price of Coca-Cola, but that's between countries with more-or-less the same economy, and it's inherently an informal calculation anyhow. You can't meaninfully compare the currencies of the US and Australia that way, much less the US and Brasil.
The problem is that different kinds of goods and services are more or less expensive in different economies. You can get VERY different ideas about the exchange rate, depending on which product you look at. In one country, technology is cheap but labor is expensive. In another, technology is unaffordable but labor is cheap. In another, both technology and labor are expensive but food is cheap. If you compare currencies based on one product, you can get yourself quite seriously confused.
Exchange rates are also driven by trade balances, and just because one US dollar can be exchanged for eight billion Ubledubgongian Frankls does not mean that a product worth one dollar in the US will cost F8 billion in Ubledubgong. It may only cost 250 Frankls. Going the other direction, just because exchanging one US dollar only gets you 50p in England does not necessarily mean that 50p has the same purchasing power as $1 would have in the US. People who don't understand economics tend to assume it works that way, but it doesn't.
> When the party in power in the state or county wins it is the
> will of the people.
I don't think there's any question about the outcome in this case. From TFA:
# Candidates for president from the Green and Libertarian parties requested
# the Ohio recount. State laws and regulations specify how a recount works.
In other words, the Democrats, who lost by a narrow margin, did not request the recount. If there'd been any real question about the outcome, they would have done so. So that's not what's at stake.
What *is* at stake is that we CANNOT have election officials violating election laws and getting away with it. They acted to avoid a painful and expensive recount process that would not change anything, but they did not have the authority to do that, and we cannot let them off with a stern lecture and a slap on the wrist, because if we do, it'll happen again, and again, and again, and at some point it'll happen when it matters. I hope the courts rake them over the coals but *good*. Make an example out of them: we will not tolerate election law violations.
The 2004 election isn't what's at stake here. The 2008 and 2012 and 2016 elections, and every one that follows, are what's at stake.
Mix 12 fl.oz. of lemon juice with 6 fl.oz. of prune juice. Add 1 tsp Dave's Insanity Sauce. Stir. Serve with ice.
> Censorship - Look at the things your government does eg censorship of games,
Violent games are not political speech in any meaninful way.
> trying to prevent flag burning,
When has the US ever tried to prevent flag burning. That would be very dangerous ground -- flag burning, although repugnant, is inherently an essential form of protected political speech, and MUST be permitted -- but I must have missed that news item, because I was not aware of its having happened. Can you cite an example?
> monitoring citizens/bloggers etc
Okay, monitoring is a privacy issue. Granted. Although comparing it with China's vigorous political censorship program is a bit... over the top. Nonetheless, it *is* an issue.
> Product safety - Right...
Agreed, the OP was being stupid on that one.
> Military issues - Whose government is an international joke for the wars it starts?
Germany, but I don't see how that's relevant here.
> Global warming
A stupid complaint also, yes.
> Forcing their government what to do - They are a soverign nation, not the 51st State of the USA
Agreed. We can't force anything. All we can do, at most, is break off relations. Which even at that could be construed as a little extreme.
We *should* be a little less timid about publically saying what we think about some of their more inane policies, however. The One China policy springs immediately to mind.
> while you can get 768 Kbps down DSL from Verizon for $20/month.
Why would I want to buy DSL from Verizon, when they can't (or won't) even keep a standard phone line in sufficiently good working order for a dialup connection to work, and every time it rains the land lines sound like cellphones? You call them, and they say nothing's wrong. You insist, and they send somebody out to your house to tell you nothing's wrong. Their repair guys will look at you with a straight face and tell you that they can't hear any noise on the line, when the noise is louder than your voice. Nope, nothing's wrong with that line. Silent line, that's what that is.
> We pay $45 a month for 512Kbps down, 256 kbps up DSL
And you actually _get_ it? Be happy. I would love to have a local telco that actually delivers what they're being paid to provide. Instead I have Verizon.
> many of them believe, because it says so in the bible, that the end
> will eb accompanied by a warming of the earth.
Actually, what the Bible predicts is rather a lot scarrier than even the most dire global warming predictions. Even the weather predictions alone make global warming look like child's play.
Try global multi-year drought on for starters -- no rain, anywhere in the world, for over three years. Imagine the price of food.
Then there's the hail. Hundred-pound hailstones, yo. It doesn't mention this, but I guess all the world's insurance companies would go bankrupt.
And that's all nothing compared to the seismic activity.
I'm not sure what any of that has to do with some melting polar ice, though. I certainly can't see any serious Christians claiming global warming fulfills these prophesies. For one thing, all of that stuff is said to take place during the tribulation period, so there wouldn't *be* any Christians on the Earth at that point.
> They said global warming didn't exist! They said there was nothing to
> worry about! Lets see all these "experts" debunk this!
I think you misunderstood. The point that was under dispute was never whether warming ever occurs at all, but whether we can confidently say, based on the scant climatological data that we have (scarcely half a millennium worth of it) that warming is a long-term trend that will continue indefinitely.
The people who say global warming isn't a problem aren't saying it isn't happening, in the short term. They're saying that it's normal, or within the normal range of climatic activity, and that after it warms up for a bit, it'll very likely cool off again. And then probably warm up again. And cool off again.
Sure, we're experiencing currently a warm winter. I don't know of anyone who seriously disputes this. And yes, the polar ice caps have at some times been rather larger than now. In the seventeenth century, for instance. I don't know of anyone who seriously disputes this, either.
But the polar ice caps have also been rather *smaller* than now (possibly even entirely absent), at some point in Earth's past. I don't know of anyone who seriously disputes *that* either. The people who are all worried about global warming are convinced that it was a very, very long time ago and not relevant to today's ecology. Not everyone is so sure about that, however.
Recorded history gives so little information about the polar ice caps, we don't really have any idea what the coasts of Norway and Greenland looked like in the first millennium. Climatologists claim to be able to extrapolate it, or determine it based on circumstantial evidence (e.g., levels of oxygen in the antarctic ice), but if you ask ten experts you'll get ten different maps, so the truth is we don't actually know. We do know that in the sixteenth century people started to really notice how much colder it was getting, and it is suspected that the arctic ice had been growing for a while already then. How much, and for how long? How big was it in 1000? In 500?
In the twentieth century, a consensus was reached that the rewarming had been completed in the middle of the nineteenth century, and that Earth's temperature was now back to "normal". I'm not convinced, however, that there's such a thing as a single "normal" temperature. I think the temperature goes up and down, normally, as a matter of course, and we just haven't been watching it long enough to know what the usual limits are.
I would dearly love to have the option to buy local phone service from a company that isn't Verizon. The phone service around here has really gone into the toilet ever since GTE North was bought out by Verizon. I don't like the games Verizon plays with customer service. According to the Verizon repair dude that came out to my house, the static sounds we have been hearing on all the phone lines around here, which get worse with every passing rainstorm, are not "noise". Those are "silent line", and are what a phone line is normally supposed to sound like. "Noise" is another variety of sound, which we don't hear on our phone lines, because they are in perfect working order.
Then there's the question of billing. Verizon takes their sweet time getting the bill to you, up to three weeks after the end of the month, and then expects it to be paid by the end of the following month -- just a few days after you finally get the bill. That's just not right.
And then of course there are the hoops you have to go through when you call them for any reason (whether for customer support of the fix-my-line variety, or for billing support, or to cancel an account, whatever). A lot of large companies have that, but still, that doesn't mean customers like it.
I don't know much about FairPoint, but if they're *not* Verizon, then that's a point in their favor as far as I'm concerned.
I actually had to discontinue use of a local phone line (which I was using for dialup) because it got so bad it was unusable, and I couldn't get Verizon to fix it. I had to go out and buy cable modem service from Time Warner, which wasn't a comfortable thing for me to do, given my views of them as a company and of their television business in particular. Granted, I've not been dissatisfied with their cable internet service. On the contrary, it's been great. Still, I'd like to have another option available, just in case I should ever _become_ dissatisfied for any reason. Currently, I don't have any other option at all; if I want internet access, it's Time Warner or nothing, or I can move to a different community.
So I'd be very excited to see Verizon sell our area to a smaller company.
> The story is that people aren't "upgrading" from Firefox 2 to IE7.
Okay, but I would have predicted that too.
What I really want to know is, are people moving from IE7 to Firefox, and are they doing it in numbers comparable to what the IE6-to-Firefox numbers looked like? I think it's probably too early to measure this, but I consider this to be the more interesting question.
Because if IE7 doesn't slow the migration, then a significant market share will leak before IE8 comes out. Because I can't imagine a credible IE8 release arriving much sooner than late 2008 at the earliest, and by then IE market share, at the rates IE6 was starting to lose it, could be down below 80%. Which would be good for webmasters, but Microsoft wouldn't be so pleased.
> The Navy keeps nuclear power on submarines because the air independence is too valuable
Quite.
> and on carriers because it makes for a ready source of steam
They keep nuclear power on carriers for more reasons than that. Carriers are large and expensive, not just to build but to operate. There are a limited number of them, and their time is valuable. Just as a submarine needs to be independent of the surface, the carrier needs to be independent of the coast.
The Navy does not want to have to pull a carrier back into port for, frankly, anything. Other ships come and go, attaching to the fleet for a few weeks and then detaching for other duties, to return to port, to attach to another fleet, or whatever -- but the carrier generally stays with the fleet and anchors it. Sometimes they do bring them to port, of course, but they don't want the ship's own needs to necessitate that at a potentially inconvenient time. If they could design them so that they could receive drydock-style repairs at sea, they would.
Also, the carriers are by far the largest ships, with the largest power requirements, and the largest infrastructure. The economics of running a nuclear reactor strongly favor deployment on the largest ships. A nuclear reactor certain overhead costs: the political cost of having a nuclear reactor, the physical requirements of maintaining it, and so forth. These costs do not increase much when you're using the reactor to produce a larger amount of power. So the cost of running a small destroyer on a nuclear reactor is almost as great as the cost of running an enormous supercarrier on one (in terms of the costs associated with the reactor -- obviously a supercarrier costs much more than a destroyer to run, for other reasons, notably staffing).
So it is much more "worth it" to use nuclear power on a very large ship than on a medium or small ship.
Except, as you note, for submarines, which have their own special considerations that make the nuclear power a more attractive option than it would otherwise be.
A true believer in personal and independent defense capabilities would want to know how to _build_ his own, not where to buy one. Only when you can design and manufacture the weapons and ammunition for your own defense can you be truly independent of external controlling influences. NRA? Bah, a bunch of wannabees. Most of them don't even make their own gunpowder. Lamers. Sheesh.
> The contract is awarded to a nuclear shop so I suspect that the thing will have
> an integrated reactor
Maybe not in all cases. If you're mounting it on a nuclear carrier, for instance, you wouldn't want the extra reactor, because it'd be more efficient to pull extra power from the ship's reactor. (Nuclear reactors have substantial overhead costs that don't increase linearly with higher power production rates. On a ship, the space they take up is not the least of these.) I'd expect the first deployments to be in this category. If the program is successful, then they can talk about integrating a reactor and deploying on non-nuclear ships later, if that's practicable.
Of course, I'm speculating. It could also turn out that the military decides it's strategically important to deploy on ships X, Y, and Z, for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the weapon.
> I'd actually venture that FORTRAN has more jokes about it than C.
The main reason for this is that Fortran is actually a pretty good langauge. Sure, it has some foibles we can make fun of, but they are minor enough to be funny. The problems with C are not funny, because they are painful to talk about. Cracking a joke about malloc/free is like making fun of Crohn's Disease: nobody laughs.
> Given that DeCSS can be written in six lines of illegible Perl, I shudder
> to think of what a Perl coder could accomplish with 57 lines...
Probably not very much more, unless the coder is somebody whose mind can keep track of an infinite number of details simultaneously (e.g., Damian Conway).
The problem with golfing is exactly what you say: it's fairly illegible. So you have to keep track of some of the less obvious aspects of what's going on, and most of us can only keep track of so much of that at any one time. With really densely golfed code, six or eight lines (at 80 columns) is just about the limit in my experience.
Clear and well-written Perl code is another matter entirely, of course. If it's written correctly, you can understand about a screenful of code at a time (which even nicely formatted with comments will still represent a fair amount of logic in Perl, much more than the same number of lines of C for instance). A well-designed program tries to limit each logical unit (e.g., a subroutine) to about that length, so that you can easily understand the section of code you're working with at any given moment.
As I said, there *are* people who can keep track in their heads of a large number of obscure details all at once, but those people are scary.
Still, 57 lines of Perl is far more than enough to print out a calendar.
> I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a
> banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound
> PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.
Umm. The program you just described could be golfed down to about thirty characters in Perl. The long version, with expansive comments to explain what's going on and why, would still be considerably less than 57 lines.
This is not to disparage Fortran. Printing out calendars is not really its designed purpose, and terseness is not usually given as one of its key strengths anyway. I'm just saying that your example isn't a very good one.
There's also VirtualPC running in a DOS-based Mac emulator within dosemu. HTH.HAND.
> This is taking "freeware" to another level- Free/Opensource the low-quality
> version, while requiring people to pay for the "professional" version?
We used to call that "shareware", back in the day, before the term "shareware" got co-opted for thirty-day demos.
> Do you have a technical reason why this is? I don't see why this should happend.
...) are willing to tolerate in their IT staff. This is not to say that *all* IT staff at all such institutions are incompetent, but the minimum standards are positively frightening.
My first guess would be that the hospital IT staff consists of a former nurse who got tired of working on the floor, thought she might like sitting behind a desk, took a couple of computer classes at a local community college, and applied for the position, thus becomming an internal candidate who consequently had automatic priority over any prospective new hire.
It is scary to me the levels of incompetence many of the services-oriented fields (hospitals, schools, libraries, law enforcement,
What scares me the most, though, is this nagging idea in the back of my head that perhaps I particularly notice this phenomenon in information technology staff because that is my field, and that in fact other professions may be in similar condition, and I simply don't know enough to see it. I try not to think about this much.
> Porting userland is trivial.
Porting userland is only trivial if your code is fairly portable in the first place.
However, OS X already runs on PPC and x86, and those are fairly different architectures. Not as different as, say, Vax and PIC, but still different enough. If the code is portable enough that it runs on both of those without a lot of #IFDEF and processor-specific code branches, then it is easily plausible that a port to another architecture might not have been very hard.
> The problem is How long does someone have to be ashamed for
Until you grow up.
Somewhere around age 25, most people wise up a bit and realize that it doesn't actually matter that much if somebody, somewhere, thinks you're a dork (or whatever) and that you will not, in fact, die of terminal embarrassment. This used to be called adulthood, before people started thinking of eighteen-year-olds as adults.
> This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards.
Oh, yeah, sure, because if Outlook doesn't support a standard, then we obviously can't use it on the web, since Outlook is one of the most popular web browsers.
Idiot.
The preferred way to handle HTML mail is for the SMTP server to respond with 554 unacceptable content type. Barring that, it can be filtered out after receipt. 100.0003% of HTML mail is unsolicited junkmail. Occasionally a misguided user with a misconfigured newsreader posts something on usenet that is otherwise legitimate and posts in HTML format by mistake, but I am not aware of a single documented instance of this happening in email.
Even if you don't trust this and are afraid that you might someday get a piece of important mail in HTML format and want to check each and every one, you wouldn't want the HTML rendered. That would be totally unnecessary, not to mention risky. You'd want the HTML markup stripped out, leaving just the text.
> Thing this will follow the form of BTX formfactor?
Unlikely. If it does, it's doomed.
> I know in the summary it says to be compatible with as much hardware as it can -
> so I sure hope that includes the Case.
To be compatible with as much hardware as possible, it would shoot for maximum ATX (or MicroATX) compatibility, not BTX. I know Intel wanted BTX to be the new standard, but the rest of the industry has pretty well ignored it to death and thereby consigned it to footnote status in the history books alongside MCA. If DTX follows in its path, we'll all still be using ATX or MicroATX in five years.