> A friend and I once found a (1904?) medical encyclopedia ("Medicology").
My mom's got one that's not quite that old, but still amusing. My personal favorite thing from it is the entry on diarrhea. The primary cause listed is constipation, and the primary recommended treatment (for diarrhea, mind) is castor oil, which is supposed to restore regularity. (Castor oil is a laxative, though of course it's more famous for tasting foul.)
> Academia speaks a completely different language than real people. It's a > hazard of living in dark hallways and not getting out much to meet the > human race.
It's more than this. The language most "real" people speak has neither the vocabulary nor the precision to express the kinds of concepts needed to discuss cryptography. Even if you could describe (e.g.) DES without using any strange words that a third-grader wouldn't know, you would nevertheless be using the words in strange *ways* that said third-grader would nevertheless not recognise or instantly comprehend without explanation.
It'll probably cost more. But people will pay it anyway, because hey, you've gotta have the thing that's the latest rage. Then they'll start swearing it tastes better, and they won't eat the old kind. Just like bottled water.
> just like artificial sweeteners taste like the finest quality cane sugar
One supposes the artificial meat would have to be rather better than that, before people would give up the real stuff.
It is worth noting that it's possible (indeed, not that hard) to make real sugars (including sucrose, i.e., table sugar) chemically in a lab, and in that case they taste just as good as the white granular stuff you buy at the store today. (Artificial "brown sugar" might be rather harder to arrange, and making artificial honey taste right is probably impossible, at least with today's technology. OTOH, I would have thought artificial meat would be really hard to do as well, and they're apparently already starting to research a means of doing it.)
The thing that makes artificial sweeteners taste bad is that they're designed to be chemically different from sugar, in order to not raise your blood sugar as much (for diabetics), not have as many Calories, and so forth. One supposes the artificial meat would not be designed, intentionally, to be so different from real meat, because that would defeat the purpose. Unless the purpose is to make low-fat meat, or low-protein meat, or PKU-safe meat... I suppose if they get the regular kind mastered, those would be obvious variations on the concept.
> The 256 MB model is $199 and the 512 MB model is $239.
Right, so basically I can carry around almost one CD's worth of data, except not really, because you presumably have to subtract whatever space the OS and applications take up. So it's like Knoppix with a USB key (or MandrakeMove), except it costs more and you don't have to reboot the host PC before and after each use -- oh, and you don't have to run netcardconfig to get on the network. Oh, and it's worthless as a rescue system because the host OS has to be running.
> Disagree - more molecules present means more barriers to exit.
From a physics perspective, that doesn't make even a small amount of sense.
Yes, the molecules lower down would likely run into molecules higher up and bounce back down, but when they do that, it transfers kinetic energy to the ones they bounced off of and sends them further up and further out.
More molecules means a thicker atmosphere, which means the top of it is higher up, which means more molecules leaving the atmosphere, unless there's enough gravity to pull them back. Id est, the more atmosphere you give Mars, the faster it escapes, until before long it's right back down where it was.
How about if, after using a modern browser for a few days, the very thought of using IE makes a user's skin crawl and they have to suppress the urge to go take a shower? Oh, wait, that was four years ago, practically forever in internet time, and ad interim IE is the only major browser that has not improved its interface at all.
> and it has to be brought to the attention of > the public at large
I'm pretty sure that has happened now. My dad, who only knows the difference between the web and email if you explain it three times slowly, approached *me* to ask if he could get "Mozilla Foxfire". He heard about it on a discussion forum dedicated to his hobby (which is not technical in nature and mostly popular with retired people), heard a description of tabbed browsing, and wanted it. He also wanted to download some smileys. This is *not* the esoteric stuff of the techno-elite geek only.
My sister, an elementary school teacher, said that the computers in the schools were "unusable" for the internet, because they use IE. (It was mostly the constant popups she was talking about; they way she described it, I assume they had accumulated some adware that made matters worse than the sites they were visiting intended -- but she didn't know that; she just knew she had to close six windows every time she clicked anything.)
Yes, there are still a lot of people using IE, but what they need more than anything at this point is for a geek with some spare time to service their computers for them: run a spyware check, install Firefox, clean the 8+ obsolete IM clients they don't use anymore out of the Run registry keys, uninstall all the old versions of AOL and the Earthlink Toolbar they haven't used in a couple of years, and, you know, just generally fix the computer up so it works better. Do it for your non-techie friends when you get a chance. They'll thank you. And if there's a Firefox icon on the desktop where the e used to be, they'll use Firefox -- and they'll like it.
> > The velocity of O2 molecules at Marsian temperature and pressure is > > greater than the escape velocity > > The point of the whole endeavor is to increase both temperature and > pressure over the long run and not keep it at current levels.
That makes the above-stated problem worse, not better, because the increase in temperature increases the velocity of the molecules, significantly, and the pressure only keeps the bottom ones in; it pushes the top ones up and out, and more gravity is required to hold them in.
Before we can usefully give Mars anything like Earth's atmosphere, we need to increase its mass and thus its gravity. The most obvious way I can come up with to do that is drop a bunch of asteroids onto it. That's an expensive project, but we do have the technology to make it feasable, given enough funding. We're talking *lots* of funding, though, probably enough to bankrupt the US government, the EU, *and* Microsoft. In other words, it's probably not going to happen until we develop a way to do it more cheaply than we currently can.
> If you warm up Mars, how long before all the atmosphere cooks off because > the gravity is lower
That's something we can fix. There's an asteroid belt located conveniently nearby, filled with chunks of matter small enough we can move them. Drop a bunch of those onto Mars until its gravity reaches the desired level. We have the technology (albeit perhaps not the financing) to do that now.
There are other problems, though. For instance, it would be significantly beneficial to have Mars in a "trojan" orbit near one of the Earth/Sun Lagrange points, but we do not possess the technology to put it there. It would be awefully nice if Mars had a lot of atmospheric nitrogen, like Earth does, but how could we arrange that? Radiation belts and magnetic fields similar to those of Earth would be really nice, but we don't know how to arrange such things. Oh, and then there's the thing about water -- there's a lot of speculation, but we still don't really know that Mars has any significant amount of it, and it certainly doesn't have, in liquid form or otherwise, anywhere near the quantity we've grown used to on Earth.
> How are we going to increase the gravity of Mars to prevent the Atmosphere from leaking off very fast?
That part's doable. To increase the gravity, we only need to increase the mass. Conveniently, there's a (reasonably) nearby asteroid belt full of chunks of matter that are small enough we can move them, but they add up to more than enough mass to increase that of Mars to the desired level.
There are other problems that we have to solve, though, before we can usefully terraform Mars. The radiation-shield issue you point out is one of them. Where to get enough atmospheric nitrogen (without siphoning off too much of Earth's atmosphere, which we still need) is another.
Oh, and also using Inform will introduce the student to the concept of extreme portability. Not all students will care ("Why would I *want* anyone to run my programs on a Series D Pocket Wocket IV?"), but at least they will be introduced to the concept.
For introductory programming, Inform is an excellent choice, for several reasons: 1. The Inform Designer's Manual is an absolute masterpiece, easily the best
computer language manual I have ever encountered. 2. The designed problem domain of the language is one that immediately
captures pretty much every student's imagination. Your students will
flock to you with questions about how to accomplish this or that. 3. The OO model of the language is excellent, very practical, and overall
a very good introduction to object-oriented programming. And it's such
a nice fit for the problem domain that the students will immediately
understand the usefulness of the paradigm. 4. The language is naturally pretty easy to read, even for people who
don't know it very well. Things are well-named (especially using
the standard library), so that it is fairly obvious what they do.
Many people have taught themselves this language just by looking
at example code, without reading the manual until they had already
written quite a bit of code themselves. 5. The standard library is an important part of the system, so the
student will be introduced immediately to the concept of standard
libraries, much more readily than using e.g. Visual Basic. 6. It's a good compromise between high-level and low-level and indeed
really has both -- a quite high-level OO paradigm and yet also the
ability to do some fairly low-level things if need be. Fairly large
programs can be written without actually using the low-level stuff
(except indirectly, through the standard library's high-level
interface to it), but it is easy to introduce specific programming
problems that will require one of the low-level features to be used
if that is desired. 7. The Inform Designer's Manual is so excellent, this point really
cannot be overstated.
No, it's not a general-purpose programming language, and your students will have to go on to learn other languages. But most of the languages used as first languages for teaching (BASIC, Pascal,...) share this property, and in any case it's best for students to learn multiple languages anyway, the more the better, to gain exposure to different paradigms.
> How could a post that has the phrase "free as in herpes" used to > refer to open source be modded anything but troll?
That wasn't *his* opinion; he was stating an opinion that in his perception exists out there in certain development shops. Although I think it's a fairly unusual opinion. Complete ignorance of the *existence* of open-source licenses is much more common. Many people, even many programmers, are not clear on the distinction between public domain and freeware, to say nothing of the nuances of the various somewhere-in-between licenses.
> While I'm sure there were alternative means by which the final defeat of > the Empire of Japan could have been brought about
Oh, yeah, sure. Eventually. Bear in mind, before the A-bombs were dropped, the US had already turned things around and was gaining ground continually. The US was winning -- gradually. But it was taking a long time. In other words, the atomic bomb did not change the *outcome* of the war (in the broad overall big-picture sense of outcome); what it changed primarily was the *duration* of the war.
Frankly, the US would have won even if Japan had the atomic bomb and the US did not; the outcome was determined by other factors, mainly infrastructure and production capacity and logistical issues. Before the atomic bomb was dropped, the US had already flown a plane over the Japanese capital city of Tokyo on at least one occasion. Japan could not put a plane over or anywhere near Washington D.C. at any time during the war, because there was an entire and rather sizeable continent in the way, controlled substantially by the US (and its allies, e.g., Canada would not have likely allowed a Japanese plane through their airspace either, even assuming a plane existed in that era that could fly that far without landing, which I think was not the case). Japan couldn't put planes over *most* US cities, not even if they could park an aircraft carrier in San Francisco harbor. They couldn't go through Panama, because the US controlled it (and anyway, it would be an unacceptably narrow chokepoint); they didn't have the submarines to go under the north polar cap (nobody did at the time), and Cape Horn (let alone going west and clear around) is so far out of the way as to create very severe supply-line problems. (Also, the British controlled the Falklands and might have had something to say about Japanese ships coming into the Atlantic that way; the allies also controlled the Suez, which leaves the route round the south of Africa, the longest route of all, completely untenable from a supply-line perspective. In short, Japan couldn't put ships in the Atlantic.)
But more than just geography, production capacity and infrastructure were in the way. After Pearl Harbor, Japan had a larger navy than the US. By the time the bomb was dropped, the US had a larger navy than Japan had had at any time during the war. How did that happen? Simple: the US could *build* a navy much faster; the US had more shipyards, more steel mills -- in short, more infrastructure. The US also had more domestic transportation and communications infrastructure, more munitions factories, more weapons factories, more *other* factories that could be converted if necessary, and more ecconomic resources (just compare the GDP of the two countries at that point in history). And if new technology was going to be developed that would impact the outcome, the US also had more universities and more research labs and every other relevant thing. And it isn't just that the US had more of those things because it was bigger; it *was* bigger, but also it was a first-world country, and Japan at the time was not; the US had much more infrastructure per capita, in addition to being rather larger.
Basically, Japan was seriously outclassed in this war. If Japan hadn't brought the US into the war by attacking first, it wouldn't have been anywhere near fair for the US to fight them (but fair sort of goes out the window when somebody attacks you).
Whether the US would have entered the war if Pearl Harbor had not been attacked is an interesting discussion, but even if they had, it is likely that Germany would have been the main focus, and Japan may have been left more-or-less alone. The Japanese leadership miscalculated this rather badly, because they did not have a good understanding of American culture and psychology, thus leading them to conclude, quite erroneously, that attacking would be a good way to keep the US out of the war, or reduce the US to a non-factor in the war's outcome. That didn't work out _quite_
> The power company owns the poles (and hates it when people call them > telephone poles).
Maybe where you live. In my neighborhood, the power lines are on a completely separate set of poles from the phone lines. The power lines run along Payne Ave and approach my house from the front; the telephone lines run along Gill and approach my house from the back side, via a pole at the intersection of two unnamed minor streets ("alleys"). When the power goes out due to a line or pole being down, we still have phone service, and vice versa.
> There is nothing easier to do in Linux than on OS X.
The most important thing that's easier to do on Linux is to customize things to be the way *you* want them, not the way the OS vendor thought would be nicest. Granted, most people seem to think that the way the OS vendor set things up is just fine, and for them a commercial OS is a reasonable choice -- but for people who just have to have things a certain way, OS X doesn't deliver.
> This is exactly the same argument the military equipment and weapons > manufacturers use as to why they should be able to sell their guns to > anyone with the money
You really think certain people/organizations/whatever shouldn't be able to buy networking equipment, because they've been known to abuse it? It's one thing being careful whom you sell thermonuclear ICBMs; it's quite another thing to say, "You want to buy some WAN equipment? Great! We'll have to do this background check on you, to make sure you aren't going to do anything untoward with it..."
There's another matter too: if everyone who sells networking equipment won't sell any to China, so they can't use them for political censorship, how are they supposed to maintain a network, then, so that any of their people can access the internet at all? Is no internet better for the people than a censored internet?
I'm very against political censorship (as opposed to other kinds of censorship, which generally don't bother me), but I'm not sure refusing to sell networking equipment to certain countries is an appropriate solution.
What's going to be the big cost? What kind of thing is this "web app" doing? Does it involve a lot of CPU activity? Once you get the thing developed, how much will it change? These factors matter enormously, because different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Consider, for instance, just two languages: C and Perl. C, competently used, will be able to squeeze more performance, in some cases quite a lot more, out of the hardware, but you're going to spend 10+ times as many developer hours on everything, because there's no CPAN, no taint checking, no CPAN, no testing framework, no CPAN, no highlevel data structures, and no CPAN. You really need to evaluate how your costs are going to break down and where you need to save and where you can afford to spend, to come out ahead overall.
Every language has its own strengths and weaknesses. Is everything going to be on the web, or are you going to want to branch out to the desktop GUI? In the latter case, should you be looking into a language with good GUI tools, such as Java? Perhaps the problem you are wanting to solve lends itself particularly well to a fully object-oriented approach, and you'd like to consider Python. Or maybe 80% of your application is text processing and interfacing with a database? Perl is really good for those things.
Do you see the problem? The description you gave, "Large-Scale Web Apps", tells us almost nothing. We're answering out of complete ignorance, taking shots in the dark, telling you... whatever pops into our heads (Perl pops into my head for most things...), but our answers are basically useless to you, because they don't have anything to do specifically with what you're doing.
> I should have typed Gimp instead of Photoshop since Gimp has been the > norm for the past year or so.
Gimp, Photoshop, whatever. For most purposes they're largely equivalent, once you get past the interface differences. I could have said "raster image editing software", and it wouldn't change the semantics of my post. I just said "Gimp" because that's the one I happen to use.
> It never feels slow, except when doing heavy Photoshop work. The only thing > I'd really like is TFT that does 1024x768.
I would think, for serious Photoshop work, that you would want a good quality CRT that does 1280x1024 or better (x24bpp of course) with a good refresh rate, preferably with at least an 18" viewable diagonal. I paid less $300 for mine, in 2001, so I'm sure they're more affordable than that these days. I'd be surprised if you couldn't get a quite good flat CRT for $200 at this point, though I haven't priced them in the last six months. The advantages of a CRT are *important* for graphics work, especially the better color discretion and accuracy. I know they use a little more power and take up a little more desk space, but if what you're doing exercises the CRT's strengths in the way graphics work does, then it's worth it.
Another advantage of a CRT is that you can set them to resolutions other than the main one you use most of the time, when you need the extra resolution (any 19" or better CRT worth its salt can do at *least* 1600x1200, especially if you're willing to live with a lower refresh rate for a few moments), or when you need things to be a bit bigger for a moment, e.g., so that you can see if your line is crooked by one pixel. Just zoom out to 640x480 mode, and suddenly if your horizontal or vertical line doglegs one pixel, it jumps out at you immediately. (Most *nix/X11 systems these days will handle this scaling on the fly without bothering your apps or window sizes; just hit ctrl-alt-+ a couple of times, and you are zoomed in on a portion of your desktop workspace; moving your mouse to the edge scrolls your viewport around like you would expect. It is possible to get third-party software to do this in Windows also, if that's your cup of tea, e.g., Matrox PowerDesk.) On a good CRT, this actually looks good and is very clear; try it on an affordable TFT display, and it's going to be as blurry as a TV screen.
In summary, I wouldn't want to have to do Gimp work in a TFT display, with only a 1024x768 resolution. For that purpose, that's not a good use of your money, IMO.
> A new computer does solve that problem to a certain extent, because > (especially with Windows) a clean install can make the subjective speed > much quicker.
Yes, the clean install issue is very real. I was lumping that under reason 1, "the old one is broken", because slower performance is by a wide margin not the most significant problem an old Windows install accumulates -- especially if it's Win9x. I will concede though that in some cases the slowdown could also be noticeable, but I don't think it's usually the biggest factor.
> Plus the memory requirements for software tend to go up an aweful lot > during the useful life of a machine.
This is mostly a factor for people who install software upgrades, and the majority of people who are comfortable doing that know what swapping is and understand the difference between RAM and a CPU. Granted, some of them might still choose to just buy new hardware. But I was under the impression we were mostly talking about end users, and as a rule end users don't install software upgrades, so the software they're using has the same memory requirements it did when they bought the computer.
> I bet you most of those friends and relatives (unless hardcore gamers) > would be very satisfied if you took their machine and did a clean install > of whatever OS they use (and if Windows make sure it's 2000 or XP) and > increased the RAM to 512Mb.
My family's still happy with the Duron 700 system I built for them several years ago, which is running Windows 98 SE. I think I built it shortly before OEM versions of Windows XP became available. I did upgrade the RAM a couple years back (because, I had some extra sitting around after an upgrade of my own), and have done a few software upgrades (mainly, the browser, repeatedly, and the office suite, repeatedly; also, a new version of Pegasus Mail a couple years back, and assorted other things) and several times have troubleshot it, and have removed malware of one sort or another at least twice (whatever came with KaZaA the first time, and Gator the second time). But they've commented to me about how much better their computer works than other people's computers, that are newer; I attribute this to basically the things you point out: putting enough RAM in it, and, more importantly, installing decent-quality software, deleting the everliving daylights out of certain incredibly shoddy software (which I won't name here, but its initials are OE), and the occasional maintenance. Honestly, I think having somebody competent service the thing once a year or so is worth twice as much money as new hardware -- up to a point. (There are limits, of course; I'm not suggesting that vintage-2000 hardware will still be good in 2025, or anything.)
Oh, and they have never had to deal with Windows dial-up networking because I put the modem in a Linux box and use a couple of Perl scripts to manage the connection, and all they have to do is click a bookmark on the browser's toolbar to fire off the thing that checks the connection and redials if necessary; that probably helps a bit, too, quite aside from the obvious benefit of its firewalling functionality (though this is less vital for Win98 than it would be for WinXP; Win98 is less stable when apps crash due to bugs, but it's also less vulnerable to worms, so connecting it directly to the internet is less dangerous, assuming you don't use client software that resembles swiss cheese, by which I mostly mean the aforesaid deleted mail client, although certain browsers and media players can also qualify).
> I'm posting this from an Athlon 1GHz with 640Mb RAM
I confess, I don't want to go back to less than a GB of RAM. But I don't pretend my usage pattern is typical in that regard. (Lots of windows open, some of them for months on end... X servers running on two different VTs with different usernames logged in... Numerous tabs in Firefox at all times... Six or eight gnome-terminal windows, with various c
> If I remember a simple remove/replug of cmos battery is enough to clear > the bios and beeing able to access all your computer...
Depends on the computer. Frequently what you have to do is set a particular jumper on the motherboard, powerup once briefly, then put it back like it was. That requires taking the cover off the case, which in some kiosk-type scenerios is likely to get noticed.
Of course, some hardware makes this a bit easier, e.g., certain models of Dell all you have to do is unplug the power cable and hold the power button in for a few seconds. One wouldn't want to rely much on a BIOS password in that kind of scenerio. One supposes that if you're setting up systems where untrusted people will have physical access, you'd try to select hardware that makes the BIOS password harder to clear than that.
And, as noted above, if random people have *unobserved* physical access, then you've got bigger problems, because at that point they can remove the hard drive and walk off with it. You would absolutely not want to have any sensitive or important data on such a system under any circumstances, ever. As a correllary, you wouldn't want to join such a system to a Windows domain.
> They just hear "three point too giga flops prints faster, faster > internet, faster faster" from the sales droids.
I hate to break it to you, but it's not 1990 anymore, and the word "faster" no longer sells hardware except in server space (which is clearly not the market you're talking about), to a relative handful of gamers and powerusers, and to the extreme low-end of the knowledge curve (where the difference between terms such as "computer" and "internet" is still unclear and problems with NetZero can get blamed on the computer's memory, or possibly the monitor).
For the mainstream ordinary everyday end user (the kind of person who either knows how to copy and paste, or is aware that it is something they probably should learn how to do at some point) there are three possible reasons to buy a new computer at this point: 1. The old one is broken. This is probably the most common of the three. 2. The old one doesn't support new features that are wanted, such as
burning DVDs. PowerUsers will add components or install new software,
but end users in some cases will replace the system instead, especially
if the upgrade process might otherwise require a screwdriver. 3. The money is burning a hole in the wallet.
The third option also covers reasons that aren't any kind of reason at all, such as, "It looked cool on the store shelf" or "My cousin has that brand and really likes it".
Slashdot Mirror
> A friend and I once found a (1904?) medical encyclopedia ("Medicology").
My mom's got one that's not quite that old, but still amusing. My personal favorite thing from it is the entry on diarrhea. The primary cause listed is constipation, and the primary recommended treatment (for diarrhea, mind) is castor oil, which is supposed to restore regularity. (Castor oil is a laxative, though of course it's more famous for tasting foul.)
Yeah, *that'll* help the situation.
> Academia speaks a completely different language than real people. It's a
> hazard of living in dark hallways and not getting out much to meet the
> human race.
It's more than this. The language most "real" people speak has neither the vocabulary nor the precision to express the kinds of concepts needed to discuss cryptography. Even if you could describe (e.g.) DES without using any strange words that a third-grader wouldn't know, you would nevertheless be using the words in strange *ways* that said third-grader would nevertheless not recognise or instantly comprehend without explanation.
> costs much less
It'll probably cost more. But people will pay it anyway, because hey, you've gotta have the thing that's the latest rage. Then they'll start swearing it tastes better, and they won't eat the old kind. Just like bottled water.
> just like artificial sweeteners taste like the finest quality cane sugar
One supposes the artificial meat would have to be rather better than that, before people would give up the real stuff.
It is worth noting that it's possible (indeed, not that hard) to make real sugars (including sucrose, i.e., table sugar) chemically in a lab, and in that case they taste just as good as the white granular stuff you buy at the store today. (Artificial "brown sugar" might be rather harder to arrange, and making artificial honey taste right is probably impossible, at least with today's technology. OTOH, I would have thought artificial meat would be really hard to do as well, and they're apparently already starting to research a means of doing it.)
The thing that makes artificial sweeteners taste bad is that they're designed to be chemically different from sugar, in order to not raise your blood sugar as much (for diabetics), not have as many Calories, and so forth. One supposes the artificial meat would not be designed, intentionally, to be so different from real meat, because that would defeat the purpose. Unless the purpose is to make low-fat meat, or low-protein meat, or PKU-safe meat... I suppose if they get the regular kind mastered, those would be obvious variations on the concept.
> The 256 MB model is $199 and the 512 MB model is $239.
Right, so basically I can carry around almost one CD's worth of data, except not really, because you presumably have to subtract whatever space the OS and applications take up. So it's like Knoppix with a USB key (or MandrakeMove), except it costs more and you don't have to reboot the host PC before and after each use -- oh, and you don't have to run netcardconfig to get on the network. Oh, and it's worthless as a rescue system because the host OS has to be running.
What am I missing?
> Disagree - more molecules present means more barriers to exit.
From a physics perspective, that doesn't make even a small amount of sense.
Yes, the molecules lower down would likely run into molecules higher up
and bounce back down, but when they do that, it transfers kinetic energy to
the ones they bounced off of and sends them further up and further out.
More molecules means a thicker atmosphere, which means the top of it is
higher up, which means more molecules leaving the atmosphere, unless there's
enough gravity to pull them back. Id est, the more atmosphere you give Mars,
the faster it escapes, until before long it's right back down where it was.
> it has to be miles betters than IE
How about if, after using a modern browser for a few days, the very thought of using IE makes a user's skin crawl and they have to suppress the urge to go take a shower? Oh, wait, that was four years ago, practically forever in internet time, and ad interim IE is the only major browser that has not improved its interface at all.
> and it has to be brought to the attention of
> the public at large
I'm pretty sure that has happened now. My dad, who only knows the difference between the web and email if you explain it three times slowly, approached *me* to ask if he could get "Mozilla Foxfire". He heard about it on a discussion forum dedicated to his hobby (which is not technical in nature and mostly popular with retired people), heard a description of tabbed browsing, and wanted it. He also wanted to download some smileys. This is *not* the esoteric stuff of the techno-elite geek only.
My sister, an elementary school teacher, said that the computers in the schools were "unusable" for the internet, because they use IE. (It was mostly the constant popups she was talking about; they way she described it, I assume they had accumulated some adware that made matters worse than the sites they were visiting intended -- but she didn't know that; she just knew she had to close six windows every time she clicked anything.)
Yes, there are still a lot of people using IE, but what they need more than anything at this point is for a geek with some spare time to service their computers for them: run a spyware check, install Firefox, clean the 8+ obsolete IM clients they don't use anymore out of the Run registry keys, uninstall all the old versions of AOL and the Earthlink Toolbar they haven't used in a couple of years, and, you know, just generally fix the computer up so it works better. Do it for your non-techie friends when you get a chance. They'll thank you. And if there's a Firefox icon on the desktop where the e used to be, they'll use Firefox -- and they'll like it.
> > The velocity of O2 molecules at Marsian temperature and pressure is
> > greater than the escape velocity
>
> The point of the whole endeavor is to increase both temperature and
> pressure over the long run and not keep it at current levels.
That makes the above-stated problem worse, not better, because the increase in temperature increases the velocity of the molecules, significantly, and the pressure only keeps the bottom ones in; it pushes the top ones up and out, and more gravity is required to hold them in.
Before we can usefully give Mars anything like Earth's atmosphere, we need to increase its mass and thus its gravity. The most obvious way I can come up with to do that is drop a bunch of asteroids onto it. That's an expensive project, but we do have the technology to make it feasable, given enough funding. We're talking *lots* of funding, though, probably enough to bankrupt the US government, the EU, *and* Microsoft. In other words, it's probably not going to happen until we develop a way to do it more cheaply than we currently can.
> If you warm up Mars, how long before all the atmosphere cooks off because
> the gravity is lower
That's something we can fix. There's an asteroid belt located conveniently nearby, filled with chunks of matter small enough we can move them. Drop a bunch of those onto Mars until its gravity reaches the desired level. We have the technology (albeit perhaps not the financing) to do that now.
There are other problems, though. For instance, it would be significantly beneficial to have Mars in a "trojan" orbit near one of the Earth/Sun Lagrange points, but we do not possess the technology to put it there. It would be awefully nice if Mars had a lot of atmospheric nitrogen, like Earth does, but how could we arrange that? Radiation belts and magnetic fields similar to those of Earth would be really nice, but we don't know how to arrange such things. Oh, and then there's the thing about water -- there's a lot of speculation, but we still don't really know that Mars has any significant amount of it, and it certainly doesn't have, in liquid form or otherwise, anywhere near the quantity we've grown used to on Earth.
> How are we going to increase the gravity of Mars to prevent the Atmosphere from leaking off very fast?
That part's doable. To increase the gravity, we only need to increase the mass. Conveniently, there's a (reasonably) nearby asteroid belt full of chunks of matter that are small enough we can move them, but they add up to more than enough mass to increase that of Mars to the desired level.
There are other problems that we have to solve, though, before we can usefully terraform Mars. The radiation-shield issue you point out is one of them. Where to get enough atmospheric nitrogen (without siphoning off too much of Earth's atmosphere, which we still need) is another.
Oh, and also using Inform will introduce the student to the concept of extreme portability. Not all students will care ("Why would I *want* anyone to run my programs on a Series D Pocket Wocket IV?"), but at least they will be introduced to the concept.
For introductory programming, Inform is an excellent choice, for several reasons:
...) share this property, and in any case it's best for students to learn multiple languages anyway, the more the better, to gain exposure to different paradigms.
1. The Inform Designer's Manual is an absolute masterpiece, easily the best
computer language manual I have ever encountered.
2. The designed problem domain of the language is one that immediately
captures pretty much every student's imagination. Your students will
flock to you with questions about how to accomplish this or that.
3. The OO model of the language is excellent, very practical, and overall
a very good introduction to object-oriented programming. And it's such
a nice fit for the problem domain that the students will immediately
understand the usefulness of the paradigm.
4. The language is naturally pretty easy to read, even for people who
don't know it very well. Things are well-named (especially using
the standard library), so that it is fairly obvious what they do.
Many people have taught themselves this language just by looking
at example code, without reading the manual until they had already
written quite a bit of code themselves.
5. The standard library is an important part of the system, so the
student will be introduced immediately to the concept of standard
libraries, much more readily than using e.g. Visual Basic.
6. It's a good compromise between high-level and low-level and indeed
really has both -- a quite high-level OO paradigm and yet also the
ability to do some fairly low-level things if need be. Fairly large
programs can be written without actually using the low-level stuff
(except indirectly, through the standard library's high-level
interface to it), but it is easy to introduce specific programming
problems that will require one of the low-level features to be used
if that is desired.
7. The Inform Designer's Manual is so excellent, this point really
cannot be overstated.
No, it's not a general-purpose programming language, and your students will have to go on to learn other languages. But most of the languages used as first languages for teaching (BASIC, Pascal,
> How could a post that has the phrase "free as in herpes" used to
> refer to open source be modded anything but troll?
That wasn't *his* opinion; he was stating an opinion that in his perception exists out there in certain development shops. Although I think it's a fairly unusual opinion. Complete ignorance of the *existence* of open-source licenses is much more common. Many people, even many programmers, are not clear on the distinction between public domain and freeware, to say nothing of the nuances of the various somewhere-in-between licenses.
> While I'm sure there were alternative means by which the final defeat of
> the Empire of Japan could have been brought about
Oh, yeah, sure. Eventually. Bear in mind, before the A-bombs were dropped, the US had already turned things around and was gaining ground continually. The US was winning -- gradually. But it was taking a long time. In other words, the atomic bomb did not change the *outcome* of the war (in the broad overall big-picture sense of outcome); what it changed primarily was the *duration* of the war.
Frankly, the US would have won even if Japan had the atomic bomb and the US did not; the outcome was determined by other factors, mainly infrastructure and production capacity and logistical issues. Before the atomic bomb was dropped, the US had already flown a plane over the Japanese capital city of Tokyo on at least one occasion. Japan could not put a plane over or anywhere near Washington D.C. at any time during the war, because there was an entire and rather sizeable continent in the way, controlled substantially by the US (and its allies, e.g., Canada would not have likely allowed a Japanese plane through their airspace either, even assuming a plane existed in that era that could fly that far without landing, which I think was not the case). Japan couldn't put planes over *most* US cities, not even if they could park an aircraft carrier in San Francisco harbor. They couldn't go through Panama, because the US controlled it (and anyway, it would be an unacceptably narrow chokepoint); they didn't have the submarines to go under the north polar cap (nobody did at the time), and Cape Horn (let alone going west and clear around) is so far out of the way as to create very severe supply-line problems. (Also, the British controlled the Falklands and might have had something to say about Japanese ships coming into the Atlantic that way; the allies also controlled the Suez, which leaves the route round the south of Africa, the longest route of all, completely untenable from a supply-line perspective. In short, Japan couldn't put ships in the Atlantic.)
But more than just geography, production capacity and infrastructure were in the way. After Pearl Harbor, Japan had a larger navy than the US. By the time the bomb was dropped, the US had a larger navy than Japan had had at any time during the war. How did that happen? Simple: the US could *build* a navy much faster; the US had more shipyards, more steel mills -- in short, more infrastructure. The US also had more domestic transportation and communications infrastructure, more munitions factories, more weapons factories, more *other* factories that could be converted if necessary, and more ecconomic resources (just compare the GDP of the two countries at that point in history). And if new technology was going to be developed that would impact the outcome, the US also had more universities and more research labs and every other relevant thing. And it isn't just that the US had more of those things because it was bigger; it *was* bigger, but also it was a first-world country, and Japan at the time was not; the US had much more infrastructure per capita, in addition to being rather larger.
Basically, Japan was seriously outclassed in this war. If Japan hadn't brought the US into the war by attacking first, it wouldn't have been anywhere near fair for the US to fight them (but fair sort of goes out the window when somebody attacks you).
Whether the US would have entered the war if Pearl Harbor had not been attacked is an interesting discussion, but even if they had, it is likely that Germany would have been the main focus, and Japan may have been left more-or-less alone. The Japanese leadership miscalculated this rather badly, because they did not have a good understanding of American culture and psychology, thus leading them to conclude, quite erroneously, that attacking would be a good way to keep the US out of the war, or reduce the US to a non-factor in the war's outcome. That didn't work out _quite_
> The power company owns the poles (and hates it when people call them
> telephone poles).
Maybe where you live. In my neighborhood, the power lines are on a completely separate set of poles from the phone lines. The power lines run along Payne Ave and approach my house from the front; the telephone lines run along Gill and approach my house from the back side, via a pole at the intersection of two unnamed minor streets ("alleys"). When the power goes out due to a line or pole being down, we still have phone service, and vice versa.
> There is nothing easier to do in Linux than on OS X.
The most important thing that's easier to do on Linux is to customize things to be the way *you* want them, not the way the OS vendor thought would be nicest. Granted, most people seem to think that the way the OS vendor set things up is just fine, and for them a commercial OS is a reasonable choice -- but for people who just have to have things a certain way, OS X doesn't deliver.
Cars were't dangerous enough otherwise.
> [Hell] has frozen over and the devil has taken up hockey and ice fishing...
We already knew that, last month, when the new version of Debian came out.
> This is exactly the same argument the military equipment and weapons
> manufacturers use as to why they should be able to sell their guns to
> anyone with the money
You really think certain people/organizations/whatever shouldn't be able to buy networking equipment, because they've been known to abuse it? It's one thing being careful whom you sell thermonuclear ICBMs; it's quite another thing to say, "You want to buy some WAN equipment? Great! We'll have to do this background check on you, to make sure you aren't going to do anything untoward with it..."
There's another matter too: if everyone who sells networking equipment won't sell any to China, so they can't use them for political censorship, how are they supposed to maintain a network, then, so that any of their people can access the internet at all? Is no internet better for the people than a censored internet?
I'm very against political censorship (as opposed to other kinds of censorship, which generally don't bother me), but I'm not sure refusing to sell networking equipment to certain countries is an appropriate solution.
What's going to be the big cost? What kind of thing is this "web app" doing? Does it involve a lot of CPU activity? Once you get the thing developed, how much will it change? These factors matter enormously, because different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Consider, for instance, just two languages: C and Perl. C, competently used, will be able to squeeze more performance, in some cases quite a lot more, out of the hardware, but you're going to spend 10+ times as many developer hours on everything, because there's no CPAN, no taint checking, no CPAN, no testing framework, no CPAN, no highlevel data structures, and no CPAN. You really need to evaluate how your costs are going to break down and where you need to save and where you can afford to spend, to come out ahead overall.
Every language has its own strengths and weaknesses. Is everything going to be on the web, or are you going to want to branch out to the desktop GUI? In the latter case, should you be looking into a language with good GUI tools, such as Java? Perhaps the problem you are wanting to solve lends itself particularly well to a fully object-oriented approach, and you'd like to consider Python. Or maybe 80% of your application is text processing and interfacing with a database? Perl is really good for those things.
Do you see the problem? The description you gave, "Large-Scale Web Apps", tells us almost nothing. We're answering out of complete ignorance, taking shots in the dark, telling you... whatever pops into our heads (Perl pops into my head for most things...), but our answers are basically useless to you, because they don't have anything to do specifically with what you're doing.
> I should have typed Gimp instead of Photoshop since Gimp has been the
> norm for the past year or so.
Gimp, Photoshop, whatever. For most purposes they're largely equivalent, once you get past the interface differences. I could have said "raster image editing software", and it wouldn't change the semantics of my post. I just said "Gimp" because that's the one I happen to use.
> It never feels slow, except when doing heavy Photoshop work. The only thing
> I'd really like is TFT that does 1024x768.
I would think, for serious Photoshop work, that you would want a good quality CRT that does 1280x1024 or better (x24bpp of course) with a good refresh rate, preferably with at least an 18" viewable diagonal. I paid less $300 for mine, in 2001, so I'm sure they're more affordable than that these days. I'd be surprised if you couldn't get a quite good flat CRT for $200 at this point, though I haven't priced them in the last six months. The advantages of a CRT are *important* for graphics work, especially the better color discretion and accuracy. I know they use a little more power and take up a little more desk space, but if what you're doing exercises the CRT's strengths in the way graphics work does, then it's worth it.
Another advantage of a CRT is that you can set them to resolutions other than the main one you use most of the time, when you need the extra resolution (any 19" or better CRT worth its salt can do at *least* 1600x1200, especially if you're willing to live with a lower refresh rate for a few moments), or when you need things to be a bit bigger for a moment, e.g., so that you can see if your line is crooked by one pixel. Just zoom out to 640x480 mode, and suddenly if your horizontal or vertical line doglegs one pixel, it jumps out at you immediately. (Most *nix/X11 systems these days will handle this scaling on the fly without bothering your apps or window sizes; just hit ctrl-alt-+ a couple of times, and you are zoomed in on a portion of your desktop workspace; moving your mouse to the edge scrolls your viewport around like you would expect. It is possible to get third-party software to do this in Windows also, if that's your cup of tea, e.g., Matrox PowerDesk.) On a good CRT, this actually looks good and is very clear; try it on an affordable TFT display, and it's going to be as blurry as a TV screen.
In summary, I wouldn't want to have to do Gimp work in a TFT display, with only a 1024x768 resolution. For that purpose, that's not a good use of your money, IMO.
> A new computer does solve that problem to a certain extent, because
> (especially with Windows) a clean install can make the subjective speed
> much quicker.
Yes, the clean install issue is very real. I was lumping that under reason 1, "the old one is broken", because slower performance is by a wide margin not the most significant problem an old Windows install accumulates -- especially if it's Win9x. I will concede though that in some cases the slowdown could also be noticeable, but I don't think it's usually the biggest factor.
> Plus the memory requirements for software tend to go up an aweful lot
> during the useful life of a machine.
This is mostly a factor for people who install software upgrades, and the majority of people who are comfortable doing that know what swapping is and understand the difference between RAM and a CPU. Granted, some of them might still choose to just buy new hardware. But I was under the impression we were mostly talking about end users, and as a rule end users don't install software upgrades, so the software they're using has the same memory requirements it did when they bought the computer.
> I bet you most of those friends and relatives (unless hardcore gamers)
> would be very satisfied if you took their machine and did a clean install
> of whatever OS they use (and if Windows make sure it's 2000 or XP) and
> increased the RAM to 512Mb.
My family's still happy with the Duron 700 system I built for them several years ago, which is running Windows 98 SE. I think I built it shortly before OEM versions of Windows XP became available. I did upgrade the RAM a couple years back (because, I had some extra sitting around after an upgrade of my own), and have done a few software upgrades (mainly, the browser, repeatedly, and the office suite, repeatedly; also, a new version of Pegasus Mail a couple years back, and assorted other things) and several times have troubleshot it, and have removed malware of one sort or another at least twice (whatever came with KaZaA the first time, and Gator the second time). But they've commented to me about how much better their computer works than other people's computers, that are newer; I attribute this to basically the things you point out: putting enough RAM in it, and, more importantly, installing decent-quality software, deleting the everliving daylights out of certain incredibly shoddy software (which I won't name here, but its initials are OE), and the occasional maintenance. Honestly, I think having somebody competent service the thing once a year or so is worth twice as much money as new hardware -- up to a point. (There are limits, of course; I'm not suggesting that vintage-2000 hardware will still be good in 2025, or anything.)
Oh, and they have never had to deal with Windows dial-up networking because I put the modem in a Linux box and use a couple of Perl scripts to manage the connection, and all they have to do is click a bookmark on the browser's toolbar to fire off the thing that checks the connection and redials if necessary; that probably helps a bit, too, quite aside from the obvious benefit of its firewalling functionality (though this is less vital for Win98 than it would be for WinXP; Win98 is less stable when apps crash due to bugs, but it's also less vulnerable to worms, so connecting it directly to the internet is less dangerous, assuming you don't use client software that resembles swiss cheese, by which I mostly mean the aforesaid deleted mail client, although certain browsers and media players can also qualify).
> I'm posting this from an Athlon 1GHz with 640Mb RAM
I confess, I don't want to go back to less than a GB of RAM. But I don't pretend my usage pattern is typical in that regard. (Lots of windows open, some of them for months on end... X servers running on two different VTs with different usernames logged in... Numerous tabs in Firefox at all times... Six or eight gnome-terminal windows, with various c
> If I remember a simple remove/replug of cmos battery is enough to clear
> the bios and beeing able to access all your computer...
Depends on the computer. Frequently what you have to do is set a particular jumper on the motherboard, powerup once briefly, then put it back like it was. That requires taking the cover off the case, which in some kiosk-type scenerios is likely to get noticed.
Of course, some hardware makes this a bit easier, e.g., certain models of Dell all you have to do is unplug the power cable and hold the power button in for a few seconds. One wouldn't want to rely much on a BIOS password in that kind of scenerio. One supposes that if you're setting up systems where untrusted people will have physical access, you'd try to select hardware that makes the BIOS password harder to clear than that.
And, as noted above, if random people have *unobserved* physical access, then you've got bigger problems, because at that point they can remove the hard drive and walk off with it. You would absolutely not want to have any sensitive or important data on such a system under any circumstances, ever. As a correllary, you wouldn't want to join such a system to a Windows domain.
> They just hear "three point too giga flops prints faster, faster
> internet, faster faster" from the sales droids.
I hate to break it to you, but it's not 1990 anymore, and the word "faster" no longer sells hardware except in server space (which is clearly not the market you're talking about), to a relative handful of gamers and powerusers, and to the extreme low-end of the knowledge curve (where the difference between terms such as "computer" and "internet" is still unclear and problems with NetZero can get blamed on the computer's memory, or possibly the monitor).
For the mainstream ordinary everyday end user (the kind of person who either knows how to copy and paste, or is aware that it is something they probably should learn how to do at some point) there are three possible reasons to buy a new computer at this point:
1. The old one is broken. This is probably the most common of the three.
2. The old one doesn't support new features that are wanted, such as
burning DVDs. PowerUsers will add components or install new software,
but end users in some cases will replace the system instead, especially
if the upgrade process might otherwise require a screwdriver.
3. The money is burning a hole in the wallet.
The third option also covers reasons that aren't any kind of reason at all, such as, "It looked cool on the store shelf" or "My cousin has that brand and really likes it".