The way I see it, Windows 7 is basically Vista SP2. Honestly, the changes it makes look small compared to everything XP SP2 did. So then Seven SP1 is essentially the third service pack.
If you want to count characters who became captains later (after the end of their main series run and/or in a future timeline), you can add not just Sulu but also Scott and Spock and Riker and Crusher and LaForge as well, and I'm probably still leaving somebody out.
Yes, they started dorking around with (i.e., fundamentally changing) Janeway's character some time in season six IIRC and then got really serious about it in season seven. It made me feel like somebody had swapped in an entirely different character. It wouldn't have been significantly weirder if they'd hired a new actress while they were at it. (Actually, it's tempting to say that the actress should've resigned and forced that, although of course that might have had serious career implications for her beyond just Star Trek, so perhaps not.)
Some of the TNG characters changed similarly, but it happened so early in season one that you can pretty much just write off their behavior in the early episodes as "the writers didn't really know the characters yet".
There's no such excuse with Janeway: the writers had had more than five seasons to get to know her character, so when she suddenly starts behaving as if she's been taken over by an alien intelligence, and the end of the episode comes and the crew doesn't discover this fact and fix it and get the real captain back, it's pretty jarring. This happens in several season-six episodes and then gets worse in season seven. As far as I'm concerned, it's bad writing.
Jim "fistfights and excessive melodramatic pauses" Kirk is the one I have reservations about calling a "Star Trek Captain". He has way more in common with Riker (the First Officer who added approximately nothing to TNG) and Kira (again a first officer, and a really poor actress) than with any of the other captains. He was also just about the most poorly developed character in his series, not excepting some of the single-use villain characters. They did a little better with him in the movies, but he still doesn't live up to the standards set by the others.
(I also don't like some of the things they did with Janeway in seasons six and seven, but since Kirk never made it anywhere near season six of anything, that's not a fair comparison.)
> shouldn't the increase in speed be only 2% and not 16x?
Define "speed".
The _bandwidth_ is almost certainly reduced a bit, because of the redundant data that have to be sent to make the error correction work.
The article and summary are not as clear about this as would be desired, but it's obvious that what they're talking about improving has more to do with effective latency than bandwidth.
> If your new error correction technology eliminates lost packets, and > you lose 5% normally, then using this you gain 5% back not 10x.
The summary is horribly misleading, and the article is not much better, but the bottom line when you sift through all that is they're talking primarily about latency rather than bandwidth.
Every time you don't have to resend the packet, it saves you an entire round trip on your latency for that packet. With 5% packet loss, 5% of packets need a second round trip, and a quarter of a percent of all packets need a third round trip. Add to this that the network stack normally can't know that the packet didn't make it until it times out, and a quarter of a percent of your packets require not just triple the average but in fact triple the *maximum* single-trip latency. The difference, if you can prevent almost all of those resends, can be very noticeable indeed for some applications.
If you're downloading large files (say, ISO images of the latest Debian stable) using reasonably robust software (like, say, wget), you won't notice any difference at all. In that use case, you could go through a tunnel where the whole connection drops entirely for thirty seconds, and it would only add about thirty-one seconds to your total download time. If you weren't watching the progress bar very closely, this could go entirely unnoticed. Not all network applications are so forgiving of latency spikes, however.
A VOIP call (or most other UDP applications) will just drop the late packets entirely, so the multiple round trips wouldn't happen. The article, however, was talking about TCP. Specifically it talks about watching YouTube videos (near-real-time sequential media delivered over HTTP), and apparently they don't know (or discounted) the trick where if your connection is a bit choppy you just pause the video right away, look at something else in another browser tab for thirty seconds, and then go back and watch the video.
And yes, error correction is a very old idea, and this is just yet another specific implementation.
> SeaMonkey still has the massive navigation bar at the top with bookmarks.
Do you mean the navigation bar, the bookmarks toolbar, or both? In any case, I actually use both of those toolbars very heavily. Does Firefox turn them off by default these days? Does it turn off the menu bar and the status bar and scroll bars by default as well?
I've got an idea how they could save a whole lot of space. They could turn off display of the web page by default. The whole browser could consist of a window border, a new tab button, and a minimize button. That would really be streamlined. I bet it would load up real fast, too.
> The ironic part is that now, people have cheap access to large screens.
It's better than that: we have cheap access to video cards that can drive *multiple* monitors. I've got a dual-19" setup at home. That isn't necessary for web browsing, but it comes in really handy for some other tasks.
> The successor to the original Mozilla Suite, it has a full- > blown email/news/RSS client, Chatzilla, and an HTML editor.
All of which nobody wants from Mozilla. We just want the web browser. I already have, from other sources, a *much* more feature-complete mail/news reader (Gnus) and an overwhelmingly better HTML editor (Emacs with some custom elisp that I wrote back in the nineties; one very major advantage this has over an HTML-specific editor is that it works when I'm writing snippets of HTML embedded in other kinds of files, such as in server-side Perl code), and if I had any use whatsoever for an IRC client I hope someone would smack me back to my senses.
Really, I just want the browser.
With that said...
> Also several other default features that would require separate extensions for Firefox.
Yes, I know. It took Firefox well more than a year just to have extensions _available_ for some of the features that I relied on heavily in the old Mozilla suite, and I refused to switch over to it until the extension manager changes that allowed you to upgrade the browser without having to find and install all your extensions again from scratch (sometime around FF 1.5 IIRC). Using the suite, I'd need about a third as many extensions as I need in Firefox, because the rest of the things I use extensions for were built in out-of-the-box in the suite.
> And they don't update their versions like crazy either;
More to the point, they haven't been gratuitously dorking around with the UI trying to see how screwed up they can make it for the last three years.
So yeah, I've thought about it. Currently, I find that Firefox 2.0.0.20 with NoScript is still adequate for my needs, but its days are obviously numbered. The nail in its coffin will be the CSS features that it doesn't support simply because its Gecko version is too old. The most important of these is probably display: inline-block, since sites that rely on that can have quite seriously messed up layouts (and, frequently, overlapping text) when it's not supported. Eventually, I'll have to upgrade because of that. (There are also some Javascript performance issues, but I find that the number of sites I ever use where I actually _want_ the functionality that the Javascript provides can be counted on the fingers of one hand without resorting to clever math tricks. Lang-8 is the main one. So I just use that site in a different browser. Sorted.)
And yes, if the Firefox team doesn't eventually quit playing around with the UI like hyperactive third graders and produce something solid and reliable, it is entirely possible that Seamonkey will be my upgrade path. Chrome is obviously unsuitable for my needs (because it's even less customizable than IE and furthermore lacks a number of features I'm not willing to live without), and while I use Opera on the side for certain things, I would have grave reservations about making it my primary browser. I've also checked out Epiphany, Midori, Flock, Galeon, and several others. So far, Seamonkey looks like the best bet, if Firefox doesn't eventually find its way back to a place where I can meet it.
If I thought I had anywhere near the C chops for it, I might attempt to fork Firefox 2 and update it to use a modern Gecko, but I'm nowhere near enough of an application developer and have nothing like enough knowledge of C to realistically attempt that kind of undertaking. (I have some programming background, but I mostly write glue code, personal utilities, and server-oriented non-GUI stuff. I'm a network administrator, not an application developer.)
With the help of a vector graphics editor (like Inkscape or Illustrator), you can easily construct images that say whatever you want and thus use those digital photo frames, which can be set to automatically rotate repeatedly through all the images you feed them, pausing for 15 or 30 seconds on each image) as a cheap but effective replacement for one of those expensive digital signage systems.
Updating the images does mean you have to walk around to each of the frames and update its memory card, but for a small installation (up to about a dozen screens) this is not a deal breaker, considering how much money you are saving.
> > tablets are rubbish for doing real work > That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems
You might want to think that one over for a minute.
I'm going to suggest specifically that you ponder the meanings of two phrases in particular: "doing real work" and "three-year-old".
(Of course, some of us think Windows in general is rubbish for doing real work, but we're mostly programmers and network administrators and geeks and stuff. The kind of work we do on the computer is just as different from most end users' work as the latter is from what a three-year-old would be doing.)
How about because it will run at all (or at least crawl) on old hardware?
I personally cannot imagine the pain and anguish and suffering that would ensue if we attempted to deploy Vista or Seven on some of the desktop hardware we still have in use here. There would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, I suspect.
You see, we have a multi-tier use cycle. New computers are used for stuff where performance is important for one reason or another, which comes to somewhere around half of our computers altogether. I call this "tier 1", and I try very hard not to let hardware get much older than five years before I move it out of tier 1, but with budget constraints that sometimes gets stretched slightly. I hope to have all the tier-1 systems on Vista or later before Windows XP *officially* goes off extended support, but that's just the first tier. When a computer gets replaced in tier 1 but still works (or has parts that still work and can be combined with another partially-working system to make one whole system), I use the hand-me-downs to upgrade systems in tier 2. Then 2-3 later, if the system still runs at all, it'll get bumped out by a newer hand-me-down, and the old one gets repurposed again for tier 3.
Currently the oldest systems we are still using are ten years old, which is typical. However, the only ones that old that run Windows are the legacy testing system (which I use for stuff like verifying that trying to look at our website in IE6 or 7 at least displays the text of the page in some kind of visible fashion and that and links are clickable) and one games computer, which is very "special needs" and will not be upgraded EVER AGAIN if I have anything to say about it. (Frankly, upgrading that one from 98 to XP was a mistake. A lot of the edutainment software it runs was originally written for Windows 3.x and then patched to work on later versions. Much fiddling around with filesystem permissions and sundry other settings was involved with getting things to run on XP. You do not want to know how many versions of QuickTime for Windows it has running on it simultaneously.)
Fortunately, most of the other tier-3 systems run Debian. The oldest Windows systems that are going to be an issue for moving off of XP, really, are the tier-2 systems. Plans change as things happen (e.g., a computer dies and is not available for use as a hand-me-down as expected), but my tentative plans currently call for Windows XP to be phased out of tier 2 circa 2015. That could easily get pushed back to 2016.
No, I am not going to install Seven on vintage 2004 low-to-midrange desktop hardware. No. Just, no. That way lies madness.
Don't even talk to me about Eight until it's got at least one service pack out.
> Me, I wish people would stop referring to the different Chinese languages as "dialects".
Honestly, the word "dialects" really just means "directly related languages". Some dialects are mutually intelligible and some are not. The various Chinese languages are generally mutually intelligible in written form, not so much when spoken.
What I find odd is that the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, etc.) are almost never called dialects. They're so closely related and so similar (apart from minor differences in pronunciation and orthography) that in virtually any other language family they would certainly be called dialects. Heck, Portuguese is more or less a regional accent (albeit a fairly pronounced one) with a handful of orthographic changes.
> Moreover, those reps who did admit issues > seemed dismissive of Windows RT as a whole.
Right, so those are the reps who know enough about Microsoft's fringe products to actually know what Windows RT is. Of course they're dismissive. It's an OEM-only OS intended exclusively for mobile devices. Since almost all mobile devices run either iOS or Android, and most of the rest run some custom OS produced by the device manufacturer, it's not surprising to me that half of Microsoft's own sales reps don't know anything about their mobile-only offering. How many of their sales reps five or ten years ago could explain Windows CE? Does anyone care?
> an innovative way to block illegal commercial robocall
But, the commercial ones aren't the ones I really want to block.
I mean, sure, you can go ahead and block them _also_. I'm not going to complain about that or anything.
The ones I really want blocked, though, are the political robocalls. In fact, I believe I would be willing to give portions of my personal anatomy to have those reliably blocked. Interesting portions.
> we can't grow trees at the rate that we want to consume [fuel]
Trees, no.
There are, however, much faster-growing plants than trees...
I suspect that alcohol-based fuels derived from plant matter will eventually largely displace petroleum, as petroleum reserves become more depleted, lowering supply and making petroleum products less cost competitive.
> We still have to wait and see how efficient this can be in large scale production
Indeed, that is likely to be the sticking point.
In particular, I have serious doubts as to whether synthesizing fuel from scratch in this manner could be cost-competitive with alcohol fuels that can be trivially derived from plant matter via simple fermentation and distillation. Making fuel this way is more expensive (for what you get) than pumping already-existing petroleum out of the ground in bulk, but I suspect it will be much cheaper than synthesizing fuel from water and carbon dioxide.
> So when we run out of fossil fuel and switch to nuclear > we can still synthesize hydrocarbons if we need them.
Yes, but it wouldn't be economic to synthesize hydrocarbons to burn as fuel.
Right now alcohol fuel is more expensive than petroleum because petroleum is artificially cheap because we don't have to actually make it because we can just drill into the ground and pump it out. However, if we had to actually synthesize the petroleum, the alcohol would then be cheaper.
We could still synthesize hydrocarbons for other purposes, of course -- e.g., for use in plastics.
> There's a extremely high density battery (read > liquid fuels) crisis coming in the next decade or two
Actually, I'm not convinced of that. Specifically, I am not convinced that there will be a sudden crisis. I suspect that instead there may be a gradual transition. As petroleum reserves become depleted, some production centers will go offline, lowering the supply curve and thus increasing the price. It is not reasonable to assume that this will necessarily happen all at once, because some petroleum-producing entities have much larger reserves than others. As the price of petroleum repeatedly increases, alternatives (notably, alcohol fuels made from renewable plant matter) would logically be expected to become more and more cost competitive. At some point, petroleum may become sufficiently expensive that alcohol fuels are actually cheaper.
Right now, you can buy a little over a quart of denatured alcohol (maybe two quarts) for the cost of a gallon of gas, and that's not a very good deal for bulk applications like driving a car all over the country; but imagine if you could buy more than a gallon of alcohol for the same price as a gallon of gas. More to the point, imagine if you could buy enough alcohol to drive a little more than a mile for the same price as enough gas to drive a mile. The automobile industry is easily capable of making vehicles that run on alcohol, but right now nobody (except a few environmentalists maybe) wants to pay extra for that; but that could easily change if gas prices and alcohol prices were about equal with the former still climbing.
Of course, a lot of petroleum gets used for things other than cars -- not least, to run electrical power plants. But those things could run on alcohol as well. We have the technology. What we lack is the economic incentive -- but we'll get that when the price of petroleum goes high enough.
And don't worry about the price of field corn. That whole issue is just politics. We can in fact make alcohol out of pretty much any organic material. Corn, wheat, soybeans, kitchen trash, grass clippings, whatever. It's not even difficult (although making the process as *efficient* as possible is an interesting exercise).
> You might have a point, but it's entirely impossible > to tell because the numbers are pulled directly from > your ass. (No offense.)
The numbers are all nice round even numbers because he was just using them as examples in an attempt to allow people who are bad at abstract thinking to nonetheless wrap their puny little weakling non-math-oriented minds around the concept he was explaining. You can replace all the numbers in his argument (except for the 100%) with different numbers, or with variables, and the logic still holds. If you aren't able to figure out his point, it's not because of anything to do with the specific numbers he used purely for illustrative purposes.
> I believe you are incorrect... Yes, if you have your > big Air-to-Petrol plant hooked directly up to the grid, > you can't choose[, b]ut there are plenty of other...
You missed his point. Economists have a term, "opportunity cost", that is highly relevant here. If you build your giant horribly inefficient Air-to-Petrol plant and, instead of powering it off the grid, build an enormous wind farm to power it, you then have not taken any power from the grid and thus have not caused more fossil fuels to be burned by the grid than were being burned before. However, you have incurred an opportunity cost, because if instead of building the giant horribly inefficient Air-to-Petrol pland and the enormous wind farm you had built *only* the enormous wind farm, you would have actively reduced the quantity of fossil fuels being burned by significantly more than you have done with the Air-to-Petrol plant.
This argument is predicated on the assumption that the Air-to-Petrol plant is horribly inefficient (compared to other existing technologies). However, that's the point the other poster was trying to make: it does matter whether the process is at all efficient or not, compared to other existing technologies. It matters because if you can take the energy you *would* have been using to convert air into petrol and instead use the same input energy in some other, more efficient way, then that would be better, and converting air to petrol is an environmentally unsound activity.
I'm in favor of trying to take good care of the environment, really I am. Nonetheless, I'm against mindlessly promoting every single thing that anybody thinks up in the name of environmentalism without analyzing it rationally. A lot of the junk that environmentalists get exciting about isn't actually good for the environment at all, quite aside from, in many cases, other (sometimes rather substantial) downsides. Discernment is almost a lost art in modern society, unfortunately.
> Many of our enemies are using weapons made by > China or her allies in Russia and Eastern Europe.
China and Russia have not been allies since... well, technically they were allies for part of World War II, but it was a pretty uneasy alliance even then. Also, that was the Nationalist government of China (which is now de facto the government of Taiwan), before they were driven out.
Yes, I know, the current Chinese government has its roots in Communism, which came out of Russia. That's true. It does not imply that they continued to see eye to eye with Russia on everything. During the height of the cold war, China and Russia had significantly more distrust for each other than for the major Western powers (America, England, France).
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sino-Russian_relations And particularly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_Split
> Interesting that the (sometimes) hours of effort involved > in derailing a message thread or debate only pays 50 cents
I don't know exactly how the article determined the "fifty cents" figure, but if that's half a US dollar's worth of the People's Currency as determined by exchange rates, it would have rather more than fifty cents' worth of purchasing power in China. (The Chinese government deliberately keeps the value of their currency somewhat low in terms of purchasing power parity compared to other currencies, especially the US dollar, so that the exchange rates favor their exports. It's an economic strategy that works for them at their current level of development because they still have a lower average standard of living than the fully developed world. In the long term, it won't be sustainable -- and indeed the exchange rate is already not as skewed as it used to be -- but in the long term they won't need this crutch as badly, because ipso facto they will have developed their economy to the point where it can compete better on other merits, which will in fact be why the undervalued-currency strategy will no longer be effective at that point.)
Also, if you're thinking in first-world terms, unskilled labor in China is less expensive than you might expect compared to the local prices of other goods and services. This is another way of saying that the standard of living for an unskilled worker is currently lower in China than in the fully developed world. (It does make a significant difference, too, which part of China you're talking about. The Shanghai area, for example, is much more developed than Xinjiang.)
> Just imagine how horrible it would have been if > people actually discussed something meaningful.
This is Slashdot. The question of what does or does not constitute piracy is considered highly meaningful by a significant percentage of the people here. The site runs a lot of stories devoted entirely to that topic, in fact. (Granted, I don't know that this was necessarily intended to be one of them; censorship is _also_ a fairly major topic here, so the submitter may well have intended the story to be mostly about that.)
Slashdot Mirror
The way I see it, Windows 7 is basically Vista SP2. Honestly, the changes it makes look small compared to everything XP SP2 did. So then Seven SP1 is essentially the third service pack.
If you want to count characters who became captains later (after the end of their main series run and/or in a future timeline), you can add not just Sulu but also Scott and Spock and Riker and Crusher and LaForge as well, and I'm probably still leaving somebody out.
Yes, they started dorking around with (i.e., fundamentally changing) Janeway's character some time in season six IIRC and then got really serious about it in season seven. It made me feel like somebody had swapped in an entirely different character. It wouldn't have been significantly weirder if they'd hired a new actress while they were at it. (Actually, it's tempting to say that the actress should've resigned and forced that, although of course that might have had serious career implications for her beyond just Star Trek, so perhaps not.)
Some of the TNG characters changed similarly, but it happened so early in season one that you can pretty much just write off their behavior in the early episodes as "the writers didn't really know the characters yet".
There's no such excuse with Janeway: the writers had had more than five seasons to get to know her character, so when she suddenly starts behaving as if she's been taken over by an alien intelligence, and the end of the episode comes and the crew doesn't discover this fact and fix it and get the real captain back, it's pretty jarring. This happens in several season-six episodes and then gets worse in season seven. As far as I'm concerned, it's bad writing.
Jim "fistfights and excessive melodramatic pauses" Kirk is the one I have reservations about calling a "Star Trek Captain". He has way more in common with Riker (the First Officer who added approximately nothing to TNG) and Kira (again a first officer, and a really poor actress) than with any of the other captains. He was also just about the most poorly developed character in his series, not excepting some of the single-use villain characters. They did a little better with him in the movies, but he still doesn't live up to the standards set by the others.
(I also don't like some of the things they did with Janeway in seasons six and seven, but since Kirk never made it anywhere near season six of anything, that's not a fair comparison.)
> Yea, the phrasing was written in the most confusing way possible.
> On second thought, I take that back - it could have been written in Esperanto.
It could have been written using Esperanto vocabulary and Japanese grammar, then translated to English using an online translation service.
> shouldn't the increase in speed be only 2% and not 16x?
Define "speed".
The _bandwidth_ is almost certainly reduced a bit, because of the redundant data that have to be sent to make the error correction work.
The article and summary are not as clear about this as would be desired, but it's obvious that what they're talking about improving has more to do with effective latency than bandwidth.
> If your new error correction technology eliminates lost packets, and
> you lose 5% normally, then using this you gain 5% back not 10x.
The summary is horribly misleading, and the article is not much better, but the bottom line when you sift through all that is they're talking primarily about latency rather than bandwidth.
Every time you don't have to resend the packet, it saves you an entire round trip on your latency for that packet. With 5% packet loss, 5% of packets need a second round trip, and a quarter of a percent of all packets need a third round trip. Add to this that the network stack normally can't know that the packet didn't make it until it times out, and a quarter of a percent of your packets require not just triple the average but in fact triple the *maximum* single-trip latency. The difference, if you can prevent almost all of those resends, can be very noticeable indeed for some applications.
If you're downloading large files (say, ISO images of the latest Debian stable) using reasonably robust software (like, say, wget), you won't notice any difference at all. In that use case, you could go through a tunnel where the whole connection drops entirely for thirty seconds, and it would only add about thirty-one seconds to your total download time. If you weren't watching the progress bar very closely, this could go entirely unnoticed. Not all network applications are so forgiving of latency spikes, however.
A VOIP call (or most other UDP applications) will just drop the late packets entirely, so the multiple round trips wouldn't happen. The article, however, was talking about TCP. Specifically it talks about watching YouTube videos (near-real-time sequential media delivered over HTTP), and apparently they don't know (or discounted) the trick where if your connection is a bit choppy you just pause the video right away, look at something else in another browser tab for thirty seconds, and then go back and watch the video.
And yes, error correction is a very old idea, and this is just yet another specific implementation.
> SeaMonkey still has the massive navigation bar at the top with bookmarks.
Do you mean the navigation bar, the bookmarks toolbar, or both? In any case, I actually use both of those toolbars very heavily. Does Firefox turn them off by default these days? Does it turn off the menu bar and the status bar and scroll bars by default as well?
I've got an idea how they could save a whole lot of space. They could turn off display of the web page by default. The whole browser could consist of a window border, a new tab button, and a minimize button. That would really be streamlined. I bet it would load up real fast, too.
> The ironic part is that now, people have cheap access to large screens.
It's better than that: we have cheap access to video cards that can drive *multiple* monitors. I've got a dual-19" setup at home. That isn't necessary for web browsing, but it comes in really handy for some other tasks.
> The successor to the original Mozilla Suite, it has a full-
> blown email/news/RSS client, Chatzilla, and an HTML editor.
All of which nobody wants from Mozilla. We just want the web browser. I already have, from other sources, a *much* more feature-complete mail/news reader (Gnus) and an overwhelmingly better HTML editor (Emacs with some custom elisp that I wrote back in the nineties; one very major advantage this has over an HTML-specific editor is that it works when I'm writing snippets of HTML embedded in other kinds of files, such as in server-side Perl code), and if I had any use whatsoever for an IRC client I hope someone would smack me back to my senses.
Really, I just want the browser.
With that said...
> Also several other default features that would require separate extensions for Firefox.
Yes, I know. It took Firefox well more than a year just to have extensions _available_ for some of the features that I relied on heavily in the old Mozilla suite, and I refused to switch over to it until the extension manager changes that allowed you to upgrade the browser without having to find and install all your extensions again from scratch (sometime around FF 1.5 IIRC). Using the suite, I'd need about a third as many extensions as I need in Firefox, because the rest of the things I use extensions for were built in out-of-the-box in the suite.
> And they don't update their versions like crazy either;
More to the point, they haven't been gratuitously dorking around with the UI trying to see how screwed up they can make it for the last three years.
So yeah, I've thought about it. Currently, I find that Firefox 2.0.0.20 with NoScript is still adequate for my needs, but its days are obviously numbered. The nail in its coffin will be the CSS features that it doesn't support simply because its Gecko version is too old. The most important of these is probably display: inline-block, since sites that rely on that can have quite seriously messed up layouts (and, frequently, overlapping text) when it's not supported. Eventually, I'll have to upgrade because of that. (There are also some Javascript performance issues, but I find that the number of sites I ever use where I actually _want_ the functionality that the Javascript provides can be counted on the fingers of one hand without resorting to clever math tricks. Lang-8 is the main one. So I just use that site in a different browser. Sorted.)
And yes, if the Firefox team doesn't eventually quit playing around with the UI like hyperactive third graders and produce something solid and reliable, it is entirely possible that Seamonkey will be my upgrade path. Chrome is obviously unsuitable for my needs (because it's even less customizable than IE and furthermore lacks a number of features I'm not willing to live without), and while I use Opera on the side for certain things, I would have grave reservations about making it my primary browser. I've also checked out Epiphany, Midori, Flock, Galeon, and several others. So far, Seamonkey looks like the best bet, if Firefox doesn't eventually find its way back to a place where I can meet it.
If I thought I had anywhere near the C chops for it, I might attempt to fork Firefox 2 and update it to use a modern Gecko, but I'm nowhere near enough of an application developer and have nothing like enough knowledge of C to realistically attempt that kind of undertaking. (I have some programming background, but I mostly write glue code, personal utilities, and server-oriented non-GUI stuff. I'm a network administrator, not an application developer.)
With the help of a vector graphics editor (like Inkscape or Illustrator), you can easily construct images that say whatever you want and thus use those digital photo frames, which can be set to automatically rotate repeatedly through all the images you feed them, pausing for 15 or 30 seconds on each image) as a cheap but effective replacement for one of those expensive digital signage systems.
Updating the images does mean you have to walk around to each of the frames and update its memory card, but for a small installation (up to about a dozen screens) this is not a deal breaker, considering how much money you are saving.
> > tablets are rubbish for doing real work
> That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems
You might want to think that one over for a minute.
I'm going to suggest specifically that you ponder the meanings of two phrases in particular: "doing real work" and "three-year-old".
(Of course, some of us think Windows in general is rubbish for doing real work, but we're mostly programmers and network administrators and geeks and stuff. The kind of work we do on the computer is just as different from most end users' work as the latter is from what a three-year-old would be doing.)
> a) it is fast even on old hardware,
How about because it will run at all (or at least crawl) on old hardware?
I personally cannot imagine the pain and anguish and suffering that would ensue if we attempted to deploy Vista or Seven on some of the desktop hardware we still have in use here. There would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, I suspect.
You see, we have a multi-tier use cycle. New computers are used for stuff where performance is important for one reason or another, which comes to somewhere around half of our computers altogether. I call this "tier 1", and I try very hard not to let hardware get much older than five years before I move it out of tier 1, but with budget constraints that sometimes gets stretched slightly. I hope to have all the tier-1 systems on Vista or later before Windows XP *officially* goes off extended support, but that's just the first tier. When a computer gets replaced in tier 1 but still works (or has parts that still work and can be combined with another partially-working system to make one whole system), I use the hand-me-downs to upgrade systems in tier 2. Then 2-3 later, if the system still runs at all, it'll get bumped out by a newer hand-me-down, and the old one gets repurposed again for tier 3.
Currently the oldest systems we are still using are ten years old, which is typical. However, the only ones that old that run Windows are the legacy testing system (which I use for stuff like verifying that trying to look at our website in IE6 or 7 at least displays the text of the page in some kind of visible fashion and that and links are clickable) and one games computer, which is very "special needs" and will not be upgraded EVER AGAIN if I have anything to say about it. (Frankly, upgrading that one from 98 to XP was a mistake. A lot of the edutainment software it runs was originally written for Windows 3.x and then patched to work on later versions. Much fiddling around with filesystem permissions and sundry other settings was involved with getting things to run on XP. You do not want to know how many versions of QuickTime for Windows it has running on it simultaneously.)
Fortunately, most of the other tier-3 systems run Debian. The oldest Windows systems that are going to be an issue for moving off of XP, really, are the tier-2 systems. Plans change as things happen (e.g., a computer dies and is not available for use as a hand-me-down as expected), but my tentative plans currently call for Windows XP to be phased out of tier 2 circa 2015. That could easily get pushed back to 2016.
No, I am not going to install Seven on vintage 2004 low-to-midrange desktop hardware. No. Just, no. That way lies madness.
Don't even talk to me about Eight until it's got at least one service pack out.
And here I am still using my antiquated 100BaseT setup, missing out on all the fun.
> Me, I wish people would stop referring to the different Chinese languages as "dialects".
Honestly, the word "dialects" really just means "directly related languages". Some dialects are mutually intelligible and some are not. The various Chinese languages are generally mutually intelligible in written form, not so much when spoken.
What I find odd is that the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, etc.) are almost never called dialects. They're so closely related and so similar (apart from minor differences in pronunciation and orthography) that in virtually any other language family they would certainly be called dialects. Heck, Portuguese is more or less a regional accent (albeit a fairly pronounced one) with a handful of orthographic changes.
> Moreover, those reps who did admit issues
> seemed dismissive of Windows RT as a whole.
Right, so those are the reps who know enough about Microsoft's fringe products to actually know what Windows RT is. Of course they're dismissive. It's an OEM-only OS intended exclusively for mobile devices. Since almost all mobile devices run either iOS or Android, and most of the rest run some custom OS produced by the device manufacturer, it's not surprising to me that half of Microsoft's own sales reps don't know anything about their mobile-only offering. How many of their sales reps five or ten years ago could explain Windows CE? Does anyone care?
> an innovative way to block illegal commercial robocall
But, the commercial ones aren't the ones I really want to block.
I mean, sure, you can go ahead and block them _also_. I'm not going to complain about that or anything.
The ones I really want blocked, though, are the political robocalls. In fact, I believe I would be willing to give portions of my personal anatomy to have those reliably blocked. Interesting portions.
> we can't grow trees at the rate that we want to consume [fuel]
Trees, no.
There are, however, much faster-growing plants than trees...
I suspect that alcohol-based fuels derived from plant matter will eventually largely displace petroleum, as petroleum reserves become more depleted, lowering supply and making petroleum products less cost competitive.
> We still have to wait and see how efficient this can be in large scale production
Indeed, that is likely to be the sticking point.
In particular, I have serious doubts as to whether synthesizing fuel from scratch in this manner could be cost-competitive with alcohol fuels that can be trivially derived from plant matter via simple fermentation and distillation. Making fuel this way is more expensive (for what you get) than pumping already-existing petroleum out of the ground in bulk, but I suspect it will be much cheaper than synthesizing fuel from water and carbon dioxide.
> So when we run out of fossil fuel and switch to nuclear
> we can still synthesize hydrocarbons if we need them.
Yes, but it wouldn't be economic to synthesize hydrocarbons to burn as fuel.
Right now alcohol fuel is more expensive than petroleum because petroleum is artificially cheap because we don't have to actually make it because we can just drill into the ground and pump it out. However, if we had to actually synthesize the petroleum, the alcohol would then be cheaper.
We could still synthesize hydrocarbons for other purposes, of course -- e.g., for use in plastics.
> There's a extremely high density battery (read
> liquid fuels) crisis coming in the next decade or two
Actually, I'm not convinced of that. Specifically, I am not convinced that there will be a sudden crisis. I suspect that instead there may be a gradual transition. As petroleum reserves become depleted, some production centers will go offline, lowering the supply curve and thus increasing the price. It is not reasonable to assume that this will necessarily happen all at once, because some petroleum-producing entities have much larger reserves than others. As the price of petroleum repeatedly increases, alternatives (notably, alcohol fuels made from renewable plant matter) would logically be expected to become more and more cost competitive. At some point, petroleum may become sufficiently expensive that alcohol fuels are actually cheaper.
Right now, you can buy a little over a quart of denatured alcohol (maybe two quarts) for the cost of a gallon of gas, and that's not a very good deal for bulk applications like driving a car all over the country; but imagine if you could buy more than a gallon of alcohol for the same price as a gallon of gas. More to the point, imagine if you could buy enough alcohol to drive a little more than a mile for the same price as enough gas to drive a mile. The automobile industry is easily capable of making vehicles that run on alcohol, but right now nobody (except a few environmentalists maybe) wants to pay extra for that; but that could easily change if gas prices and alcohol prices were about equal with the former still climbing.
Of course, a lot of petroleum gets used for things other than cars -- not least, to run electrical power plants. But those things could run on alcohol as well. We have the technology. What we lack is the economic incentive -- but we'll get that when the price of petroleum goes high enough.
And don't worry about the price of field corn. That whole issue is just politics. We can in fact make alcohol out of pretty much any organic material. Corn, wheat, soybeans, kitchen trash, grass clippings, whatever. It's not even difficult (although making the process as *efficient* as possible is an interesting exercise).
> You might have a point, but it's entirely impossible
> to tell because the numbers are pulled directly from
> your ass. (No offense.)
The numbers are all nice round even numbers because he was just using them as examples in an attempt to allow people who are bad at abstract thinking to nonetheless wrap their puny little weakling non-math-oriented minds around the concept he was explaining. You can replace all the numbers in his argument (except for the 100%) with different numbers, or with variables, and the logic still holds. If you aren't able to figure out his point, it's not because of anything to do with the specific numbers he used purely for illustrative purposes.
> I believe you are incorrect... Yes, if you have your
> big Air-to-Petrol plant hooked directly up to the grid,
> you can't choose[, b]ut there are plenty of other...
You missed his point. Economists have a term, "opportunity cost", that is highly relevant here. If you build your giant horribly inefficient Air-to-Petrol plant and, instead of powering it off the grid, build an enormous wind farm to power it, you then have not taken any power from the grid and thus have
not caused more fossil fuels to be burned by the grid than were being burned before. However, you have incurred an opportunity cost, because if instead of building the giant horribly inefficient Air-to-Petrol pland and the enormous wind farm you had built *only* the enormous wind farm, you would have actively reduced the quantity of fossil fuels being burned by significantly more than you have done with the Air-to-Petrol plant.
This argument is predicated on the assumption that the Air-to-Petrol plant is horribly inefficient (compared to other existing technologies). However, that's the point the other poster was trying to make: it does matter whether the process is at all efficient or not, compared to other existing technologies. It matters because if you can take the energy you *would* have been using to convert air into petrol and instead use the same input energy in some other, more efficient way, then that would be better, and converting air to petrol is an environmentally unsound activity.
I'm in favor of trying to take good care of the environment, really I am. Nonetheless, I'm against mindlessly promoting every single thing that anybody thinks up in the name of environmentalism without analyzing it rationally. A lot of the junk that environmentalists get exciting about isn't actually good for the environment at all, quite aside from, in many cases, other (sometimes rather substantial) downsides. Discernment is almost a lost art in modern society, unfortunately.
Unnecessary. Americans will do it for free, just because they're bored.
> Many of our enemies are using weapons made by
> China or her allies in Russia and Eastern Europe.
China and Russia have not been allies since... well, technically they were allies for part of World War II, but it was a pretty uneasy alliance even then. Also, that was the Nationalist government of China (which is now de facto the government of Taiwan), before they were driven out.
Yes, I know, the current Chinese government has its roots in Communism, which came out of Russia. That's true. It does not imply that they continued to see eye to eye with Russia on everything. During the height of the cold war, China and Russia had significantly more distrust for each other than for the major Western powers (America, England, France).
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sino-Russian_relations
And particularly here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_Split
> Interesting that the (sometimes) hours of effort involved
> in derailing a message thread or debate only pays 50 cents
I don't know exactly how the article determined the "fifty cents" figure, but if that's half a US dollar's worth of the People's Currency as determined by exchange rates, it would have rather more than fifty cents' worth of purchasing power in China. (The Chinese government deliberately keeps the value of their currency somewhat low in terms of purchasing power parity compared to other currencies, especially the US dollar, so that the exchange rates favor their exports. It's an economic strategy that works for them at their current level of development because they still have a lower average standard of living than the fully developed world. In the long term, it won't be sustainable -- and indeed the exchange rate is already not as skewed as it used to be -- but in the long term they won't need this crutch as badly, because ipso facto they will have developed their economy to the point where it can compete better on other merits, which will in fact be why the undervalued-currency strategy will no longer be effective at that point.)
Also, if you're thinking in first-world terms, unskilled labor in China is less expensive than you might expect compared to the local prices of other goods and services. This is another way of saying that the standard of living for an unskilled worker is currently lower in China than in the fully developed world. (It does make a significant difference, too, which part of China you're talking about. The Shanghai area, for example, is much more developed than Xinjiang.)
> Just imagine how horrible it would have been if
> people actually discussed something meaningful.
This is Slashdot. The question of what does or does not constitute piracy is considered highly meaningful by a significant percentage of the people here. The site runs a lot of stories devoted entirely to that topic, in fact. (Granted, I don't know that this was necessarily intended to be one of them; censorship is _also_ a fairly major topic here, so the submitter may well have intended the story to be mostly about that.)