> It's still fairly easy for a program using XFree86 to freeze or crash > the entire Xserver
Indeed, this is substantially my biggest peave with XFree at this time. I'm hoping that one of the various projects resulting from the recent license and development model arguments and forks will result in a more stable X server.
I would even be happy if it were done like Gnu screen, so that if the X server crashes the apps all sit there happily waiting for the X server to start back up again. The crashes would still be annoying, but at least you wouldn't lose so much state. As it stands now, if there's an app with a bug that causes an X server crash, I'm *afraid* to try to reproduce it, or to use the app at all, for fear I'll lose everything in all my windows. (No, saving doesn't solve the problem; there's still the matter of what windows are open, what's loaded in them, where the cursor is, and so on and so forth. It's like losing your whole train of thought; it can take an hour or more to get back in the flow.)
> People don't go without food just because someone chooses to eat 3 Big Macs > a day.
Three Big Macs a day isn't even extreme. There are people who get two Double Quarters in a single meal. (Yes, that's a pound of beef, plus cheese and whatnot.) Plus SuperSize fries.
The one that scares me, though is the guy who waits in the drivethrough for fifteen minutes every single morning for McDs to open so he can get is four large coffees. He doesn't just come when it's time for the place to open, presumably because someone might get in line ahead of him.
But no, these people, disgusting though they are, do not contribute to world hunger; they do contribute to McD's profit margins, though.
> However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern > food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population > growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing > the population 10-fold.
This is not due to having enough food, however. It's due to ecconomic factors. The countries that have the ecconomic strength to keep all their people fed are the same countries with adequate police coverage, transportation infrastructure, something that resembles a passable excuse for an education system, unemployment and inflation mostly under control most of the time, adequate communications infrastructure, enough hospitals, and so on. Basically, it's the prosperous countries that have lower birthrates, the countries where stress is a bigger concern on a day-to-day basis than whether your children will live long enough to have children.
> and how many of the people starving in africa are you going to tell that we > have the food we just don't send it?
It's true; we have extra food, more than we can possibly use. It sits around and rots because the supermarkets don't buy it all up in time, and the food the supermarkets do buy up, a significant portion of *that* sits there (mostly in their back rooms, but sometimes out in the consumer areas even) until it rots, because people don't buy it fast enough, and the food that people do buy, more than half of it doesn't end up going into anyone's stomach, for one reason or another -- it doesn't get prepared before it goes bad, or once it's prepared there's more than enough and it doesn't all get put on a plate, or it does get put on a plate but then it's not all eaten. The *poor* people in Ohio throw away almost as much food as they eat, and that's just what gets all the way to the consumer before it gets thrown out.
Restaurants waste even more food than supermarkets. School cafeterias, *especially* college cafeterias, waste even more than restaurants.
We have plenty of food. More food than we know what to do with. Who do you know who, if a clearly emaciated person obviously starving came to the door, would *for lack of extra food* turn the person away? (Some people would turn them away for other reasons (fear of criminal activity, annoyance at being interrupted by a total stranger, a dislike for the poor, a worldview that considers handouts not to be doing the recipient any favors, or cetera), but here I'm talking about turning them away for lack of any food to spare.)
Further, there are lots of people in the USA who would be happy to donate food, even purchase food just to donate it, for the warm fuzzy feelings they get from it. When the public library offers "Food for Fines", wherein people can pay their fines with the equivalent amount of food, which is then donated to some community action group, people come out of the woodwork to pay off fines that they've let stand for months or years. McDonald's would be pleased (if they were approached correctly) to donate a hundred thousand Extra Value Meals toward a Solving World Hunger initiative just for the PR value, and they're not alone.
But shipping donated food to where the starving people are is less than altogether practicable (much less practical). If the recipients can't afford food, they *certainly* can't afford the international shipping. On a small scale, the cost of the international shipping positively *dwarfs* the cost of the food, so that you feel like you're mostly giving your money to the shipping company, not to the starving people. On a large scale, the ecconomics of the shipping would be somewhat less unfavourable, but getting the scale large enough would almost certainly require government involvement (which raises budget issues and can upset taxpayers) or a large corporation (which by the time you consider shipping and organizational overhead can probably get a larger PR kick by doing something domestically).) And the problems don't stop when you drop the shipment of food onto the docks. The starving people are mostly inland, and the transportation infrastructure is somewhat less developed[1] than around here. So you're looking at probably using choppers half the time... it gets expensive fast.
Then with any large-scale food import operation there's the issue of making sure the starving people get to eat the food; in a lot of places this would require a significant long-term military presence, lest the local thugs[2] take the food to make feeding their armies a little easier. Of course, a significant long-term military presence has serious political ramifications; Various nations (mostly Europe) would not be keen to allow us to keep armed forces all over Africa on a more-or-less permanent basis. They would make a big deal publically abo
> The reference-counted Perl model is equally powerful but more comprehensible.
Huh? The _semantic_ in Perl is natural and powerful and easy to comprehend, but what does that have to do with the reference counting? That's a detail of the implementation and, in fact, it's going away in Perl6 (wherein we are getting real garbage collection to replace it, so we can stop worrying about circular structures creating memory leaks). The things that make the Perl model matural and powerful and comprehensible are language-level things, not implementation details.
> Notice how of all the intelectual fields the only ones that are anal > about spelling are the technical fields?
This is untrue. Language scholars are *way* more anal about spelling than people in almost any technical field. Some of the social sciences are also rather more careful about spelling than geeks. Historians, biologists, geologists, and archeologists all tend to care about spelling more than (say) computer programmers.
Grammar is what geeks and techies are anal about. Screw the spelling; as long as it pronounces and the meaning is clear, I'm generally happy. My mind is able to work out what the word is, even if a couple of letters are off, and the first guess is usually correct, or if not I (almost subconsciously) try a handful of "close" matches in context to see which one fits best and go with that. This takes almost no time (less than a second generally) and is not a big deal. However, if you start playing fast and loose with the grammar, using possessives as plurals and that sort of thing, I find it hard to make myself read past the first couple of sentences; my parser takes the word the way it's written and goes on past, only later getting hung up, and then I have to backtrack and reconsider for every word, "is there another word that *sort of* sounds or looks like this word that, if substituted, would make the parse come out right?" This takes much longer, usually several seconds -- per instance. If it's an isolated incident, no big deal, but generally the people who do this do it several times per sentence. Grrrr. I won't take very much of that; I have other things to do with my time.
So, "intelectual" doesn't bother me (and I mightn't have even noticed it, if spelling hadn't been the topic of your post), but if you'd written something more like this...
> Notice who off all you're intellectual fields, only ones that our > anal about there grammer our you're technical fields?
I'd have had a much harder time deciphering that, mostly because of the combinatorial explosion of possibilities to consider.
It also bothers me when in speaking people mispronounce words as other words, e.g., pronouncing "you're" as if it were "your", "hour" as if it were "our", "our" as if it were "are", and so on. Mere bad pronunciation doesn't bother me very much, but when one word becomes another, I have trouble. There are a handful of people in my acquaintence who do this, and I usually just smile and not whenever they talk and look for an excuse to be busy elsewhere, because I don't feel like doing the mental gymnastics necessary to make sense of their broken speech.
(Accents create this effect at first, but after I listen to them for a bit I can generally adjust and have little trouble; the information is all there, only the phonetics are altered slightly. The exceptions I've noticed are the Texan accent (wherein almost all vowells are made long, which makes it quite hard to distinguish long vowells from short ones) and, much worse, a strong Korean accent, wherein most consonants are not pronounced distinctly enough that I can tell them apart. (Aparently Hangul carries most of the meaning in the vowells and places little emphasis on consonants, and so upon first learning English many Koreans tend to have some trouble with consonants, just like we (English speakers) have trouble trying to hear the difference between retroflex and dental or aspirate and unaspirate consonants in the Hindustani languages.)
> The highest reading she shows or talks about is 3 mR/hr.
Actually, she does talk a little about some higher ratings in a couple of places. Notably, there's one place where she talks about here meter going "off scale" (meaning, presumably, that the _reading_ is off the scale of what the meter can measure; she doesn't stay there long), and another place later on wherein she talks about a custom-built meter that another person has that doesn't go off scale (presumably, because it can measure the higher readings), and about how having one of these is necessary for going into the buildings in Pripyat', presumably because the readings are high enough that you need to be concerned about how many roetwhatevers you're getting in a shorter timeframe than an hour. I would have liked a little more detail in her explanation of that (e.g., some actual numbers).
> Some people smoke. Others drive their motorcycle through [Chernobyl]
Indeed, but which is the more dangerous activity? As a one-time activity, I think I'd have to rate the cycle ride through Chernobyl as more dangerous, but over the long term smoking might be worse, because you tend to do more and more of it; after ten years of visiting Chernobyl you probably wouldn't spend any more time there per month than the first month, possibly even less, but after ten years of smoking you'll be lighting up every twenty minutes. So over the decades, smoking might actually get to be worse for you.
Then again, if after your nth visit to Chernobyl you get brave and decide to go poking around inside some of those buildings... "Say, I've never seen inside that sarcophagus thingy over the fourth reactor..." That could get to be a pretty significant health risk...
Pripyat, incidentally, is the city that has been labelled "ghosttown" in the article. I initially figure this out by correlating the map in the article with my atlas, but a number of pages further into the article there are photos from the place which, if you can make anything out of cyrrilic characters, make it pretty clear that Pripyat is the name of the town.
> It's funny, many people scream about the massive retraining required > switching workers to Open Source... It's not real.
It can be; it depends what apps you're switching. The browser interface of MSIE was mostly designed to mimick the one in Netscape (which was mostly made to mimick the one in Mosaic) exactly for this reason: to minimize the need for retraining. Consequently, with browsers it's largely a non-issue.
Basic word-processing is similarly standardized, as long as you don't want to do anything very complex. Once you start wanting to fool around with columns and frames and other things not found on the toolbar there are more differences, however. With spreadsheets it's similar: if all you want to do is balance your checkbook, Excel and Calc and MS Works and Gnumeric and Foxpro and KSpread are all pretty much exactly the same, but when you start wanting to mess with more involved functions (conditionals, statistical functions,...) and insert charts and graphs and things, you start seeing more noticeable UI differences.
There are also differences in the browsers, as far as that goes, when you start messing around with poweruser features like capability policies and tabbed browsing. But for most end users the only really important features in the browser are hyperlinks, the address bar, and the back button, and those are quite well standardised across the major browsers (except for the text browsers (Lynx, W3, Links, w3m,...), but end users don't use those).
> But, if he would have sent you a file in HTML, PDF or, best, RTF
No, no, no, please, no. Send me the Word documents; OpenOffice does *MUCH* better with Word documents than *anything* does with RTF. Have you ever actually tried to work with RTF? It preserves things like boldness and italics, but that's about it. It doesn't preserve margins, doesn't properly support tab stops (I think it does left tabs only? Not sure; maybe this depends on what app you use to read or write it), can't handle columns, much less frames, tables, sidebars, images, draw objects,... it does bold and italic and underline, but not outline, shadow, or other text effects, doesn't handle borders properly (e.g., on paragraphs) and, in general, is a steaming heap of freshly boiled rabbit dung.
Opening Word documents with OO is also better than anything I've tried (Acrobat Reader, xpdf, GSView) does with PDFs. When I open a Word document in OpenOffice, I can select any text I want, easily perform a document-wide search, scroll from the bottom of one page right through to the top of the next (none of this nonsense about scrolling to the bottom, hitting "next page", and scrolling back to the top to read the top of the next page), and, most importantly, the font color is usually already set to Automatic, and if it isn't I can set it that way, and then I can comfortably read the text in my chosen colors, instead of squinting into white, trying in vain to pretend that the screen is paper or that I don't mind going snowblind. No, PDFs are evil.
HTML is okay, but only if you write it by hand, which most people aren't willing to do. The autogenerated stuff is, again, worse than the results I get opening Word documents in OpenOffice.
Ideal would be if everyone would send me documents in OpenOffice format, of course, but barring that, Word format is preferable to these other options that you list.
Old-school Unix geeks will of course vote for TeX, but they suck so who cares.
> when inserting a clarifying phrase into a quote, one encloses it in square > brackets and not normal brackets.
Normal brackets *are* square. The angle brackets may be more common in certain kinds of data markup, but in general they are less common, so we always call them "angle brackets". If we just say "brackets", we always mean the square ones.
> > it only uses the swap space actively if you run out of RAM. > Should be true. Isn't though. Just watch the Perf Mon.
How about listening for hard drive activity? Depending on your drive and your case and how much other noise you have in the area, some of us can actually *hear it* when the system swaps. Plus, of course, you can just tell, because an alt-tab operation can take an extra couple of seconds, which is quite noticeable.
I'll also note that I didn't say Windows doesn't use the swapfile at all if you have enough RAM; I said it doesn't use it *actively* if you have enough RAM. Which is to say, it doesn't use it enough to have a user-noticeable impact on performance, so don't sweat it -- until your RAM gets all filled up, that is, and then it gets quite noticeable indeed.
This is easy in Gimp. Just use the select tool and then stroke your selection.
The advantage of this approach is that it's very flexible. For one thing, you can select any brushtip you want and use that brushtip to stroke the selection, which gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of what the edge of the shape looks like. For another thing, you can use any select tool, including the magic wand or the bezier, which means you can make any shape you want, and most shapes are very easy. A simpler paint program will let you draw elipses and rectangles easily, but if you want a triangle or pentagon that's somewhat trickier, or you have to piece it together from parts. With the Gimp's way of doing things you can do any shape you want.
Additionally, with the Gimp's approach you can also get fancy if you really want to, switching your selection to a mask, editing the mask, switching the mask back to a selection, using shift to do multiselect so you can do several regions at once, using shrink and grow to alter the shape and size of the selection(s), and so on and so forth.
> By that logic, scientists should start using "theory" instead of "hypothesis,"
They already do that. The old idea that a hyphothesis had to be tested in multiple experiments in order to become a theory is gone decades ago. Now it's good enough to get enough other scientists that several countries are represented to agree with you that your hypothesis might be correct, and you can call it a theory. If you're famous enough in the scientific community, you can just call your ideas theories right off the bat.
This is especially true in certain sciences, most notably evolutionary biology. (An even better example, if you consider it a science at all, which is no foregone conclusion IMO, is psychology.) Harder sciences like physics are a little more rigid with the terminology, however.
Then there's math: testing, schmesting; no amount of experimentation or testing can ever be enough; if you haven't *proven* it, it's not a theorem. You can, however, make it a postulate if you want, but then you're defining your own system and can't make claims about other established systems based on it, unless you can prove that your system is isomorphic to the other system (which you probably can't do if you've added postulates). Math rocks.
"Serious music", of course, means polyphony -- true polyphony, not that half-baked monody stuff everyone's so eager to write these days, but real polyphony, with multiple independent or interdependent voices, e.g. fugue.
It's hard to take music seriously if all it's got is one melody part and some supporting harmony parts. That takes, what, two minutes per measure to write? Lazy bums.
Yeah, go ahead and mod me as Funny, nevermind that I'm actually mostly serious.
> put your Windows system behind a NAT gateway. You can use a dedicated > Linux box for this (IP Masquerade)
Incidentally, this doesn't have to be expensive, since it isn't doing a whole lot other than sitting between your Windows system and the internet. It needs whatever it needs to connect to the internet (a modem, if you're on dialup), but you might be able to scavange that off your Windows system if the modem you have has hardware flow control. Assuming you don't need this Linux box for anything else (say, for use as a desktop), it can run headless, meaning it doesn't need a monitor. (You'll borrow your monitor from your Windows system while you set it up, and afterward you'll run it totally via ssh.) It doesn't have to be very powerful, either. Mine is a Pentium/90 system, which is more than powerful enough and on the brutal used computer market is worth pocket lint and a song. The biggest cost is likely to be the power it uses which, without a monitor or printer, is not going to be a really huge amount.
Oh, and it needs a network card, which you can get for ten bucks, and you can connect it to the network card in your Windows system either with two patch cables and a $30 hub or with one crossover patch cable if you don't plan any more nodes on your network.
Or you could go with a dedicated hardware NAT, which is what I would suggest if you didn't know Linux, but since you mention using an offsite Linux server I mentioned the Linux solution as an option.
Reasonable security is possible, assuming the attackers do not have physical access to the system. (If you have to protect against your family or your landlord, you're screwed.)
First, get rid of Outlook. No, I mean it, get rid of Outlook. (This includes Outlook Express.) 100.0% of all known email-born viruses and worms[1] have exploited Outlook exclusively; get rid of Outlook, and you can stop worrying about email-borne malware.
This leaves the issue of stuff that comes in over open ports, exploiting various services that are running on your system. It's possible to close all those off and shut them down individually, but it's much simpler to put your Windows system behind a NAT gateway. You can use a dedicated Linux box for this (IP Masquerade) or there are also hardware NAT gateway solutions available.
That right there is pretty good. There's still the occasional vulnerability in MSIE, but that only hits you if you visit a malicious website. Of course you still have to engage in safe practices generally (e.g., don't download and execute stuff you don't trust, don't share floppies with unprotected systems, et cetera), but the steps I've just outlined will stop cold over 99% of all internet-based attacks on your Windows system, especially the automated ones like worms and viruses.
Did I mention, I've only outlined two simple steps to take? Two *very* important simple steps: get rid of Outlook, and put your Windows system behind a NAT gateway. There are other things that you can do, but these two steps are each vastly more important than all other things you can do combined, so they're the first two things you should do, before even considering anything else. Do them, do them soon.
What to replace Outlook with? If you don't care about portability (i.e., a Windows-only solution will do), Pegasus Mail is excellent, but of course you have other options too, including some that are open-source if that scores any points with you. You will not regret getting rid of Outlook. Well, for a few minutes you may not be so sure, while you're importing all your mail from Outlook, setting your prefs, and learning how to use the new system, but the next time you read on slashdot about Yet Another New Outlook Virus infecting half of the desktop computers on the internet once again (hmmm... when will that be? I'm betting on sometime in May, but it could be as soon as April or possibly as late as June if the virus writers decide to do something else over spring break...) you'll be glad you don't have to worry about that anymore.
The reasons why Outlook, even with all the latest patches, is a huge security risk are technical in nature, but you don't need to understand the technical reasons: just look at the track record; fully *half* of all internet-borne viruses in the last five years have exploited Outlook, and 100% of the ones that spread by email have exploited Outlook.
Windows itself isn't too bad, especially if you put it behind a NAT gateway like I'm recommending.
[1] Trojans, of course, exploit the *user's* willingness to execute the
attachment, so they don't care what mailreader you use, but you can
protect yourself from trojans by not executing any attachments unless
you're sure you know what they are.
> Windows requires swap no matter your physical RAM size,
However, it only uses the swap space actively if you run out of RAM. If you get rid of your RAM disk swap space, you'll free up enough real RAM to cover all the situations in which Windows would have resorted to swap space -- a simpler configuration and at least as fast.
The only reason the grandparent isn't informative is because everybody already knows that, and even if they didn't it isn't exactly rocket science to figure it out.
> Don't let Windows resize the swapfile - that's a surefire path to fragmentation
This is an overrated concern. First off, Windows only makes the swapfile as big as it needs to be, and on a decently large drive there's plenty of room for it to be as big as it needs to be without fragmentation. Second, while it's true that fragmentation can lead to slowness, this is less of a concern with modern drives than it used to be and, in any case, no amount of fragmentation on any drive can create enough slowness to be worse than what happens if you run *out* of swap space. Third, even if the swapfile is fragmented, this only will create slowness on swaps that cross one of the boundaries, and in any normal setup that's going to be such a small portion of the swaps that the impact will be lost in the underflow, dwarfed by other factors.
Having a swapfile that Windows has resized is in practice no worse than having several swapfiles (as is possible e.g. on Linux -- although in other ways not pertinent to this discussion Linux handles swap space better than Windows; the resizing in Windows, though, is actually a good thing).
The exception is if your drive is mostly full; in that case, fragmentation will be more of a problem and fixing the size of your swapfile may help. But the real solution would be to get a larger or second drive. A more common scenerio in Windows is for the drive to be mostly empty, and in that case the swapfile-resizing solves more significant problems than it creates.
> The general advice that I've picked up is that, at least in the *n?x world, > you should create a swap partition which is double the size of the machine's > physical RAM.
I consider this advice flawed. If you don't have enough RAM, then you have all the more need for extra swap space. Given the way the Linux kernel handles the situation of running out of swap space, and given how much drive space doesn't cost these days, I recommend having enough swap space that you NEVER run out.
As for Windows, let it resize the swap file to any size it wants. If it starts to get even a little bit close to filling up the drive, it'll warn you, which gives you the chance to find what's using too much RAM and close it.
> I can't remember when I heard my prime dueller do the rumble, and its only > got 512 megs of ram.
I make it a point to have enough RAM that the system almost never has to use the swap space, but I consider it vital to have the swap space there as a safety net, because occasionally something uses a whole lot of RAM (e.g., I might write a quick-and-dirty use-once-and-throw-away Perl script to process some data, and it might store them in a Really Big Hash while doing so, or I might have to work with an image in Gimp that's intended to be printed at 600dpi at 8x10 inches, and I might forget to turn down the length of the undo history and perform several memory-intensive operations on the image), and the Linux kernel has a tendency to react rather badly to running out of both memory and swap space. So, as cheap as drive space is, I like to have plenty of swap space available for such occasions. Usually, it's 0% used and 100% available, but I consider it an important safety net. I like to have several gigabytes of swap space, Just In Case.
However, if you're using the swap space often enough that you want to optimize its speed by putting it on a separate controller, I recommend more RAM instead.
> Are you aware that MS did make a version of IE for Solaris? It was > astonishingly bad, but it did exist.
I was aware that there was a version of IE for some brand or another of Unix, though I'd forgotten exactly which one. However, wasn't that, like, IE3 or so, an early version that nobody actually used even on Windows, from back in the days when Netscape was still dominant and Microsoft still considered TCP/IP to be an optional add-on? I was thinking more of claiming to be using a somewhat more current version of MSIE on X11, possibly on an OS that doesn't normally use X11 as its primary GUI. You know, like this: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; PC-DOS 3.3)
> I have Hurd installed on my computer. It's not vaporware.
I was vaguely aware that it exists now and that Debian has a distro out based on it (though nobody else seems to, and Debian probably does for ideological rather than practical reasons), but it *was* vapor for over five years, long enough to earn it a permanent status as well-known vaporware, the closest equivalent in the operating systems world to what Duke Nukem Forever is in the gaming community.
Incidentally, the other example, the BeOS, is theoretically back to active development now and will eventually have an actual version 6, so we're told. But it's too little too late, and the world has passed it by.
> Anyway, couldn't you list Emacs as the operating system, the browser, the > gui, and the hardware architecture? (I'm sure that must be an extension.)
Not per se. Emacs could be listed as the OS, and W3 could be listed as the browser. Emacs doesn't really have a GUI as such; it has a standard widget set (and has had for a long time), but the widgets are text-based, and though Emacs now supports graphics and proportional fonts, the widgets still don't feel GUIish. Also, Emacs doesn't do overlapping windows, the fundamental GUI feature; it just splits its frame horizontally and/or vertically into multiple windows that don't overlap. (This works for Emacs very well, primarily because of the ease of switching a given window to show any buffer, a feature for which there is no analog in any GUI of which I am aware; it's just a different way of doing things.)
As for being the hardware architecture, I'm not sure that makes sense. Emacs is very portable and runs an basically any hardware, but it's not really a vm in the usual sense of that term.
What Emacs needs is to get some of the cool features all the modern OSes seem to have these days, like preemptive multitasking and memory protection, and then people would maybe stop looking down their nose at it. Hey, it worked for the Mac:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> It's still fairly easy for a program using XFree86 to freeze or crash
> the entire Xserver
Indeed, this is substantially my biggest peave with XFree at this time. I'm
hoping that one of the various projects resulting from the recent license and
development model arguments and forks will result in a more stable X server.
I would even be happy if it were done like Gnu screen, so that if the X server
crashes the apps all sit there happily waiting for the X server to start back
up again. The crashes would still be annoying, but at least you wouldn't lose
so much state. As it stands now, if there's an app with a bug that causes an
X server crash, I'm *afraid* to try to reproduce it, or to use the app at all,
for fear I'll lose everything in all my windows. (No, saving doesn't solve
the problem; there's still the matter of what windows are open, what's loaded
in them, where the cursor is, and so on and so forth. It's like losing your
whole train of thought; it can take an hour or more to get back in the flow.)
> People don't go without food just because someone chooses to eat 3 Big Macs
> a day.
Three Big Macs a day isn't even extreme. There are people who get two Double
Quarters in a single meal. (Yes, that's a pound of beef, plus cheese and
whatnot.) Plus SuperSize fries.
The one that scares me, though is the guy who waits in the drivethrough for
fifteen minutes every single morning for McDs to open so he can get is four
large coffees. He doesn't just come when it's time for the place to open,
presumably because someone might get in line ahead of him.
But no, these people, disgusting though they are, do not contribute to world
hunger; they do contribute to McD's profit margins, though.
> However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern
> food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population
> growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing
> the population 10-fold.
This is not due to having enough food, however. It's due to ecconomic factors.
The countries that have the ecconomic strength to keep all their people fed are
the same countries with adequate police coverage, transportation infrastructure,
something that resembles a passable excuse for an education system, unemployment
and inflation mostly under control most of the time, adequate communications
infrastructure, enough hospitals, and so on. Basically, it's the prosperous
countries that have lower birthrates, the countries where stress is a bigger
concern on a day-to-day basis than whether your children will live long enough
to have children.
> and how many of the people starving in africa are you going to tell that we
> have the food we just don't send it?
It's true; we have extra food, more than we can possibly use. It sits around
and rots because the supermarkets don't buy it all up in time, and the food the
supermarkets do buy up, a significant portion of *that* sits there (mostly in
their back rooms, but sometimes out in the consumer areas even) until it rots,
because people don't buy it fast enough, and the food that people do buy, more
than half of it doesn't end up going into anyone's stomach, for one reason or
another -- it doesn't get prepared before it goes bad, or once it's prepared
there's more than enough and it doesn't all get put on a plate, or it does get
put on a plate but then it's not all eaten. The *poor* people in Ohio throw
away almost as much food as they eat, and that's just what gets all the way to
the consumer before it gets thrown out.
Restaurants waste even more food than supermarkets. School cafeterias,
*especially* college cafeterias, waste even more than restaurants.
We have plenty of food. More food than we know what to do with. Who do you
know who, if a clearly emaciated person obviously starving came to the door,
would *for lack of extra food* turn the person away? (Some people would turn
them away for other reasons (fear of criminal activity, annoyance at being
interrupted by a total stranger, a dislike for the poor, a worldview that
considers handouts not to be doing the recipient any favors, or cetera), but
here I'm talking about turning them away for lack of any food to spare.)
Further, there are lots of people in the USA who would be happy to donate
food, even purchase food just to donate it, for the warm fuzzy feelings they
get from it. When the public library offers "Food for Fines", wherein people
can pay their fines with the equivalent amount of food, which is then donated
to some community action group, people come out of the woodwork to pay off
fines that they've let stand for months or years. McDonald's would be
pleased (if they were approached correctly) to donate a hundred thousand
Extra Value Meals toward a Solving World Hunger initiative just for the PR
value, and they're not alone.
But shipping donated food to where the starving people are is less than
altogether practicable (much less practical). If the recipients can't afford
food, they *certainly* can't afford the international shipping. On a small
scale, the cost of the international shipping positively *dwarfs* the cost
of the food, so that you feel like you're mostly giving your money to the
shipping company, not to the starving people. On a large scale, the
ecconomics of the shipping would be somewhat less unfavourable, but getting
the scale large enough would almost certainly require government involvement
(which raises budget issues and can upset taxpayers) or a large corporation
(which by the time you consider shipping and organizational overhead can
probably get a larger PR kick by doing something domestically).) And the
problems don't stop when you drop the shipment of food onto the docks. The
starving people are mostly inland, and the transportation infrastructure is
somewhat less developed[1] than around here. So you're looking at probably
using choppers half the time... it gets expensive fast.
Then with any large-scale food import operation there's the issue of making
sure the starving people get to eat the food; in a lot of places this would
require a significant long-term military presence, lest the local thugs[2]
take the food to make feeding their armies a little easier. Of course, a
significant long-term military presence has serious political ramifications;
Various nations (mostly Europe) would not be keen to allow us to keep armed
forces all over Africa on a more-or-less permanent basis. They would make
a big deal publically abo
> The reference-counted Perl model is equally powerful but more comprehensible.
Huh? The _semantic_ in Perl is natural and powerful and easy to comprehend,
but what does that have to do with the reference counting? That's a detail
of the implementation and, in fact, it's going away in Perl6 (wherein we are
getting real garbage collection to replace it, so we can stop worrying about
circular structures creating memory leaks). The things that make the Perl
model matural and powerful and comprehensible are language-level things, not
implementation details.
> Notice how of all the intelectual fields the only ones that are anal
> about spelling are the technical fields?
This is untrue. Language scholars are *way* more anal about spelling than
people in almost any technical field. Some of the social sciences are
also rather more careful about spelling than geeks. Historians, biologists,
geologists, and archeologists all tend to care about spelling more than
(say) computer programmers.
Grammar is what geeks and techies are anal about. Screw the spelling; as long
as it pronounces and the meaning is clear, I'm generally happy. My mind is
able to work out what the word is, even if a couple of letters are off, and
the first guess is usually correct, or if not I (almost subconsciously) try a
handful of "close" matches in context to see which one fits best and go with
that. This takes almost no time (less than a second generally) and is not
a big deal. However, if you start playing fast and loose with the grammar,
using possessives as plurals and that sort of thing, I find it hard to make
myself read past the first couple of sentences; my parser takes the word the
way it's written and goes on past, only later getting hung up, and then I have
to backtrack and reconsider for every word, "is there another word that
*sort of* sounds or looks like this word that, if substituted, would make the
parse come out right?" This takes much longer, usually several seconds --
per instance. If it's an isolated incident, no big deal, but generally the
people who do this do it several times per sentence. Grrrr. I won't take
very much of that; I have other things to do with my time.
So, "intelectual" doesn't bother me (and I mightn't have even noticed it, if
spelling hadn't been the topic of your post), but if you'd written something
more like this...
> Notice who off all you're intellectual fields, only ones that our
> anal about there grammer our you're technical fields?
I'd have had a much harder time deciphering that, mostly because of the
combinatorial explosion of possibilities to consider.
It also bothers me when in speaking people mispronounce words as other words,
e.g., pronouncing "you're" as if it were "your", "hour" as if it were "our",
"our" as if it were "are", and so on. Mere bad pronunciation doesn't bother
me very much, but when one word becomes another, I have trouble. There are
a handful of people in my acquaintence who do this, and I usually just smile
and not whenever they talk and look for an excuse to be busy elsewhere,
because I don't feel like doing the mental gymnastics necessary to make sense
of their broken speech.
(Accents create this effect at first, but after I listen to them for a bit
I can generally adjust and have little trouble; the information is all there,
only the phonetics are altered slightly. The exceptions I've noticed are
the Texan accent (wherein almost all vowells are made long, which makes it
quite hard to distinguish long vowells from short ones) and, much worse, a
strong Korean accent, wherein most consonants are not pronounced distinctly
enough that I can tell them apart. (Aparently Hangul carries most of the
meaning in the vowells and places little emphasis on consonants, and so upon
first learning English many Koreans tend to have some trouble with consonants,
just like we (English speakers) have trouble trying to hear the difference
between retroflex and dental or aspirate and unaspirate consonants in the
Hindustani languages.)
> The highest reading she shows or talks about is 3 mR/hr.
Actually, she does talk a little about some higher ratings in a couple of
places. Notably, there's one place where she talks about here meter going
"off scale" (meaning, presumably, that the _reading_ is off the scale of
what the meter can measure; she doesn't stay there long), and another place
later on wherein she talks about a custom-built meter that another person
has that doesn't go off scale (presumably, because it can measure the higher
readings), and about how having one of these is necessary for going into the
buildings in Pripyat', presumably because the readings are high enough that
you need to be concerned about how many roetwhatevers you're getting in a
shorter timeframe than an hour. I would have liked a little more detail in
her explanation of that (e.g., some actual numbers).
> Some people smoke. Others drive their motorcycle through [Chernobyl]
Indeed, but which is the more dangerous activity? As a one-time activity,
I think I'd have to rate the cycle ride through Chernobyl as more dangerous,
but over the long term smoking might be worse, because you tend to do more
and more of it; after ten years of visiting Chernobyl you probably wouldn't
spend any more time there per month than the first month, possibly even less,
but after ten years of smoking you'll be lighting up every twenty minutes.
So over the decades, smoking might actually get to be worse for you.
Then again, if after your nth visit to Chernobyl you get brave and decide to
go poking around inside some of those buildings... "Say, I've never seen
inside that sarcophagus thingy over the fourth reactor..." That could get
to be a pretty significant health risk...
Pripyat, incidentally, is the city that has been labelled "ghosttown" in the
article. I initially figure this out by correlating the map in the article
with my atlas, but a number of pages further into the article there are photos
from the place which, if you can make anything out of cyrrilic characters, make
it pretty clear that Pripyat is the name of the town.
> It's funny, many people scream about the massive retraining required
...) and insert
...), but end users don't use those).
> switching workers to Open Source... It's not real.
It can be; it depends what apps you're switching. The browser interface of
MSIE was mostly designed to mimick the one in Netscape (which was mostly made
to mimick the one in Mosaic) exactly for this reason: to minimize the need
for retraining. Consequently, with browsers it's largely a non-issue.
Basic word-processing is similarly standardized, as long as you don't want to
do anything very complex. Once you start wanting to fool around with columns
and frames and other things not found on the toolbar there are more differences,
however. With spreadsheets it's similar: if all you want to do is balance
your checkbook, Excel and Calc and MS Works and Gnumeric and Foxpro and KSpread
are all pretty much exactly the same, but when you start wanting to mess with
more involved functions (conditionals, statistical functions,
charts and graphs and things, you start seeing more noticeable UI differences.
There are also differences in the browsers, as far as that goes, when you
start messing around with poweruser features like capability policies and
tabbed browsing. But for most end users the only really important features
in the browser are hyperlinks, the address bar, and the back button, and
those are quite well standardised across the major browsers (except for the
text browsers (Lynx, W3, Links, w3m,
> But, if he would have sent you a file in HTML, PDF or, best, RTF
... it does bold
No, no, no, please, no. Send me the Word documents; OpenOffice does *MUCH*
better with Word documents than *anything* does with RTF. Have you ever
actually tried to work with RTF? It preserves things like boldness and
italics, but that's about it. It doesn't preserve margins, doesn't properly
support tab stops (I think it does left tabs only? Not sure; maybe this
depends on what app you use to read or write it), can't handle columns,
much less frames, tables, sidebars, images, draw objects,
and italic and underline, but not outline, shadow, or other text effects,
doesn't handle borders properly (e.g., on paragraphs) and, in general, is
a steaming heap of freshly boiled rabbit dung.
Opening Word documents with OO is also better than anything I've tried
(Acrobat Reader, xpdf, GSView) does with PDFs. When I open a Word document
in OpenOffice, I can select any text I want, easily perform a document-wide
search, scroll from the bottom of one page right through to the top of the
next (none of this nonsense about scrolling to the bottom, hitting "next
page", and scrolling back to the top to read the top of the next page),
and, most importantly, the font color is usually already set to Automatic,
and if it isn't I can set it that way, and then I can comfortably read the
text in my chosen colors, instead of squinting into white, trying in vain
to pretend that the screen is paper or that I don't mind going snowblind.
No, PDFs are evil.
HTML is okay, but only if you write it by hand, which most people aren't
willing to do. The autogenerated stuff is, again, worse than the results
I get opening Word documents in OpenOffice.
Ideal would be if everyone would send me documents in OpenOffice format, of
course, but barring that, Word format is preferable to these other options
that you list.
Old-school Unix geeks will of course vote for TeX, but they suck so who cares.
> when inserting a clarifying phrase into a quote, one encloses it in square
> brackets and not normal brackets.
Normal brackets *are* square. The angle brackets may be more common in
certain kinds of data markup, but in general they are less common, so we
always call them "angle brackets". If we just say "brackets", we always
mean the square ones.
> > it only uses the swap space actively if you run out of RAM.
> Should be true. Isn't though. Just watch the Perf Mon.
How about listening for hard drive activity? Depending on your drive and
your case and how much other noise you have in the area, some of us can
actually *hear it* when the system swaps. Plus, of course, you can just
tell, because an alt-tab operation can take an extra couple of seconds,
which is quite noticeable.
I'll also note that I didn't say Windows doesn't use the swapfile at all if
you have enough RAM; I said it doesn't use it *actively* if you have enough
RAM. Which is to say, it doesn't use it enough to have a user-noticeable
impact on performance, so don't sweat it -- until your RAM gets all filled up,
that is, and then it gets quite noticeable indeed.
> I frequently draw shapes (you know, circles, squares, rectangles, etc)
This is easy in Gimp. Just use the select tool and then stroke your selection.
The advantage of this approach is that it's very flexible. For one thing, you
can select any brushtip you want and use that brushtip to stroke the selection,
which gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of what the edge of the shape
looks like. For another thing, you can use any select tool, including the
magic wand or the bezier, which means you can make any shape you want, and
most shapes are very easy. A simpler paint program will let you draw elipses
and rectangles easily, but if you want a triangle or pentagon that's somewhat
trickier, or you have to piece it together from parts. With the Gimp's way
of doing things you can do any shape you want.
Additionally, with the Gimp's approach you can also get fancy if you really
want to, switching your selection to a mask, editing the mask, switching the
mask back to a selection, using shift to do multiselect so you can do several
regions at once, using shrink and grow to alter the shape and size of the
selection(s), and so on and so forth.
> By that logic, scientists should start using "theory" instead of "hypothesis,"
They already do that. The old idea that a hyphothesis had to be tested in
multiple experiments in order to become a theory is gone decades ago. Now
it's good enough to get enough other scientists that several countries are
represented to agree with you that your hypothesis might be correct, and you
can call it a theory. If you're famous enough in the scientific community,
you can just call your ideas theories right off the bat.
This is especially true in certain sciences, most notably evolutionary biology.
(An even better example, if you consider it a science at all, which is no
foregone conclusion IMO, is psychology.) Harder sciences like physics are a
little more rigid with the terminology, however.
Then there's math: testing, schmesting; no amount of experimentation or
testing can ever be enough; if you haven't *proven* it, it's not a theorem.
You can, however, make it a postulate if you want, but then you're defining
your own system and can't make claims about other established systems based
on it, unless you can prove that your system is isomorphic to the other
system (which you probably can't do if you've added postulates). Math rocks.
> mph... '"serious" music...'
Oooh, glad you brought that up...
"Serious music", of course, means polyphony -- true polyphony, not that
half-baked monody stuff everyone's so eager to write these days, but real
polyphony, with multiple independent or interdependent voices, e.g. fugue.
It's hard to take music seriously if all it's got is one melody part and
some supporting harmony parts. That takes, what, two minutes per measure
to write? Lazy bums.
Yeah, go ahead and mod me as Funny, nevermind that I'm actually mostly serious.
> put your Windows system behind a NAT gateway. You can use a dedicated
> Linux box for this (IP Masquerade)
Incidentally, this doesn't have to be expensive, since it isn't doing a
whole lot other than sitting between your Windows system and the internet.
It needs whatever it needs to connect to the internet (a modem, if you're
on dialup), but you might be able to scavange that off your Windows system
if the modem you have has hardware flow control. Assuming you don't need
this Linux box for anything else (say, for use as a desktop), it can run
headless, meaning it doesn't need a monitor. (You'll borrow your monitor
from your Windows system while you set it up, and afterward you'll run it
totally via ssh.) It doesn't have to be very powerful, either. Mine is
a Pentium/90 system, which is more than powerful enough and on the brutal
used computer market is worth pocket lint and a song. The biggest cost is
likely to be the power it uses which, without a monitor or printer, is not
going to be a really huge amount.
Oh, and it needs a network card, which you can get for ten bucks, and you
can connect it to the network card in your Windows system either with two
patch cables and a $30 hub or with one crossover patch cable if you don't
plan any more nodes on your network.
Or you could go with a dedicated hardware NAT, which is what I would suggest
if you didn't know Linux, but since you mention using an offsite Linux server
I mentioned the Linux solution as an option.
Reasonable security is possible, assuming the attackers do not have physical
access to the system. (If you have to protect against your family or your
landlord, you're screwed.)
First, get rid of Outlook. No, I mean it, get rid of Outlook. (This includes
Outlook Express.) 100.0% of all known email-born viruses and worms[1] have
exploited Outlook exclusively; get rid of Outlook, and you can stop worrying
about email-borne malware.
This leaves the issue of stuff that comes in over open ports, exploiting
various services that are running on your system. It's possible to close
all those off and shut them down individually, but it's much simpler to
put your Windows system behind a NAT gateway. You can use a dedicated
Linux box for this (IP Masquerade) or there are also hardware NAT gateway
solutions available.
That right there is pretty good. There's still the occasional vulnerability
in MSIE, but that only hits you if you visit a malicious website. Of course
you still have to engage in safe practices generally (e.g., don't download
and execute stuff you don't trust, don't share floppies with unprotected
systems, et cetera), but the steps I've just outlined will stop cold over
99% of all internet-based attacks on your Windows system, especially the
automated ones like worms and viruses.
Did I mention, I've only outlined two simple steps to take? Two *very*
important simple steps: get rid of Outlook, and put your Windows system
behind a NAT gateway. There are other things that you can do, but these
two steps are each vastly more important than all other things you can do
combined, so they're the first two things you should do, before even
considering anything else. Do them, do them soon.
What to replace Outlook with? If you don't care about portability (i.e.,
a Windows-only solution will do), Pegasus Mail is excellent, but of course
you have other options too, including some that are open-source if that
scores any points with you. You will not regret getting rid of Outlook.
Well, for a few minutes you may not be so sure, while you're importing all
your mail from Outlook, setting your prefs, and learning how to use the
new system, but the next time you read on slashdot about Yet Another New
Outlook Virus infecting half of the desktop computers on the internet once
again (hmmm... when will that be? I'm betting on sometime in May, but it
could be as soon as April or possibly as late as June if the virus writers
decide to do something else over spring break...) you'll be glad you don't
have to worry about that anymore.
The reasons why Outlook, even with all the latest patches, is a huge
security risk are technical in nature, but you don't need to understand
the technical reasons: just look at the track record; fully *half* of
all internet-borne viruses in the last five years have exploited Outlook,
and 100% of the ones that spread by email have exploited Outlook.
Windows itself isn't too bad, especially if you put it behind a NAT
gateway like I'm recommending.
[1] Trojans, of course, exploit the *user's* willingness to execute the
attachment, so they don't care what mailreader you use, but you can
protect yourself from trojans by not executing any attachments unless
you're sure you know what they are.
> Also, has "128Mb swap limit" been surpassed in Lunix-land?
What 128MB swap limit? I've got one swapfile that's twice that size by itself.
> RAM disks are fast,
Yeah, but not faster than RAM.
> Windows requires swap no matter your physical RAM size,
However, it only uses the swap space actively if you run out of RAM. If you
get rid of your RAM disk swap space, you'll free up enough real RAM to cover
all the situations in which Windows would have resorted to swap space -- a
simpler configuration and at least as fast.
The only reason the grandparent isn't informative is because everybody already
knows that, and even if they didn't it isn't exactly rocket science to figure
it out.
> Don't let Windows resize the swapfile - that's a surefire path to fragmentation
This is an overrated concern. First off, Windows only makes the swapfile as
big as it needs to be, and on a decently large drive there's plenty of room
for it to be as big as it needs to be without fragmentation. Second, while
it's true that fragmentation can lead to slowness, this is less of a concern
with modern drives than it used to be and, in any case, no amount of
fragmentation on any drive can create enough slowness to be worse than what
happens if you run *out* of swap space. Third, even if the swapfile is
fragmented, this only will create slowness on swaps that cross one of the
boundaries, and in any normal setup that's going to be such a small portion
of the swaps that the impact will be lost in the underflow, dwarfed by other
factors.
Having a swapfile that Windows has resized is in practice no worse than having
several swapfiles (as is possible e.g. on Linux -- although in other ways not
pertinent to this discussion Linux handles swap space better than Windows;
the resizing in Windows, though, is actually a good thing).
The exception is if your drive is mostly full; in that case, fragmentation
will be more of a problem and fixing the size of your swapfile may help.
But the real solution would be to get a larger or second drive. A more
common scenerio in Windows is for the drive to be mostly empty, and in that
case the swapfile-resizing solves more significant problems than it creates.
> The general advice that I've picked up is that, at least in the *n?x world,
> you should create a swap partition which is double the size of the machine's
> physical RAM.
I consider this advice flawed. If you don't have enough RAM, then you have all
the more need for extra swap space. Given the way the Linux kernel handles the
situation of running out of swap space, and given how much drive space doesn't
cost these days, I recommend having enough swap space that you NEVER run out.
As for Windows, let it resize the swap file to any size it wants. If it starts
to get even a little bit close to filling up the drive, it'll warn you, which
gives you the chance to find what's using too much RAM and close it.
> I can't remember when I heard my prime dueller do the rumble, and its only
> got 512 megs of ram.
I make it a point to have enough RAM that the system almost never has to use
the swap space, but I consider it vital to have the swap space there as a
safety net, because occasionally something uses a whole lot of RAM (e.g., I
might write a quick-and-dirty use-once-and-throw-away Perl script to process
some data, and it might store them in a Really Big Hash while doing so, or I
might have to work with an image in Gimp that's intended to be printed at
600dpi at 8x10 inches, and I might forget to turn down the length of the undo
history and perform several memory-intensive operations on the image), and
the Linux kernel has a tendency to react rather badly to running out of both
memory and swap space. So, as cheap as drive space is, I like to have plenty
of swap space available for such occasions. Usually, it's 0% used and 100%
available, but I consider it an important safety net. I like to have several
gigabytes of swap space, Just In Case.
However, if you're using the swap space often enough that you want to optimize
its speed by putting it on a separate controller, I recommend more RAM instead.
> Are you aware that MS did make a version of IE for Solaris? It was
> astonishingly bad, but it did exist.
I was aware that there was a version of IE for some brand or another of Unix,
though I'd forgotten exactly which one. However, wasn't that, like, IE3 or
so, an early version that nobody actually used even on Windows, from back in
the days when Netscape was still dominant and Microsoft still considered
TCP/IP to be an optional add-on? I was thinking more of claiming to be using
a somewhat more current version of MSIE on X11, possibly on an OS that doesn't
normally use X11 as its primary GUI. You know, like this:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; PC-DOS 3.3)
> I have Hurd installed on my computer. It's not vaporware.
:-)
I was vaguely aware that it exists now and that Debian has a distro out based
on it (though nobody else seems to, and Debian probably does for ideological
rather than practical reasons), but it *was* vapor for over five years, long
enough to earn it a permanent status as well-known vaporware, the closest
equivalent in the operating systems world to what Duke Nukem Forever is in
the gaming community.
Incidentally, the other example, the BeOS, is theoretically back to active
development now and will eventually have an actual version 6, so we're told.
But it's too little too late, and the world has passed it by.
> Anyway, couldn't you list Emacs as the operating system, the browser, the
> gui, and the hardware architecture? (I'm sure that must be an extension.)
Not per se. Emacs could be listed as the OS, and W3 could be listed as the
browser. Emacs doesn't really have a GUI as such; it has a standard widget
set (and has had for a long time), but the widgets are text-based, and though
Emacs now supports graphics and proportional fonts, the widgets still don't
feel GUIish. Also, Emacs doesn't do overlapping windows, the fundamental
GUI feature; it just splits its frame horizontally and/or vertically into
multiple windows that don't overlap. (This works for Emacs very well,
primarily because of the ease of switching a given window to show any buffer,
a feature for which there is no analog in any GUI of which I am aware; it's
just a different way of doing things.)
As for being the hardware architecture, I'm not sure that makes sense. Emacs
is very portable and runs an basically any hardware, but it's not really a vm
in the usual sense of that term.
What Emacs needs is to get some of the cool features all the modern OSes seem
to have these days, like preemptive multitasking and memory protection, and
then people would maybe stop looking down their nose at it. Hey, it worked
for the Mac