Virtually anyone *can* learn at least enough basic programming to do a useful amount of small personal stuff (automating repetitive tasks for yourself and that sort of thing), and I think most folks are smart enough to also do useful business programming (basic web development, enough SQL to generate custom reports, etc.)
In practice almost everyone *doesn't*, however, usually because the desire isn't there. It does take a particular mindset to become a programmer. You have to be *interested* in learning how to use a computer at a deeper level than typing words into Google and clicking on links. If the interest isn't there, the learning doesn't happen.
Of course, there are also kinds of programming that are more advanced, which not everyone is smart enough to learn how to do even given the desire. This is true in just about every field, I think. There are kinds of salesmanship not everyone can learn, kinds of writing not everyone can learn to do, levels of sports performance not all athletes are capable of achieving, and so on.
Couldn't you just, you know, go to the bathroom at home before you go in to work, again on your mid-shift meal break (which should be at least 30 minutes), and again when you get home after work?
If they're working you more than about five hours at a time between breaks, then that's the real problem you should be complaining about. That's very bad for productivity and worse for morale, plus it sucks.
On the other hand, if you can't usually wait five hours between bathroom breaks, then you should see a doctor about that, because it's probably a symptom of a serious medical condition, such as a bladder infection or prostate cancer, either of which is potentially lethal if left untreated.
(Exception: if you're currently pregnant, then having to go to the bathroom constantly is totally normal in that case, on account of the fact that the bladder is being actively squeezed by another organ, which has grown to a significantly larger size than it would usually be, in order to accommodate your prenatal offspring. In this situation if your employer questions you about needing to visit the facilities frequently, you can just point to your lower abdomen and say, "The doctor says I'm probably going to have this issue until [rough estimate of due date]." When you get to the point where you can't work -- this usually lasts at least three days no matter what, longer if it's your first time, even longer if the nature of your work involves a lot of physical exertion, and potentially much longer if there are complications -- that's what the FMLA is for.)
(Second exception: if you're a primary-school-aged child, needing to go to the bathroom every couple of hours is normal. However, in that case you should be in school, rather than working some other job. Elementary schools generally make copious allowances for frequent bathroom needs, especially in the lower grades, because it is well understood that children have this issue.)
If it's just an occasional thing (e.g., you ate too much plum pie at mom's birthday celebration and now you've got the runs today), then don't worry about it. Nobody's going to think anything about your going to the bathroom a couple of extra times a couple of times a quarter. Everybody has a day like that once in a while. This isn't what your employer is trying to catch or prevent. It won't even get noticed, because it won't differentiate you from everyone else. (What ARE they trying to catch or prevent? There are people out there who go to the bathroom for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, three or four times an hour throughout the entire work day, in order to get out of ever having to do any actual work. This practice is even worse for productivity and morale than long shifts with no breaks.)
> much of that speech is now hosted by third-parties > who are under no obligation to protect it
Such has always been the case. If Ben Franklin wanted his letter to the editor to be printed in a newspaper, he either had to convince the owner of the newspaper to include it (this was traditionally done by writing something they would consider worth printing) or else set up his own press and run his own paper. Since Gutenberg, freedom of the press has always been the sole province those who maintain the press. Before that, it was whoever kept scribes around to hand-copy everything.
If Google won't host your video, you can find someone else who will. Failing that, you can set up your own server and host it yourself. You may not get as much traffic as Google would, just as in the days of yore your little startup newspaper that you ran out of your back shed wouldn't start out with as many subscribers as a big established city paper. The cure for that is to publish content that people keep wanting to read and discuss and refer to and tell others about -- just as it has always been since antiquity. (If anything, this can happen much faster now than it could even twenty years ago, though as always people have to actually be interested in your content, or they'll ignore it. If people aren't going to read your manifesto, you are you gonna stop 'em? Nonetheless, if you publish something people actually want to see, word does get around.)
> 1. Fuck IPv6. Let's keep the IP addresses a rare and highly desired commodity; > 2. Charge an exorbitant fee every time a DHCP request is serviced; > 3. Profit!
The problem with this is, IPv4 addresses are not rare. They're not anything like rare. There are approximately ten thousand times as many of them as are actually needed.
We only ran out because they were systematically over-allocated, handed out like free candy, based purely on requests, with no regard for actual need or common sense. My employer, for example, currently has more _unused_ global IPv4 address than we have employees. Our upstream provider did not even inquire how many addresses we needed or even wanted; they just handed us a block of the things. Something like 80% of the allocated global IPv4 addresses are not currently being used on the public internet.
More to the point, in excess of 99.9% of the public IPv4 addresses that *are* actually being used on the public internet, in the sense of packets actually traversing public networks to or from systems assigned those addresses, aren't *needed*, because they're being used strictly for the client side of client/server networking (mostly in the form of DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS) and would if anything be better off behind NAT (because it would reduce the risk of worms, and there's no downside for systems that are not servers and do not actually need peer-to-peer, i.e., most home systems and virtually all business desktops).
IPv6 is not a solution to this problem. If we allocate IPv6 addresses the way we have allocated IPv4 addresses, we'll run out of them in just a few more years. Then what? IPv8, with 1024-bit addresses, so we can start allocating entire/256 blocks and run out again?
The correct solution is to stop allocating public IP addresses that aren't needed. This can easily be done by charging a *small* amount (per month or per annum) for each address. Honestly, as many addresses as there are available, a dollar a month retail, marked up from less than half that in bulk, would be more than enough to charge. That way people can go ahead and get addresses they *might* actually need and not feel too bad about the expense, but it's enough to keep most people from grabbing ridiculously more addresses than they could ever possibly find a use for, as has been the case so far.
When people sign up for the internet at home, the ISP can ask, "For an extra dollar a month, do you want a public IPv4 address for peer-to-peer networking or to access your computer remotely from another location?" Most people will say no and can go behind NAT. Small businesses, instead of getting a/24 just because they can, can get as many addresses as they actually need for their servers plus one NAT gateway to service all the desktops. (Business desktops *need* to be behind some kind of hardware firewall or gateway anyway, for security reasons. There's no reason it can't do NAT as well -- the extra 0.002% of CPU cycles will put the electric bill up by, what, three cents a month?) Large international megacorporations, similarly, instead of nabbing a/8 for each major national subdivision of their company just because it costs almost nothing to do so, can scale down their allocation request to something more in keeping with what they might potentially actually need.
I believe this will naturally happen over the next few years (assuming IPv6 adoption goes about as far as I think it will). Nothing particular needs to be done (other than perhaps the usual anti-trust stuff in areas where competition between ISPs is artificially restricted e.g. by only one local phone company being allowed to maintain lines). The situation will sort itself out. ISPs that try to charge completely unreasonable fees for public IP addresses will go out of business, because people will just go find another ISP (assuming there's another ISP to go find -- see previous note about anti-trust issues). ISPs that charge too little (which I think would just about have to be nothing at all) will run out of addresses to allocate. Sorted.
> What do you mean? Newspeak has always existed. > It sounds like you're overdue for another re-education.
Newspeak is duckspeak. Duckspeak is goodthink. Goodthink is Big Brother.
Big Brother is dead. Yesterday Big Brother is dead. Today Big Brother is plusdead. Tomorrow Big Brother is doubleplusdead. Tomorrow Ingsoc is doubleplusdead. Tomorrow Oceania is pluslife.
> For the rest, from the face of it, this suggestion sounds a bit > like "let's bury it, then it doesn't exist any more". Like how the > Party tried to introduce Newspeak,
Thing is, that would never work.
Orwell's books are very interesting and make some useful points, but his understanding of linguistics is fundamentally smurfed. People understand words, phrases, and sentences in light of the context in which they occur, whether it matches anything in a dictionary or not. Consequently, virtually any word can be pressed into service and made to mean something that it ordinarily would not, simply by placing it in a particular context. The reader or listener can easily avunculate the intended meaning.
> I can't remember a single math class that _permitted_ > calculators in class, let alone _required_ them
I majored in math (graduated in 1997), and I think all of my math classes permitted calculators, but in practice we didn't have any use for them most of the time. Calculators can't reason for you, and math at the college level doesn't usually have a lot of multi-digit numbers in it (unless you count ones with an _infinite_ number of non-repeating digits, but those are hardly ever converted to decimal notation, for obvious reasons; we just wrote our answers in terms of e or pi or what-have-you). Obviously we used the calculators a bit more for some classes (e.g., Prob & Stats) than for others (Group Theory springs immediately to mind here -- after about the third day of class you never even see a variable that stands for anything a non-math-major would recognize as being a number -- let G and H be ordered abelian groups, and suppose that * and x are distinct one-to-one onto functions from G to H... yeah, you don't really need a calculator).
Universal time is for practical everyday purposes essentially the same thing as GMT.
(There's a technical distinction, but you can probably ignore it unless you're running a low-tier ntp server. They're never off from each other by more than a couple of seconds, tops.)
> Which came first, Debian Potatoe or Debian Sarge?
That's not a fair example. Potato and Sarge were separated by Woody, which lasted for an aeon and a half. By the time Sarge came out, everybody who had used Potato was in a nursing home if not pushing up daisies.
(I jest. As it happens, the first Debian release I ever used was 1.3.1, and I don't recall the codename, if I ever knew it in the first place. This, however, is only possible because people live much longer than software releases. Actually, it's kind of like "dog years".)
I should clarify: they were about ten when Kerry ran for President, more like six during the Great Florida Chad Controversy, and about two when Clinton left office.
In context, his comment implies less about his age than you seem to think. (Hint: Compare his username with the grandparent post.)
However, since you mention feeling old, I may as well point out that the kids who will graduate from high school this coming spring probably do not know who John Kerry is, or what hanging chad is for that matter. (They were about ten years old at the time, and most people don't really start noticing politics until circa junior high.)
> After all it is the kernel that is WinNT 6.1 whereas the > distro (again using Linux terminology) is Windows 7.
Windows 7 is not a whole distro. It's more than a kernel, obviously, so I'm not sure exactly what the closest analogue would be in the Linux world (a base-system package, perhaps, but wouldn't a base-system package include a package manager that could be used to install everything else?), but whatever it is it is clearly not a whole distro.
What kind of distro would it be?
A desktop distro, for example, would have at least the really basic desktop features, such as word processing software (WordPad does not count, because it doesn't include basic features that all word processing software has had since the eighties, e.g., spellcheck) and an image editor (leastwise, not one that can do real transparency, layers, filters, etc.) Windows 7 does not have these things; ergo, it is not a desktop distro.
Rather obviously, it's not a server-oriented distro. It's not even a server OS, much less a whole server distro. It's missing even the extremely basic server-oriented features that *all* serious server operating systems (not just Linux distros, but also the BSDs, OS X, Solaris, you name it) have, such as perl and logrotate. You ever try to run a server without logrotate or perl? Haha. Good luck with that. Even Windows "Server" doesn't have the stuff it would need to really qualify here, and Windows 7 certainly does not.
It does not include any development tools whatsoever, so apparently it's not a developer-oriented distro. It doesn't even include a real text editor.
Windows is more than a kernel, but it's less than a distro. We used to have a term for these things. We called them "operating systems". That's what Windows is: an operating system.
We don't really have "operating systems" in the Linux world -- not as an independent component. We don't need them, because we have distros, which are much more. A distro is sort of like an operating system and package management system and a whole bunch of utilities and application, all rolled into one.
I've left out the thing that *all* distros have, no matter what their focus: a package management system, which can be used to retrieve and install a wide variety of software that is not installed by default, resolving dependencies along the way, and, more importantly, to upgrade all of them when desired (or, in the case of security updates, when necessary). This is, arguably, the *core* of a distro, the thing that makes it a distro. Windows has never had one. It's got Windows Update, but Windows Update does not install updates for any other software that you have installed, so you end up with umpteen billion separate "updater" apps running out of the system tray, each one individually checking for updates to its one program it supports, each one separately bugging the user every time there's an update, each one separately triggering an auth event for administrative permission to install updates, every time there's an update, until eventually the user goes insane and downloads a Sysinternals utility (called Autoruns) to turn them all off, at which point updates are no longer checked for automatically at all, which is insecure, but at least then it's possible to get half an hour's work done without being interrupted eight times by various updaters for software that isn't even currently being used.
If Windows were a *distribution*, it would have a package manager. Users who need development tools or word processing software or whatever could just bring up the package manager, search for what they want, click an install button, minimize while it downloads, and five minutes later they'd be using their new software. Even better, any software that's installed via the package manager would automatically be on the list, and any other software that's installed would only have to add itself to the list, and then updates for all the apps would be handled at the same time as the OS updates, by the package manager that comes with the distribution. Automatically.
That's what makes a distribution better than an OS.
Don't be absurd. Nobody actually goes to 4chan, in the sense of looking at the site with human eyeballs.
The way it works is, Anonymous has a set of shell scripts and Windows batch files that randomly select content (or what passes for content on 4chan) from the various other boards and reposts a percentage of it on/b/, sometimes running it through a Markov chain generator first. Then another set of shell scripts looks for repeating patterns on/b/. When something shows up frequently enough it becomes a meme and is automatically reposted to other internet venues, such as slashdot. No part of this process requires any human interaction or intelligence.
It isn't really important what computer you buy him. What matters is how you introduce him to it.
If you put the computer in his room, show him how to turn it on and start a couple of games and a drawing program, and then leave him to his own devices (pun not originally intended, but now that I've written it I kind of like it), you are effectively abandoning your duty as a parent.
The computer is just an object -- not a teacher, and certainly not a parent. Furthermore, it'll be hopelessly obsolete by the time he's in junior high anyway. It doesn't matter very much exactly what model of computer he's got.
What matters is how *you* interact with him. If you're constantly showing him things, asking him questions, guiding him to understand the system better, teaching him to experiment and learn what different things do, and so on and so forth, then you're teaching him how to learn, and perhaps more importantly how to enjoy learning. Some kids can pick this up on their own, but it's not the way to bet. Some kids will pick it up in school, but that's not the way to bet either.
Don't take chances. Teach your son how to enjoy learning. A computer is a tool you can use for that, but the exact model you select is not important. Honestly, an old 386 with DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 would be adequate.
Oh, one more thing: this won't seem important now, when he's seven, but it sets a precedent. He's probably going to be a teenager at some point in the future, and this precedent may then become very important. Put the computer in a public room, like a family room or living room or den or something. When he gets to be about 10 or 12, he's going to want some privacy in his bedroom, and you're going to want to start giving him that (because it's a healthy part of his growing up), but you don't really want him to have that privacy when using the internet until he's somewhat older, because he won't have the discernment to handle it well yet. Put the computer where there can be adult supervision a good healthy percentage of the time, so you'll be able to continue to guide him through his teenage years. (This isn't just about porn, either. You'll need to teach him to tell the difference between an article and an advertisement, evaluate privacy risks associated with social networking, and so on and so forth.)
It depends. If by "organic" you mean "has a label on it that says it's organic", then obviously you would not expect any significant difference. A label that says this food is organic is about as meaningful as a label that says no puppies were harmed in the making of this Slashdot post. It's true in the sense of not being false, but it's also entirely redundant.
However, if the "food" that's not considered organic is actually really inorganic (I put the word "food" in quotation marks because inorganic substances are not usually considered to be food, with a handful of special exceptions such as table salt), then I would not expect the human digestive system to get much value out of it. Okay, yes, inorganic "food" could contain some minerals, and obviously it could be rich in dietary fiber...
Nonetheless, fundamentally, by definition, nothing inorganic would contain any protein, carbohydrates, or vitamins. I really don't see how that could make for a healthy diet in the long term.
> IMO, there should be an implied minimum speed > of 5 under the posted limit with very few exceptions.
5mph isn't a wide enough window to allow people to consistently maintain their speed in that range. Many vehicles' dashboard speedometers are off by that much.
Also, on large controlled-access highways with more than three lanes (I mean more than three going your direction, of course; roads that aren't divided don't have minimum speeds), the implied minimum should be rather higher in the left lane than in the right lane (where you might be trying to merge or somesuch -- sometimes you just really need to be _behind_ those three cars over there).
However, I do agree that the current minima are too low. On a 65mph highway, going 45 is *dangerous*, especially if you do it for a protracted period of time. (Driving 45 mph in the left lane should be punished by making the offender watch a thousand continuous hours of back-to-back used car dealership commercials while wearing a badly-fitting jumpsuit made of burlap and naugahyde, seated on a low cast-iron bench with a ten-degree forward tilt to the seat.)
I could just about see holding the leftmost lane to the 5mph window you suggest, with the usual allowances for congestion and other driving conditions. The rightmost lane needs to be able to get away with 15 or maybe even 20mph below the limit in the immediate vicinity of entrance ramps and at least 10mph below the limit elsewhere (so you can quickly and easily let idiots pass you -- by far the fastest and safest way to get out of their immediate vicinity).
It's true worldwide, because it's a result not of legal restrictions that vary by jurisdiction but rather fundamental economic forces that do not discriminate based on geographical location.
> the trees used for making pulp come from forests owned by the > paper companies and they sure as hell replant them when they harvest
Sometimes the land is owned by the company, and sometimes it is not, but the trees used to make pulp (and thus paper) are always, always, always fast-growth pine grown for that express purpose. Because it's MUCH cheaper that way. Go to the lumber yard nearest you and compare the price of cheap pine (e.g., 2x4s) versus any other kind of wood. Notice a difference?
Any paper company that tried to make paper out of non-farmed trees would go out of business very quickly. That's true worldwide and has been for more than a century. Even in places where deforestation is a major problem, it's not because of the paper industry. Usually it's because the land is wanted (typically for agriculture). Sometimes it's an indirect result of other ecological problems (e.g., desertification can result from improper subsistence farming when there is inadequate education about basic techniques like crop rotation; once desertification gets going, it can degrade not just the farmland but the forests as well, and of course it also forces people to clear new land, which they generally then proceed to mismanage in the same way as the old land).
If you want to use these materials in any kind of bulk, you're going to be getting wood pulp from trees.
What the other poster apparently doesn't realize is that the cheapest way to do that is to use cheap bulk fast-growth pine raised for the purpose on what is effectively farmland and which, if the trees ever became unprofitable, would to used to grow something else. The same way they make paper.
Any other kind of wood is too expensive to use as pulp. Don't believe me? Go to a lumber yard and compare the prices of cheap pine (e.g., 2x4s) versus any other kind of wood.
> So what exactly does it do that similarly equipped > Linux machines/vps' can't do that justify the cost?
Oh, that's easily.
By integrating seamlessly with a Microsoft-Windows-based business network (including Software Assurance licensing), Microsoft Windows Server 2012 provides a suitable framework for Microsoft-certified business solutions. By partnering with Microsoft and building your product on Microsoft technologies, you ensure your access to the largest possible customer base.
Oh, yes, please. I would love to see that. I think I might pay money to see that and, in particular, to watch Windows-server apologists trying to explain how much easier to administer Windows is with those tools. I bet I could watch video of that all day. My stomach muscles would probably hurt from laughing for a week. It would be even funnier than that hilarious Mozilla video on why "Tabs on top" is better.
Realistically, to make a really practical space elevator, I think you pretty much need a composite material with scrith as the substrate. You can't just use scrith, due to its dangerously low coefficient of friction. You can't use anything else, because nothing else has the required tensile strength to density ratio.
The best known carbon-nanotube materials could just barely handle a cable length of perhaps one eighth of the length needed to reach geostationary orbit, without providing the safety cushion you'd want for any practical real-world deployment, in case of wind, small meteorites, birds, etc. To actually consider really building a space elevator, we'd need a material more than ten, preferably closer to twenty times better than the best thing we've ever seen.
It's highly worthwhile to continue investigating high-quality materials, because they're generally useful; but in terms of reaching the point of being able to build a space elevator, I wouldn't hold my breath.
The main problem with Pykrete is that it *does* melt. It takes significantly longer than regular ice, but it melts. This, with the cost of construction in the developed world being more than half for labor and less than half for the materials, makes Pykrete uneconomic for almost all purposes.
This doesn't mean the basic idea is bad. It just means water ice is the wrong substrate. I suspect these days the right substrate is probably some kind of thermoset plastic, although flammability could be a concern there if you don't choose your plastic carefully or perhaps mix in something fire retardant (e.g., perhaps a ceramic that releases a reaction-suppressing gas when heated, in much the same way that the plaster in fire-resistant document safes releases water vapor, could be mixed in with the plastic).
I can understand the objection to Plymouth. (Animations on the boot-up screen? Seriously? Are we making a distro for nine-year-old girls now, or what?) Hopefully that's optional.
Grub2, however, doesn't seem like a problem to me. It's been in the distro I use (Debian stable) for seven months now, and I've got it on my main workstations at home and at work, two desktops I maintain that are used by other people (*numerous* other people), six special-purpose kiosks (used by the general public), a web server, and a mail server. If it made boot-time problems hard to diagnose, I think I'd have probably noticed by now. Admittedly, the servers and my workstations don't reboot often, but the other systems all get turned off at night. Some of them are running on fairly old hardware (I believe the oldest kiosk is vintage 2003), so there _have_ been occasional issues that I had to resolve. I don't think Grub2 complicated this at all.
> Who owns a system that still cannot run 64bit software?
I've got one that I use regularly, but I'm really only using it as a router, so I'm not sure that counts.
If you count systems that I don't turn on on a regular basis but which are still in working order if I should happen to want them for any reason, then I've got several, including a MicroVax 3100-40 and an old ITT XTRA (though, the hard drive in that one died years ago, so to use it I'd have to find a bootable 360K floppy that's still readable).
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Virtually anyone *can* learn at least enough basic programming to do a useful amount of small personal stuff (automating repetitive tasks for yourself and that sort of thing), and I think most folks are smart enough to also do useful business programming (basic web development, enough SQL to generate custom reports, etc.)
In practice almost everyone *doesn't*, however, usually because the desire isn't there. It does take a particular mindset to become a programmer. You have to be *interested* in learning how to use a computer at a deeper level than typing words into Google and clicking on links. If the interest isn't there, the learning doesn't happen.
Of course, there are also kinds of programming that are more advanced, which not everyone is smart enough to learn how to do even given the desire. This is true in just about every field, I think. There are kinds of salesmanship not everyone can learn, kinds of writing not everyone can learn to do, levels of sports performance not all athletes are capable of achieving, and so on.
Couldn't you just, you know, go to the bathroom at home before you go in to work, again on your mid-shift meal break (which should be at least 30 minutes), and again when you get home after work?
If they're working you more than about five hours at a time between breaks, then that's the real problem you should be complaining about. That's very bad for productivity and worse for morale, plus it sucks.
On the other hand, if you can't usually wait five hours between bathroom breaks, then you should see a doctor about that, because it's probably a symptom of a serious medical condition, such as a bladder infection or prostate cancer, either of which is potentially lethal if left untreated.
(Exception: if you're currently pregnant, then having to go to the bathroom constantly is totally normal in that case, on account of the fact that the bladder is being actively squeezed by another organ, which has grown to a significantly larger size than it would usually be, in order to accommodate your prenatal offspring. In this situation if your employer questions you about needing to visit the facilities frequently, you can just point to your lower abdomen and say, "The doctor says I'm probably going to have this issue until [rough estimate of due date]." When you get to the point where you can't work -- this usually lasts at least three days no matter what, longer if it's your first time, even longer if the nature of your work involves a lot of physical exertion, and potentially much longer if there are complications -- that's what the FMLA is for.)
(Second exception: if you're a primary-school-aged child, needing to go to the bathroom every couple of hours is normal. However, in that case you should be in school, rather than working some other job. Elementary schools generally make copious allowances for frequent bathroom needs, especially in the lower grades, because it is well understood that children have this issue.)
If it's just an occasional thing (e.g., you ate too much plum pie at mom's birthday celebration and now you've got the runs today), then don't worry about it. Nobody's going to think anything about your going to the bathroom a couple of extra times a couple of times a quarter. Everybody has a day like that once in a while. This isn't what your employer is trying to catch or prevent. It won't even get noticed, because it won't differentiate you from everyone else. (What ARE they trying to catch or prevent? There are people out there who go to the bathroom for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, three or four times an hour throughout the entire work day, in order to get out of ever having to do any actual work. This practice is even worse for productivity and morale than long shifts with no breaks.)
> much of that speech is now hosted by third-parties
> who are under no obligation to protect it
Such has always been the case. If Ben Franklin wanted his letter to the editor to be printed in a newspaper, he either had to convince the owner of the newspaper to include it (this was traditionally done by writing something they would consider worth printing) or else set up his own press and run his own paper. Since Gutenberg, freedom of the press has always been the sole province those who maintain the press. Before that, it was whoever kept scribes around to hand-copy everything.
If Google won't host your video, you can find someone else who will. Failing that, you can set up your own server and host it yourself. You may not get as much traffic as Google would, just as in the days of yore your little startup newspaper that you ran out of your back shed wouldn't start out with as many subscribers as a big established city paper. The cure for that is to publish content that people keep wanting to read and discuss and refer to and tell others about -- just as it has always been since antiquity. (If anything, this can happen much faster now than it could even twenty years ago, though as always people have to actually be interested in your content, or they'll ignore it. If people aren't going to read your manifesto, you are you gonna stop 'em? Nonetheless, if you publish something people actually want to see, word does get around.)
> 1. Fuck IPv6. Let's keep the IP addresses a rare and highly desired commodity;
/256 blocks and run out again?
/24 just because they can, can get as many addresses as they actually need for their servers plus one NAT gateway to service all the desktops. (Business desktops *need* to be behind some kind of hardware firewall or gateway anyway, for security reasons. There's no reason it can't do NAT as well -- the extra 0.002% of CPU cycles will put the electric bill up by, what, three cents a month?) Large international megacorporations, similarly, instead of nabbing a /8 for each major national subdivision of their company just because it costs almost nothing to do so, can scale down their allocation request to something more in keeping with what they might potentially actually need.
> 2. Charge an exorbitant fee every time a DHCP request is serviced;
> 3. Profit!
The problem with this is, IPv4 addresses are not rare. They're not anything like rare. There are approximately ten thousand times as many of them as are actually needed.
We only ran out because they were systematically over-allocated, handed out like free candy, based purely on requests, with no regard for actual need or common sense. My employer, for example, currently has more _unused_ global IPv4 address than we have employees. Our upstream provider did not even inquire how many addresses we needed or even wanted; they just handed us a block of the things. Something like 80% of the allocated global IPv4 addresses are not currently being used on the public internet.
More to the point, in excess of 99.9% of the public IPv4 addresses that *are* actually being used on the public internet, in the sense of packets actually traversing public networks to or from systems assigned those addresses, aren't *needed*, because they're being used strictly for the client side of client/server networking (mostly in the form of DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS) and would if anything be better off behind NAT (because it would reduce the risk of worms, and there's no downside for systems that are not servers and do not actually need peer-to-peer, i.e., most home systems and virtually all business desktops).
IPv6 is not a solution to this problem. If we allocate IPv6 addresses the way we have allocated IPv4 addresses, we'll run out of them in just a few more years. Then what? IPv8, with 1024-bit addresses, so we can start allocating entire
The correct solution is to stop allocating public IP addresses that aren't needed. This can easily be done by charging a *small* amount (per month or per annum) for each address. Honestly, as many addresses as there are available, a dollar a month retail, marked up from less than half that in bulk, would be more than enough to charge. That way people can go ahead and get addresses they *might* actually need and not feel too bad about the expense, but it's enough to keep most people from grabbing ridiculously more addresses than they could ever possibly find a use for, as has been the case so far.
When people sign up for the internet at home, the ISP can ask, "For an extra dollar a month, do you want a public IPv4 address for peer-to-peer networking or to access your computer remotely from another location?" Most people will say no and can go behind NAT. Small businesses, instead of getting a
I believe this will naturally happen over the next few years (assuming IPv6 adoption goes about as far as I think it will). Nothing particular needs to be done (other than perhaps the usual anti-trust stuff in areas where competition between ISPs is artificially restricted e.g. by only one local phone company being allowed to maintain lines). The situation will sort itself out. ISPs that try to charge completely unreasonable fees for public IP addresses will go out of business, because people will just go find another ISP (assuming there's another ISP to go find -- see previous note about anti-trust issues). ISPs that charge too little (which I think would just about have to be nothing at all) will run out of addresses to allocate. Sorted.
> What do you mean? Newspeak has always existed.
> It sounds like you're overdue for another re-education.
Newspeak is duckspeak. Duckspeak is goodthink. Goodthink is Big Brother.
Big Brother is dead. Yesterday Big Brother is dead. Today Big Brother is plusdead. Tomorrow Big Brother is doubleplusdead. Tomorrow Ingsoc is doubleplusdead. Tomorrow Oceania is pluslife.
Oceania unneeds Newspeak. Oceania unneeds duckspeak. Oceania unneeds goodthink. Oceania unneeds Big Brother. Oceania unneeds Ingsoc. Oceania needs pluslife. Oceania plusneeds Tomorrow.
Today is dead. Big Brother is dead. Tomorrow is pluslife.
> For the rest, from the face of it, this suggestion sounds a bit
> like "let's bury it, then it doesn't exist any more". Like how the
> Party tried to introduce Newspeak,
Thing is, that would never work.
Orwell's books are very interesting and make some useful points, but his understanding of linguistics is fundamentally smurfed. People understand words, phrases, and sentences in light of the context in which they occur, whether it matches anything in a dictionary or not. Consequently, virtually any word can be pressed into service and made to mean something that it ordinarily would not, simply by placing it in a particular context. The reader or listener can easily avunculate the intended meaning.
> I can't remember a single math class that _permitted_
> calculators in class, let alone _required_ them
I majored in math (graduated in 1997), and I think all of my math classes permitted calculators, but in practice we didn't have any use for them most of the time. Calculators can't reason for you, and math at the college level doesn't usually have a lot of multi-digit numbers in it (unless you count ones with an _infinite_ number of non-repeating digits, but those are hardly ever converted to decimal notation, for obvious reasons; we just wrote our answers in terms of e or pi or what-have-you). Obviously we used the calculators a bit more for some classes (e.g., Prob & Stats) than for others (Group Theory springs immediately to mind here -- after about the third day of class you never even see a variable that stands for anything a non-math-major would recognize as being a number -- let G and H be ordered abelian groups, and suppose that * and x are distinct one-to-one onto functions from G to H... yeah, you don't really need a calculator).
Universal time is for practical everyday purposes essentially the same thing as GMT.
(There's a technical distinction, but you can probably ignore it unless you're running a low-tier ntp server. They're never off from each other by more than a couple of seconds, tops.)
> Which came first, Debian Potatoe or Debian Sarge?
That's not a fair example. Potato and Sarge were separated by Woody, which lasted for an aeon and a half. By the time Sarge came out, everybody who had used Potato was in a nursing home if not pushing up daisies.
(I jest. As it happens, the first Debian release I ever used was 1.3.1, and I don't recall the codename, if I ever knew it in the first place. This, however, is only possible because people live much longer than software releases. Actually, it's kind of like "dog years".)
> (They were about ten years old at the time
I should clarify: they were about ten when Kerry ran for President, more like six during the Great Florida Chad Controversy, and about two when Clinton left office.
In context, his comment implies less about his age than you seem to think. (Hint: Compare his username with the grandparent post.)
However, since you mention feeling old, I may as well point out that the kids who will graduate from high school this coming spring probably do not know who John Kerry is, or what hanging chad is for that matter. (They were about ten years old at the time, and most people don't really start noticing politics until circa junior high.)
> After all it is the kernel that is WinNT 6.1 whereas the
> distro (again using Linux terminology) is Windows 7.
Windows 7 is not a whole distro. It's more than a kernel, obviously, so I'm not sure exactly what the closest analogue would be in the Linux world (a base-system package, perhaps, but wouldn't a base-system package include a package manager that could be used to install everything else?), but whatever it is it is clearly not a whole distro.
What kind of distro would it be?
A desktop distro, for example, would have at least the really basic desktop features, such as word processing software (WordPad does not count, because it doesn't include basic features that all word processing software has had since the eighties, e.g., spellcheck) and an image editor (leastwise, not one that can do real transparency, layers, filters, etc.) Windows 7 does not have these things; ergo, it is not a desktop distro.
Rather obviously, it's not a server-oriented distro. It's not even a server OS, much less a whole server distro. It's missing even the extremely basic server-oriented features that *all* serious server operating systems (not just Linux distros, but also the BSDs, OS X, Solaris, you name it) have, such as perl and logrotate. You ever try to run a server without logrotate or perl? Haha. Good luck with that. Even Windows "Server" doesn't have the stuff it would need to really qualify here, and Windows 7 certainly does not.
It does not include any development tools whatsoever, so apparently it's not a developer-oriented distro. It doesn't even include a real text editor.
Windows is more than a kernel, but it's less than a distro. We used to have a term for these things. We called them "operating systems". That's what Windows is: an operating system.
We don't really have "operating systems" in the Linux world -- not as an independent component. We don't need them, because we have distros, which are much more. A distro is sort of like an operating system and package management system and a whole bunch of utilities and application, all rolled into one.
I've left out the thing that *all* distros have, no matter what their focus: a package management system, which can be used to retrieve and install a wide variety of software that is not installed by default, resolving dependencies along the way, and, more importantly, to upgrade all of them when desired (or, in the case of security updates, when necessary). This is, arguably, the *core* of a distro, the thing that makes it a distro. Windows has never had one. It's got Windows Update, but Windows Update does not install updates for any other software that you have installed, so you end up with umpteen billion separate "updater" apps running out of the system tray, each one individually checking for updates to its one program it supports, each one separately bugging the user every time there's an update, each one separately triggering an auth event for administrative permission to install updates, every time there's an update, until eventually the user goes insane and downloads a Sysinternals utility (called Autoruns) to turn them all off, at which point updates are no longer checked for automatically at all, which is insecure, but at least then it's possible to get half an hour's work done without being interrupted eight times by various updaters for software that isn't even currently being used.
If Windows were a *distribution*, it would have a package manager. Users who need development tools or word processing software or whatever could just bring up the package manager, search for what they want, click an install button, minimize while it downloads, and five minutes later they'd be using their new software. Even better, any software that's installed via the package manager would automatically be on the list, and any other software that's installed would only have to add itself to the list, and then updates for all the apps would be handled at the same time as the OS updates, by the package manager that comes with the distribution. Automatically.
That's what makes a distribution better than an OS.
> Have you ever even been to 4chan's tech board?
/b/, sometimes running it through a Markov chain generator first. Then another set of shell scripts looks for repeating patterns on /b/. When something shows up frequently enough it becomes a meme and is automatically reposted to other internet venues, such as slashdot. No part of this process requires any human interaction or intelligence.
Don't be absurd. Nobody actually goes to 4chan, in the sense of looking at the site with human eyeballs.
The way it works is, Anonymous has a set of shell scripts and Windows batch files that randomly select content (or what passes for content on 4chan) from the various other boards and reposts a percentage of it on
It isn't really important what computer you buy him. What matters is how you introduce him to it.
If you put the computer in his room, show him how to turn it on and start a couple of games and a drawing program, and then leave him to his own devices (pun not originally intended, but now that I've written it I kind of like it), you are effectively abandoning your duty as a parent.
The computer is just an object -- not a teacher, and certainly not a parent. Furthermore, it'll be hopelessly obsolete by the time he's in junior high anyway. It doesn't matter very much exactly what model of computer he's got.
What matters is how *you* interact with him. If you're constantly showing him things, asking him questions, guiding him to understand the system better, teaching him to experiment and learn what different things do, and so on and so forth, then you're teaching him how to learn, and perhaps more importantly how to enjoy learning. Some kids can pick this up on their own, but it's not the way to bet. Some kids will pick it up in school, but that's not the way to bet either.
Don't take chances. Teach your son how to enjoy learning. A computer is a tool you can use for that, but the exact model you select is not important. Honestly, an old 386 with DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 would be adequate.
Oh, one more thing: this won't seem important now, when he's seven, but it sets a precedent. He's probably going to be a teenager at some point in the future, and this precedent may then become very important. Put the computer in a public room, like a family room or living room or den or something. When he gets to be about 10 or 12, he's going to want some privacy in his bedroom, and you're going to want to start giving him that (because it's a healthy part of his growing up), but you don't really want him to have that privacy when using the internet until he's somewhat older, because he won't have the discernment to handle it well yet. Put the computer where there can be adult supervision a good healthy percentage of the time, so you'll be able to continue to guide him through his teenage years. (This isn't just about porn, either. You'll need to teach him to tell the difference between an article and an advertisement, evaluate privacy risks associated with social networking, and so on and so forth.)
It depends. If by "organic" you mean "has a label on it that says it's organic", then obviously you would not expect any significant difference. A label that says this food is organic is about as meaningful as a label that says no puppies were harmed in the making of this Slashdot post. It's true in the sense of not being false, but it's also entirely redundant.
However, if the "food" that's not considered organic is actually really inorganic (I put the word "food" in quotation marks because inorganic substances are not usually considered to be food, with a handful of special exceptions such as table salt), then I would not expect the human digestive system to get much value out of it. Okay, yes, inorganic "food" could contain some minerals, and obviously it could be rich in dietary fiber...
Nonetheless, fundamentally, by definition, nothing inorganic would contain any protein, carbohydrates, or vitamins. I really don't see how that could make for a healthy diet in the long term.
> I'm no mathematician, but I'm pretty sure that 1.6 divided by 0.1 is *EXACTLY* 16.
One imagines the numbers given in the summary are rounded off. HTH.HAND.
> IMO, there should be an implied minimum speed
> of 5 under the posted limit with very few exceptions.
5mph isn't a wide enough window to allow people to consistently maintain their speed in that range. Many vehicles' dashboard speedometers are off by that much.
Also, on large controlled-access highways with more than three lanes (I mean more than three going your direction, of course; roads that aren't divided don't have minimum speeds), the implied minimum should be rather higher in the left lane than in the right lane (where you might be trying to merge or somesuch -- sometimes you just really need to be _behind_ those three cars over there).
However, I do agree that the current minima are too low. On a 65mph highway, going 45 is *dangerous*, especially if you do it for a protracted period of time. (Driving 45 mph in the left lane should be punished by making the offender watch a thousand continuous hours of back-to-back used car dealership commercials while wearing a badly-fitting jumpsuit made of burlap and naugahyde, seated on a low cast-iron bench with a ten-degree forward tilt to the seat.)
I could just about see holding the leftmost lane to the 5mph window you suggest, with the usual allowances for congestion and other driving conditions. The rightmost lane needs to be able to get away with 15 or maybe even 20mph below the limit in the immediate vicinity of entrance ramps and at least 10mph below the limit elsewhere (so you can quickly and easily let idiots pass you -- by far the fastest and safest way to get out of their immediate vicinity).
> Uh, at least in the US and Canada
It's true worldwide, because it's a result not of legal restrictions that vary by jurisdiction but rather fundamental economic forces that do not discriminate based on geographical location.
> the trees used for making pulp come from forests owned by the
> paper companies and they sure as hell replant them when they harvest
Sometimes the land is owned by the company, and sometimes it is not, but the trees used to make pulp (and thus paper) are always, always, always fast-growth pine grown for that express purpose. Because it's MUCH cheaper that way. Go to the lumber yard nearest you and compare the price of cheap pine (e.g., 2x4s) versus any other kind of wood. Notice a difference?
Any paper company that tried to make paper out of non-farmed trees would go out of business very quickly. That's true worldwide and has been for more than a century. Even in places where deforestation is a major problem, it's not because of the paper industry. Usually it's because the land is wanted (typically for agriculture). Sometimes it's an indirect result of other ecological problems (e.g., desertification can result from improper subsistence farming when there is inadequate education about basic techniques like crop rotation; once desertification gets going, it can degrade not just the farmland but the forests as well, and of course it also forces people to clear new land, which they generally then proceed to mismanage in the same way as the old land).
If you want to use these materials in any kind of bulk, you're going to be getting wood pulp from trees.
What the other poster apparently doesn't realize is that the cheapest way to do that is to use cheap bulk fast-growth pine raised for the purpose on what is effectively farmland and which, if the trees ever became unprofitable, would to used to grow something else. The same way they make paper.
Any other kind of wood is too expensive to use as pulp. Don't believe me? Go to a lumber yard and compare the prices of cheap pine (e.g., 2x4s) versus any other kind of wood.
> So what exactly does it do that similarly equipped
> Linux machines/vps' can't do that justify the cost?
Oh, that's easily.
By integrating seamlessly with a Microsoft-Windows-based business network (including Software Assurance licensing), Microsoft Windows Server 2012 provides a suitable framework for Microsoft-certified business solutions. By partnering with Microsoft and building your product on Microsoft technologies, you ensure your access to the largest possible customer base.
> ... it will need Metro-style management tools!
Oh, yes, please. I would love to see that. I think I might pay money to see that and, in particular, to watch Windows-server apologists trying to explain how much easier to administer Windows is with those tools. I bet I could watch video of that all day. My stomach muscles would probably hurt from laughing for a week. It would be even funnier than that hilarious Mozilla video on why "Tabs on top" is better.
Realistically, to make a really practical space elevator, I think you pretty much need a composite material with scrith as the substrate. You can't just use scrith, due to its dangerously low coefficient of friction. You can't use anything else, because nothing else has the required tensile strength to density ratio.
The best known carbon-nanotube materials could just barely handle a cable length of perhaps one eighth of the length needed to reach geostationary orbit, without providing the safety cushion you'd want for any practical real-world deployment, in case of wind, small meteorites, birds, etc. To actually consider really building a space elevator, we'd need a material more than ten, preferably closer to twenty times better than the best thing we've ever seen.
It's highly worthwhile to continue investigating high-quality materials, because they're generally useful; but in terms of reaching the point of being able to build a space elevator, I wouldn't hold my breath.
The main problem with Pykrete is that it *does* melt. It takes significantly longer than regular ice, but it melts. This, with the cost of construction in the developed world being more than half for labor and less than half for the materials, makes Pykrete uneconomic for almost all purposes.
This doesn't mean the basic idea is bad. It just means water ice is the wrong substrate. I suspect these days the right substrate is probably some kind of thermoset plastic, although flammability could be a concern there if you don't choose your plastic carefully or perhaps mix in something fire retardant (e.g., perhaps a ceramic that releases a reaction-suppressing gas when heated, in much the same way that the plaster in fire-resistant document safes releases water vapor, could be mixed in with the plastic).
I can understand the objection to Plymouth. (Animations on the boot-up screen? Seriously? Are we making a distro for nine-year-old girls now, or what?) Hopefully that's optional.
Grub2, however, doesn't seem like a problem to me. It's been in the distro I use (Debian stable) for seven months now, and I've got it on my main workstations at home and at work, two desktops I maintain that are used by other people (*numerous* other people), six special-purpose kiosks (used by the general public), a web server, and a mail server. If it made boot-time problems hard to diagnose, I think I'd have probably noticed by now. Admittedly, the servers and my workstations don't reboot often, but the other systems all get turned off at night. Some of them are running on fairly old hardware (I believe the oldest kiosk is vintage 2003), so there _have_ been occasional issues that I had to resolve. I don't think Grub2 complicated this at all.
> Who owns a system that still cannot run 64bit software?
I've got one that I use regularly, but I'm really only using it as a router, so I'm not sure that counts.
If you count systems that I don't turn on on a regular basis but which are still in working order if I should happen to want them for any reason, then I've got several, including a MicroVax 3100-40 and an old ITT XTRA (though, the hard drive in that one died years ago, so to use it I'd have to find a bootable 360K floppy that's still readable).