Think about the companies with the huge fleets of cars and trucks.
Oh, the poor companies with huge fleets of cars and trucks! Their thousands of miles of driving and beating down the roads with their heavy loads should really get a break. We should take up a collection for them. A bake sale, maybe.
Recycling computers into raw materials is REALLY nasty.
A friend of mine just started working as the director of American Retroworks/Good Points Recycling, a small non-profit company here in Vermont that specializes in computer and electronics recycling. Their website is kindof a mess (I'm helping to fix that), but as can be seen in their white papers and publications, there is a serious problem with many 'recycling' operations selling to any buyer who will take their stuff, often leading to unscrupulous buyers purchasing tons of computers, pulling a few sellable parts off of them, then dumping the rest.
Retroworks (as a small non-profit) on the other hand is primarily concerned with envirnmental impact and focuses on distributing the electronics that they collect to operations that can reuse the computers/parts instead of trying to convert them back into raw materials. Apparently one of their biggest businesses is selling monitors with broken electronics to companies in china which then use the tubes (with new control electronics) in multimedia entertainment consoles that they sell there. Also, I believe that they are currently in negotiations with other environmentally focused electronics recycling firms to have an environmental standard for computer recycling that those wishing to dispose of their equipment can use as a reference to determine if their computer will actually be handled in an environmentally friendly[er] way. For now, they have this (PowerPoint) info on choosing an electronics diposer. This has some interesting info on the effects of poor recycling practices.
I have Xandros running on a Pentium 200 laptop and it is painfully slow, but workable. I installed it (the open-circulation edition) on a friends P3 600MHz system with 128MB of RAM and its not lightning, but it a lot faster than the Win2000 that was on it before.
but I think she sees the stuff we, the geeks miss.
I work in educational technology (developing software for humanities profs amongst others) and working with absolutely clueless users has led to some great interface improvements. We spend weeks or months writing up some interface or feature, but its the feedback from those who haven't seen it before that allows us to make things discoverable and usable by other new users without having to train them. Plus, those interface improvements that allow newbies to do things often make the software easier for everyone to use, experts included.
Why on earth would I switch from a Proprietary Windows world to a Proprietary Linux world? It makes no sense. Perhaps you get a brief respite from viruses, etc. But without the benefit of a free (as in speech) distribution, what is the point?
Just because Xandros is 'propietary', most [if not all] of the proprietary stuff is the CrossoverOffice/WinX/Windows glue, the rest is all standard GPL/BSD/etc. By moving your operation to a 'proprietary' Linux, you get a system made with 99% open-source code, with a little proprietary glue on top to make your transition from the Windows world easier. Don't need ActiveDirectory or Office2003? switch to the Free 'Open Distribution Version' of Xandros and redistribute to your hearts content.
The point is, by switching you can start using all the open-source apps where they exist or have the features you need, all running on the Free kernel/GNU OS, and still keep SPSS/Photoshop/what-have-you running until/if replacements are availible or good enough for your needs. Once that is the case, just drop the Codeweavers tools and you are all in the Free.
About a 8 months ago I had a hard drive fail and decided to install Xandros to replace the RedHat 9 that was on my dead drive. I had been happily using apt-for-rpm thanks to the great guy[s?] at freshrpms.net and had long since grown to love the Debian software management way: 1. $ sudo -s 2. # apt-get update 3. # apt-get upgrade/install xxxx 4. there is no 4, its done everything is up to date, nothing else to do. The web server that I inherited was running Debian, so I had general idea of where to look for configs and things and thought I'd try Xandros for myself as well as try it out in preparation for setting up for my mother. The mother test is yet to come yet as I've spent most of our brief visits socializing instead of messing with the computer. This will happen soon though since I must say that using Xandros has been far and away the most pleasurable Linux experience that I have ever had.
The good:
- As little battling with hardware as I've ever experienced.
- Auto recognizes CDs, my camera, other USB stuff. Finally plug and play without having to write shell scripts to mount/unmount the CD!
- Unlike the rest of the Distros, Xandros cleaned out the 'start' menu, organized them, and got rid of the dozens of choices for every kind of app. This is probably on of the most confusing things about most distros, you pull up the 'Applications' menu and see 2 office suites (KOffice and OpenOffice), 5 email clients, 10 text editors, and 4 sound players. I'm all for choice, but its overwhelming for first-timers and cluttered for everyone else.
- Everything I love about Debian, in a friendly package.
- A 'fast user-switching' button like OSX and winXP so that you can easily switch between X-Sessions without having to know the ALT+F6/ALT+F7 keys
The not so good:
- Its not the most blazing distro, but does [barely] function with KDE on a Pentium200. I am running Xandros without KDE on my laptop/picture-frame.
- It takes up about gig, but I guess this is pretty standard for distros (with apps included).
The 'not good, but problematic elsewhere' dept:
- have to manually configure things to get all 5 buttons working on my mouse. This IS doable though, and I have made up a step-by-step install guide for beginners wanting to set up Xandros. It includes all the little steps I did to get the mouse, DVDCSS, nVidia drivers, etc going. I wrote this up for a friend, but it might help others beginners too, since these things seem to beyond the scope of most distributed install guides.
All in all, I've found it to be VERY user-friendly compared to everything except OS X. At the same time, its Debian, so when I wanted to set up PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, and Apache so I could do some work, it didn't get in my way.
No, if you had an accident at least half of those people would of died.
Very true. Whether right or wrong, I judged that 15 miles on a back road at 30mph was safe enough. Could have been bad though were an accident to occur.
Call them a cab or have them walk it off on the way home.
Unfortunately rural Vermont doesn't have much in the way of cab service and 15miles is a bit far to walk at 2am.
If you do not live in a city in which you can walk home at night, why are you living there?
Its beautiful out here, the people are nice, and I have a job. That's why I live here. I also chose to live in the [small] town where I work, so it is rare that I drive at all.
I agree that it isn't the best thing to do, but 9 people can be squezed into a little car.:-)
No, it wasn't legal, but I once fit 9 people into my 2-door Acura Integra. 2 on the front passenger seat, 4 in the back seat, 1 laying on the laps across the back seat, 1 curled up in the trunk, and 1 driver.
Granted the muffler was dragging on the ground every tiny bump, but better squished with a DD than trying to drive themselves.
Commence writing. Commence listening to music. Commence shutdown procedure.
It works for everything!
Usage of "Start" instead of "Commence" probably has something to do with the majority of the population wondering who was graduating when they clicked the button...
I also believe in killing the fsck out of crazy ratbastards that have killed or are planning to kill me and my neighbors. Better that the money earned by the sweat of my brow, then taken by the government, goes to killing bad guys than to feeding lazy ones.
Sounds good. Why don't we spend $80billion+ going after terrorists like Al Queda instead of an impovorished (via our sanctions), oil-rich country that has not attacked or threatened to attack us.
I'd like to second (or third) the recommendation on the Canon A80 (or newer model). I got the [2Mpx] A40 back when it was new and have loved it, and that product line has just gotten better. I've recommended it to family and friends, 5 of which have gotten newer A-series cameras over the past 2 years. The newer models have a flip-out screens and nicer controls than the A40, but they all have manual aperture and shutter-speed control, making them the closest thing to an SLR (exposure-control-wise) in point-and-shoot body. Additionally, the A-series cameras take 4 AA batteries, a God-send in my opinion. With NiMH rechargebles, the batteries seem to last a long time; and emergency alkiline replacement are availible anywhere in the world for reasonable prices as AA seems to be the most common size everywhere.
As for camera resolution and printing, I just tried printing some 2Mpx images from my A40 on a Canon i9900 photo printer, the first that I've tried that prints higher res than the camera does. The results:
- 4x6 prints looked flawless
- 8x10 prints looked flawless if your nose isn't pressed up to the picture. (in my opinion, good enough for framing and hanging on the wall)
- I haven't yet found 13x19 paper, but I imagine the results will be similar to the 8x10s, grainy close up, but not bad on the wall above the couch.
All this said, I'm hankering for a Canon Digital Rebel. As much as the aperture control of the A-series fits my creative needs, I am eager to return to the composition control provided by multiple lenses. I plan on keeping the A40 though, for remaining on belt in easy reach while the SLR is safely stowed in the backpack while skiing, etc.
The Materials Engineering Lab at Colorado State is doing some really cool stuff with thin-film PV modules. They are able to get 12.44% efficiences from cells that they make evaporating CdS/CdTe onto a glass backing.
The really cool thing (lots of pictures in the linked site) is that the manufacturing process is very simple (a conveyour belt passes glass into a vaccum-chamber and over several crucibles containing the CdS/CdTe to be evaporated onto the glass) and produces no liquid and virtually no solid waste. As well, if I can remember correctly from my visit to the lab, the raw materials (metals that will be evaporated onto the glass) are readily availible as by-products from other industrial processes.
Hopefully this technology will be out of the lab and in wide-scale use in the near future.
Weren't we all slagging of Microsoft for implementing the EXACT same feature in Longhorn, i.e. a databased file system, not all that long ago?
The KDE thing is not changing the filesystem, but crawling the files on it and indexing their contents for searching. The *nix "locate" command uses a simmilar database, but only of file-paths, not contents. Like the locate database, this searching one would probably have to be rebuilt (at low operating priority) on a regular basis.
Part of the problem with the Longhorn database-filesystem is the overhead that that would add to all filesystem operations, such as move/copy. In contrast, the overhead of this KDE feature is all at the application level when the database generation is done (at night/nice 19).
Oh a more serious note, the "air taxis due in a few years" that are refered to in the article are not the type of taxi that will take you to their door.
The "air taxis" are simply small, fuel-efficient planes that you can book to fly you to small municipal airports, maybe stopping on the way to drop off other passengers. Instead of having large planes that fly the same schedualed route, no matter if the plane is full or empty, the air taxi just flys when/where up to 8 people want to go, when they want to go.
PenguinAirlines was mentioned on/. a few years ago and looks like it is finally coming into service. I can't find any pricing since they are not fully operational yet, but in the press release that I read a while ago, they said that they were aiming for ticket prices just a little above a first-class ticket.
(note to distributors: PLEASE start designing for a versioned/etc.)
This is a REALLY good idea! Just think, roll-back your configuration to a known working point, tags, be able to run dated diffs to find out what some GUI config tool changed...
Has anyone tried importing/etc into a cvs repository? I am a little worried that those CVS directories migh cause errors in the rcX.d (and I don't have a spare machine to try it on right now). I guess another issue with cvs would be symbolic links. Hmmm.
Any suggestions on how to achieve this sort of functionality with currently availible tools, or do we need a transparent, filesystem-based, versioning system?
is it ever legal to pass these vehicles on roads with double-yellow lines?
That depends on which state you are in. In my state, Vermont, it is always legal to pass in double-yellow sections of road unless there is a sign specifically stating "No passing". Other states may differ. Also, going around a cyclist at low speed rarely requires the usage of the opposite lane, since bicycles are so narrow. Speeding past requires a much greater separation for safety, though this is unfortunately often ignored.
If anything, cars have MORE of a right to be there since the roads were primarily built because of automobile transportation.
There have been paved roads LONG before cars. Romans had them 2000 years ago. In China they have paved roads where 1% of the traffic is cars.
They also were funded more by automobiles than by bicyles (gas taxes and whatnot).
This is simply not true. For example, this page shows that for Minnesotta roads [emphasis mine]:
Derived from three statewide taxesmotor fuels excise taxes, motor vehicle registration taxes, and starting in 2003, a portion (30 percent) of the motor vehicle sales taxroad aid accounts for nearly a third of the $1.5 billion in total local road spending annually. The remaining two-thirds comes from local government general funds, primarily property taxes and state property tax relief, also known as general-purpose aid.
While a cyclist isn't paying a fuel tax, they are still paying for the roads via other taxes. Additionally, since a bicycle induces virtually no wear on the road-surface, cyclists are paying for more than their share of road maintainence.
As an avid cyclist and bicycle-commuter, I'd just like to address some of your comments.
everyone is riding side-by-side rather than single file... Are those of us in cars really expected to ride along at 10-15 mph behind a cyclist for 5 or 10 miles?
A bicycle happens to be a slow moving vehicle that is traveling down a public road. Other examples of common slow-moving vehicles are farm-tractors, Amish/Mennonite buggies, construction vehicles, mail-delivery-trucks, garbage trucks, old people, etc. In the case of ALL of these, the vehicle in front, no matter what its speed, has the right of way and should be passed in a safe manner when room on the road allows. In general practice (with the exception of the elderly) most slow-moving vehicle operators make some sort of attempt to stay to the side of the road as much as possible to allow for easy passing by vehicles that have the ability to travel faster. "Being nice" however, does not mean that the slower vehicle has renounced its right-of-way. When approaching any slow vehicle, the safe, legal, nice way to do it (if there is not an empty passing lane) is to slow down, wait for enough room to pass, and then pass.
Back to bicycles. A bicycle's maximum width is the span of its rider's sholders, ~2ft/.6m. Two bicycles with a foot inbetween them take up only 5ft/1.5m. If the approching car is following the above mentioned safe-overtaking practice, there is little difference in a cars ability to pass one cyclist or two side-by-side. Where the problem for all involved resides is in auto-driver's insistance on overtaking cyclists at full speed, in the same lane, no matter what configuration the cyclists are riding in. When riding single-file, right on the edge of the road, I've often had cars pass me at 70mph with less than 2ft of clearance. This is both terrifying and incredibly unsafe. By taking up [slightly] more of the road by riding side-by-side, a cyclist can assert a bit more of their right-of-way and force overtaking traffic to at least slow down slightly (or move over) when passing, making the road safer for all parties.
running through stopsigns without stopping, blatantly running red lights and advancing past all the cars that are stopped at both of the above.
This is just bad form, illegal, and shouldn't be done.
Re:Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 1
During the developement of our PHP CMS, Segue, we did just what you mentioned: a rewrite, with the realization that another was needed before the first was even done. To nip this one in the bud, we spent several months researching application design, OO design, XP, and several other topics. This research left us with two products:
- A site that is a collection of most of the articles that we read in preparation to all this work.
The documentation site title is XP, but the articles contained are more general design stuff than just XP. Speaking of XP, it is something that over time we have found to be partially useful. Unit testing can be good, though we often don't do it, while pair-programming is universally despised by our group.
I did this when I was crashing on a friend's couch for a month.
He had the main X session and I the second one. CTRL+ALT+F6 and you got his desktop, CTRL+ALT+F7 and you got mine. It was great for me because I could effectively have my own thing (while job-searching, house-hunting) going on on the computer and he could hit three keys and check his email. The only problem was sharing sound, but that wasn't too much of an issue anyway.
On a 4-hour, 56 mile ride last weekend I ended up consuming the following (above and beyond my normal intake):
4 Cliff bars @ $1.30 each.
4 quarts of Gatorade @ ~$0.40 each for Gatorade powder.
Total: $6.80
This gives a cost/mile of $0.12 for the bike @ 14mph.
A car getting 30mpg on the same trip would spend $3.60 on $2.00/gal gas, giving a cost/mile of $0.06/mile.
My employer pays a pretty standardard (I think) $0.37/mile for use of one's own vehicle for business. This includes not just gas, but also wear and tear.
Where does this leave us? Well, gas alone is cheaper than Cliff bars, but once you factor in the additional car costs (and heart surgury later), the car is more expensive. This doesn't get into polution, traffic, or anything else either.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about the companies with the huge fleets of cars and trucks.
Oh, the poor companies with huge fleets of cars and trucks! Their thousands of miles of driving and beating down the roads with their heavy loads should really get a break. We should take up a collection for them. A bake sale, maybe.
Recycling computers into raw materials is REALLY nasty.
A friend of mine just started working as the director of American Retroworks/Good Points Recycling, a small non-profit company here in Vermont that specializes in computer and electronics recycling. Their website is kindof a mess (I'm helping to fix that), but as can be seen in their white papers and publications, there is a serious problem with many 'recycling' operations selling to any buyer who will take their stuff, often leading to unscrupulous buyers purchasing tons of computers, pulling a few sellable parts off of them, then dumping the rest.
Retroworks (as a small non-profit) on the other hand is primarily concerned with envirnmental impact and focuses on distributing the electronics that they collect to operations that can reuse the computers/parts instead of trying to convert them back into raw materials. Apparently one of their biggest businesses is selling monitors with broken electronics to companies in china which then use the tubes (with new control electronics) in multimedia entertainment consoles that they sell there. Also, I believe that they are currently in negotiations with other environmentally focused electronics recycling firms to have an environmental standard for computer recycling that those wishing to dispose of their equipment can use as a reference to determine if their computer will actually be handled in an environmentally friendly[er] way. For now, they have this (PowerPoint) info on choosing an electronics diposer. This has some interesting info on the effects of poor recycling practices.
Wow, I was holding out for that to be a spoof site.
There's nothing mysterious here: in the absence of gravity, an apple would be as likely to fall up as it would be to fall down.
:-)
Actually, it wouldn't 'fall' anywhere.
I have Xandros running on a Pentium 200 laptop and it is painfully slow, but workable. I installed it (the open-circulation edition) on a friends P3 600MHz system with 128MB of RAM and its not lightning, but it a lot faster than the Win2000 that was on it before.
I fixed it, using "IT Ninja Tech Support" ( SSH )
:-)
I love that line!
but I think she sees the stuff we, the geeks miss.
I work in educational technology (developing software for humanities profs amongst others) and working with absolutely clueless users has led to some great interface improvements. We spend weeks or months writing up some interface or feature, but its the feedback from those who haven't seen it before that allows us to make things discoverable and usable by other new users without having to train them. Plus, those interface improvements that allow newbies to do things often make the software easier for everyone to use, experts included.
Why on earth would I switch from a Proprietary Windows world to a Proprietary Linux world? It makes no sense. Perhaps you get a brief respite from viruses, etc. But without the benefit of a free (as in speech) distribution, what is the point?
Just because Xandros is 'propietary', most [if not all] of the proprietary stuff is the CrossoverOffice/WinX/Windows glue, the rest is all standard GPL/BSD/etc. By moving your operation to a 'proprietary' Linux, you get a system made with 99% open-source code, with a little proprietary glue on top to make your transition from the Windows world easier. Don't need ActiveDirectory or Office2003? switch to the Free 'Open Distribution Version' of Xandros and redistribute to your hearts content.
The point is, by switching you can start using all the open-source apps where they exist or have the features you need, all running on the Free kernel/GNU OS, and still keep SPSS/Photoshop/what-have-you running until/if replacements are availible or good enough for your needs. Once that is the case, just drop the Codeweavers tools and you are all in the Free.
About a 8 months ago I had a hard drive fail and decided to install Xandros to replace the RedHat 9 that was on my dead drive. I had been happily using apt-for-rpm thanks to the great guy[s?] at freshrpms.net and had long since grown to love the Debian software management way:
1. $ sudo -s
2. # apt-get update
3. # apt-get upgrade/install xxxx
4. there is no 4, its done everything is up to date, nothing else to do.
The web server that I inherited was running Debian, so I had general idea of where to look for configs and things and thought I'd try Xandros for myself as well as try it out in preparation for setting up for my mother. The mother test is yet to come yet as I've spent most of our brief visits socializing instead of messing with the computer. This will happen soon though since I must say that using Xandros has been far and away the most pleasurable Linux experience that I have ever had.
The good:
- As little battling with hardware as I've ever experienced.
- Auto recognizes CDs, my camera, other USB stuff. Finally plug and play without having to write shell scripts to mount/unmount the CD!
- Unlike the rest of the Distros, Xandros cleaned out the 'start' menu, organized them, and got rid of the dozens of choices for every kind of app. This is probably on of the most confusing things about most distros, you pull up the 'Applications' menu and see 2 office suites (KOffice and OpenOffice), 5 email clients, 10 text editors, and 4 sound players. I'm all for choice, but its overwhelming for first-timers and cluttered for everyone else.
- Everything I love about Debian, in a friendly package.
- A 'fast user-switching' button like OSX and winXP so that you can easily switch between X-Sessions without having to know the ALT+F6/ALT+F7 keys
The not so good:
- Its not the most blazing distro, but does [barely] function with KDE on a Pentium200. I am running Xandros without KDE on my laptop/picture-frame.
- It takes up about gig, but I guess this is pretty standard for distros (with apps included).
The 'not good, but problematic elsewhere' dept:
- have to manually configure things to get all 5 buttons working on my mouse. This IS doable though, and I have made up a step-by-step install guide for beginners wanting to set up Xandros. It includes all the little steps I did to get the mouse, DVDCSS, nVidia drivers, etc going. I wrote this up for a friend, but it might help others beginners too, since these things seem to beyond the scope of most distributed install guides.
All in all, I've found it to be VERY user-friendly compared to everything except OS X. At the same time, its Debian, so when I wanted to set up PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, and Apache so I could do some work, it didn't get in my way.
No, if you had an accident at least half of those people would of died.
:-)
Very true. Whether right or wrong, I judged that 15 miles on a back road at 30mph was safe enough. Could have been bad though were an accident to occur.
Call them a cab or have them walk it off on the way home.
Unfortunately rural Vermont doesn't have much in the way of cab service and 15miles is a bit far to walk at 2am.
If you do not live in a city in which you can walk home at night, why are you living there?
Its beautiful out here, the people are nice, and I have a job. That's why I live here. I also chose to live in the [small] town where I work, so it is rare that I drive at all.
I agree that it isn't the best thing to do, but 9 people can be squezed into a little car.
No, it wasn't legal, but I once fit 9 people into my 2-door Acura Integra. 2 on the front passenger seat, 4 in the back seat, 1 laying on the laps across the back seat, 1 curled up in the trunk, and 1 driver.
Granted the muffler was dragging on the ground every tiny bump, but better squished with a DD than trying to drive themselves.
I personally like "Commence".
Commence writing.
Commence listening to music.
Commence shutdown procedure.
It works for everything!
Usage of "Start" instead of "Commence" probably has something to do with the majority of the population wondering who was graduating when they clicked the button...
I also believe in killing the fsck out of crazy ratbastards that have killed or are planning to kill me and my neighbors. Better that the money earned by the sweat of my brow, then taken by the government, goes to killing bad guys than to feeding lazy ones.
Sounds good. Why don't we spend $80billion+ going after terrorists like Al Queda instead of an impovorished (via our sanctions), oil-rich country that has not attacked or threatened to attack us.
I'd like to second (or third) the recommendation on the Canon A80 (or newer model). I got the [2Mpx] A40 back when it was new and have loved it, and that product line has just gotten better. I've recommended it to family and friends, 5 of which have gotten newer A-series cameras over the past 2 years. The newer models have a flip-out screens and nicer controls than the A40, but they all have manual aperture and shutter-speed control, making them the closest thing to an SLR (exposure-control-wise) in point-and-shoot body. Additionally, the A-series cameras take 4 AA batteries, a God-send in my opinion. With NiMH rechargebles, the batteries seem to last a long time; and emergency alkiline replacement are availible anywhere in the world for reasonable prices as AA seems to be the most common size everywhere.
As for camera resolution and printing, I just tried printing some 2Mpx images from my A40 on a Canon i9900 photo printer, the first that I've tried that prints higher res than the camera does.
The results:
- 4x6 prints looked flawless
- 8x10 prints looked flawless if your nose isn't pressed up to the picture. (in my opinion, good enough for framing and hanging on the wall)
- I haven't yet found 13x19 paper, but I imagine the results will be similar to the 8x10s, grainy close up, but not bad on the wall above the couch.
All this said, I'm hankering for a Canon Digital Rebel. As much as the aperture control of the A-series fits my creative needs, I am eager to return to the composition control provided by multiple lenses. I plan on keeping the A40 though, for remaining on belt in easy reach while the SLR is safely stowed in the backpack while skiing, etc.
Hope this helps!
Adam
I did this with a Creative Muvo2 that had its 4GB Micro drive removed and have been quite pleased with it.
The Materials Engineering Lab at Colorado State is doing some really cool stuff with thin-film PV modules. They are able to get 12.44% efficiences from cells that they make evaporating CdS/CdTe onto a glass backing.
The really cool thing (lots of pictures in the linked site) is that the manufacturing process is very simple (a conveyour belt passes glass into a vaccum-chamber and over several crucibles containing the CdS/CdTe to be evaporated onto the glass) and produces no liquid and virtually no solid waste. As well, if I can remember correctly from my visit to the lab, the raw materials (metals that will be evaporated onto the glass) are readily availible as by-products from other industrial processes.
Hopefully this technology will be out of the lab and in wide-scale use in the near future.
Weren't we all slagging of Microsoft for implementing the EXACT same feature in Longhorn, i.e. a databased file system, not all that long ago?
The KDE thing is not changing the filesystem, but crawling the files on it and indexing their contents for searching. The *nix "locate" command uses a simmilar database, but only of file-paths, not contents. Like the locate database, this searching one would probably have to be rebuilt (at low operating priority) on a regular basis.
Part of the problem with the Longhorn database-filesystem is the overhead that that would add to all filesystem operations, such as move/copy. In contrast, the overhead of this KDE feature is all at the application level when the database generation is done (at night/nice 19).
Oh a more serious note, the "air taxis due in a few years" that are refered to in the article are not the type of taxi that will take you to their door.
/. a few years ago and looks like it is finally coming into service. I can't find any pricing since they are not fully operational yet, but in the press release that I read a while ago, they said that they were aiming for ticket prices just a little above a first-class ticket.
The "air taxis" are simply small, fuel-efficient planes that you can book to fly you to small municipal airports, maybe stopping on the way to drop off other passengers. Instead of having large planes that fly the same schedualed route, no matter if the plane is full or empty, the air taxi just flys when/where up to 8 people want to go, when they want to go.
PenguinAirlines was mentioned on
(note to distributors: PLEASE start designing for a versioned /etc .)
/etc into a cvs repository? I am a little worried that those CVS directories migh cause errors in the rcX.d (and I don't have a spare machine to try it on right now). I guess another issue with cvs would be symbolic links. Hmmm.
This is a REALLY good idea! Just think, roll-back your configuration to a known working point, tags, be able to run dated diffs to find out what some GUI config tool changed...
Has anyone tried importing
Any suggestions on how to achieve this sort of functionality with currently availible tools, or do we need a transparent, filesystem-based, versioning system?
is it ever legal to pass these vehicles on roads with double-yellow lines?
That depends on which state you are in. In my state, Vermont, it is always legal to pass in double-yellow sections of road unless there is a sign specifically stating "No passing". Other states may differ. Also, going around a cyclist at low speed rarely requires the usage of the opposite lane, since bicycles are so narrow. Speeding past requires a much greater separation for safety, though this is unfortunately often ignored.
If anything, cars have MORE of a right to be there since the roads were primarily built because of automobile transportation.
There have been paved roads LONG before cars. Romans had them 2000 years ago. In China they have paved roads where 1% of the traffic is cars.
They also were funded more by automobiles than by bicyles (gas taxes and whatnot).
This is simply not true. For example, this page shows that for Minnesotta roads [emphasis mine]:
Derived from three statewide taxesmotor fuels excise taxes, motor vehicle registration taxes, and starting in 2003, a portion (30 percent) of the motor vehicle sales taxroad aid accounts for nearly a third of the $1.5 billion in total local road spending annually. The remaining two-thirds comes from local government general funds, primarily property taxes and state property tax relief, also known as general-purpose aid.
While a cyclist isn't paying a fuel tax, they are still paying for the roads via other taxes. Additionally, since a bicycle induces virtually no wear on the road-surface, cyclists are paying for more than their share of road maintainence.
Please, share the road.
As an avid cyclist and bicycle-commuter, I'd just like to address some of your comments.
everyone is riding side-by-side rather than single file... Are those of us in cars really expected to ride along at 10-15 mph behind a cyclist for 5 or 10 miles?
A bicycle happens to be a slow moving vehicle that is traveling down a public road. Other examples of common slow-moving vehicles are farm-tractors, Amish/Mennonite buggies, construction vehicles, mail-delivery-trucks, garbage trucks, old people, etc. In the case of ALL of these, the vehicle in front, no matter what its speed, has the right of way and should be passed in a safe manner when room on the road allows. In general practice (with the exception of the elderly) most slow-moving vehicle operators make some sort of attempt to stay to the side of the road as much as possible to allow for easy passing by vehicles that have the ability to travel faster. "Being nice" however, does not mean that the slower vehicle has renounced its right-of-way. When approaching any slow vehicle, the safe, legal, nice way to do it (if there is not an empty passing lane) is to slow down, wait for enough room to pass, and then pass.
Back to bicycles. A bicycle's maximum width is the span of its rider's sholders, ~2ft/.6m. Two bicycles with a foot inbetween them take up only 5ft/1.5m. If the approching car is following the above mentioned safe-overtaking practice, there is little difference in a cars ability to pass one cyclist or two side-by-side. Where the problem for all involved resides is in auto-driver's insistance on overtaking cyclists at full speed, in the same lane, no matter what configuration the cyclists are riding in. When riding single-file, right on the edge of the road, I've often had cars pass me at 70mph with less than 2ft of clearance. This is both terrifying and incredibly unsafe. By taking up [slightly] more of the road by riding side-by-side, a cyclist can assert a bit more of their right-of-way and force overtaking traffic to at least slow down slightly (or move over) when passing, making the road safer for all parties.
running through stopsigns without stopping, blatantly running red lights and advancing past all the cars that are stopped at both of the above.
This is just bad form, illegal, and shouldn't be done.
You just called your significant other a monkey!
/. :-).
Better hope they don't read
During the developement of our PHP CMS, Segue, we did just what you mentioned: a rewrite, with the realization that another was needed before the first was even done. To nip this one in the bud, we spent several months researching application design, OO design, XP, and several other topics. This research left us with two products:
- A large application framework (Harmoni) written in PHP that provides implementations of the Open Knowledge Inititiative (OKI) services along with others.
- A site that is a collection of most of the articles that we read in preparation to all this work.
The documentation site title is XP, but the articles contained are more general design stuff than just XP. Speaking of XP, it is something that over time we have found to be partially useful. Unit testing can be good, though we often don't do it, while pair-programming is universally despised by our group.
Anyway, read a lot before writing.
I did this when I was crashing on a friend's couch for a month.
He had the main X session and I the second one. CTRL+ALT+F6 and you got his desktop, CTRL+ALT+F7 and you got mine. It was great for me because I could effectively have my own thing (while job-searching, house-hunting) going on on the computer and he could hit three keys and check his email. The only problem was sharing sound, but that wasn't too much of an issue anyway.
Total: $6.80
This gives a cost/mile of $0.12 for the bike @ 14mph.
A car getting 30mpg on the same trip would spend $3.60 on $2.00/gal gas, giving a cost/mile of $0.06/mile.
My employer pays a pretty standardard (I think) $0.37/mile for use of one's own vehicle for business. This includes not just gas, but also wear and tear.
Where does this leave us? Well, gas alone is cheaper than Cliff bars, but once you factor in the additional car costs (and heart surgury later), the car is more expensive. This doesn't get into polution, traffic, or anything else either.