I've installed Debian every time I decided to change a system's hard disk*, so it is not such a big time sink. Compare that with the number of times one needs to install Ubuntu just to stay current. Also, there are some years since when Debian didn't work perfectly out of the installation. Recently (the last 4 or 5 years), I've had more problems with Ubuntu, altough I only tried to install it one one computer.
Now, compare that terrible time sink that is installing Debian every decade or so, with daily administration and installing random software. Those huge repositories are quite helpfull here. And not everything in them works well with Ubuntu (specialy if you don't reinstall it every so often).
* Currently, on 3 computers, just at home, sometimes there were more, some times less. Last time I changed a system's disk I didn't go into the trouble of reinstalling it, tough, and just copied everyting in place. Yeah, you have to create/dev/null and/dev/console, also you must reinstall grub/lilo, but it's all. I think it will take more than a decade for me to reinstall it on the future.
I don't know why we should concentrate on only one of the alternatives. But if so, yeah, I'd vote for launch loops that use rockets for the latter stages.
No, you don't. If you take enough time with your eyes out of the road to read the sign you'll be able to guess, but that isn't how such information should be written.
There is a internationaly agreed standard yellow sign for that. But, yes, I know, people don't care about standards... And the "300m ahead" piece of information is pretty useless.
"I have found my self going down roads where if my GPS quit I would only have a vague idea of how to get home from that location."
I also find myself quite often going into places I have no idea how to come back home without a GPS... But I don't use GPS (I don't even own one), asking for information won't kill you (ok, sometimes you should take care to ask the police, or it will).
Anyway, that is interesting that people use more than half a gas tank going into a desert, or that they take their cars out of the road just because a machine told them to. I don't know how interesting, since some people are quite wiling to kill somebody else just because somebody told them to, so, I guess doing stupid things shouldn't qualify for heavy awesomeness. Anyway, it's a machine giving them orders, not some authority.
"Some more diplomatic papers seem to reveal some arab states actually urged the US to attack Iran - hmm - is that helping peace along in ANY way?"
It made it harder for the US to attack Iran. It also made it quite harder to the US to start any war at the middle east, since it showed that the biggest supporter of Al Qaeda is the exact same country that the US is protecting by making wars at the middle east.
Now, I'd like to know if those current revolutions have anything to do with Wikileaks.
Some strong enough gravity can keep hydrogen from escaping. That seems to happen on the larger gaseous planets. But no rocky planet has a gravity strong enough to keep pure hydrogen (or even helium) inside. We have a lot of it here on Earth just because it isn't pure, most of it is in water.
Dunno, byt the GP wording, it is more like 4. Instantly replaced by a even worse despot who... 5. is snipped away shortly after. 6. ??????? 7. Civil war.
1 - You invent a device that is great. You can't deal with the strings that come attached with Windows, you also don't thing that it is a serious OS (AKA your reputation will suffer if you ship windows), and it would be too expensive to make your device run Windows anyway. So it runs Linux.
2 - Your device is a success. You improve it a couple of times, with time it becomes quite serious at computing power, while keeping the price. All this time lots of people tell you that they'd buy it, but it doesn't run Windows (some even buy, and return because it doesn't run Windows).
3 - You realise that your product just need a little upgrade (that will make it just a bit more expensive) to run Windows. At the same time, your competitors are starting to anounce products that are just a little more expensive than yours, and run Windows. The press is running wild, covering your competitors, and telling people to not look into your product, since it doesn't run Windows.
4 - Now, do you make that small upgrade, and add Windows products to your portifolio? Or do you risk being displaced by those Windows products? If you choose Windows, soon you'll discover that the strings that come atached to Windows will take away all the lucrativity that comes from selling the non-Windows products you have. Only the Windows based ones will be lucrative.
I don't know how you managed to run Mathlab on it, but try m-a-d-n-e-s-s, that will fix that problem you have, thinking something less than 16GB is enough.
So, instead of letting people couple with change you want to avoid suffering by giving the market to less able companies, that are less productive, what makes everybody poorer. Exchanging a little bit of suffering on the short term for a huge amount (it compounds with time) of suffering on the long term, that is what people do best.
If they kept it running FreeBSD it would still work, and they would be much more proeminent (ok, untill they started losing data and cancelling the accounts of people that don't check their email on vacations). But they changed to Windows as soon as they bought the company, and lost most of its clients.
Anticompetitive practices killed the Linux netbooks just like they killed the Linux PCs, and by doing that, they doomed the entire netbook market to be filled with pieces of junk, with very little market appeal, since very little innovation is possible when using Windows.
Now we are seeing that innovation migrate to another kind of device, the smartphone. That is making it popular, and it is yet out of the reach of Microsoft. Maybe when devices become more powerfull, the non-Windows ones will start to be unavailable for selling, just like the netbooks, and the specification (followed by the price) of all of them will go up just enough to run Windows. If that happens, expect creative people to launch another class of device, that is just not powerfull enough to run Windows, but that has plenty of interesting uses. Again.
Microsoft is clearly doing that to push H264 on the internet, with the intent of hurting free software, and creating a competitive edge for them. The fact that they'll pay for that doesn't make it less of a finantial incentive.
You could always redefine the Ampere as a multiple of the elementar charge, and use the current definition of it (the force that appears on two conductors where some current is running) as the definition of a Newton. That is the Watt balance, one of the proposals for replacing the kg, but nobody got the needed precision on its measurements yet.
Whatever path they go, the new standard will define both Plank's and Avogadro's constants. That is because the speed of light is already defined, and the second is defined as something that is a function of both of those constants. So, define something else as a function of those constants, and they'll be defined.
Now, of course, one of the constants will probably be defined as a number, the other one as the result of some calculation that we may, or may not, know the exact value at the future (we don't know now).
Once in a while they do use the cilinder to calibrate a few other cilinders, that they use to calibrate other cilinders, that calibrate things that somebody finaly sells out to labs for calibrating actual equipment.
It would be more like redefine the light speed to an exact value (thus redefining the metre), or redefining the second to something you can measure anywhere. Both were already done, the kg is the only SI unit that can't be created on any lab. It is the only reminiscent of the XIX century, where people first defined such things.
Also, if you take a look at the plan, they'll redefine the kg as the mass of the cilinder measured when somebody creates an aparatus that can be used to define mass. Or, in other words, the difference between the current kg and the one to be defined must be smaller than the current measurement errors.
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The dropped architectures aern't going away. They just didn't get to stable.
I've installed Debian every time I decided to change a system's hard disk*, so it is not such a big time sink. Compare that with the number of times one needs to install Ubuntu just to stay current. Also, there are some years since when Debian didn't work perfectly out of the installation. Recently (the last 4 or 5 years), I've had more problems with Ubuntu, altough I only tried to install it one one computer.
Now, compare that terrible time sink that is installing Debian every decade or so, with daily administration and installing random software. Those huge repositories are quite helpfull here. And not everything in them works well with Ubuntu (specialy if you don't reinstall it every so often).
* Currently, on 3 computers, just at home, sometimes there were more, some times less. Last time I changed a system's disk I didn't go into the trouble of reinstalling it, tough, and just copied everyting in place. Yeah, you have to create /dev/null and /dev/console, also you must reinstall grub/lilo, but it's all. I think it will take more than a decade for me to reinstall it on the future.
The bandwidth is wide enough to broadcast the date of a protest. You just have to assure there are enough people listening.
I don't know why we should concentrate on only one of the alternatives. But if so, yeah, I'd vote for launch loops that use rockets for the latter stages.
No, you don't. If you take enough time with your eyes out of the road to read the sign you'll be able to guess, but that isn't how such information should be written.
There is a internationaly agreed standard yellow sign for that. But, yes, I know, people don't care about standards... And the "300m ahead" piece of information is pretty useless.
I also find myself quite often going into places I have no idea how to come back home without a GPS... But I don't use GPS (I don't even own one), asking for information won't kill you (ok, sometimes you should take care to ask the police, or it will).
Anyway, that is interesting that people use more than half a gas tank going into a desert, or that they take their cars out of the road just because a machine told them to. I don't know how interesting, since some people are quite wiling to kill somebody else just because somebody told them to, so, I guess doing stupid things shouldn't qualify for heavy awesomeness. Anyway, it's a machine giving them orders, not some authority.
It made it harder for the US to attack Iran. It also made it quite harder to the US to start any war at the middle east, since it showed that the biggest supporter of Al Qaeda is the exact same country that the US is protecting by making wars at the middle east.
Now, I'd like to know if those current revolutions have anything to do with Wikileaks.
It is called sampling bias. They have nothing to rewrite yet (altough, they may have in the future).
Some strong enough gravity can keep hydrogen from escaping. That seems to happen on the larger gaseous planets. But no rocky planet has a gravity strong enough to keep pure hydrogen (or even helium) inside. We have a lot of it here on Earth just because it isn't pure, most of it is in water.
Dunno, byt the GP wording, it is more like
4. Instantly replaced by a even worse despot who...
5. is snipped away shortly after.
6. ???????
7. Civil war.
Let me bring you another situation...
1 - You invent a device that is great. You can't deal with the strings that come attached with Windows, you also don't thing that it is a serious OS (AKA your reputation will suffer if you ship windows), and it would be too expensive to make your device run Windows anyway. So it runs Linux.
2 - Your device is a success. You improve it a couple of times, with time it becomes quite serious at computing power, while keeping the price. All this time lots of people tell you that they'd buy it, but it doesn't run Windows (some even buy, and return because it doesn't run Windows).
3 - You realise that your product just need a little upgrade (that will make it just a bit more expensive) to run Windows. At the same time, your competitors are starting to anounce products that are just a little more expensive than yours, and run Windows. The press is running wild, covering your competitors, and telling people to not look into your product, since it doesn't run Windows.
4 - Now, do you make that small upgrade, and add Windows products to your portifolio? Or do you risk being displaced by those Windows products? If you choose Windows, soon you'll discover that the strings that come atached to Windows will take away all the lucrativity that comes from selling the non-Windows products you have. Only the Windows based ones will be lucrative.
I don't know how you managed to run Mathlab on it, but try m-a-d-n-e-s-s, that will fix that problem you have, thinking something less than 16GB is enough.
Bad dissipation, maybe.
So, instead of letting people couple with change you want to avoid suffering by giving the market to less able companies, that are less productive, what makes everybody poorer. Exchanging a little bit of suffering on the short term for a huge amount (it compounds with time) of suffering on the long term, that is what people do best.
If they kept it running FreeBSD it would still work, and they would be much more proeminent (ok, untill they started losing data and cancelling the accounts of people that don't check their email on vacations). But they changed to Windows as soon as they bought the company, and lost most of its clients.
Shareholders seem to be very happy with dividends. If they weren't, Microsoft stock would have be already trashed.
Anticompetitive practices killed the Linux netbooks just like they killed the Linux PCs, and by doing that, they doomed the entire netbook market to be filled with pieces of junk, with very little market appeal, since very little innovation is possible when using Windows.
Now we are seeing that innovation migrate to another kind of device, the smartphone. That is making it popular, and it is yet out of the reach of Microsoft. Maybe when devices become more powerfull, the non-Windows ones will start to be unavailable for selling, just like the netbooks, and the specification (followed by the price) of all of them will go up just enough to run Windows. If that happens, expect creative people to launch another class of device, that is just not powerfull enough to run Windows, but that has plenty of interesting uses. Again.
Microsoft is clearly doing that to push H264 on the internet, with the intent of hurting free software, and creating a competitive edge for them. The fact that they'll pay for that doesn't make it less of a finantial incentive.
Also, is that # prompt literal? The guy is root but is failing to run things through sudo?
Calculated by newtonian mechanics, I assume. I dare you calculate it by relativistic mechanics.
You could always redefine the Ampere as a multiple of the elementar charge, and use the current definition of it (the force that appears on two conductors where some current is running) as the definition of a Newton. That is the Watt balance, one of the proposals for replacing the kg, but nobody got the needed precision on its measurements yet.
Whatever path they go, the new standard will define both Plank's and Avogadro's constants. That is because the speed of light is already defined, and the second is defined as something that is a function of both of those constants. So, define something else as a function of those constants, and they'll be defined.
Now, of course, one of the constants will probably be defined as a number, the other one as the result of some calculation that we may, or may not, know the exact value at the future (we don't know now).
Once in a while they do use the cilinder to calibrate a few other cilinders, that they use to calibrate other cilinders, that calibrate things that somebody finaly sells out to labs for calibrating actual equipment.
It would be more like redefine the light speed to an exact value (thus redefining the metre), or redefining the second to something you can measure anywhere. Both were already done, the kg is the only SI unit that can't be created on any lab. It is the only reminiscent of the XIX century, where people first defined such things.
Also, if you take a look at the plan, they'll redefine the kg as the mass of the cilinder measured when somebody creates an aparatus that can be used to define mass. Or, in other words, the difference between the current kg and the one to be defined must be smaller than the current measurement errors.