Further, don't they have runaway lanes in France? We've got them all over the place here
In the US, they only have them in mountainous regions. I'm in the midwest and you'll virtually never see them here. Go to west to the Rockies and they're all over the place...so it doesn't suprise me that none were around.
I'm an Electronics Engineer and I'd never trust a drive-by-wire car. Things go wrong; you have to have some sort of mechanical over-ride for a life-critical system like a car.
I wonder if the electronic transmission has "safety sensors" that won't shift to a lower gear if it might cause engine damage.
Bingo. I bet this is the case...many (most?) modern cars have this...hell even my old Buick Park Ave wouldn't allow a manual downshift if it would redline the engine..it would only go down as far as engine speed allowed and no lower.
And as for cutting ignition and losing power steering and braking, well every car I've ever seen has a vacuum reservoir that will give power assist for a couple stops if the engine stops providing vacuum (stops running). After that, they still work but you do have to push much harder. All cars (in the US at least) have to allow the steering and braking to control the car in the event of an engine stall, albeit with increased effort. While it may make things more difficult, it's still probably your first best chance to come out of the ordeal alive.
Direct ancestor? Not by a long shot. Unless you consider that any multi user, multi tasking, time sharing operating system as a direct ancestor.
errr...I think the submitter means that conceptually, Linux is a descendent of CTSS. This was 1961...you couldn't just download a multi-user, timesharing system off the internet and burn a copy on CD. This was one of the first, and no doubt had an influence on other systems that followed, including UNIX. Obviously the Linux codebase doesn't share anything in common with CTSS. It's a direct descendent in the same way that the PC on your desk is the descendent of the ENIAC.
Re:The ultimate hardware hack
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
If a seemingly "unupgradable" and unassuming iMac can be overclocked, then the cask can be broken.
Your actual point is well taken, but did you seriously just compare the casing of a nuclear reactor that is intended to be placed in a potentially unstable region to the case of an iMac?
it may or may not be tomorrow, it may or may not be related to cyber-terrorism, it may or may not happen at all, and it may or may not be simply an excuse for a security company to get some free publicity.
Well then, it meets all the requirements.....time to raise the national terror alert to ORANGE! w00t!
At that price, and in such small production numbers, I have a feeling that the workmanship is shoddy
I can't speak to the usefulness of this thing, but I do work for a company that sells Cherry gear (point of sale things like...keyboards) and I have never seen a Cherry product I'd describe as shoddy. They may not make the best keyboards ever (that would be AT&T in the late 80s), but based on their other products I doubt the hardware is crap.
Not trying to pimp Cherry gear or anything...just sayin.
Hey now....don't cut down Buicks. I am 27 and moved from an Audi to a Park Avenue Ultra. Except for the fact that the Buick can't handle like the Audi (obviously...the thing's twice the size), I'm extremely happy. I've got a car that's just as nice, just as fast, more comfortable, more room, and will last just as long if not longer (GM's 3800 v6 is a fantastically reliable engine). Plus it was cheaper. There is a lot to be said for the newest stuff coming out of Detroit...the big 3 have wised up a lot over the last couple years and are realizing they cannot compete with imports on quality unless things change. And they are.
At least Comcast does. Evil as some people think they are, you can get a pretty good deal on their services in my area. One line into the house, to a box at the demarc which gives cable TV, broadband internet, and phone jacks. It works great in my house. YMMV of course.
In XP users never know what is going on in the software. Hence virii, trojans, spyware, key loggers, etc. Also licensing issues, dll rot, and huge update downloads. Windows media player ratting you out. DRM.
These are all big issues with users, even more than the speed or 'features' of the desktop.
Depends...if you are talking geeks and sysadmins, I'd say you had a point, but if you're discussing users in general, you're dead wrong. Most users don't give a rat's ass about those things. If they did, Linux would be adopted by home users in throngs and you'd read about DRM backlash in the daily newspaper all the time. In the corporate world, there are lots of legitimate barriers to Linux on the desktop, proprietary application incompatibility probably being the highest, but for home users there are no such barriers. Most software a casual user would want is there now. Despite your list of benefits, 90% of the world is still using Windows. Why? Because Linux does not work as well as Windows for the casual user, because it's unfamiliar, and sluggish without extensive tweaking. Clearly they DO care about those things.
And the excuse that hardware will catch up is the same kind of excuse that got the computing world into it's current state in the first place. I don't WANT to buy a new computer every 6 months, and neither does your average user. This must all change before we see mass adoption of Linux on the desktop.
I wonder... did s/he compile the lastest custom kernel for their hardware? Did they tune ATA I/O performance with hdparm? Did he disable non-essential daemons running in the background? I doubt it.
True, but then again they didn't do it for Windows either. Regular users don't care to dig that deeply into their system, they expect it will simply work. If it doesn't work at least as well as Windows out-of-the-box, well then there is another Windows user.
Well, here at work, we have a handful of Dell desktop machines and we were also the first on our block to get the dual 2Ghz G5. I can tell you for certain that the Mac is WAY quieter than these particular Dells (YMMV of course).
It's not so much that the Mac is amazingly quiet for having 9 fans, it's amazingly quiet for having any fans. They could definitely get away with 2 fans, but they'd have to run faster so they'd be louder.
The liquid cooling thing is all part of it...you know the kind of fans you're typically running on a new Intel/AMD chip? Well if you liquid cooled them like this Mac, you could probably get away with a much quieter setup. Again, I'm sure they could air-cool them, but they'd be loud like your typical PC.
No, he didn't, nor should he have, known the seeds contained a patented gene. What he did know was that those plants resisted the herbicide he was using to kill weeds. You make it sound like the Monsanto seeds are bright purple or the plants grow with Monsanto's logo on them or something. He simply used the seeds from the part of the crop that shows herbicide resistance during the previous season. There was no way for him to know they had patented genes in them.
At least, that's his story. I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't know what the courts could have found that would prove it false....it seems like a perfectly reasonable explaination to me. My first thought when I see an interesting plant isn't, "oh, lookie here...this is neat...must be some kind of patented genes in there..."
Besides, you forget the fact that during this ruling, they decided he didn't use their resistance to his competitive advantage (hence the $0 damages), so why would he have knowingly planted them if he wasn't going to take advantage of the thing that makes them worth planting?
Complain all you want, but that is exactly the kind of thing that a company like the one I work for needs to seriously consider a switch to a Linux desktop. On the one hand, FOSS zealots somehow see the logic in handing out CDs with free software to get Win users "used to" free software to make the switch easier...but somehow if you're trying to make the switch easier by making the FOSS more like what they're already used to, then it's a terrible idea.
News flash: MS Office isn't free but right now it's beating the crap out of OpenOffice. OOo is good, but the cold hard truth is that MS Office is still better in many ways...maybe (hopefully!) not forever, but simply because somebody might be making a living off a quality product does not automatically make it inferior.
On the other hand, it opens up the possibilites of adoption in organizations where compatibility is necessary. Like almost every business in existence.
I'd love for our company to switch to a Linux desktop...I feel the OS itself if there. The problem is applications..."sort of compatible" isn't good enough when you have to deal with customers who are prefectly happy using Excel.
Congratulations! You've just reinvented the core of LTSP!
Seriously, there is no voodoo in LTSP..it works much like you've described...boot via ROM or floppy, download minimal OS into ram via network, connect to remote X server. The thing that makes LTSP worthwhile as a project is putting together the pieces to make this happen (think multiple client configs...even with a thin client you've got differing hardware setups), along with some other things like remoting sound and parallel ports and such.
Novell sounds like they are going to put some cohesive, enterprise-class management tools and packaging behind it. Which it could really use to make it more attractive to businesses who might consider such a solution.
True fans of science fiction, who see the futures portrayed therein as possibilities waiting to be unlocked rather than foolhardy dreams, are our pilgrims into the future.
True, those people definitely exist, however most hardcore sci-fi fans aren't inspired visionaries....they're just plain old dorks.;-)
seriously, Power Macs *are* real quiet
on
A Silent PC Solution?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Our company was the first one on our block to get one of the 2ghz dual G5 Power Macs and it is BY FAR the quietest fan-cooled machine I've ever seen. You can barely hear the hard drive spin up, but other than that, it's virtually dead-silent.
It's not ideal if you need wintel, but they're real quiet out of the box, and they're dead sexy.
You are mistaken. First, the c64 was plenty capable of 2400 baud. I still have mine, along with my Aprotek 2400 baud mini-modem. It always worked fine on my c64 (the really old brown one even)...what an upgrade from 300 (remember the old Commodore 300 baud that could do 600 baud if it was talking to another Commodore modem? wow!)
Also, the reason there wasn't a "real UART" is because UARTs are for serial communication, and the user port on a c64 was a parallel interface. The CIA (called a u2 IIRC?) handled it, and it worked very fine, thanks. Also while I'm already off topic, it should be noted that the PCs of the period (and I presume other machines) that actually had "real UARTs" used NMIs to read data as well, the same way the 64 did. The buffer was just 1 byte, and if the processor didn't pick it up before the next one arrived, it was lost, just like the 64.
When you get the source code for FREE, the author can disclaim responsibility because anybody in the world can audit/modify it etc. When you pay money for software from a proprietary vendor, you can't take that responsibility on youself. If it's closed, it's not unreasonable to expect said vendor to shoulder the burden. That's the value (or at least should be) of propritary software over open source. On one hand, you can get complete transparency and control in exchange for a much manpower as you are comfortable expending (OSS) and OTOH you have to pay cash but you get a product whose security is the responsibility of somebody else that you shouldn't need to worry about (proprietary). In an ideal world, of course.
I thought that plant next to the turkey-processing place was supposed to be running by now..has anybody heard any follow up on that? You'd think it would be bigger news if it was operating as well as they said it would...
Slashdot Mirror
Further, don't they have runaway lanes in France? We've got them all over the place here
In the US, they only have them in mountainous regions. I'm in the midwest and you'll virtually never see them here. Go to west to the Rockies and they're all over the place...so it doesn't suprise me that none were around.
I'm an Electronics Engineer and I'd never trust a drive-by-wire car. Things go wrong; you have to have some sort of mechanical over-ride for a life-critical system like a car.
Damn right.
I wonder if the electronic transmission has "safety sensors" that won't shift to a lower gear if it might cause engine damage.
Bingo. I bet this is the case...many (most?) modern cars have this...hell even my old Buick Park Ave wouldn't allow a manual downshift if it would redline the engine..it would only go down as far as engine speed allowed and no lower.
And as for cutting ignition and losing power steering and braking, well every car I've ever seen has a vacuum reservoir that will give power assist for a couple stops if the engine stops providing vacuum (stops running). After that, they still work but you do have to push much harder. All cars (in the US at least) have to allow the steering and braking to control the car in the event of an engine stall, albeit with increased effort. While it may make things more difficult, it's still probably your first best chance to come out of the ordeal alive.
Direct ancestor? Not by a long shot. Unless you consider that any multi user, multi tasking, time sharing operating system as a direct ancestor.
errr...I think the submitter means that conceptually, Linux is a descendent of CTSS. This was 1961...you couldn't just download a multi-user, timesharing system off the internet and burn a copy on CD. This was one of the first, and no doubt had an influence on other systems that followed, including UNIX. Obviously the Linux codebase doesn't share anything in common with CTSS. It's a direct descendent in the same way that the PC on your desk is the descendent of the ENIAC.
If a seemingly "unupgradable" and unassuming iMac can be overclocked, then the cask can be broken.
Your actual point is well taken, but did you seriously just compare the casing of a nuclear reactor that is intended to be placed in a potentially unstable region to the case of an iMac?
(heh I know...just messin with ya)
Seriously though?
it may or may not be tomorrow, it may or may not be related to cyber-terrorism, it may or may not happen at all, and it may or may not be simply an excuse for a security company to get some free publicity.
Well then, it meets all the requirements.....time to raise the national terror alert to ORANGE! w00t!
At that price, and in such small production numbers, I have a feeling that the workmanship is shoddy
I can't speak to the usefulness of this thing, but I do work for a company that sells Cherry gear (point of sale things like...keyboards) and I have never seen a Cherry product I'd describe as shoddy. They may not make the best keyboards ever (that would be AT&T in the late 80s), but based on their other products I doubt the hardware is crap.
Not trying to pimp Cherry gear or anything...just sayin.
Hey now....don't cut down Buicks. I am 27 and moved from an Audi to a Park Avenue Ultra. Except for the fact that the Buick can't handle like the Audi (obviously...the thing's twice the size), I'm extremely happy. I've got a car that's just as nice, just as fast, more comfortable, more room, and will last just as long if not longer (GM's 3800 v6 is a fantastically reliable engine). Plus it was cheaper. There is a lot to be said for the newest stuff coming out of Detroit...the big 3 have wised up a lot over the last couple years and are realizing they cannot compete with imports on quality unless things change. And they are.
At least Comcast does. Evil as some people think they are, you can get a pretty good deal on their services in my area. One line into the house, to a box at the demarc which gives cable TV, broadband internet, and phone jacks. It works great in my house. YMMV of course.
In XP users never know what is going on in the software. Hence virii, trojans, spyware, key loggers, etc. Also licensing issues, dll rot, and huge update downloads. Windows media player ratting you out. DRM. These are all big issues with users, even more than the speed or 'features' of the desktop.
Depends...if you are talking geeks and sysadmins, I'd say you had a point, but if you're discussing users in general, you're dead wrong. Most users don't give a rat's ass about those things. If they did, Linux would be adopted by home users in throngs and you'd read about DRM backlash in the daily newspaper all the time. In the corporate world, there are lots of legitimate barriers to Linux on the desktop, proprietary application incompatibility probably being the highest, but for home users there are no such barriers. Most software a casual user would want is there now. Despite your list of benefits, 90% of the world is still using Windows. Why? Because Linux does not work as well as Windows for the casual user, because it's unfamiliar, and sluggish without extensive tweaking. Clearly they DO care about those things.
And the excuse that hardware will catch up is the same kind of excuse that got the computing world into it's current state in the first place. I don't WANT to buy a new computer every 6 months, and neither does your average user. This must all change before we see mass adoption of Linux on the desktop.
I wonder... did s/he compile the lastest custom kernel for their hardware? Did they tune ATA I/O performance with hdparm? Did he disable non-essential daemons running in the background? I doubt it.
True, but then again they didn't do it for Windows either. Regular users don't care to dig that deeply into their system, they expect it will simply work. If it doesn't work at least as well as Windows out-of-the-box, well then there is another Windows user.
Well, here at work, we have a handful of Dell desktop machines and we were also the first on our block to get the dual 2Ghz G5. I can tell you for certain that the Mac is WAY quieter than these particular Dells (YMMV of course).
It's not so much that the Mac is amazingly quiet for having 9 fans, it's amazingly quiet for having any fans. They could definitely get away with 2 fans, but they'd have to run faster so they'd be louder.
The liquid cooling thing is all part of it...you know the kind of fans you're typically running on a new Intel/AMD chip? Well if you liquid cooled them like this Mac, you could probably get away with a much quieter setup. Again, I'm sure they could air-cool them, but they'd be loud like your typical PC.
No, he didn't, nor should he have, known the seeds contained a patented gene. What he did know was that those plants resisted the herbicide he was using to kill weeds. You make it sound like the Monsanto seeds are bright purple or the plants grow with Monsanto's logo on them or something. He simply used the seeds from the part of the crop that shows herbicide resistance during the previous season. There was no way for him to know they had patented genes in them.
At least, that's his story. I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't know what the courts could have found that would prove it false....it seems like a perfectly reasonable explaination to me. My first thought when I see an interesting plant isn't, "oh, lookie here...this is neat...must be some kind of patented genes in there..."
Besides, you forget the fact that during this ruling, they decided he didn't use their resistance to his competitive advantage (hence the $0 damages), so why would he have knowingly planted them if he wasn't going to take advantage of the thing that makes them worth planting?
Complain all you want, but that is exactly the kind of thing that a company like the one I work for needs to seriously consider a switch to a Linux desktop. On the one hand, FOSS zealots somehow see the logic in handing out CDs with free software to get Win users "used to" free software to make the switch easier...but somehow if you're trying to make the switch easier by making the FOSS more like what they're already used to, then it's a terrible idea.
I just don't get it.
News flash: MS Office isn't free but right now it's beating the crap out of OpenOffice. OOo is good, but the cold hard truth is that MS Office is still better in many ways...maybe (hopefully!) not forever, but simply because somebody might be making a living off a quality product does not automatically make it inferior.
On the other hand, it opens up the possibilites of adoption in organizations where compatibility is necessary. Like almost every business in existence.
I'd love for our company to switch to a Linux desktop...I feel the OS itself if there. The problem is applications..."sort of compatible" isn't good enough when you have to deal with customers who are prefectly happy using Excel.
It may not be preferable, but it's necessary.
I know the intent was good, but somewhere in hell, Rube Goldberg is giggling ;-)
Congratulations! You've just reinvented the core of LTSP!
Seriously, there is no voodoo in LTSP..it works much like you've described...boot via ROM or floppy, download minimal OS into ram via network, connect to remote X server. The thing that makes LTSP worthwhile as a project is putting together the pieces to make this happen (think multiple client configs...even with a thin client you've got differing hardware setups), along with some other things like remoting sound and parallel ports and such.
Novell sounds like they are going to put some cohesive, enterprise-class management tools and packaging behind it. Which it could really use to make it more attractive to businesses who might consider such a solution.
True fans of science fiction, who see the futures portrayed therein as possibilities waiting to be unlocked rather than foolhardy dreams, are our pilgrims into the future.
;-)
True, those people definitely exist, however most hardcore sci-fi fans aren't inspired visionaries....they're just plain old dorks.
Our company was the first one on our block to get one of the 2ghz dual G5 Power Macs and it is BY FAR the quietest fan-cooled machine I've ever seen. You can barely hear the hard drive spin up, but other than that, it's virtually dead-silent. It's not ideal if you need wintel, but they're real quiet out of the box, and they're dead sexy.
So you're the clown that almost hit me!
Man, I almost dropped my cell phone I was scared so bad!
You are mistaken. First, the c64 was plenty capable of 2400 baud. I still have mine, along with my Aprotek 2400 baud mini-modem. It always worked fine on my c64 (the really old brown one even)...what an upgrade from 300 (remember the old Commodore 300 baud that could do 600 baud if it was talking to another Commodore modem? wow!)
Also, the reason there wasn't a "real UART" is because UARTs are for serial communication, and the user port on a c64 was a parallel interface. The CIA (called a u2 IIRC?) handled it, and it worked very fine, thanks. Also while I'm already off topic, it should be noted that the PCs of the period (and I presume other machines) that actually had "real UARTs" used NMIs to read data as well, the same way the 64 did. The buffer was just 1 byte, and if the processor didn't pick it up before the next one arrived, it was lost, just like the 64.
When you get the source code for FREE, the author can disclaim responsibility because anybody in the world can audit/modify it etc. When you pay money for software from a proprietary vendor, you can't take that responsibility on youself. If it's closed, it's not unreasonable to expect said vendor to shoulder the burden. That's the value (or at least should be) of propritary software over open source. On one hand, you can get complete transparency and control in exchange for a much manpower as you are comfortable expending (OSS) and OTOH you have to pay cash but you get a product whose security is the responsibility of somebody else that you shouldn't need to worry about (proprietary). In an ideal world, of course.
yeah yeah....brain fart...then biffing the submit button instead of the preview button on top of it...and to think they pay me to be a webmaster!
yikes!
<Oh my god! They killed google!<
Yeah it was the thermal depolymerization (TDP) process...supposedly perfected by some company called Changing World Technologies...
I thought that plant next to the turkey-processing place was supposed to be running by now..has anybody heard any follow up on that? You'd think it would be bigger news if it was operating as well as they said it would...