I haven't looked back. I pretty much follow Google's model for my primary desktops (home and work) -- I stick with the LTS releases, and transition several months after the new LTS comes out. In the interim, I load up the non-LTS releases in VMs or on secondary machines to try them out and get a feel for what's coming in the next LTS release.
Have to say, I'm not a Unity fan so far. I've been using GNOME up until now, but will likely transition to KDE when I upgrade to 12.04. KDE does seem to be a resource pig, but hey RAM is cheap these days, all my desktops have at least 8GB.
Does anyone know what this alleged show-stopper (for Google) Python 2.7 compatibility issue is?
My home data center consists of three old PCs (two servers and a router, all running Ubuntu Server), a couple of gigabit switches, and a pair of UPSes, stacked in a corner of my crawlspace.
Yes, lack of accountability is a big part of the problem. Top executives' rewards are not tied closely enough to long-term performance, and they are rarely punished when they screw up.
Black-Scholes is sound in a statistical/mathematical sense. Unfortunately it makes implicit assumptions about how the market operates that simply aren't true, so it was bound to fail. Financial engineers -- and I use the word "engineers" loosely here! -- accepted the assumptions as gospel because their jobs/bonuses depended on it.
I used to work in that industry. It will be a cold day in Hell before I go back.
The only way to prevent another train wreck is to remove the incentives for "too big to fail" banks to take unreasonable risks with other peoples' money, based on the assumption that the government will bail them out if things go badly.
You didn't even notice that the subject line says "femal", huh?
While I agree that proper grammar and spelling are something we should strive for, in a web discussion forum "it's the thought that counts". Isn't that the purpose of language -- to convey our thoughts?
Dismissing someone who may have a worthwhile contribution to the discussion just because they misplaced an apostrophe (or misspelled a word) smacks of elitism. If we measure someone's value by the amount of useful information contributed to the discussion, you're more of a "fuckwit"... by at least an order of magnitude.
...women are more selective than men regarding who to include in their social circle. I could've predicted this from real-world interactions. Women tend to form close-knit cliques. Men will hang with anyone who will get shitfaced drunk with them and commiserate about their problems with women, work, money, etc.
Along with brands like Pioneer back in the '70s and '80s, they helped make decent hi-fi gear affordable. With the Walkman they launched the entire portable audio market, and they co-invented the CD. Their Trinitron TVs and monitors were well-respected, and they were a major player in developing the portable camcorder market as well.
Then in 1987 they acquired CBS Records, and in 1989 they acquired Columbia Pictures; this started them down the road to becoming a "content" company. It's been all downhill ever since. Quality of their hardware declined sharply; the last piece of Sony electronics I bought was a Digital-8 camcorder around 7 years ago, and it sucked. Debacles like the CD rootkit incident, the controversial change in stance over 3rd party code on the PS3, and the PSN security breach have now become the norm.
In my lifetime the Sony brand has transformed itself from something I actively sought out, to something akin to a warning label. It's a damn shame; I now go out of my way to avoid their products.
Probably more like he paid $20 for it at Best Buy. The cheap ones from Monoprice beat pretty much anything else I've seen quality-wise, including the ones B&M retailers sell for 10x the price.
How do we know that what brewers have traditionally referred to as "flocculation" isn't a superset of this effect? The end result (yeast that settles out faster) is the same regardless of whether the cells tend to clump after floating free for a while, or stay stuck together after budding. Unless brewers have been specifically testing individual clusters of settled yeast cells to see whether they are genetically identical, there would be little or no discernible difference.
I brew (and judge) beer... different strains of brewers yeast already have widely varying behaviors with regards to how they settle out. Yeast with "low flocculation" tend to remain in suspension for weeks, consuming more of the sugars (drier, more alcoholic beer); yeast with "high flocculation" tend to clump together and settle after a few days, leaving more residual sugar (sweeter/heavier beer). This is widely known already in the brewing community. These strains have evolved over the years to suit the preferences and procedures of individual breweries. So all these guys have really done is to repeat in a controlled environment the same selective breeding that brewers have been doing (whether they understood it or not) for centuries.
Take a look here; if you click through to each individual strain of yeast, you'll see that there's a spec for flocculation (tendency to clump) and attenuation (tendency to consume sugars); there's a pretty good (though not perfect) inverse correlation between the two.
The only thing really novel here is the claim that these yeast clumps somehow represent a first step towards multi-cellular life. Interesting, but -- while I'm not dismissing it out-of-hand -- I'm definitely taking it with a pinch of salt.
Not if you want it to be productive enough to be even close to economically viable. The high levels of production achieved by modern breeds of corn are highly dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and in the quantities we're talking about here you'd never be able to harvest it all by hand unless you had an army of slaves on the order of the one that built the pyramids in Egypt.
Even now, the only reason it is profitable for farmers to grow corn for ethanol is the massive government subsidies (which, in case you hadn't noticed, is the point of the article we're commenting on).
Right. But with oil, it has already been produced for us by natural processes, over the eons. So on human timescales it is a huge net win from a thermodynamic standpoint... until it runs out.
Problem with corn-based ethanol is, once you factor in all the chemical fertilizers and the energy required to grow the corn, harvest it, and refine it into ethanol, you've consumed about as much fossil fuel as you're saving by burning the ethanol. So in reality t's just a convoluted way of burning the same oil you would've burned if you'd used normal gasoline to begin with.
If we could produce it from sugarcane instead (the way Brazil does), the story would be different. Unfortunately, unlike Brazil we don't have a lot of land that is suitable for cultivation of sugarcane. (And in Brazil's case, converting large amounts of land to sugarcane production isn't entirely benign either, but that's another story.)
You said "neither compact fluorescent nor LED bulbs can stand those environments". Clearly implying that both technologies are unsuitable for both environments.
LED will be great for this sort of application once the cost comes down more. They're already getting down to price levels CFLs were at about a decade ago, so we'll get there eventually.
You can't transmit power over long distances at end-user voltage; the resistive losses make it impractical. A century ago there was no efficient way to step DC voltages up/down for long-distance transmission; AC made it possible to use simple and inexpensive electromagnetic transformers for this.
Even today, if we supplied DC to individual homes it would still need to be at a voltage too high for most electronics (that pesky resistive loss issue again), so you'd still need converters. Yes, they would be DC-DC instead of AC-DC, but this would only make them marginally more efficient.
Agreed. The negative publicity is the main thing, since the publicity will get more people to think about transferring their domains. That's why it is a big deal.
They're losing future revenue (due to current customers moving domains) and future customers (due to bad publicity). Presumably some of those moved domains were up for renewal in the very near future (possibly even within the next few days); so they are losing the revenue from the automatic (by default) credit card charges for the domain renewals.
Slashdot Mirror
If that was true, why would they post negative stories like this one? You fail at logic.
I haven't looked back. I pretty much follow Google's model for my primary desktops (home and work) -- I stick with the LTS releases, and transition several months after the new LTS comes out. In the interim, I load up the non-LTS releases in VMs or on secondary machines to try them out and get a feel for what's coming in the next LTS release.
Have to say, I'm not a Unity fan so far. I've been using GNOME up until now, but will likely transition to KDE when I upgrade to 12.04. KDE does seem to be a resource pig, but hey RAM is cheap these days, all my desktops have at least 8GB.
Does anyone know what this alleged show-stopper (for Google) Python 2.7 compatibility issue is?
My home data center consists of three old PCs (two servers and a router, all running Ubuntu Server), a couple of gigabit switches, and a pair of UPSes, stacked in a corner of my crawlspace.
Yes, lack of accountability is a big part of the problem. Top executives' rewards are not tied closely enough to long-term performance, and they are rarely punished when they screw up.
Black-Scholes is sound in a statistical/mathematical sense. Unfortunately it makes implicit assumptions about how the market operates that simply aren't true, so it was bound to fail. Financial engineers -- and I use the word "engineers" loosely here! -- accepted the assumptions as gospel because their jobs/bonuses depended on it.
I used to work in that industry. It will be a cold day in Hell before I go back.
The only way to prevent another train wreck is to remove the incentives for "too big to fail" banks to take unreasonable risks with other peoples' money, based on the assumption that the government will bail them out if things go badly.
I think the threshold for achieving that level of trust is probably lower for men. ;-)
...and never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. You'll get through life with a lot less conflict that way.
You didn't even notice that the subject line says "femal", huh?
While I agree that proper grammar and spelling are something we should strive for, in a web discussion forum "it's the thought that counts". Isn't that the purpose of language -- to convey our thoughts?
Dismissing someone who may have a worthwhile contribution to the discussion just because they misplaced an apostrophe (or misspelled a word) smacks of elitism. If we measure someone's value by the amount of useful information contributed to the discussion, you're more of a "fuckwit"... by at least an order of magnitude.
...women are more selective than men regarding who to include in their social circle. I could've predicted this from real-world interactions. Women tend to form close-knit cliques. Men will hang with anyone who will get shitfaced drunk with them and commiserate about their problems with women, work, money, etc.
Along with brands like Pioneer back in the '70s and '80s, they helped make decent hi-fi gear affordable. With the Walkman they launched the entire portable audio market, and they co-invented the CD. Their Trinitron TVs and monitors were well-respected, and they were a major player in developing the portable camcorder market as well.
Then in 1987 they acquired CBS Records, and in 1989 they acquired Columbia Pictures; this started them down the road to becoming a "content" company. It's been all downhill ever since. Quality of their hardware declined sharply; the last piece of Sony electronics I bought was a Digital-8 camcorder around 7 years ago, and it sucked. Debacles like the CD rootkit incident, the controversial change in stance over 3rd party code on the PS3, and the PSN security breach have now become the norm.
In my lifetime the Sony brand has transformed itself from something I actively sought out, to something akin to a warning label. It's a damn shame; I now go out of my way to avoid their products.
RIP Sony, you are dead to me.
Probably more like he paid $20 for it at Best Buy. The cheap ones from Monoprice beat pretty much anything else I've seen quality-wise, including the ones B&M retailers sell for 10x the price.
Newegg currently lists 77 different video cards with DisplayPort connectors on them.
How do we know that what brewers have traditionally referred to as "flocculation" isn't a superset of this effect? The end result (yeast that settles out faster) is the same regardless of whether the cells tend to clump after floating free for a while, or stay stuck together after budding. Unless brewers have been specifically testing individual clusters of settled yeast cells to see whether they are genetically identical, there would be little or no discernible difference.
I brew (and judge) beer... different strains of brewers yeast already have widely varying behaviors with regards to how they settle out. Yeast with "low flocculation" tend to remain in suspension for weeks, consuming more of the sugars (drier, more alcoholic beer); yeast with "high flocculation" tend to clump together and settle after a few days, leaving more residual sugar (sweeter/heavier beer). This is widely known already in the brewing community. These strains have evolved over the years to suit the preferences and procedures of individual breweries. So all these guys have really done is to repeat in a controlled environment the same selective breeding that brewers have been doing (whether they understood it or not) for centuries.
Take a look here; if you click through to each individual strain of yeast, you'll see that there's a spec for flocculation (tendency to clump) and attenuation (tendency to consume sugars); there's a pretty good (though not perfect) inverse correlation between the two.
The only thing really novel here is the claim that these yeast clumps somehow represent a first step towards multi-cellular life. Interesting, but -- while I'm not dismissing it out-of-hand -- I'm definitely taking it with a pinch of salt.
Not if you want it to be productive enough to be even close to economically viable. The high levels of production achieved by modern breeds of corn are highly dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and in the quantities we're talking about here you'd never be able to harvest it all by hand unless you had an army of slaves on the order of the one that built the pyramids in Egypt.
Even now, the only reason it is profitable for farmers to grow corn for ethanol is the massive government subsidies (which, in case you hadn't noticed, is the point of the article we're commenting on).
Right. But with oil, it has already been produced for us by natural processes, over the eons. So on human timescales it is a huge net win from a thermodynamic standpoint... until it runs out.
Problem with corn-based ethanol is, once you factor in all the chemical fertilizers and the energy required to grow the corn, harvest it, and refine it into ethanol, you've consumed about as much fossil fuel as you're saving by burning the ethanol. So in reality t's just a convoluted way of burning the same oil you would've burned if you'd used normal gasoline to begin with.
If we could produce it from sugarcane instead (the way Brazil does), the story would be different. Unfortunately, unlike Brazil we don't have a lot of land that is suitable for cultivation of sugarcane. (And in Brazil's case, converting large amounts of land to sugarcane production isn't entirely benign either, but that's another story.)
Please read the whole sub-thread, genius. I actually agree with you.
Because if they are only used "for a short period, infrequently" you will probably be dead before you see the payback in energy savings.
You said "neither compact fluorescent nor LED bulbs can stand those environments". Clearly implying that both technologies are unsuitable for both environments.
In my experience, they do last longer than incandescent. But they don't last anywhere near as long as claimed on the packaging.
Why would LEDs not work inside a fridge?
LED will be great for this sort of application once the cost comes down more. They're already getting down to price levels CFLs were at about a decade ago, so we'll get there eventually.
You can't transmit power over long distances at end-user voltage; the resistive losses make it impractical. A century ago there was no efficient way to step DC voltages up/down for long-distance transmission; AC made it possible to use simple and inexpensive electromagnetic transformers for this.
Even today, if we supplied DC to individual homes it would still need to be at a voltage too high for most electronics (that pesky resistive loss issue again), so you'd still need converters. Yes, they would be DC-DC instead of AC-DC, but this would only make them marginally more efficient.
Agreed. The negative publicity is the main thing, since the publicity will get more people to think about transferring their domains. That's why it is a big deal.
They're losing future revenue (due to current customers moving domains) and future customers (due to bad publicity). Presumably some of those moved domains were up for renewal in the very near future (possibly even within the next few days); so they are losing the revenue from the automatic (by default) credit card charges for the domain renewals.