Why bother? I have an HDD mounted as/, and an SSD mounted as/usr on my Gentoo system. Using atop I consistently see the HDD receive 10-20 times the writes the SSD receives but only about 2x the reads. In other words, on Linux the SSD is already serving primarily as a read-only caching filesystem just by mounting it correctly.
I was reminded of this implementation blindness the other day watching an old Outer Limits episode (can't remember the exact one) from the early 1960's. Because the show was set in the future about 50 years (ie, now), the episode showed advanced technology. For example, video phones about the size of a PC, with the monitor showing the person on the other end of the line (in B&W, of course). The 'keyboard' area was where the dialing device was. You know, put your finger in the hole, turn the dial, let it go, put your finger in another hole, turn,...
Same here. It's actually fun in mutt to see the clever ways the malware authors try to fake out the Window users of the world with encrypted javascript and other nonsense.
I'm not the OP, and I do have a prepaid phone, but can't say I use it much either. I suppose if I had to call for help I might turn it on, but mostly in case of car or bike trouble I fix it myself and go on, much like I did years ago. Ain't no bus service up here in Podunk; ain't ever been no pay phones either.
This. I always buy three identical hard drives and two enclosures. Partition them the same way. Make them all bootable. One stays off-site, the other is plugged in regularly, rsync'd and then unplugged. The drives are rotated every few weeks. It's easy enough to occasionally boot from the backups to verify they work.
Important stuff is kept in a VCS repository and pushed regularly to a server which is also kept off-site. This server also gets the 3-disk backup treatment.
In the U.S., one party wants more of this Big Government. The other wants more of Big Corp. Both want you to slave away ('sprint' in Agile terms) for Big Labor or Big Corp. Neither is interested in Independent You, because there's no money or power in that for them.
I had a great laugh the first time my 10-year-old niece tried to make a phone call using the old rotary phone in my Mom's house (which still works by the way). She kept trying to push the indented 'buttons' instead of leaving her finger inside the hole, rotating the dial to the right, and then releasing it, waiting for it to stop moving,before repeating the procedure with the next phone digit.When I explained the process to her, she got frustrated and impatient and used her Mom's cell instead.
What's wrong with the youth of today? They just don't get it.
On a related note, I just finished watching an old Outer Limits episode--filmed in 1963 with a storyline set in 2030--where the occupants of the futuristic house were chatting over a LIVE VIDEOPHONE (now that's futuristic!), the size of an IBM XT, with the exact same rotary dial as the user interface.
I'm not so sure it's a generational thing. IMO it's more of a personality thing.
Do you push that unlabeled BIG RED BUTTON to see what it does? Or do you leave it the h*ll alone because you don't know what it might do?
I'm an older generation now, but I still PUSH. Always have:-)
The '+' is a stupid UI design, but I'd figure it out eventually because I PUSH. A lot of people of all ages wouldn't because they don't push. This UI discriminates against the latter, and that's stupid.
My favorite are the designers who like to implement the PUSH and HOLD FOR 3 SECONDS power button, and don't spell it out somewhere. I'm a PUSH-er, not a HOLD-er. Arrgh.
I have to agree, and Linux has been my desktop OS since the mid '90s.
I've had my mom (in her 70's) running Linux for over a decade. Ubuntu for the last 5 years. It's cut down my IT support calls by 90%. But she's not a Linux user, she's a Firefox/Thunderbird user. And she knows how to respond to the upgrade alert, typing in that admin password every time. I dread the day Linux becomes popular enough to start targeting.
Those were my thoughts exactly. And equally applicable to other technologies as well. Every time I heard the folks on TV wondering whether or not there was water in the spent fuel pools, I kept wondering why they didn't just talk to the RC helicopter folks, who've been mounting HD cameras on their (relatively) inexpensive gyro-stabilized 'copters for years. Fly one in and have a look.
What drove me to Linux back in the late '90s was the increasingly expensive software development environment. They killed off all the inexpensive $10-$99 C/C++ compiler vendors, then ratcheted up the cost of Visual Studio to the point where hobbyists, individual programmers, et al, couldn't afford it. Not to mention the outrageous MSDN subscription fees. When it became obvious that only corporate developers were welcome to code for Windows, I ditched it and haven't looked back.
They should build nuke plants on steep cliffs near the ocean in fault zones. Then when they go, the whole reactor will be dumped into the sea. No need to pump sea water then.
Get real. When there's only so much money, what will be cut: music, or sports? Around here, High School football is shown on local TV on Friday nights. The national-award winning choir? Never. Besides, teaching the Math class is a great job for the High School football coach. You cover a hard-to-fill vacancy, and get to pretend he's actually there for something besides creating a league-winning football team.
Same here. My Mom (now 70 as well) has been running Linux for over 10 years. Ubuntu LTS is my OS of choice for her now. The long-term-support version is the best choice IMO for the casual/clueless user, because it gets frequent security updates but only minor GUI changes over a long period of time. The less change, the better, as even minor icon changes cause major confusion. And all of my previous struggles with anti-virus software, bot-mail and the like on her system disappeared long ago. Support calls now: almost nil.
Being the anti-social Linux-loving Slashdot geek I am, I naturally run Gentoo and haven been enjoying my KDE3 to KDE4 lets-change-everything experience. Which is also why 'Just use Linux(TM)' is the wrong answer...
The problem with your fictional example is that women will never dictate when men go to war. Men go to war because men go to war. It's in their nature. There's about a 25% male mortality rate from warfare in Europe over the past 10 decades up until the end of WWII. That's equivalent to the male mortality rate in more primitive human cultures (now mostly gone), also from warfare. Google it.
Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz stated men have four outlets: sport, hunting, sexual conquest and war. Relatively few men need to hunt now. It would take a female:male ratio of 10:1 or so to keep men so tired out from sex that they stopped playing football or fighting each other. (Yeah I made that number up.) Football gets boring after a while. Hence, war.
The only reason there hasn't been as much male slaughter recently is the A-Bomb. Give it the Nobel Peace Prize. Then again, maybe all it's done is put a cork on pent-up demand. Pakistan, India, Iran, Israel, or somewhere else, sooner or later I predict a big BOOM. Why? I have faith in human nature.
If legions of ursine female warriors fight the 'just' wars, men will just evolve football into Rollerball. Won't change a thing, other than fewer women will be caught in the crossfire.
Exactly R2.0. I suspect a *lot* of folks share my opinion. Teachers are not laid off. Schools aren't closed for two years. What happens is that local school districts return to local control, the educate to the 'fill-in-the-right-bubble on the federal test so we can get funds' teaching approach goes away, and we use the money saved eliminating a huge needless federal bureaucracy to pay for school reform and keeping libraries open.
In my opinion, that reform includes not using the schools as daycare centers for parents, breaking big warehouse schools up into many smaller charter ones that are more integrated into the daily life of the local community, and giving the kids expanded opportunities for learning outside of rote memorization from textbooks, for starters. None of these big idea changes come from Washington; they begin, are refined, and implemented at the local level.
You are soooo right. No amount of longer days, longer hours, different teachers, whatever, is going to change the reality that the system is fundamentally broken. The first step in fixing the education system is to abolish the federal Department of Education and rethink the whole system from a more local point of view.
There are two aspects to software: design, and code. The first part is done with UML diagrams, flowcharts, architecture docs, whatever, and lots and lots of thought. The second part consists of expressing that design in whatever programming language seems appropriate. That second part is monkey work because it is basically just pounding away at a keyboard like the infamous monkeys creating the Encyclopedia Britannica (maybe Wikipedia?) A computer can--and occasionally does--do it. No computer can yet do the first part.
To be sure, real monkeys are quite smart, and probably take offensive at this crude characterization...
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Why bother? I have an HDD mounted as /, and an SSD mounted as /usr on my Gentoo system. Using atop I consistently see the HDD receive 10-20 times the writes the SSD receives but only about 2x the reads. In other words, on Linux the SSD is already serving primarily as a read-only caching filesystem just by mounting it correctly.
Bob Johnson here. John, is that you?
Great. Goldfish and Newts. Pretty soon everyone will have flown in space except me.
I was reminded of this implementation blindness the other day watching an old Outer Limits episode (can't remember the exact one) from the early 1960's. Because the show was set in the future about 50 years (ie, now), the episode showed advanced technology. For example, video phones about the size of a PC, with the monitor showing the person on the other end of the line (in B&W, of course). The 'keyboard' area was where the dialing device was. You know, put your finger in the hole, turn the dial, let it go, put your finger in another hole, turn, ...
Same here. It's actually fun in mutt to see the clever ways the malware authors try to fake out the Window users of the world with encrypted javascript and other nonsense.
Totally agree.
I'm not the OP, and I do have a prepaid phone, but can't say I use it much either. I suppose if I had to call for help I might turn it on, but mostly in case of car or bike trouble I fix it myself and go on, much like I did years ago. Ain't no bus service up here in Podunk; ain't ever been no pay phones either.
This. I always buy three identical hard drives and two enclosures. Partition them the same way. Make them all bootable. One stays off-site, the other is plugged in regularly, rsync'd and then unplugged. The drives are rotated every few weeks. It's easy enough to occasionally boot from the backups to verify they work.
Important stuff is kept in a VCS repository and pushed regularly to a server which is also kept off-site. This server also gets the 3-disk backup treatment.
This. Exactly.
In the U.S., one party wants more of this Big Government. The other wants more of Big Corp. Both want you to slave away ('sprint' in Agile terms) for Big Labor or Big Corp. Neither is interested in Independent You, because there's no money or power in that for them.
I had a great laugh the first time my 10-year-old niece tried to make a phone call using the old rotary phone in my Mom's house (which still works by the way). She kept trying to push the indented 'buttons' instead of leaving her finger inside the hole, rotating the dial to the right, and then releasing it, waiting for it to stop moving,before repeating the procedure with the next phone digit.When I explained the process to her, she got frustrated and impatient and used her Mom's cell instead.
What's wrong with the youth of today? They just don't get it.
On a related note, I just finished watching an old Outer Limits episode--filmed in 1963 with a storyline set in 2030--where the occupants of the futuristic house were chatting over a LIVE VIDEOPHONE (now that's futuristic!), the size of an IBM XT, with the exact same rotary dial as the user interface.
No wonder the generations hate each other.
I'm not so sure it's a generational thing. IMO it's more of a personality thing.
Do you push that unlabeled BIG RED BUTTON to see what it does? Or do you leave it the h*ll alone because you don't know what it might do?
I'm an older generation now, but I still PUSH. Always have :-)
The '+' is a stupid UI design, but I'd figure it out eventually because I PUSH. A lot of people of all ages wouldn't because they don't push. This UI discriminates against the latter, and that's stupid.
My favorite are the designers who like to implement the PUSH and HOLD FOR 3 SECONDS power button, and don't spell it out somewhere. I'm a PUSH-er, not a HOLD-er. Arrgh.
I have to agree, and Linux has been my desktop OS since the mid '90s.
I've had my mom (in her 70's) running Linux for over a decade. Ubuntu for the last 5 years. It's cut down my IT support calls by 90%. But she's not a Linux user, she's a Firefox/Thunderbird user. And she knows how to respond to the upgrade alert, typing in that admin password every time. I dread the day Linux becomes popular enough to start targeting.
Go Windows!
Someone mod the parent insightful.
Never watched Star Trek:Voyager did 'ya?
Those were my thoughts exactly. And equally applicable to other technologies as well. Every time I heard the folks on TV wondering whether or not there was water in the spent fuel pools, I kept wondering why they didn't just talk to the RC helicopter folks, who've been mounting HD cameras on their (relatively) inexpensive gyro-stabilized 'copters for years. Fly one in and have a look.
Correct. Google 'coffin corner' for a full explanation. The margins at high altitude are quite slim.
What drove me to Linux back in the late '90s was the increasingly expensive software development environment. They killed off all the inexpensive $10-$99 C/C++ compiler vendors, then ratcheted up the cost of Visual Studio to the point where hobbyists, individual programmers, et al, couldn't afford it. Not to mention the outrageous MSDN subscription fees. When it became obvious that only corporate developers were welcome to code for Windows, I ditched it and haven't looked back.
They should build nuke plants on steep cliffs near the ocean in fault zones. Then when they go, the whole reactor will be dumped into the sea. No need to pump sea water then.
Get real. When there's only so much money, what will be cut: music, or sports? Around here, High School football is shown on local TV on Friday nights. The national-award winning choir? Never. Besides, teaching the Math class is a great job for the High School football coach. You cover a hard-to-fill vacancy, and get to pretend he's actually there for something besides creating a league-winning football team.
Same here. My Mom (now 70 as well) has been running Linux for over 10 years. Ubuntu LTS is my OS of choice for her now. The long-term-support version is the best choice IMO for the casual/clueless user, because it gets frequent security updates but only minor GUI changes over a long period of time. The less change, the better, as even minor icon changes cause major confusion. And all of my previous struggles with anti-virus software, bot-mail and the like on her system disappeared long ago. Support calls now: almost nil.
Being the anti-social Linux-loving Slashdot geek I am, I naturally run Gentoo and haven been enjoying my KDE3 to KDE4 lets-change-everything experience. Which is also why 'Just use Linux(TM)' is the wrong answer...
The problem with your fictional example is that women will never dictate when men go to war. Men go to war because men go to war. It's in their nature. There's about a 25% male mortality rate from warfare in Europe over the past 10 decades up until the end of WWII. That's equivalent to the male mortality rate in more primitive human cultures (now mostly gone), also from warfare. Google it.
Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz stated men have four outlets: sport, hunting, sexual conquest and war. Relatively few men need to hunt now. It would take a female:male ratio of 10:1 or so to keep men so tired out from sex that they stopped playing football or fighting each other. (Yeah I made that number up.) Football gets boring after a while. Hence, war.
The only reason there hasn't been as much male slaughter recently is the A-Bomb. Give it the Nobel Peace Prize. Then again, maybe all it's done is put a cork on pent-up demand. Pakistan, India, Iran, Israel, or somewhere else, sooner or later I predict a big BOOM. Why? I have faith in human nature.
If legions of ursine female warriors fight the 'just' wars, men will just evolve football into Rollerball. Won't change a thing, other than fewer women will be caught in the crossfire.
Exactly R2.0. I suspect a *lot* of folks share my opinion. Teachers are not laid off. Schools aren't closed for two years. What happens is that local school districts return to local control, the educate to the 'fill-in-the-right-bubble on the federal test so we can get funds' teaching approach goes away, and we use the money saved eliminating a huge needless federal bureaucracy to pay for school reform and keeping libraries open.
In my opinion, that reform includes not using the schools as daycare centers for parents, breaking big warehouse schools up into many smaller charter ones that are more integrated into the daily life of the local community, and giving the kids expanded opportunities for learning outside of rote memorization from textbooks, for starters. None of these big idea changes come from Washington; they begin, are refined, and implemented at the local level.
You are soooo right. No amount of longer days, longer hours, different teachers, whatever, is going to change the reality that the system is fundamentally broken. The first step in fixing the education system is to abolish the federal Department of Education and rethink the whole system from a more local point of view.
Of course, that's not ever going to happen.
...on carbonated beverages.
Maybe you can cap and trade tax credits for a Big Mac?
There are two aspects to software: design, and code. The first part is done with UML diagrams, flowcharts, architecture docs, whatever, and lots and lots of thought. The second part consists of expressing that design in whatever programming language seems appropriate. That second part is monkey work because it is basically just pounding away at a keyboard like the infamous monkeys creating the Encyclopedia Britannica (maybe Wikipedia?) A computer can--and occasionally does--do it. No computer can yet do the first part.
To be sure, real monkeys are quite smart, and probably take offensive at this crude characterization...