Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
1) Open image of currency to be manipulated in M$ Paint. 2) Cut. 3) Paste into existing properly-sized image in PS. 4) Manipulate. 5) Print out 500,000 copies.
There's some video clips here showing the [astro|cosmo]nauts eating various unedible looking substances. There's also some shorts on the preparation of spacefood. All in all the stuff seems really noxious (we all know the freeze-dried icecream from museum stores is god-awful). I think the next ISS module should be a soul food shack. Am I the only one who wonders what the *nauts do when dinner doesn't sit well? Do you suppose Febreeze works in space?
To change the subject... If NASA is so worried about errant crumbs perhaps they should spend a few million bucks researching a dustbuster that works in zero gravity instead of funding magnetic resonance imaging research into why their (crumb-free) tortillas taste bitter after six months on the shelf.
If I'm a cow then microsoft is the guy with the milking machine. When is microsoft going to stop looking at us powerusers as a bank account, instead of as a category of clients that deserve not to be bilked any more than the rest of their clientelle?
Woo! lets get the flame machine into full gear. I use gentoo not because i (admittedly do) get a 2.1% performance boost, but because the emerge system kicks ass. it really does. i thought i'd never leave FBSD's ports system, but then i met emerge. it's got like every friggin ap & lib i'd ever need, plus with a single command line switch i can compile straight into my own binary tarballs, which reside on my nfs server. it's so simple to export the packages dir to any new machines i need to install on. it's like having my own copy of the Redhat rpm tree with binaries that actually work... no matter what deps they have. the real power in gentoo comes from it's fusion of RPM, APT, and Ports. not the 2.1% (or whatever) performance boost. if you ask me, it's about time someone released a "Grown up" package generation/installation/management system. Ports is capable of getting the job done, APT sucks because of it's poor support for very new packages, and i won't touch RPM with a 5 foot pole. emerge wipes the floor with all three at the same time. i can see how compilation time would discourage some users from emerge. but honestly, i've been using *nix for quite awhile now, and the only thing that gets close to being as convienent as emerge is Ports. if you really do hate gentoo that much, at least do yourself a favor and run FBSD.
There are two types of power users: ones with a purpose and ones without. the ones without are the ones bragging about their 2.1% performance increase. they aren't are the ones smugly installing a new linux system w/ 350+ (including gnome/kde) custom compiled apps with only a few shell commands & an nfs server in an hour or two. hehehe. real powerusing means getting down to business faster & easier than any other way (notice faster implies no 3 day configuration/compilation times). and when getting down to business requires the absolute latest, secure versions of a shitload of software, you can't beat emerge (when properly used).
Note: i'm not trying to say gentoo is better, but don't mistake every gentoo user as a 14 year old looking for that extra 2.1%:P to each his own, and certainly there are cases where i'm sure the likes of APT and RPM whoop emerge's ass. i just haven't seen any yet...
Usenet is a good source for news. Especially a ClariNet feed. ClariNet news is way above the CNN/Yahoo par: incredibly timely, accurate, and well written first-hand news from many international sources available in a convienent format (your fav. usenet client). For reasearch, if you can't find it on google, LexisNexis, or one of the hundreds of thousands of paper publications freely available online, you might as well give up looking for it in my opinion. Personally, the only hard copy texts I use for research are either old college textbooks or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Unfortunately, most people don't have easy access to Clari or Lexis. Honestly... who would pay for a Clari feed and/or Lexis account for personal usage?
It's my opinion that the greatest technological advances in sports are modern hunting firearms. Without beauties like this, hunting would be ridiculously difficult. Pick one up for yourself today, and fill that deer quota in hours flat. On a sidenote, we really must thank the NRA for vigorously protecting our right as patriotic Americans to carry gas-powered semiautomatic pistol grip combat shotguns (capable of firing 7 76mm Magnum slugs in under 5 seconds) for the purpose of sport.
Interestingly, a friend of mine's father designed a device that helps cancel noise in jumbo jets. Conceptually it's very simple. Leveraging the physics of wave interference, an electronic device with an ultrasensitive microphone and a high fidelity speaker generates sound waves of the exact opposite signature as the existing sound waves. These "negative" waves interfere with the existing waves and act to cancel them out. Obviously it would be impossible to cancel _all_ sound with this sort of device, but theoretically this could lower the overall noise in a confined area significantly. I have no idea how well this works. Perhaps someone else has heard of these devices. This technology is similar to new high tech inertial dampeners used for earthquake protecting large buildings. By swinging a massive pendulum inside the building at the opposite waveform as the earthquake, a great deal of force is cancelled out.
Here's a great way to fuck with people w/ a device like this: use a really really good omni mic and a high output hifi speaker (few hundred watts), mount the rig in the back of a hatchback, turn it up all the way (cancel maximum sound) and drive down a crowded street at low speed with the back open. Watch in gleeful delight as everyone thinks they are going deaf.
A Gui that I have to move the mouse all the way down the screen to open a menu? A GUI without middle click paste? A GUI without virtual & multiple desktops? You think thats easier?
Keyboard shortcuts. Middle click paste only works in something like 50% of the X apps I use.
My nvidia card comes with a handy virtual & multiple desktop feature in Windows, although it's not quite as good as X's.
Aside from not constantly rebooting. What do I do all day, surf the web, write some stuff, more surfing, email, write more stuff. There is nothing I do that I can do in windows that I cant do in Linux faster and more efficently. Oh, and windows refuses to play a bunch of divx and xvid videos. (Plays some, but not all).
Surfing the web is not what I use a computer for when I want to get things done. When I want to design a website or web based application, or create a professional looking PDF, or use Adobe (I know gimp is good but I already know Photoshop) sofware Windows is where I look. Find me a Linux program that can even come close to matching Adobe Premiere's features. And when I'm done working I can use the same box I develop on to play some games. Surfing the web doesn't cut it entertainment-wise for me. Oh yeah... ever tried to use the avaliable higher-end music & sound creation tools for linux? There may be a few decent MIDI sequencers but the rest is crap.
Yeah, I broke debian by aborting a dist-upgrade to sid. I also broke it once by "apt-get remove libc6". Does windows allow one-line (although you should use dselect really) instalation of almost any program you can think of?
Debian stable often lags behind recent software releases. When you try to upgrade with non-standard APT sources often things break. And once APT really fucks up, it's a massive chore to fix it. Dselect sucks hard for basic APT functions... there was a really good GTK app that served that purpose really well but I forget what it's called.
OK, I'm a little confused. Load up a terminal, type "ssh user@host" and it just works. What mroe do you want from an SSH app? Either way, Putty for debian
Why should I have to type a mangled command line each time I connect because I require logging (yes, a shell script would fix this, but why should I have to learn shell scripting [or even write a script] simply to get a feature that many Windows SSH clients have already? Similarily, I make heavy use of proxies for SSH. Pain in the ass at a command line. Oh... and since you've enlightened me on the existence of a version of PuTTY for debian, maybe you can show me a xterm that has search capabilities in the scrollback buffer instead of making me pipe output?
This argument could go on and on, nitpicking over the painful details. Instead, why not agree that, for some people, using both Windows and *nix simultaneously saves more time than using one or the other? For example, I have a simple batch script that spawns a remote X copy of Gaim, a GTK AIM client (the native win32 version sucks hard), each time I load Windows. I do this because Gaim saves me time, it is more functional than any Windows AIM program I've seen.
Instead of vehemently supporting one system over the other blindly, one should support the elements of the OS that actually benefit them. I'll fight to the death that Linux is a better, faster, more efficient, and more stable server platform than any MS product. However, I'm not going to lie to myself that all the painful hours of meticulously setting up an X desktop that suits my needs, simply to miss all my favorite Apps, is easier or faster than dealing with Windows' bullshit. I've spent hundreds of hours carefully and consistently trying my hardest to configure a Linux desktop that suits my needs, and have even gotten somewhat close on several seperate occasions to a system that satisfies me. I'm ready to give up. If GNU/Linux were a mature desktop OS, it wouldn't be so goddamn hard to set up. I'm really picky about what features
I keep running home to Windows because of the easy to use GUI and the fact that although I can't fix windows when it really fucks up, I can reinstall it faster than I can fix linux (esp x11 crap) when i really fuck it up (seeing as linux very rarely fucks itself up). That aside, there is nothing worth doing in linux that you can't do perfectly well (perhaps a bit slower) in a VMware virtual machine. Period. Snag a dual or quad opteron and a gig of ram and you can develop websites at the same time you're deploying backend databases... with one machine.
My Basic Linux Machine Configuration Procedure:
Install slackware.
Break Slackware, curse excessively.
Install Debian, get everything set up, and then break it all at once with one bad apt command. Curse.
Find my copy of FreeBSD 5.0, install, compile a few ports, work.
Just in case you were wondering, I'm not a fucking idiot -- once I get a box set up and working properly in vm put I put it's drive in a real machine. Also I realize that some people seem to think GNU/Linux is a good desktop environment. I have done lots of work while using several different GNU/Linux XFree86 desktops, and I have to say that it sucks... not bad enough for me to uninstall it, but enough that when it comes time to reinstall I choose Windows time and time again. I simply spend less time doing more work in Windows, even if it's remote work on a *nix box. That and I'm still trying to find an SSH app for X that I like as much as PuTTy, for those times that I have no choice but to use an X desktop.
It's funny that you hit the nail on the head so well in the Slack/RH flamewar. When I started with GNU/Linux, I definitely did just h4x0r it up on my single 1337 Slack box. Then I actually started getting into production level projects, and realized Slack needed too much tweaking to be practical.
Why learn the ins and outs of Redhat when I can migrate to a system like Deb or FreeBSD? Slack->FBSD was easier than Slack->RH for me, and Slack->Deb is ridiculously easy. That and you have to admit that the ports system is really quite good. The advances FBSD has made in the last 3 years have been rather promising.
IMHO FreeBSD 5.0 can definitely compete with RH9 -- not in ease of use but in the fact that they are both a stable, production quality OS.
That still doesn't mean that I like the way RH is organized. In fact, the init scripts are really what bugged me. On the type of servers I usually set up, I don't need an init system that fancy. To be honest though, the only time I've used RH9 was handling administration for a box that ran email, dns, and a cs server. Not much experience really, especially in areas where RH does excell.
I'm undisputedly a Slackware geek but I have to admit that Debian really is a better system. Whenever I feel the need to deploy some kind of GNU/Linux application, I find time and time again that it's easier and faster to do in Debian. More and more these days, however, when I need to deploy some kind of *nix application FreeBSD beats all the competition hands down as a platform. It's simply superior. P.S. Redhat is no good at all. It's not that I'm being close-minded, but every single time I try to use Redhat it ends up wasting huge amounts of my time.
I had to laugh while reading this article. I've never heard of Grid computing before. However, about a month ago while sitting on the can, after just setting up my first cluster using OpenMosix, I had a very similar idea. Given a worldwide fibre network, systems similar to distributed.net could be set up, but simply to share idle processor cycles, with the hope that when you are ocassionally doing local computations that are red lining your proc, the offending processes could be sent out to the distributed cluster you are a member of. Sort of like p2p processor sharing. Of course, someone would have to write a kernel level dynamic memory allocation capable clustering thang. That definitely wouldn't be fun. Especially in win32.
Learning Linux was very difficult for me as well. The single thing that helped the most was having an extra working computer on the net that I could use to contact friends who use linux and access The Linux Documentation Project from. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance to become proficient with any *NIX CLI... however learning Linux/GNU can be really rewarding. My advice: pick up a cheap 266MHz (or akin) machine you can use to figure out Linux/GNU on, before you try to use Linux as your primary desktop system.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Open image of currency to be manipulated in M$ Paint.
2) Cut.
3) Paste into existing properly-sized image in PS.
4) Manipulate.
5) Print out 500,000 copies.
There's some video clips here showing the [astro|cosmo]nauts eating various unedible looking substances. There's also some shorts on the preparation of spacefood. All in all the stuff seems really noxious (we all know the freeze-dried icecream from museum stores is god-awful). I think the next ISS module should be a soul food shack. Am I the only one who wonders what the *nauts do when dinner doesn't sit well? Do you suppose Febreeze works in space?
To change the subject...
If NASA is so worried about errant crumbs perhaps they should spend a few million bucks researching a dustbuster that works in zero gravity instead of funding magnetic resonance imaging research into why their (crumb-free) tortillas taste bitter after six months on the shelf.
If I'm a cow then microsoft is the guy with the milking machine. When is microsoft going to stop looking at us powerusers as a bank account, instead of as a category of clients that deserve not to be bilked any more than the rest of their clientelle?
Woo! lets get the flame machine into full gear. I use gentoo not because i (admittedly do) get a 2.1% performance boost, but because the emerge system kicks ass. it really does. i thought i'd never leave FBSD's ports system, but then i met emerge. it's got like every friggin ap & lib i'd ever need, plus with a single command line switch i can compile straight into my own binary tarballs, which reside on my nfs server. it's so simple to export the packages dir to any new machines i need to install on. it's like having my own copy of the Redhat rpm tree with binaries that actually work... no matter what deps they have. the real power in gentoo comes from it's fusion of RPM, APT, and Ports. not the 2.1% (or whatever) performance boost. if you ask me, it's about time someone released a "Grown up" package generation/installation/management system. Ports is capable of getting the job done, APT sucks because of it's poor support for very new packages, and i won't touch RPM with a 5 foot pole. emerge wipes the floor with all three at the same time. i can see how compilation time would discourage some users from emerge. but honestly, i've been using *nix for quite awhile now, and the only thing that gets close to being as convienent as emerge is Ports. if you really do hate gentoo that much, at least do yourself a favor and run FBSD.
:P to each his own, and certainly there are cases where i'm sure the likes of APT and RPM whoop emerge's ass. i just haven't seen any yet...
There are two types of power users: ones with a purpose and ones without. the ones without are the ones bragging about their 2.1% performance increase. they aren't are the ones smugly installing a new linux system w/ 350+ (including gnome/kde) custom compiled apps with only a few shell commands & an nfs server in an hour or two. hehehe. real powerusing means getting down to business faster & easier than any other way (notice faster implies no 3 day configuration/compilation times). and when getting down to business requires the absolute latest, secure versions of a shitload of software, you can't beat emerge (when properly used).
Note: i'm not trying to say gentoo is better, but don't mistake every gentoo user as a 14 year old looking for that extra 2.1%
Usenet is a good source for news. Especially a ClariNet feed. ClariNet news is way above the CNN/Yahoo par: incredibly timely, accurate, and well written first-hand news from many international sources available in a convienent format (your fav. usenet client). For reasearch, if you can't find it on google, LexisNexis, or one of the hundreds of thousands of paper publications freely available online, you might as well give up looking for it in my opinion. Personally, the only hard copy texts I use for research are either old college textbooks or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Unfortunately, most people don't have easy access to Clari or Lexis. Honestly... who would pay for a Clari feed and/or Lexis account for personal usage?
I wish I was an uber-eleet h4x0ring packetmonkey just like netgear. I ph34r their ddos skillz!
It's my opinion that the greatest technological advances in sports are modern hunting firearms. Without beauties like this, hunting would be ridiculously difficult. Pick one up for yourself today, and fill that deer quota in hours flat. On a sidenote, we really must thank the NRA for vigorously protecting our right as patriotic Americans to carry gas-powered semiautomatic pistol grip combat shotguns (capable of firing 7 76mm Magnum slugs in under 5 seconds) for the purpose of sport.
Interestingly, a friend of mine's father designed a device that helps cancel noise in jumbo jets. Conceptually it's very simple. Leveraging the physics of wave interference, an electronic device with an ultrasensitive microphone and a high fidelity speaker generates sound waves of the exact opposite signature as the existing sound waves. These "negative" waves interfere with the existing waves and act to cancel them out. Obviously it would be impossible to cancel _all_ sound with this sort of device, but theoretically this could lower the overall noise in a confined area significantly. I have no idea how well this works. Perhaps someone else has heard of these devices. This technology is similar to new high tech inertial dampeners used for earthquake protecting large buildings. By swinging a massive pendulum inside the building at the opposite waveform as the earthquake, a great deal of force is cancelled out.
Here's a great way to fuck with people w/ a device like this: use a really really good omni mic and a high output hifi speaker (few hundred watts), mount the rig in the back of a hatchback, turn it up all the way (cancel maximum sound) and drive down a crowded street at low speed with the back open. Watch in gleeful delight as everyone thinks they are going deaf.
A Gui that I have to move the mouse all the way down the screen to open a menu? A GUI without middle click paste? A GUI without virtual & multiple desktops? You think thats easier?
Keyboard shortcuts. Middle click paste only works in something like 50% of the X apps I use. My nvidia card comes with a handy virtual & multiple desktop feature in Windows, although it's not quite as good as X's.
Aside from not constantly rebooting. What do I do all day, surf the web, write some stuff, more surfing, email, write more stuff. There is nothing I do that I can do in windows that I cant do in Linux faster and more efficently. Oh, and windows refuses to play a bunch of divx and xvid videos. (Plays some, but not all).
Surfing the web is not what I use a computer for when I want to get things done. When I want to design a website or web based application, or create a professional looking PDF, or use Adobe (I know gimp is good but I already know Photoshop) sofware Windows is where I look. Find me a Linux program that can even come close to matching Adobe Premiere's features. And when I'm done working I can use the same box I develop on to play some games. Surfing the web doesn't cut it entertainment-wise for me. Oh yeah... ever tried to use the avaliable higher-end music & sound creation tools for linux? There may be a few decent MIDI sequencers but the rest is crap.
Yeah, I broke debian by aborting a dist-upgrade to sid. I also broke it once by "apt-get remove libc6". Does windows allow one-line (although you should use dselect really) instalation of almost any program you can think of?
Debian stable often lags behind recent software releases. When you try to upgrade with non-standard APT sources often things break. And once APT really fucks up, it's a massive chore to fix it. Dselect sucks hard for basic APT functions... there was a really good GTK app that served that purpose really well but I forget what it's called.
OK, I'm a little confused. Load up a terminal, type "ssh user@host" and it just works. What mroe do you want from an SSH app? Either way, Putty for debian
Why should I have to type a mangled command line each time I connect because I require logging (yes, a shell script would fix this, but why should I have to learn shell scripting [or even write a script] simply to get a feature that many Windows SSH clients have already? Similarily, I make heavy use of proxies for SSH. Pain in the ass at a command line. Oh... and since you've enlightened me on the existence of a version of PuTTY for debian, maybe you can show me a xterm that has search capabilities in the scrollback buffer instead of making me pipe output?
This argument could go on and on, nitpicking over the painful details. Instead, why not agree that, for some people, using both Windows and *nix simultaneously saves more time than using one or the other? For example, I have a simple batch script that spawns a remote X copy of Gaim, a GTK AIM client (the native win32 version sucks hard), each time I load Windows. I do this because Gaim saves me time, it is more functional than any Windows AIM program I've seen.
Instead of vehemently supporting one system over the other blindly, one should support the elements of the OS that actually benefit them. I'll fight to the death that Linux is a better, faster, more efficient, and more stable server platform than any MS product. However, I'm not going to lie to myself that all the painful hours of meticulously setting up an X desktop that suits my needs, simply to miss all my favorite Apps, is easier or faster than dealing with Windows' bullshit. I've spent hundreds of hours carefully and consistently trying my hardest to configure a Linux desktop that suits my needs, and have even gotten somewhat close on several seperate occasions to a system that satisfies me. I'm ready to give up. If GNU/Linux were a mature desktop OS, it wouldn't be so goddamn hard to set up. I'm really picky about what features
My Basic Linux Machine Configuration Procedure:
- Install slackware.
- Break Slackware, curse excessively.
- Install Debian, get everything set up, and then break it all at once with one bad apt command. Curse.
- Find my copy of FreeBSD 5.0, install, compile a few ports, work.
Just in case you were wondering, I'm not a fucking idiot -- once I get a box set up and working properly in vm put I put it's drive in a real machine. Also I realize that some people seem to think GNU/Linux is a good desktop environment. I have done lots of work while using several different GNU/Linux XFree86 desktops, and I have to say that it sucks... not bad enough for me to uninstall it, but enough that when it comes time to reinstall I choose Windows time and time again. I simply spend less time doing more work in Windows, even if it's remote work on a *nix box. That and I'm still trying to find an SSH app for X that I like as much as PuTTy, for those times that I have no choice but to use an X desktop.It's funny that you hit the nail on the head so well in the Slack/RH flamewar. When I started with GNU/Linux, I definitely did just h4x0r it up on my single 1337 Slack box. Then I actually started getting into production level projects, and realized Slack needed too much tweaking to be practical.
Why learn the ins and outs of Redhat when I can migrate to a system like Deb or FreeBSD? Slack->FBSD was easier than Slack->RH for me, and Slack->Deb is ridiculously easy. That and you have to admit that the ports system is really quite good. The advances FBSD has made in the last 3 years have been rather promising.
IMHO FreeBSD 5.0 can definitely compete with RH9 -- not in ease of use but in the fact that they are both a stable, production quality OS.
That still doesn't mean that I like the way RH is organized. In fact, the init scripts are really what bugged me. On the type of servers I usually set up, I don't need an init system that fancy. To be honest though, the only time I've used RH9 was handling administration for a box that ran email, dns, and a cs server. Not much experience really, especially in areas where RH does excell.
I'm undisputedly a Slackware geek but I have to admit that Debian really is a better system. Whenever I feel the need to deploy some kind of GNU/Linux application, I find time and time again that it's easier and faster to do in Debian. More and more these days, however, when I need to deploy some kind of *nix application FreeBSD beats all the competition hands down as a platform. It's simply superior.
P.S. Redhat is no good at all. It's not that I'm being close-minded, but every single time I try to use Redhat it ends up wasting huge amounts of my time.
I had to laugh while reading this article. I've never heard of Grid computing before. However, about a month ago while sitting on the can, after just setting up my first cluster using OpenMosix, I had a very similar idea. Given a worldwide fibre network, systems similar to distributed.net could be set up, but simply to share idle processor cycles, with the hope that when you are ocassionally doing local computations that are red lining your proc, the offending processes could be sent out to the distributed cluster you are a member of. Sort of like p2p processor sharing. Of course, someone would have to write a kernel level dynamic memory allocation capable clustering thang. That definitely wouldn't be fun. Especially in win32.
Learning Linux was very difficult for me as well. The single thing that helped the most was having an extra working computer on the net that I could use to contact friends who use linux and access The Linux Documentation Project from. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance to become proficient with any *NIX CLI... however learning Linux/GNU can be really rewarding. My advice: pick up a cheap 266MHz (or akin) machine you can use to figure out Linux/GNU on, before you try to use Linux as your primary desktop system.