My experience with rpm is that the whole system starts to break down and/or become a PITA to maintain if you start installing non-rpm versions of software on your system (for example, if you decide to compile some package from source).
I've never used deb, I'm mainly a Slackware and Gentoo guy. I'm quite enamored with Gentoo's portage system, and so far I still feel that Slackware's use of straight up tarballs has been easier on my sanity.
Tho that's quite possibly just beause a) my first distro ever was Slacwkare and b) I've had terrible luck with all the rpm-based distros I've tried in the past.
Then how do you explain microwave guns being used as crowd control devices nowadays? Barely warm your skin? These things give people dangerously high fevers!
The ComEd plant in Byron, IL. Last I heard, it was still rated as the most dangerous nuclear power plant in the world. Security so lax that testing teams get assault rifles into the plant about 40% of the time.
Nuclear power plants are safe if they are managed properly. Too bad so many of the nuclear power plants in the USA are not managed properly.
Where the @#$% are they going to put a battery or other power supply that can power the nanomachines (which will have to be capable of moving autonomously) in order to power them indefinitely without making them stop being nano?
So we've got some ideas of stuff we can do with nanomachines. That doesn't mean we're anywhere near getting them to do a lot of the stuff futurists say are just a few years (decades, whatever) in the future. Don't forget that in the 1950's, we were all going to be driving flying cars, or at least personal helicopters, by now, and in the 1970's artificial neural networks were going to have given us true artificial intelligence by now. Oh yeah, and we're supposed to have people living on Mars, or at least the Moon, by now.
Hell, to build autonomous nanorobots capable of building and maintaining an orbital power station with minimal supervision, we'd have to give them some sort of modicum of useful computational power. At this point, that means transistors. Lots of them. Take the smallest functional transistor we've got. Cram it into a microscopic device. Now cram some mechanism in there, and make it be controllable by the transistors. Now cram that dern power supply in there, and make it capable of supplying enough wattage to keep those transistors working.
And if some profoundly amazing team of engineers succeeds in designing something like this within the next four decades, I challenge them to come up with a process for fabricating them. Not futuristic ideas and vague hand-waving about how it can be done with self-assembling molecules and the like. An actual working fabrication plant.
And I'm still not sure how we're going to make solar cells out of moon rocks. I was pretty sure the moon didn't have too much in the way of the kinds of elements and compounds we need to fabricate solar cells nowadays.
Man, if the military can't even figure out that you could point a huge microwave transmitter at some point on the surface of the earth, set the frequency to one that resonates nicely with, say, water, and turn power up to high, we probably shouldn't be letting them have nukes and weaponized anthrax. Kind of like handing a gun to a kid too young to understand how to operate a microwave oven, hmmmmmm?
If we all make an average of $150,000 (which we probably will in 2050), will we really be any richer, or is it just going to be inflation?
I just fail to see where that huge amount of money comes from. I know that I'm not spending enough money on electricity to jump my spendable cash from $30,000 to $150,000 should electricity become mind-bogglingly cheap or even free - my annual income is in the $20s, and I can afford to pay for electricity. What is the USA filled with rich bastards I haven't met who somehow succeed in finding wasy to jack their annual electricity bills up to $120,000 a year?
I saw CBR's halloween show in Chicago, and it's one of the most interesting things I've seen onstage in a long time.
The current tour is inspired by The Ten Commandments (you know, that old Heston movie), with 10 songs that follow the storyline of the music. Our hero, the one human onstage plays Moses. GTRBOT plays Ramses. DRMBOT plays Nefertiti. TAWHNN plays God, and Jesus was written into the script just to give SOTAWHNN a part to play.
The music isn't as good as his normal stuff, but how can you resist a song titled, "Nefertiti Sex Jam"?
I used to deathmatch in Quake2 using only a blaster.
Not because I wanted to go at it the hard way so much as because it really pissed my friends off when I actually killed them with the pea-shooter. (Even moreso once I got good enough to get a few kills every session)
While this is true, the problem doesn't seem to be products that have their packaging written entirely in English so much as products whose packaging is in some amalgam of English and French.
I can understand why Quebec might want to pass a law agains this - prevention of dilution of the language an' all that. Actually, not really dilution of the language - as one of the most spoken languages in the world, French is hardly in any danger of disappearing from the face of the earth. I think the Quebequois are worried that their kids will just start speaking English, which would be a major step toward their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group.
But still, I see two problems with this law other than the knee-jerk "stupid foreigners rejecting the God-Given language of the American People" reaction a lot of folks seem to be spouting on this subject.
First - Does it outlaw a shopkeeper selling imported products which were never meant to be marketed in Quebec in the first place? (I'm thinking video games that haven't been translated into French.)
Second, it seems like it could discourage commerce in Quebec. Requiring 100% of a product's packaging, even the small stuff that doesn't matter like an Official Nintendo Seal of Quality or somesuch, is increasing the bottom line for companies that wish to market products in Quebec, and might succeed in causing some products to simply not be sold there. Here I'm primarily thinking stuff that won't be sold outside of Canada or North America, where the french-speaking population is small enough to make such an increase in bottom line really matter.
Only one year left 'till we get a chance to give up this experiment with pathologically homicidal cowboy oil barons and go back to putting crooked lawyers in charge of the United States.
But what if I wanna buy the latest snazzy graphics card so I can play all the cool new video games that aren't ever going to be ported to the Mac anyways so I'm not sure why I'm even talking.
Seriously, while exterior peripheral support is great on Macs, the support for a lot of internal hardware (really mostly just PCI and AGP cards) is lacking.
But I can't remember the last time I needed to stick a new PCI card in my PC, let alone my Mac.
I do understand, and have read all about the Atkins diet. I was making fun of the multitudes of people out there who say they are on the "Atkins diet" but don't seem to have read about it, or at least haven't read the parts that recommend eating your veggies and taking a walk after dinner.
Granted, but I gotta say that low-fat does NOT mean high-carb. I've been a vegan for quite a while now, and I've experienced similar improvements in my health - I don't get headaches anymore and I don't feel the need to take a nap during the day, where I used to need at least a 30 minute siesta after I got off work.
And my diet is not particularly high-carb. I got curious about that a few months ago, did some calorie-counting, and discovered that most days my intake was somewhere around 1,500. (2,500 on indulgent days, but if I didn't get pasta every week or so my soul would probably leave me for another body.)
Granted, I wouldn't recommend a vegan diet to most people. You have to love cooking and be able to cook creatively, or you'll never get much in the way of stuff like essential amino acids and vitamin B12.
A lot of PC users I have worked with are extremely resistant to using Mac OS machines. It's better with OS X than it is with OS 9 and earlier, but most of the average users I know are threatened by things like the lack of a Start menu and a Windows-style taskbar. Once I've shown them the ropes and explained all the Mac OS equivalents, they get a lot more comfortable.
Regardless, I've noticed that the defining feature of a great number of computer users is that they freeze up in the face of anything new or different. I imagine it's the same mechanism that gave rise to those interesting statistics about how Windows 3.1 users learned Windows 95 more slowly than people who were just learning to use a computer.
So all in all, I gotta say that there is one huge glaring thing that a lot of PC users find wrong with Macs: they aren't PCs.
(although some neural network weenies might see a way of turning this into something more than just a DSP)
I'll ignore the weenies bit. ..
but yeah, that's actually the first thing I thought of when I saw it was basically only good for matrix operations. Granted, the precision is really low, but depending on how expensive this thing is it could make really fat neural networks a whole lot cheaper to run.
Slashdot Mirror
They're assholes, too!
Yet another reason to not read their crappy reviews that I don't read anyway because they're crappy.
My experience with rpm is that the whole system starts to break down and/or become a PITA to maintain if you start installing non-rpm versions of software on your system (for example, if you decide to compile some package from source).
I've never used deb, I'm mainly a Slackware and Gentoo guy. I'm quite enamored with Gentoo's portage system, and so far I still feel that Slackware's use of straight up tarballs has been easier on my sanity.
Tho that's quite possibly just beause a) my first distro ever was Slacwkare and b) I've had terrible luck with all the rpm-based distros I've tried in the past.
Hey, I'm fine with any standard for binary packages as long as it's _NOT_ rpm.
Then how do you explain microwave guns being used as crowd control devices nowadays? Barely warm your skin? These things give people dangerously high fevers!
The ComEd plant in Byron, IL. Last I heard, it was still rated as the most dangerous nuclear power plant in the world. Security so lax that testing teams get assault rifles into the plant about 40% of the time.
Nuclear power plants are safe if they are managed properly. Too bad so many of the nuclear power plants in the USA are not managed properly.
One of my many questions about nanomachines:
Where the @#$% are they going to put a battery or other power supply that can power the nanomachines (which will have to be capable of moving autonomously) in order to power them indefinitely without making them stop being nano?
So we've got some ideas of stuff we can do with nanomachines. That doesn't mean we're anywhere near getting them to do a lot of the stuff futurists say are just a few years (decades, whatever) in the future. Don't forget that in the 1950's, we were all going to be driving flying cars, or at least personal helicopters, by now, and in the 1970's artificial neural networks were going to have given us true artificial intelligence by now. Oh yeah, and we're supposed to have people living on Mars, or at least the Moon, by now.
Hell, to build autonomous nanorobots capable of building and maintaining an orbital power station with minimal supervision, we'd have to give them some sort of modicum of useful computational power. At this point, that means transistors. Lots of them. Take the smallest functional transistor we've got. Cram it into a microscopic device. Now cram some mechanism in there, and make it be controllable by the transistors. Now cram that dern power supply in there, and make it capable of supplying enough wattage to keep those transistors working.
And if some profoundly amazing team of engineers succeeds in designing something like this within the next four decades, I challenge them to come up with a process for fabricating them. Not futuristic ideas and vague hand-waving about how it can be done with self-assembling molecules and the like. An actual working fabrication plant.
And I'm still not sure how we're going to make solar cells out of moon rocks. I was pretty sure the moon didn't have too much in the way of the kinds of elements and compounds we need to fabricate solar cells nowadays.
Man, if the military can't even figure out that you could point a huge microwave transmitter at some point on the surface of the earth, set the frequency to one that resonates nicely with, say, water, and turn power up to high, we probably shouldn't be letting them have nukes and weaponized anthrax.
Kind of like handing a gun to a kid too young to understand how to operate a microwave oven, hmmmmmm?
Or how the hell we're going to build solar cells and gigantic microwave transmitters out of moon rocks.
Or how we're going to build robots sophisticated enough to figure out how to build solar cells and microwave transmitters out of moon rocks.
Hell, we're already having a hard enough time making robots that don't walk/roll straight off the table without even slowing down.
If we all make an average of $150,000 (which we probably will in 2050), will we really be any richer, or is it just going to be inflation?
I just fail to see where that huge amount of money comes from. I know that I'm not spending enough money on electricity to jump my spendable cash from $30,000 to $150,000 should electricity become mind-bogglingly cheap or even free - my annual income is in the $20s, and I can afford to pay for electricity. What is the USA filled with rich bastards I haven't met who somehow succeed in finding wasy to jack their annual electricity bills up to $120,000 a year?
I saw CBR's halloween show in Chicago, and it's one of the most interesting things I've seen onstage in a long time.
The current tour is inspired by The Ten Commandments (you know, that old Heston movie), with 10 songs that follow the storyline of the music. Our hero, the one human onstage plays Moses. GTRBOT plays Ramses. DRMBOT plays Nefertiti. TAWHNN plays God, and Jesus was written into the script just to give SOTAWHNN a part to play.
The music isn't as good as his normal stuff, but how can you resist a song titled, "Nefertiti Sex Jam"?
I used to deathmatch in Quake2 using only a blaster.
Not because I wanted to go at it the hard way so much as because it really pissed my friends off when I actually killed them with the pea-shooter. (Even moreso once I got good enough to get a few kills every session)
While this is true, the problem doesn't seem to be products that have their packaging written entirely in English so much as products whose packaging is in some amalgam of English and French.
I can understand why Quebec might want to pass a law agains this - prevention of dilution of the language an' all that. Actually, not really dilution of the language - as one of the most spoken languages in the world, French is hardly in any danger of disappearing from the face of the earth. I think the Quebequois are worried that their kids will just start speaking English, which would be a major step toward their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group.
But still, I see two problems with this law other than the knee-jerk "stupid foreigners rejecting the God-Given language of the American People" reaction a lot of folks seem to be spouting on this subject.
First - Does it outlaw a shopkeeper selling imported products which were never meant to be marketed in Quebec in the first place? (I'm thinking video games that haven't been translated into French.)
Second, it seems like it could discourage commerce in Quebec. Requiring 100% of a product's packaging, even the small stuff that doesn't matter like an Official Nintendo Seal of Quality or somesuch, is increasing the bottom line for companies that wish to market products in Quebec, and might succeed in causing some products to simply not be sold there. Here I'm primarily thinking stuff that won't be sold outside of Canada or North America, where the french-speaking population is small enough to make such an increase in bottom line really matter.
Va te fais fautre.
Quebec, being in Canada, has an entire ocean and a huge chunk of North America between itself and France.
And what are those other reasons that don't get attention which people have for not going to the moon?
The only one I can think of is the perception that there's nothing interesting about the moon, that it's just a big rock.
All you pun makers can BURN IN HELL!
.that's wrong. . .
no, wait. .
Only one year left 'till we get a chance to give up this experiment with pathologically homicidal cowboy oil barons and go back to putting crooked lawyers in charge of the United States.
Really, how many operating systems have you used that didn't have known problems/issues?
But what if I wanna buy the latest snazzy graphics card so I can play all the cool new video games that aren't ever going to be ported to the Mac anyways so I'm not sure why I'm even talking.
Seriously, while exterior peripheral support is great on Macs, the support for a lot of internal hardware (really mostly just PCI and AGP cards) is lacking.
But I can't remember the last time I needed to stick a new PCI card in my PC, let alone my Mac.
I do understand, and have read all about the Atkins diet. I was making fun of the multitudes of people out there who say they are on the "Atkins diet" but don't seem to have read about it, or at least haven't read the parts that recommend eating your veggies and taking a walk after dinner.
Granted, but I gotta say that low-fat does NOT mean high-carb. I've been a vegan for quite a while now, and I've experienced similar improvements in my health - I don't get headaches anymore and I don't feel the need to take a nap during the day, where I used to need at least a 30 minute siesta after I got off work.
And my diet is not particularly high-carb. I got curious about that a few months ago, did some calorie-counting, and discovered that most days my intake was somewhere around 1,500. (2,500 on indulgent days, but if I didn't get pasta every week or so my soul would probably leave me for another body.)
Granted, I wouldn't recommend a vegan diet to most people. You have to love cooking and be able to cook creatively, or you'll never get much in the way of stuff like essential amino acids and vitamin B12.
A lot of PC users I have worked with are extremely resistant to using Mac OS machines. It's better with OS X than it is with OS 9 and earlier, but most of the average users I know are threatened by things like the lack of a Start menu and a Windows-style taskbar. Once I've shown them the ropes and explained all the Mac OS equivalents, they get a lot more comfortable.
Regardless, I've noticed that the defining feature of a great number of computer users is that they freeze up in the face of anything new or different. I imagine it's the same mechanism that gave rise to those interesting statistics about how Windows 3.1 users learned Windows 95 more slowly than people who were just learning to use a computer.
So all in all, I gotta say that there is one huge glaring thing that a lot of PC users find wrong with Macs: they aren't PCs.
You mean I can't just cut all the bread out of my diet and get healthy eating nothing but beef and cheese? I have to eat vegetables and go for walks!?
(although some neural network weenies might see a way of turning this into something more than just a DSP)
.
I'll ignore the weenies bit. .
but yeah, that's actually the first thing I thought of when I saw it was basically only good for matrix operations. Granted, the precision is really low, but depending on how expensive this thing is it could make really fat neural networks a whole lot cheaper to run.
I mean, Apple did it what, 3 times before OS X came out. ::ducks::