Fairly tough to make a sturdy car that is also lightweight enough to be driven by low-power solar generation...
This was a 2-lane highway (with typical speeds around 55mph, if I remember that area right?), and the solar car was hit when it swerved into the oncoming lane. That could be a fatal even for someone driving a larger vehicle.
So the more interesting question to me would be what caused the driver lost control.
Though really, if my doctor *has* to go check something on the internet before he can figure out what to do with me, I'll just stay home, thanks.
You want a doctor that never reads medical journals, consults with colleagues, participates in research studies,...?
All that stuff is likely to be an integral part of any good doctor's daily job (including doing research to help diagnose you; you don't really want a doctor who make every single diagnosis based on memory alone).
Having to retype words is it's own penalty already if you just look at the sum totals at the end.
Of course, you're right, that's the only kind of performance that usually matters in the end.
All I'm arguing is that that's probably *not* the best way to judge performance while learning to type, because accuracy is harder to learn (or, more precisely, poor accuracy is harder to unlearn), so in the long run the learning typist who is more accurate probably has the better potential than the one who is less accurate but faster.
Or at least that's my experience with learning similar motor skills, like playing musical instruments, where speed is the result of first practicing very slowly with high accuracy and then pushing the tempo only when you're totally comfortable.
So the high penalty set on accuracy may be more than just a holdover from old technology.
The reason backspacing is "soooo" bad is a layover from typewriter era as best I can tell --even on a typewriter with a good working backspace, if you don't notice it before you've gone to the next line, you throw the page away.
This of course is complete BS in a modern word processor.
I suppose that makes sense; though for the purposes of teaching typing, insisting on high accuracy may still be useful; in practice a student that types more slowly, but with 100% accuracy, is going to be the better typist in the long run than one that types a little faster and uses the backspace key occasionally--my experience with these kinds of physical skills is that speeding up is easy, once you know how to do something with complete accuracy, but unlearning mistakes can be very hard. So both students will eventually reach a high speed, but the originally faster one may never unlearn their habit of missing "p"'s (or whatever).
I'm an architect for a large corporation that is today trying to find a replacement for NFS. Our key goals are:
- Integration with a Kerberos SSO strategy
- Fast performance
- Cross-platform compatibility with Windows
- Robust Access Control mechanisms, RBAC would be nice but DACL is probably reality.
I'm working on the linux NFSv4 implementation: krb5 support, performance at least as good as NFSv3, built-in ACLs, implementations for Windows also apparently exist (and some features, e.g., share locks and an NT-like ACL model, were clearly chosen to improve windows interoperability--but I'm not a Windows expert).
Repeated vandalism? You (or your IP address) can get a one-day ban by any of the administrators. A longer ban can be placed if needed.
Thanks to widespread inattention to security and incentives to exploit those machines (because you can use them to send spam), huge numbers of internet hosts are now known to be compromised. IP blacklisting is not a long-term solution to the problem for the same reason it's not a long-term solution to the spam problem.
In general I think he's underestimating the security problem. The last few years should have taught us that given a security hole and given some incentive for exploiting it, it *will* eventually be exploited.
As it stands, you can quote Encyclopedia Britannica in any school essay.
What school are you talking about? Certainly I've never seen any professional academic cite an encyclopedia. You might be able to get away with it as late as high school, but even there it already seems a bit dubious--shouldn't a high school student have the resources to track down an original source?
Britannica may have made errors in the past, but there're more things wrong with a handful of individual articles on Wikipedia than Britannica has made mistakes in their entire history.
Maybe. I'd be interested to see any data on the reliability of either one....
I asked my librarian at the school I go to, and she had thought that it would be a bad idea to use it, because it's written by random people, instead of scholars like in "traditional" encyclopedias.
Encyclopedias in general are useful as a place to get a broad overview of a subject, or to look up a few quick facts for your personal use, but if you're writing a paper and need to cite something then I think you really should track down an original source to cite. E.g., you might look up the world population in an encyclopedia, but when the time comes to find a citation for it, you might try to find out what source the encyclopedia used and cite that.
Maybe this can be changed somehow to get Wikipedia look more credible.
Part of the reason Wikipedia has been so succesful (and Nupedia, last I heard, hasn't been so popular) is the extremely low barrier to entry. *Any* extra steps you add to the process (verification of author's credentials, mandatory review, etc.), no matter how trivial, are likely to cut down substantially on contributions, because it's no longer something you can get hooked on by trying it just for fun in a spare 15 minutes.
When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s,
he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs,
On the bottom of one page appeared the following: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will
be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it.
We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." W.G.
Whoever wound up with the rights to his music has, I suspect, a rather different view of things.
Anyone know what's the best SFF for quiet computing?
The Shuttle Zen XPC. Built to be quiet.
I'm posting from one right now. It's sitting on top of a desk in my living room, and is indeed pretty quiet.
Cute little box. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint is that I haven't gotten 3D acceleration working--the little bit of research I did suggested it should work with open source drivers, but no luck so far.
This is bad. Not all distribution maintainers have armies of patch people.
Well, part of the problem previously has been the "armies of patch people" required to backport new features from development branches to stable branches. Look at the distributor's 2.4 kernels, and you'll see they've been doing lots of work to maintain backports of features their customers wanted.
So this is hoped in part to reduce rather than increase the workload of people patching kernels for distribution.
They probably didn't even bother to turn on the security features of what they had. It's not likely a hardware problem.
I mean, passwords being sent in the clear. That sounds like a software issue to me and there aren't very many pieces of current software that you can turn on SSL at least for something like that.
Actually, it looks from their article like the adminstrators think the correct solution is a switched network; perhaps that is the "expense" they're referring to:
An IT Officer at College A said: "Short of keeping the network as segmented as possible, there is very little we can do."
-All students getting unfirewalled public IPs (I shit you not)
A firewall makes a lame attempt to divide the network into an inside and an outside, under the assumption that attacks will come from the outside. But all it takes is for one machine on the inside to be compromised and that assumption is no longer true. Unfortunately, these days virtually all networks of any size have compromised machines: email and web browsing are sources of compromises, and firewalls don't block those; and lots of people use laptops on other networks as well, where they may have picked up something nasty.
The advantages of firewalls are insufficient to outweigh the disadvantages of not having a real public IP.
The maintenance for an 8 speed system should be no different from a 6. If your shop is charging you by the cog, find a different shop.
Based on the start of the thread (about the difficulty of finding parts for a bike from the 80's), I was worrying more about parts availability a few more years down the road. But I haven't had to pay attention to that kind of thing, so maybe it's not bad as other posters suggest.
I've also been told those integrated brake/shifter things can be a pain to service. I certainly wouldn't have any idea what to do with them if they broke, whereas the shifters on the old 10-speed Peugot looked like something I might have a hope of figuring out....
Your UID's low enough that I can't ask if you're new here,
Frightening....
but that's exactly the impression I get from a lot of posts (not in this thread, but the similarity was close enough remind me of it) when extravagant "non computer-related" purchases are mentioned.
/. understands spending lots of money on CPU/video/memory/games quite well, but conveniently forgets that to a different demographic it translates into "stupid shiny stuff."
It's not the spending so much as the price/performance ratio. I think you'll see many slashdotters take a view of people that plunk down $500 the very latest pentium extreme and then skimp on memory, as they would of people willing to spend $500 on a bike part of dubious value when they'd be better off lubricating their chain.
When we see a lot of people overspend on the flashy heavily-advertised stuff, surely a little eye-rolling is not out of order?
I love indexed shifting. I've used both, and I think indexing is just way, way better. I also really like the STI/Ergopower shift-brake levers. OK, they're heavy and complicated, but they are just so darn CONVENIENT.
Yeah, somehow the times when I want to shift are also the same times when I want to turn, brake, signal, and shout at the guy about to cut me off, all at once.... So it's nice to have all the controls right under my fingers and not have to pay any attention to them.
Noticeable benefit? Maybe, maybe not. But it's more or less a zero-cost option, so why not? I mean, you pay more for the 10 speed gear, but 8 or 9 is de rigeur nowadays.
Well, I just worry that we'll all end up paying for it in maintenance costs down the road somewhere.... And it seems a bit more finicky to keep it adjusted right. But so far it hasn't actually required any maintenance beyond basic adjustments.
Indexed shifting changed everything when it appeared around 1986 or so.
Oh, right.
I have an overpowering urge to say index shifting is for wimps and was a big mistake.... But I have to admit when I got my new bike the other year that it really is rather nice.
Though some changes still seem unnecessary. How many people really get any noticeable benefit from that eigth or ninth sprocket on the rear?
You can justify whatever you want to buy with the words "I can afford it." Now, it may be a waste of money in all aspects other than the satisfaction of the desire for the product, but that's irrelevant.
If you go to the store, buy yourself a tinfoil hate, and tell us that it's to keep the aliens from reading your thoughts, fine, I won't stop you. But the "I can afford it" argument won't make you immune from being made fun of on Slashdot.
Noone's proposing denying anyone's sacred right to buy stupid shiny stuff, but most of are going to translate "well it makes me feel good and I can afford it" into "I've been brainwashed by advertisers".
...I work in distribution for a regional bicycle parts wholesaler in the Southeast. If it was last available on a bike OEM at any point before 1999 or 2000, chances are it hasn't been in production since, and god help you if you go to a shop that hasn't been open as long as your bike is old. Best that a bike wrench can do is substitute something new that may or may not work, and will certainly not look original. Planned obselescence is almost as bad as the hardware/software industries, if not worse. It sucks.
Huh. I guess the only bikes I've done this with have been generic old 80's 10-speeds, and I haven't had trouble finding a replacement. Did the higher-end bikes from that era have less standard components?
On the other hand, the new stuff really is as good as the grandparent post suggests, compared to the old stuff. Go ride a bike. It ain't what it was even ten years ago.
Yeah, I'm on a 2-year old bike now. Though really for my purposes (getting to work and back), it's not that huge a difference.
But to say that you have to be in top condition to get any gain from these products is not true.
More correct would be that no sane person can justify spending $1000's for a improvements that are at best going to help by a few seconds over many miles, unless they're doing time trials and have someone else paying for them....
they can spend the cash and have an easier ride without the hassles of giving up pizza.
I suspect that, compared to having the bike adjusted and maintained well, any improvements towards an "easier ride" due to high-end components are likely to be lost in the noise....
Ok, I'm an old-timer now I guess. My current roadbike is the one I bought in highschool in the 80's. I recently decided I needed a new derailer so I brought it in to a shop. Of course, with a bike that old, they would have had to replace, well, just about everything in order to put in a new derailer.
Of course?? I'm no expert, but I've never had trouble finding derailers for bikes from the 80's. I thought they were pretty standard. I'd shop around a little more if I were you....
Linux has the hardware support. Linux has the software support. Linux does not have the integration of the software with the software, nor the software with the hardware, to compete against Windows as a desktop operating system at this time IMHO.
This is a longstanding problem, and a difficult one: we're able to build such capable systems by assembling all the essential parts from all these different projects (GNU, Linux, Gnome, Xfree86,...) but then it turns out that each has made its own (often entirely sensible) decisions about user interfaces, documentation (info, man, html), configuration file formats, etc. Forget the whole novice/expert distinction, the profileration of interfaces is a problem even for the experts.
Fortunately there's a huge incentive to solve this problem, and a lot of smart people working very hard on it....
Actually, I had to do exactly this with an HP DeskJet 950C on a new debian install just a couple weeks ago. I hooked up the cables, chose "add printer" in the CUPS administration web page, and accepted the defaults. (OK, there might also have been an "apt-get install cupsys" in there at the beginning). A link from an obvious place on the desktop to the CUPS printer administration page is the one thing that might have made the process more straightforward. In all, though, it seemed pretty reasonable.
how do i connect to a windows network?
Not being blessed with any Windows machines either at home or at work, I must confess to having no idea....
linux is NOT a suitable desktop operating system for the majority of users. most users do NOT want to spend a whole lot of time reading documentation on how to setup/configure their system, and most find it fustrating.
Agreed. But I've been pleasantly suprised at the direction things have been going in. I've been running Debian (mainly Sid) for four years now, and every year I find that my system is closer and closer to the defaults, and that Debian is doing more and more of the work for me. Watching friends and family use Windows, they face some setup problems too, and I often have more trouble helping them since I don't know how to troubleshoot as well on Windows.
Not that I'd claim there isn't still lots of work to be done....
Slashdot Mirror
This was a 2-lane highway (with typical speeds around 55mph, if I remember that area right?), and the solar car was hit when it swerved into the oncoming lane. That could be a fatal even for someone driving a larger vehicle.
So the more interesting question to me would be what caused the driver lost control.
--Bruce Fields
You want a doctor that never reads medical journals, consults with colleagues, participates in research studies,...?
All that stuff is likely to be an integral part of any good doctor's daily job (including doing research to help diagnose you; you don't really want a doctor who make every single diagnosis based on memory alone).
--b.
Of course, you're right, that's the only kind of performance that usually matters in the end.
All I'm arguing is that that's probably *not* the best way to judge performance while learning to type, because accuracy is harder to learn (or, more precisely, poor accuracy is harder to unlearn), so in the long run the learning typist who is more accurate probably has the better potential than the one who is less accurate but faster.
Or at least that's my experience with learning similar motor skills, like playing musical instruments, where speed is the result of first practicing very slowly with high accuracy and then pushing the tempo only when you're totally comfortable.
So the high penalty set on accuracy may be more than just a holdover from old technology.
I suppose that makes sense; though for the purposes of teaching typing, insisting on high accuracy may still be useful; in practice a student that types more slowly, but with 100% accuracy, is going to be the better typist in the long run than one that types a little faster and uses the backspace key occasionally--my experience with these kinds of physical skills is that speeding up is easy, once you know how to do something with complete accuracy, but unlearning mistakes can be very hard. So both students will eventually reach a high speed, but the originally faster one may never unlearn their habit of missing "p"'s (or whatever).
I'm working on the linux NFSv4 implementation: krb5 support, performance at least as good as NFSv3, built-in ACLs, implementations for Windows also apparently exist (and some features, e.g., share locks and an NT-like ACL model, were clearly chosen to improve windows interoperability--but I'm not a Windows expert).
--Bruce Fields
Thanks to widespread inattention to security and incentives to exploit those machines (because you can use them to send spam), huge numbers of internet hosts are now known to be compromised. IP blacklisting is not a long-term solution to the problem for the same reason it's not a long-term solution to the spam problem.
In general I think he's underestimating the security problem. The last few years should have taught us that given a security hole and given some incentive for exploiting it, it *will* eventually be exploited.
--Bruce Fields
What school are you talking about? Certainly I've never seen any professional academic cite an encyclopedia. You might be able to get away with it as late as high school, but even there it already seems a bit dubious--shouldn't a high school student have the resources to track down an original source?
Maybe. I'd be interested to see any data on the reliability of either one....
--Bruce Fields
Encyclopedias in general are useful as a place to get a broad overview of a subject, or to look up a few quick facts for your personal use, but if you're writing a paper and need to cite something then I think you really should track down an original source to cite. E.g., you might look up the world population in an encyclopedia, but when the time comes to find a citation for it, you might try to find out what source the encyclopedia used and cite that.
Part of the reason Wikipedia has been so succesful (and Nupedia, last I heard, hasn't been so popular) is the extremely low barrier to entry. *Any* extra steps you add to the process (verification of author's credentials, mandatory review, etc.), no matter how trivial, are likely to cut down substantially on contributions, because it's no longer something you can get hooked on by trying it just for fun in a spare 15 minutes.
--Bruce Fields
Whoever wound up with the rights to his music has, I suspect, a rather different view of things.
--Bruce Fields
I'm posting from one right now. It's sitting on top of a desk in my living room, and is indeed pretty quiet.
Cute little box. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint is that I haven't gotten 3D acceleration working--the little bit of research I did suggested it should work with open source drivers, but no luck so far.
--Bruce Fields
Well, part of the problem previously has been the "armies of patch people" required to backport new features from development branches to stable branches. Look at the distributor's 2.4 kernels, and you'll see they've been doing lots of work to maintain backports of features their customers wanted.
So this is hoped in part to reduce rather than increase the workload of people patching kernels for distribution.
--Bruce Fields
His busy schedule of making bizarre unsubstantiated claims also earned him over a million dollars last year.
A couple of years of that, and many people would stop worrying about future career opportunities completely....
--Bruce Fields
Actually, it looks from their article like the adminstrators think the correct solution is a switched network; perhaps that is the "expense" they're referring to:
Sigh....
--Bruce Fields
A firewall makes a lame attempt to divide the network into an inside and an outside, under the assumption that attacks will come from the outside. But all it takes is for one machine on the inside to be compromised and that assumption is no longer true. Unfortunately, these days virtually all networks of any size have compromised machines: email and web browsing are sources of compromises, and firewalls don't block those; and lots of people use laptops on other networks as well, where they may have picked up something nasty.
The advantages of firewalls are insufficient to outweigh the disadvantages of not having a real public IP.
--Bruce Fields
Based on the start of the thread (about the difficulty of finding parts for a bike from the 80's), I was worrying more about parts availability a few more years down the road. But I haven't had to pay attention to that kind of thing, so maybe it's not bad as other posters suggest.
I've also been told those integrated brake/shifter things can be a pain to service. I certainly wouldn't have any idea what to do with them if they broke, whereas the shifters on the old 10-speed Peugot looked like something I might have a hope of figuring out....
--Bruce Fields
Frightening....
It's not the spending so much as the price/performance ratio. I think you'll see many slashdotters take a view of people that plunk down $500 the very latest pentium extreme and then skimp on memory, as they would of people willing to spend $500 on a bike part of dubious value when they'd be better off lubricating their chain.
When we see a lot of people overspend on the flashy heavily-advertised stuff, surely a little eye-rolling is not out of order?
--Bruce Fields
Yeah, somehow the times when I want to shift are also the same times when I want to turn, brake, signal, and shout at the guy about to cut me off, all at once.... So it's nice to have all the controls right under my fingers and not have to pay any attention to them.
Well, I just worry that we'll all end up paying for it in maintenance costs down the road somewhere.... And it seems a bit more finicky to keep it adjusted right. But so far it hasn't actually required any maintenance beyond basic adjustments.
--Bruce Fields
Oh, right.
I have an overpowering urge to say index shifting is for wimps and was a big mistake.... But I have to admit when I got my new bike the other year that it really is rather nice.
Though some changes still seem unnecessary. How many people really get any noticeable benefit from that eigth or ninth sprocket on the rear?
--Bruce Fields
If you go to the store, buy yourself a tinfoil hate, and tell us that it's to keep the aliens from reading your thoughts, fine, I won't stop you. But the "I can afford it" argument won't make you immune from being made fun of on Slashdot.
Noone's proposing denying anyone's sacred right to buy stupid shiny stuff, but most of are going to translate "well it makes me feel good and I can afford it" into "I've been brainwashed by advertisers".
--Bruce Fields
Huh. I guess the only bikes I've done this with have been generic old 80's 10-speeds, and I haven't had trouble finding a replacement. Did the higher-end bikes from that era have less standard components?
Yeah, I'm on a 2-year old bike now. Though really for my purposes (getting to work and back), it's not that huge a difference.
--bruce Fields
More correct would be that no sane person can justify spending $1000's for a improvements that are at best going to help by a few seconds over many miles, unless they're doing time trials and have someone else paying for them....
I suspect that, compared to having the bike adjusted and maintained well, any improvements towards an "easier ride" due to high-end components are likely to be lost in the noise....
--Bruce Fields
Of course?? I'm no expert, but I've never had trouble finding derailers for bikes from the 80's. I thought they were pretty standard. I'd shop around a little more if I were you....
--Bruce Fields
This is a longstanding problem, and a difficult one: we're able to build such capable systems by assembling all the essential parts from all these different projects (GNU, Linux, Gnome, Xfree86,...) but then it turns out that each has made its own (often entirely sensible) decisions about user interfaces, documentation (info, man, html), configuration file formats, etc. Forget the whole novice/expert distinction, the profileration of interfaces is a problem even for the experts.
Fortunately there's a huge incentive to solve this problem, and a lot of smart people working very hard on it....
--Bruce Fields
Actually, I had to do exactly this with an HP DeskJet 950C on a new debian install just a couple weeks ago. I hooked up the cables, chose "add printer" in the CUPS administration web page, and accepted the defaults. (OK, there might also have been an "apt-get install cupsys" in there at the beginning). A link from an obvious place on the desktop to the CUPS printer administration page is the one thing that might have made the process more straightforward. In all, though, it seemed pretty reasonable.
Not being blessed with any Windows machines either at home or at work, I must confess to having no idea....
--Bruce Fields
Agreed. But I've been pleasantly suprised at the direction things have been going in. I've been running Debian (mainly Sid) for four years now, and every year I find that my system is closer and closer to the defaults, and that Debian is doing more and more of the work for me. Watching friends and family use Windows, they face some setup problems too, and I often have more trouble helping them since I don't know how to troubleshoot as well on Windows.
Not that I'd claim there isn't still lots of work to be done....
--Bruce Fields