As a caligrapher, I must say that *I* would be dissapointed if caligraphy were to die out. I don't think it will, though, because it's pretty and there will always be people who want to be able to write things in a way that looks nice.
Cursive, though. Yech. What's the point, I can print faster than I can... than I can cursive? than I can curse? I don't know the right word, but you know what I can mean. And if I want something to look nice, I'll get out my caligraphy pens and some nice parchment or high-cotton paper.
"Consequently, there must be far more simulations running in future millennia than seconds since you were born. Thus its astronomically more likely you are a simulation than real... if humans don't go extinct shortly."
There's a logical flaw here - the author is assuming that the existance of a large number of simulations equates to likelyhood that one or more of the simulations will be used to re-create human life/the human experience of life.
Just because simulations will undoubtedly exist does not mean that those simulations will be used to recreate human beings.
"Consider, though, that large power plants are massively more efficient, well-maintained and clean than millions individual ICEs combined."
Good point, I hadn't considered that. I think that a distributed rooftop H2 generation scheme would probably be a good idea... if it could be made to work. See other posts for some potential problems.
Going to have to disagree with you on this one, sorry. When you use electricity to run your vehicle, you're actually being *less* efficient than you would be to simply burn petrol (or hydrogen) in your engine.
Think about it - how is electricity produced? Yes there are some plants that produce clean electricity from wind, water, sun, or nuclear (which is only sort of clean...) but there are still a large number of coal-burning power plants around. Particularly in the US. So instead of burning a fossil fuel in your car and converting that directly to energy, you're burning a fossil fuel at the power plant, turning it into electricity (losing energy in the process,) sending that electricity down power lines to a substation (losing power in the process), from there to your house (or wherever your outlet is,) and through a lot of... I forget what they're called, but they're needed to boost the power periodically. All of these involve a loss of power along the way.
While I appreciate that it's important to find cheaper and cleaner power supplies, and I agree with your efforts to move away from dependency on oil/petrol, I think it's important to realize that using electricity is not necessarily the best (or at least not the most efficient) way to do that.
but have you ever actually written any large piece of interactive software? What about any large piece of multi-threaded/multi-user software? The reason I ask is because it is *impossible* to predict, when you're writing the software, what bizarre combination of input your end users are going to come up with.
It's all well and good to gripe and moan about how the people writing software should write it to handle errors, (and you're right, they *should* write their code to handle errors, there's no excuse not to,) but I don't think you can safely blame everything on shoddy coding. There's just no way to predict every possible combination of input, particularly on a large or complex piece of software. And just writing good error handling code isn't going to change that.
but I'm going to have to disagree with you on most of the points here.
For one, I've got a Windows 98 box (se) that I've been running for about three years now with no crashes, no reinstalls, etc. etc. I turn it off now and then to deal with the memory leaks in IE but other than that, it stays up. The reason I've been able to keep it stable is because I closely monitor the software that's installed and running on it. In my experience, Windows only crashes if you gratuitously install every piece of crap software that's offered to you. And if you do that, really, you deserve to have it crash.
Windows aside - I've got a FreeBSD box that *never* goes down. That's with several dozen sandboxed accounts on it, each of which is running its own web services package - sendmail, apache, mysql, any custom perl scripts the users want to install, etc. etc. Unless you're a clueless sysadmin, running *nix can generally guarantee that your system will never crash. Individual programs, yes, but not the system as a whole.
Bottom line is that if your machine is crashing, you're either using crap for an OS, or you're installing crappy software. Keep your system clean and running only what you need it to run, and you should see your crashes go away.
People make decisions for their reasons, not for yours. They don't care that it will make your job easier, they don't care that it will run better, they don't care that it will save you time and frustration.
So find out what they do care about, and then sell it to them based on those points. Don't mention why *you* want it at all; talk all day about why *they* want it.
(Incidentally, you can copy and paste that response with almost no changes for any "How do I convince..." question.)
Slashdot Mirror
As a caligrapher, I must say that *I* would be dissapointed if caligraphy were to die out. I don't think it will, though, because it's pretty and there will always be people who want to be able to write things in a way that looks nice.
Cursive, though. Yech. What's the point, I can print faster than I can... than I can cursive? than I can curse? I don't know the right word, but you know what I can mean. And if I want something to look nice, I'll get out my caligraphy pens and some nice parchment or high-cotton paper.
Oooohhh, cool stuff. Gonna re-read that article now that I know what it's talking about.
what exactly "number portability" means? Or is this a case where I should RTFM (or STFG, Search The F*#$ Google)?
"Consequently, there must be far more simulations running in future millennia than seconds since you were born. Thus its astronomically more likely you are a simulation than real ... if humans don't go extinct shortly."
There's a logical flaw here - the author is assuming that the existance of a large number of simulations equates to likelyhood that one or more of the simulations will be used to re-create human life/the human experience of life.
Just because simulations will undoubtedly exist does not mean that those simulations will be used to recreate human beings.
"Consider, though, that large power plants are massively more efficient, well-maintained and clean than millions individual ICEs combined."
Good point, I hadn't considered that. I think that a distributed rooftop H2 generation scheme would probably be a good idea... if it could be made to work. See other posts for some potential problems.
Going to have to disagree with you on this one, sorry. When you use electricity to run your vehicle, you're actually being *less* efficient than you would be to simply burn petrol (or hydrogen) in your engine.
Think about it - how is electricity produced? Yes there are some plants that produce clean electricity from wind, water, sun, or nuclear (which is only sort of clean...) but there are still a large number of coal-burning power plants around. Particularly in the US. So instead of burning a fossil fuel in your car and converting that directly to energy, you're burning a fossil fuel at the power plant, turning it into electricity (losing energy in the process,) sending that electricity down power lines to a substation (losing power in the process), from there to your house (or wherever your outlet is,) and through a lot of... I forget what they're called, but they're needed to boost the power periodically. All of these involve a loss of power along the way.
While I appreciate that it's important to find cheaper and cleaner power supplies, and I agree with your efforts to move away from dependency on oil/petrol, I think it's important to realize that using electricity is not necessarily the best (or at least not the most efficient) way to do that.
What about plain old 02? Or is that not stable to hang around very long?
related to the Iraqi Information Minister?
but have you ever actually written any large piece of interactive software? What about any large piece of multi-threaded/multi-user software? The reason I ask is because it is *impossible* to predict, when you're writing the software, what bizarre combination of input your end users are going to come up with.
It's all well and good to gripe and moan about how the people writing software should write it to handle errors, (and you're right, they *should* write their code to handle errors, there's no excuse not to,) but I don't think you can safely blame everything on shoddy coding. There's just no way to predict every possible combination of input, particularly on a large or complex piece of software. And just writing good error handling code isn't going to change that.
but I'm going to have to disagree with you on most of the points here.
For one, I've got a Windows 98 box (se) that I've been running for about three years now with no crashes, no reinstalls, etc. etc. I turn it off now and then to deal with the memory leaks in IE but other than that, it stays up. The reason I've been able to keep it stable is because I closely monitor the software that's installed and running on it. In my experience, Windows only crashes if you gratuitously install every piece of crap software that's offered to you. And if you do that, really, you deserve to have it crash.
Windows aside - I've got a FreeBSD box that *never* goes down. That's with several dozen sandboxed accounts on it, each of which is running its own web services package - sendmail, apache, mysql, any custom perl scripts the users want to install, etc. etc. Unless you're a clueless sysadmin, running *nix can generally guarantee that your system will never crash. Individual programs, yes, but not the system as a whole.
Bottom line is that if your machine is crashing, you're either using crap for an OS, or you're installing crappy software. Keep your system clean and running only what you need it to run, and you should see your crashes go away.
Thankee kindly, sir.
*waits 20 seconds...*
using short words and simple language what this means exactly? Is this basically just a move to stop Amazon.com from going nuts?
People make decisions for their reasons, not for yours. They don't care that it will make your job easier, they don't care that it will run better, they don't care that it will save you time and frustration.
So find out what they do care about, and then sell it to them based on those points. Don't mention why *you* want it at all; talk all day about why *they* want it.
(Incidentally, you can copy and paste that response with almost no changes for any "How do I convince..." question.)
how unbearably sexy it is to hear a girl discussing mind-bending physics. Or anything that's way over my head, for that matter.
Aye, it's only the recording industry that takes legal action against its own customers.