I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Dual CPU G5 2.5GHz) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 1.7 Gig file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium 4 2.6GHz running Gentoo, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Lynx is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.5GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
On the scale of the network you lose 50% each time. Why?
Let's do it the 'direct way' - as Bittorrent does now. Each user to each user.
Let's say we have 2 users @ 30kbyte/sec upload. Both of them upload to the network @ 60kbyte/sec.
Now let's say the first user connects to the second user to upload to another user (one proxy). The first user uploads at 30k/sec, but the second user also has to upload data _that is most likely useless to him_ at 30k/sec.
You've effectively starved the network out of 50% of it's bandwidth - it's not a good way to go.
Yes, but each time you do that you half (or worse) the bandwidth.
This is already a big problem on bittorrrent and similar file sharing methods - the majority of residential connections have an upload an quarter or even an eighth of their download - usually 30KB/sec or 45KB/sec.
Let's say you have a NAT router per person, and you've just dropped the speed to 15 or 22.5KB/sec.
This sadly isn't good enough though. The RIAA/MPAA can just set up one router and that's it - they have you.
You really need two so you can say that you were just routing on someone elses behalf. You are now at 7.5KB/sec or 11.25KB/sec which is approaching dialup speeds.
Basically NAT routers are not the answer. Encryption is, but it means you have to trust everyone you share with, which is not very efficent in the world of 'share with 15,000 people'.
Electrolysis is VERY efficient. Try doing it sometime. Get a 9V battery and a cup of water. Connect them up.
As you will notice, you'll have hydrogen bubbling and virtually NO heat. Heat is the waste product here. There is no heat, so there is no waste (more or less).
What you are referring to is the fact that it's a very energy-expensive process. But so is electrolysis in aluminium - the price of which is around 90% of the cost of the electricity - yet tonnes upon tonnes are made. The people that discovered how to get the aluminium we use today thought it'd never be used because all they had was batteries (in 1825) and as such put it down as an interesting, but not very useful, discovery. Nowadays the world wouldn't be the same without it.
What if we discover a 'cheap' nuclear fusion process in 5 years, after the G7 realise that yes, peak oil is a problem and pump trillions into research? Hydrogen would be a great energy carrier. Let's face it, if you could 'fill up' your hydrogen car overnight in the garage for $1 because electricity is so cheap thanks to fusion, everyone would choose it, even if it had a 270mile range (which I suspect will vastly increase with time).
Err. yes they do. They use local loop unbundling to put _THEIR_ DSLAMs into FT's exchanges and FTs local loop.
The same situation exists in the UK, namely:
UK Online - www.ukonline.net/8000 who offer 8mbit down, 512k up for £39.99/month (about $75/month?) BulldogDSL www.bulldogdsl.net who offer 4mbit/400k with phone line rental for £39.99 (but it's currently priced at £30/month for the first 12m), which is about $60/month.
There is also more providers using LLU and the two above are looking into using ADSL2+ to provide the same speeds as glorious france. Of course, both of those two providers only cover a selected area, UK Online covering most of the big UK cities, and Bulldog covering London only.
Yes, but you are forgetting a vital point that the UK has the worlds highest coverage of DSL broadband. It's nearly 99.5% now, and will be by the end of 2005.
This, has of course, meant that money has been poured into upgrading the network for small villages instead of fiber optics and higher speed DSL.
The French offer you are talking about is nowhere near 100% coverage and it's unsustainable at that price. Either they are going to go bankrupt or they will hike prices later on.
Also, France Telecom is just starting privatisation. BT was privatised in 1985 or thereabouts and it's a very painful conversion, so expect France Telecom to suffer badly and be totally underfunded over the next few years as it cuts costs as much as possible and hikes prices to get in the black.
BT is now starting to trial ADSL2 and Fibre to the Home, and they have pledged £billions into rolling it out, along with converting the entire phone network to use IP instead of being circuit switched. I'm sure in the next 5 years that the UK will have the best of both worlds, excellent coverage, stable pricing and good speeds.
You do know that the UN is actually worried about a huge drop in population growth in 50 years time?
In 50 years time, they predict that China, India and other '2nd world' countries quality of life will have improved to roughly what ours is. This means people stop 'breeding', as they have better education etc.
The world's population is going to top off at around 9billion and start falling after that. The earth can easily support 9billion, 15billion would be where we start to struggle with current farming techniques... and even then in 50 years it is likely we will be able to colonize other planets.
Right. But Bush's guard records are very different to an asteriod hitting earth. 1) People are bored about being told asteriod's are going to hit earth. They associate it with insantiy. 2) The evididence for an asteriod hitting earth is vastly different. You have at best, a bunch of calculations done with some pretty basic equipment compared to what NASA has. It is far more likely that the media would shrug it off as a mistake in his/her calculations.
They took the KHTML code, and improved it. They submitted their patches back, not as helpful, commented code, but instead mainly huge code dumps of uncommented, undocumented code that needs to be audited, understood and then finally intergrated. Most of the code Apple has submitted is still not intergrated, months after the dumps started coming in. Why? Because it's just so damn hard.
I think you are also confusing the ZeroConf story. Name one software product outside of Apple that uses Apple's implementation - oh, next to none. Because it's buggy and undocumented, the open source one anyway. On OSX it may be a glorious, synergized, Jobs-thumbs-up development experience but outside of that it's basically a shitheap.
The only reason Apple lets you 'plug into shit' is because they are desperate for developers to use their platform. You think they'd be oh-so-nice and happy if they had the monopoly like Microsoft has? Nope is the answer to that. I know we don't admit it on Slashdot, but.NET is a very nice programming enviroment, techincally. I wouldn't use it personally because I don't enjoy playing Microsoft politics, but then again I don't develop for OSX.
Oh btw, I don't really see Apple as a hero in the OSS world. I see them very good at taking OSS techonology and using it to plug the gaps where they can't afford to write their own code.
Yes, but 'anyone with a decent telescope' would not have the power to put a press release or get any major air time or coverage in any mainstream media outlet.
Anyway, let's say 2004 MN4 is a 99% certainty, but they put this press release out saying it's really just a tiny % of likelyhood. Who honestly would go out and double check these calculations?
While we joke, what would the government(s) do if they knew that there was a near certain collision scheduled for sometime in the long-term future?
They certainly wouldn't publicise it. Instead, they'd probably cover it up. The other option is to tell everyone and as such, bring the world to a grinding halt later on and certainly change society drastically in the short and medium term. Who would bother planning anything for the future - pension, education etc would all stop.
I don't set WEP up on my AP even though I'm a techie.
Reason?
1) It takes less than 5 minutes to crack any WEP key with the right tools. 2) It's such a pain in the ass remembering the damn key. 3) My AP speeds drop about 5 fold if I put a 128bit or higher key on it.
Could I make a requst for Slashdot's RSS feed to be longer than the 10 items it currently is. Stuff gets pushed off the bottom too fast and it's hard not to miss stuff.
First of all, the concept of a community-built encyclopedia, open to submissions and revisions from users, is wonderful. It's much like open-source, in fact, and Wikipedia certainly exemplifies how to reapply the OS model to other contexts.
However, the contexts of encyclopedias and software are different. Significantly so. I'm interested specifically in quality control- you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior.
In what ways can a Wiki article be bad, and how can one tell? Do you think QC is a large issue for Wikipedia, and do you have any plans to further integrate the community in the QC process (perhaps akin to the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system)?
I don't live in America. I live in the UK. I am just pointing out that while the USSR was a nasty, oppressive regieme, it did result in huge improvements to the quality of education and living for most Russians.
It's not just as simple to say that Russia is backwards and they should suddenly drop spending on their space program.
No, it might be fine with CSS, but it's DOM support blows. 7.6 has the bare bones to get _GMail_ to work, and it's still not complete (no spell checking support - thanks to Opera's crappy DOM support).
Opera has to move a hell of a lot faster on the ol' implementing DOM front, because at the moment they are behind IE, Gecko and KHTML/Safari.
As for Firefox not rendering Slashdot correctly, it's an issue that's been fixed in the main Gecko trunk for months and was slightly too late getting checked in to make it for 1.0. It'll be fixed in 1.1. Moz 1.8 (which Firefox 1.1 has) has the best CSS3 support of any browser btw, and when they have Cairo implemented they'll have support for a load more.
What, like the USA is a startling success for combating poverty?
5 million+ people directly rely on the govt for food aid, plus god knows how more that have 'fell out of the system' and are struggling to eat.
Not to mention Russia's education system is far superior to the USA one in terms of catering to all, even though it's the most expensive in the world in terms of $/student:
US Literacy rate: 97% Russia Literacy rate: 99.6%
Make your own conclusions from that.
Anyway, what if Russia's space exploration program ended up making a breakthrough in fusion rocket technology, which allowed Russia to generate Gigawatts of power and export it to the rest of the world, making huge sums of money and easily feeding their populace?
If you always cater to the lowest dominator in society, you will fail.
WTF are you on about? Seriously, if you are a 'headend technician' you need to learn about something called DSL.
Yes, that's right, this magic thing called DSL uses the frequencies _ABOVE_ 4KHz (normal telephones use up to 4000Hz, not 3000Hz) to provide high speed internet access.
ADSL2 can provide upto 50MBit/sec and ADSL3 (or VDSL2, they don't know what to call it) can provide 100MBit+. Whether people will bother with these is still unknown, especially with Verizon deploying FTTH massively and driving down costs.
But basically, your comment is bollocks. How you got an informative moderation I will never know.
On healthcare, what I believe the UK system is run as is a 'private' company (it's a trust, but it is more like a private organisation) and they 'buy' patients and they get 'paid' for it. Say you need a heart transplant. The doctor notifies the local trust about it and the local hospitals put a price they can do it at. The trust then chooses the cheapest one and the patient goes to it, has their treatment and the hospital gets paid for it by the local trust.
This inspires both competition and much less centralisation of the hospitals. Obviously, this system is not perfect, because in the events of traffic accidents (for example) people need treatment now, not after a few hours of price checking.
As for the matter of common approval, for the vast majority of cases it is not a problem. I think it's very counter-productive to suggest that universal healthcare is not workable because a minority of cases are hard. Abortion or cosmetic surgery need dealt with on a case-to-case basis depending on their legality.
I also thank you for yours.. very interesting indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Sorry.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Dual CPU G5 2.5GHz) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 1.7 Gig file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium 4 2.6GHz running Gentoo, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Lynx is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.5GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
It's not really a problem. With intelligence caching and lots of RAM, for the majority of uses it won't be a problem.
Most of the files I use such as applications, movies and music are only ever wrote once or maybe 10 times in their lifetime.
No.
On the scale of the network you lose 50% each time. Why?
Let's do it the 'direct way' - as Bittorrent does now. Each user to each user.
Let's say we have 2 users @ 30kbyte/sec upload. Both of them upload to the network @ 60kbyte/sec.
Now let's say the first user connects to the second user to upload to another user (one proxy). The first user uploads at 30k/sec, but the second user also has to upload data _that is most likely useless to him_ at 30k/sec.
You've effectively starved the network out of 50% of it's bandwidth - it's not a good way to go.
Yes, but each time you do that you half (or worse) the bandwidth.
This is already a big problem on bittorrrent and similar file sharing methods - the majority of residential connections have an upload an quarter or even an eighth of their download - usually 30KB/sec or 45KB/sec.
Let's say you have a NAT router per person, and you've just dropped the speed to 15 or 22.5KB/sec.
This sadly isn't good enough though. The RIAA/MPAA can just set up one router and that's it - they have you.
You really need two so you can say that you were just routing on someone elses behalf. You are now at 7.5KB/sec or 11.25KB/sec which is approaching dialup speeds.
Basically NAT routers are not the answer. Encryption is, but it means you have to trust everyone you share with, which is not very efficent in the world of 'share with 15,000 people'.
Electrolysis is VERY efficient. Try doing it sometime. Get a 9V battery and a cup of water. Connect them up.
As you will notice, you'll have hydrogen bubbling and virtually NO heat. Heat is the waste product here. There is no heat, so there is no waste (more or less).
What you are referring to is the fact that it's a very energy-expensive process. But so is electrolysis in aluminium - the price of which is around 90% of the cost of the electricity - yet tonnes upon tonnes are made. The people that discovered how to get the aluminium we use today thought it'd never be used because all they had was batteries (in 1825) and as such put it down as an interesting, but not very useful, discovery. Nowadays the world wouldn't be the same without it.
What if we discover a 'cheap' nuclear fusion process in 5 years, after the G7 realise that yes, peak oil is a problem and pump trillions into research? Hydrogen would be a great energy carrier. Let's face it, if you could 'fill up' your hydrogen car overnight in the garage for $1 because electricity is so cheap thanks to fusion, everyone would choose it, even if it had a 270mile range (which I suspect will vastly increase with time).
Err. yes they do. They use local loop unbundling to put _THEIR_ DSLAMs into FT's exchanges and FTs local loop.
The same situation exists in the UK, namely:
UK Online - www.ukonline.net/8000 who offer 8mbit down, 512k up for £39.99/month (about $75/month?)
BulldogDSL www.bulldogdsl.net who offer 4mbit/400k with phone line rental for £39.99 (but it's currently priced at £30/month for the first 12m), which is about $60/month.
There is also more providers using LLU and the two above are looking into using ADSL2+ to provide the same speeds as glorious france. Of course, both of those two providers only cover a selected area, UK Online covering most of the big UK cities, and Bulldog covering London only.
Yes, but you are forgetting a vital point that the UK has the worlds highest coverage of DSL broadband. It's nearly 99.5% now, and will be by the end of 2005.
This, has of course, meant that money has been poured into upgrading the network for small villages instead of fiber optics and higher speed DSL.
The French offer you are talking about is nowhere near 100% coverage and it's unsustainable at that price. Either they are going to go bankrupt or they will hike prices later on.
Also, France Telecom is just starting privatisation. BT was privatised in 1985 or thereabouts and it's a very painful conversion, so expect France Telecom to suffer badly and be totally underfunded over the next few years as it cuts costs as much as possible and hikes prices to get in the black.
BT is now starting to trial ADSL2 and Fibre to the Home, and they have pledged £billions into rolling it out, along with converting the entire phone network to use IP instead of being circuit switched. I'm sure in the next 5 years that the UK will have the best of both worlds, excellent coverage, stable pricing and good speeds.
You do know that the UN is actually worried about a huge drop in population growth in 50 years time?
In 50 years time, they predict that China, India and other '2nd world' countries quality of life will have improved to roughly what ours is. This means people stop 'breeding', as they have better education etc.
The world's population is going to top off at around 9billion and start falling after that. The earth can easily support 9billion, 15billion would be where we start to struggle with current farming techniques... and even then in 50 years it is likely we will be able to colonize other planets.
Am I the only one which reads POS as 'piece of shit' regardless of the fact I know it means point of sale?
It always fits perfectly in the context as well, as this example proves.
Rendezous is a standard. Just like HTML is a standard.
Apple's implementation of it, for the most part, is terrible. It's great on OSX, but for anything else it's totally unworkable.
Just because Apache uses a totally different implementation of Rendezous (aka Zeroconf) doesn't suddenly make Apple's implementation of it good.
Right. But Bush's guard records are very different to an asteriod hitting earth.
1) People are bored about being told asteriod's are going to hit earth. They associate it with insantiy. 2) The evididence for an asteriod hitting earth is vastly different. You have at best, a bunch of calculations done with some pretty basic equipment compared to what NASA has. It is far more likely that the media would shrug it off as a mistake in his/her calculations.
Most of what you said is purely biased.
.NET is a very nice programming enviroment, techincally. I wouldn't use it personally because I don't enjoy playing Microsoft politics, but then again I don't develop for OSX.
They took the KHTML code, and improved it. They submitted their patches back, not as helpful, commented code, but instead mainly huge code dumps of uncommented, undocumented code that needs to be audited, understood and then finally intergrated. Most of the code Apple has submitted is still not intergrated, months after the dumps started coming in. Why? Because it's just so damn hard.
I think you are also confusing the ZeroConf story. Name one software product outside of Apple that uses Apple's implementation - oh, next to none. Because it's buggy and undocumented, the open source one anyway. On OSX it may be a glorious, synergized, Jobs-thumbs-up development experience but outside of that it's basically a shitheap.
The only reason Apple lets you 'plug into shit' is because they are desperate for developers to use their platform. You think they'd be oh-so-nice and happy if they had the monopoly like Microsoft has? Nope is the answer to that. I know we don't admit it on Slashdot, but
Oh btw, I don't really see Apple as a hero in the OSS world. I see them very good at taking OSS techonology and using it to plug the gaps where they can't afford to write their own code.
Yes, but 'anyone with a decent telescope' would not have the power to put a press release or get any major air time or coverage in any mainstream media outlet.
Anyway, let's say 2004 MN4 is a 99% certainty, but they put this press release out saying it's really just a tiny % of likelyhood. Who honestly would go out and double check these calculations?
While we joke, what would the government(s) do if they knew that there was a near certain collision scheduled for sometime in the long-term future?
They certainly wouldn't publicise it. Instead, they'd probably cover it up. The other option is to tell everyone and as such, bring the world to a grinding halt later on and certainly change society drastically in the short and medium term. Who would bother planning anything for the future - pension, education etc would all stop.
I don't set WEP up on my AP even though I'm a techie.
Reason?
1) It takes less than 5 minutes to crack any WEP key with the right tools.
2) It's such a pain in the ass remembering the damn key.
3) My AP speeds drop about 5 fold if I put a 128bit or higher key on it.
Result - no WEP key.
Could I make a requst for Slashdot's RSS feed to be longer than the 10 items it currently is. Stuff gets pushed off the bottom too fast and it's hard not to miss stuff.
First of all, the concept of a community-built encyclopedia, open to submissions and revisions from users, is wonderful. It's much like open-source, in fact, and Wikipedia certainly exemplifies how to reapply the OS model to other contexts.
However, the contexts of encyclopedias and software are different. Significantly so. I'm interested specifically in quality control- you know when code doesn't work when it doesn't compile or results in unexpected behavior.
In what ways can a Wiki article be bad, and how can one tell? Do you think QC is a large issue for Wikipedia, and do you have any plans to further integrate the community in the QC process (perhaps akin to the slashdot moderation/metamoderation system)?
looks like a major crapflood from the GNAA.
I believe they are using the 'tor' p2p anonymous internet system, from my sources (antislash.org forums).
I don't live in America. I live in the UK. I am just pointing out that while the USSR was a nasty, oppressive regieme, it did result in huge improvements to the quality of education and living for most Russians.
It's not just as simple to say that Russia is backwards and they should suddenly drop spending on their space program.
No, it might be fine with CSS, but it's DOM support blows. 7.6 has the bare bones to get _GMail_ to work, and it's still not complete (no spell checking support - thanks to Opera's crappy DOM support).
Opera has to move a hell of a lot faster on the ol' implementing DOM front, because at the moment they are behind IE, Gecko and KHTML/Safari.
As for Firefox not rendering Slashdot correctly, it's an issue that's been fixed in the main Gecko trunk for months and was slightly too late getting checked in to make it for 1.0. It'll be fixed in 1.1. Moz 1.8 (which Firefox 1.1 has) has the best CSS3 support of any browser btw, and when they have Cairo implemented they'll have support for a load more.
What, like the USA is a startling success for combating poverty?
5 million+ people directly rely on the govt for food aid, plus god knows how more that have 'fell out of the system' and are struggling to eat.
Not to mention Russia's education system is far superior to the USA one in terms of catering to all, even though it's the most expensive in the world in terms of $/student:
US Literacy rate: 97%
Russia Literacy rate: 99.6%
Make your own conclusions from that.
Anyway, what if Russia's space exploration program ended up making a breakthrough in fusion rocket technology, which allowed Russia to generate Gigawatts of power and export it to the rest of the world, making huge sums of money and easily feeding their populace?
If you always cater to the lowest dominator in society, you will fail.
WTF?
Does, in your 'godly' opinion, DSL use the _frequencies_ past 'traditional analogue frequency?!'
He just said that phone lines would need rewiried to use the frequencies past 3KHz. This is utter bullshit.
WTF are you on about? Seriously, if you are a 'headend technician' you need to learn about something called DSL.
Yes, that's right, this magic thing called DSL uses the frequencies _ABOVE_ 4KHz (normal telephones use up to 4000Hz, not 3000Hz) to provide high speed internet access.
ADSL2 can provide upto 50MBit/sec and ADSL3 (or VDSL2, they don't know what to call it) can provide 100MBit+. Whether people will bother with these is still unknown, especially with Verizon deploying FTTH massively and driving down costs.
But basically, your comment is bollocks. How you got an informative moderation I will never know.
On healthcare, what I believe the UK system is run as is a 'private' company (it's a trust, but it is more like a private organisation) and they 'buy' patients and they get 'paid' for it. Say you need a heart transplant. The doctor notifies the local trust about it and the local hospitals put a price they can do it at. The trust then chooses the cheapest one and the patient goes to it, has their treatment and the hospital gets paid for it by the local trust.
This inspires both competition and much less centralisation of the hospitals. Obviously, this system is not perfect, because in the events of traffic accidents (for example) people need treatment now, not after a few hours of price checking.
As for the matter of common approval, for the vast majority of cases it is not a problem. I think it's very counter-productive to suggest that universal healthcare is not workable because a minority of cases are hard. Abortion or cosmetic surgery need dealt with on a case-to-case basis depending on their legality.
I also thank you for yours.. very interesting indeed.