"The impression I get is that you think that these are inadequate reasons (I may, of course be wrong), but if that is the case, what is so bad about that?"
I can't speak for the original poster, but what -I- see as bad about it is roughly this: * The MS GUIs make doing simple tasks by hand easy, but make doing complex tasks or automated tasks difficult or impossible. * Command line with plain-text config files makes doing simple tasks more complex, but makes it much easier to automate tasks, or perform more complex configuration tasks.
The worst cases come when the program controlling the GUIs view of your configuration ends up out of sync with the actual configuration (Ever have a Windows bug that was fixed by typing the exact same values into a box then re-saving? I have.) or when the GUI designers decided that you won't need to adjust some value, and thus didn't include it in the GUI.
For what it's worth, my vote for best interface concept goes to OSX... pretty 'clickety-click' GUI used to hide the command line and text files... WHICH ARE STILL THERE FOR WHEN YOU NEED THEM.
There are some tasks for which a GUI is the best and most efficient answer, and there are tasks for which it is not. The parent post complains of tasks that would take moments in Windows seeming difficult in Linux (how long does it take to use the command line?), but as an administrator I invariably find the opposite to be true. It's easier to compose and enter a few command lines than to navigate through 6 layers of GUI and tabs in order to change several values... and heaven help you if you need to do it on 100 systems before you go home.
It's not the Microsoft GUI that's bad. It's a very nice GUI, in fact. Friendly and useable. The problem is that MS insists that the GUI is all that you will -ever- need and allows for no other options.
Methanol (a room temperature liquid) is much, much, much easier to store and transfer from container to container than hydrogen (a notoriously difficult to contain gas). A device capable of containing the latter will invariably be much simpler and less expensive than the former.
Besides, local laws permitting, anyone can make methanol at home as well with an appropriate small garden plot and a still.
As for cost: "The Methanex non-discounted US reference price for July 2003 is $263 per tonne (79.0 cents per gallon)." That sounds like wholesale... but the markup shouldn't be more than a few hundred percent, so it should still be considerably less than $1 per pint.
Brains will only get a player so far: he still has no control over the cards that he is dealt.
It's true that one can't control their cards. The brains come into knowing what to do with the cards you have given the situation. Over time, everyone gets good cards and bad cards; smart players maximize what they get from the good cards and minimize what they lose from bad cards. Depending on your betting position, and the state of the table, one can often win a pot regardless of the cards held (winning when you have no cards is often referred to as "bluffing" and considered one of the keys to playing good poker, btw).
Also in the classic defense of poker, the state of California legally defines draw poker as a "game of skill" and not a "game of chance".
You and your friends are not a statistically significant sample [...] there, I just refuted your assertion.
No, but we're a dozen or so datapoints toward collecting a statistically significant sample. That comment was there primarily for informational purposes, and is in no way neccessary to my assertion that poker is 'nerdy'.
"Maybe I'm just too narrow-minded in wanting only nerdy things on a nerdy site."
I think you just have too narrow a definition of 'nerdy'. Nerdy isn't just gadgets... it's anything that relates to an (often excessive) interest in intellectual pursuits.
Poker is a game that relies heavily on understanding complex probability, strategy, and psychology, and it has always had a strong attraction for smart or geeky people who (rightly) see it as one of the rare forums where one can excel based on brains over brawn. All of the geekiest people I know play poker regularly.
It's at least as nerdy as Chess, and I for one enjoyed the review and will probably go look up a book I might have otherwise missed.
I read through the Discover article when the print magazine came out a few weeks ago, and the science definately seems in order. The fact that they have a pilot plant ready to start operation is also a big plus in the 'legit' column.
And this should have a much bigger environmental impact than standard 'biodiesel' or 'vegetable oil vehicle' projects. If all goes well, we might even be able to stop sucking oil out of the ground in a few decades.
The 'conspiracy theory' part of the story is that it's nearly impossible to get a fiber-owning company (usually a phone provider) to lease you dark fiber. There aren't any technical barriers, just business-model barriers, which lead to dark fiber either not even being offered, or being offered at vastly inflated prices.
The only cases where the extra capacity can really be considered 'wasted' are where there are companies who want to use it but are not being permitted to by the owner. These do exist, but would only account for a small fraction of the excess (spare, not wasted) capacity.
What they don't have to disclose are their keys and tokens.
Only in the case of a "security" API that is, in fact, inherently insecure (such that mere knowledge of how the API functions compromises security) could they not disclose an API, and in that case thay'd have to publically declare that their "security-related" API is insecure...
I'd say that CKK is interested in upholding the law, not in "corporate protectionism" (I make no claims on the interests of this Congress or President).
It is not against the law to be a monopoly. What is against the law is for a monopoly to abuse it's power and status by behaving in certain ways (like using unfair practices to retain it's status, or using it's leverage in one market to dominate other related markets).
The settlement is actually a reasonable attempt at correcting the illegal actions as presented in this case. The changes in enforcement are quite promising, as is the court's retaining of power over the settlement, as it implies to me that they intend to make sure that the intent of the settlement is upheld rather than leaving it open for the usual 'weaseling out through the language'.
...but I will lament the lower circulation of "other" tracks. In my experience, there is usually a track or two on every album that are grossly underestimated by The Recording Industry(tm) and thus don't receive the advertising, airplay, or circulation that they deserve.
It used to be, once I got that album home to listen to, these provided a pleasant surprise, and often became some of my favorite tracks.
Now I (and I presume everyone else) will be significantly less likely to hear those tracks (because we'd have to pay for them before receiving, and are unlikely to have heard them through 'regular' channels) and even more excellent music may be lost to the common consciousness.
How do we know whether a song is "filler" or "underappreciated gem" until we hear it? How do we hear it before we pay for it?
Several of the ozone-friendly replacements (I forget their unfriendly alphanumeric designations) still work by sucking all of the oxygen out ofthe room.
You do need the radius to describe each point's absolute position in 3-space, but you don't need it to describe a point's position relative to the other points on the surface.
In other words, because the radius is the same for every point on the sphere, we can ignore it in the same way that we ignore the time on every point on the sphere, or the 5th dimensional position of every point on the sphere, because they are constant.
A classical plane (which most people accept as a 2-dimensional object) could be defined in 3-dimension space by something like "z=5". Every point has an x,y and z component, but because the z is constant for every point, it can be ignored, leaving the plane as a 2-dimensional x,y specified object. A sphere is just a type of plane described with polar coordinates rather than cartesian.
Does that help?:) Note that IANAM (i am not a mathemetician), so I may not be as precise, or confusing, as a formal proof.
You can always assign extra components to an object by simply measuring it in additional dimensions. If you specify the time your sphere existed at, giving the points x,y,z and t components, it doesn't make it a 4-dimensional object.
The dimension of an object is the -minimal- number of components neccessary to differentiate all of the points. In the case of the sphere, you can specify all of the points involved with only latitude and longitude: two dimensions. Similarly, with the circle, you can specify any point with only one dimension, the length along the circle from a defined origin.
Don't get confused between the dimension of an object and the dimension of the space it exists in. (The minimal space needed to contain the sphere, as you note, is three-dimensional-space).
I believe that was the infamous legislation which had a last minute 26 page addendum tacked on that changed it from being designed to ease finanical impact on small Webcasters into something deisgned to save a mere handful of the largest small webcasters and leave the others to hang.
It snuck through the house before people realized it had changed. So blocking it in the Senate actually was acting on the side of the small webcasters.
Check out the previous news on the subject for more details.
I'm pretty sure it's an LCD and not just a flat-panel. Quoting from http://www.sle.sharp.co.uk/research/3d/index.htm "Sharp Laboratories of Europe has developed a technology that creates a 3D display on a single LCD without the need for any special glasses. Sharp is currently in discussions about the commercialisation of this amazing new technology. "
trans, adj : (prefix) across or crossing gaming, n : the act or practice of playing games
They're bringing MSWindows games *across* to a new operating system. No, it's not really sexy, but it is descriptive. Wouldn't it be better if more companies had descriptive names?
What would happen is that a spammer might start incorporating lots of "high-innocence" words into their spam to try to balance out the "low-innocence" words that they must also include to sell their message. If they don't include enough it gets marked as spam anyway, and those words will start to lose their innocence. If they do include enough for it to get through, you have one email to delete and those words will still lose their innocence.
Plus, since he recommends that every user (or at least every site) maintain their own hash table, there are no "globally innocent" words. Analysis of a central corpus of spam can provide a seed set of "globally spammish" words for us to use (and them to try to avoid if they can).
The individually adaptive nature of the system makes it extremely difficult to circumvent in any reliable manner.
I think that article sums up what I didn't like about the last two movies better than any I've read so far.
The closest characters to the "rogue ideal" in E2 are, oddly enough, Jango and Boba, and I did find myself sympathizing with them probably more than I was "supposed to". I found Jango's death particularly unsatisfying as well, expecting a fight more in line with the one he gave Kenobi, rather than the "oops... *lop*" that he got.
I will say that there were actually humanoids that got hurt and killed in E2, not just droids, but lightsabers leave such nice clean self-cauterizing wounds, don't they?
Besides the R&D costs, you now also need to provide software support to your customers. Additionally, when the next generation of hardware arrives, you have to port and debug your little OS all by yourself.
Implementation is much easier and cheaper in both the short and long run with an off-the-shelf OS solution.
What you might gain is performance and stability, but will you gain enough to offset the fact that you now have to charge $20k for what could have been a $10k wheel in order to cover your SW development costs?
To the price-performance leader go the customers... sometimes.
You need software capable of controlling disks, using the network, providing some sort of configuration ability, and implementing NFS and SMB.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to use an OS and associated software that can do this already (ie: Windows server or UNIX w/Samba).
Network Appliance took an OS and stripped it down to the bare minimum required to do what the NAS needs to, but they spent considerable time and money doing so. Most people are willing to take the extra/unused functionality of a full OS rather than design their own, new, NAS OS.
[my opinions are my own. They definately aren't my company's.]
Raidzone (www.raidzone.com) also makes Linux-based NAS products. They're (for the obvious reasons) many times less expensive than NetApp, and easier to customize the configuration (just add new rpms) but aren't nearly as slick in a few regards.
Snapshots are the biggest way in which NetApp is much better. Raidzone supports it's own "snapshots", but it implements them with a series of gigantic find-based cron scripts that can (on a large filesystem) bring your NAS to it's knees, and it maintains them more like incremental backups than NetApp's snapshot concept.
Basically, each snapshot 'bucket' contains -only- files that have changed in the last time increment. If you delete a file that hasn't been changed in longer than the longest snapshot bucket, you lose. I'm not real thrilled with this, but don't have a better linux snapshot implementation without messing with the hardware or the kernel. Anyone know of anything more NetApp-like?
In the context of chemistry and materials, organic refers to a material based on carbon (an element abbreviated as C). Additional elements that are commonly found in organic materials are hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), phosphorus (P) and sulfur (S).
So... if the plastic is carbon (or hydrocarbon) based, it's organic. Note that this definition of organic has nothing to do with the one used to refer to naturally grown produce.
Slashdot Mirror
"The impression I get is that you think that these are inadequate reasons (I may, of course be wrong), but if that is the case, what is so bad about that?"
I can't speak for the original poster, but what -I- see as bad about it is roughly this:
* The MS GUIs make doing simple tasks by hand easy, but make doing complex tasks or automated tasks difficult or impossible.
* Command line with plain-text config files makes doing simple tasks more complex, but makes it much easier to automate tasks, or perform more complex configuration tasks.
The worst cases come when the program controlling the GUIs view of your configuration ends up out of sync with the actual configuration (Ever have a Windows bug that was fixed by typing the exact same values into a box then re-saving? I have.) or when the GUI designers decided that you won't need to adjust some value, and thus didn't include it in the GUI.
For what it's worth, my vote for best interface concept goes to OSX... pretty 'clickety-click' GUI used to hide the command line and text files... WHICH ARE STILL THERE FOR WHEN YOU NEED THEM.
There are some tasks for which a GUI is the best and most efficient answer, and there are tasks for which it is not. The parent post complains of tasks that would take moments in Windows seeming difficult in Linux (how long does it take to use the command line?), but as an administrator I invariably find the opposite to be true. It's easier to compose and enter a few command lines than to navigate through 6 layers of GUI and tabs in order to change several values... and heaven help you if you need to do it on 100 systems before you go home.
It's not the Microsoft GUI that's bad. It's a very nice GUI, in fact. Friendly and useable. The problem is that MS insists that the GUI is all that you will -ever- need and allows for no other options.
Methanol (a room temperature liquid) is much, much, much easier to store and transfer from container to container than hydrogen (a notoriously difficult to contain gas). A device capable of containing the latter will invariably be much simpler and less expensive than the former.
Besides, local laws permitting, anyone can make methanol at home as well with an appropriate small garden plot and a still.
As for cost: "The Methanex non-discounted US reference price for July 2003 is $263 per tonne (79.0 cents per gallon)." That sounds like wholesale... but the markup shouldn't be more than a few hundred percent, so it should still be considerably less than $1 per pint.
Brains will only get a player so far: he still has no control over the cards that he is dealt.
It's true that one can't control their cards. The brains come into knowing what to do with the cards you have given the situation. Over time, everyone gets good cards and bad cards; smart players maximize what they get from the good cards and minimize what they lose from bad cards. Depending on your betting position, and the state of the table, one can often win a pot regardless of the cards held (winning when you have no cards is often referred to as "bluffing" and considered one of the keys to playing good poker, btw).
Also in the classic defense of poker, the state of California legally defines draw poker as a "game of skill" and not a "game of chance".
You and your friends are not a statistically significant sample [...] there, I just refuted your assertion.
No, but we're a dozen or so datapoints toward collecting a statistically significant sample. That comment was there primarily for informational purposes, and is in no way neccessary to my assertion that poker is 'nerdy'.
"Maybe I'm just too narrow-minded in wanting only nerdy things on a nerdy site."
I think you just have too narrow a definition of 'nerdy'. Nerdy isn't just gadgets... it's anything that relates to an (often excessive) interest in intellectual pursuits.
Poker is a game that relies heavily on understanding complex probability, strategy, and psychology, and it has always had a strong attraction for smart or geeky people who (rightly) see it as one of the rare forums where one can excel based on brains over brawn. All of the geekiest people I know play poker regularly.
It's at least as nerdy as Chess, and I for one enjoyed the review and will probably go look up a book I might have otherwise missed.
I read through the Discover article when the print magazine came out a few weeks ago, and the science definately seems in order. The fact that they have a pilot plant ready to start operation is also a big plus in the 'legit' column.
And this should have a much bigger environmental impact than standard 'biodiesel' or 'vegetable oil vehicle' projects. If all goes well, we might even be able to stop sucking oil out of the ground in a few decades.
That's all reasonably true.
The 'conspiracy theory' part of the story is that it's nearly impossible to get a fiber-owning company (usually a phone provider) to lease you dark fiber. There aren't any technical barriers, just business-model barriers, which lead to dark fiber either not even being offered, or being offered at vastly inflated prices.
The only cases where the extra capacity can really be considered 'wasted' are where there are companies who want to use it but are not being permitted to by the owner. These do exist, but would only account for a small fraction of the excess (spare, not wasted) capacity.
What they don't have to disclose are their keys and tokens.
Only in the case of a "security" API that is, in fact, inherently insecure (such that mere knowledge of how the API functions compromises security) could they not disclose an API, and in that case thay'd have to publically declare that their "security-related" API is insecure...
That's not a particularly fair assessment.
I'd say that CKK is interested in upholding the law, not in "corporate protectionism" (I make no claims on the interests of this Congress or President).
It is not against the law to be a monopoly. What is against the law is for a monopoly to abuse it's power and status by behaving in certain ways (like using unfair practices to retain it's status, or using it's leverage in one market to dominate other related markets).
The settlement is actually a reasonable attempt at correcting the illegal actions as presented in this case. The changes in enforcement are quite promising, as is the court's retaining of power over the settlement, as it implies to me that they intend to make sure that the intent of the settlement is upheld rather than leaving it open for the usual 'weaseling out through the language'.
Universal
Corporation for
Assigning
Names and
Numbers via
Totalitarianism
"How the hell do you make it go away?"
/plugins/ directory and it'll be gone.
Well, if you're using Netscape or Mozilla just remove libflashplayer.so and ShockwaveFlash.class from your
At least that works on my favorite UNIX-like OSs... it might work with Windows as well, but somehow I suspect there are evil registry keys involved.
...but I will lament the lower circulation of "other" tracks. In my experience, there is usually a track or two on every album that are grossly underestimated by The Recording Industry(tm) and thus don't receive the advertising, airplay, or circulation that they deserve.
It used to be, once I got that album home to listen to, these provided a pleasant surprise, and often became some of my favorite tracks.
Now I (and I presume everyone else) will be significantly less likely to hear those tracks (because we'd have to pay for them before receiving, and are unlikely to have heard them through 'regular' channels) and even more excellent music may be lost to the common consciousness.
How do we know whether a song is "filler" or "underappreciated gem" until we hear it?
How do we hear it before we pay for it?
Actually, it isn't used any more because it was found to be ozone-depleting and banned by international agreement.
p ://palimpsest.stanford.edu/waac/wn/wn15/wn15-2 /wn15-208.html
http://www.haifire.com/press/halon_rep.htm
htt
Several of the ozone-friendly replacements (I forget their unfriendly alphanumeric designations) still work by sucking all of the oxygen out ofthe room.
You do need the radius to describe each point's absolute position in 3-space, but you don't need it to describe a point's position relative to the other points on the surface.
:) Note that IANAM (i am not a mathemetician), so I may not be as precise, or confusing, as a formal proof.
In other words, because the radius is the same for every point on the sphere, we can ignore it in the same way that we ignore the time on every point on the sphere, or the 5th dimensional position of every point on the sphere, because they are constant.
A classical plane (which most people accept as a 2-dimensional object) could be defined in 3-dimension space by something like "z=5". Every point has an x,y and z component, but because the z is constant for every point, it can be ignored, leaving the plane as a 2-dimensional x,y specified object. A sphere is just a type of plane described with polar coordinates rather than cartesian.
Does that help?
You can always assign extra components to an object by simply measuring it in additional dimensions. If you specify the time your sphere existed at, giving the points x,y,z and t components, it doesn't make it a 4-dimensional object.
The dimension of an object is the -minimal- number of components neccessary to differentiate all of the points. In the case of the sphere, you can specify all of the points involved with only latitude and longitude: two dimensions. Similarly, with the circle, you can specify any point with only one dimension, the length along the circle from a defined origin.
Don't get confused between the dimension of an object and the dimension of the space it exists in. (The minimal space needed to contain the sphere, as you note, is three-dimensional-space).
Mmmm, topology
I believe that was the infamous legislation which had a last minute 26 page addendum tacked on that changed it from being designed to ease finanical impact on small Webcasters into something deisgned to save a mere handful of the largest small webcasters and leave the others to hang.
It snuck through the house before people realized it had changed. So blocking it in the Senate actually was acting on the side of the small webcasters.
Check out the previous news on the subject for more details.
I'm pretty sure it's an LCD and not just a flat-panel.
Quoting from http://www.sle.sharp.co.uk/research/3d/index.htm
"Sharp Laboratories of Europe has developed a technology that creates a 3D display on a single LCD without the need for any special glasses. Sharp is currently in discussions about the commercialisation of this amazing new technology. "
"Popular Madcap Dog and Rabbity Thing"
It's a reasonably straightforward name, actually.
trans, adj : (prefix) across or crossing
gaming, n : the act or practice of playing games
They're bringing MSWindows games *across* to a new operating system. No, it's not really sexy, but it is descriptive. Wouldn't it be better if more companies had descriptive names?
"Then the whole process starts over again."
But not completely.
What would happen is that a spammer might start incorporating lots of "high-innocence" words into their spam to try to balance out the "low-innocence" words that they must also include to sell their message. If they don't include enough it gets marked as spam anyway, and those words will start to lose their innocence. If they do include enough for it to get through, you have one email to delete and those words will still lose their innocence.
Plus, since he recommends that every user (or at least every site) maintain their own hash table, there are no "globally innocent" words. Analysis of a central corpus of spam can provide a seed set of "globally spammish" words for us to use (and them to try to avoid if they can).
The individually adaptive nature of the system makes it extremely difficult to circumvent in any reliable manner.
please please PLEASE don't forget to leave a command-line or scriptable alternative.
Some of us have large clusters of systems to maintain, and running a GUI on every system involved is almost as annoying as installing MS software.
All I really want for work is a little command-line tool that helps settle RPM dependencies and select updated packages for install.
For home use, the red-carpet interface is definately one of the better ones I've worked with.
I think that article sums up what I didn't like about the last two movies better than any I've read so far.
The closest characters to the "rogue ideal" in E2 are, oddly enough, Jango and Boba, and I did find myself sympathizing with them probably more than I was "supposed to". I found Jango's death particularly unsatisfying as well, expecting a fight more in line with the one he gave Kenobi, rather than the "oops... *lop*" that he got.
I will say that there were actually humanoids that got hurt and killed in E2, not just droids, but lightsabers leave such nice clean self-cauterizing wounds, don't they?
Besides the R&D costs, you now also need to provide software support to your customers. Additionally, when the next generation of hardware arrives, you have to port and debug your little OS all by yourself.
Implementation is much easier and cheaper in both the short and long run with an off-the-shelf OS solution.
What you might gain is performance and stability, but will you gain enough to offset the fact that you now have to charge $20k for what could have been a $10k wheel in order to cover your SW development costs?
To the price-performance leader go the customers... sometimes.
[my opinions. Not anyone else's.]
You need software capable of controlling disks, using the network, providing some sort of configuration ability, and implementing NFS and SMB.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to use an OS and associated software that can do this already (ie: Windows server or UNIX w/Samba).
Network Appliance took an OS and stripped it down to the bare minimum required to do what the NAS needs to, but they spent considerable time and money doing so. Most people are willing to take the extra/unused functionality of a full OS rather than design their own, new, NAS OS.
[my opinions are my own. They definately aren't my company's.]
Raidzone (www.raidzone.com) also makes Linux-based NAS products. They're (for the obvious reasons) many times less expensive than NetApp, and easier to customize the configuration (just add new rpms) but aren't nearly as slick in a few regards.
Snapshots are the biggest way in which NetApp is much better. Raidzone supports it's own "snapshots", but it implements them with a series of gigantic find-based cron scripts that can (on a large filesystem) bring your NAS to it's knees, and it maintains them more like incremental backups than NetApp's snapshot concept.
Basically, each snapshot 'bucket' contains -only- files that have changed in the last time increment. If you delete a file that hasn't been changed in longer than the longest snapshot bucket, you lose. I'm not real thrilled with this, but don't have a better linux snapshot implementation without messing with the hardware or the kernel. Anyone know of anything more NetApp-like?
[My opinions are my own and no one else's]
In the context of chemistry and materials, organic refers to a material based on carbon (an element abbreviated as C). Additional elements that are commonly found in organic materials are hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), phosphorus (P) and sulfur (S).
So... if the plastic is carbon (or hydrocarbon) based, it's organic. Note that this definition of organic has nothing to do with the one used to refer to naturally grown produce.