Have you bumped into any porn/dating-system ads that appear to pretty effectively map your ip address to your locality ("Find someone in Smallville to sleep with tonight!")?
As a matter of fact, yes, I have. Pretty disturbing.
Even "average" users expect to be able to move content around and watch it without having to jump through hoops. There are no examples of content and products with hard DRM that have been a success. Have you played video games lately?
Similarly, having a very fuel-efficient car makes it more likely that I'll actually use and enjoy the convenience of my car. If it cost me $50 every 200 or 250 miles, I might think more about hopping in the car -- but at $30 every 400 miles, I don't really think about the price of fuel when i'm deciding whether to zip off somewhere to go hiking. That's not exactly good for the environment then is it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
City buses cause more pollution per rider than almost any vehicle.
After you factor average riders per bus day, mileage per rider, and the cost of maintenance, the average short bus trip is over $10 (in Chicago) per rider. Some say $18 per trip. Just divide the yearly operating budget by yearly riders and you see a frightening figure. It would be nice if you could back this up (better than "some say"). Dollar cost != environmental cost. Also, the marginal cost per additional rider is low, so taking the bus instead of driving is still a good benefit.
And all those city employees? Many drive cars. If they weren't city employees, they would probably still drive cars, so this isn't a good argument.
Let me make a comparison. I'm not gay and have no interest whatsoever in homosexual pornography. But I would fight against a law forbidding it. As Voltaire said (pardon my French:) ): "Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites mais je me battrai jusqu'à la mort pour que vous ayez le droit de le dire." ("I don't agree with what you say, but I'll fight to death for you to be allowed to say it")
I am currently playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within I (tried to) play this one. First of all, it took me 20 tries to get past the first boss (which comes after 2 minutes) (until I figured out I should be parrying all the time). Second, the controls are terrible. I though this kind of thing had disappeared after the first years of 3D gaming, but your direction buttons are relative to the CAMERA. Unfortunately, the camera doesn't like being inside walls, so it moves around. So it's impossible to just go straight. Since you always have to jump over pits, etc, that makes the game unplayable (for me at least, maybe console gamers are used to this weird system).
Last I heard, lightning reaches temperatures approaching that of the sun's surface. If such is the case, then something approaching that process has to occur. The sun's surface is approximately 5780 K (See here). That's not much, fusion usually needs on the order of millions of K.
From what I understand, Linux doesn't lock the files like Windows. You can overwrite a file that's already open, and all new opens of that file will use the new contents. I've certainly never seen an error like: "cp: Error: Unable to copy file - destination file locked" or similar. That's right. On Linux, files are reference-counted. If you have a filesystem entry, that's a reference (note that you can have several references to the same files: that's what hard links are). If you have a file handle, that's one too. A file is physically removed only if its ref count goes down to 0, but you can remove a reference at any time. That's why you can overwrite an open file, and that's probably the single biggest advantage of Linux over Windows.
Quote from Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise: - "The party of the first part gives the party of the second part, and his associates, full power to do with him, at their pleasure, to rule, to send, to fetch, or carry him or his, be it either body, soul, flesh, blood, or goods." What does that mean? - Oh, that's a transportation clause.
What is this "Windows J" he speaks of? Is this the code name for the real next version of Windows (since Longhorn is due out in 2042)? It looks like smileys have been turned into J
Re:Dvorak sucks if you're not American.
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
all are derivatives of some english characters and pressing the alt+original character produces the extra one, alt+o=ó etc. Pretty simple? Yes, and could be easily ported to Dvorak. But it wasn't. I'm left out in the cold, no Dvorak-PL for me. On linux if you have a Multi_key usually you can do things like Multi + ' + o => ó. This also works with Dvorak (as far as I can tell, on my configuration)
It's cheap, environmentally friendly (just fire the waste water off to your garden)
So, if it is environmentally friendly, just where did the "ice water" come from?
Unless you have a solar or wind-powered refrigerator, I suspect that the overall system is not actually all that environmentally friendly. What is the energy efficiency of the system?
I take the principle that A/C CAN'T be environmentally friendly. The 2nd principle of thermodynamics implies that A/C creates a LOT of entropy / consumes a LOT of energy. Where the energy comes from also affects the environment-friendliness, in that case it comes from the water distribution system (+ the electricity for the fridge, which actually makes the system perform worse if the fridge is in the same room as the A/C), which probably uses electricity & gas, as usual. Plus the system is certainly much less efficient than a real A/C, so it's actually bad for the environment (I guess you gain a little by not having to build the A/C)
better still- if one can copy a password out of a file on the USB drive or floppy (or even a burned CD ROM), and paste it into the login field, then a keylogger will never see keystrokes other than "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v". It wouldn't be hard to have a clipboard logger.
wind resistance is cubed every time you double your speed You mean *8 when speed is *2? You can't "cube" a value that has a unit, and expect the same kind of value.
It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car. It may be true that it's harder to keep a plane flying than a car rolling, but think of an airship. It doesn't require any energy to keep airborne (physics don't require any energy for that), is generally probably much more efficient than a car, and yet its mass is certainly bigger than that of a car. So your "physics fact" is certainly not one. Your figure on oil reserves is also probably wrong, but I agree with you that this is still a big problem.
If McVoy thinks that reverse-engineering is so "dishonest", then why did he offer to give free tools to a worldwide project whose primary focus is to reverse-engineering an entire OS? What project? What OS? AFAIK Linux is a "forward" engineering project (the device drivers might be different in some (most?) cases)
I work with XML every day. And every day I wonder the same thing: why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated? Why can't it just be optional? In other words, why can't it just be abbreviated as: <tagname>data</> ? Same thing for me, although I'd rather have C-like blocks e.g. {data} so it's easier to jump from one side to the other (as any good editor will allow you to do). And quoting could be made easier, too (Come on, <? What were they thinkin?!). The only advantage of not using \ as everyone else does is that if you actually have to store a string that's quoted for something else you don't have to write e.g. \\\\\\\\ (what you need for instance to grep for a \\ from a shell).
Re:I just want C++ programs to COMPILE faster
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
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· Score: 1
Thats not always a good thing. Sometimes you need to view header source to get info that simply isn't in the man pages, eg the type of some variable or the default value of a parameter. Precompiled header != "binary-only" header Usually you do the precompilation yourself, you just don't need to do it for every single file you compile.
Re:I just want C++ programs to COMPILE faster
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
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· Score: 1
Is it just me, or is compiling C++ code an order of magnitude slower than compiling C code? (exaggeration) I'm sure there's a very good reason why this is so, but it still doesn't make me happy. You're quite right, and the main reason is the quantity of headers, containing templates: templates usually have their code inside the headers, so if you use STL or boost or similar, each of your file will be preprocessed to a file 100000 lines long, with a lot of code that's hard (slow) to compile. I believe gcc has precompiled headers since 3.4, which should improve things a lot (e.g. Visual Studio compiles very fast with pch), but I haven't tried them yet.
It's not that expensive with some of the newer AUTOMATED technologies out there. The DOD and NASA are actually DOING this right now. I have a friend involved with funding advanced research in this area and products are coming. The products will likely cost in the 100-200K range and they are pretty fast. They will reveal things like buffer overflows, memory leaks, pointer problems, malformed expression problems, etc. I work at a company doing this, and while the technology is good, it doesn't guarantee anything (to be fast, and especially to avoid overwhelming false positives, they need to be conservarive). In the not too distant future they will be able to formally prove the correctness of a system. "Correctness" is hard to define; most interesting problems (leaks, overflows...) are unsolvable in the general case (think halting). To prove "correctness" you usually need predicates that you need to prove are valid. The hardest part is not necessarily the proof.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you bumped into any porn/dating-system ads that appear to pretty effectively map your ip address to your locality ("Find someone in Smallville to sleep with tonight!")?
As a matter of fact, yes, I have. Pretty disturbing.
Think of each "case" as a goto label and the "switch" as an indexed goto.
Even "average" users expect to be able to move content around and watch it without having to jump through hoops. There are no examples of content and products with hard DRM that have been a success.
Have you played video games lately?
Similarly, having a very fuel-efficient car makes it more likely that I'll actually use and enjoy the convenience of my car. If it cost me $50 every 200 or 250 miles, I might think more about hopping in the car -- but at $30 every 400 miles, I don't really think about the price of fuel when i'm deciding whether to zip off somewhere to go hiking.
That's not exactly good for the environment then is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
City buses cause more pollution per rider than almost any vehicle.
After you factor average riders per bus day, mileage per rider, and the cost of maintenance, the average short bus trip is over $10 (in Chicago) per rider. Some say $18 per trip. Just divide the yearly operating budget by yearly riders and you see a frightening figure.
It would be nice if you could back this up (better than "some say"). Dollar cost != environmental cost. Also, the marginal cost per additional rider is low, so taking the bus instead of driving is still a good benefit.
And all those city employees? Many drive cars.
If they weren't city employees, they would probably still drive cars, so this isn't a good argument.
but I know I'm really Xander.
I used to identify with Xander too, until he got a girlfriend.
GIFs have advantages too /. still use them? :)
Of course, why else would
Let me make a comparison. I'm not gay and have no interest whatsoever in homosexual pornography. But I would fight against a law forbidding it. :) ):
As Voltaire said (pardon my French
"Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites mais je me battrai jusqu'à la
mort pour que vous ayez le droit de le dire."
("I don't agree with what you say, but I'll fight to death for you to be allowed to say it")
I am currently playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
I (tried to) play this one.
First of all, it took me 20 tries to get past the first boss (which comes after 2 minutes) (until I figured out I should be parrying all the time).
Second, the controls are terrible. I though this kind of thing had disappeared after the first years of 3D gaming, but your direction buttons are relative to the CAMERA. Unfortunately, the camera doesn't like being inside walls, so it moves around. So it's impossible to just go straight. Since you always have to jump over pits, etc, that makes the game unplayable (for me at least, maybe console gamers are used to this weird system).
Last I heard, lightning reaches temperatures approaching that of the sun's surface. If such is the case, then something approaching that process has to occur.
The sun's surface is approximately 5780 K (See here). That's not much, fusion usually needs on the order of millions of K.
They going to patent XML?
close...
I know that and wouldn't buy a CD without the logo in a store, but what about when you order it (e.g. from Amazon)? How do you know?
From what I understand, Linux doesn't lock the files like Windows. You can overwrite a file that's already open, and all new opens of that file will use the new contents. I've certainly never seen an error like: "cp: Error: Unable to copy file - destination file locked" or similar.
That's right. On Linux, files are reference-counted. If you have a filesystem entry, that's a reference (note that you can have several references to the same files: that's what hard links are). If you have a file handle, that's one too. A file is physically removed only if its ref count goes down to 0, but you can remove a reference at any time. That's why you can overwrite an open file, and that's probably the single biggest advantage of Linux over Windows.
Quote from Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise:
- "The party of the first part gives the party of the second part, and his associates, full power to do with him, at their pleasure, to rule, to send, to fetch, or carry him or his, be it either body, soul, flesh, blood, or goods." What does that mean?
- Oh, that's a transportation clause.
What is this "Windows J" he speaks of? Is this the code name for the real next version of Windows (since Longhorn is due out in 2042)?
It looks like smileys have been turned into J
all are derivatives of some english characters and pressing the alt+original character produces the extra one, alt+o=ó etc. Pretty simple? Yes, and could be easily ported to Dvorak. But it wasn't. I'm left out in the cold, no Dvorak-PL for me.
On linux if you have a Multi_key usually you can do things like Multi + ' + o => ó. This also works with Dvorak (as far as I can tell, on my configuration)
It's cheap, environmentally friendly (just fire the waste water off to your garden)
So, if it is environmentally friendly, just where did the "ice water" come from?
Unless you have a solar or wind-powered refrigerator, I suspect that the overall system is not actually all that environmentally friendly. What is the energy efficiency of the system?
I take the principle that A/C CAN'T be environmentally friendly.
The 2nd principle of thermodynamics implies that A/C creates a LOT of entropy / consumes a LOT of energy. Where the energy comes from also affects the environment-friendliness, in that case it comes from the water distribution system (+ the electricity for the fridge, which actually makes the system perform worse if the fridge is in the same room as the A/C), which probably uses electricity & gas, as usual.
Plus the system is certainly much less efficient than a real A/C, so it's actually bad for the environment (I guess you gain a little by not having to build the A/C)
better still- if one can copy a password out of a file on the USB drive or floppy (or even a burned CD ROM), and paste it into the login field, then a keylogger will never see keystrokes other than "ctrl-c" and "ctrl-v".
It wouldn't be hard to have a clipboard logger.
wind resistance is cubed every time you double your speed
You mean *8 when speed is *2? You can't "cube" a value that has a unit, and expect the same kind of value.
It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car.
It may be true that it's harder to keep a plane flying than a car rolling, but think of an airship. It doesn't require any energy to keep airborne (physics don't require any energy for that), is generally probably much more efficient than a car, and yet its mass is certainly bigger than that of a car. So your "physics fact" is certainly not one.
Your figure on oil reserves is also probably wrong, but I agree with you that this is still a big problem.
If McVoy thinks that reverse-engineering is so "dishonest", then why did he offer to give free tools to a worldwide project whose primary focus is to reverse-engineering an entire OS?
What project? What OS?
AFAIK Linux is a "forward" engineering project (the device drivers might be different in some (most?) cases)
I work with XML every day. And every day I wonder the same thing: why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated? Why can't it just be optional? In other words, why can't it just be abbreviated as: <tagname>data</> ?
Same thing for me, although I'd rather have C-like blocks e.g. {data} so it's easier to jump from one side to the other (as any good editor will allow you to do). And quoting could be made easier, too (Come on, <? What were they thinkin?!). The only advantage of not using \ as everyone else does is that if you actually have to store a string that's quoted for something else you don't have to write e.g. \\\\\\\\ (what you need for instance to grep for a \\ from a shell).
Thats not always a good thing. Sometimes you need to view header source to get info that simply isn't in the man pages, eg the type of some variable or the default value of a parameter.
Precompiled header != "binary-only" header
Usually you do the precompilation yourself, you just don't need to do it for every single file you compile.
Is it just me, or is compiling C++ code an order of magnitude slower than compiling C code? (exaggeration) I'm sure there's a very good reason why this is so, but it still doesn't make me happy.
You're quite right, and the main reason is the quantity of headers, containing templates: templates usually have their code inside the headers, so if you use STL or boost or similar, each of your file will be preprocessed to a file 100000 lines long, with a lot of code that's hard (slow) to compile.
I believe gcc has precompiled headers since 3.4, which should improve things a lot (e.g. Visual Studio compiles very fast with pch), but I haven't tried them yet.
It's not that expensive with some of the newer AUTOMATED technologies out there. The DOD and NASA are actually DOING this right now. I have a friend involved with funding advanced research in this area and products are coming. The products will likely cost in the 100-200K range and they are pretty fast. They will reveal things like buffer overflows, memory leaks, pointer problems, malformed expression problems, etc.
I work at a company doing this, and while the technology is good, it doesn't guarantee anything (to be fast, and especially to avoid overwhelming false positives, they need to be conservarive).
In the not too distant future they will be able to formally prove the correctness of a system.
"Correctness" is hard to define; most interesting problems (leaks, overflows...) are unsolvable in the general case (think halting). To prove "correctness" you usually need predicates that you need to prove are valid. The hardest part is not necessarily the proof.