Here's my fictional top 3 as told by popularity-contest
As a debian developer for many years I can assure you it is primarily used to split install media. The top quintile of popularity goes on the first DVD, the bottom quintile goes on the last, fifth DVD. If you are too poor to afford all the DVDs (or CDs), just start burning disks starting with disk #1, until you run out of cash for disks, and you'll probably end up having what you need on the disks you could afford.
Another entertainment is to use it to justify dropping unmaintained packages, by the same type of person that enjoys deleting other peoples wikipedia pages. If only 50 people use it according to popcon, and none of them can be bothered to become the official maintainer, then suggest deleting it, because deleting other peoples work and enjoyment is fun and its easier to get away with when few people notice.
The new applications hijack your homepage - I can no longer middle click to open things I want to see later into the background, because they've been AJAX'd (the new hijacked?).
When I was a pre-beta tester (or whatever) a couple months ago, I agree, that was broken. Today, using FF 3.0.3 (along with about 15 extension addons) that works along with right clicking. For example I opened this/. story by right click open in new tab off the slashdot rss applet. That did not work a couple months ago. Maybe noscript is saving me or something?
For years I removed or disabled flash to avoid stupid graphic designer mistakes and only recently added flash to watch videos, with the protection of adblock and noscript and friends. Will I now have to find a way to disable ajax to work around stupid designs?
I don't recall being asked. I suddenly had it, got to use it for a day or two, then got a link on the page to a survey. I didn't like it very much and my answers reflected that. The next day it was back to normal.
The beta I tested was just like the current page, with the addition of bugs.
This was quite awhile ago maybe months so my recollections may be in error.
When I logged in this morning, I thought to myself, oh no! Its back for more testing! Apparently the situation is even worse. Compared to my memory of the testing experience, the operational bugs seem fixed, but the UI is identical and still sucks.
The downside is it's somewhat different, much more "cluttered". The upside is... uh... what upside?
This community environment would be intended to simulate being able to talk shop with the person next to you, along with the lunchroom and water cooler.
A bar in Second Life(tm)(c)? Finally a "real" use for second life?
Not necessarily. You have to factor in how long the engine is running.
Right, here is another explanation.
My old 87 plymouth horizon got about 10 mpg for the first ten minutes when it was icy cold. After warm up, assuming I had recently spray cleaned the normally stuck choke plate, I easily got in the 30s.
Short trips equals low speed equals 10 mpg due to icy cold engine. So, drive at 25 MPH to the food store, get 10 mpg.
Long trips equals high speed equals 35 mpg due to hot engine. So, drive at 75 MPH across the state, get 35 mpg.
Since almost all of my trips were local, I averaged about 15 mpg in my "economy car" especially during the winter.
"turn the page by swiping their finger across the screen"
Only appeals to those whose laptop screens are encrusted with fingerprints. Ugh. Gross. I'm also not impressed with cellphones that accumulate a "face-print" on their LCDs.
Yet another product that looks great until actually used. I'm sure the focus group loved it.
Perhaps the target market is those folks whom still run their finger along underneath the words?
It's like promoting the "quality" of HDTV to nation where 90% of sets have 1/4 inch of dust and pet hair and badly maladjusted picture controls.
Aircraft have one advantage only: speed. The simple physics of the matter is that an engine used to power an aircraft will never have the same fuel efficiency as putting the same damned engine in a car or a train or any other vehicle where much of the engine's power is put into supporting the weight of the vehicle.
Amtrak to Hawaii? Maybe a really long underground "chunnel" between NYC and London? Water has a non-zero viscosity so don't tell me about boats. Boats are slow thus need to be huge to carry all the food and drinking water. A cruise ship is not going to beat a 777. Maybe if we changed the oceans into liquid Helium-II...
Wow, psychologists must be forbidden to ever take a statistics class then. Remember, these people are usually just as fucked up as the people who pay them $$$ to listen and now we're trusting them to do math.
Uh? I'm in a statistics class right now, and I can assure you that in a normal distribution the median is the same as the mean. The plot of the probability distribution function of a normal distribution is a bell curve. It's symmetric, so the mean is in the middle (which is the median). I think you might be the one who needs to crack a book.
I think he means that its silly to think the distribution could be even remotely normal... Looking at the tails of the curve, you're always going to have more people at the low end whom are randomly physically screwed up (due to accidents or whatever) and a smaller tail at the high end of superior intellects.
Consider that the superior intellects require good genetics AND not getting screwed up from environment or accident vs the lower end requires either bad genetics OR getting screwed up from environment or accident. And certainly the distribution of getting screwed up from environment or accident is not a normal distribution. And random mutation and un-natural selection will not give normal distribution either.
There's just no way the high and low tails can belong to a normal distribution. Sure, maybe if you squint and look kind of blurry around the center, the range of 99 to 101 might be kind of a symmetric normal distribution...
It's just the "soft sciences" being politically correct while using math terms they don't understand.
If the interest rate you can get in the USA is around 2% and the real-world non-manipulated inflation rate is around 10% then how long does it take to save inflation adjusted $50K if you save $1K per year, while losing 8% per year...
You missed the part where I noted that there is more to it than hardware. I would suspect that Red Hat rarely gets support calls resulting from problems in configuring drivers. Really, Red Hat and Novell are spending their time solving problems like, "How do we work around this bug in ksh? Are you going to submit a fix to that?" rather than, "This network card isn't working."
No, I got that. Ironically RHEL would be far more useful at fixing the driver than fixing ksh, assuming the (numerous?) authors of ksh don't work at RH and assuming that their support group understands and can communicate how their developer group implemented their RH specific driver modules and module options.
Here's your choices:
1) Google for ksh and your error message, and either work around or fix ksh, depending on which solution better fits YOUR business requirements. Won't take long.
-or-
2) Spend quite awhile to interface with RH (license # site # phone queue time) then explain what ksh is (they might not know), why you're using it, what doesn't work, what you've tried, why you haven't used a better more modern full featured alternative like bash, what your specific business requirements are for a fix, etc. Perhaps EM and IM sensitive internal documents and files to RH for their review to reproduce the bug, assuming they can do so and/or have the will to do so. Then after a day or so of getting them up to speed on the problem, someone at RH googles for ksh and your error message, and works around or patches ksh whichever better fits RHs business requirements (which may or may not fit your business requirements)
#1 takes a heck of a lot less of your time and provides a solution that actually matches your business needs.
If the bug is so generic that it applies to widely used software on any server, then probably any "IT person" in the industry could help you, including yourself. If its a peculiar problem in a rarely used piece of software, all they'll do is get between you and google and the original software developers.
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to choose a supported distro, even at a purely technical institution. For many organizations, it doesn't make sense to devote time or personnel to debugging system problems,
Looking at the cost of labor, when you're working with low end stuff, it's usually cheaper to replace the hardware with something that is supported than waste labor time. When working with high end stuff, someone's job is/was on the line when they specified the equipment, so presumably they got it right due to careful research. It's a good question if there is a middle ground anymore or if that has been overlapped and eliminated.
and it often costs more to have an IT department handle everything than to have someone from Red Hat or Novell solve the problem
Usually the more people you involve the longer it takes. Realize that it is extremely unlikely that RHEL or Novell has hired author of the software that is having a problem, and probably not likely they have anyone with more experience than your own guys in your field of endeavor. It is also highly unlikely that you are having a problem with the distribution mechanism itself (bug in dpkg or apt-get or whatever). So, what it boils down to, is it more efficient for someone familiar with your local system to use google to find the answer, or to have your guys spend extra time explaining the problem to someone else, who knows nothing about your system, so they can use google to find the answer?
Or did you think the most successful financial companies in the world made an unplanned decision
Considering that virtually all financial companies are either bankrupt or going bankrupt due to fraud and stupidity, looking at them as a role model seems about a decade out of date.
Virtually all decisions made to buy support contracts are either:
1) Out of touch "pre google era" PHB decision
2) No internal skillset for something that is business critical, terrible is better than nothing at all.
3) Cascading interlocking licenses and requirements (you "need" oracle, which requires RHEL, so you "need" a contract) That is a bad economic structure which will eventually be worked around or eliminated.
The would-be SF writer in me wonders if it would be possible to redesign the craft to passively eliminate any hazardous oscillations, by making sure that the structure doesn't have any resonances near the frequencies put out by the engines.
Although most engine designs have a structure reminiscent of a brass musical instrument, surprisingly most of the time they output something like white noise, which will have a measurable and probably high level at all of those frequencies.
Limiting and controlling oscillations takes a real rocket scientist (pun intended?)
Solids give a notoriously rough ride. Liquid fuel engines are fed a smooth flow of fuel and are fine tuned to keep out any combustion instability or oscillation.
Apollo pogo'd pretty well. Maybe a solid Apollo would have pogo'd worse. You seem to be implying that liquids don't pogo which is blatantly in error.
Combustion instability and oscillation and smooth flow of fuel refers to the flow of cooling gas in the engine, basically a swirly gas flow increases heat flux by a large factor until the nozzle melts. Howling engines come from low pressure drop across the injector, as regards your "smooth flow of fuel". You're using the wrong words.
You are correct that the solid stage is a huge mistake, but politically necessary.
Hilariously the apollo program had some pretty serious pogo oscillation problems. Pogo is shaking the rocket up and down makes the propellant flow increase and decrease making the oscillations worse.
In the apollo era, as per http://www.clavius.org/techsvpogo.html they used plumbing style water hammer chambers to eliminate the fluid surges. Let the vehicle shake but prevent the ability for shaking to cause thrust variations.
The modern solution is apparently dynamic shock absorber technology on the vehicle.
The modern solution eliminates the shaking, the old solution allowed it to shake but patched around it so it didn't have negative effects.
The modern solution is better, which makes the comparisons to Apollo kind of funny to those who know...
Drugs are not going to ruin the life of an athlete anyway.
As for the olympic class athletes and pro athletes, they're ruined their life already by being separated from friends and family, removed from real schools and placed in training camps, been given inflated grades by "helpful" teachers so they don't get kicked out for academic ineligibility, and generally don't have the education or degree to succeed after retirement. Most end up pretty well physically ruined by retirement with no hope for the future. I'm sure you can find one counter example, maybe even a couple, but this is the truth for the majority. And we're supposed to think that with such a screwed up lifestyle that a hairy upper lip from roids is just going to push them over the edge, what a laugh, they're already ruined broken souls in bodies that will be broken soon enough and tossed aside.
As for the kids that emulate them, who cares. Anyone kid with that bad of judgment would probably otherwise try to emulate the local crack dealer or otherwise totally screw up their lives anyway. The point I'm making is that roids are not going to screw up good kids, the already screwed up kids are going to use the roids, and frankly maybe that will improve their lives, so why not?
Slashdot Mirror
This article was on here a couple of days ago. DUPE!
Given the subject of the article, "counterfeit" would be a more appropriate term.
Here's my fictional top 3 as told by popularity-contest
As a debian developer for many years I can assure you it is primarily used to split install media. The top quintile of popularity goes on the first DVD, the bottom quintile goes on the last, fifth DVD. If you are too poor to afford all the DVDs (or CDs), just start burning disks starting with disk #1, until you run out of cash for disks, and you'll probably end up having what you need on the disks you could afford.
Another entertainment is to use it to justify dropping unmaintained packages, by the same type of person that enjoys deleting other peoples wikipedia pages. If only 50 people use it according to popcon, and none of them can be bothered to become the official maintainer, then suggest deleting it, because deleting other peoples work and enjoyment is fun and its easier to get away with when few people notice.
As I see it, this plasma rocket is not really useful without a nuclear power source of some kind.
Solar would work quite well, especially on a trip to the inner solar system (mercury / venus)
I think it would be wiser to head inbound for manned missions... easier to keep warm and vastly higher solar output levels.
The new applications hijack your homepage - I can no longer middle click to open things I want to see later into the background, because they've been AJAX'd (the new hijacked?).
When I was a pre-beta tester (or whatever) a couple months ago, I agree, that was broken. Today, using FF 3.0.3 (along with about 15 extension addons) that works along with right clicking. For example I opened this /. story by right click open in new tab off the slashdot rss applet. That did not work a couple months ago. Maybe noscript is saving me or something?
For years I removed or disabled flash to avoid stupid graphic designer mistakes and only recently added flash to watch videos, with the protection of adblock and noscript and friends. Will I now have to find a way to disable ajax to work around stupid designs?
Google was even asking for beta testers.
I don't recall being asked. I suddenly had it, got to use it for a day or two, then got a link on the page to a survey. I didn't like it very much and my answers reflected that. The next day it was back to normal.
The beta I tested was just like the current page, with the addition of bugs.
This was quite awhile ago maybe months so my recollections may be in error.
When I logged in this morning, I thought to myself, oh no! Its back for more testing! Apparently the situation is even worse. Compared to my memory of the testing experience, the operational bugs seem fixed, but the UI is identical and still sucks.
The downside is it's somewhat different, much more "cluttered". The upside is... uh... what upside?
This community environment would be intended to simulate being able to talk shop with the person next to you, along with the lunchroom and water cooler.
A bar in Second Life(tm)(c)? Finally a "real" use for second life?
Not necessarily. You have to factor in how long the engine is running.
Right, here is another explanation.
My old 87 plymouth horizon got about 10 mpg for the first ten minutes when it was icy cold. After warm up, assuming I had recently spray cleaned the normally stuck choke plate, I easily got in the 30s.
Short trips equals low speed equals 10 mpg due to icy cold engine. So, drive at 25 MPH to the food store, get 10 mpg.
Long trips equals high speed equals 35 mpg due to hot engine. So, drive at 75 MPH across the state, get 35 mpg.
Since almost all of my trips were local, I averaged about 15 mpg in my "economy car" especially during the winter.
In other words, their technique only reveals enormous, low colour-depth, uncompressed images. Do such images actually exist in real life?
Yes tactical military maps
"turn the page by swiping their finger across the screen"
Only appeals to those whose laptop screens are encrusted with fingerprints. Ugh. Gross. I'm also not impressed with cellphones that accumulate a "face-print" on their LCDs.
Yet another product that looks great until actually used. I'm sure the focus group loved it.
Perhaps the target market is those folks whom still run their finger along underneath the words?
It's like promoting the "quality" of HDTV to nation where 90% of sets have 1/4 inch of dust and pet hair and badly maladjusted picture controls.
The "Political Candidate Will Embarrass and Impoverish The Nation" detector
Light is always on?
The "Chick Will Sleep With Men Who Have The Detector" detector
You think the light is always on, but its actually always off?
Aircraft have one advantage only: speed. The simple physics of the matter is that an engine used to power an aircraft will never have the same fuel efficiency as putting the same damned engine in a car or a train or any other vehicle where much of the engine's power is put into supporting the weight of the vehicle.
Amtrak to Hawaii? Maybe a really long underground "chunnel" between NYC and London? Water has a non-zero viscosity so don't tell me about boats. Boats are slow thus need to be huge to carry all the food and drinking water. A cruise ship is not going to beat a 777. Maybe if we changed the oceans into liquid Helium-II...
Wow, psychologists must be forbidden to ever take a statistics class then. Remember, these people are usually just as fucked up as the people who pay them $$$ to listen and now we're trusting them to do math.
Uh? I'm in a statistics class right now, and I can assure you that in a normal distribution the median is the same as the mean. The plot of the probability distribution function of a normal distribution is a bell curve. It's symmetric, so the mean is in the middle (which is the median). I think you might be the one who needs to crack a book.
I think he means that its silly to think the distribution could be even remotely normal... Looking at the tails of the curve, you're always going to have more people at the low end whom are randomly physically screwed up (due to accidents or whatever) and a smaller tail at the high end of superior intellects.
Consider that the superior intellects require good genetics AND not getting screwed up from environment or accident vs the lower end requires either bad genetics OR getting screwed up from environment or accident. And certainly the distribution of getting screwed up from environment or accident is not a normal distribution. And random mutation and un-natural selection will not give normal distribution either.
There's just no way the high and low tails can belong to a normal distribution. Sure, maybe if you squint and look kind of blurry around the center, the range of 99 to 101 might be kind of a symmetric normal distribution...
It's just the "soft sciences" being politically correct while using math terms they don't understand.
I don't know how much more efficient plane engines are today, but automobiles are twice as efficient as they were in the '70s.
And you're basing that on your own personal experience of three whole cars? I'm sold.
But could he fill a 208 page book?
This government has forgot a basic precept, that we are citizens, not subjects.
No, you're consumers, not citizens.
Monty Widenius, a widely respected MySQL engineer, summarized some of the key problems last April:
- no multi-master
Works great here. OK, no multi-master as of April, but which decade?
If the interest rate you can get in the USA is around 2% and the real-world non-manipulated inflation rate is around 10% then how long does it take to save inflation adjusted $50K if you save $1K per year, while losing 8% per year...
You missed the part where I noted that there is more to it than hardware. I would suspect that Red Hat rarely gets support calls resulting from problems in configuring drivers. Really, Red Hat and Novell are spending their time solving problems like, "How do we work around this bug in ksh? Are you going to submit a fix to that?" rather than, "This network card isn't working."
No, I got that. Ironically RHEL would be far more useful at fixing the driver than fixing ksh, assuming the (numerous?) authors of ksh don't work at RH and assuming that their support group understands and can communicate how their developer group implemented their RH specific driver modules and module options.
Here's your choices:
1) Google for ksh and your error message, and either work around or fix ksh, depending on which solution better fits YOUR business requirements. Won't take long.
-or-
2) Spend quite awhile to interface with RH (license # site # phone queue time) then explain what ksh is (they might not know), why you're using it, what doesn't work, what you've tried, why you haven't used a better more modern full featured alternative like bash, what your specific business requirements are for a fix, etc. Perhaps EM and IM sensitive internal documents and files to RH for their review to reproduce the bug, assuming they can do so and/or have the will to do so. Then after a day or so of getting them up to speed on the problem, someone at RH googles for ksh and your error message, and works around or patches ksh whichever better fits RHs business requirements (which may or may not fit your business requirements)
#1 takes a heck of a lot less of your time and provides a solution that actually matches your business needs.
If the bug is so generic that it applies to widely used software on any server, then probably any "IT person" in the industry could help you, including yourself. If its a peculiar problem in a rarely used piece of software, all they'll do is get between you and google and the original software developers.
I call astroturf on the above...
Actually, there are plenty of reasons to choose a supported distro, even at a purely technical institution. For many organizations, it doesn't make sense to devote time or personnel to debugging system problems,
Looking at the cost of labor, when you're working with low end stuff, it's usually cheaper to replace the hardware with something that is supported than waste labor time. When working with high end stuff, someone's job is/was on the line when they specified the equipment, so presumably they got it right due to careful research. It's a good question if there is a middle ground anymore or if that has been overlapped and eliminated.
and it often costs more to have an IT department handle everything than to have someone from Red Hat or Novell solve the problem
Usually the more people you involve the longer it takes. Realize that it is extremely unlikely that RHEL or Novell has hired author of the software that is having a problem, and probably not likely they have anyone with more experience than your own guys in your field of endeavor. It is also highly unlikely that you are having a problem with the distribution mechanism itself (bug in dpkg or apt-get or whatever). So, what it boils down to, is it more efficient for someone familiar with your local system to use google to find the answer, or to have your guys spend extra time explaining the problem to someone else, who knows nothing about your system, so they can use google to find the answer?
Or did you think the most successful financial companies in the world made an unplanned decision
Considering that virtually all financial companies are either bankrupt or going bankrupt due to fraud and stupidity, looking at them as a role model seems about a decade out of date.
Virtually all decisions made to buy support contracts are either:
1) Out of touch "pre google era" PHB decision
2) No internal skillset for something that is business critical, terrible is better than nothing at all.
3) Cascading interlocking licenses and requirements (you "need" oracle, which requires RHEL, so you "need" a contract) That is a bad economic structure which will eventually be worked around or eliminated.
Heisen-cow uncertainty principle?
I'll gladly ship you a copy of the free Project gutenberg DVD for 100...
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_CD_and_DVD_Project
The would-be SF writer in me wonders if it would be possible to redesign the craft to passively eliminate any hazardous oscillations, by making sure that the structure doesn't have any resonances near the frequencies put out by the engines.
Although most engine designs have a structure reminiscent of a brass musical instrument, surprisingly most of the time they output something like white noise, which will have a measurable and probably high level at all of those frequencies.
Limiting and controlling oscillations takes a real rocket scientist (pun intended?)
Solids give a notoriously rough ride. Liquid fuel engines are fed a smooth flow of fuel and are fine tuned to keep out any combustion instability or oscillation.
Apollo pogo'd pretty well. Maybe a solid Apollo would have pogo'd worse. You seem to be implying that liquids don't pogo which is blatantly in error.
Combustion instability and oscillation and smooth flow of fuel refers to the flow of cooling gas in the engine, basically a swirly gas flow increases heat flux by a large factor until the nozzle melts. Howling engines come from low pressure drop across the injector, as regards your "smooth flow of fuel". You're using the wrong words.
You are correct that the solid stage is a huge mistake, but politically necessary.
Hilariously the apollo program had some pretty serious pogo oscillation problems. Pogo is shaking the rocket up and down makes the propellant flow increase and decrease making the oscillations worse.
In the apollo era, as per http://www.clavius.org/techsvpogo.html they used plumbing style water hammer chambers to eliminate the fluid surges. Let the vehicle shake but prevent the ability for shaking to cause thrust variations.
The modern solution is apparently dynamic shock absorber technology on the vehicle.
The modern solution eliminates the shaking, the old solution allowed it to shake but patched around it so it didn't have negative effects.
The modern solution is better, which makes the comparisons to Apollo kind of funny to those who know...
No one has brought up the obvious point that this indicates what we call "constants" don't need to be constant to fit with the stars we see?
Or at least they need to be less constant than originally believed?
Drugs are not going to ruin the life of an athlete anyway.
As for the olympic class athletes and pro athletes, they're ruined their life already by being separated from friends and family, removed from real schools and placed in training camps, been given inflated grades by "helpful" teachers so they don't get kicked out for academic ineligibility, and generally don't have the education or degree to succeed after retirement. Most end up pretty well physically ruined by retirement with no hope for the future. I'm sure you can find one counter example, maybe even a couple, but this is the truth for the majority. And we're supposed to think that with such a screwed up lifestyle that a hairy upper lip from roids is just going to push them over the edge, what a laugh, they're already ruined broken souls in bodies that will be broken soon enough and tossed aside.
As for the kids that emulate them, who cares. Anyone kid with that bad of judgment would probably otherwise try to emulate the local crack dealer or otherwise totally screw up their lives anyway. The point I'm making is that roids are not going to screw up good kids, the already screwed up kids are going to use the roids, and frankly maybe that will improve their lives, so why not?