In particular, anything affecting the North Atlantic Current will make most of Europe a good bit colder.
True. If we assume that the climate change somehow manages to disrupt the Gulf Stream we'd end up with a situation where "global warming" means freezing temperatures for most of Europe. Remember, Berlin isn't too much further south than Moscow. In terms more familiar to US Americans, it would lie about halfway between the northern tip of Washington and the southern tip of Alaska (well, actually more like 2/3 towards Alaska). The only reason we have it as nice and cozy as we do is because the Gulf Stream is warming us.
"Global warming" doesn't neccessarily mean warmer temperatures for everyone, thus the new name.
DIY Homeland Security is easy. Just randomly cancel flights you want to take, record your own phone calls and put them on the internet and occasionally use a lubed up rubber glove on yourself.
Probably because gravity works that way. Unless they can make outer space have a greater gravitational pull on the ISS than Earth has things are going to fall down from there, not up.
I'm posting from Australia as well and the situation here is PERFECTLY FINE. Internet access in Australia is FAST AND CHEAP as it is, but now they're filtering all kinds of SITES NORMAL PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO VISIT ANYWAY. I also suspect they LEAVE INTACT all outgoing data so as to LET EVERYONE ENJOY THEIR FREE SPEECH.
Seriously, what kind of EXTREMELY LIKABLE AND INTELLIGENT government comes up with something like that? Australia is really looking more and more like AN UTOPIA. I'm going back to THE OUTBACK as fast as I can. DON'T LOOK FOR ME, I'M GOING TO STAY OUT THERE FOR A WHILE.
The niche exists so something had to fill it. We ended up with PHP - imagine what would've happened if the morons' language of choice would've been Perl (probably with some kind of framework only 10% of people bother to configure correctly). As clueless people tend to abuse each and any mechanism a language has to offer we can be happy Perl didn't end up being everyone's darling.
Actually, science is a very limited resource and one of the Mars missions' most important goals is to see if Mars has any substantial science ore deposits and how we could mine them. It turned out that Martian soil actually contains small lumps of high-purity science ore, which the rovers collect. NASA is working on remotely using that almost-pure science to generate further insights into the Martian science deposits before Martian winter kills off the electronics. However, using impure science with equipment not designed for it has a high chance of failure and might, for example, generate data implying that tabletop cold fusion works.
NASA has already tried to remotely solve an issue by remotely throwing Martian science ore at it: The design of the Space Shuttle successor platform. The result was the Ares V launch vehicle, which now required copious amounts of refined Earth science to work around the scientific flaws caused by Martian science impurities. They have learned their lesson about lightly using insufficiently-refined science the hard way.
Unfortunately the NASA budget doesn't allow them to buy as much science as they would need so nowadays they usually rely on either recycled second-hand science or alternative sources of science like Mars. That's also why they desperately want to get Hubble back online - it was launched with a substantial science stockpile onboard and they really need to tap into that, even if the Hubble design limits the applications of onboard science mostly to deep-space observation.
Given how much science might be found on Mars I think NASA should really try to get Congress to open parts of the National Science Reserve to them - after all, if they manage to get a small science refinery up there they might relieve the already-strained world supply (and generate quite a bit of money by selling access to Martian science to other countries). This is especially important as leading science experts predict that we might reach peak science in less than twenty years.
More importantly, does this mean another terrible Aerosmith song?!?
Screw the song, do we have to suffer another "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing"-level music video? When that video was released the Yangtze burst its banks, the ruble devalued by 70%, Iraq officially suspended all cooperation with UNSCOM teams and over 200 were killed and over 4,500 injured in US embassy bombings. And that's just one month.
I really hope the United Nations and/or NATO will make sure this tragedy doesn't happen again. I advocate surgical preemptive strikes in case a new Armageddon script is suspected.
If votes are available in a database the database was... ...run and populated by a few persons using the tallies from lots of publically supervised counters or... ...run and populated by a few persons using the tallies from machines designed, built and maintained by a few persons.
At each point I mentioned "a few persons" you can pay off someone without having to buy half of the country. In the upper example that's twice (DB admins and whoever enters data into the DB), in the lower one five times (DB admin, DB entry, machine designer, machine builder, machine maintainer) - and since there's usually significant overlap between those various sets of persons paying off someone becomes even more effective.
Traditional paper voting might be attackable as well but the voting part is actually the most secure part. Usually representatives from all partes are there to count and cross-validate their results and the public gets to watch. That means that if you want to reliably tamper with counting you'd have to pay off everyone in the voting district - and that includes the very people you want to skew the votes against.
And try holding a dragged item over a taskbar button. The window will activate and you can drop the item anywhere in it.
I know, I have used Windows (and OS X supports exactly the same thing). But it's easier to just throw stuff on an icon/button than to drag it down, wait for the window to activate, locate the spot where the window expects file to be dropped (if such a spot exists) and drag it over there. While the latter method is more flexible, the former one is much faster for when you just want to open files and both aren't mutually exclusive.
I think it's especially stupid that Windows actually has a special handler for dropping stuff down there - it shows you a dialog informing youn that you can't drop stuff on taskbar buttons. Changing that into an "open file" handler should be trivial. Even allowing applications to define their own taskbar button drop handlers should only be moderately more complex and the desktop environment game is about one-upping each other, not just reaching parity.
Quicklists? You can already right click on a running app in the OS X Dock and it has contextual tasks.
True. In fact I consider it to be extremely basic stuff and am surprised that Vista doesn't already have it. But then again Windows still insists that you can't drop anything on a taskbar button (under OS X the same is equivalent to opening the dropped file with the application in question)...
Even in that case the question remains whether he's solely responsible - after all he could only do what he did because of the admins' negligience. (Of course any charges pressed against the admins would be a separate case, though.)
Is it breaking and entering when I give you the key to my house and you use that key to enter my house? Remember, the student legally possessed a password giving him access to the data in question.
German law is more about resocialization then punishment. American law often works the other way. I think in theory harsh punishments are supposed to discourage people from breaking the law; of course the number of Americans in prison shows that practice appears to look different...
I fail to understand why you even have that issue. In Germany Bundestag elections (the closest we get to your presidential elections) are always held on sundays - virtually no one has to leave work to go vote or volunteer. The election sunday is engrained deeply enough in our culture that the "Who yould you elect?" question is called the "sunday question" (as it's invariably "Who would you vote for if the Bundestag election was this Sunday?").
So what's so special about the 9-4 date that you have to stick with it? If it is a historically significant date then either should it be a holiday or, well, there's not enough significance to keep it as the One True Election Day(TM).
Imagine you are going to implement a normal file system, just like the ones we use today. But there's one different thing about it: you will *always* know in advance the "class" of any file that you will ever be asked to store within that FS. The class would describe its semantics: whether will it grow or not, will it change frequently, will it be big or small, etc. This actually could help a lot in deciding where to physically put the file.
I probably didn't express what I wanted to express. The problem with specialized FSes is that (unless you only use FSes that can easily handle growing and shrinking) you'll have to guess how much of the drive to format with which FS. If you mispredict you're either going to waste space (as some partition sees less use than you expected), you're going to run out of storage even though there is still place left (as the "fitting" partition is full) and/or you end up storing files in partitions that are suboptimal because the optimal ones are full. If you do have dynamic growing and shrinking you have to handle repartitioning the drive while it's live without generating too much access lag.
It's certainly doable, but I think it might have too many pitfalls - especially if the user inexplicably gets "disk full" errors on volumes with gigabytes of space left or sees performance go down the drain as partitions are moved in mid-work (or mid-game). It is an interesting concept, though, and certainly worth looking into.
Well... Once the ODB and "FS over ODB" would be completed... All there is to make the old applications work is to link them with a C library that would redirect all FS-related function calls to libfs2odb, or whatever it will be called like. Hey, in the initial stage one of the interfaces to the ODB could be a Fuse filesystem! For example "ls/search/anystring/" would be internally equivalent to 'find tag:"anystring"', etc. I think it's all doable.
The problem with linking is that some things are unlinkable - applications distributed only in binary form, for example. Ugly as they are, some companies swear by them. You'd have to hook into the file access layer and emulate the filesystem they expect to see. Of course this gets easier in kernel space (and becomes irrelevant if you simply make your own OS).
I think the nicest solution would be if we simply had ODB structures alongside a regular FS and exposed that power to the user. But that would require people to tag their files if they want any benefit - and even with a rather comfortable helper script I quickly gave up on tagging when I tried to do it with Spotlight. Laziness prevails.
Maybe a more friendly UI might help... You could try to just add your ideas to an OSS file manager*, using extended attributes to store the tags. That would only implement a small part of what you envision, but it might both give you a feel for how popular such tags are and prepare the masses for further advaces.
* I suggest Dolphin or a new app; there would need to be an option to turn it off and the GNOME devs would rather chew off their own legs than add a checkbox to Nautilus.
'find type:image tag:"mybusinessproject" tag:!"family"', or something like that? Tags all around.
You do realize that there will have to be an easy and efficient GUI? The system you propose is very much aimed at the nontechnical end-user so anything that involves more than a minimal amount of typing is unacceptable. GUI-wise we have the problem that there are no good ways of handling large amounts of tags in a GUI - at least none that I know of. You'd have to develop a way of assigning arbitrary numbers of arbitrary tags (of arbitary types) to files with no more effort than it takes to navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\Fiscal Reports\2008\Q4.
A popular (although admittedly often clueless) German computer magazine once found Firefox 2 to be inferior to Internet Explorer 6 - because printing a page takes one click less in IE6. End users do care about stuff like that. Also remember that people hate anything different - so not only does the new interface has to be at least as fast as a traditional path-based interface, it has to work exactly the same or face a serious uphill battle for appreciation.
For small pictures or quick notes, the "main content" could as well be stored together with the metadata in the DB. For bigger stuff, the proposed object db (let's call it ODB for short) could as well use an existing implementation of a file system as a back-end. The choice of an optimal FS would be ODB's concern. Hell, it could even use a bunch of FS's, one would support files that grow and shrink in size often, another would support large files well, another one would optimize for a crapload of small files, and yet another one would support fast online defragmentation. ODB would be able to choose the right storage pool depending on the object's class (because, for example, we know that "type:logfile" would only grow in time, and probably only the latest entries are of much interest (so we can compress the older ones), and that "type:mp3file" will probably never change its audio data stream at all).
Of course that assumes either a hard drive so big that the user doesn't mind that parts of it will never be used (because the filesystem used for some partition is not deemed optimal to all files and ths rarely used) or multiple file systems existing in the same physical ocation, which sounds pretty nightmarish.
Yes, that's true. However, the "other" approach (as implemented by Nepomuk), ODB over a file system, has a great flaw. The underlying files should be private to the ODB, and no other program should be able to read or modify them. The problem is clearly seen when you, for example, manually rename the file "some artist - cool song.mp3" into "Some Artist/02 Cool Song.mp3", and have to rescan the collection, or when you use regular/bin/mv to rename a file that is under a version control, etc.
Just what would happen if you'd release a library and suddenly a compiler would let user programs freely modify private fields of all the data structures? This is how I see the current approaches to FS+"object collection" tandem bikes working at the moment.
The file name should not be used to internally identify a file. The file name is a user-friendly way of describing it but not what the system should use internally - there are more efficient and robust ways of doing that.
The legacy software would run well within this scheme - just provide it with a runtime library that would implement file system API over the ODB API. Listing the contents of/bin or/usr/bin would have the same effect as running a query asking for objects of type "executable program".
At the beginning, ODB could be implemented in the user space as a library, just like FUSE is. Then, for reasons of performance, it could slowly get moved into the kernel (so that every call to the ODB won't have to go through all
They can have. Most of PHP's target demographic doesn't want to spend the time to learn Perl.
PHP is to scripting languages what pre-.NET Visual Basic was to GUIs: Easy to write messy code in but also very easy to pick up and fast to work with even without special skills. Also, php.net serves as an excellent reference for when you just want to get things done with the minimal amount of research neccessary. Not even the inconsistencies PHP is notorious for can balance that out.
I know, Ruby contains enough sugar to ruin your teeth, but it requires more time getting used to than PHP. As far as the more basic things are concerned, PHP is a rather unsurprising language - and php.net makes for an extremely useful (perhaps even unparalleled in a cost-free environment) reference.
None that makes it as easy as PHP. In PHP, arrays and hashtables are identical and writing to nonexistant fields just means that field is created. That enables you to quickly construct complex data structures without much code. (In fact, the only thing recogizable as a function call is used to create new arrays.)
Of course classes would be cleaner but PHP-style arrays are very coding-time efficient. This trade-off might very well be worth it if you only write a quick script that won't be used in a real product and thus doesn't justify spending much time on it.
Slashdot Mirror
True. If we assume that the climate change somehow manages to disrupt the Gulf Stream we'd end up with a situation where "global warming" means freezing temperatures for most of Europe. Remember, Berlin isn't too much further south than Moscow. In terms more familiar to US Americans, it would lie about halfway between the northern tip of Washington and the southern tip of Alaska (well, actually more like 2/3 towards Alaska). The only reason we have it as nice and cozy as we do is because the Gulf Stream is warming us.
"Global warming" doesn't neccessarily mean warmer temperatures for everyone, thus the new name.
That's why I always type out the <a> tag. That way I can be certain Slashdot won't mess up my links no matter what I put behind them.
DIY Homeland Security is easy. Just randomly cancel flights you want to take, record your own phone calls and put them on the internet and occasionally use a lubed up rubber glove on yourself.
Probably because gravity works that way. Unless they can make outer space have a greater gravitational pull on the ISS than Earth has things are going to fall down from there, not up.
I'm posting from Australia as well and the situation here is PERFECTLY FINE. Internet access in Australia is FAST AND CHEAP as it is, but now they're filtering all kinds of SITES NORMAL PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO VISIT ANYWAY. I also suspect they LEAVE INTACT all outgoing data so as to LET EVERYONE ENJOY THEIR FREE SPEECH.
Seriously, what kind of EXTREMELY LIKABLE AND INTELLIGENT government comes up with something like that? Australia is really looking more and more like AN UTOPIA. I'm going back to THE OUTBACK as fast as I can. DON'T LOOK FOR ME, I'M GOING TO STAY OUT THERE FOR A WHILE.
Until Wednesday.
The niche exists so something had to fill it. We ended up with PHP - imagine what would've happened if the morons' language of choice would've been Perl (probably with some kind of framework only 10% of people bother to configure correctly). As clueless people tend to abuse each and any mechanism a language has to offer we can be happy Perl didn't end up being everyone's darling.
Actually, science is a very limited resource and one of the Mars missions' most important goals is to see if Mars has any substantial science ore deposits and how we could mine them. It turned out that Martian soil actually contains small lumps of high-purity science ore, which the rovers collect. NASA is working on remotely using that almost-pure science to generate further insights into the Martian science deposits before Martian winter kills off the electronics. However, using impure science with equipment not designed for it has a high chance of failure and might, for example, generate data implying that tabletop cold fusion works.
NASA has already tried to remotely solve an issue by remotely throwing Martian science ore at it: The design of the Space Shuttle successor platform. The result was the Ares V launch vehicle, which now required copious amounts of refined Earth science to work around the scientific flaws caused by Martian science impurities. They have learned their lesson about lightly using insufficiently-refined science the hard way.
Unfortunately the NASA budget doesn't allow them to buy as much science as they would need so nowadays they usually rely on either recycled second-hand science or alternative sources of science like Mars. That's also why they desperately want to get Hubble back online - it was launched with a substantial science stockpile onboard and they really need to tap into that, even if the Hubble design limits the applications of onboard science mostly to deep-space observation.
Given how much science might be found on Mars I think NASA should really try to get Congress to open parts of the National Science Reserve to them - after all, if they manage to get a small science refinery up there they might relieve the already-strained world supply (and generate quite a bit of money by selling access to Martian science to other countries). This is especially important as leading science experts predict that we might reach peak science in less than twenty years.
As seen in the next Harry Potter books Harry Potter and the Stars, Stripes and Galaxies and Harry Potter and the Martian Real Estate Bubble.
Screw the song, do we have to suffer another "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing"-level music video? When that video was released the Yangtze burst its banks, the ruble devalued by 70%, Iraq officially suspended all cooperation with UNSCOM teams and over 200 were killed and over 4,500 injured in US embassy bombings. And that's just one month.
I really hope the United Nations and/or NATO will make sure this tragedy doesn't happen again. I advocate surgical preemptive strikes in case a new Armageddon script is suspected.
I think its the one where they reconstruct the formula for gasoline because Picard's dad wants him to enter a moped race.
We might be talking about the same episode, though; there might be some inaccuracies in the German dub.
If votes are available in a database the database was...
...run and populated by a few persons using the tallies from lots of publically supervised counters or...
...run and populated by a few persons using the tallies from machines designed, built and maintained by a few persons.
At each point I mentioned "a few persons" you can pay off someone without having to buy half of the country. In the upper example that's twice (DB admins and whoever enters data into the DB), in the lower one five times (DB admin, DB entry, machine designer, machine builder, machine maintainer) - and since there's usually significant overlap between those various sets of persons paying off someone becomes even more effective.
Traditional paper voting might be attackable as well but the voting part is actually the most secure part. Usually representatives from all partes are there to count and cross-validate their results and the public gets to watch. That means that if you want to reliably tamper with counting you'd have to pay off everyone in the voting district - and that includes the very people you want to skew the votes against.
I know, I have used Windows (and OS X supports exactly the same thing). But it's easier to just throw stuff on an icon/button than to drag it down, wait for the window to activate, locate the spot where the window expects file to be dropped (if such a spot exists) and drag it over there. While the latter method is more flexible, the former one is much faster for when you just want to open files and both aren't mutually exclusive.
I think it's especially stupid that Windows actually has a special handler for dropping stuff down there - it shows you a dialog informing youn that you can't drop stuff on taskbar buttons. Changing that into an "open file" handler should be trivial. Even allowing applications to define their own taskbar button drop handlers should only be moderately more complex and the desktop environment game is about one-upping each other, not just reaching parity.
True. In fact I consider it to be extremely basic stuff and am surprised that Vista doesn't already have it. But then again Windows still insists that you can't drop anything on a taskbar button (under OS X the same is equivalent to opening the dropped file with the application in question)...
Even in that case the question remains whether he's solely responsible - after all he could only do what he did because of the admins' negligience. (Of course any charges pressed against the admins would be a separate case, though.)
Is it breaking and entering when I give you the key to my house and you use that key to enter my house? Remember, the student legally possessed a password giving him access to the data in question.
German law is more about resocialization then punishment. American law often works the other way. I think in theory harsh punishments are supposed to discourage people from breaking the law; of course the number of Americans in prison shows that practice appears to look different...
What you need is a system wth more than two parties. That way you it's virtually guaranteed that paper is accurate enough.
And no, currently all parties except for the Dems and the Reps are just decoration in the USA.
I fail to understand why you even have that issue. In Germany Bundestag elections (the closest we get to your presidential elections) are always held on sundays - virtually no one has to leave work to go vote or volunteer. The election sunday is engrained deeply enough in our culture that the "Who yould you elect?" question is called the "sunday question" (as it's invariably "Who would you vote for if the Bundestag election was this Sunday?").
So what's so special about the 9-4 date that you have to stick with it? If it is a historically significant date then either should it be a holiday or, well, there's not enough significance to keep it as the One True Election Day(TM).
I probably didn't express what I wanted to express. The problem with specialized FSes is that (unless you only use FSes that can easily handle growing and shrinking) you'll have to guess how much of the drive to format with which FS. If you mispredict you're either going to waste space (as some partition sees less use than you expected), you're going to run out of storage even though there is still place left (as the "fitting" partition is full) and/or you end up storing files in partitions that are suboptimal because the optimal ones are full. If you do have dynamic growing and shrinking you have to handle repartitioning the drive while it's live without generating too much access lag.
It's certainly doable, but I think it might have too many pitfalls - especially if the user inexplicably gets "disk full" errors on volumes with gigabytes of space left or sees performance go down the drain as partitions are moved in mid-work (or mid-game). It is an interesting concept, though, and certainly worth looking into.
You do realize that there will have to be an easy and efficient GUI? The system you propose is very much aimed at the nontechnical end-user so anything that involves more than a minimal amount of typing is unacceptable. GUI-wise we have the problem that there are no good ways of handling large amounts of tags in a GUI - at least none that I know of. You'd have to develop a way of assigning arbitrary numbers of arbitrary tags (of arbitary types) to files with no more effort than it takes to navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\Fiscal Reports\2008\Q4.
A popular (although admittedly often clueless) German computer magazine once found Firefox 2 to be inferior to Internet Explorer 6 - because printing a page takes one click less in IE6. End users do care about stuff like that. Also remember that people hate anything different - so not only does the new interface has to be at least as fast as a traditional path-based interface, it has to work exactly the same or face a serious uphill battle for appreciation.
Of course that assumes either a hard drive so big that the user doesn't mind that parts of it will never be used (because the filesystem used for some partition is not deemed optimal to all files and ths rarely used) or multiple file systems existing in the same physical ocation, which sounds pretty nightmarish.
The file name should not be used to internally identify a file. The file name is a user-friendly way of describing it but not what the system should use internally - there are more efficient and robust ways of doing that.
Ah, so that's the root fault.
They can have. Most of PHP's target demographic doesn't want to spend the time to learn Perl.
PHP is to scripting languages what pre-.NET Visual Basic was to GUIs: Easy to write messy code in but also very easy to pick up and fast to work with even without special skills. Also, php.net serves as an excellent reference for when you just want to get things done with the minimal amount of research neccessary. Not even the inconsistencies PHP is notorious for can balance that out.
I know, Ruby contains enough sugar to ruin your teeth, but it requires more time getting used to than PHP. As far as the more basic things are concerned, PHP is a rather unsurprising language - and php.net makes for an extremely useful (perhaps even unparalleled in a cost-free environment) reference.
Example:
prints:
Of course classes would be cleaner but PHP-style arrays are very coding-time efficient. This trade-off might very well be worth it if you only write a quick script that won't be used in a real product and thus doesn't justify spending much time on it.