Se, now that's a nice idea. It also beats the usual "XYZ sucks so don't do anything" comments. I'm sure that the actual implementation would still suck as it'd be tied to some badly-implemented platform, but I'd have no problems at all with a system like that.
It'd probably be uneconomical, but it is a nice concept.
Yeah, California is one of those places where I'd go with wood + mineral wool. By the way, having a well-insulated house and A/C is not mutually exclusive, of course. The insulation would just mean that you need to run the A/C less, which still results in savings.
By the way, a quick googling got me some quotes. Depending on how much insulation you want, a certain manufacturer wants between 10 EUR/sq.m. (0.43 W/sq.m. K) and 35 EUR/sq.m. (0.14 W/sq.m. K). I don't know much about the mathematical details of house construction/insulation, but there's probably someone here who can use those values to get an idea how much it would cost to insulate a typical house and how much energy that would save.
Actually, Gentoo is one of the two distros I see most commonly offered to newbies, the other one being Ubuntu, of course. Those newbies who want an "it just works" distro get Ubuntu while those who have specific needs such as a shell-only test box on old hardware are told to get Gentoo. Even if Portage is getting slow, it's still so much more useful than everything else out there that most advanced users I know tend to gravitate towards it because they are averse to the ridiculous dependency graphs binary -ased package managers tend to generate.
Also, Gentoo is the best-documented distro out there with Gentoo HOWTOs often containing very useful information even for non-Gentoo users. It's pretty much irrelevant what you intend to do on your Linux box, a google for [subject matter] gentoo will usually give yu a detailed description of what you need to do.
Gentoo is much more than the ricer distro many people see in it.
I expect a torrent of lawsuits to follow when people had the power sockets their computers are connected to shut down, losing unsaved work. It'l probably end in a class-action lawsuit that will prevent power companies from limiting user consumption in any way for the next twenty years.
During my visits to the States I wondered why AC is so immensely popular there. Most areas don't suffer from enough natural catastrophes to make building your house out of something better than wood unfeasible, so aerated concrete would be a viable alternative to the current "erect some wood beams and bolt the facade to them" design. It's relatively easy to build a house with (you essentialy have huge bricks that you can easily cut/sand/drill into any desired shape) and its thermal insulation properties are awesome. Combined with standard evacuated/argon-filled double-pane windows and mineral wool to insulate the roof you get a level of thermal insulation that is worlds apart from a simple wood house.
Also, even if you have a wood house, double-pane windows and mineral wool will go a long way towards insulating it (make sure you wear a mask while working with mineral wool, though; it generates dust while being worked with and you don't want that stuff in your lungs). The big downside to mineral wool is that as of a couple years ago it was quite difficult to get your hands on in the USA. My brother had to import his from Germany, as that turned out to be easier to do than finding an American vendor. (If that's still the case this just screams "market gap".)
Of course, the foam concrete thing might not quite fit the American concept of moving every couple years; a proper two-family house built according to German standards can set you back about 300 to 500 grand, depending on whether you want a basement - not an investment you'd like to make if you don't intend on keeping that house for the next couple decades. Mineral wool, however, is much cheaper and can already save you tons of money in heating/AC costs.
I think that double-pane windows ought to be the standard in the USA already, so using them goes without saying. The States are pretty backwards when it comes to private house construction, but I don't think they're that backwards.
Maybe I'm living under a rock here, but I've never really seen evolution demonstrated. I've heard plenty of explanations and leaps of logic attached to it, but I've never actually seen anything evolve
I haven't seen creation in action, either. So why do people think it's more or less acceptable to teach about it than evolution in school?
Like you said, none of the theories is more definitely proven than the other - evolution happens to match our observations, but it might just be a coincidence that things happen as predicted. Or our model is too simple. Evolution as we see it today might not be an accurate theory, but neither might be creation (which has the added malus of not fitting any but the most basic observations like "humans exist").
So in the end either you teach both side by side and let the students decide which they believe in (maybe both?) or you don't teach them at all, because they're both unprovable. Everything else is pushing your views onto the students.
Onfortunately, people like pushing their views onto others, regardless of whether that's in the interest of anyone.
Actually, if they refuse to teach about evolution then I'd start a movement to prohibit them from teaching about creation as well. After all, the creation theory is, very much like the evolution theory, not definitely and unchallengably proven. Thus, no school should teach it to children, especially not as true or even plausible.
Yes, that means that schools in fact can't teach anything at all besides basic language knowledge and math (and some aspects of history), but hey - we don't want to teach our children stuff that can't be definitely proven, right?
Actually, I was talking about those mythical "significantly faster than hard drives"-SSDs. Thumb drives hardly fit into that category. They're nice, but neither are they a hard drive replacement, nor are they fast enough to saturate even a USB 2.0 connection.
I'd really like a thumb drive capable of read/write speeds beyond 800 MBit/s, though.
Yeah, but you only get a really warm feeing if your USB controller uses vacuum tubes. Seriously, after using vacuum tube-driven USB once, I'm not going back to that silicone crap.
Seeing as I'm migrating my external storage from USB to FireWire (and people getting Macs tending to do the same): Nobody, it's quite healthy. Just not as ubiquitous as USB is.
Then IEEE comes up with a smaller 9-pin FireWire connector and everyone will go FireWire. Most peripherals will be happy with S400's bandwidth, external hard drives will stick with S800 as that's already faster than the drive itself and S3200 will be reserved for really fast stuff like solid state disks, professional A/V equipment or networking.
And yeah, unless they'd somehow make the new jack very expensive, it'd make sense for an S400 device to have a 9-pin port so you can just daisy-chain a faster device behind it.
Seriously, if USB hardware became more expensive then FireWire hardware, USB's only remaining advantage would be its ubiquity.
Of course it remains to be seen where the big market for such speeds is. Unless external SSDs become really popular, anything beyong FireWire S800 will be of zero use to most consumers. Of course people would see USB 3.0 as an improvement over USB 2.0, but thats because USB 2.0 is pretty slow. If USB 3.0 hardware became noticably more expensive than FireWire 800, FireWire might take over the external storage market for the same reason USB beat it out before: Cheaper hardware.
If USB3 is faster than SATAII, then why not just use that for drives?
Probably because if they didn't make major changes to how the USB chipset works, USB 3.0 will still rely on the CPU to do its work. Additional CPU overhead on every HDD access is not something you want.
When I think about what I'd want from a new USB standard I immediately think that it should become like FireWire. Having a true bus is very nice. Also, a scenario I've encountered a few times is that I'm plugged into my external HDD and someone wants to copy over a large file to my laptop. Since we both have FW 800 ports, he just plugs his laptop into my hard drive and we instantly have a really fast network going - daisy chaining and network capability are an awesome combination. Also, there's the whole 'enough amperes to reliably power a 2.5" hard drive' thing and the fact that FireWire controllers are self-contained.
Even though I know I'm going to have USB 3.0 before I'll encounter a FW 3200 capable machine, I do think that we'd be better off if either FireWire replaced USB or USB started emulating FireWire. FireWire is just better at pretty much anything except HID.
That sounds pretty awesome. Imagine a regular projector without the expensive, fragile bulb. No more leaving the thing in standby for five minutes so the fan can cool the lamp down to a safe temperature before you can completely power it down. No more waiting for the lamp to heat up before you get a picture... No more paying four hundred bucks for a replacement bulb.
Of course the LED array will probably be just as expensive as a traditional bulb, but I fathom it should be much more resilient to aging/overheating/shattering etc. And there's the question whether a regular LED-illuminated projector is actually feasible - after all, a projector should be a bit brighter than this monitor.
My university's CS department is rather Java-centric. Our first programming courses were all about Java - however, we mostly implemented stuff that already was in the class library. And no, we weren't allowed to write simple wrappers, at least not if we wanted a decent score. Oh, and we never did GUI programming.
Later mandatory languages are C++, Haskell and Prolog. No scripting languages, though having one would've been nice.
There is a problem with having Java as the main language, though: People tend to fall back to Java when doing projects as that's the one language most people can actually work in. I can see the downsides in my current (mandatory two-year) project: Because only half of the group is comfortable with C++ we wrote our text mining software in Java and now that we're ready to throw multi-gigabyte corpora at the thing performance starts to become a real issue.
In the end I think that Java is usable as a learning language, but after the initial learning steps the focus should be shifted elsewhere (e.g. C++) entirely so people can comfortably work in more than just Java.
You neither need to work as root all the time on a *nix box, nor is that the common way to do work. Windows Vista still has plenty of programs that insist on writing to system directories at run-time so while it is possible to work as something else than an administrator there still are some configurations under which it's much easier to just screw security to hell and give yourself administrator privileges.
I think those keyboards have the disadvantage that you're constantly tapping your fingers on some hard surface, which isn't very ergonomic. On the other hand, you're most likely not going to do that much typing on one. On the third hand, 140 bucks for a device that doesn't see much use is somewhat steep.
A foldable BT keyboard might work better - if they actually made one that isn't full-sized, taking up much space even when folded.
Interestingly, the Seagate has so much space that "[t]he odds are excellent that Windows will never again tell you that you're running low on hard disk space with this 1TB drive, and that alone might be worth the price of admission", while the equally-sized Hitachi "doesn't boast efficiency, but its slightly lower platter density allows it to achieve better error-checking without the need for sophisticated firmware". Either Hitachi's drive is somehow bigger than Seagate's or Hitachis just fill up faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Se, now that's a nice idea. It also beats the usual "XYZ sucks so don't do anything" comments. I'm sure that the actual implementation would still suck as it'd be tied to some badly-implemented platform, but I'd have no problems at all with a system like that.
It'd probably be uneconomical, but it is a nice concept.
Yeah, California is one of those places where I'd go with wood + mineral wool. By the way, having a well-insulated house and A/C is not mutually exclusive, of course. The insulation would just mean that you need to run the A/C less, which still results in savings.
By the way, a quick googling got me some quotes. Depending on how much insulation you want, a certain manufacturer wants between 10 EUR/sq.m. (0.43 W/sq.m. K) and 35 EUR/sq.m. (0.14 W/sq.m. K). I don't know much about the mathematical details of house construction/insulation, but there's probably someone here who can use those values to get an idea how much it would cost to insulate a typical house and how much energy that would save.
Actually, Gentoo is one of the two distros I see most commonly offered to newbies, the other one being Ubuntu, of course. Those newbies who want an "it just works" distro get Ubuntu while those who have specific needs such as a shell-only test box on old hardware are told to get Gentoo. Even if Portage is getting slow, it's still so much more useful than everything else out there that most advanced users I know tend to gravitate towards it because they are averse to the ridiculous dependency graphs binary -ased package managers tend to generate.
Also, Gentoo is the best-documented distro out there with Gentoo HOWTOs often containing very useful information even for non-Gentoo users. It's pretty much irrelevant what you intend to do on your Linux box, a google for [subject matter] gentoo will usually give yu a detailed description of what you need to do.
Gentoo is much more than the ricer distro many people see in it.
I expect a torrent of lawsuits to follow when people had the power sockets their computers are connected to shut down, losing unsaved work. It'l probably end in a class-action lawsuit that will prevent power companies from limiting user consumption in any way for the next twenty years.
During my visits to the States I wondered why AC is so immensely popular there. Most areas don't suffer from enough natural catastrophes to make building your house out of something better than wood unfeasible, so aerated concrete would be a viable alternative to the current "erect some wood beams and bolt the facade to them" design. It's relatively easy to build a house with (you essentialy have huge bricks that you can easily cut/sand/drill into any desired shape) and its thermal insulation properties are awesome. Combined with standard evacuated/argon-filled double-pane windows and mineral wool to insulate the roof you get a level of thermal insulation that is worlds apart from a simple wood house.
Also, even if you have a wood house, double-pane windows and mineral wool will go a long way towards insulating it (make sure you wear a mask while working with mineral wool, though; it generates dust while being worked with and you don't want that stuff in your lungs). The big downside to mineral wool is that as of a couple years ago it was quite difficult to get your hands on in the USA. My brother had to import his from Germany, as that turned out to be easier to do than finding an American vendor. (If that's still the case this just screams "market gap".)
Of course, the foam concrete thing might not quite fit the American concept of moving every couple years; a proper two-family house built according to German standards can set you back about 300 to 500 grand, depending on whether you want a basement - not an investment you'd like to make if you don't intend on keeping that house for the next couple decades. Mineral wool, however, is much cheaper and can already save you tons of money in heating/AC costs.
I think that double-pane windows ought to be the standard in the USA already, so using them goes without saying. The States are pretty backwards when it comes to private house construction, but I don't think they're that backwards.
Like you said, none of the theories is more definitely proven than the other - evolution happens to match our observations, but it might just be a coincidence that things happen as predicted. Or our model is too simple. Evolution as we see it today might not be an accurate theory, but neither might be creation (which has the added malus of not fitting any but the most basic observations like "humans exist").
So in the end either you teach both side by side and let the students decide which they believe in (maybe both?) or you don't teach them at all, because they're both unprovable. Everything else is pushing your views onto the students.
Onfortunately, people like pushing their views onto others, regardless of whether that's in the interest of anyone.
Actually, if they refuse to teach about evolution then I'd start a movement to prohibit them from teaching about creation as well. After all, the creation theory is, very much like the evolution theory, not definitely and unchallengably proven. Thus, no school should teach it to children, especially not as true or even plausible.
Yes, that means that schools in fact can't teach anything at all besides basic language knowledge and math (and some aspects of history), but hey - we don't want to teach our children stuff that can't be definitely proven, right?
Actually, I was talking about those mythical "significantly faster than hard drives"-SSDs. Thumb drives hardly fit into that category. They're nice, but neither are they a hard drive replacement, nor are they fast enough to saturate even a USB 2.0 connection.
I'd really like a thumb drive capable of read/write speeds beyond 800 MBit/s, though.
Yeah, but you only get a really warm feeing if your USB controller uses vacuum tubes. Seriously, after using vacuum tube-driven USB once, I'm not going back to that silicone crap.
Seeing as I'm migrating my external storage from USB to FireWire (and people getting Macs tending to do the same): Nobody, it's quite healthy. Just not as ubiquitous as USB is.
Then IEEE comes up with a smaller 9-pin FireWire connector and everyone will go FireWire. Most peripherals will be happy with S400's bandwidth, external hard drives will stick with S800 as that's already faster than the drive itself and S3200 will be reserved for really fast stuff like solid state disks, professional A/V equipment or networking.
And yeah, unless they'd somehow make the new jack very expensive, it'd make sense for an S400 device to have a 9-pin port so you can just daisy-chain a faster device behind it.
Seriously, if USB hardware became more expensive then FireWire hardware, USB's only remaining advantage would be its ubiquity.
Of course it remains to be seen where the big market for such speeds is. Unless external SSDs become really popular, anything beyong FireWire S800 will be of zero use to most consumers. Of course people would see USB 3.0 as an improvement over USB 2.0, but thats because USB 2.0 is pretty slow. If USB 3.0 hardware became noticably more expensive than FireWire 800, FireWire might take over the external storage market for the same reason USB beat it out before: Cheaper hardware.
When I think about what I'd want from a new USB standard I immediately think that it should become like FireWire. Having a true bus is very nice. Also, a scenario I've encountered a few times is that I'm plugged into my external HDD and someone wants to copy over a large file to my laptop. Since we both have FW 800 ports, he just plugs his laptop into my hard drive and we instantly have a really fast network going - daisy chaining and network capability are an awesome combination. Also, there's the whole 'enough amperes to reliably power a 2.5" hard drive' thing and the fact that FireWire controllers are self-contained.
Even though I know I'm going to have USB 3.0 before I'll encounter a FW 3200 capable machine, I do think that we'd be better off if either FireWire replaced USB or USB started emulating FireWire. FireWire is just better at pretty much anything except HID.
It's the second character in a shell script.
That sounds pretty awesome. Imagine a regular projector without the expensive, fragile bulb. No more leaving the thing in standby for five minutes so the fan can cool the lamp down to a safe temperature before you can completely power it down. No more waiting for the lamp to heat up before you get a picture... No more paying four hundred bucks for a replacement bulb.
Of course the LED array will probably be just as expensive as a traditional bulb, but I fathom it should be much more resilient to aging/overheating/shattering etc. And there's the question whether a regular LED-illuminated projector is actually feasible - after all, a projector should be a bit brighter than this monitor.
Still, quite interesting.
We put our entire R&D staff on a rocket and had them touch down on the sun to find a way to mine the helium. So far we haven't heard back.
Bob Q. Dunce
CEO/CVO/interim leader of the R&D department
Brillant Solutions, Inc.
What, you mean noble gases aren't highly reactive? Who would've thought!
My university's CS department is rather Java-centric. Our first programming courses were all about Java - however, we mostly implemented stuff that already was in the class library. And no, we weren't allowed to write simple wrappers, at least not if we wanted a decent score. Oh, and we never did GUI programming.
Later mandatory languages are C++, Haskell and Prolog. No scripting languages, though having one would've been nice.
There is a problem with having Java as the main language, though: People tend to fall back to Java when doing projects as that's the one language most people can actually work in. I can see the downsides in my current (mandatory two-year) project: Because only half of the group is comfortable with C++ we wrote our text mining software in Java and now that we're ready to throw multi-gigabyte corpora at the thing performance starts to become a real issue.
In the end I think that Java is usable as a learning language, but after the initial learning steps the focus should be shifted elsewhere (e.g. C++) entirely so people can comfortably work in more than just Java.
Actually, that reference is amazingly current with regards to Vista:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/17/vista_hit_by_stoned_angelina/
I don't want to know the kind of screwed up configuration which has the guest account running with administrator rights.
You neither need to work as root all the time on a *nix box, nor is that the common way to do work. Windows Vista still has plenty of programs that insist on writing to system directories at run-time so while it is possible to work as something else than an administrator there still are some configurations under which it's much easier to just screw security to hell and give yourself administrator privileges.
I think those keyboards have the disadvantage that you're constantly tapping your fingers on some hard surface, which isn't very ergonomic. On the other hand, you're most likely not going to do that much typing on one. On the third hand, 140 bucks for a device that doesn't see much use is somewhat steep.
A foldable BT keyboard might work better - if they actually made one that isn't full-sized, taking up much space even when folded.
With a little digging around in the "Hardware" section you can find three Terabyte HDD reviews, one for "The 1TB Barracuda", one for the WD RE2-GP and one for the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.
Interestingly, the Seagate has so much space that "[t]he odds are excellent that Windows will never again tell you that you're running low on hard disk space with this 1TB drive, and that alone might be worth the price of admission", while the equally-sized Hitachi "doesn't boast efficiency, but its slightly lower platter density allows it to achieve better error-checking without the need for sophisticated firmware". Either Hitachi's drive is somehow bigger than Seagate's or Hitachis just fill up faster.
I wouldn't know about any of thaz. I try to stay away from sitcoms. I've been clean for quite some time now and I'm not going to risk a relapse.
Mark Erickson, is that you?