Funny how helium is one of the most abundant elements in the whole UNIVERSE and we have a shortage!!!
Helium is the second most abundant element at 25%. Hydrogen is the most abundant at 75%. The rest amount to a rounding error at this time.
Mind you, it's interesting to note that Oxygen and Carbon are the next two most abundant elements in our galaxy, and both are vital for life. Which way the causation runs, I wonder - does the known life in our galaxy use these elements because they are common, or does our galaxy has life because it has the necessary elements?
I believe I've differentiated between the two the entire time. Nor am I the only one that considers what Wine does emulation, even if it is not at the machine level, you do realize that the original acronym for Wine was Windows Emulator right? Read the old FAQ if you don't believe me, the name was changed to help differentiate it from full virtual machines.
No, I didn't know that, nor do I care; I care about technical details and leave marketing speech to those better at it.
However, if Wine does count as emulator, should the ability of newer Windows versions to run programs made for the older ones be considered that too? I am, while I'm writing this, installing Wine on Ubuntu running in VirtualBox under Windows 7 to see if I can run Crimson Skies on it - and all because the newer ATI drivers break something.
Business licenses should only exist to generate the revenue required to regulate businesses that can harm the public.
But blogs can definitely harm the public; they might give them information they are not ready for, causing them to vote so the wrong lizard wins. Everyone here is always talking about how the "sheep" vote whoever will give them the most rather than whoever will give the writer most, and we wouldn't want that, right? A mean, mean blogger might say mean, mean things about her wise and benevolent overlords, and have them replaced by some populist who'll cater to the public rather than the local elite, and that would be communism.
A lot of Linux users are exactly the same with anything closed source; *they* don't want closed source software and drivers because *they* feel it's unacceptable for people to use them and that it will have a negative effect on Linux because it goes against what they believe in. It never occurs to them that *other* people might be quite happy to use closed source software & drivers without any issues at all and just see it as their duty to protect all us witless heathens from ourselves.
Do you know what the real beauty of open source is? You can take Linux and make your own version which bends over backwards to accomodate closed-source drivers. You don't have to care about what "they" say, you can ignore them and do your own thing.
Notice the differentiation, Wine does not do any/CPU/ emulation, it does on the other hand do software, often called binary, emulation./Every/ other system that performs similarly refers to itself as binary emulation. Look up FreeBSD linux binary emulation if you don't believe me.
Well, you are of course free to call it whatever you want. The fact remains that Wine doesn't emulate a Windows system in the way that, say, VirtualBox running Windows does.
I'm confused as to how you think Wine works, if it was simply APIs as you seem to think, how exactly would it go about loading binaries, as well as handling Windows memory layouts, exceptions, threads, and processes.
All of those are part of Windows API. Also, running native Linux ELF-format binaries also involves using a special loader program (/lib/ld-linux.so.1). This format is simply recognized directly by the kernel, yet Wine can also be registered as such a loader by following the instructions here.
If APIs were all you needed you wouldn't have to preface every single windows command with "wine."
One of the reasons manned flights are so damn expensive is because there's redundancy after redundancy to try to do absolutely everything to ensure 99.99999% crew survival rate. By letting crew survival rate go down to, say, 25%, things could get a lot cheaper.
25% survival rate is useless for almost all purposes. It means that only one flight in 4 succeeds, which is far below the sweet spot of most bang for buck, even if the payload were free of cost. It also means that you'll be replacing your crew constantly, making everyone a novice in every flight.
Also, exactly why do you think we do manned flights at all? It's precisely to increase the safety to the point where you can sell tourist tickets to celebrities, after which we can concentrate on decreasing price until Joe Average can get one too. At that point space colonization should really start kicking in.
Pretty unlikely, since PCs have both larger installed base and far lower cost of development than any console. They are also technologically superior, so the most ambitious games - especially complex simulators and strategy games - simply can't be done on anything else.
I can't speak for other employers, but I would never hire someone without having measurable expectations. (I honestly don't see how I could hire someone without telling them what I expect from them.)
How do you measure a programmers performance? By lines of code, by problems solved, the inverse of difficulty of maintenance of code produced, or what? Any simple standard is going to fail because the goal is complex, and any complex standard is going to encourage office lawyers splitting hairs to maximize their number, rather than doing useful work.
Ultimately, you either trust your employees to have work ethic, in which case trying to quantity performance is a waste of time, or you don't, in which case trying to quantity performance simply gives them more opportunities for weaseling. Just look at any country's laws for an example; notice how they evolve over time into mind-bendingly convoluted maze as people find new loopholes and lawmakers try to close old ones? The same will happen for any attempt to measure performance with any kind of accuracy.
I'll agree with you though that there are companies who turn simple performance measurement into a fake science and come up with incomprehensible matrixes and what not that serve no real purpose other than to make them money.
They don't usually serve even that much of a function; they're there simply to make the management feel like they're doing something. But then again, nowadays companies not only have to be profitable, but they have to exceed the expectations on every quarter, least the share price falls, which of course is an impossible task, so perhaps it's understandable that the management is turning to voodoo in desperation.
(especially crazy things like wanting WWIII to reveal the last imam)
As opposed to wanting WWIII to start the Rapture?
There are crazy people everywhere, and they tend to be louder than the normal, sane ones. Maybe the people running the show in Iran are crazy, maybe they're sane but talking crazy to win the crazy crowd, or maybe they're neither and you've been listening to propaganda.
Every country has its lunatics and the US has the Rapture crowd, who post "Halleluja" in response to every bad thing that happens because in their mind it brings the end of the world closer, and that's a good thing. Don't judge other countries based on their lunatic fringe, especially when you only know them through your own country's propaganda machine.
It would be difficult but the only way there is ever going to be peace in the region is if there is clean water, reliable power and telecommunications, and a stable economy. Until that comes most of the Middle East is going to be stuck in the 1900s.
Unfortunately our economies are slowly but surely crumbling. We have a bad case of fundamentalism infecting our societies, free-market fundamentalism rather than outright religion but fundamentalism nonetheless. Add the fact that the richest and most powerful have more to gain from stuffing the world back to Dark Ages and feudalism than helping it towards democracy, and things don't look good.
Other continents haven't been following this cycle. The US has had centuries of continuity and progress.
Bullshit. The US has fought constant wars for as long as it has existed. The difference is simply that it lacks a foe in its home continent who had the resources for a major war. Or, to put it even blunter: your progress has mainly depended on slaughtering the natives and stealing their land, and you aren't seeing this as similar to European wars because said natives lacked the ability to fight back effectively. Oh, and you did have a major Civil War too.
What was it you said about cultural arrogance again?
South America and Africa don't have stability at all, but they don't have European delusions of grandeur either.
So basically they aren't following the cycle because they're stuck in the Hell-on-Earth part of it. That doesn't exactly increase my confidence in humanity, you know.
you'd think history would have taught them to maximize personal liberties, not to diminish them in any way?
Second World War was generations ago. The lessons have been forgotten, so authoritarianism and militarism are once again on the rise in Europe, and will once again lead to the world burning. That will be followed by the survivors being horrified of what they have seen and done, and swearing "never again", but a few generations later things will deteriorate again. That is the cycle of human history, and it cannot be broken, since no matter what lessons you might learn, your children won't, and their children certainly won't care.
There's a difference between negotiating your price as an individual, and negotiating price as a group. At that point, you're now "negotiating" at gunpoint which is a whole different animal.
Well then, it must be good for the workers to unionize, least they be robbed by the group of shareholders a company represents. That is why unions were formed in the first place, after all.
Any and all arguments against employee collective bargaining inevitably run into the little problem that a company is a collective group, and thus bargains collectively. Either you have two collectives bargaining on more or less even ground, or you have a collective company wielding way disproportionate power over employees. This is something right-wingers seem to have trouble comprehending.
Human nature? That's the nature of life. All life forms from bacteria to dogs to people fail to rationally ration themselves. If there's food on the ground, and you don't eat it or take it, something else probably will and you won't get any benefit from it.
Actually, most animals change their rate of reproduction based on available food resources.
if he's acquitted on the other hand, well... let's just say it might not be wise to have a man suspected of rape and harassment to be handling leaks.
So basically you're willing to punish him whether he's guilty or not.
This kind of shit is why I no longer take any accusation of rape or harassment seriously. It's far too easy to use baseless accusations as weapons, and there are far too many people willing to do just that. And it's people like you who are at fault for that.
By the way, I heard that laparel, Slashdot user #930257, is a rapist. No wait, I didn't, but everyone ignore that and mark him as a Foe. After all, he was once "suspected" so it wouldn't be wise to listen to him.
Yea, but thats only cause the Catholic Church will bury it for the next 100 years, it'll eventually become public when some high school kid cobbles together enough info and publishes it before someone realizes they need to buy him off.
Fixed that for you. The Pope is actively and purposefully lying to keep people from protecting themselves as is, after all.
Why? Unless the resulting drivers are actually better which remains to be seen, just the fact that they are open source is meaningless.
Says someone who's never had to try and update the latest version that supported his card by hand to make it compatible with the latest kernel. Linux doesn't have a stable driver/module interface, and that makes closed-source drivers an absolute pain.
I'm an Mechanical Engineer and I have to have a certification and insurance even as a contractor, why should I have to spend 1000's of dollars a year doing so I can work on building the mechanical systems of the plane when the programmers involved in avionic hardware don't?
As an engineer you can assume that the laws of physics underlaying your work don't change, but as a programmer youcannot.
Modern microprocessors contain close to a billion (1,000,000,000) transistors. It's simply impossible to guarantee that such a complex system works correctly in all circustances, and that's before we're talking about the correctness of software itself. If you have electronics in the system, it's going to contain bugs, period. The only question is: do unexpected conditions cause it to fail silently (as happened here), or does it make alarms blare, allowing humans to bypass or reset the faulty component?
Of course none of this means that you should hire the cheapest Visual Basic experts to program critical systems, but you have to take into account that no matter how careful the programmer is, things can and will fail.
Intelligence isn't the only part of the equation. Luck does play it's role, but so does brawn. Regulations that level the playing field do nothing but add to the notion that "All men are created equal."
Regulations change the fitness criteria. If you are less fit, relatively speaking, in the new environment they create than in the old one, then, to quote your own earlier post, though shit.
All men are NOT created equal, evolutionarily speaking.
Why is it that those who understand a theory the least are the quickest to base their arguments on it?
If that were the case, the animal kingdom wouldn't favor mates who have the brightest, strongest, fastest, biggest, etc.
It doesn't. It generally favours health.
It comes down to one factor. Who is the most fit to survive?
Whoever survives. Or, evolutionary speaking, whoever manages to pass his genes to most offspring. Of course even this is a simplification, since for example ants are very fit despite most ants being sterile.
Fitness has certainly changed it's meaning over the ages.
Fitness has never changed its meaning. How specific qualities change your fitness has, and has in fact done so constantly since life began; the ability to quickly adapt to new circumstances is a very important part of long-term fitness.
Unfortunately, what we have now is people who live thousands of miles away making declarations on who is fittest (or isn't).
Which would make the ability to influence people thousands of miles away have an important contribution to your fitness. It is not "unfortunate", it is simply reality disagreeing with your personal fantasies. Don't worry about it, it's a common occurrence for the adherents of Social Darwinism or other nonsensical belief systems.
The human race is now stagnated. There is less motivation than ever to ensure the fittest survive.
Fittest always survive, by definition. You are confusing "fit" as a term in a scientific theory with "fit" as a term in Aryan superman fantasies.
I'd say that linux, perhaps with realtime extensions, would be a somewhat better platform -- it's exposed way more, and most of the holes have been patched.
Does ground control really need realtime scheduling? It's basically a glorified traffick light system with cameras (radards). It doesn't really matter if it makes a decision a microsecond sooner or later, or even a whole second.
Anyway, a simple and efficient solution would be to run several parallel system on different OSes, and rise an alarm if they disagree.
I'm failing to see the benefit of soldered-on in this context as well. To me soldered-on means disposable and my data is anything but. (Yes, I do backup but why make it harder to recover for no significant return?)
No significant return? You just said yourself that if this thing is soldered on, you need to replace the whole motherboard if it dies, rather than just this tiny chip. That means more sales for the motherboard manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
Helium is the second most abundant element at 25%. Hydrogen is the most abundant at 75%. The rest amount to a rounding error at this time.
Mind you, it's interesting to note that Oxygen and Carbon are the next two most abundant elements in our galaxy, and both are vital for life. Which way the causation runs, I wonder - does the known life in our galaxy use these elements because they are common, or does our galaxy has life because it has the necessary elements?
No, I didn't know that, nor do I care; I care about technical details and leave marketing speech to those better at it.
However, if Wine does count as emulator, should the ability of newer Windows versions to run programs made for the older ones be considered that too? I am, while I'm writing this, installing Wine on Ubuntu running in VirtualBox under Windows 7 to see if I can run Crimson Skies on it - and all because the newer ATI drivers break something.
But blogs can definitely harm the public; they might give them information they are not ready for, causing them to vote so the wrong lizard wins. Everyone here is always talking about how the "sheep" vote whoever will give them the most rather than whoever will give the writer most, and we wouldn't want that, right? A mean, mean blogger might say mean, mean things about her wise and benevolent overlords, and have them replaced by some populist who'll cater to the public rather than the local elite, and that would be communism.
Do you know what the real beauty of open source is? You can take Linux and make your own version which bends over backwards to accomodate closed-source drivers. You don't have to care about what "they" say, you can ignore them and do your own thing.
Well, you are of course free to call it whatever you want. The fact remains that Wine doesn't emulate a Windows system in the way that, say, VirtualBox running Windows does.
All of those are part of Windows API. Also, running native Linux ELF-format binaries also involves using a special loader program (/lib/ld-linux.so.1). This format is simply recognized directly by the kernel, yet Wine can also be registered as such a loader by following the instructions here.
You don't. See above.
25% survival rate is useless for almost all purposes. It means that only one flight in 4 succeeds, which is far below the sweet spot of most bang for buck, even if the payload were free of cost. It also means that you'll be replacing your crew constantly, making everyone a novice in every flight.
Also, exactly why do you think we do manned flights at all? It's precisely to increase the safety to the point where you can sell tourist tickets to celebrities, after which we can concentrate on decreasing price until Joe Average can get one too. At that point space colonization should really start kicking in.
Pretty unlikely, since PCs have both larger installed base and far lower cost of development than any console. They are also technologically superior, so the most ambitious games - especially complex simulators and strategy games - simply can't be done on anything else.
How do you measure a programmers performance? By lines of code, by problems solved, the inverse of difficulty of maintenance of code produced, or what? Any simple standard is going to fail because the goal is complex, and any complex standard is going to encourage office lawyers splitting hairs to maximize their number, rather than doing useful work.
Ultimately, you either trust your employees to have work ethic, in which case trying to quantity performance is a waste of time, or you don't, in which case trying to quantity performance simply gives them more opportunities for weaseling. Just look at any country's laws for an example; notice how they evolve over time into mind-bendingly convoluted maze as people find new loopholes and lawmakers try to close old ones? The same will happen for any attempt to measure performance with any kind of accuracy.
They don't usually serve even that much of a function; they're there simply to make the management feel like they're doing something. But then again, nowadays companies not only have to be profitable, but they have to exceed the expectations on every quarter, least the share price falls, which of course is an impossible task, so perhaps it's understandable that the management is turning to voodoo in desperation.
How about we stop being obsessed with performance, and accept that for most jobs there is no performance standard that makes sense?
As opposed to wanting WWIII to start the Rapture?
There are crazy people everywhere, and they tend to be louder than the normal, sane ones. Maybe the people running the show in Iran are crazy, maybe they're sane but talking crazy to win the crazy crowd, or maybe they're neither and you've been listening to propaganda.
Every country has its lunatics and the US has the Rapture crowd, who post "Halleluja" in response to every bad thing that happens because in their mind it brings the end of the world closer, and that's a good thing. Don't judge other countries based on their lunatic fringe, especially when you only know them through your own country's propaganda machine.
Unfortunately our economies are slowly but surely crumbling. We have a bad case of fundamentalism infecting our societies, free-market fundamentalism rather than outright religion but fundamentalism nonetheless. Add the fact that the richest and most powerful have more to gain from stuffing the world back to Dark Ages and feudalism than helping it towards democracy, and things don't look good.
Bullshit. The US has fought constant wars for as long as it has existed. The difference is simply that it lacks a foe in its home continent who had the resources for a major war. Or, to put it even blunter: your progress has mainly depended on slaughtering the natives and stealing their land, and you aren't seeing this as similar to European wars because said natives lacked the ability to fight back effectively. Oh, and you did have a major Civil War too.
What was it you said about cultural arrogance again?
So basically they aren't following the cycle because they're stuck in the Hell-on-Earth part of it. That doesn't exactly increase my confidence in humanity, you know.
Second World War was generations ago. The lessons have been forgotten, so authoritarianism and militarism are once again on the rise in Europe, and will once again lead to the world burning. That will be followed by the survivors being horrified of what they have seen and done, and swearing "never again", but a few generations later things will deteriorate again. That is the cycle of human history, and it cannot be broken, since no matter what lessons you might learn, your children won't, and their children certainly won't care.
Why not simply forget about the card and tattoo the number in your arm? That way you can't lose it.
Well then, it must be good for the workers to unionize, least they be robbed by the group of shareholders a company represents. That is why unions were formed in the first place, after all.
Any and all arguments against employee collective bargaining inevitably run into the little problem that a company is a collective group, and thus bargains collectively. Either you have two collectives bargaining on more or less even ground, or you have a collective company wielding way disproportionate power over employees. This is something right-wingers seem to have trouble comprehending.
Actually, most animals change their rate of reproduction based on available food resources.
So basically you're willing to punish him whether he's guilty or not.
This kind of shit is why I no longer take any accusation of rape or harassment seriously. It's far too easy to use baseless accusations as weapons, and there are far too many people willing to do just that. And it's people like you who are at fault for that.
By the way, I heard that laparel, Slashdot user #930257, is a rapist. No wait, I didn't, but everyone ignore that and mark him as a Foe. After all, he was once "suspected" so it wouldn't be wise to listen to him.
Of course, they could be virgins for a good reason. Just another thought :).
Fixed that for you. The Pope is actively and purposefully lying to keep people from protecting themselves as is, after all.
Says someone who's never had to try and update the latest version that supported his card by hand to make it compatible with the latest kernel. Linux doesn't have a stable driver/module interface, and that makes closed-source drivers an absolute pain.
As an engineer you can assume that the laws of physics underlaying your work don't change, but as a programmer you can not.
Modern microprocessors contain close to a billion (1,000,000,000) transistors. It's simply impossible to guarantee that such a complex system works correctly in all circustances, and that's before we're talking about the correctness of software itself. If you have electronics in the system, it's going to contain bugs, period. The only question is: do unexpected conditions cause it to fail silently (as happened here), or does it make alarms blare, allowing humans to bypass or reset the faulty component?
Of course none of this means that you should hire the cheapest Visual Basic experts to program critical systems, but you have to take into account that no matter how careful the programmer is, things can and will fail.
Regulations change the fitness criteria. If you are less fit, relatively speaking, in the new environment they create than in the old one, then, to quote your own earlier post, though shit.
Why is it that those who understand a theory the least are the quickest to base their arguments on it?
It doesn't. It generally favours health.
Whoever survives. Or, evolutionary speaking, whoever manages to pass his genes to most offspring. Of course even this is a simplification, since for example ants are very fit despite most ants being sterile.
Fitness has never changed its meaning. How specific qualities change your fitness has, and has in fact done so constantly since life began; the ability to quickly adapt to new circumstances is a very important part of long-term fitness.
Which would make the ability to influence people thousands of miles away have an important contribution to your fitness. It is not "unfortunate", it is simply reality disagreeing with your personal fantasies. Don't worry about it, it's a common occurrence for the adherents of Social Darwinism or other nonsensical belief systems.
Fittest always survive, by definition. You are confusing "fit" as a term in a scientific theory with "fit" as a term in Aryan superman fantasies.
This gives the term "crash and burn" a whole new meaning.
Does ground control really need realtime scheduling? It's basically a glorified traffick light system with cameras (radards). It doesn't really matter if it makes a decision a microsecond sooner or later, or even a whole second.
Anyway, a simple and efficient solution would be to run several parallel system on different OSes, and rise an alarm if they disagree.
No significant return? You just said yourself that if this thing is soldered on, you need to replace the whole motherboard if it dies, rather than just this tiny chip. That means more sales for the motherboard manufacturer.
Or did you mean a significant return for you?