I'd like to see a law prohibiting the use of gasoline powered cars by 2016.
Oh brilliant. Throw away an entire working infrastructure with a fuel that makes a great deal of sense. That's not to mention the chaos you'd cause with the economy (a hundred million people or more being forced to buy a new car or stop driving, combined with the retooling of the fueling infrastructure and turning the petrochemical refining industry on its head)
It takes time to meet the engineering and regulatory hurdles needed to bring a new model to market. What you buy today has probably been in development for at least 3-5 years, based on what I know from my friends in auto industry. Plus, they all borrow parts that have been in development or production much longer. There's no way you can slap some miracle car together by 2010, let alone an entire line of them meeting everyone's differing needs while still having the high reliability, safety, and now fuel economy required.
Plus, as a classic car nut, I'd personally devote my life to getting any asshat politician who proposed such a thing thrown out of office and replaced with someone smarter. The government should keep its grubby mitts off my cars and my guns.
Are you nuts? That would require a 100 gallon gas tank!
That's why I plan to buy TWO H2s. The first one to drive, and the second one I'll gut and turn into a fuel tank to drag along behind. Think of it as a bubba trailer, but rather than being the old back end of a pickup to haul stuff, it'll be a matching fuel tender.
I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I have to agree with the parent post. I drive a couple small cars, one of which being a 1995 Honda del Sol. Two seater t-top convertible. I've seen pictures of what happens when one gets a Suburban in the ass at a 60mph differential in speed. The driver got out and, while being slightly confused from being nailed by the airbag, was otherwise fine.
Small cars, if properly engineered, are very survivable in nasty accidents. The difference is that they're usually severely damaged by any accident, unlike bigger vehicles like real SUVs and trucks. I've had at least one full sized GM SUV or trucks most of my life, and minor accidents can almost always be fixed by unbolting a panel or a bumper and putting on a new one (correctly pre-painted, of course...) Not so with the little Honda, where a minor fender bender required pretty massive repairs (and about a $2500 bill).
Oh, and my car already makes nearly 40mpg without any terribly exotic technologies, and I like it that way. Though since it's approaching 300k miles, it's going to need a new engine one of these days.
Would mod you up if I could. I get really sick of people thinking that change for change's sake is good. No, change requires me to relearn a bunch of crap, frustrates me to no end, and impairs me actually getting work done.
Now, maybe at the end of the day, I've changed to a new and better way of working, but I doubt it. The menu bar has been around for decades, and I've yet to find anything I prefer more. It's nice to just have the conventional File - Edit - (...) - Help menus we're all used to at the top.
While I'm an Ubuntu guy normally, this UI train wreck is the reason I can't stand using Office 2007 or IE 7/8 on Windows boxes I occasionally encounter in their default forms. I can't find jack, and I don't want to spend the time looking for whatever I needed. Give me good ol' Firefox, OO, or even earlier versions of IE or Office with traditional menu bars.
There are two pieces of good app design:
- Similarity to UI metaphors every user is used to, so that somebody trying to use something for the first time can intuitively find things and start being productive
- Simplicity and efficiency, so that power users aren't bogged down in a mire of crap designed to hand-hold noobs.
Balancing these two is an eternal struggle, and very few apps do both well.
Aside from his dogmatic dictates on what I may do with my freedom (including being free to use a non-free piece of software, if I so choose), I actually partly agree with him on this. SaaS to replace basic things that my desktop does well on its own only seems to add more complexity and possibilities for failure, and removes my control over them. It transfers responsibility to manage it from someone who cares a great deal if it works (me) to someone who barely gives a rat's ass, and only does that much because he/she gets paid.
On the other hand, if you want to use them, then by all means I think you should be *free* to do so.
Constant current supplies don't deal with fail opens, though. If a string fails open, then the other parallel strings pick up additional current, likely causing them to fail. It's a cascading effect. The more that fail, the faster the remaining strings burn out. Per-string current regulators would be the way to go.
Not every shop requires 24/7 99.99999% uptime. Not every shop can afford identical test hardware (or test hardware at all). My point is there are very different levels of "production" and pain tolerance (vs. spending more money and time).
Sometimes, in small companies, you just have to wing it and hope for the best (while having a fallback plan if everything goes to hell). A competent admin with an adequate sense of risk-vs-reward will do fine.
If she likes the same pr0n you do, most likely she likes chicks as much as you do....
And frankly, that's just awesome. Only because I've typically found that geeky chicks who appreciate women (but are still bi, or at least keeping their options open) are ungodly awesome in bed. Freaky doesn't usually begin to cover it.
Yes, but the women it does attract are usually ones you should pay attention to. They're either gold-diggers, in which case you need to know to grip your wallet very very tightly, or they're car chicks, in which case you take them for a ride. Then take them for another ride. *wink wink nudge nudge*
Women complaining about men with expensive cars is like women claiming they want a sensitive guy. They will make the claims all day long, and spend the night banging the guy with the expensive car.
Having been divorced for about four years now (I'm 34 - nice 30th birthday present from my ex), I can say it's absolutely true. I've always been the nice guy, but I've had to learn to be an ass with flashy toys.
Women are always claiming, "I want a nice guy who takes care of me and treats me well," and then go home with the biggest douche-bag at the end of the night. I guarantee, if you're nice to her and actually do the things that make her happy, she'll put you firmly in the friend zone. You have little to no chance of ever getting in more than a friendship-type relationship, and a corresponding chance of getting laid.
I unfortunately made this mistake with a very wonderful female friend of mine about a year after the divorce, and in a matter of hours, forever shut down any possibility of something more. I'm still kicking myself as she's just incredible - smart, successful, incredibly hot. Particularly kicking myself lately, as I'm helping her through another horrible breakup. (The guy was the typical macho asshole type, and she finally figured out after three years of living with him that he was a cheating, lying, drunk, lazy, immature drug-addict leech. See? Honestly he was just too stupid to keep stringing her along correctly.)
So I say this, fellow geeks, don't follow your instincts to be nice. Be a dick. Flaunt your cash. It's what she's really attracted to, despite the fact she doesn't even realize it herself. Don't call, don't be overly helpful, don't listen attentively (or don't look like you are). Talk about yourself. Dismiss her problems. Hit on other women when you're out with her. Seriously, it's the dumbest fucking thing you've ever seen, but soon enough she'll be hooked.
Yes, I have a late model sportscar that I bought after the divorce as a present to myself. Yes, I learned to dress better than usual when going out. But until I learned to completely blow chicks off and not be the nice guy that comes to the rescue, neither of those got me anywhere. Learn those last to - really, really, do.
After BSG ends, really there's nothing to keep me watching Scifi or whatever they want to call themselves now. I'll probably see what becomes of the new Stargate series when it launches, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope. SG-1 - the cast, their characters, and the mythos - was awesome. SGA moderately sucked, but was watchable. SGU, well, ummm... yeeeaaaah. I'd rather they get back to what SG-1 was about - ancient cool alien stuff and badass alien overlords, fought off by a snarky guy (be it Jack or Cameron) and his team.
You're right, my 50D does have some noise. I thought my 40D would become my backup body, but it hasn't. I still like the image quality coming off the 40 better than the 50.
I'd say from here, DSLR designers should start working on noise issues. The pixel density of a 15mpxl APS-C sensor is adequate for almost everything I do, and I'd much rather have lower noise. I've been scanning a bit of old Kodachrome over the weekend, and it's remarkable how quiet, smooth, and colorful K25 really was. If the practical increase in resolution can be shown, working on eliminating Bayer-pattern sensors in favor of sensors capable of RGB at every detector site might be another path of progress (such as Foveon's part).
On the "me specific" feature list, integrated GPS for geocoding would be darn handy, too. Not sure how many photographers would use it, but for those of us who spend a good amount of time out hiking through the mountains with our cameras, it would be easier than juggling a separate GPS and keeping notes (or post-processing everything together).
Seems like a problem I see very commonly with developers:
Dev: "The old thing sucked, so we built this shiny new better thing."
User: "Does it do everything the old one did."
Dev: "Yes! It's just that the applications don't support it yet."
User: "So stuff that I use now stops working?"
Dev: "But our new thing is better. BETTER!(tm)"
User: "So stuff that I use now stops working?"
...and on this goes. Suffice to say the user doesn't give a shit about protocols and how sucky the old system was and how awesome the new thing is. He cares about features that did work now suddenly stop, and in his eyes, your new thing sucks more than the old one, because it doesn't *work*.
Computers, for most of us, exist to accomplish other tasks. The users really don't care about the underlying architecture, or how comp sci awesome it might be, they just care about feature parity when big chunks are replaced.
Sadly, many developers never figure this part out.
In other words, if the programmer took on the burden of tons of work and complexity in order to replicate lots of the functionality of the file system and make it not the file system's problem, then it wouldn't be my problem.
I couldn't agree more. A filesystem *is* a database, people. It's a sort of hierarchical one, but a database nonetheless.
It shouldn't care if there's some mini-SQL thing app sitting on top providing another speed hit and layer of complexity or just a bunch of apps making hundreds of f{read|write|open|close|sync}() calls against hundreds of files. Hundreds of files, while cluttered, is very simple and easily debugged/fixed when something gets trashed. Some sort of obfuscated database cannot be fixed with mere vi. (Emacs, maybe, but only because it probably has 17 database repair modules built in, right next to the 87 kitchen sinks that are also included.)
I do rather agree that it's not a bug. An unclean shutdown is an unclean shutdown, and Ts'o is right - there's not a defined behaviour. Ext4 is better at speed, but less safe in an unstable environment. Ext3 is safer, but less speedy. It's all just trade-offs, folks. Pick one appropriate to your use. (Which is why, when I install Jaunty, I'll be using Ext3.)
Excellent point, missed by 95% of the other posters. Most of us have no idea what Active Directory and Microsoft's group policy crap are capable of doing. The idea of using those sorts of controls has simply never crossed our mind, because we haven't run into a use case.
Honestly I didn't know squat about GP until about a year ago. It's an interesting way to restrict users. That said, it and Unix-based OSes definitely don't do things the same way, and you shouldn't try to force them down the same path.
It would have been far more useful if the OP gave us use cases, rather than just "How do I do this Windows thing in Linux?" Given that most of us are not MCSE types, we have little idea on what features it offers and which features OP wants to use.
America is founded on religious freedom, even if you and I consider Scientology to be a cult it is still a 'religion' and cannot be outlawed
Outlawed by the government, no, but pretty much everybody else can make fun of it for the ridiculous batch of pyramid-scheme profiteering BS that it is.
Personally, I like both of them. I think you'll find a lot of very talented folks who really make this stuff happen have been influenced over the years by the creative folks who create scifi. Neither Gene Roddenberry nor Joss Whedon could engineer a space vessel any more than I could, but creative individuals like them almost certainly inspired some of those that *could* do the job.
Worse, try telling Jayne. He's already got gender confusing name issues. If you tell him his current ship is girly, too, he might just snap. More than usual, that is.
Civilized is relative - we still have a huge number of morality zealots out there who somehow think this is going to be the downfall of society. I strongly disagree with this point of view, but more from my libertarian "it's a private transaction between two willing parties" point of view. Regulate it if you must from a public health standpoint (mandatory STD testing, etc.), but otherwise it should absolutely be legal.
Personally, I think we'd have a much better world if we were all just getting laid more often.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see a law prohibiting the use of gasoline powered cars by 2016.
Oh brilliant. Throw away an entire working infrastructure with a fuel that makes a great deal of sense. That's not to mention the chaos you'd cause with the economy (a hundred million people or more being forced to buy a new car or stop driving, combined with the retooling of the fueling infrastructure and turning the petrochemical refining industry on its head)
It takes time to meet the engineering and regulatory hurdles needed to bring a new model to market. What you buy today has probably been in development for at least 3-5 years, based on what I know from my friends in auto industry. Plus, they all borrow parts that have been in development or production much longer. There's no way you can slap some miracle car together by 2010, let alone an entire line of them meeting everyone's differing needs while still having the high reliability, safety, and now fuel economy required.
Plus, as a classic car nut, I'd personally devote my life to getting any asshat politician who proposed such a thing thrown out of office and replaced with someone smarter. The government should keep its grubby mitts off my cars and my guns.
Are you nuts? That would require a 100 gallon gas tank!
That's why I plan to buy TWO H2s. The first one to drive, and the second one I'll gut and turn into a fuel tank to drag along behind. Think of it as a bubba trailer, but rather than being the old back end of a pickup to haul stuff, it'll be a matching fuel tender.
I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I have to agree with the parent post. I drive a couple small cars, one of which being a 1995 Honda del Sol. Two seater t-top convertible. I've seen pictures of what happens when one gets a Suburban in the ass at a 60mph differential in speed. The driver got out and, while being slightly confused from being nailed by the airbag, was otherwise fine.
Small cars, if properly engineered, are very survivable in nasty accidents. The difference is that they're usually severely damaged by any accident, unlike bigger vehicles like real SUVs and trucks. I've had at least one full sized GM SUV or trucks most of my life, and minor accidents can almost always be fixed by unbolting a panel or a bumper and putting on a new one (correctly pre-painted, of course...) Not so with the little Honda, where a minor fender bender required pretty massive repairs (and about a $2500 bill).
Oh, and my car already makes nearly 40mpg without any terribly exotic technologies, and I like it that way. Though since it's approaching 300k miles, it's going to need a new engine one of these days.
Would mod you up if I could. I get really sick of people thinking that change for change's sake is good. No, change requires me to relearn a bunch of crap, frustrates me to no end, and impairs me actually getting work done.
Now, maybe at the end of the day, I've changed to a new and better way of working, but I doubt it. The menu bar has been around for decades, and I've yet to find anything I prefer more. It's nice to just have the conventional File - Edit - (...) - Help menus we're all used to at the top.
While I'm an Ubuntu guy normally, this UI train wreck is the reason I can't stand using Office 2007 or IE 7/8 on Windows boxes I occasionally encounter in their default forms. I can't find jack, and I don't want to spend the time looking for whatever I needed. Give me good ol' Firefox, OO, or even earlier versions of IE or Office with traditional menu bars.
There are two pieces of good app design:
- Similarity to UI metaphors every user is used to, so that somebody trying to use something for the first time can intuitively find things and start being productive
- Simplicity and efficiency, so that power users aren't bogged down in a mire of crap designed to hand-hold noobs.
Balancing these two is an eternal struggle, and very few apps do both well.
I don't really believe in SaaS as progress.
Aside from his dogmatic dictates on what I may do with my freedom (including being free to use a non-free piece of software, if I so choose), I actually partly agree with him on this. SaaS to replace basic things that my desktop does well on its own only seems to add more complexity and possibilities for failure, and removes my control over them. It transfers responsibility to manage it from someone who cares a great deal if it works (me) to someone who barely gives a rat's ass, and only does that much because he/she gets paid.
On the other hand, if you want to use them, then by all means I think you should be *free* to do so.
Constant current supplies don't deal with fail opens, though. If a string fails open, then the other parallel strings pick up additional current, likely causing them to fail. It's a cascading effect. The more that fail, the faster the remaining strings burn out. Per-string current regulators would be the way to go.
Precisely. My browser currently does everything I want (and more). I don't need more features, I need it to be fast, small, secure, and stable.
Not every shop requires 24/7 99.99999% uptime. Not every shop can afford identical test hardware (or test hardware at all). My point is there are very different levels of "production" and pain tolerance (vs. spending more money and time).
Sometimes, in small companies, you just have to wing it and hope for the best (while having a fallback plan if everything goes to hell). A competent admin with an adequate sense of risk-vs-reward will do fine.
If she likes the same pr0n you do, most likely she likes chicks as much as you do....
And frankly, that's just awesome. Only because I've typically found that geeky chicks who appreciate women (but are still bi, or at least keeping their options open) are ungodly awesome in bed. Freaky doesn't usually begin to cover it.
...but very few woman.
Yes, but the women it does attract are usually ones you should pay attention to. They're either gold-diggers, in which case you need to know to grip your wallet very very tightly, or they're car chicks, in which case you take them for a ride. Then take them for another ride. *wink wink nudge nudge*
Works with my S2000, anyway.
Women complaining about men with expensive cars is like women claiming they want a sensitive guy. They will make the claims all day long, and spend the night banging the guy with the expensive car.
Having been divorced for about four years now (I'm 34 - nice 30th birthday present from my ex), I can say it's absolutely true. I've always been the nice guy, but I've had to learn to be an ass with flashy toys.
Women are always claiming, "I want a nice guy who takes care of me and treats me well," and then go home with the biggest douche-bag at the end of the night. I guarantee, if you're nice to her and actually do the things that make her happy, she'll put you firmly in the friend zone. You have little to no chance of ever getting in more than a friendship-type relationship, and a corresponding chance of getting laid.
I unfortunately made this mistake with a very wonderful female friend of mine about a year after the divorce, and in a matter of hours, forever shut down any possibility of something more. I'm still kicking myself as she's just incredible - smart, successful, incredibly hot. Particularly kicking myself lately, as I'm helping her through another horrible breakup. (The guy was the typical macho asshole type, and she finally figured out after three years of living with him that he was a cheating, lying, drunk, lazy, immature drug-addict leech. See? Honestly he was just too stupid to keep stringing her along correctly.)
So I say this, fellow geeks, don't follow your instincts to be nice. Be a dick. Flaunt your cash. It's what she's really attracted to, despite the fact she doesn't even realize it herself. Don't call, don't be overly helpful, don't listen attentively (or don't look like you are). Talk about yourself. Dismiss her problems. Hit on other women when you're out with her. Seriously, it's the dumbest fucking thing you've ever seen, but soon enough she'll be hooked.
Yes, I have a late model sportscar that I bought after the divorce as a present to myself. Yes, I learned to dress better than usual when going out. But until I learned to completely blow chicks off and not be the nice guy that comes to the rescue, neither of those got me anywhere. Learn those last to - really, really, do.
After BSG ends, really there's nothing to keep me watching Scifi or whatever they want to call themselves now. I'll probably see what becomes of the new Stargate series when it launches, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope. SG-1 - the cast, their characters, and the mythos - was awesome. SGA moderately sucked, but was watchable. SGU, well, ummm... yeeeaaaah. I'd rather they get back to what SG-1 was about - ancient cool alien stuff and badass alien overlords, fought off by a snarky guy (be it Jack or Cameron) and his team.
You're right, my 50D does have some noise. I thought my 40D would become my backup body, but it hasn't. I still like the image quality coming off the 40 better than the 50.
I'd say from here, DSLR designers should start working on noise issues. The pixel density of a 15mpxl APS-C sensor is adequate for almost everything I do, and I'd much rather have lower noise. I've been scanning a bit of old Kodachrome over the weekend, and it's remarkable how quiet, smooth, and colorful K25 really was. If the practical increase in resolution can be shown, working on eliminating Bayer-pattern sensors in favor of sensors capable of RGB at every detector site might be another path of progress (such as Foveon's part).
On the "me specific" feature list, integrated GPS for geocoding would be darn handy, too. Not sure how many photographers would use it, but for those of us who spend a good amount of time out hiking through the mountains with our cameras, it would be easier than juggling a separate GPS and keeping notes (or post-processing everything together).
Seems like a problem I see very commonly with developers:
Dev: "The old thing sucked, so we built this shiny new better thing."
User: "Does it do everything the old one did."
Dev: "Yes! It's just that the applications don't support it yet."
User: "So stuff that I use now stops working?"
Dev: "But our new thing is better. BETTER!(tm)"
User: "So stuff that I use now stops working?"
...and on this goes. Suffice to say the user doesn't give a shit about protocols and how sucky the old system was and how awesome the new thing is. He cares about features that did work now suddenly stop, and in his eyes, your new thing
sucks more than the old one, because it doesn't *work*.
Computers, for most of us, exist to accomplish other tasks. The users really don't care about the underlying architecture, or how comp sci awesome it might be, they just care about feature parity when big chunks are replaced.
Sadly, many developers never figure this part out.
In other words, if the programmer took on the burden of tons of work and complexity in order to replicate lots of the functionality of the file system and make it not the file system's problem, then it wouldn't be my problem.
I couldn't agree more. A filesystem *is* a database, people. It's a sort of hierarchical one, but a database nonetheless.
It shouldn't care if there's some mini-SQL thing app sitting on top providing another speed hit and layer of complexity or just a bunch of apps making hundreds of f{read|write|open|close|sync}() calls against hundreds of files. Hundreds of files, while cluttered, is very simple and easily debugged/fixed when something gets trashed. Some sort of obfuscated database cannot be fixed with mere vi. (Emacs, maybe, but only because it probably has 17 database repair modules built in, right next to the 87 kitchen sinks that are also included.)
I do rather agree that it's not a bug. An unclean shutdown is an unclean shutdown, and Ts'o is right - there's not a defined behaviour. Ext4 is better at speed, but less safe in an unstable environment. Ext3 is safer, but less speedy. It's all just trade-offs, folks. Pick one appropriate to your use. (Which is why, when I install Jaunty, I'll be using Ext3.)
Excellent point, missed by 95% of the other posters. Most of us have no idea what Active Directory and Microsoft's group policy crap are capable of doing. The idea of using those sorts of controls has simply never crossed our mind, because we haven't run into a use case.
Honestly I didn't know squat about GP until about a year ago. It's an interesting way to restrict users. That said, it and Unix-based OSes definitely don't do things the same way, and you shouldn't try to force them down the same path.
It would have been far more useful if the OP gave us use cases, rather than just "How do I do this Windows thing in Linux?" Given that most of us are not MCSE types, we have little idea on what features it offers and which features OP wants to use.
Now where's Agnew's headless body?
Under the runaway golf cart, duh...
America is founded on religious freedom, even if you and I consider Scientology to be a cult it is still a 'religion' and cannot be outlawed
Outlawed by the government, no, but pretty much everybody else can make fun of it for the ridiculous batch of pyramid-scheme profiteering BS that it is.
And "Enterprise" is any different?
Personally, I like both of them. I think you'll find a lot of very talented folks who really make this stuff happen have been influenced over the years by the creative folks who create scifi. Neither Gene Roddenberry nor Joss Whedon could engineer a space vessel any more than I could, but creative individuals like them almost certainly inspired some of those that *could* do the job.
Worse, try telling Jayne. He's already got gender confusing name issues. If you tell him his current ship is girly, too, he might just snap. More than usual, that is.
You've got it all wrong...
*bzbzbzbzbzbz*
ALL HAIL THE HYPNOTOAD!
*bzbzbzbzbzbz*
The thing is, I'm torn. I'm a rabid Joss Whedon fan (at least Firefly), and I'm also a reasonably rabid Colbert fan.
"Scilons" ?? ...were created by man. Er, wait, this isn't BSG....
Civilized is relative - we still have a huge number of morality zealots out there who somehow think this is going to be the downfall of society. I strongly disagree with this point of view, but more from my libertarian "it's a private transaction between two willing parties" point of view. Regulate it if you must from a public health standpoint (mandatory STD testing, etc.), but otherwise it should absolutely be legal.
Personally, I think we'd have a much better world if we were all just getting laid more often.
No, but neither did my ex wife.