Normal use?
Not having anything smaller than an inch when everything is miniaturized in todays world is not something fit for "normal use". A meter is a perfectly reasonable every day unit, it's about the length of an arm, or the length of a leg, it's a real stretch to say that a foot is much better than a meter! Besides how many people do you know have 1 foot long feet,it's well below that! And then how many feet are in a mile? I have no idea.. How many cups in a quart? No idea either... And so on. While in metric it is a no brainer, 1000m in a 1km, 1000mm in 1m, 1000g in a 1kg, 1000ml in a 1l and so on. It is kind of obvious that shifting decimals is a lot easier than using factors or 8 12 16 or whatever they are. There is absolutely no reason to stick with imperial units...
big cost with a very low ROI.
Well not having million dollar satellites go to waste is a good start. Being able to talk to other countries is a good benefit. Having children learn some science in school instead of wasting years trying to teach them just how to make sense of the imperial system then waste some more time teaching the metric system then teaching how to convert between the two is another positive thing.
Because: A) The metric system actually makes sense (I still don't know how may yards are in a mile or how many cups are in a quart and so on). B) Everyone one else is doing it. We are not living in the 1900s anymore and we have to talk and deal with the rest of the world, that means using the same metric system. C) Finally the kids will be able to study something more important in school instead of wasting time converting units. D) Million dollar satellites will not go to waste because somebody forgot to convert inches to millimeters E) An inch as the smallest unit is not small enough. Today everything is miniaturized and I would rather talk about 2mm. instead of 1/134 inch or whatever that comes to.
They probably already did this, the sats with nuclear devices in orbit are very effective for the EMP effect when detonated. Dropping them down will probably not be too hard...
For low voltage one of the hardest things to do is to provide adequate shielding. The sensors in my lab go nuts from all the interference. We had to build a copper mesh Faraday cage to measure extremely low voltages.
But something has to run the Internet or be used to access the Internet. Do you really see us going back to the age of dumb terminals?
OS's, might become more specialized (one for internet access, one for the server, one for gaming and so on -- kind of like Home, Professional, Media and Enterprise versions of Windows), but in no way will they become smaller and leaner. Software (often the bad kind) will fill any hardware up to its capacity. I think if Intel or AMD came out with a 10 core, 5GHz processor, in a year there will be some software product that will need 11 cores running @6 GHz to work properly.
I had to do that too until I just switched to Ubuntu then I could just focus on my work. I don't even miss all the 1000+1 KDE options and all the flashy menu effects, the Gnome defaults and dpkg/apt repositories just work for me. It was sort of like growing up (or getting lazy). When I was a Linux noob I liked to play with my options, customize my KDE desktop and choose between a 100 different screen savers. I even ran Gentoo for a while there, compiled for 2 days straight! Now, I just need my work done and don't care if my menus have shadows or fade in and out. I just want sensible defaults.
As for RPM itself, there is nothing wrong with it. Feature-wise it probably better then dpkg, but the big difference is the _repositories_. Yes, Debian and therefore Ubuntu have very well maintained repositories. I did not have any dependency hell in Ubuntu (yet!?), but I remember having it with SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake and Red Hat. So I am not blaming RPM, but rather Redhat and SuSE.
I weakest link will become the battery. Even after switching to OLED for displays and to solid state drives, the CPUs and the video cards will drain more and more power because they'll have to run behemoths like Vista on the machine. So unless there is a dramatic improvement in the basic processor design or battery technology (fuel cells?) mobile computing won't quite live up to it potential yet.
I have tested Cairo for my project and at this moment it is slower than I needed. I was looking for a good canvas to draw a graph on, but I had to settle for something else. I like the features of Cairo, the idea of being able to render to PDF or to the screen, and so on, but it is just not fast enough. Perhaps the attention from the Gecko engine will get some more development going on the Cairo side as well...
Raiser's prison IRC chat logs:
[HRaiser944]: So we need to work on the caching a little more. There are some performance issues.
[Developer38]: Yeah, the journals are not kept consistent at all times.
[HRaiser944]: Uh..I gotta go Bubba is here to pound my ass, I'll have to get back to you in 10 minutes.
[Developer34]: Don't worry we'll send petroleum jelly for Christmas, have fun!
...10 minutes later...
[HRaiser944]: Alright! I'm back and Bubba is happy. I found if I don't struggle he doesn't beat me unconscious and I can get back to work in no time. Strangely I find a part of me likes it and I am secretly waiting for him. He can be a gentle giant sometimes...
[Developer34]: So where were we? Caching...
[HRaiser944]: Right, let me take a look at the source one more time.
Eating, sleeping and going to the gym is not exactly living hell. Now if they can send them to a prison in Siberia, then we'll talk about "living hell". Heck, some homeless people would commit a small crime to get spend the winter in jail.
My point,since you also seem the need this explaining to you, is that I don't care how much they suffer. Them suffering or not will _not_ reverse the crime. Just say that a couple of times to yourself, to get a grip on the idea.
Even if the purpose of prison is emotional punishment, there is _no_ way to measure that, in other words, we don't torture inmates so actual physical pain is not present and as far as emotional pain, what is painful and unbearable for some might be quite pleasant for others. How do you know if Johnny Convict is suffering or perhaps he is enjoying hanging out with his friends at the prison gym every day?
My point is simple, _I_ am paying for all of these idiot's food, shelter and recreation. I could either have them socialize and sleep all day or have them stamp license plates, cleaning highways or developing file systems. Whatever they can do to pay back, let them do it.
I wasn't serious when I wrote "Who is James Kim". I just made the point that to the Slashdot geeks, Hans Reiser is more known than James Kim. The complaint was why doesn't Slashdot cover the James Kim story -- well it was already covered pretty well by the media.Slashdot isn't CNN, that is why you don't see news about Palestine and Iraq here unless they have to do with technology. Kim wasn't directly involved with creating technology, just writing on it, so somehow that doesn't interest the nerds as much. If it is not interesting for the nerds, it has no place on Slashdot.
No, that would presume that I am paying my tax dollars to have all these convicts sit around, eat, go to the gym and sleep all day for the rest of their lives. If Hans can develop his file system, I would still pay my tax dollars for him to sit around, eat, go to the gym, sleep BUT in addition, I would have a great _free_ journaling file system. The later choice seems quite obvious to me...
This has nothing to do with rehabilitation. Where did you see that word in my post or are you just trolling...?
Yes, because is can be locked and contribute. For once a convicted killer wouldn't just eat, sleep and go to the gym while we are all paying for it with our tax money. He can at least contribute to the technological progress. Wouldn't you agree?
Let's look at the two choices here:
1. You can spend your tax dollars and have him sit around, eat, sleep and exercise.
OR
2. You can spend your tax dollars and have a great journaling file system that you can use and nobody will come asking you to pay up royalties for it.
I say regardless whether he is guilty or not, he should have access to a computer so that he can continue developing RaiserFS. One can argue that it will benefit the society at large because it is an open source technology tool. Also it would make a lot more sense as opposed to just let him lounge around all day, get fed and work out at the gym, while all of us pay for it.
I think in case of the U.S., the government _is_ representative of the people. In fact that is the painful side effect of democracy. The "demos" are often not very bright.
Yes, as hard as it may be for you (and me) to believe Bush is still president and a lot of people from the "red" states would still vote for Bush, would still condone war, torture and lack of privacy in the name of some "war on terror" (or as Borat put it "war _of_ terror"). So as dismayed as we are we are in a great minority, the whole state of Texas would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake. The best you can do is make a lot of noise, write to your Congressman, try to educate people yourself hoping that they would listen to you.
The main reason that in U.S. primary education is mandatory and free is so people could be educated enough to cast an intelligent vote. Unfortunately that system is not working very well...
Don't trust the government. Whenever you feel the "I just want to help" vibe coming on, rephrase that into "How can _I_ profit from this?". If he did that he would have sold his generator to al-Qaeda for cash and retired by now. He wanted to "help" and he got screwed!
The thing is, Americans cannot understand how someone could possibly just "want to help" and not "want to make money". If such a thing happens, then surely they must be up to something, they are probably a terrorist and should be locked up anyway.
You are the only one who got my idea. My claim was that Joe BigSUV probably already knows that his car drinks a lot of gas and takes a lot of his money. He will only drive to work but might think twice about doing "extra" driving. Someone with a Prius, will say, "my car is fuel efficient I will go see a movie on the other side of town". So they both will spend the same ammount of money on gas and burn about the same amount of fuel. Except that the guy in the Prius might drive more thus also contributing to traffic congestion, another big problem. Now, I don't have any data to support it, it was just a guess, so take it for what it's worth.
When Jane AnyCar sees that just driving to work will cost so much at the end of the year, she might think twice about commuting 60mi round-trip every day far. Now she pays at the gas pump, and the small increase per gallon (actually not that small!) doesn't bother her and she never really does the math to figure out how much she would save if she moved closer to her work (or moved the work closer to her). And yes, the side benefit, besides saving the environment is decongesting the transportation system.
... it would have a negligible impact on oil consumption in the US
You are right, today's SUV manufacturers have felt some of the pressure due to excessive mileage and there are already mid-size SUV's that have around 30mpg. I also wonder if the people who buy hybrids end up driving more, knowing that their car is so fuel efficient. In other words, an SUV owner knows how much gas his "tank" sucks and might not decide to go shopping to a mall on the other side of town, because he will have to get another a $30 tank of gas on the way back, and Prius owner instead would choose to go.
What do you think of the idea of tracking the amount of driving and increasing the tax accordingly? Would that be feasible? Such that someone who drives 30mi to work everyday might start to consider moving closer to his workplace or finding a job close to their home. This will seriously piss off a lot of people. But when New York starts to sink perhaps nobody would mind moving close to the city. This would seriously reshape the distribution of population long term and would probably create giant metropolitan areas isolated by desert and farmland. The extra money generated could go into development of greener fuels and the building of better transportation networks.
So this guy killed himself because he wanted embarrass Putin? Putin, obviously _very_ embarrassed, said, "Sorry about his death, we all feel bad, I am going back to being a dictator, what's for lunch?"
If anything, KGB spies are not mentally unbalanced. Quite the opposite. There is no way that the former KGB (now FSB) would hire someone who is unbalanced in anyway. They need people who can keep their cool.
I don't know if the actions are more appalling because of their openness, I think they are just appalling. For every poisoning and assassination that we hear about, there are hundreds more that we do not know of.
I don't really think that this was meant to be a secret killing, in other words they could have just made him "slip and fall" somewhere, or find other ways to kill him. But they:
1. Made sure the chemical used (Po-210) is exotic and rare enough that only a professional would have access to (governments make the top of the list here)
2. Chose poisoning. Poisoning is painful and terrifying. It is like being burned or being tortured slowly. The world and the loved ones watched him die slowly as nobody could do anything -- Good show for the media though, everyone in the world got to witness it.
3. Made an ambiguous comment of "how sorry" Putin feels about this guy's death. You mean the guy who criticized you and accused you of pedophilia?...Right, Putin is "so sorry".
The above leads me to believe that this was a well orchestrated show of force. A message has been sent that says "if you defect, or criticize us in any way, this will happen to you."
FSB(KGB)-1, The world-0
Slashdot Mirror
Normal use? Not having anything smaller than an inch when everything is miniaturized in todays world is not something fit for "normal use". A meter is a perfectly reasonable every day unit, it's about the length of an arm, or the length of a leg, it's a real stretch to say that a foot is much better than a meter! Besides how many people do you know have 1 foot long feet,it's well below that! And then how many feet are in a mile? I have no idea.. How many cups in a quart? No idea either... And so on. While in metric it is a no brainer, 1000m in a 1km, 1000mm in 1m, 1000g in a 1kg, 1000ml in a 1l and so on. It is kind of obvious that shifting decimals is a lot easier than using factors or 8 12 16 or whatever they are. There is absolutely no reason to stick with imperial units... big cost with a very low ROI. Well not having million dollar satellites go to waste is a good start. Being able to talk to other countries is a good benefit. Having children learn some science in school instead of wasting years trying to teach them just how to make sense of the imperial system then waste some more time teaching the metric system then teaching how to convert between the two is another positive thing.
Because:
A) The metric system actually makes sense (I still don't know how may yards are in a mile or how many cups are in a quart and so on).
B) Everyone one else is doing it. We are not living in the 1900s anymore and we have to talk and deal with the rest of the world, that means using the same metric system.
C) Finally the kids will be able to study something more important in school instead of wasting time converting units.
D) Million dollar satellites will not go to waste because somebody forgot to convert inches to millimeters
E) An inch as the smallest unit is not small enough. Today everything is miniaturized and I would rather talk about 2mm. instead of 1/134 inch or whatever that comes to.
Seems pretty obvious to me....
You must be new here...
They probably already did this, the sats with nuclear devices in orbit are very effective for the EMP effect when detonated. Dropping them down will probably not be too hard...
For low voltage one of the hardest things to do is to provide adequate shielding. The sensors in my lab go nuts from all the interference. We had to build a copper mesh Faraday cage to measure extremely low voltages.
OS's, might become more specialized (one for internet access, one for the server, one for gaming and so on -- kind of like Home, Professional, Media and Enterprise versions of Windows), but in no way will they become smaller and leaner. Software (often the bad kind) will fill any hardware up to its capacity. I think if Intel or AMD came out with a 10 core, 5GHz processor, in a year there will be some software product that will need 11 cores running @6 GHz to work properly.
As for RPM itself, there is nothing wrong with it. Feature-wise it probably better then dpkg, but the big difference is the _repositories_. Yes, Debian and therefore Ubuntu have very well maintained repositories. I did not have any dependency hell in Ubuntu (yet!?), but I remember having it with SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake and Red Hat. So I am not blaming RPM, but rather Redhat and SuSE.
I weakest link will become the battery. Even after switching to OLED for displays and to solid state drives, the CPUs and the video cards will drain more and more power because they'll have to run behemoths like Vista on the machine. So unless there is a dramatic improvement in the basic processor design or battery technology (fuel cells?) mobile computing won't quite live up to it potential yet.
I have tested Cairo for my project and at this moment it is slower than I needed. I was looking for a good canvas to draw a graph on, but I had to settle for something else. I like the features of Cairo, the idea of being able to render to PDF or to the screen, and so on, but it is just not fast enough. Perhaps the attention from the Gecko engine will get some more development going on the Cairo side as well...
Raiser's prison IRC chat logs:
...10 minutes later...
[HRaiser944]: So we need to work on the caching a little more. There are some performance issues.
[Developer38]: Yeah, the journals are not kept consistent at all times.
[HRaiser944]: Uh..I gotta go Bubba is here to pound my ass, I'll have to get back to you in 10 minutes.
[Developer34]: Don't worry we'll send petroleum jelly for Christmas, have fun!
[HRaiser944]: Alright! I'm back and Bubba is happy. I found if I don't struggle he doesn't beat me unconscious and I can get back to work in no time. Strangely I find a part of me likes it and I am secretly waiting for him. He can be a gentle giant sometimes...
[Developer34]: So where were we? Caching...
[HRaiser944]: Right, let me take a look at the source one more time.
And what if the victim or the family will only be satisfied if they pop her/his eyeballs and then take turns fucking the sockets...
My point,since you also seem the need this explaining to you, is that I don't care how much they suffer. Them suffering or not will _not_ reverse the crime. Just say that a couple of times to yourself, to get a grip on the idea.
Even if the purpose of prison is emotional punishment, there is _no_ way to measure that, in other words, we don't torture inmates so actual physical pain is not present and as far as emotional pain, what is painful and unbearable for some might be quite pleasant for others. How do you know if Johnny Convict is suffering or perhaps he is enjoying hanging out with his friends at the prison gym every day?
My point is simple, _I_ am paying for all of these idiot's food, shelter and recreation. I could either have them socialize and sleep all day or have them stamp license plates, cleaning highways or developing file systems. Whatever they can do to pay back, let them do it.
I wasn't serious when I wrote "Who is James Kim". I just made the point that to the Slashdot geeks, Hans Reiser is more known than James Kim. The complaint was why doesn't Slashdot cover the James Kim story -- well it was already covered pretty well by the media.Slashdot isn't CNN, that is why you don't see news about Palestine and Iraq here unless they have to do with technology. Kim wasn't directly involved with creating technology, just writing on it, so somehow that doesn't interest the nerds as much. If it is not interesting for the nerds, it has no place on Slashdot.
This has nothing to do with rehabilitation. Where did you see that word in my post or are you just trolling...?
Let's look at the two choices here:
1. You can spend your tax dollars and have him sit around, eat, sleep and exercise.
OR
2. You can spend your tax dollars and have a great journaling file system that you can use and nobody will come asking you to pay up royalties for it.
I don't know about you, but I choose 2.
...
Who is James Kim?
Yes, as hard as it may be for you (and me) to believe Bush is still president and a lot of people from the "red" states would still vote for Bush, would still condone war, torture and lack of privacy in the name of some "war on terror" (or as Borat put it "war _of_ terror"). So as dismayed as we are we are in a great minority, the whole state of Texas would probably rejoice at the arrest of Sagoyan and would want him burned at the stake. The best you can do is make a lot of noise, write to your Congressman, try to educate people yourself hoping that they would listen to you.
The main reason that in U.S. primary education is mandatory and free is so people could be educated enough to cast an intelligent vote. Unfortunately that system is not working very well...
The thing is, Americans cannot understand how someone could possibly just "want to help" and not "want to make money". If such a thing happens, then surely they must be up to something, they are probably a terrorist and should be locked up anyway.
You mean you can't string 10 millions LEDs around a phone and light up a whole city for free while you talk on your phone? Stupid physics laws!
You are the only one who got my idea. My claim was that Joe BigSUV probably already knows that his car drinks a lot of gas and takes a lot of his money. He will only drive to work but might think twice about doing "extra" driving. Someone with a Prius, will say, "my car is fuel efficient I will go see a movie on the other side of town". So they both will spend the same ammount of money on gas and burn about the same amount of fuel. Except that the guy in the Prius might drive more thus also contributing to traffic congestion, another big problem. Now, I don't have any data to support it, it was just a guess, so take it for what it's worth. When Jane AnyCar sees that just driving to work will cost so much at the end of the year, she might think twice about commuting 60mi round-trip every day far. Now she pays at the gas pump, and the small increase per gallon (actually not that small!) doesn't bother her and she never really does the math to figure out how much she would save if she moved closer to her work (or moved the work closer to her). And yes, the side benefit, besides saving the environment is decongesting the transportation system.
You are right, today's SUV manufacturers have felt some of the pressure due to excessive mileage and there are already mid-size SUV's that have around 30mpg. I also wonder if the people who buy hybrids end up driving more, knowing that their car is so fuel efficient. In other words, an SUV owner knows how much gas his "tank" sucks and might not decide to go shopping to a mall on the other side of town, because he will have to get another a $30 tank of gas on the way back, and Prius owner instead would choose to go.
What do you think of the idea of tracking the amount of driving and increasing the tax accordingly? Would that be feasible? Such that someone who drives 30mi to work everyday might start to consider moving closer to his workplace or finding a job close to their home. This will seriously piss off a lot of people. But when New York starts to sink perhaps nobody would mind moving close to the city. This would seriously reshape the distribution of population long term and would probably create giant metropolitan areas isolated by desert and farmland. The extra money generated could go into development of greener fuels and the building of better transportation networks.
If anything, KGB spies are not mentally unbalanced. Quite the opposite. There is no way that the former KGB (now FSB) would hire someone who is unbalanced in anyway. They need people who can keep their cool.
I don't really think that this was meant to be a secret killing, in other words they could have just made him "slip and fall" somewhere, or find other ways to kill him. But they:
1. Made sure the chemical used (Po-210) is exotic and rare enough that only a professional would have access to (governments make the top of the list here)
2. Chose poisoning. Poisoning is painful and terrifying. It is like being burned or being tortured slowly. The world and the loved ones watched him die slowly as nobody could do anything -- Good show for the media though, everyone in the world got to witness it.
3. Made an ambiguous comment of "how sorry" Putin feels about this guy's death. You mean the guy who criticized you and accused you of pedophilia?...Right, Putin is "so sorry".
The above leads me to believe that this was a well orchestrated show of force. A message has been sent that says "if you defect, or criticize us in any way, this will happen to you."
FSB(KGB)-1, The world-0