Let me make this even simpler for you. TiVo is a product. Do it yourself Linux PVR software is a program.
I apologise for falsely assuming you were attempting to communicate in English.
By the way, Redhat linux comes with Apache. It also comes with gui configure tools for setting it up without ever pulling the http.conf file into an editor. And it is about on par with what you get from apple in that regard (easy to use unless you want to do something interesting with it.)
Wow. How are they going to do that? I mean "Tombs of Atuan" was so different from the first book that back when I read it I had a hard time believing it was supposed to be the sequel until finally Ged shows up at the very end briefly. Tombs of atuan, while good, felt like a seperate self-contained new setting from scratch. The third book (can't remember the name) actually seemed to fit as a sequel to the first much better.
First you said -> Linux (and Apache) aren't products, they're programs. Then you said right after that -> A box that I can run my business website is a commercial product.
These are incompatable statements.
Linux can run a business website, and often DOES. If you don't believe that, I can provide examples with netcraft.
Looks promising. One thing that annoys me about most attempts at something 'better than X' is that they either (1) assume you don't need to bother with remote usability, or (2) assume it's not possible to make a better system be compatble with old X programs. Those things make me automatically stop paying attention to those projects. The ability to run programs written 15 years ago just as well as ones written 15 minutes ago is a major win of Linux. Don't take that away.
This Y-Windows guy looks like he understands this and wants there to be compatability with X applications. (Which really shouldn't be hard - after all even something totally foreign like MS Windows can run an X server as an application.)
The premise of Y windows seems to be "Keep it compatable with X, but put more high-level API calls in there too." That way, instead of opening a window being rendered into 20 or so low level X graphics calls, it is done with just one call and the server deals with the rest. That should make things a lot faster, and open the way for more use of hardware accellerations that are currently impossible because they occur at a more high level than the layer of the X server.
I'd also like to see if he plans to add sound to the remote API. It would be good to finally have that (so just like you remotely transmit keyboard and mouse and screen activity, you also remotely transmit audio activity.)
The problem is that you are operating under the assumption that the same programmer who is willing to spend time fiddling with the UI in KDE would also be good at (and willing to spend time at) fiddling with the hardware drivers in the kernel. It's not that simple. People do what they like to do, and what they are best at doing. Pull people off the KDE project and that won't cause them to start working on more USB driver support. Those things are being worked on in parallel by people who aren't just interchangable parts.
Engineers still work at the companies that design the machines that make gas pumping easy. That machine that lets you lift-the-handle-pick-payment-method-squeeze-the-ha ndle-wait-for-auto-shutoff-pay-at-the-pump
didn't materialize out of thin air.
That is where computer software is a very different sort of market than anything we have experienced in the past, and these analogies don't work. In the gas-pumping world, the job of an attendant to pump the gas and the job of an engineer to design the pump and the job of a tool and die worker to run the machine that made the parts for the pump were three totally different jobs requiring different skillsets entirely. This is not the case with the many layers of computer software. The person who makes the custom app for the end-user company and the person who makes the compiler tools used to make that custom app are both programmers. Sure, they have different styles of work, and different high-level skills, but their low-level skillsets are a heck of a lot closer to each other than the skillsets of the gas station attendant versus the gas pump designer.
So if programming dissapears from the place where end-users see it happening that doesn't mean it disappears as a job. It's just that then the programmers make the tools that the end-users use to make programs.
The article said the mistake was caught before it actually was going to go before the council for a vote. That means those PhD's you talk about hadn't really seen it yet.
Of course all the printers so far have been male! The parallel port on the back of the computer is female, so it wouldn't work any other way! I guess this printer could work with a dongle, though.
I know the iron and copper are what makes it visible, and that they are not particularly harmful. The problem is that the fact that the pipes are in such a state of decay makes me wonder just how bad the water really is, with regards to the stuff I *can't* see. It's obvious that the system is in a state of poor repair. They won't fix it because the building is condemned and scheduled to be torn down in a few years.
Southern california has some of the best weather in the US, bar-none.
Unless you dislike heat and drought. Having to live through an actual winter is a small price to pay for having beautiful mild summers with actual greenery (not brownery) that naturally occurs all over, without the need for sprinklers.
no smoking in bars or restaurants (seriously)
Why was that lised as a bad thing? Your right to do whatever you want to your own body ends when it affects everyone else in the vacinity. If you want tobacco, go for it, but use a delivery method that doesn't affect everyone else near you. (I think those people trying to legalize marijuana would have an easier time of it if they worked just on legalizing the non-smoked methods of delivery - i.e. brownies. It's easier to argue "let the people do what they want to their own brains" when they are affecting ONLY their own brains and not those of people in the vacinity.)
"Flammable" means "combines with oxygen exothermically". Oxygen, touching more oxygen, doesn't do a damn thing by itself, otherwise the atmosphere would be constantly on fire.
Oxygen is what causes everything *ELSE* to be flammable.
Replace oxygen with any other thing and that won't be true.
The 'flammable' label is actually just as stupid, given how fire actually works. Oxygen isn't flammable at all. Yeah, it's dangerous, and having more of it present makes fire more likely, but it's not what's catching on fire. It's what makes it possible for everything else that is flammable to be flammable.
For example, iron is almost always on fire here on earth. It's a very slow process, but eventually it does finish, and the 'ash' left behind is called rust.
Technically that "some earn even more" does add a miniscule amount of additional information and is thus not entirely redundant. If the average of something is X, that could be because some things are above X and some are below, OR it could be because absolutely everything in the set is exactly X, no more, no less. Saying "some earn even more" does in fact add information by ruling out that possiblity. (Although anyone dumb enough to think that every high school graduate earns the same amount of money has a different kind of problem.)
I drink tapwater *because* it's impure. For one thing it tastes better that way (bottled water tastes like...nothing.) And for another, the human immune system works better when it gets to practice on something - that's the premise behind innoculations.
I do make an exception for the tapwater at work, however. It's an old building with terrible pipes because it's had biochemistry experiments being conducted in it for over a century - with all manner of corrosive compounds being used. I insist that my tapwater at least *look* clear before I drink it. The tapwater at work often comes out yellowish, with chunks of stuff in it. No, I'm not kidding. You can also see brown stains on all the drinking fountains' porcelin where the water regularly runs, and all the pipes I can see when the ceiling tiles are pulled aside are covered in crusty green stuff.
The joke was built on a false assumption - that anyone buying the paint is an ignoramus who doesn't know that latex paint disolves in water. The explanation shows that there could still be a reason to buy 'paint thinner' - if it's pure distilled water that works better than what you get from your tap. Perhaps you think humor is so important that it's okay to ridicule undeserving people for it. Some people don't.
I've heard of this concept used to cancel the noise of moving the big airplane lifts in aircraft carriers too (it echos around inside the big room under the deck, making an intolerably loud sound down there.)
But, what I don't get about these is... HOW? It seems to me that if you need to measure phenonenom FOO to decide how to cancel phenomenon FOO, then you just got rid of the thing you need to sample to do the getting rid of it - a chicken-and-egg problem it seems.
Somewhere the sound has to be detectable, at its full original amplitude, so you can calculate what sound wave to send to the speaker, AND how strong it should be (No sense sending an opposite wave that's twice as strong as it needs to be and thus creates pretty much the same sound back out again - so you do need to be able to hear the sound at its original volume at some point in the system.)
The reason is clear - a toilet seat is cleaned more often, and has a surface shape such that it is devoid of nooks and crannies, so it's easier to wipe it down. Picture the effort that it takes to clean a keyboard on a computer - about one hundred keys, each sourrounded by a trench. Trying to wipe that down is slow. This is made worse by the fact that the thing is full of electronics that you don't want turned on if they're wet - so you have to unplug it, wipe it good, then let it dry a long time, and THEN plug it back in.
Even so, I end up having to replace my keyboard once a year because it's so full of hair and skin flakes that the switches under the keys are sometimes failing to make contact. (It doesn't help that my skin grows fast (forgot the name of this condition, but basically the normal process of outer skin flaking off and being replaced with skin from underneath happens at an accellerated rate for me, meaning I have to wash my hair twice a day to avoid an itchy scalp (or use a special shampoo that I hate because it really stings a lot when it hits my eyes.).) So my keyboard gets really disgusting really fast.
I just bought a laptop and this is one thing that I'm worried about with it. If its keyboard gets gunked up I can't easily replace it by dropping $20 at a computer store.
The problem is that the actual culprit is completely undetectable. While Microsoft isn't guilty of the specific crime of breaking into your computer, they are guilty of fraudulent advertising about what their system does - just like if the locksmith who installed your door lock claimed the lock would work, when in fact it didn't, and as a result the murderer stole your gun and used it. The locksmith wouldn't be guilty of the murder, but would be guilty of fradulent business practices.
The difference is purely psychological in the minds of the lawmakers. In reality the issue of open use of DVD's is exactly like the issue of open use of your car. But lawmakers have had *personal* experience with cars, and had *personal* experience with the act of taking a car to a mechanic. They know that in the past it was an open business - take the car to whomever you want. They know how it should work because they've experienced it firsthand. Now, compare that to software. How many lawmakers have taken in their computer software to a professional code mechanic to get a big fixed? How many lawmakers even understand what the job of a programmer really entails? The auto-fixing business is something *everyone* has firsthand experience dealing with. The software industry is not. So lawmakers just don't understand what the world of open standards really is like, and they end up trusting whatever the large companies tell them. They don't put a similar level of trust in what an automaker tells them, because they've experienced firsthand how a third-party mechanic isn't necessarily an evil person just because he has knowlege of how someone else's car works.
If an object is a moon orbiting quickly (relative to the length of a year) around a parent planet, then it's mass ends up just adding to the parent's mass for the purpose of detecting how it affect's other object's orbits. The entire orbiting system of moons around jupiter can be thought of as one large mass centered at Jupiter, for the most part.
(Calculate how the earth-moon system pulls at the orbit of Mars. Now replace the earth-moon system with a single object equal to their combined mass and calculate based on that - the difference in the effect on mars is negligable.)
The key to preventing an extinction-causing asteroid impact is simply to NOTICE it early enough and have a fast means to get a vehicle there. The reason the asteroid-defeating plans are so hard to create is that we have to wait until the asteroid is near us before we can reach it. By then it's too late. If we can affect it sooner, then exploding it into parts could work really well because the parts would be imparted with enough velocity to spread apart so most of them miss the Earth. Even if an object is headed to strike the earth dead-center, then you only need to deflect it far enough to move it a little more than one earth-radius of distance to the side by the time it gets here and that will make it miss. (You do need to go a little more than one earth radius because gravity will pull it in - you need to get it far enough out so it will at least slingshot around earth instead of striking it.)
To put this in perspective, if the asteroid was blown up 40 days before impact, that would give us 960 hours for it to move. In 960 hours, an object can move an entire earth radius by going a mere 4.1 miles per hour. So as long as the explosion can impart a velocity of a little over 4.1 miles per hour perpendicular to the course of the asteroid, then the asteroid bits will veer far enough off course to miss. So exploding the asteroid and sending it's parts off in different directions *can* work, if your explosion is big enough to impart that much velocity, and (this is the hard part) you can get a vehicle carrying the bomb out there 40 days before the impacyt.)
The best defense against such an asteroid is a better space program, with faster vehicles that don't require months of prep time to launch. That gives us the time for a simple solution to actually work.
1 - Planet: A chunk of material directly orbiting a star (as opposed to a moon, which orbits a body which in turn orbits a star). To be called a planet, the object must have become a sphere or elipsoid. (This will happen when there is enough mass there for gravity to 'crunch' the bits of matter together and pack them like a snowball.)
2 - Asteroid: an object that directly orbits a star, like a planet does, but it's NOT a sphere or elipsoid. This will happen where there is not enough mass there for the gravity to 'crunch' the matter into a packed ball.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me make this even simpler for you. TiVo is a product. Do it yourself Linux PVR software is a program.
I apologise for falsely assuming you were attempting to communicate in English.
By the way, Redhat linux comes with Apache. It also comes with gui configure tools for setting it up without ever pulling the http.conf file into an editor. And it is about on par with what you get from apple in that regard (easy to use unless you want to do something interesting with it.)
Wow. How are they going to do that? I mean "Tombs of Atuan" was so different from the first book that back when I read it I had a hard time believing it was supposed to be the sequel until finally Ged shows up at the very end briefly. Tombs of atuan, while good, felt like a seperate self-contained new setting from scratch. The third book (can't remember the name) actually seemed to fit as a sequel to the first much better.
First you said -> Linux (and Apache) aren't products, they're programs.
Then you said right after that -> A box that I can run my business website is a commercial product.
These are incompatable statements.
Linux can run a business website, and often DOES. If you don't believe that, I can provide examples with netcraft.
Looks promising. One thing that annoys me about most attempts at something 'better than X' is that they either (1) assume you don't need to bother with remote usability, or (2) assume it's not possible to make a better system be compatble with old X programs. Those things make me automatically stop paying attention to those projects. The ability to run programs written 15 years ago just as well as ones written 15 minutes ago is a major win of Linux. Don't take that away.
This Y-Windows guy looks like he understands this and wants there to be compatability with X applications. (Which really shouldn't be hard - after all even something totally foreign like MS Windows can run an X server as an application.)
The premise of Y windows seems to be "Keep it compatable with X, but put more high-level API calls in there too." That way, instead of opening a window being rendered into 20 or so low level X graphics calls, it is done with just one call and the server deals with the rest. That should make things a lot faster, and open the way for more use of hardware accellerations that are currently impossible because they occur at a more high level than the layer of the X server.
I'd also like to see if he plans to add sound to the remote API. It would be good to finally have that (so just like you remotely transmit keyboard and mouse and screen activity, you also remotely transmit audio activity.)
The problem is that you are operating under the assumption that the same programmer who is willing to spend time fiddling with the UI in KDE would also be good at (and willing to spend time at) fiddling with the hardware drivers in the kernel. It's not that simple. People do what they like to do, and what they are best at doing. Pull people off the KDE project and that won't cause them to start working on more USB driver support. Those things are being worked on in parallel by people who aren't just interchangable parts.
Pick a Window Manager. Pick a Tool Kit. Now, the person running on the end machine must have the exact same items installed, or it won't work.
Since when? I'm typing this using Mozilla. Which works just as well under many window managers.
Engineers still work at the companies that design the machines that make gas pumping easy. That machine that lets you lift-the-handle-pick-payment-method-squeeze-the-ha ndle-wait-for-auto-shutoff-pay-at-the-pump
didn't materialize out of thin air.
That is where computer software is a very different sort of market than anything we have experienced in the past, and these analogies don't work. In the gas-pumping world, the job of an attendant to pump the gas and the job of an engineer to design the pump and the job of a tool and die worker to run the machine that made the parts for the pump were three totally different jobs requiring different skillsets entirely. This is not the case with the many layers of computer software. The person who makes the custom app for the end-user company and the person who makes the compiler tools used to make that custom app are both programmers. Sure, they have different styles of work, and different high-level skills, but their low-level skillsets are a heck of a lot closer to each other than the skillsets of the gas station attendant versus the gas pump designer.
So if programming dissapears from the place where end-users see it happening that doesn't mean it disappears as a job. It's just that then the programmers make the tools that the end-users use to make programs.
The article said the mistake was caught before it actually was going to go before the council for a vote. That means those PhD's you talk about hadn't really seen it yet.
Of course all the printers so far have been male! The parallel port on the back of the computer is female, so it wouldn't work any other way! I guess this printer could work with a dongle, though.
I know the iron and copper are what makes it visible, and that they are not particularly harmful. The problem is that the fact that the pipes are in such a state of decay makes me wonder just how bad the water really is, with regards to the stuff I *can't* see. It's obvious that the system is in a
state of poor repair. They won't fix it because the building is condemned and scheduled to be torn down in a few years.
Southern california has some of the best weather in the US, bar-none.
Unless you dislike heat and drought. Having to live through an actual winter is a small price to pay for having beautiful mild summers with actual greenery (not brownery) that naturally occurs all over, without the need for sprinklers.
no smoking in bars or restaurants (seriously)
Why was that lised as a bad thing? Your right to do whatever you want to your own body ends when it affects everyone else in the vacinity. If you want tobacco, go for it, but use a delivery method that doesn't affect everyone else near you. (I think those people trying to legalize marijuana would have an easier time of it if they worked just on legalizing the non-smoked methods of delivery - i.e. brownies. It's easier to argue "let the people do what they want to their own brains" when they are affecting ONLY their own brains and not those of people in the vacinity.)
Same is true over on the east coast. People say "east cost" when they really mean "New York".
Get south of Washington and that cynicism goes away.
"Flammable" means "combines with oxygen exothermically". Oxygen, touching more oxygen, doesn't do a damn thing by itself, otherwise the atmosphere would be constantly on fire.
Oxygen is what causes everything *ELSE* to be flammable.
Replace oxygen with any other thing and that won't be true.
The 'flammable' label is actually just as stupid, given how fire actually works. Oxygen isn't flammable at all. Yeah, it's dangerous, and having more of it present makes fire more likely, but it's not what's catching on fire. It's what makes it possible for everything else that is flammable to be flammable.
For example, iron is almost always on fire here on
earth. It's a very slow process, but eventually it does finish, and the 'ash' left behind is called rust.
So, it's only dangerous if you live in California, then?
Technically that "some earn even more" does add a miniscule amount of additional information and is thus not entirely redundant. If the average of something is X, that could be because some things are above X and some are below, OR it could be because absolutely everything in the set is exactly X, no more, no less. Saying "some earn even more" does in fact add information by ruling out that possiblity. (Although anyone dumb enough to think that every high school graduate earns the same amount of money has a different kind of problem.)
I drink tapwater *because* it's impure. For one thing it tastes better that way (bottled water tastes like...nothing.) And for another, the human immune system works better when it gets to practice on something - that's the premise behind innoculations.
I do make an exception for the tapwater at work, however. It's an old building with terrible pipes because it's had biochemistry experiments being conducted in it for over a century - with all manner of corrosive compounds being used. I insist that my tapwater at least *look* clear before I drink it. The tapwater at work often comes out yellowish, with chunks of stuff in it.
No, I'm not kidding. You can also see brown stains on all the drinking fountains' porcelin where the water regularly runs, and all the pipes I can see when the ceiling tiles are pulled aside are covered in crusty green stuff.
The joke was built on a false assumption - that anyone buying the paint is an ignoramus who doesn't know that latex paint disolves in water. The explanation shows that there could still be a reason to buy 'paint thinner' - if it's pure distilled water that works better than what you get from your tap. Perhaps you think humor is so important that it's okay to ridicule undeserving people for it. Some people don't.
I've heard of this concept used to cancel the noise of moving the big airplane lifts in aircraft carriers too (it echos around inside the big room under the deck, making an intolerably loud sound down there.)
... HOW? It seems to me that if you need to measure phenonenom FOO to decide how to cancel phenomenon FOO, then you just got rid of the thing you need to sample to do the getting rid of it - a chicken-and-egg problem it seems.
But, what I don't get about these is
Somewhere the sound has to be detectable, at its full original amplitude, so you can calculate what sound wave to send to the speaker, AND how strong it should be (No sense sending an opposite wave that's twice as strong as it needs to be and thus creates pretty much the same sound back out again - so you do need to be able to hear the sound at its original volume at some point in the system.)
The reason is clear - a toilet seat is cleaned more often, and has a surface shape such that it is devoid of nooks and crannies, so it's easier to wipe it down. Picture the effort that it takes to clean a keyboard on a computer - about one hundred keys, each sourrounded by a trench. Trying to wipe that down is slow. This is made worse by the fact that the thing is full of electronics that you don't want turned on if they're wet - so you have to unplug it, wipe it good, then let it dry a long time, and THEN plug it back in.
Even so, I end up having to replace my keyboard once a year because it's so full of hair and skin flakes that the switches under the keys are sometimes failing to make contact. (It doesn't help that my skin grows fast (forgot the name of this condition, but basically the normal process of outer skin flaking off and being replaced with skin from underneath happens at an accellerated rate for me, meaning I have to wash my hair twice a day to avoid an itchy scalp (or use a special shampoo that I hate because it really stings a lot when it hits my eyes.).) So my keyboard gets really disgusting really fast.
I just bought a laptop and this is one thing that I'm worried about with it. If its keyboard gets gunked up I can't easily replace it by dropping $20 at a computer store.
The problem is that the actual culprit is completely undetectable. While Microsoft isn't guilty of the specific crime of breaking into your computer, they are guilty of fraudulent advertising about what their system does - just like if the locksmith who installed your door lock claimed the lock would work, when in fact it didn't, and as a result the murderer stole your gun and used it. The locksmith wouldn't be guilty of the murder, but would be guilty of fradulent business practices.
The difference is purely psychological in the minds of the lawmakers. In reality the issue of open use of DVD's is exactly like the issue of open use of your car. But lawmakers have had *personal* experience with cars, and had *personal* experience with the act of taking a car to a mechanic. They know that in the past it was an open business - take the car to whomever you want. They know how it should work because they've experienced it firsthand. Now, compare that to software. How many lawmakers have taken in their computer software to a professional code mechanic to get a big fixed? How many lawmakers even understand what the job of a programmer really entails? The auto-fixing business is something *everyone* has firsthand experience dealing with. The software industry is not. So lawmakers just don't understand what the world of open standards really is like, and they end up trusting whatever the large companies tell them. They don't put a similar level of trust in what an automaker tells them, because they've experienced firsthand how a third-party mechanic isn't necessarily an evil person just because he has knowlege of how someone else's car works.
It's about the exposure.
If an object is a moon orbiting quickly (relative to the length of a year) around a parent planet, then it's mass ends up just adding to the parent's mass for the purpose of detecting how it affect's other object's orbits. The entire orbiting system of moons around jupiter can be thought of as one large mass centered at Jupiter, for the most part.
(Calculate how the earth-moon system pulls at the orbit of Mars. Now replace the earth-moon system with a single object equal to their combined mass and calculate based on that - the difference in the effect on mars is negligable.)
The key to preventing an extinction-causing asteroid impact is simply to NOTICE it early enough and have a fast means to get a vehicle there. The reason the asteroid-defeating plans are so hard to create is that we have to wait until the asteroid is near us before we can reach it. By then it's too late. If we can affect it sooner, then exploding it into parts could work really well because the parts would be imparted with enough velocity to spread apart so most of them miss the Earth. Even if an object is headed to strike the earth dead-center, then you only need to deflect it far enough to move it a little more than one earth-radius of distance to the side by the time it gets here and that will make it miss.
(You do need to go a little more than one earth radius because gravity will pull it in - you need to get it far enough out so it will at least slingshot around earth instead of striking it.)
To put this in perspective, if the asteroid was blown up 40 days before impact, that would give us 960 hours for it to move. In 960 hours, an object can move an entire earth radius by going a mere 4.1 miles per hour. So as long as the explosion can impart a velocity of a little over 4.1 miles per hour perpendicular to the course of the asteroid, then the asteroid bits will veer far enough off course to miss. So exploding the asteroid and sending it's parts off in different directions *can* work, if your explosion is big enough to impart that much velocity, and (this is the hard part) you can get a vehicle carrying the bomb out there 40 days before the impacyt.)
The best defense against such an asteroid is a better space program, with faster vehicles that don't require months of prep time to launch. That gives us the time for a simple solution to actually work.
How about this set of definitions:
1 - Planet: A chunk of material directly orbiting a star (as opposed to a moon, which orbits a body which in turn orbits a star). To be called a planet, the object must have become a sphere or elipsoid. (This will happen when there is enough mass there for gravity to 'crunch' the bits of matter together and pack them like a snowball.)
2 - Asteroid: an object that directly orbits a star, like a planet does, but it's NOT a sphere or elipsoid. This will happen where there is not enough mass there for the gravity to 'crunch' the matter into a packed ball.