"Powershell is very powerful. Much more so than cmd.exe."
One would certainly hope so, considering how old and antiquated MS-DOS and cmd are. I mean, come on. How could it NOT be? I looked at the user guide for powershell, and saw that "Windows PowerShell is based on the.NET framework."
There's a strike against it right away.
I've been programming command languages for four decades now, and of course there will be unique features to the command language for any operating system. For example, the DCL on the VAX and the CCL on NOS naturally won't interchange on the computers. But times have changed- With the ability to run perl and other open tools on any system, why make something as obtuse as Powershell?
Let's look at an example command "Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem." Even with command completion, this looks cumbersome as hell. Kinda reminds me of COBOL. Computers and their programs are supposed to do the work, while reducing the work for the users.
Read the manual, THEN knock it.
Habits are transferred- Is that "contagious?"
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
Considering how many parties are "catered by Costco," I can see how habits of what one consumes is transferred to another. Perhaps it's the convenience of not having to cook, but the food we consume these days has lower nutritional content (or lower percentage compared to higher fat and carbs) than food of yesterday.
I can't believe how wrong this is on so many levels.
It's already been said above that people will bumble around, walking into others while viewing their phones. No doubt those who drive while talking on the phone will be even more deadly, once they divert more attention to WATCHING their phones.
But let's be (unbelievably) optimistic for a moment, and assume that people will actually be responsible enough to not get into trouble while watching their phones. What other ramifications would there be?
Advertisers LOVE the idea, as their ads are viewed by SO many more people.
Advertising rates increase, justifying it as the viewership skyrockets.
Product pricing skyrockets, to cover the manufacturer's cost of advertising.
The airwaves get more and more jammed.
Health quality goes down- If not due to brain tumors, at least some repetitive stress injury of swinging one's hand back and forth in front of one's face.
The environment is further degraded, as there will be MANY more batteries created and discarded.
More power is consumed, increasing the energy crisis and global warming.
The "dumbing down" of civilization kicks into overdrive.
Phones with TV is a BAD idea. But there's money to be made, so what else could be important?
If you ever have the need to go into any kind of secure facility, you'll want a pilot (and phone) without a built-in camera. It'd be a drag to go in for a meeting only to have them require you leave your tools in your car.
Lower speeds are quite normal when driving off-road. There are all sorts of things to negotiate around- rocks, bushes, holes, etc. I ride motorcycles both on- and off-road. I ride freeway speeds on the asphalt, but commonly 15-35 on the dirt. Believe me, 35 on dirt, even on mildly rough dirt roads, can be considered flying! For bushwhacking across the desert, fording streams and bouncing around rocks, 19.1 is pretty respectable, especially for a robot who doesn't have the benefit of millions of years evolution learning how to balance.
Remember, that's an average speed- Sometimes it's easy to fly across the landscape, other times you have to crawl over obstacles.
I'm delighted to hear this. I have found ext3 to be a very fragile filesystem- Unexepected reboots or powerfails can have a devastating effect.
I've experienced roached ext3 filesystems a number of times- With no hardware failure. Recovering that data by converting it to ext2 helped once, but I'm still trying to recover the data after the last incident. I'm sure (rather, hope!) that these experiences aren't the norm.
Interesting how things change, and how quickly it happens. I recall when AltaVista was the most blindingly fast search engine around. I've been onsite there, and their lobby walls are (were?) covered with patents for their innovative database routines. And where are they now?
Of course, Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) has much more going on than AltaVista did, so the possibility of fading into obscurity is much less likely. Still, it's good to see that a young upstart company can displace a large, entrenched industry leader with a good idea and the drive to do so.
The whole point of the programs is to run your CPU to max when it would be otherwise idle...These programs are designed to utilize any resources you aren't using, and immediately give them back if you need to use them. This is done by setting the priority of the process just over system idle. Any cycles that would be spent idle are spent on processing instead, but when a program wants cycles, it gives them up.
Yes, I understand (and yes, I've tuned it properly). But that's not how it works. While it may not encroach on my productivity once I'm busy on the machine, there ARE issues. There's a significant lag time for it to relinquish its resources whenever I start doing something on the machine. Each time I'm away from the mouse/keyboard long enough for the screensaver to launch BOINC, whatever I'm working on is swapped to disk (despite having a prodigious amount of RAM in the machines). When I once again return to the system, it takes an annoyingly long time to get it brought back into memory. And then there's the power/heat issue on desktops, and battery as well on laptops.
As I said, I'd love to be able to run it, but I just can't justify it.
Hey, I tried using the BOINC software. I'd love to help and be a part of the project, but the fact is that it simply eats all the resources on my machines. Yes, I've tried tuning it back, but to no avail.
When using it, the laptop fans run all the time, and no doubt my power utilization is higher. As much as I'd like to help , I just can't justify it.
I once worked with a junior programmer who'd recently "graduated" from one of those computer tech schools advertised on TV. He was a nice guy, and got his job done for the most part.
Then we started noticing that his code was SIGNIFICANTLY larger than it really needed to be. Once more experienced people started checking his code, it became glaringly obvious that he didn't know what a loop was. He just duplicated code for as many iterations as was necessary.
Now of course, this was an extreme example of the difference between a good programmer and a barely adequate one, but you see the point...
My sentiments exactly. While others have had a good experience with Comcast, my experiences have not been good.
They accidentally unplug my cable, then take 72 hours to reconnect it.
I pay for 5 IP addresses (all DHCP, no less), and they can't get more than two working.
Nobody there seems to know all the procedures for getting something done. I frequently hear that I "should have called a different department" in order to get something done.
Fairly regularly, my service inexplicably drops for minutes to hours at a time.
It's impossible to get to any employee authorized to make a decision. All I can reach are incompetent first-level support people and first-level "managers" (who are probably just other support flunkies).
They consistently fall down on promises of "we'll have you working in 24-72 hours."
Their phone menu takes forever to navigate in order to get to a human.
No call to their service department is ever quick- I've rarely been on hold less than 10 minutes, and commonly over a half hour.
Their customer service is without a doubt the WORST I have ever seen for ANY kind of service provider.
And a personal gripe: The condescending "Thank you for calling Comcast" really irks me. If the friggin' service worked, I wouldn't HAVE to keep calling those bozos!
There's NO WAY I'll rely on them for telephony. I truly wish they weren't a broadband monopoly. I can't get DSL with any reasonable speed where I live, so Comcast is the only game in town.
Why not just use solar panels and convert it to electricity?
Because photovoltaic cells have a limited lifespan. Some articles found state that a lifespan can be unlimited, some say about 30-35 years, but I've heard that the practical lifespan for powering household current is about 7 years- About as long as it takes to recoup the cost of purchasing the things in the first place.
Also, it can't be nearly as efficient to convert light to energy and back to light again as it is to simply redirect the light where it's wanted.
Of course, this would only work while the sun's up- You'd still need lightbulbs and other lighting infrastructure to light at night.
Speaking as one who's been in the solid-state industry (and have even had papers on the technology published), I feel compelled to write a little here.
1. Solid-state disks are NOT a cure-all for any performance problems. You must have I/O bottlenecks, and more to the point, LATENCY problems. Bandwidth problems can be cured with much cheaper RAID stripes.
Let's use a metaphor of a Ferrari as a solid-state disk, and a truck as a rotating disk.
Ferrari fast, truck slow.
Ferarri can't carry much, truck carries loads.
Ferrari expensive, truck cheap.
Consider a race between a Ferrari and a Truck- Who wins? Ferrari, of course. What if I add more trucks? Five trucks still won't be any faster than the Ferrari. Same with disks- A solid-state disk has no heads to seek, no platters to rotate, no latency. Even in a many-disk RAID stripe, to get to random data, a head has to seek, a disk has to spin. Period.
2. Solid-state disks are more reliable than a RAM disk. You see, if you reboot a computer with a RAMdisk, the data contained on it is toast. Not so with a solid-state disk. Yes, I know, there are RAMdisk packages which periodically save the data to a non-volatile medium. Fine. But it can leave a vunerability window- If it backs up every 30 minutes, and the machine crashes on the 29th minute, you've potentially lost 29 minutes worth of data. Is that a problem? For a bank, yes. For a home user, not likely. Your mileage may vary.
3. A solid-state disk should be considered reasonably non-volatile (though I wouldn't back one up to another). A real solid-state disk will have an integrated disk drive, flash storage, battery backup, redundant power. Often times, it will have many of these features. They are reliable. They have to be, in order to justify their enterprise-class price tags.
4. Don't freak out about the price. "Oooo! The cost per gigabyte is about 10x what a rotating disk is!" So what? Nobody (intelligent) would ever advocate replacing all the rotating disks on a system with solid-state. There simply isn't a need to do so. (unless you're in zero-G, or in a tremendously high-vibration environment, etc.)
Traditionally only about 5% of one's data has bottleneck problems. Put THAT data on solid-state, and ONLY that data! A solid-state disk is a specialty tool, and should be used only where needed- Where there are latency problems. To do otherwise would be to essentially drive the above-mentioned Ferrari through a school zone. Sure it's a fast car, but other constraints (kids in crosswalk, speed limits) would keep you from realizing the performance it offers.
I wonder how many of the subscribers are satisfied?
I'm hitchiking on my neighbor's wireless at the moment, because Comcast has let me down yet again. Last Friday they disconnected me accidentally, and can't fix it until Monday (and I live in Silicon Valley, not somewhere hard to reach). From my point of view, they're another monopolistic phone type company with abyssmal customer service. Sure, I can get a DSL line, but it's under 1Mbps at my location. There are no other broadband providers available to me.
At what point will our society view internet access as necessary and ubiquitous as the generic phone line?
Okay, it's been said above that the U.S. doesn't allow supersonic travel between its borders. True, for commercial aircraft.
Still:
There's no reason why it couldn't be used for supersonic travel between New York and Europe.
There's no reason why it couldn't be used for supersonic travel between California and Asia.
For flights that go over the U.S., like New York to Tokyo, there's nothing that says the pilots can't throttle back to subsonic speeds while over land, is there?
If it's fast and fuel/cost/environmentally efficient, I say bring it on. It'll probably be a lot easier to implement than suborbital flight.
This is common practice. I live in California, and do business with a company who has no physical presence in here. When it was purchased by a bigger company who DOES have presence in California (despite being based in Michigan), all of a sudden California sales tax was required by its new subsidiary.
This doesn't seem to be predatory or unusual. Borders has stores all over California. Whether the internet sales is run by someone else or not, it still says "Borders" on the web page.
I'm astounded at how many postings regarding this project belittle the effort. Sure, a 3 MHz TTL device isn't going to compete with anything comtemporary, particularly a commercial microprocessor. True, nobody is going to buy one due to the labor cost to build it.
But can anyone think that it was built to set the world on fire? Has nobody but me ever built something simply for the love of doing it, or the knowledge gained from figuring out how to do so? There's more to building something (whether it be from a kit or personal design) than the usefulness of the end result.
Dark Horse comics? Author Yukinobu Hoshino? 1997? What a ripoff.
James P. Hogan wrote "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" in 1979. The plot line is the same as the one listed on the Dark Horse page.
Slashdot Mirror
One would certainly hope so, considering how old and antiquated MS-DOS and cmd are. I mean, come on. How could it NOT be? I looked at the user guide for powershell, and saw that "Windows PowerShell is based on the
There's a strike against it right away.
I've been programming command languages for four decades now, and of course there will be unique features to the command language for any operating system. For example, the DCL on the VAX and the CCL on NOS naturally won't interchange on the computers. But times have changed- With the ability to run perl and other open tools on any system, why make something as obtuse as Powershell?
Let's look at an example command "Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem." Even with command completion, this looks cumbersome as hell. Kinda reminds me of COBOL. Computers and their programs are supposed to do the work, while reducing the work for the users.
Read the manual, THEN knock it.
Considering how many parties are "catered by Costco," I can see how habits of what one consumes is transferred to another. Perhaps it's the convenience of not having to cook, but the food we consume these days has lower nutritional content (or lower percentage compared to higher fat and carbs) than food of yesterday.
It's already been said above that people will bumble around, walking into others while viewing their phones. No doubt those who drive while talking on the phone will be even more deadly, once they divert more attention to WATCHING their phones.
But let's be (unbelievably) optimistic for a moment, and assume that people will actually be responsible enough to not get into trouble while watching their phones. What other ramifications would there be?
Phones with TV is a BAD idea. But there's money to be made, so what else could be important?
If you ever have the need to go into any kind of secure facility, you'll want a pilot (and phone) without a built-in camera. It'd be a drag to go in for a meeting only to have them require you leave your tools in your car.
Remember, that's an average speed- Sometimes it's easy to fly across the landscape, other times you have to crawl over obstacles.
I've experienced roached ext3 filesystems a number of times- With no hardware failure. Recovering that data by converting it to ext2 helped once, but I'm still trying to recover the data after the last incident. I'm sure (rather, hope!) that these experiences aren't the norm.
I recall when AltaVista was the most blindingly fast search engine around. I've been onsite there, and their lobby walls are (were?) covered with patents for their innovative database routines. And where are they now?
Of course, Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) has much more going on than AltaVista did, so the possibility of fading into obscurity is much less likely. Still, it's good to see that a young upstart company can displace a large, entrenched industry leader with a good idea and the drive to do so.
Yes, I understand (and yes, I've tuned it properly). But that's not how it works. While it may not encroach on my productivity once I'm busy on the machine, there ARE issues. There's a significant lag time for it to relinquish its resources whenever I start doing something on the machine. Each time I'm away from the mouse/keyboard long enough for the screensaver to launch BOINC, whatever I'm working on is swapped to disk (despite having a prodigious amount of RAM in the machines). When I once again return to the system, it takes an annoyingly long time to get it brought back into memory. And then there's the power/heat issue on desktops, and battery as well on laptops.
As I said, I'd love to be able to run it, but I just can't justify it.
When using it, the laptop fans run all the time, and no doubt my power utilization is higher. As much as I'd like to help , I just can't justify it.
This wasn't the case. Knowing when not to use a loop, and not knowing what a loop is are two entirely different things.
Then we started noticing that his code was SIGNIFICANTLY larger than it really needed to be. Once more experienced people started checking his code, it became glaringly obvious that he didn't know what a loop was. He just duplicated code for as many iterations as was necessary.
Now of course, this was an extreme example of the difference between a good programmer and a barely adequate one, but you see the point...
There's NO WAY I'll rely on them for telephony. I truly wish they weren't a broadband monopoly. I can't get DSL with any reasonable speed where I live, so Comcast is the only game in town.
Imagine, skylights on every floor! :-)
Of course, there'd be extended coffee breaks for those total solar eclipses...
Because photovoltaic cells have a limited lifespan. Some articles found state that a lifespan can be unlimited, some say about 30-35 years, but I've heard that the practical lifespan for powering household current is about 7 years- About as long as it takes to recoup the cost of purchasing the things in the first place.
Also, it can't be nearly as efficient to convert light to energy and back to light again as it is to simply redirect the light where it's wanted.
Of course, this would only work while the sun's up- You'd still need lightbulbs and other lighting infrastructure to light at night.
1. Solid-state disks are NOT a cure-all for any performance problems. You must have I/O bottlenecks, and more to the point, LATENCY problems. Bandwidth problems can be cured with much cheaper RAID stripes.
Let's use a metaphor of a Ferrari as a solid-state disk, and a truck as a rotating disk.
- Ferrari fast, truck slow.
- Ferarri can't carry much, truck carries loads.
- Ferrari expensive, truck cheap.
Consider a race between a Ferrari and a Truck- Who wins? Ferrari, of course. What if I add more trucks? Five trucks still won't be any faster than the Ferrari. Same with disks- A solid-state disk has no heads to seek, no platters to rotate, no latency. Even in a many-disk RAID stripe, to get to random data, a head has to seek, a disk has to spin. Period.2. Solid-state disks are more reliable than a RAM disk. You see, if you reboot a computer with a RAMdisk, the data contained on it is toast. Not so with a solid-state disk. Yes, I know, there are RAMdisk packages which periodically save the data to a non-volatile medium. Fine. But it can leave a vunerability window- If it backs up every 30 minutes, and the machine crashes on the 29th minute, you've potentially lost 29 minutes worth of data. Is that a problem? For a bank, yes. For a home user, not likely. Your mileage may vary.
3. A solid-state disk should be considered reasonably non-volatile (though I wouldn't back one up to another). A real solid-state disk will have an integrated disk drive, flash storage, battery backup, redundant power. Often times, it will have many of these features. They are reliable. They have to be, in order to justify their enterprise-class price tags.
4. Don't freak out about the price. "Oooo! The cost per gigabyte is about 10x what a rotating disk is!" So what? Nobody (intelligent) would ever advocate replacing all the rotating disks on a system with solid-state. There simply isn't a need to do so. (unless you're in zero-G, or in a tremendously high-vibration environment, etc.)
Traditionally only about 5% of one's data has bottleneck problems. Put THAT data on solid-state, and ONLY that data! A solid-state disk is a specialty tool, and should be used only where needed- Where there are latency problems. To do otherwise would be to essentially drive the above-mentioned Ferrari through a school zone. Sure it's a fast car, but other constraints (kids in crosswalk, speed limits) would keep you from realizing the performance it offers.
And now he has a radio show.
I'm hitchiking on my neighbor's wireless at the moment, because Comcast has let me down yet again. Last Friday they disconnected me accidentally, and can't fix it until Monday (and I live in Silicon Valley, not somewhere hard to reach). From my point of view, they're another monopolistic phone type company with abyssmal customer service. Sure, I can get a DSL line, but it's under 1Mbps at my location. There are no other broadband providers available to me.
At what point will our society view internet access as necessary and ubiquitous as the generic phone line?
Uh, does this scream "Fahrenheit 451" to anyone else?
Still:
If it's fast and fuel/cost/environmentally efficient, I say bring it on. It'll probably be a lot easier to implement than suborbital flight.
Oh wait- I think I have this backwards. If the case I related were the same thing, then I'd be paying Michigan tax. Never mind.
This doesn't seem to be predatory or unusual. Borders has stores all over California. Whether the internet sales is run by someone else or not, it still says "Borders" on the web page.
Sure, a 3 MHz TTL device isn't going to compete with anything comtemporary, particularly a commercial microprocessor.
True, nobody is going to buy one due to the labor cost to build it.
But can anyone think that it was built to set the world on fire? Has nobody but me ever built something simply for the love of doing it, or the knowledge gained from figuring out how to do so? There's more to building something (whether it be from a kit or personal design) than the usefulness of the end result.
Dark Horse comics? Author Yukinobu Hoshino? 1997? What a ripoff.
James P. Hogan wrote "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" in 1979. The plot line is the same as the one listed on the Dark Horse page.
1. Gates is rich.
2. Therefore he must be smart to have amassed that wealth.
3. He's THE richest,
4. Therefore, he must be THE smartest.
So of course I'll not buy an iPod, I'll follow his lead and buy a Win Phone.
But wait, who was it that said "640k ought to be enough for anyone?"
So much for vision...
http://kineticsculpturerace.org/
I'm not certain how long Baltimore's been doing it, but the Arcata race has been going for 37 years.