There's actually a lot of potentional scientific correct stuff in the Bible. Yet, discussing them usually gets frowned upon by either team - it seems (for atheist scientists) a lot easier to discard the bible as 'rubbish' instead of an historical document - where the religious camp tends to take this same history book too literal, despite all translation issues.
Genesis conforming our current Big Bang theory is already a nice start. But, it also hints of more scientific knowledge already known back in the days we call 'stone age'.
A good example of this are Mozes' hygienic laws - about washing hands, seperating raw from cooked food, refraining from eating animals which carry nasty parasites (pigs) etc.
To stretch the imagination more, more stories possibly have some scientific origin. Let me mention a few (without claiming this is correct, but hopefully also without hilarious laugther):
* The arch of Noah - might well have been a spaceship from another planet or solar system, colonializing earth with humans and various animal species.
* Adam and Eve may tell us about genetic engineering - and hence being banned from paradise (animals have no worries apart the current moment) by the knowledge gained (our brains improved by genetic engineering).
* Jesus might have been a space traveller with a good first-aid kit - hence the miracle curings.
* Ascension tells us how he (Jesus) left with his spaceship.
* Even our fossile records supports theories of an alien origin of mankind - there is the famous 'missing link' between apes and humans, especially recent fossiles. Admittingly there are plenty other explanations for that.
* The reasonable recent human races (homo sapiens, neanderthalers, denisovan) might hint to a humanlike race already spreading accross the universe, and colonizing earth with astronauts from various planets.
* The bible distinguishes between 'The Lord' and 'God' - where the Lord is an actual impersonification of a man. Such Lord may well be some space traveller, or otherwise well-educated person, and is mistaken for God only by misinterpretation.
Etc etc. It's easy reply to this with a 'what the f* did you smoke'. However, keeping all options open is what a scientist ought to do. We may have well been interpreting the Bible the wrong way all along. The better reader already noticed that some of the theories mentioned above conflict eachother. However, seeking a scientific explanantion makes more sence than believing in miracles and an almighty God.
There is so much in history that we don't know, and can only guess. Thinking that we are the first intelligent species and culture that lives on this 4-billion year old earth may be very naive.
To put that in perspective: We will probably be able this, or next century latest, to colonize other planets. We will also be able to send robotic vehicles to other star systems. Chances are, that in the next 500-1000 years, we will be able to geo-engineer another planet (Mars). We may be able to send deepfrozen life and DNA in a robotic space ship to another star. We may be able to send bacterial life to other planets. We even may be able to send animal embryo's to other planets. This is all only limited to our imagination, technically this all seems possible in theory.
Now, if you accept this is possible, by us. Then it is reasonable to assume it happened before. It may be reasonable to speculate that earth is actively colonized, possible after being geo-engineered first for millions of years to make it suitable for human life forms.
Surely the Pope won't like this last speculative thoughts. Yet, it's just a scientific-plausible theory. And we may actually have a record of exactly such in our very own Bible.
Mine is currently actively used to fill a box which would otherwise be useless. I'm very happy for the box now having a meaningful purpose in life.
For what i was planning to do, one plan did not work due to obscure compatibility reasons which boiled down to floating points and a buggy database connection. The other plan - using it as motion capture, did not work as the USB webcam driver / or webcam / would crash on occasion but definitively overnight. Might have to do with the bad USB power output causing instability.
I would have used it as media player if the sound output wasn't of such bad quality.
Overall, i think the project is nice and all but the hardware is of inferior quality. If you are serious about embedded devices or building robots or so there is, and existed for long, much better hardware.
I admit the price is low. However, to me the key sales point is that it's a standardized platform with several linux distributions ready to roll. So, the community around it makes it great. But for any serious project the hardware s*x big time. I'd rather have that community and a slightly more expensive device that performs as expected (as in: proper USB, total open hardware without vague GPU blobs, more and better IO pins with for example a 12-bit A/D converter arduino style, quality audio in and out, etc etc).
Nevertheless i'm impressed by the momentum. I also think newer generations might fix the hardware issues they have. But just in my view, just focusing on 'as cheap as possible' was a terrible design decision. Had all hardware be high-end, like USB conforming specs, then it would be golden.
In the Netherlands, you may pay 30% taxes, but on top of that come contributions to the welfare system, since you are insured against unemployment by law.
Typically, the average worker cost the employer about 3 times as much as the employee will receive netto on their bank account. This because employers pay a large amount of healthcare costs and other things.
So, for the average worker, they will see their salary `taxed` by about 65-70%. Just, they don't call it tax but insurance fees. As your income climbs, taxes raises but social security fees are capped. So yes, someone with a 200k income or more pays in procents less taxes and fees.
On topic. The Netherlands are killing all kind of active entrepreneurship. Seems only multinationals are welcome. Small businesses are not appreciated here, and even if you succeed, taxes and (local) governments will make your live miserable by regulations. Uber is just the latest example in this. Meanwhile, only few people take taxi's because no-one can or is willing to afford them, partly because their is no competitive market since its all being regulated. Paying 30 euro for a 2 km trip is not uncommon, and that's not even night tariff.
Instead of thinking complex solutions, you could also think of simpler solutions. Why don't you focus on improving your mobile connection.
Like: make extension cord to tether your phone, and place the phone near or even outside the window.
Or, buy a 'real' (seperate) G2/3/4 modem with a big (and seperate) antenna for $150.
Or. See if you have local interference. Or, see if another type or brand of phone has a better connection.
And of course you already stripped all apps from your tethering phone and disabled wifi, as your phones processor isn't that fast and may easily be stale to other tasks for a few hundred ms.
Also, you could / should check which provider has the strongest signal at your place, may well be a 3rd provider.
I'd seek solution in optimizing one mobile connection. My personal experiences with tethering are that in general it is actually more reliable than wifi, with less latency and less packet loss, but obviously this may vary depending on your location. However, i'd go for all 'low tech' solutions first, starting by putting you cellphone antenna at the most optimal location, like the roof of the building (...).
You can breath pure oxygen perfectly fine, especially when you lower the atmospheric pressure. On Mars, it would make total sense to breath pure oxygen at 1/5 earth atmospheric pressure. It's also what mountain climbers use to compensate for the pressure drop.
The real issue is fire danger - anything combustible might spontaneously catch fire, so all materials in such environment would have to be fire-resistant. That, or you must wear a helmet all day.
A good example of this is the American vs Russian space technology - the Russians choose for 1 atmosphere pressure and normal (earth) levels of oxygene, while the Americans standardized initially on pure oxygen. Quote: ``The docking module was designed as both an airlock — as the Apollo was pressurized at 5.0 psi using pure oxygen, while the Soyuz used a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere at sea level pressure`` (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... )
The most obvious approach is to combine the 2 methods - much like humans do, especially in noisy environments. It might improve the accuracy of current speech recognition which is, too be honest, still sub-standard.
Speech recognition as is now is way too limited. Sure, Siri and the likes may work. And some computerized phone systems use it to nag us instead of using reliable button clicking. But it is still far from transcribing an accurate memo. Let alone automated subtitling or other fancy applications.
So yes, please, develop it, and use it to improve overall speech recognition.
* Trees are a wind barrier, making it easier and safer to drive in windy weather
* Trees block sunlight especially when the sun is low, making driving a lot more safer
* Trees reduce noise from the vehicles so people living nearby the road perceive less hinder
There are many good reasons to have trees near the roads. Also, falling leaves is a seasonal effect and falling branches/trees only happens during stormy weather (assuming the trees are well maintained).
Of course situations may differ from place to place, but there are good reasons for the trees to be there and they may actually make the roads safer for the driver. Added bonus for pedestrians and bicylists if they are on a lane seperated by trees from the cars.
The only real exception i can think of when trees block sight on crossroads. But to solve that you certainly not have to remove all trees. [And playing advocate of the devil: some people say this actually makes the crossroad safer as people really have to stop and look carefully]
The board integrates a real time clock. This makes it ideal in remote, disconnected or power-safe configurations. From a wild-life camera to an embedded dishwasher controller. Being compatible, low-cost, running Linux and 'just works an community supported' is a big plus. I'd say, bring more of those clones.
* It preheats some element or reservoir for a limited time duty cycle * It just draws more power from USB ; powerbanks happily support 2A and the '900mA specced USB port' on their macbook might also capable of delivering much more. * The pen includes a rechargable battery capable of delivering more peak current. The pen could easily hold a 1Ah 3.7V lithion cell. * They provide an adapter to plug it in 2 USB ports * *
Note about the floating point - before ppl start pointing out - i tried both available debian distrubitions (with hard and soft floating point). While the soft floating point did fix some issues, unfortunately, not all of them (when it came to mono/mysql).
A friend got me a PI recently as little present, which was very welcome.
It's a great little device, though with some very odd design decisions.
For me personally, the graphics chip is simply not needed. Also, onboard is a DSP that's unfortunately undocumented and hence disfunctional.
The I/O pins are hardly protected - so if you want to experiment with electronics, best start by a simple circuit to protect them, with some transistors or an optocoupler. Also, the pens are 3.3V and provide no power more than a 10mA... Not really an issue, but also implies that you cannot drive a relais from it directly.
The biggest issue is in the power. The power supply i had was adequate (1.4A), but, the PI itself is not. Hotplugging the USB with any power hungry device - like a WLAN key, or a webcam, is likely to power-cycle the PI. It is known issue - but can come unexpected. Low power devices like mice and keyboards are likely to be hotplugged but, any sane person only uses those during installation process.
Software - What works, what not works. Firefox runs. This is really impressive, it actually works. Albeit, that even when idle, the FF process alone will take 60-80% of the CPU power.
What not works - mono. Well, mono works. But, there are issues - especially regarding floating points, and it typically shows when accessing databases. 'Conversion error in (system.sql.data.import or some - i'm not that good with mono).
Performance - it is said it 'feels' like a pentium 300. I agree, overal the performance is not very sluggish, and much what you'd expect from such device. However, when running benchmarks, things turn out different. For example stockfish, the chess program. With parameter 'bench' it'll perform a single-core benchmark. Ubuntu-pc-32: 4900ms Ubuntu-pc-32 / optimized build: 4500ms Ubuntu-pc-64: 3300ms Raspberry pi: 239.000ms From this benchmark, the PI more runs like a pentium66. This is a cpu and integer intensive benchmark. I'm sure modern memory access will make up for it. However, it is very clear that the ARM instruction set is very very elegant, but also very inefficient.
As far as connectors etc go, i agree with the reviewer. It's soldered, but does not look very bullet proof. Best be handled with care, and unplug power by unplugging adapter from mains might be prefered. That being said, apart some installation quircks i did not have to powercycle it often.
Stability. On idle load, it is very stable. I installed 'motion' - the videocam 'guarding' software, and configured it. However, this software was not stable. I don't know if it's the software, the port, or the PI, but it will not run much longer than a day, when making repeated snapshots (like 1/second).
The basic distro's seem fine. When adding custom software, the debian package may well be present (very very much kudo's to those distro maintainers!). Compiling software yourself on the PI is going fine in most cases, though may take a while. On larger compiles it may suffer from low memory and break - so, if you want to compile a lot for your PI, best set up a crosscompiler. The biggest issue i had was in unforeseen instabilities, either when putting the PI under load, either when using not-too-well-tested software like mono. That being said, it is very impressive that almost anything in a standard debian distro just works.
On occasion, i had a process that could not be killed. Here, it shows the architectural differences between i386 and ARM i guess. On a pc, the kernel should be able to kill any process. On the PI arm, this seems not always to be the case. I'm not enough cpu guru to guess details on this, just i guess it has to do with ARM.
Wifi - i had a nice wifi stick. It works fine. However - again, not perfect stable in my view, it may loose connection. May be my adapter maybe the pi. If you have chance, just use ethernet - it will releive the pi's cpu on the fly, and you may need the cpu power for other things.
Learned something new today - because, until now i was always assuming the console already did run in user space, and was as friendly to print kernel messages.
Sais someone who obviously didn't take the time to learn him/herself Dvorak.
The only disadvantage i found - as Dvorak typer - is compatability with games. For any other purpose like typing text and programming, i like it and will never go back to qwerty. I'm not telling anyone they should learn Dvorak, i'm also not saying it's superior - it's a matter of personal taste. And yes, once you learn it you will notice it performs as promised. Also, these days Dvorak is thus widely accepted, that international keyboard layouts are supported on almost any platform. A thing to consider may be your native language, but my native language (dutch) has simular letter frequencies to english.
Having said that, for the sole purpose of breaking a record, it is definitively not worth to learn it. It will take you years to get the same accuracy and speed as you find yourself now using Qwerty. If any, i'd say, set the record, then learn Dvorak, and try again in 8 years. If you want to learn it, personal interest should be your motivation.
I'd love to do so. I've played with the thought many times. Why not just an open wifi. I have reasons to do so, like friends bringing a smartphone. Like other strangers, just looking for map directions or whatever they do online. Personally i'd love to if other private parties in our city did as well - as currently open wifi is only available near our library (during opening hours) and a single pub.
However. Legal obligations and practice, make me responsible what happens over my internet connection. So, to get a reasonable plausible deniability on that, i'd have to go to real investments like, for example, by sharing a FON spot. If FON was a pure software-based solution, i'd done so already. However, it requires hardware. That i'd have to pay for, admittingly, it's not much. But on the other hand, i do not need 2 wifi stations at my home. Or have a 3rd party in control over my connection.
If there was a _simple_ way of logging. Like, a prefab solution, preferably installable on my wifi dsl modeml/router, i'd do so to. But, to run my own server, surging 200W, just for the sake of providing free wifi services, with all more or less obliged logging just to warrant myself from legal stuff.. That's a bit too far stretched. Not in the last place because of electricity and mainterance costs.
So, i totally agree with the EFF. I'd really love to. I'm also all ears for a wifi 'mesh' network, etc. But the legal practice is that i'm responsible whatever goes over my internet connection. Wether being 'illegal' downloads, illegal porn or illegal messanging, current laws in my current country, and probably laws all over the world, tell me this is a very bad idea. Sooner or later it'll get me into trouble. Which makes generousity having a high price.
Concluding. It's both a legal and a software issue. If there was a reasonable easy software solution that would allow me to do so, i would. I hate telco's and their mobile rates. I totally believe that if i, and everyone, would just open wifi the world would be a nicer online place. But i admit. I'm just a coward.
Now you have all time in the world, but seriously. When you arrive at your new home, new job, new everything, you have, and want to have, other stuff on your mind than your old computer collection.
All you need, most likely, is one working, in a fashionable way, PC or laptop. Printers are not relevant as they are available in any corner of the world for $50. So is all your old data, if it doesn't fit on an SD card it's rubbish anyways.
Disassembling working hardware is a bad idea too, better leave the computer just as-is, in working order, than to dissassemble. That's only waiting for extra unanticipated problems.
Meanwhile, you are going to sit and wait 8 weeks without your hardware. You will find some replace, and use that.
Imho, the only reason to ship your old hardware is if you think over there where you going is a viable 2nd hand market for it. And even then you should wonder.
When migrating. Bring as little as possible. On bring stuff you have a strong bond with. To me, that would not be a set of computers, that for sure. One, maximum. And better even: just one usb-key with data.
You will have other things on your mind when you get there. Now you have all time of the world bothering this issue, even asking for it on/. In two months, you'll regret giving yourself the extra hassle of re-assembling your computer farm. Chances are it'll keep in boxes for the next year. And that you only unpack you furniture, and other comfortable stuff.
What is that with Americans playing on the person all the time?
In Holland, we have had politicians who were publicly known to visit SM dungeons and black rooms. Are publicly gay. Or just unmarried, like our current prime minister. And no-one, literally no-one, makes a fuzz out of that.
Any debate will be about political issues. The worst accusations regarding personal lifes is about possible activist behaviour in the past. Working for greenpeace for example, like the current leader of the big labour party who has been arrested at least 10 times due to his activist history.
So.. I think this is a good thing. I'm not seeing how a politicians personal life, sexlife, hobbies, children, wife or man, has anything to do with the quality of the person as politician, and the message he or she brings. They are ordinary humans just like you and me with human desires, emotions and errors.
So, why with 'you' it is an issue if a politician plays a rogue in WoW? I wouldn't know, and have no issue with it myself untill she ganks me. If any, it only proves she's just as human as the 2 million other rogues around in this game, and is in for some fun and entertainment at a time, proving she's got a modern youthful mind..
My latest PC still has a windows on, mostly because the oem license wasn't that expensive (admittingly, if i wouldnt take it i'd had to pay an extra 50 euro assembly fee). But, it made me purchase a windows license just in case. And/or to play a game.
Well, that game runs about equally well under linux. The last time i booted windows was more than a month ago, and only for 15 minutes. Most of that time spent because of the funky updates, which i let it download just to reboot into a sane OS after.
If the next PC would be a 'single boot', no way i need a windows license. It'll run any of my favo distro's, but no Windows, because that'll require secure boot. -Yes, i plan to use my current PC quite a few years to come-
Lot of friends of mine are seriously interested in running linux, i help them where i can. When time comes, they'll also be rightfully pissed when they notice their hardware is crippled. Or maybe got permanent *n*x fans before that.
MS may think the market for linux is small, they also may underestimate the need. And the 20% geeks that actually want to -at least- dual boot.
So go ahead. Do it. I'll happily pay 50 euro extra for my next mobo to have an 'alternate' bios. If any, it only drives me away from using NT. I don't need it for any task expect for trying that casual game that found a new way to bug wine, anyways.
Conclusion: if MS wants to sell me a license, they'd better offer dual boot option. Else no sale for them. Not that they really bother, but just in case, let them take their pig. I'm quite sure the soup will be aten less hot then it's served atm, even if i think it's a quite troublesome development and indeed has more to do with vendor-lock in, drm, crippling hardware and limiting users, than it has with security.
after the plane lands, and you're already in baggage claim before you can finally check your voicemail.
That was a good laugh for me.. It's only 10 years ago that you'd had to find a phonecell to call. If you had small change. Which was in europe even more fun - exchange notes, get small change, and only then call. Makes me smile that you find a phone in your pocket taking 3 minutes to get you connected to 3G (and only because you installed too many apps on it) is a serious concern...
In my opinion, don't even try to 'brighten up' boring information. I so hate that, and i'm sure many others.
If the information is dull, best you can do is to organize it as good as you can, hand them out on paper if you want, so people can review them for their own, and keep your verbal notes on it as brief as possible.
Look. The main reason you'r giving that talk is to give that information. Not to try to be funny. If your audience wanted to be entertained, they'd hired a stand-up comedian. They didn't, they asked you. To give that information.
So, you just do exactly that. Give the information. As brief as possible. Don't go into dull but supposedly funny anecdotes, as they will not have the effect you expect. Also, don't expect that all of the sudden you are as funny as this-brilliant-TED-speaker, as you won't.
The best way of entertaining is if you can keep your talk in less than the 30 minutes that are given you (and for sure not a minute longer), and by being as informative as you can in that time, so that your audience doesn't feel their time is wasted. Just. be. informative. No more, no less. And yes, this post is the exact opposite of a good example as i'm repeating the same over and over again.
commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market
That's exactly what i ment.. Commercial, not open-source, and secondly, aimed at embedded systems.
And indeed, most current kernels will be some hybrid between monolithic and micro. That's what makes Hurd and Minix so interesting: pure userland drivers/servers/ or whatever you call it; sshfs and fuse just faints by it. From a programmer stance of view, it narrows the gap between database (in the broad sense) / filesystem / IO, allowing way more efficient approaches of dealing with data and information services.
I wonder, how is real-world useability state of microkernels? As i know of only 3 serious open source projects developing an actual useable microkernel for pc-ish hardware (namely: minix, hurd and -shoot me- reactos), how does minix compare to hurd. Which of those 2 projects would be likely to be a serious (`production`-ready) alternative for linux?
On first sight, it seems Hurd is a few steps further - debian delivers an experimental distro around a Hurd kernel (comparable to the debian/freebsd project) for a few years now, whereas minix just implemented netBSD's userland with this release. On the other hand, news on Hurd has been steadily stale for a decade or 2.
If our future would be easy selectable kernels (linux/hurd/minix) and userland (gnu/*bsd), in any combination of our liking and/or most suited for the goals, then i'd welcome it, but i'm quite sure this is an oversimplification of current reality, and probably future, especially seen current *bsd vs linux development (partly caused by licensing issues). Maybe some expert on the matter could enlighten us with enduser-understandable technical details, and a comparison on those projects, please.
I'm sorry, while i understand the correct plural of 'forum' is 'forums' in english, in dutch we mimic the original latin grammar making the plural of 'forum' to be 'fora' (and 'museum' like 'musea' etc). Our school teachers made pretty damn sure that we would do this correctly, and thus it has slipped into my english in unguarded moments.
Paid customer services, like character recustomization and especially migration have been deadly for certain realms and games in general.
If your friends move to another realm, you have 2 options: transfer your own character, or quit playing. The same goes when a previously florishing realm goes 'dead' - people either move either quit playing.
Blizzard neglected this issue way too long - look at their fora, for certain realm subfora this is the most common complaint 'our realm was good but now everyone left there's : not even enough players to raid with / too many opponents / etc. The character transfers also heavily affected PvP - no-one wants to belong to the 'loosers' so a lot of battlegroups got serious balancing issues. -There are other indications that blizzard didnt take PvP serious enough, like heavy class imbalances, but in my opinion it were the character migrations that have been deadly for certain realms...
Last not least - blizzard 'hardened' the content. While most will agree that a lot of content in previous expansions was 'too easy' (major cause of this being 'epics' too easily available - hence the term 'welfare epics' was introduced) - the balance now swapped to the other side and a lot of semi-casual guilds and players just gave up on the raiding content because it was 'too hard'. Blizz still being king of content - they'd better taken some of the complaints on the fora more serious as they seem to be unaware of certain issues that every player is aware of..
So.. i'm not surprised - it's still a great game but it cries for more variation in the content to please both hardcore, casual, PvE and PvP players - and yes, the players got spoiled over the years, too, demanding a better game all the time;)
This might explain accelerating expansion of the universe (anti-matter continues to apply a repulsive force).
The expansion of the universe has nothing to do with galaxies 'just drifting apart' but involves the stretching of space itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space might be a good, albeit mind-boggling, read.
Luckily, i see others 'defending'.NET here too. Cause just because it's from Microsoft 'it must be bad' is a very invalid statement. That it isn't portable is simply a troll too, that just depends on the libraries you use, very much like any other language. There's.NET, there's mono. If portability is a key, use mono (or make sure it compiles on mono), and you'r pretty much set. I rejected.NET for long time too, just for the same invalid reasons, until i actually gave it a shot.. Let me state a few conclusions:
* The language itself is a beauty. Really. It's the best and most beautiful programming language i ever met. It's powerful, it has very nice language constructs, it has about everything a programmer could wish for - and more. From the beauty stance of view, C# is Claudia Shiffer whereas Java would be the average south european, Python the average german, Ruby the average american, pearl the average russian geek and c++ just a plain troll from the tundra.
* It is very portable. I developed some standalone specialiced servers. To deploy it on my linux server, i just copy the frikking binaries. No more. No less. It _just_ _works_. Yes, there are some details. 32 vs 64 bit, for example. Or platform-dependant assemblies. It is hardly an issue. Of course, integrating IE in your app would be windows only. Or take winforms, it is what it sais: forms for windows. Use GTK if you need cross-platform UI's, for example, as mono defaults too.
* It's versatile. From UI's, stand alone server apps, http integration (ASP). Actually, a lot of ASP solutions run on apache + mono. Stating that C# has only use for a few niches is simply false. Of course, take the right tool for the job, up to you to decide, but there's not much that could be excluded by definition.
Now, the cons: * It's managed code, rendering it a bit slower than strictly needed. However, this has the advantage of easifying cross-platform binaries. The same as Java does. So, this con as a pre same time. * Microsoft refrained from creating (and thus supporting) a cross platform implementation themselves. They rely on (cooperation with) the mono project for this. Having said they, MS clearly stated they embrace the mono project. * Microsoft created it. The name alone blinds zealots. Please, spend a few weeks or months learning the language, then come back and say what you think.
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There's actually a lot of potentional scientific correct stuff in the Bible. Yet, discussing them usually gets frowned upon by either team - it seems (for atheist scientists) a lot easier to discard the bible as 'rubbish' instead of an historical document - where the religious camp tends to take this same history book too literal, despite all translation issues.
Genesis conforming our current Big Bang theory is already a nice start. But, it also hints of more scientific knowledge already known back in the days we call 'stone age'.
A good example of this are Mozes' hygienic laws - about washing hands, seperating raw from cooked food, refraining from eating animals which carry nasty parasites (pigs) etc.
To stretch the imagination more, more stories possibly have some scientific origin. Let me mention a few (without claiming this is correct, but hopefully also without hilarious laugther):
* The arch of Noah - might well have been a spaceship from another planet or solar system, colonializing earth with humans and various animal species.
* Adam and Eve may tell us about genetic engineering - and hence being banned from paradise (animals have no worries apart the current moment) by the knowledge gained (our brains improved by genetic engineering).
* Jesus might have been a space traveller with a good first-aid kit - hence the miracle curings.
* Ascension tells us how he (Jesus) left with his spaceship.
* Even our fossile records supports theories of an alien origin of mankind - there is the famous 'missing link' between apes and humans, especially recent fossiles. Admittingly there are plenty other explanations for that.
* The reasonable recent human races (homo sapiens, neanderthalers, denisovan) might hint to a humanlike race already spreading accross the universe, and colonizing earth with astronauts from various planets.
* The bible distinguishes between 'The Lord' and 'God' - where the Lord is an actual impersonification of a man. Such Lord may well be some space traveller, or otherwise well-educated person, and is mistaken for God only by misinterpretation.
Etc etc. It's easy reply to this with a 'what the f* did you smoke'. However, keeping all options open is what a scientist ought to do. We may have well been interpreting the Bible the wrong way all along. The better reader already noticed that some of the theories mentioned above conflict eachother. However, seeking a scientific explanantion makes more sence than believing in miracles and an almighty God.
There is so much in history that we don't know, and can only guess. Thinking that we are the first intelligent species and culture that lives on this 4-billion year old earth may be very naive.
To put that in perspective: We will probably be able this, or next century latest, to colonize other planets. We will also be able to send robotic vehicles to other star systems. Chances are, that in the next 500-1000 years, we will be able to geo-engineer another planet (Mars). We may be able to send deepfrozen life and DNA in a robotic space ship to another star. We may be able to send bacterial life to other planets. We even may be able to send animal embryo's to other planets. This is all only limited to our imagination, technically this all seems possible in theory.
Now, if you accept this is possible, by us. Then it is reasonable to assume it happened before. It may be reasonable to speculate that earth is actively colonized, possible after being geo-engineered first for millions of years to make it suitable for human life forms.
Surely the Pope won't like this last speculative thoughts. Yet, it's just a scientific-plausible theory. And we may actually have a record of exactly such in our very own Bible.
Mine is currently actively used to fill a box which would otherwise be useless. I'm very happy for the box now having a meaningful purpose in life.
For what i was planning to do, one plan did not work due to obscure compatibility reasons which boiled down to floating points and a buggy database connection. The other plan - using it as motion capture, did not work as the USB webcam driver / or webcam / would crash on occasion but definitively overnight. Might have to do with the bad USB power output causing instability.
I would have used it as media player if the sound output wasn't of such bad quality.
Overall, i think the project is nice and all but the hardware is of inferior quality. If you are serious about embedded devices or building robots or so there is, and existed for long, much better hardware.
I admit the price is low. However, to me the key sales point is that it's a standardized platform with several linux distributions ready to roll. So, the community around it makes it great. But for any serious project the hardware s*x big time. I'd rather have that community and a slightly more expensive device that performs as expected (as in: proper USB, total open hardware without vague GPU blobs, more and better IO pins with for example a 12-bit A/D converter arduino style, quality audio in and out, etc etc).
Nevertheless i'm impressed by the momentum. I also think newer generations might fix the hardware issues they have. But just in my view, just focusing on 'as cheap as possible' was a terrible design decision. Had all hardware be high-end, like USB conforming specs, then it would be golden.
Wrong again.
In the Netherlands, you may pay 30% taxes, but on top of that come contributions to the welfare system, since you are insured against unemployment by law.
Typically, the average worker cost the employer about 3 times as much as the employee will receive netto on their bank account. This because employers pay a large amount of healthcare costs and other things.
So, for the average worker, they will see their salary `taxed` by about 65-70%. Just, they don't call it tax but insurance fees. As your income climbs, taxes raises but social security fees are capped. So yes, someone with a 200k income or more pays in procents less taxes and fees.
On topic. The Netherlands are killing all kind of active entrepreneurship. Seems only multinationals are welcome. Small businesses are not appreciated here, and even if you succeed, taxes and (local) governments will make your live miserable by regulations. Uber is just the latest example in this. Meanwhile, only few people take taxi's because no-one can or is willing to afford them, partly because their is no competitive market since its all being regulated. Paying 30 euro for a 2 km trip is not uncommon, and that's not even night tariff.
Instead of thinking complex solutions, you could also think of simpler solutions. Why don't you focus on improving your mobile connection.
Like: make extension cord to tether your phone, and place the phone near or even outside the window.
Or, buy a 'real' (seperate) G2/3/4 modem with a big (and seperate) antenna for $150.
Or. See if you have local interference. Or, see if another type or brand of phone has a better connection.
And of course you already stripped all apps from your tethering phone and disabled wifi, as your phones processor isn't that fast and may easily be stale to other tasks for a few hundred ms.
Also, you could / should check which provider has the strongest signal at your place, may well be a 3rd provider.
I'd seek solution in optimizing one mobile connection. My personal experiences with tethering are that in general it is actually more reliable than wifi, with less latency and less packet loss, but obviously this may vary depending on your location. However, i'd go for all 'low tech' solutions first, starting by putting you cellphone antenna at the most optimal location, like the roof of the building (...).
You can breath pure oxygen perfectly fine, especially when you lower the atmospheric pressure. On Mars, it would make total sense to breath pure oxygen at 1/5 earth atmospheric pressure. It's also what mountain climbers use to compensate for the pressure drop.
The real issue is fire danger - anything combustible might spontaneously catch fire, so all materials in such environment would have to be fire-resistant. That, or you must wear a helmet all day.
A good example of this is the American vs Russian space technology - the Russians choose for 1 atmosphere pressure and normal (earth) levels of oxygene, while the Americans standardized initially on pure oxygen. Quote: ``The docking module was designed as both an airlock — as the Apollo was pressurized at 5.0 psi using pure oxygen, while the Soyuz used a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere at sea level pressure`` (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... )
The most obvious approach is to combine the 2 methods - much like humans do, especially in noisy environments. It might improve the accuracy of current speech recognition which is, too be honest, still sub-standard.
Speech recognition as is now is way too limited. Sure, Siri and the likes may work. And some computerized phone systems use it to nag us instead of using reliable button clicking. But it is still far from transcribing an accurate memo. Let alone automated subtitling or other fancy applications.
So yes, please, develop it, and use it to improve overall speech recognition.
You are missing the facts that:
* Trees are a wind barrier, making it easier and safer to drive in windy weather
* Trees block sunlight especially when the sun is low, making driving a lot more safer
* Trees reduce noise from the vehicles so people living nearby the road perceive less hinder
There are many good reasons to have trees near the roads. Also, falling leaves is a seasonal effect and falling branches/trees only happens during stormy weather (assuming the trees are well maintained).
Of course situations may differ from place to place, but there are good reasons for the trees to be there and they may actually make the roads safer for the driver. Added bonus for pedestrians and bicylists if they are on a lane seperated by trees from the cars.
The only real exception i can think of when trees block sight on crossroads. But to solve that you certainly not have to remove all trees. [And playing advocate of the devil: some people say this actually makes the crossroad safer as people really have to stop and look carefully]
The board integrates a real time clock. This makes it ideal in remote, disconnected or power-safe configurations. From a wild-life camera to an embedded dishwasher controller. Being compatible, low-cost, running Linux and 'just works an community supported' is a big plus. I'd say, bring more of those clones.
* It preheats some element or reservoir for a limited time duty cycle
* It just draws more power from USB ; powerbanks happily support 2A and the '900mA specced USB port' on their macbook might also capable of delivering much more.
* The pen includes a rechargable battery capable of delivering more peak current. The pen could easily hold a 1Ah 3.7V lithion cell.
* They provide an adapter to plug it in 2 USB ports
* *
Note about the floating point - before ppl start pointing out - i tried both available debian distrubitions (with hard and soft floating point). While the soft floating point did fix some issues, unfortunately, not all of them (when it came to mono/mysql).
A friend got me a PI recently as little present, which was very welcome.
It's a great little device, though with some very odd design decisions.
For me personally, the graphics chip is simply not needed. Also, onboard is a DSP that's unfortunately undocumented and hence disfunctional.
The I/O pins are hardly protected - so if you want to experiment with electronics, best start by a simple circuit to protect them, with some transistors or an optocoupler. Also, the pens are 3.3V and provide no power more than a 10mA... Not really an issue, but also implies that you cannot drive a relais from it directly.
The biggest issue is in the power. The power supply i had was adequate (1.4A), but, the PI itself is not. Hotplugging the USB with any power hungry device - like a WLAN key, or a webcam, is likely to power-cycle the PI. It is known issue - but can come unexpected. Low power devices like mice and keyboards are likely to be hotplugged but, any sane person only uses those during installation process.
Software - What works, what not works. Firefox runs. This is really impressive, it actually works. Albeit, that even when idle, the FF process alone will take 60-80% of the CPU power.
What not works - mono. Well, mono works. But, there are issues - especially regarding floating points, and it typically shows when accessing databases. 'Conversion error in (system.sql.data.import or some - i'm not that good with mono).
Performance - it is said it 'feels' like a pentium 300. I agree, overal the performance is not very sluggish, and much what you'd expect from such device. However, when running benchmarks, things turn out different. For example stockfish, the chess program. With parameter 'bench' it'll perform a single-core benchmark.
Ubuntu-pc-32: 4900ms
Ubuntu-pc-32 / optimized build: 4500ms
Ubuntu-pc-64: 3300ms
Raspberry pi: 239.000ms
From this benchmark, the PI more runs like a pentium66. This is a cpu and integer intensive benchmark. I'm sure modern memory access will make up for it. However, it is very clear that the ARM instruction set is very very elegant, but also very inefficient.
As far as connectors etc go, i agree with the reviewer. It's soldered, but does not look very bullet proof. Best be handled with care, and unplug power by unplugging adapter from mains might be prefered. That being said, apart some installation quircks i did not have to powercycle it often.
Stability. On idle load, it is very stable. I installed 'motion' - the videocam 'guarding' software, and configured it. However, this software was not stable. I don't know if it's the software, the port, or the PI, but it will not run much longer than a day, when making repeated snapshots (like 1/second).
The basic distro's seem fine. When adding custom software, the debian package may well be present (very very much kudo's to those distro maintainers!). Compiling software yourself on the PI is going fine in most cases, though may take a while. On larger compiles it may suffer from low memory and break - so, if you want to compile a lot for your PI, best set up a crosscompiler. The biggest issue i had was in unforeseen instabilities, either when putting the PI under load, either when using not-too-well-tested software like mono. That being said, it is very impressive that almost anything in a standard debian distro just works.
On occasion, i had a process that could not be killed. Here, it shows the architectural differences between i386 and ARM i guess. On a pc, the kernel should be able to kill any process. On the PI arm, this seems not always to be the case. I'm not enough cpu guru to guess details on this, just i guess it has to do with ARM.
Wifi - i had a nice wifi stick. It works fine. However - again, not perfect stable in my view, it may loose connection. May be my adapter maybe the pi. If you have chance, just use ethernet - it will releive the pi's cpu on the fly, and you may need the cpu power for other things.
What's missing:
Audio-in. This is really a
Learned something new today - because, until now i was always assuming the console already did run in user space, and was as friendly to print kernel messages.
Sais someone who obviously didn't take the time to learn him/herself Dvorak.
The only disadvantage i found - as Dvorak typer - is compatability with games. For any other purpose like typing text and programming, i like it and will never go back to qwerty. I'm not telling anyone they should learn Dvorak, i'm also not saying it's superior - it's a matter of personal taste. And yes, once you learn it you will notice it performs as promised. Also, these days Dvorak is thus widely accepted, that international keyboard layouts are supported on almost any platform. A thing to consider may be your native language, but my native language (dutch) has simular letter frequencies to english.
Having said that, for the sole purpose of breaking a record, it is definitively not worth to learn it. It will take you years to get the same accuracy and speed as you find yourself now using Qwerty. If any, i'd say, set the record, then learn Dvorak, and try again in 8 years. If you want to learn it, personal interest should be your motivation.
I'd love to do so. I've played with the thought many times. Why not just an open wifi. I have reasons to do so, like friends bringing a smartphone. Like other strangers, just looking for map directions or whatever they do online. Personally i'd love to if other private parties in our city did as well - as currently open wifi is only available near our library (during opening hours) and a single pub.
However. Legal obligations and practice, make me responsible what happens over my internet connection. So, to get a reasonable plausible deniability on that, i'd have to go to real investments like, for example, by sharing a FON spot. If FON was a pure software-based solution, i'd done so already. However, it requires hardware. That i'd have to pay for, admittingly, it's not much. But on the other hand, i do not need 2 wifi stations at my home. Or have a 3rd party in control over my connection.
If there was a _simple_ way of logging. Like, a prefab solution, preferably installable on my wifi dsl modeml/router, i'd do so to. But, to run my own server, surging 200W, just for the sake of providing free wifi services, with all more or less obliged logging just to warrant myself from legal stuff.. That's a bit too far stretched. Not in the last place because of electricity and mainterance costs.
So, i totally agree with the EFF. I'd really love to. I'm also all ears for a wifi 'mesh' network, etc. But the legal practice is that i'm responsible whatever goes over my internet connection. Wether being 'illegal' downloads, illegal porn or illegal messanging, current laws in my current country, and probably laws all over the world, tell me this is a very bad idea. Sooner or later it'll get me into trouble. Which makes generousity having a high price.
Concluding. It's both a legal and a software issue. If there was a reasonable easy software solution that would allow me to do so, i would. I hate telco's and their mobile rates. I totally believe that if i, and everyone, would just open wifi the world would be a nicer online place. But i admit. I'm just a coward.
Now you have all time in the world, but seriously. When you arrive at your new home, new job, new everything, you have, and want to have, other stuff on your mind than your old computer collection.
All you need, most likely, is one working, in a fashionable way, PC or laptop. Printers are not relevant as they are available in any corner of the world for $50. So is all your old data, if it doesn't fit on an SD card it's rubbish anyways.
Disassembling working hardware is a bad idea too, better leave the computer just as-is, in working order, than to dissassemble. That's only waiting for extra unanticipated problems.
Meanwhile, you are going to sit and wait 8 weeks without your hardware. You will find some replace, and use that.
Imho, the only reason to ship your old hardware is if you think over there where you going is a viable 2nd hand market for it. And even then you should wonder.
When migrating. Bring as little as possible. On bring stuff you have a strong bond with. To me, that would not be a set of computers, that for sure. One, maximum. And better even: just one usb-key with data.
You will have other things on your mind when you get there. Now you have all time of the world bothering this issue, even asking for it on /. In two months, you'll regret giving yourself the extra hassle of re-assembling your computer farm. Chances are it'll keep in boxes for the next year. And that you only unpack you furniture, and other comfortable stuff.
What is that with Americans playing on the person all the time?
In Holland, we have had politicians who were publicly known to visit SM dungeons and black rooms. Are publicly gay. Or just unmarried, like our current prime minister. And no-one, literally no-one, makes a fuzz out of that.
Any debate will be about political issues. The worst accusations regarding personal lifes is about possible activist behaviour in the past. Working for greenpeace for example, like the current leader of the big labour party who has been arrested at least 10 times due to his activist history.
So.. I think this is a good thing. I'm not seeing how a politicians personal life, sexlife, hobbies, children, wife or man, has anything to do with the quality of the person as politician, and the message he or she brings. They are ordinary humans just like you and me with human desires, emotions and errors.
So, why with 'you' it is an issue if a politician plays a rogue in WoW? I wouldn't know, and have no issue with it myself untill she ganks me. If any, it only proves she's just as human as the 2 million other rogues around in this game, and is in for some fun and entertainment at a time, proving she's got a modern youthful mind..
2 cents from over the atlantic.
My latest PC still has a windows on, mostly because the oem license wasn't that expensive (admittingly, if i wouldnt take it i'd had to pay an extra 50 euro assembly fee). But, it made me purchase a windows license just in case. And/or to play a game.
Well, that game runs about equally well under linux. The last time i booted windows was more than a month ago, and only for 15 minutes. Most of that time spent because of the funky updates, which i let it download just to reboot into a sane OS after.
If the next PC would be a 'single boot', no way i need a windows license. It'll run any of my favo distro's, but no Windows, because that'll require secure boot. -Yes, i plan to use my current PC quite a few years to come-
Lot of friends of mine are seriously interested in running linux, i help them where i can. When time comes, they'll also be rightfully pissed when they notice their hardware is crippled. Or maybe got permanent *n*x fans before that.
MS may think the market for linux is small, they also may underestimate the need. And the 20% geeks that actually want to -at least- dual boot.
So go ahead. Do it. I'll happily pay 50 euro extra for my next mobo to have an 'alternate' bios. If any, it only drives me away from using NT. I don't need it for any task expect for trying that casual game that found a new way to bug wine, anyways.
Conclusion: if MS wants to sell me a license, they'd better offer dual boot option. Else no sale for them. Not that they really bother, but just in case, let them take their pig. I'm quite sure the soup will be aten less hot then it's served atm, even if i think it's a quite troublesome development and indeed has more to do with vendor-lock in, drm, crippling hardware and limiting users, than it has with security.
after the plane lands, and you're already in baggage claim before you can finally check your voicemail.
That was a good laugh for me.. It's only 10 years ago that you'd had to find a phonecell to call. If you had small change. Which was in europe even more fun - exchange notes, get small change, and only then call. Makes me smile that you find a phone in your pocket taking 3 minutes to get you connected to 3G (and only because you installed too many apps on it) is a serious concern...
In my opinion, don't even try to 'brighten up' boring information. I so hate that, and i'm sure many others.
If the information is dull, best you can do is to organize it as good as you can, hand them out on paper if you want, so people can review them for their own, and keep your verbal notes on it as brief as possible.
Look. The main reason you'r giving that talk is to give that information. Not to try to be funny. If your audience wanted to be entertained, they'd hired a stand-up comedian. They didn't, they asked you. To give that information.
So, you just do exactly that. Give the information. As brief as possible. Don't go into dull but supposedly funny anecdotes, as they will not have the effect you expect. Also, don't expect that all of the sudden you are as funny as this-brilliant-TED-speaker, as you won't.
The best way of entertaining is if you can keep your talk in less than the 30 minutes that are given you (and for sure not a minute longer), and by being as informative as you can in that time, so that your audience doesn't feel their time is wasted. Just. be. informative. No more, no less. And yes, this post is the exact opposite of a good example as i'm repeating the same over and over again.
commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market
That's exactly what i ment.. Commercial, not open-source, and secondly, aimed at embedded systems.
And indeed, most current kernels will be some hybrid between monolithic and micro. That's what makes Hurd and Minix so interesting: pure userland drivers/servers/ or whatever you call it; sshfs and fuse just faints by it. From a programmer stance of view, it narrows the gap between database (in the broad sense) / filesystem / IO, allowing way more efficient approaches of dealing with data and information services.
I wonder, how is real-world useability state of microkernels? As i know of only 3 serious open source projects developing an actual useable microkernel for pc-ish hardware (namely: minix, hurd and -shoot me- reactos), how does minix compare to hurd. Which of those 2 projects would be likely to be a serious (`production`-ready) alternative for linux?
On first sight, it seems Hurd is a few steps further - debian delivers an experimental distro around a Hurd kernel (comparable to the debian/freebsd project) for a few years now, whereas minix just implemented netBSD's userland with this release. On the other hand, news on Hurd has been steadily stale for a decade or 2.
If our future would be easy selectable kernels (linux/hurd/minix) and userland (gnu/*bsd), in any combination of our liking and/or most suited for the goals, then i'd welcome it, but i'm quite sure this is an oversimplification of current reality, and probably future, especially seen current *bsd vs linux development (partly caused by licensing issues). Maybe some expert on the matter could enlighten us with enduser-understandable technical details, and a comparison on those projects, please.
I'm sorry, while i understand the correct plural of 'forum' is 'forums' in english, in dutch we mimic the original latin grammar making the plural of 'forum' to be 'fora' (and 'museum' like 'musea' etc). Our school teachers made pretty damn sure that we would do this correctly, and thus it has slipped into my english in unguarded moments.
Paid customer services, like character recustomization and especially migration have been deadly for certain realms and games in general.
If your friends move to another realm, you have 2 options: transfer your own character, or quit playing. The same goes when a previously florishing realm goes 'dead' - people either move either quit playing.
Blizzard neglected this issue way too long - look at their fora, for certain realm subfora this is the most common complaint 'our realm was good but now everyone left there's : not even enough players to raid with / too many opponents / etc. The character transfers also heavily affected PvP - no-one wants to belong to the 'loosers' so a lot of battlegroups got serious balancing issues. -There are other indications that blizzard didnt take PvP serious enough, like heavy class imbalances, but in my opinion it were the character migrations that have been deadly for certain realms...
Last not least - blizzard 'hardened' the content. While most will agree that a lot of content in previous expansions was 'too easy' (major cause of this being 'epics' too easily available - hence the term 'welfare epics' was introduced) - the balance now swapped to the other side and a lot of semi-casual guilds and players just gave up on the raiding content because it was 'too hard'. Blizz still being king of content - they'd better taken some of the complaints on the fora more serious as they seem to be unaware of certain issues that every player is aware of..
So.. i'm not surprised - it's still a great game but it cries for more variation in the content to please both hardcore, casual, PvE and PvP players - and yes, the players got spoiled over the years, too, demanding a better game all the time ;)
This might explain accelerating expansion of the universe (anti-matter continues to apply a repulsive force).
The expansion of the universe has nothing to do with galaxies 'just drifting apart' but involves the stretching of space itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space might be a good, albeit mind-boggling, read.
Luckily, i see others 'defending' .NET here too. Cause just because it's from Microsoft 'it must be bad' is a very invalid statement. That it isn't portable is simply a troll too, that just depends on the libraries you use, very much like any other language. There's .NET, there's mono. If portability is a key, use mono (or make sure it compiles on mono), and you'r pretty much set. .NET for long time too, just for the same invalid reasons, until i actually gave it a shot.. Let me state a few conclusions:
I rejected
* The language itself is a beauty. Really. It's the best and most beautiful programming language i ever met. It's powerful, it has very nice language constructs, it has about everything a programmer could wish for - and more. From the beauty stance of view, C# is Claudia Shiffer whereas Java would be the average south european, Python the average german, Ruby the average american, pearl the average russian geek and c++ just a plain troll from the tundra.
* It is very portable. I developed some standalone specialiced servers. To deploy it on my linux server, i just copy the frikking binaries. No more. No less. It _just_ _works_. Yes, there are some details. 32 vs 64 bit, for example. Or platform-dependant assemblies. It is hardly an issue. Of course, integrating IE in your app would be windows only. Or take winforms, it is what it sais: forms for windows. Use GTK if you need cross-platform UI's, for example, as mono defaults too.
* It's versatile. From UI's, stand alone server apps, http integration (ASP). Actually, a lot of ASP solutions run on apache + mono. Stating that C# has only use for a few niches is simply false. Of course, take the right tool for the job, up to you to decide, but there's not much that could be excluded by definition.
Now, the cons:
* It's managed code, rendering it a bit slower than strictly needed. However, this has the advantage of easifying cross-platform binaries. The same as Java does. So, this con as a pre same time.
* Microsoft refrained from creating (and thus supporting) a cross platform implementation themselves. They rely on (cooperation with) the mono project for this. Having said they, MS clearly stated they embrace the mono project.
* Microsoft created it. The name alone blinds zealots. Please, spend a few weeks or months learning the language, then come back and say what you think.