Disk reliability metrics are much more science than myth. Like all science, this means you actually need to put some minimal effort into understanding them. Unlike myths:-)
Disks have two separate reliability metrics. The first is their expected life time. In general disks failure follows a "bathtub distribution". They are much more likely to fail at the first few weeks of operation. If they make it past this phase, they become very reliable - for a while anyway. Once their expected lifetime is reached, their failure rate starts steeply climbing.
The often quoted MTBF numbers express the disk reliability during the "safe" part of this probability distribution. Therefore, a disk with an expected lifetime of, say, 4 years, can have an MTBF of 100 years. This sounds theoretical until you consider that if you have 200 of such disks, you can expect that on average one of them will fail each year.
People running large data warehouses are painfully aware of these two separate numbers. They need to replace all "expired" disks, and also have enough redundancy to survive disk failures in the duration.
The article goes so far as to state this:
"When the vendor specs a 300,000-hour MTBF -- which is common for consumer-level SATA drives -- they're saying that for a large population of drives, half will fail in the first 300,000 hours of operation," he says on his blog. "MTBF, therefore, says nothing about how long any particular drive will last."
However, this obviously flew over the head of the author:
The study also found that replacement rates grew constantly with age, which counters the usual common understanding that drive degradation sets in after a nominal lifetime of five years, Schroeder says.
Common understanding is that 5 years is a bloody long life expectancy for a hard disk! It would take divine intervention to stop failures from rising after such a long time!
A watermark on an audio track is supposed to be inaudible to the human ear. Compression algorithms are supposed to preserve only what is audible to the human ear. Therefore, either re-encoding an audio track with a different codec will remove the watermark, or the watermark is audible after all and reduces the quality of the track. There may be a gray area where the effect is "just barely audible", so codecs preserve it but typical users can't hear it. In that case it should be possible to erase the mark by encoding it with a lower bitrate, such that the typical users will not hear a difference. This is someone any grandmother can do (decode/encode with existing nice GUI programs), and of course some bored 15 year old will write a watermark removal program... Either way, watermarks just don't work.
First we had to re-purchase all our LP and cassete music as CDs. At least they forgot to DRM it. Then we had to re-purchase all our VHS videos as DVDs. At least they didn't try hard to DRM it. Soon we'll have to re-purchase all our books in some E-ink format. Three guesses on how weak the DRM will be this time. Not to mention the joy of scanning your "very out of print" books - one page at a time. There's only small comfort knowing someone in Apple regrets the day he wasted "iBook" on a laptop line.
The semantic web assumes everyone in the world will play nice and publish his data using standard schemas.
This is estimated to happen soon after Microsoft will switch to a POSIX standard operating system, the RIAA will support buying musing in Ogg Vorbis format, and Sony and Microsoft will agree on a common Blu-DVD format, and airline companies will really tell you how the compute their ticket prices. And the rupture.
Seriously... the idea is beautiful in theory, but in practice people do not want their data to be available. The business case for the semantic web seems to be "lets all cut our profit margins to nothing!". Small wonder it took off like a lead baloon.
Here is a trivial example: product prices. If vendors had wanted to make it easy for everyone in the internet to be able to view their catalog and compare prices, all it would take is a "standard" using <!-- product: iPod nano --> and <!-- price: $200 -->. There is a reason this doesn't happen. The internet vendors hate pricegrabber and froggle and their kind. They want you the customer to log in to their site to look prices up, thank you very much.
There are a lot of replies about what software to use to track the books on a PC. That's cool and all, but it is very little help when you have to find a book on the shelves. I happen to own about 1700 books - roughly half the number you have. I think people underestimate the magnitude of the task - assume roughly 1m shelves, 3500 books of 2cm each require 70 shelves - that's over a dozen packed bookcases!
To keep things sane, I added a colored sticker (yellow in my case) to the spine of each book, marked with the first letters of the author's first and last name. Actually I cheat a bit, there are a very small number of categories I use - cookbooks, references - where I put a category icon instead. I put the books on the shelves ordered by the marker. This is loose enough that I don't have to think too much when returning a book to the library, but tight enough I can easily find anything I want. Another side benefit is that when I visit old friends (or mothers:-), my books immediately stick out amongst the pile of books in their own sizable library.
Nobody reads the old classics any more... "Stand on Zanzibar", by John Brunner - a book very much worth reading.
At any rate, like the book mentions in passing... just make a glove out of this material. I think the book's version was a half-glove (covering the palm and only part of the fingers) so you can do delicate work with your hands, but if you threw a fist or simply chopped... instant brass knuckles at the point of contact.
Depending on how good this material is, a full body suit may be incredibly useful in a hand-to-hand combat situation, for anyone using a "hard" martial art - karate, kickboxing etc. Less so for "soft" martial arts like Judo and Aikido, I suppose. And if you can improve it some, it might make bullet proof clothing more comfortable (today's vests are a pain).
So, definitely coming soon to a black ops armoury near you... I don't know about Wall-Mart though. Give it a decade or two.
Testament 1.0 is like an original UNIX system. It wasn't meant to be an end-user system; it has a steep learning curve and demands a lot from its users. A stubborn minority of purists stick with its CLI interface and the POSIX api to great effect. Lately, some people (Reform) try to continue active development, with others (Orthodox) viewing this as potentially creating a new fork.
Testament 2.0 is like the addition of window system and, later on, desktop environment. There are two main camps (like KDE and Gnome) whose philosophical differences seem obscure to an outsider (I'll leave the reader to decide which side is which:-). While 2.0 builds upon and is, in theory, compatible with 1.0, in fact it is a whole new way of doing things and removes many of 1.0 restrictions ("thou shall not make icons", for example:-). Its adopters tend ignore 1.0 users or look down at them as relics of an ancient age.
Koran 1.0 is either a fork of the Testament line, or a whole new system (depending to whose PR you believe) - think of it as Windows. While there is some testament 1.0 (POSIX) compatibility (enough to win DARPA contracts:-), Koran users view the Testament line as obsolete and have been known to convert users at any means necessary (the point of a sword, monopolistic power). These practices have gained immense popularity for the Koran fork. Testament 2.0 users view Koran 1.0 users as a notch below testament 1.0 users - at best, misguided souls who need to be shown the light; at worse, barbarians who should be taught better.
Testament 3.0 is like OS/X. It shares the 1.0 core with 2.0, but it is so different from 2.0 that some people view it as a different fork. It is more user-oriented than 2.0 (for example, it used to allow plugging in extra wife devices, like Koran 1.0). However, 2.0 remained the most popular version, and is some variants were undergoing active development (Vatican 2).
I recall reading about such a system in the late 80s or early 90s. It was made by TI and was much more ambitious - think a 2m x 2m x 1m tank used for air traffic control.
This ones looks more practical, even if much less useful. At 15Hz and a mere 200x768x768 pixels, it is requires a mere 1/3GB but a whopping bandwidth of 5GB/s, and the quality is like that of a Dr. Who prop. Scale it up to 512x1048x1048 at 60Hz and you'll need an acceptable 1.5GB of memory but unrealistic 90GB/s memory bandwidth to drive the thing.
While this might be possible to resolve using massively parallel interfaces or something, I bet we'd still need Moore's law to hold for another decade or two before the quality of this type of display can rival that of current 2D ones.
In the meanwhile, this will remain a gimmick or be limited for very special applications where the low quality is acceptable (hint: this probably rules out medical applications:-)
Sure, I can stop every rapist too. Ok, sure, I get to violate the rights of a lot of other people, and lock up lots of innocent people, but I can stop every rapist.
Good point. So I guess you are against using DNA testing to identify rapists as well? Luckily enough, people have more common sense than that.
Problem is, we have a society that predicates itself on treating people equally.
Like I said, that is very admirable. So you treat everyone boarding a plane as a suicidal fanatic armed mass murderer. Think about it for a second... and you'll see that in this case, any technological gizmo that makes such treatment less obnoxious is a blessing.
Look how many false "confessions" there are. You think airport screening is any different?
True. However, in the case of screening, all that happens is some hassle before you board. I'll remind you that:
Richard Reid, who was to became infamous as the 'shoe bomber', was stopped by officials on an El Al flight three years ago and forced to sit beside an armed sky marshal because he was considered a security risk.
I guess he was a "false positive" at that time. So what? He wasn't sent to jail or executed, he even got to fly. "False positive" in the case of, say, murder charges, is something else altogether.
Issue is, that super invasive security measures at an airport will simply force those people to attack at another weak spot.
True enough. For example, there have been attempts to shoot planes down with anti-aircraft missiles. Security against these sort of attacks is something else, and ultimately requires good intelligence.
As to stopping all forms of terrorist attacks everywhere, for ever, well... Nice troll, and a whole separate discussion:-)
Why not make the door for the airplane pilot bullet proof and locked from the inside... Secondly armed guards should be on all public plains in case of crazy guy trying to kill everyone.
Funny, both these precautions are routine in El-Al flights. There was one El-Al hijacked plane. In 1968. Never since. And it has been tried, and foiled by these exact measures.
That said...
First, it costs.
Having a few highly trained armed guards in each and every flight... this isn't cheap. Now imagine you are a commercial American airline. Who would pay for that? Locking the door to the cockpit only works as long as people on both side of the door are willing to die - or see others die - to keep it closed. Now, imagine that was a prequisite to being hired as air crew in a commercial Americal airline. Would you find enough employees? How much extra would you need to pay to those you do find?
Second, security meausures in El-Al flights are even tighter than the new security routines in American flights since 9/11. The main difference is that El-Al security is free to focus on effectiveness as opposed to political correctness. This means that profiling is used heavily to achieve the same level of security with the minimal hassle.
I believe that for legal reasons, American security is barred from only giving the 3rd degree treatment to an angry-looking 25 year old Arab-descent man who has spent several years in Afganistan with no family in the USA, while ignoring a 70-year old grandmother flying with her grandchildren back to their parents from Disney world. The current solution is to give everyone the 3rd degree - so you see the man, the grandmother and her grandsons taking off their shoes together so some poor soul can sniff them for explosives.
In an Israeli airport, the grandmother would sail through security, while the man's luggage would go under a microscope while he is being thoroughly questioned to see if he really is what he claims to be. And before someone draws the racist card - when I flew from Athents to Israel in the late 70s, everyone went through the same 3rd degree, without any exceptions. And today, if you are a 25-year old WASP idealistic female who has spent the last 6 months volunteering in the occupied territories and is carrying some presents from her new found boyfriend there to his family back in Europe, she'd get the same 3rd degree. And it just might save her life, even if she's newly pregnant by him (what, you thought someone willing to blow up a plane full of innocent people would care? Guess again - this did happen).
At any rate, anyone who complains about how harsh the new security checks is should read the enraged accounts of people who raised too many "suspect" flags in an Israeli airport. The reason the country puts up with it is because it works, and the public is indifferent to the hardship suffered by a negligible fraction of mostly foreign passengers. You have to admire the fact the American people put up with this "equal mistreatment". Good for you, really. I just wonder how long you can keep it up. It is a horribly inefficient way of going about it.
I think it is great that once the Americans have been put in this awkward position, they are throwing technology (that is, money) at the problem. For example, see explosive sniffers are now standard, which saves a lot of "open your luggage, please". Having machines that see through clothes would be a great way to give everyone equal treatment while minimizing the hassle. As for privacy issues - even assuming the pictures are playboy-perfect (which they aren't), what exactly is the problem? Believe it or not, but we are all rather alike.
I predict you wouldn't even see whoever is looking at the pictures (for an additional $0.02, it would be a "she" for women and a "he" for men - there, feel better?). They'd be off at some booth to the side, so all you will experience is "stand here for a second, please... bzzzz... thank you, move along, nothing to see here".
Are available at the company's site. Flash animation of how the system works can be found here.
From their site:
A typical 30MW installation would occupy a square kilometre of ocean and provide sufficient electricity for 20,000 homes. Twenty of these farms could power a city such as Edinburgh.
And:
The 750kw full-scale prototype is 120m long and 3.5m in diameter...
So this isn't very different from the power density of, say, wind turbines. It has the advantage that you can locate the 40,000 12m long 3.5m diameter devices - not to mention X00,000 anchoring cables - out of sight in the ocean, instead on the top of ridges where they stick out like sore thumbs and chop the occasional bird migration.
Still, you'd need something lime X000 km^2 to provide all of the UK's electricity this way. With that amount, people will start complaining. Also, their site gives no estimation of cost per kw. A salt ocean with high waves is a very machine-hostile environment, so these devices will have a very finite life time, and at the sizes they give, they are anything but cheap.
So while this is very clever, and nice, it doesn't get us off the hook for a sustainable energy source. Floating nuclear plants, now - that's a thought. Its the ultimate in "not in my back yard".:-)
No, that line can be drawn: Software is something that can be stored on CD, emailed or downloaded from a webserver.
Fine. Can I patent a device that includes software? "A device consisting of a general-purpose CPU plus the following software..."?
Software can be distributed, sold etc without violating any patent. That is, if you can produce hardware and put the software (e.g, firmware) on a CD in the box you do not have to worry about patents for that software.
As opposed to producing the hardware and pre-installing the software on it (on a hard disk, say), in which case it you would have to worry about patents for the software? How about if the software is pre-installed on flash memory? EEPROM? ROM? ASIC? At what point did the software become "embedded" into the device and hence patentable?
Trying to draw such lines is hopeless. More to the point, its useless; there's no "moral" difference between software embedded into silicon and software burned to CDs. The effort is better spent trying to distinguish "obvious" vs. "non-obvious" patents, regardless of their form.
My claim is that the RSA algorithm is patent-worthy. True, the patent should have been granted to Ellis and Cocks rather than Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, but that's a separate issue.
Stop the bullshit. Software should not be patentable, not pure software, not embedded software, NO software.
First, it is simply impossible to draw the line between a pure software patent and an embedded one, and between an embedded one and a pure hardware patent.
Second, in this view, the RSA algorithm is not patentable - a brilliant piece of work by three top-rated minds solving a well-defined problem which has defied solution for several years. In contrast, the simple insight that in an inkjet printer, printing speed is doubled if printing is done on both the left-to-right motion and on the right-to-left motion is patentable. This is ridiculous.
The problem isn't software patents vs. hardware patents, the problem is bad patents vs. good patents. Despite the best efforts of the PTO, the current mechanism for filtering patents has collapsed. As a result, we are flooded by "bad" patents. True, most of these are software patents, but that's besides the point.
The law should not be modified to forbid a certain type of patents - be it either software, hardware, wetware, business, design or whatever. It should be modified to raise the bar on patent "non-obviousness". This isn't a trivial change in the law (and the patent granting process), but it is doable. As long as this core issue is not addressed, we'll keep being flooded by bad patents.
... the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice's behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior...
In soon to come news:
Professor Greely has been executed last night for crimes against rodenthood, after his final appeal being rejected by the supremouse court. He was also denied pardon by the world president, Brain.
Channel 8 brings you the following exclusive footage from professor Greely's damning laboratory video tapes, released to the public for the first time:
(Camera zooms to three mice in a cage: Pinky, the Brain, and their little known brother Artsy)
Artsy: Look guys, it can't get any simpler. I'll just draw the proof of the Pythagorean theorm on the side of the cage. They will realize we are intelligent and let us out of here. Now, give me some room to work here - I draw better than you two...
Pinky and the Brain move to the other side of the cage, while Artsy starts drawing...
*SPLAT*
The Brain: From now on, what we'll do every night, Pinky...
(Camera fades back)
All hail the coming of our human-brained underlords!
Now wherever a person stands, each eye will only see a particular image.
This is a key point. There is a huge distinctrion between 3D displays that create two images, one for each eye, and rely on stereoscopic vision; and multiple-viewpoint displays.
Its a little appreciated fact that many people don't have stereoscopic vision at all, even if they have two functioning eyes. These people still see 3D (e.g., can drive safely). How? The same reason you can see 3D at long ranges (miles and miles), where stereoscopic vision is useless anyway (with a paralax of a measly few inches).
The main mechanism most people use to detect 3D is that when they move their head, they see a different picture. This gives them an effective paralax that's much higher. For example, when you drive a car and closer trees move more than far trees. Again, this is a big factor even when you are looking at a chess board, where stereoscopic vision is applicable.
Another example is that cobras sway their heads from side to side when they threat to strike. Their eyes are too close together to get a classic stereoscopic view, but by moving their head they can get an excellent 3D view of the world. So, what you should ask yourself about any 3D display technology is "would it work for a cobra?" (don't try asking this of sales drones in trade shows, or at least don't blame me for the consequences:-)
Most of the so called "3D displays" suck - won't work for a cobra. They give you the same two images, regardless of where your head is. Your vision circuits expect that if you move your head to the side, you'll see "behind" a nearby object, and this doesn't happen - it is as if the viewed object is moving with you.
As with other types of optical illusions, some unlucky people get get nauseous, paradoxically because they have stereoscopic vision. Most people adapt to the effect, but it doesn't feel "natural", and they get tired after a while watching it. A surprising few have no problem watching it for hours at end. If you ever had to find operators for old optical sterescopic plotters, who had to do this for hours at end, you'd apperciate how few.
Of course, the Toshiba prototype can only generate 16 images, and if I understand correctly, they are not sensitive to your head's height. Still, it is a step in the right direction - better than most of the so called "3D displays" out there.
... that this will be a good movie. I heard OSC give a talk where he refered to the movie, about two years back. It sounded as though he was going to great lengths to ensure Holywood doesn't ruin it.
It seems he once (almost) sold the movie rights, and as soon as the ink was on paper the studio started making changes like raising the age of the actors to teenagers, adding romantic interest, changing the plot to add a final confrontation between Peter and Ender, and so on. When he protested, they pointed out that the contract gives them the final say on the script. If you want an idea of how bad it would have been, think "Starship Troopers".
That deal fell through for various reasons, and he swore that next time he'll make sure he has the final say. That's one of the reasons it took so long for the movie to get started - he absolutely insisted that the children be played by, well, children, that the script will not be butchered, etc.
Another reason is that he wanted to wait until special effects caught up with people's expectations - specifically, getting the battle room scenes right. If you give it a moment's thought, you'll see that this is very, very hard. A *lot* of people at arbitrary orientations very energetically trying to shoot each other out of the sky, creating formations, hiding and launching from the "stars", all in believable zero-G... I can't wait for "the making of" DVD:-)
At any rate, OSC made it clear he'll have the final word on the movie, otherwise there would be no movie (it isn't as though he needs the money:-). As long as he keeps his word, getting a professional *cough* script writer involved is actually a good thing; books and movies are very different mediums, so being a book good writer doesn't automatically make one a good script writer.
While having the P2P world stabilize on common protocols is surely a good thing, there's a down side as well. BitTorrent is nice and decentralized but doesn't do much to protect the privacy of those using it - unlike, say, FreeNet.
So, MPAA/RIAA evil plan:
1. Promote a P2P protocol that wasn't necessarily centralized but that makes it easy to discover who downloaded what. Do this "subtly": don't sue it, but sue anything else els; or "blatantly": push it into Windows and the Macintosh, market it to companies who distribute large files (ISOs) and so on.
2. In while (a few years), the truly "dangerous" P2P protocols would die off (since "everybody uses the same protocol that everybody uses"). Then unleash some reasonably effective system tracking users downloading copyrighted files (this is the point where the privacy-minded would insert "and the goverment unleash tracking of anyone it wants, which is everyone").
3. Go after anyone using a "dangerous" (non trackable) P2P protocol with a vengence: since "everybody" would be using the standard, trackable one for legal stuff, it is trivial to brand such protocols as illegal. No mercy to pirates, hanging is too god for them!
4. Using non-free music formats, and the ability to track P2P traffic, maintain the domination of the music market. Lucrative side business - offer a paid service tracking downloads of copyrighted material.
5. $$$ Profit $$$
From TFA, it seems they have finally caught on to this strategy. This isn't good news... Until now, we could have counted on the RIAA/MPAA doing us all a favor - blindly attacking each and every P2P protocol as it gets popular and thereby driving forward the evolution of such protocols at a furious pace, until we create the "holy grail": a system as secure as FreeNet, as easy to use as eMule, and as fast as BitTorrent.
To prevent their nefarious scheme, we need to push the RIAA/MPAA folk back to their blind attacks on everything P2P. The best way would be to start massively and blatantly using BitTorrent for copyrighted stuff - so much that they won't be able to resist the temptation to start the usual lawsuits campaign.
Anyone willing to be a martyr to the cause? Simply make available his entire CD collection as BitTorrents. Make sure to post them as widely as possible so I'll be able to download your music before they send you to jail:-)
That's not insanity- that's just an expansion of the ratio General Titus used when dealing with Zionist Terror in 70 A.D. Say what you like about the genocide and diaspora of the Jews, it did prevent Zionist Terrorism from bothering the planet again until 1968.
Yeah, we all know about the horrible atricities performed by the "Zionist terrorists" against Roman schoolchildren in Italy, don't we?
And funny you should say 1968. If you believe Zionist terrorism started then, you'd be hard pressed to explain the Palestinian terrorist acts which took place in the previous 50 years.
I guess that marxists don't bother to learn 20th century history - too painful a subject, what with what happened to the USSR. Not to mention a short period of time known as WWII where people with your grasp of morality have made a big impact:
The theory behind the diaspora was that when you're dealing with religious based terrorism, nobody with national identity under that religion is entirely innocent. EVER. They're just potential replacement troops for the terrorists you're going to kill anyway.
Isn't it great you can now nuke them from a distance instead of going to the trouble of rounding them up and shooting or gassing them?
I'm not complaining about anything- my favored strategy in the war on terror would have Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Jordan, and parts of Egypt glowing in the dark WITHIN 72 HOURS OF THE TOWERS FALLING. Anything short of that is a stupid waste of time and American lives - and might as well not have been done at all for all the terrorism it's going to stop.
Putting aside minor considerations like the insanity of anihilating ten time the number of people killed in the twins, SQUARED; the fact that almost all of them are innocent; ruining the world economy (all this oil gone); possibly causing nuclear winter; fallout carried into Russia, Europe and India; and various other such pesky issues.
And if that's not enough - *Israel*? Why would you want to nuke Israel after the twins? It would have made more sense if you listed France. They also have tons of Muslems in the country. Come on, just between the two of us - you are itching for an excuse to nuke France. Admit it.
In short: You, sir, are a terrorist. Yours is exactly the same mindset used by the terrorists who killed hundreds of school children because "their people have been wronged" and they wanted to "fight back" their "just war".
Then again, I suppose any American deluded enough to call himself a "marxist hacker" isn't expected to be rational...
That after failing to get a Darwin award using conventional baloons, someone would come up with a version that would guarantee you get the award. If you use a lawn chair as payload, anyway:-)
VI modes FUD
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JOE Hits 3.0
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· Score: 4, Interesting
VI doesn't have modes, damn it! VI has commands, period. It so happens that some commands have arguments, one of the possible arguments is text to be inserted into the file. There is no "insert mode" and "command mode". If you learn VI keeping this fact firmly in mind, you'll have no problems. If you try to keep track of "insert mode" vs. "command mode" you'll get lost faster than you can say "dt,f)P".
People get so hung up about VI's "modes" they miss its true brilliance - its orthogonal command structure: a VI command is usually a combination of (1) character(s) indicating which action to take followed by (2) character(s) indicating what area of the file is affected. For example, if 'w' moves the cursor one word, and '$' moves it to the end of the line, then you can combine them with the 'd' (delete) action to obtain 'dw' - delete word and 'd$' - delete to the end of the line.
When you insert text, you type something like "aText", reading "add-to-right-of-cursor" "Text" "done". "Text" is just an argument to the "add" command (there are various other commands that also insert text into the file). There is no "insert mode", there's just "writing the argument to an insertion command".
This is much more intuitive than remembering that control-W or alt-E deletes a word and control-T or alt-Q deletes to the end of the line. It is also much, much more powerful, since at the price of N+M commands you get all N*M combinations. No other editor comes even close. I'll bet most non-VI users don't know whether their editor even has a command to delete to the end of the line, and even less what the command is if there is one. No to mention useful things like "cut everything between this parenthesis" ("d%"), or "copy the next function argument" ("yt,").
*That* is what VI is all about. It is also why so many editors can be made to emulate each other's keystrokes, but they can't emulate VI.
I have had friends learning VI, and once this simple notion "clicked" they became proficient very quickly. Watching people learn VI is rather fun... first, make sure they understand the above. Then, and only then, let them work through the tutorial, and in general use VI for all their editing work.
For the first few days, they'll tend to throw a chair at you if you ask them how well things are going. Don't worry, that's a normal response. Most people drop off at this stage, but since your vic... - sorry, friend - knows why he's going through this, he'll pull through.
Within a week you'll see the "click" happening. It is easy to verify; at this point, be prepared to duck another chair if you dare suggest to the new VI convert that he give it up for the "intuitive" editor he's been using before. The real fun part is having plenty of witnesses to both the "before" and "after" reactions.
Now, if someone decides, for some mysterious reason, the universe needs yet another editor, at least do it *right*! The "perfect" editor would use the VI way of constructing commands, but all commands would start with control-X or alt-X, so that normal ASCII characters would be just inserted. My biggest disappointment with Emacs is that it doesn't work this way. I'm certain it is possible to write an Emacs mode that _does_ work this way, but nobody did (except, of course, VIPER - which makes Emacs emulate VI).
I have been using VI ever since its first version came out for UNIX version 7, and AFAIK, in all this time, *nobody* has *ever* came up with another editor that uses VI-like combined operator/operand commands. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. I suspect a lot of it is due to people getting so hung up about VI having "modes" and therefore being so "bad" there's nothing good to learn from it. Well, their loss!
Well, I (and many others) will hang on to our out-"moded" editor. VI addiction is so strong that I have personally ported VI to VMS to satisfy it. Today we have VIM running on every imaginable platform, so getting our fix is easier than ever.
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Disk reliability metrics are much more science than myth. Like all science, this means you actually need to put some minimal effort into understanding them. Unlike myths :-)
Disks have two separate reliability metrics. The first is their expected life time. In general disks failure follows a "bathtub distribution". They are much more likely to fail at the first few weeks of operation. If they make it past this phase, they become very reliable - for a while anyway. Once their expected lifetime is reached, their failure rate starts steeply climbing.
The often quoted MTBF numbers express the disk reliability during the "safe" part of this probability distribution. Therefore, a disk with an expected lifetime of, say, 4 years, can have an MTBF of 100 years. This sounds theoretical until you consider that if you have 200 of such disks, you can expect that on average one of them will fail each year.
People running large data warehouses are painfully aware of these two separate numbers. They need to replace all "expired" disks, and also have enough redundancy to survive disk failures in the duration.
The article goes so far as to state this:
"When the vendor specs a 300,000-hour MTBF -- which is common for consumer-level SATA drives -- they're saying that for a large population of drives, half will fail in the first 300,000 hours of operation," he says on his blog. "MTBF, therefore, says nothing about how long any particular drive will last."
However, this obviously flew over the head of the author:
The study also found that replacement rates grew constantly with age, which counters the usual common understanding that drive degradation sets in after a nominal lifetime of five years, Schroeder says.
Common understanding is that 5 years is a bloody long life expectancy for a hard disk! It would take divine intervention to stop failures from rising after such a long time!
A watermark on an audio track is supposed to be inaudible to the human ear.
Compression algorithms are supposed to preserve only what is audible to the human ear.
Therefore, either re-encoding an audio track with a different codec will remove the watermark,
or the watermark is audible after all and reduces the quality of the track.
There may be a gray area where the effect is "just barely audible",
so codecs preserve it but typical users can't hear it.
In that case it should be possible to erase the mark by encoding it with a lower bitrate,
such that the typical users will not hear a difference.
This is someone any grandmother can do (decode/encode with existing nice GUI programs),
and of course some bored 15 year old will write a watermark removal program...
Either way, watermarks just don't work.
First we had to re-purchase all our LP and cassete music as CDs. At least they forgot to DRM it.
Then we had to re-purchase all our VHS videos as DVDs. At least they didn't try hard to DRM it.
Soon we'll have to re-purchase all our books in some E-ink format. Three guesses on how weak the DRM will be this time.
Not to mention the joy of scanning your "very out of print" books - one page at a time.
There's only small comfort knowing someone in Apple regrets the day he wasted "iBook" on a laptop line.
The semantic web assumes everyone in the world will play nice and publish his data using standard schemas.
This is estimated to happen soon after Microsoft will switch to a POSIX standard operating system, the RIAA will support buying musing in Ogg Vorbis format, and Sony and Microsoft will agree on a common Blu-DVD format, and airline companies will really tell you how the compute their ticket prices. And the rupture.
Seriously... the idea is beautiful in theory, but in practice people do not want their data to be available. The business case for the semantic web seems to be "lets all cut our profit margins to nothing!". Small wonder it took off like a lead baloon.
Here is a trivial example: product prices. If vendors had wanted to make it easy for everyone in the internet to be able to view their catalog and compare prices, all it would take is a "standard" using <!-- product: iPod nano --> and <!-- price: $200 -->. There is a reason this doesn't happen. The internet vendors hate pricegrabber and froggle and their kind. They want you the customer to log in to their site to look prices up, thank you very much.
There are a lot of replies about what software to use to track the books on a PC. That's cool and all, but it is very little help when you have to find a book on the shelves. I happen to own about 1700 books - roughly half the number you have. I think people underestimate the magnitude of the task - assume roughly 1m shelves, 3500 books of 2cm each require 70 shelves - that's over a dozen packed bookcases!
:-), my books immediately stick out amongst the pile of books in their own sizable library.
To keep things sane, I added a colored sticker (yellow in my case) to the spine of each book, marked with the first letters of the author's first and last name. Actually I cheat a bit, there are a very small number of categories I use - cookbooks, references - where I put a category icon instead. I put the books on the shelves ordered by the marker. This is loose enough that I don't have to think too much when returning a book to the library, but tight enough I can easily find anything I want. Another side benefit is that when I visit old friends (or mothers
Nobody reads the old classics any more... "Stand on Zanzibar", by John Brunner - a book very much worth reading.
At any rate, like the book mentions in passing... just make a glove out of this material. I think the book's version was a half-glove (covering the palm and only part of the fingers) so you can do delicate work with your hands, but if you threw a fist or simply chopped... instant brass knuckles at the point of contact.
Depending on how good this material is, a full body suit may be incredibly useful in a hand-to-hand combat situation, for anyone using a "hard" martial art - karate, kickboxing etc. Less so for "soft" martial arts like Judo and Aikido, I suppose. And if you can improve it some, it might make bullet proof clothing more comfortable (today's vests are a pain).
So, definitely coming soon to a black ops armoury near you... I don't know about Wall-Mart though. Give it a decade or two.
Things are a bit more complex. We have:
Testament 1.0 is like an original UNIX system. It wasn't meant to be an end-user system; it has a steep learning curve and demands a lot from its users. A stubborn minority of purists stick with its CLI interface and the POSIX api to great effect. Lately, some people (Reform) try to continue active development, with others (Orthodox) viewing this as potentially creating a new fork.
Testament 2.0 is like the addition of window system and, later on, desktop environment. There are two main camps (like KDE and Gnome) whose philosophical differences seem obscure to an outsider (I'll leave the reader to decide which side is which
Koran 1.0 is either a fork of the Testament line, or a whole new system (depending to whose PR you believe) - think of it as Windows. While there is some testament 1.0 (POSIX) compatibility (enough to win DARPA contracts
Testament 3.0 is like OS/X. It shares the 1.0 core with 2.0, but it is so different from 2.0 that some people view it as a different fork. It is more user-oriented than 2.0 (for example, it used to allow plugging in extra wife devices, like Koran 1.0). However, 2.0 remained the most popular version, and is some variants were undergoing active development (Vatican 2).
I recall reading about such a system in the late 80s or early 90s. It was made by TI and was much more ambitious - think a 2m x 2m x 1m tank used for air traffic control.
:-)
This ones looks more practical, even if much less useful. At 15Hz and a mere 200x768x768 pixels, it is requires a mere 1/3GB but a whopping bandwidth of 5GB/s, and the quality is like that of a Dr. Who prop. Scale it up to 512x1048x1048 at 60Hz and you'll need an acceptable 1.5GB of memory but unrealistic 90GB/s memory bandwidth to drive the thing.
While this might be possible to resolve using massively parallel interfaces or something, I bet we'd still need Moore's law to hold for another decade or two before the quality of this type of display can rival that of current 2D ones.
In the meanwhile, this will remain a gimmick or be limited for very special applications where the low quality is acceptable (hint: this probably rules out medical applications
Nice troll, BTW.
:-)
:-)
We try to please
Sure, I can stop every rapist too. Ok, sure, I get to violate the rights of a lot of other people, and lock up lots of innocent people, but I can stop every rapist.
Good point. So I guess you are against using DNA testing to identify rapists as well? Luckily enough, people have more common sense than that.
Problem is, we have a society that predicates itself on treating people equally.
Like I said, that is very admirable. So you treat everyone boarding a plane as a suicidal fanatic armed mass murderer. Think about it for a second... and you'll see that in this case, any technological gizmo that makes such treatment less obnoxious is a blessing.
Look how many false "confessions" there are. You think airport screening is any different?
True. However, in the case of screening, all that happens is some hassle before you board. I'll remind you that:
Richard Reid, who was to became infamous as the 'shoe bomber', was stopped by officials on an El Al flight three years ago and forced to sit beside an armed sky marshal because he was considered a security risk.
I guess he was a "false positive" at that time. So what? He wasn't sent to jail or executed, he even got to fly. "False positive" in the case of, say, murder charges, is something else altogether.
Issue is, that super invasive security measures at an airport will simply force those people to attack at another weak spot.
True enough. For example, there have been attempts to shoot planes down with anti-aircraft missiles. Security against these sort of attacks is something else, and ultimately requires good intelligence.
As to stopping all forms of terrorist attacks everywhere, for ever, well... Nice troll, and a whole separate discussion
Consider the grandmother who has had all of her children killed by the Israeli army and their home bulldozed... Sounds like a loophole to me.
She wouldn't be traveling with her grandkids then, right? And at any rate, naturally the actual "flags" are much more complex than my crude examples.
Besides, its hard to argue with success. It has been over 30 years now. Mayne, just maybe, they are doing something right?
Why not make the door for the airplane pilot bullet proof and locked from the inside... Secondly armed guards should be on all public plains in case of crazy guy trying to kill everyone.
Funny, both these precautions are routine in El-Al flights. There was one El-Al hijacked plane. In 1968. Never since. And it has been tried, and foiled by these exact measures.
That said...
First, it costs.
Having a few highly trained armed guards in each and every flight... this isn't cheap. Now imagine you are a commercial American airline. Who would pay for that? Locking the door to the cockpit only works as long as people on both side of the door are willing to die - or see others die - to keep it closed. Now, imagine that was a prequisite to being hired as air crew in a commercial Americal airline. Would you find enough employees? How much extra would you need to pay to those you do find?
Second, security meausures in El-Al flights are even tighter than the new security routines in American flights since 9/11. The main difference is that El-Al security is free to focus on effectiveness as opposed to political correctness. This means that profiling is used heavily to achieve the same level of security with the minimal hassle.
I believe that for legal reasons, American security is barred from only giving the 3rd degree treatment to an angry-looking 25 year old Arab-descent man who has spent several years in Afganistan with no family in the USA, while ignoring a 70-year old grandmother flying with her grandchildren back to their parents from Disney world. The current solution is to give everyone the 3rd degree - so you see the man, the grandmother and her grandsons taking off their shoes together so some poor soul can sniff them for explosives.
In an Israeli airport, the grandmother would sail through security, while the man's luggage would go under a microscope while he is being thoroughly questioned to see if he really is what he claims to be. And before someone draws the racist card - when I flew from Athents to Israel in the late 70s, everyone went through the same 3rd degree, without any exceptions. And today, if you are a 25-year old WASP idealistic female who has spent the last 6 months volunteering in the occupied territories and is carrying some presents from her new found boyfriend there to his family back in Europe, she'd get the same 3rd degree. And it just might save her life, even if she's newly pregnant by him (what, you thought someone willing to blow up a plane full of innocent people would care? Guess again - this did happen).
At any rate, anyone who complains about how harsh the new security checks is should read the enraged accounts of people who raised too many "suspect" flags in an Israeli airport. The reason the country puts up with it is because it works, and the public is indifferent to the hardship suffered by a negligible fraction of mostly foreign passengers. You have to admire the fact the American people put up with this "equal mistreatment". Good for you, really. I just wonder how long you can keep it up. It is a horribly inefficient way of going about it.
I think it is great that once the Americans have been put in this awkward position, they are throwing technology (that is, money) at the problem. For example, see explosive sniffers are now standard, which saves a lot of "open your luggage, please". Having machines that see through clothes would be a great way to give everyone equal treatment while minimizing the hassle. As for privacy issues - even assuming the pictures are playboy-perfect (which they aren't), what exactly is the problem? Believe it or not, but we are all rather alike.
I predict you wouldn't even see whoever is looking at the pictures (for an additional $0.02, it would be a "she" for women and a "he" for men - there, feel better?). They'd be off at some booth to the side, so all you will experience is "stand here for a second, please... bzzzz... thank you, move along, nothing to see here".
Are available at the company's site. Flash animation of how the system works can be found here.
:-)
From their site:
A typical 30MW installation would occupy a square kilometre of ocean and provide sufficient electricity for 20,000 homes. Twenty of these farms could power a city such as Edinburgh.
And:
The 750kw full-scale prototype is 120m long and 3.5m in diameter...
So this isn't very different from the power density of, say, wind turbines. It has the advantage that you can locate the 40,000 12m long 3.5m diameter devices - not to mention X00,000 anchoring cables - out of sight in the ocean, instead on the top of ridges where they stick out like sore thumbs and chop the occasional bird migration.
Still, you'd need something lime X000 km^2 to provide all of the UK's electricity this way. With that amount, people will start complaining. Also, their site gives no estimation of cost per kw. A salt ocean with high waves is a very machine-hostile environment, so these devices will have a very finite life time, and at the sizes they give, they are anything but cheap.
So while this is very clever, and nice, it doesn't get us off the hook for a sustainable energy source. Floating nuclear plants, now - that's a thought. Its the ultimate in "not in my back yard".
No, that line can be drawn: Software is something that can be stored on CD, emailed or downloaded from a webserver.
Fine. Can I patent a device that includes software? "A device consisting of a general-purpose CPU plus the following software..."?
Software can be distributed, sold etc without violating any patent. That is, if you can produce hardware and put the software (e.g, firmware) on a CD in the box you do not have to worry about patents for that software.
As opposed to producing the hardware and pre-installing the software on it (on a hard disk, say), in which case it you would have to worry about patents for the software? How about if the software is pre-installed on flash memory? EEPROM? ROM? ASIC? At what point did the software become "embedded" into the device and hence patentable?
Trying to draw such lines is hopeless. More to the point, its useless; there's no "moral" difference between software embedded into silicon and software burned to CDs. The effort is better spent trying to distinguish "obvious" vs. "non-obvious" patents, regardless of their form.
My claim is that the RSA algorithm is patent-worthy. True, the patent should have been granted to Ellis and Cocks rather than Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, but that's a separate issue.
Stop the bullshit. Software should not be patentable, not pure software, not embedded software, NO software.
First, it is simply impossible to draw the line between a pure software patent and an embedded one, and between an embedded one and a pure hardware patent.
Second, in this view, the RSA algorithm is not patentable - a brilliant piece of work by three top-rated minds solving a well-defined problem which has defied solution for several years. In contrast, the simple insight that in an inkjet printer, printing speed is doubled if printing is done on both the left-to-right motion and on the right-to-left motion is patentable. This is ridiculous.
The problem isn't software patents vs. hardware patents, the problem is bad patents vs. good patents. Despite the best efforts of the PTO, the current mechanism for filtering patents has collapsed. As a result, we are flooded by "bad" patents. True, most of these are software patents, but that's besides the point.
The law should not be modified to forbid a certain type of patents - be it either software, hardware, wetware, business, design or whatever. It should be modified to raise the bar on patent "non-obviousness". This isn't a trivial change in the law (and the patent granting process), but it is doable. As long as this core issue is not addressed, we'll keep being flooded by bad patents.
... the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice's behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior...
In soon to come news:
Professor Greely has been executed last night for crimes against rodenthood, after his final appeal being rejected by the supremouse court. He was also denied pardon by the world president, Brain.
Channel 8 brings you the following exclusive footage from professor Greely's damning laboratory video tapes, released to the public for the first time:
(Camera zooms to three mice in a cage: Pinky, the Brain, and their little known brother Artsy)
Artsy: Look guys, it can't get any simpler. I'll just draw the proof of the Pythagorean theorm on the side of the cage. They will realize we are intelligent and let us out of here. Now, give me some room to work here - I draw better than you two...
Pinky and the Brain move to the other side of the cage, while Artsy starts drawing...
*SPLAT*
The Brain: From now on, what we'll do every night, Pinky...
(Camera fades back)
All hail the coming of our human-brained underlords!
Now wherever a person stands, each eye will only see a particular image.
:-)
This is a key point. There is a huge distinctrion between 3D displays that create two images, one for each eye, and rely on stereoscopic vision; and multiple-viewpoint displays.
Its a little appreciated fact that many people don't have stereoscopic vision at all, even if they have two functioning eyes. These people still see 3D (e.g., can drive safely). How? The same reason you can see 3D at long ranges (miles and miles), where stereoscopic vision is useless anyway (with a paralax of a measly few inches).
The main mechanism most people use to detect 3D is that when they move their head, they see a different picture. This gives them an effective paralax that's much higher. For example, when you drive a car and closer trees move more than far trees. Again, this is a big factor even when you are looking at a chess board, where stereoscopic vision is applicable.
Another example is that cobras sway their heads from side to side when they threat to strike. Their eyes are too close together to get a classic stereoscopic view, but by moving their head they can get an excellent 3D view of the world. So, what you should ask yourself about any 3D display technology is "would it work for a cobra?" (don't try asking this of sales drones in trade shows, or at least don't blame me for the consequences
Most of the so called "3D displays" suck - won't work for a cobra. They give you the same two images, regardless of where your head is. Your vision circuits expect that if you move your head to the side, you'll see "behind" a nearby object, and this doesn't happen - it is as if the viewed object is moving with you.
As with other types of optical illusions, some unlucky people get get nauseous, paradoxically because they have stereoscopic vision. Most people adapt to the effect, but it doesn't feel "natural", and they get tired after a while watching it. A surprising few have no problem watching it for hours at end. If you ever had to find operators for old optical sterescopic plotters, who had to do this for hours at end, you'd apperciate how few.
Of course, the Toshiba prototype can only generate 16 images, and if I understand correctly, they are not sensitive to your head's height. Still, it is a step in the right direction - better than most of the so called "3D displays" out there.
... that this will be a good movie. I heard OSC give a talk where he refered to the movie, about two years back. It sounded as though he was going to great lengths to ensure Holywood doesn't ruin it.
:-)
:-). As long as he keeps his word, getting a professional *cough* script writer involved is actually a good thing; books and movies are very different mediums, so being a book good writer doesn't automatically make one a good script writer.
It seems he once (almost) sold the movie rights, and as soon as the ink was on paper the studio started making changes like raising the age of the actors to teenagers, adding romantic interest, changing the plot to add a final confrontation between Peter and Ender, and so on. When he protested, they pointed out that the contract gives them the final say on the script. If you want an idea of how bad it would have been, think "Starship Troopers".
That deal fell through for various reasons, and he swore that next time he'll make sure he has the final say. That's one of the reasons it took so long for the movie to get started - he absolutely insisted that the children be played by, well, children, that the script will not be butchered, etc.
Another reason is that he wanted to wait until special effects caught up with people's expectations - specifically, getting the battle room scenes right. If you give it a moment's thought, you'll see that this is very, very hard. A *lot* of people at arbitrary orientations very energetically trying to shoot each other out of the sky, creating formations, hiding and launching from the "stars", all in believable zero-G... I can't wait for "the making of" DVD
At any rate, OSC made it clear he'll have the final word on the movie, otherwise there would be no movie (it isn't as though he needs the money
While having the P2P world stabilize on common protocols is surely a good thing, there's a down side as well. BitTorrent is nice and decentralized but doesn't do much to protect the privacy of those using it - unlike, say, FreeNet.
:-)
So, MPAA/RIAA evil plan:
1. Promote a P2P protocol that wasn't necessarily centralized but that makes it easy to discover who downloaded what. Do this "subtly": don't sue it, but sue anything else els; or "blatantly": push it into Windows and the Macintosh, market it to companies who distribute large files (ISOs) and so on.
2. In while (a few years), the truly "dangerous" P2P protocols would die off (since "everybody uses the same protocol that everybody uses"). Then unleash some reasonably effective system tracking users downloading copyrighted files (this is the point where the privacy-minded would insert "and the goverment unleash tracking of anyone it wants, which is everyone").
3. Go after anyone using a "dangerous" (non trackable) P2P protocol with a vengence: since "everybody" would be using the standard, trackable one for legal stuff, it is trivial to brand such protocols as illegal. No mercy to pirates, hanging is too god for them!
4. Using non-free music formats, and the ability to track P2P traffic, maintain the domination of the music market. Lucrative side business - offer a paid service tracking downloads of copyrighted material.
5. $$$ Profit $$$
From TFA, it seems they have finally caught on to this strategy. This isn't good news... Until now, we could have counted on the RIAA/MPAA doing us all a favor - blindly attacking each and every P2P protocol as it gets popular and thereby driving forward the evolution of such protocols at a furious pace, until we create the "holy grail": a system as secure as FreeNet, as easy to use as eMule, and as fast as BitTorrent.
To prevent their nefarious scheme, we need to push the RIAA/MPAA folk back to their blind attacks on everything P2P. The best way would be to start massively and blatantly using BitTorrent for copyrighted stuff - so much that they won't be able to resist the temptation to start the usual lawsuits campaign.
Anyone willing to be a martyr to the cause? Simply make available his entire CD collection as BitTorrents. Make sure to post them as widely as possible so I'll be able to download your music before they send you to jail
There was an embarrassingly long period of time during which I wrote 'create' without an 'e' at the end :-)
That's not insanity- that's just an expansion of the ratio General Titus used when dealing with Zionist Terror in 70 A.D. Say what you like about the genocide and diaspora of the Jews, it did prevent Zionist Terrorism from bothering the planet again until 1968.
Yeah, we all know about the horrible atricities performed by the "Zionist terrorists" against Roman schoolchildren in Italy, don't we?
And funny you should say 1968. If you believe Zionist terrorism started then, you'd be hard pressed to explain the Palestinian terrorist acts which took place in the previous 50 years.
I guess that marxists don't bother to learn 20th century history - too painful a subject, what with what happened to the USSR. Not to mention a short period of time known as WWII where people with your grasp of morality have made a big impact:
The theory behind the diaspora was that when you're dealing with religious based terrorism, nobody with national identity under that religion is entirely innocent. EVER. They're just potential replacement troops for the terrorists you're going to kill anyway.
Isn't it great you can now nuke them from a distance instead of going to the trouble of rounding them up and shooting or gassing them?
I'm not complaining about anything- my favored strategy in the war on terror would have Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Jordan, and parts of Egypt glowing in the dark WITHIN 72 HOURS OF THE TOWERS FALLING. Anything short of that is a stupid waste of time and American lives - and might as well not have been done at all for all the terrorism it's going to stop.
Putting aside minor considerations like the insanity of anihilating ten time the number of people killed in the twins, SQUARED; the fact that almost all of them are innocent; ruining the world economy (all this oil gone); possibly causing nuclear winter; fallout carried into Russia, Europe and India; and various other such pesky issues.
And if that's not enough - *Israel*? Why would you want to nuke Israel after the twins? It would have made more sense if you listed France. They also have tons of Muslems in the country. Come on, just between the two of us - you are itching for an excuse to nuke France. Admit it.
In short: You, sir, are a terrorist. Yours is exactly the same mindset used by the terrorists who killed hundreds of school children because "their people have been wronged" and they wanted to "fight back" their "just war".
Then again, I suppose any American deluded enough to call himself a "marxist hacker" isn't expected to be rational...
Radio.
That after failing to get a Darwin award using conventional baloons, someone would come up with a version that would guarantee you get the award. If you use a lawn chair as payload, anyway :-)
VI doesn't have modes, damn it! VI has commands, period. It so happens that some commands have arguments, one of the possible arguments is text to be inserted into the file. There is no "insert mode" and "command mode". If you learn VI keeping this fact firmly in mind, you'll have no problems. If you try to keep track of "insert mode" vs. "command mode" you'll get lost faster than you can say "dt,f)P".
People get so hung up about VI's "modes" they miss its true brilliance - its orthogonal command structure: a VI command is usually a combination of (1) character(s) indicating which action to take followed by (2) character(s) indicating what area of the file is affected. For example, if 'w' moves the cursor one word, and '$' moves it to the end of the line, then you can combine them with the 'd' (delete) action to obtain 'dw' - delete word and 'd$' - delete to the end of the line.
When you insert text, you type something like "aText", reading "add-to-right-of-cursor" "Text" "done". "Text" is just an argument to the "add" command (there are various other commands that also insert text into the file). There is no "insert mode", there's just "writing the argument to an insertion command".
This is much more intuitive than remembering that control-W or alt-E deletes a word and control-T or alt-Q deletes to the end of the line. It is also much, much more powerful, since at the price of N+M commands you get all N*M combinations. No other editor comes even close. I'll bet most non-VI users don't know whether their editor even has a command to delete to the end of the line, and even less what the command is if there is one. No to mention useful things like "cut everything between this parenthesis" ("d%"), or "copy the next function argument" ("yt,").
*That* is what VI is all about. It is also why so many editors can be made to emulate each other's keystrokes, but they can't emulate VI.
I have had friends learning VI, and once this simple notion "clicked" they became proficient very quickly. Watching people learn VI is rather fun... first, make sure they understand the above. Then, and only then, let them work through the tutorial, and in general use VI for all their editing work.
For the first few days, they'll tend to throw a chair at you if you ask them how well things are going. Don't worry, that's a normal response. Most people drop off at this stage, but since your vic... - sorry, friend - knows why he's going through this, he'll pull through.
Within a week you'll see the "click" happening. It is easy to verify; at this point, be prepared to duck another chair if you dare suggest to the new VI convert that he give it up for the "intuitive" editor he's been using before. The real fun part is having plenty of witnesses to both the "before" and "after" reactions.
Now, if someone decides, for some mysterious reason, the universe needs yet another editor, at least do it *right*! The "perfect" editor would use the VI way of constructing commands, but all commands would start with control-X or alt-X, so that normal ASCII characters would be just inserted. My biggest disappointment with Emacs is that it doesn't work this way. I'm certain it is possible to write an Emacs mode that _does_ work this way, but nobody did (except, of course, VIPER - which makes Emacs emulate VI).
I have been using VI ever since its first version came out for UNIX version 7, and AFAIK, in all this time, *nobody* has *ever* came up with another editor that uses VI-like combined operator/operand commands. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. I suspect a lot of it is due to people getting so hung up about VI having "modes" and therefore being so "bad" there's nothing good to learn from it. Well, their loss!
Well, I (and many others) will hang on to our out-"moded" editor. VI addiction is so strong that I have personally ported VI to VMS to satisfy it. Today we have VIM running on every imaginable platform, so getting our fix is easier than ever.