I can guarantee you that a drive that runs for 40-50 hours a week is going to last longer than a drive that runs 168 hours a week.
Do you have a source for that? Because it runs directly contrary to my personal experience.
A harddrive that has motors or bearings that are starting to fail can be caught when they have trouble spinning up and be replaced before they totally fail, preventing data loss.
OTOH, when you start getting SMART errors you know it's time to backup right the hell now, wheras the normal failure mode for a drive that's turned on and off (again in my experience) is it not being mountable at all when you turn the machine on.
Don't blame it on windows, running through your whole disk is going to take a while on any machine. And windows is pretty good at scheduling I/O - try lowering the priority of the relevant processes in the task manager.
Although Konqueror is a good browser, it's still light-years behind Firefox. Firefox is my bread and butter nowadays, as I suspect it is for many others. I couldn't live with it, and as long as this is true, I couldn't be without Gtk either.
Just out of interest, what makes you prefer firefox? I switched to konqueror as my primary browser nearly two years ago and haven't looked back - so much faster and "cleaner"-looking.
I thought you were about to mention a quite common practice in the PC games industry - initially release with copy protection, then disable it in a later patch. This strikes me as a very good compromise - the copy protection is as effective as it can ever be, and makes the difference when it matters - namely immediately after release - while customers aren't inconvenienced for very long.
Occam's Razor is NOT a law. It's a belief. You can't PROVE Occam's Razor.
Of course you can, because it's empiricly testable by repeated observation.
history isn't necessarily fact. You can't actually prove that everything isn't happening instantaneously or that memories are made up, etc, etc, etc.
Au contraire, it is fact, in spite of the second part of your statement. Why would the term "fact" even exist if there was nothing to which it applied?
Your comment about Einstein's Law replacing Newton's, I'll just respond again with anecdotal evidence. You can't rule out the possibility something out there will just cause it to fall apart when applied to it.
But it's not just the one case of gravity, it's every scientific theory in history. Yes, there is that possibility, just as there is with any fact - but it's a vanishingly small one.
This universe is a subset of whatever else is out there (if anything). A subset can fall under the same governing rules as the entire set. However, the rules that govern the superset may not apply to all its subsets.
Uh, that's entirely false. A subset by its very nature remains a part of the larger set, and so everything that applies to the larger set applies to the smaller.
Occam's Razor is not a law. Occam's Razor has been, can be, and will be wrong at times. "All things being equal, the simplest solution TENDS to be the right one." please stop spouting on about Occam's Razor as if it really held any water.
Occam's Razor is very much a law; it's the only thing that stops us believing in a chocolate teapot orbiting Jupiter. Of course it is occasionally wrong, but the onus is on you to demonstrate that it's wrong here, because it is right in almost all cases.
so, no. cause and effect are NOT fact. they are as solid as evolution.
Or gravity, or any piece of history you care to name, or the fact that there is a world outside our heads. If you define a fact to be that which is absolutely impossible to dispute, then there is no such thing as a fact.
Being close does not mean its true. Newton's Laws are "good enough," but they actually fall apart at a certain point. So, while they may be good enough to apply today, there's no reason to think that in the future they'll still apply.
Yes there is - the fact that they've been experimentally verified across a huge domain. The planets didn't stop following their orbits when Einstein's laws replaced Newton's.
i'm surprised you've come up with a concrete list of what defines a religion. are you going to give a list of what qualifies as art next?
If you like.
i don't have to explain the existence of the higher being. that existence is outside the realm of my own.
Then how can you claim it explains anything inside your own existence?
I wonder if this would be so easily possible with EFI based booting. OS X uses it. Vista SP1 supports booting using EFI off disks don't partitioned with the old DOS partition format.
I can't imagine that would make any difference. The computer needs to boot somehow, there are legitimate reasons for modifying the boot code (such as installing a new OS, or fixing flaws in it) so you can't just block it wholesale, and any program that runs at the boot stage will necessarily have complete control of your computer. About the best you can do is require the user to confirm before overwriting the MBR - something I thought windows already did (and if it doesn't, there's really no excuse for it not to) - but that's far from foolproof.
when was cause and effect tested beyond a doubt? (notice the lack of of the word "reasonable," because for absolute certainty, you have to prove beyond any doubt whatsoever).
It wasn't; nothing can be proven beyond a doubt. But it was proven firmly enough to be accepted as fact.
i never was referring to location. i was referring to repeatability. you can repeat an experiment a billion times, but you technically you cannot prove beyond any doubt that it will occur the same way every time after that. each experiment only proves that during the time you tested it, whatever idea or theory you were testing still held true.
Everything I said still holds true though - apply Occam's Razor.
plus, science gets rewritten over and over again. nothing is ever true for that long.
False. Although new theories arise, the predictions made by the previous ones remain accurate across a huge domain - it's only in the newest areas that the theories disagree. You could live well based on the state of science at any point over the last century.
could science just be a religion that isn't afraid to change its mind when faced with new knowledge?
Well, no, because it doesn't have all the usual attributes of a religion.
anecdotal evidence is not proof, its completely circumstantial
If you're disputing the truth of my statement I'll find a source; do you actually not believe me, or are you just complaining to make yourself look better?
i'm am fully capable of changing my mind in light of new evidence. but until someone gives me a simpler explanation than a higher being (not God, but a higher being) putting forth such an improbable scenario such as existence, then fine.
The universe coming spontaneously into existence is a more satisfactory explanation - a higher being only makes things worse, because you now have to explain the existence of the higher being, and the higher being gives no explanatory power or ability to make predictions.
And tube amps certainly have their uses, e.g. if you want the "warm analog" sound (which you can then easily record on to a CD).
Why not just simulate that digitally, a lot more easily? I'm surprised no-one's sold a CD player that does this. Oh wait, no I'm not, because the "warm analog" sound is actually just a worse sound.
and on a further note, science has yet to ever be proven as fact. there's one assumption that is always made and can never be proven (just as one could say a higher power could never be proven, therefore you can only assume there is or there isn't); you assume that a cause will always have the same effect.
Au contraire. This can be, and is, tested, and to a certain extent this is done in every scientific experiment. Furthermore, what if that were provably false? It wouldn't kill science, at all - science would eventually discover it, and then go on to investigate why, and how, it happened. Contrast this with what would happen to a religion whose basic tenets were proven false.
the only reason people accept this as true is because no one has disproved it. repeated tests are only circumstantial tests at best.
Of course; you can't prove something universally. But it's a lot more reasonable to assume that this holds than that it holds in the particular locations we have tested it, and doesn't somewhere else. Occam's razor, and good sense. In a word, science.
believe my opinion is valid because no matter how much science you bring behind you, you will never be able to explain its creation
Go on and prove that. Less than 150 years ago there were people saying no matter how far science advanced it would never be able to explain what the stars were made of.
I cannot believe that a file format can have inherent vulnerabilities that cannot be circumvented by the program that reads the file.
Of course it can, quite trivially. Have it include the ability to make arbitrary calls to the outside environment in some turing-complete language - e.g. for OLE. If these are actually used, there is no way to programmaticly determine in general whether a given call is good or bad, and any attempt you make will probably introduce more security vulnerabilities than there were in the first place.
You're wrong, really. My personal hardware experience:
Previous computer:
Basics: all ok
Graphics card (nvidia TNT2): driver download for both
Sound card (via 82xx onboard): driver download in windows, supported out of the box in linux
Printer (epson stylus C20UX): ditto
Current computer:
Basics: windows required me to find a floppy drive, and disk, so that I could install (SATA hard drive)
Graphics card (nvidia GF6): driver download for both
Sound card (SB live 24-bit): out of box in linux, download in windows
Printer (epson C46): download for both
Webcam (logitech quickcam): download in linux, out of box in windows
PDA (asus a730): download in windows, out of box in linux
Wireless (admtek 8211): out of box in windows, download in linux
Graphics calculator (TI-84+ silver edition)
TV card (winTV 250, I think): download in linux, still can't get the bloody thing to work at all in windows.
Pretty close, but linux actually does a fair bit better. And none of this was researched for linux compatibility or anything before buying it - I just got the stuff and it worked, and some of it's fairly obscure.
To use your example, Spore has been in development for like seven years and has undoubtedly cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly in man-hours of work. Do you think a free-source project could get a solid core of designers, coders, and artists to donate their time and money regularly for over half a decade with NO product to show for it, on the hope that one day it might be released and... look good on their resumes?
Yes. Because there are people growing up for whom OSS has always been around, and is something they really believe in, and they're willing to put the work in. People die for idealism all the time.
/it's 3:20AM here, I'm working on an open source game.
They're encoded with some codec, and then encrypted over the top of that with the DRM. Ideally you want to remove the second layer but not the first (otherwise you get all your generation loss fun) - your method removes both.
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Do you have a source for that? Because it runs directly contrary to my personal experience.
A harddrive that has motors or bearings that are starting to fail can be caught when they have trouble spinning up and be replaced before they totally fail, preventing data loss.
OTOH, when you start getting SMART errors you know it's time to backup right the hell now, wheras the normal failure mode for a drive that's turned on and off (again in my experience) is it not being mountable at all when you turn the machine on.
/linux user, but give credit where it's due
Just out of interest, what makes you prefer firefox? I switched to konqueror as my primary browser nearly two years ago and haven't looked back - so much faster and "cleaner"-looking.
There are games that get ratings below 80% these days?
I most recently noticed it with Supreme Commander, but IIRC it happened with most of the recent versions of Quake/Doom and Unreal Tournament.
I thought you were about to mention a quite common practice in the PC games industry - initially release with copy protection, then disable it in a later patch. This strikes me as a very good compromise - the copy protection is as effective as it can ever be, and makes the difference when it matters - namely immediately after release - while customers aren't inconvenienced for very long.
Writing ASCII art.
Windows - Almost useless, squeezed between useful keys. Fortunately my Linux systems ignore this key.
Why? You can get a whole new set of shortcuts with it - e.g. amarok's win-whatever to control it even when it's not focussed.
How do you think attackers are finding those holes?
Of course you can, because it's empiricly testable by repeated observation.
history isn't necessarily fact. You can't actually prove that everything isn't happening instantaneously or that memories are made up, etc, etc, etc.
Au contraire, it is fact, in spite of the second part of your statement. Why would the term "fact" even exist if there was nothing to which it applied?
Your comment about Einstein's Law replacing Newton's, I'll just respond again with anecdotal evidence. You can't rule out the possibility something out there will just cause it to fall apart when applied to it.
But it's not just the one case of gravity, it's every scientific theory in history. Yes, there is that possibility, just as there is with any fact - but it's a vanishingly small one.
This universe is a subset of whatever else is out there (if anything). A subset can fall under the same governing rules as the entire set. However, the rules that govern the superset may not apply to all its subsets.
Uh, that's entirely false. A subset by its very nature remains a part of the larger set, and so everything that applies to the larger set applies to the smaller.
BeOS. Oh, how we miss you.
Occam's Razor is very much a law; it's the only thing that stops us believing in a chocolate teapot orbiting Jupiter. Of course it is occasionally wrong, but the onus is on you to demonstrate that it's wrong here, because it is right in almost all cases.
so, no. cause and effect are NOT fact. they are as solid as evolution.
Or gravity, or any piece of history you care to name, or the fact that there is a world outside our heads. If you define a fact to be that which is absolutely impossible to dispute, then there is no such thing as a fact.
Being close does not mean its true. Newton's Laws are "good enough," but they actually fall apart at a certain point. So, while they may be good enough to apply today, there's no reason to think that in the future they'll still apply.
Yes there is - the fact that they've been experimentally verified across a huge domain. The planets didn't stop following their orbits when Einstein's laws replaced Newton's.
i'm surprised you've come up with a concrete list of what defines a religion. are you going to give a list of what qualifies as art next?
If you like.
i don't have to explain the existence of the higher being. that existence is outside the realm of my own.
Then how can you claim it explains anything inside your own existence?
I can't imagine that would make any difference. The computer needs to boot somehow, there are legitimate reasons for modifying the boot code (such as installing a new OS, or fixing flaws in it) so you can't just block it wholesale, and any program that runs at the boot stage will necessarily have complete control of your computer. About the best you can do is require the user to confirm before overwriting the MBR - something I thought windows already did (and if it doesn't, there's really no excuse for it not to) - but that's far from foolproof.
It wasn't; nothing can be proven beyond a doubt. But it was proven firmly enough to be accepted as fact.
i never was referring to location. i was referring to repeatability. you can repeat an experiment a billion times, but you technically you cannot prove beyond any doubt that it will occur the same way every time after that. each experiment only proves that during the time you tested it, whatever idea or theory you were testing still held true.
Everything I said still holds true though - apply Occam's Razor.
plus, science gets rewritten over and over again. nothing is ever true for that long.
False. Although new theories arise, the predictions made by the previous ones remain accurate across a huge domain - it's only in the newest areas that the theories disagree. You could live well based on the state of science at any point over the last century.
could science just be a religion that isn't afraid to change its mind when faced with new knowledge?
Well, no, because it doesn't have all the usual attributes of a religion.
anecdotal evidence is not proof, its completely circumstantial
If you're disputing the truth of my statement I'll find a source; do you actually not believe me, or are you just complaining to make yourself look better?
i'm am fully capable of changing my mind in light of new evidence. but until someone gives me a simpler explanation than a higher being (not God, but a higher being) putting forth such an improbable scenario such as existence, then fine.
The universe coming spontaneously into existence is a more satisfactory explanation - a higher being only makes things worse, because you now have to explain the existence of the higher being, and the higher being gives no explanatory power or ability to make predictions.
I've wanted something like this to use with my PDA for some time.
Why not just simulate that digitally, a lot more easily? I'm surprised no-one's sold a CD player that does this. Oh wait, no I'm not, because the "warm analog" sound is actually just a worse sound.
Au contraire. This can be, and is, tested, and to a certain extent this is done in every scientific experiment. Furthermore, what if that were provably false? It wouldn't kill science, at all - science would eventually discover it, and then go on to investigate why, and how, it happened. Contrast this with what would happen to a religion whose basic tenets were proven false.
the only reason people accept this as true is because no one has disproved it. repeated tests are only circumstantial tests at best.
Of course; you can't prove something universally. But it's a lot more reasonable to assume that this holds than that it holds in the particular locations we have tested it, and doesn't somewhere else. Occam's razor, and good sense. In a word, science.
believe my opinion is valid because no matter how much science you bring behind you, you will never be able to explain its creation
Go on and prove that. Less than 150 years ago there were people saying no matter how far science advanced it would never be able to explain what the stars were made of.
No, it's just using Linux for reasons other than the sticker price - performance, TCO, etc. Learn to read.
I'm not saying that strength has no beneficial aspects, just that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages for modern society.
Because intelligence is good for society, wheras strength isn't.
Of course it can, quite trivially. Have it include the ability to make arbitrary calls to the outside environment in some turing-complete language - e.g. for OLE. If these are actually used, there is no way to programmaticly determine in general whether a given call is good or bad, and any attempt you make will probably introduce more security vulnerabilities than there were in the first place.
You're wrong, really. My personal hardware experience: Previous computer: Basics: all ok Graphics card (nvidia TNT2): driver download for both Sound card (via 82xx onboard): driver download in windows, supported out of the box in linux Printer (epson stylus C20UX): ditto Current computer: Basics: windows required me to find a floppy drive, and disk, so that I could install (SATA hard drive) Graphics card (nvidia GF6): driver download for both Sound card (SB live 24-bit): out of box in linux, download in windows Printer (epson C46): download for both Webcam (logitech quickcam): download in linux, out of box in windows PDA (asus a730): download in windows, out of box in linux Wireless (admtek 8211): out of box in windows, download in linux Graphics calculator (TI-84+ silver edition) TV card (winTV 250, I think): download in linux, still can't get the bloody thing to work at all in windows. Pretty close, but linux actually does a fair bit better. And none of this was researched for linux compatibility or anything before buying it - I just got the stuff and it worked, and some of it's fairly obscure.
Yes. Because there are people growing up for whom OSS has always been around, and is something they really believe in, and they're willing to put the work in. People die for idealism all the time.
/it's 3:20AM here, I'm working on an open source game.
it's not *all* that bad, actually
They're encoded with some codec, and then encrypted over the top of that with the DRM. Ideally you want to remove the second layer but not the first (otherwise you get all your generation loss fun) - your method removes both.
I can read this just fine on the toilet using my PDA and wifi.