My first days of linux consisted of Suse, because it came in a nice box with all CDs and a hefty manual (practical when you have no DSL). After Suse, I had openbsd installed for a few years in my early linux days, and its man documentation is really as good as its reputation. I needed it a lot, because Suse used many non-standard file locations:(
What exactly "predates science"? Although the scientific method we use now might not have been used so much in antique times, there was really an effort done to understand the world around us: the movement of the stars, to optimize construction works, etc.
As far as the new president is concerned: the guy has a lot of shit to clean up now, and we don't even know what's still coming. He will have to take a lot of unpopular measures, and I really wonder if he can keep a high popularity for long.
Last time there was a discussion about anti-aircraft lasers, I checked the 'nets a bit and it appears that what is currently possible with lasers is not to actually burn or cut an aircraft or rockets, but just to heat its outer shell enough for it to weaken above the threshold where it can collapse due to high pressures. Obviously, the chunk of space junk is already disintegrated so the laser can't do much change there.
What's the troll? Some businessman made a bet with himself in July, remembering people that a president's job should be to increase the well-being of the country's population. Since you can't measure that, he defined 5 at that time unrealistic goals most Americans would probably agree with. Due to an interesting combination of events, one of these goals was met. The guy now loses some money buy giving away licenses, where he otherwise might have sold at least a percentage of those he has to give away. And since this is rather newsworthy, he gets free publicity.
Since you can use your iPhone to hook up to your stereo, is it possible to turn it's antenna off? Actually, this could be a reason not to merge the device that you use to play all your audio with your cellphone. It's like recording a feature movie with your cellphone and then getting a call.
Ok, I can see that using an SQL backend might make sense for a PC-based Music Player. But either Asus or Xandros made a big mistake here by using it on a netbook. Thanks for suggesting moc! I will try it out, my current solution: "mplayer *.mp3" has its limits:p
I'm glad as hell I stumped for the early EEE PC. It's a real netbook, not a laptop with a smaller screen. Only SSD, no HD. Small, lightweight, sleek OS with clear big buttons, good battery life. Netbooks with SSD and without Vista are among the minority already.
My next one would have to be a 9 or 10 inch, with touchscreen, SSD, and > 6 hour battery life, preferably linux. If the dual core Atom is efficient enough, that would be nice. However, the way things are going, I wonder if it will ever come.
Luckily, the US is different. It has institutionalized bribery, just pay at election time and reap the results later. You don't even risk doing something illegal in the process.
The other problem is that, once you put the mechanisms in place that endanger freedom and privacy, they will be misused. Just ask the Icelandic government that had their UK assets frozen because the UK could make convenient use of an "anti-terrorism" act that allowed for uninhibited blocking of money assets.
Yes, I did. I am not the best perl or C programmer around, but when I ported my program which is a simple loop of additions from perl to C, I got a speedup of about 20. It was a pain to do the memory management in C, but I really needed the speedup. Actually if you look at fast perl packages like PDL, they are based around precompiled C or fortran code (LAPACK/BLAS).
I have no clue, it was the default install! I can check. I think it's the UI, though, because it happens independent of the amount of songs in the playlist. Then again, sometimes the database contains all songs that were present in the playlist at some point.
Of course you are partly correct, but each time I try to run the music player on the eee (amarok), I find that it is written in such a bloated way that it hangs the music each time I open a page in firefox. I now just run mplayer directly, using up about 0.1% of cpu power. We don't have to write everything by hand in assembly anymore, but at least a basic optimization of the overhead should be fundamental in every software project.
Quality that this side of the world had... when? In the 60's? PCs are built in the far east for god knows how long already. You just never thought about it. As for Asus, the construction of the eee is pretty sturdy. Had mine fall down several times already, and it just keeps working. The thing is also pretty serviceable, easy to replace batteries with ones from a different model even, or from a generic brand. Some high profile brands from around Cupertino could learn a thing or two from Asus.
A quick skim over the bloody summary shows that this is a "don't read the f-ing article" if there ever was one: "co-optation", "infusion of application development", "fast evolving beyond their traditional purpose", "the cloud", "code enablers".
I use perl daily, python when I need OO, and hack together most time-savers with bash. Like people did before me since the Bourne shell came out in 1977, and the more complicated scripting languages after that. In 30 years, people will probably still be doing the same. The only thing that might change is that more and more programs that are not depending on performance, might be completely written in scripting languages. As far as my work is concerned, the factor 20 or more speedup I get by actually programming in C will always be of use. It's not like we want to do the same with tomorrow's computing capacity as we can do now, we want to do more!
Actually, costing at all is pretty dangerous as far as breaking is concerned. With your transmission in gear, the engine takes over a lot of the breaking for you. If you would need to break from 50 mph in neutral by just applying your brakes, they will probably overheat and fail. If you get hit from the back while in neutral, you are a projectile. That's probably why my driving instructor, though learning how to get good mileage, learned me not to press the clutch at a traffic light until just the moment where the engine starts complaining about low rpms.
tables! Now I remember! Tables have driven me nuts with Openoffice. I had a table at the end of my page, and inserted a newline. There was no way to remove the newline without the table. For some reason they got fixed together for ever and always. That and getting the background color of a table cell took me a long time. The old granddaddy of tables is also not perfect: I did have MS Office crash on me last week just removing a table row!
The equation editor of OO is excellent however. MS really messed up that one, especially if you are using different office versions at some point, and the equations may or may not show up... Overall, Openoffice is ready for light to normal use at the moment, much more so than two years ago, and will probably surpass MS office in usability and stability in the not to distant future.
Would the head of accounting from the 60's ever have the idea to make copies of all binders and bring them home, in case the office would burn down? Electronic data really is "smaller" than its paper counterpart, and also more easily moved to other devices, laptops, pcs, etc. BTW I'm sorry for you that you have to take over the questionable practice of taking the tapes home, just because someone else did it in a worse way. Are you sure that you want to carry the liability in case the tapes get stolen from your home?
You might not need a british ID card, but just by the fact that you are a foreigner you do need a passport or equivalent. I am not sure if england is in schengen, I guess not, in which case you will be checked at the border. Owning an ID card is compulsory for all german citizens, since 2007 also with a fingerprint. By reading the wikipedia entry for Personalausweis I discovered that you don't actually have to carry it.
Furthermore privacy is on the slippery slope in germany as it is everywhere else. There is a toll-collecting system of cameras on almost all highways, currently just for trucks and not searchable by the police. But after some policeman got killed at a parking spot last year, there was the outcry to make it searchable, as the murderer COULD HAVE been seen by such a camera. Probably the paranoid minister of interior Schäuble would be all to happy to see that. Otherwise every now and then it is proposed to extend the electronic toll system for all cars.
Overall, however, I would agree. The situation in Germany is pretty ok at the moment at leeast. Databases of public services are not connected. And the higher court is pretty efficient in defending privacy laws. One thing I noticed is important is the division of governmental power between the state "Bund" and the provinces "Bundesländer". On many laws suggested by the state, each bundesland is free to implement it or not, or how they implement it. There is also a lot of economic independence to do this. It might seem confusing at first to have so many different laws, but as a citizen it really is an extra layer of protection against insane laws.
well, I tried to get reliable numbers. In a BBC article from 2007 I found a mention of 14.2 million cameras. I don't know how many of these are government owned, I would be interested in knowing how many there are, and how many people are employed to do the surveillance. Just imagine that every camera was actually a police officer or private security person, you'd need 14.2 million people constantly checking out the rest.
And wtf is garden vandalism and why are you leaving in the same house as a drug dealer? It seems that the UK has severe problems in society, and using CCTV is seen as a cure to all, and a way out to actually have to solve the problems. At the same time it is stimulating these problems by stimulating teen pregnancies (free flat for a teen mother, etc.), which of course works out in increasing the low-educated, low-income class.
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it seems like you sure are an expert on efficient use of keystrokes ;)
My first days of linux consisted of Suse, because it came in a nice box with all CDs and a hefty manual (practical when you have no DSL). After Suse, I had openbsd installed for a few years in my early linux days, and its man documentation is really as good as its reputation. I needed it a lot, because Suse used many non-standard file locations :(
If only my parents had told me earlier.
What exactly "predates science"? Although the scientific method we use now might not have been used so much in antique times, there was really an effort done to understand the world around us: the movement of the stars, to optimize construction works, etc.
Nicely put!
As far as the new president is concerned: the guy has a lot of shit to clean up now, and we don't even know what's still coming. He will have to take a lot of unpopular measures, and I really wonder if he can keep a high popularity for long.
Last time there was a discussion about anti-aircraft lasers, I checked the 'nets a bit and it appears that what is currently possible with lasers is not to actually burn or cut an aircraft or rockets, but just to heat its outer shell enough for it to weaken above the threshold where it can collapse due to high pressures. Obviously, the chunk of space junk is already disintegrated so the laser can't do much change there.
I have the impression that these layoffs were in the planning already, the current crisis is just a very welcome excuse.
What's the troll? Some businessman made a bet with himself in July, remembering people that a president's job should be to increase the well-being of the country's population. Since you can't measure that, he defined 5 at that time unrealistic goals most Americans would probably agree with. Due to an interesting combination of events, one of these goals was met. The guy now loses some money buy giving away licenses, where he otherwise might have sold at least a percentage of those he has to give away. And since this is rather newsworthy, he gets free publicity.
Since you can use your iPhone to hook up to your stereo, is it possible to turn it's antenna off? Actually, this could be a reason not to merge the device that you use to play all your audio with your cellphone. It's like recording a feature movie with your cellphone and then getting a call.
Ok, I can see that using an SQL backend might make sense for a PC-based Music Player. But either Asus or Xandros made a big mistake here by using it on a netbook. Thanks for suggesting moc! I will try it out, my current solution: "mplayer *.mp3" has its limits :p
I'm glad as hell I stumped for the early EEE PC. It's a real netbook, not a laptop with a smaller screen. Only SSD, no HD. Small, lightweight, sleek OS with clear big buttons, good battery life. Netbooks with SSD and without Vista are among the minority already.
My next one would have to be a 9 or 10 inch, with touchscreen, SSD, and > 6 hour battery life, preferably linux. If the dual core Atom is efficient enough, that would be nice. However, the way things are going, I wonder if it will ever come.
Luckily, the US is different. It has institutionalized bribery, just pay at election time and reap the results later. You don't even risk doing something illegal in the process.
The other problem is that, once you put the mechanisms in place that endanger freedom and privacy, they will be misused. Just ask the Icelandic government that had their UK assets frozen because the UK could make convenient use of an "anti-terrorism" act that allowed for uninhibited blocking of money assets.
Yes, I did. I am not the best perl or C programmer around, but when I ported my program which is a simple loop of additions from perl to C, I got a speedup of about 20. It was a pain to do the memory management in C, but I really needed the speedup. Actually if you look at fast perl packages like PDL, they are based around precompiled C or fortran code (LAPACK/BLAS).
I have no clue, it was the default install! I can check. I think it's the UI, though, because it happens independent of the amount of songs in the playlist. Then again, sometimes the database contains all songs that were present in the playlist at some point.
Of course you are partly correct, but each time I try to run the music player on the eee (amarok), I find that it is written in such a bloated way that it hangs the music each time I open a page in firefox. I now just run mplayer directly, using up about 0.1% of cpu power. We don't have to write everything by hand in assembly anymore, but at least a basic optimization of the overhead should be fundamental in every software project.
Quality that this side of the world had... when? In the 60's? PCs are built in the far east for god knows how long already. You just never thought about it. As for Asus, the construction of the eee is pretty sturdy. Had mine fall down several times already, and it just keeps working. The thing is also pretty serviceable, easy to replace batteries with ones from a different model even, or from a generic brand. Some high profile brands from around Cupertino could learn a thing or two from Asus.
A quick skim over the bloody summary shows that this is a "don't read the f-ing article" if there ever was one: "co-optation", "infusion of application development", "fast evolving beyond their traditional purpose", "the cloud", "code enablers".
I use perl daily, python when I need OO, and hack together most time-savers with bash. Like people did before me since the Bourne shell came out in 1977, and the more complicated scripting languages after that. In 30 years, people will probably still be doing the same. The only thing that might change is that more and more programs that are not depending on performance, might be completely written in scripting languages. As far as my work is concerned, the factor 20 or more speedup I get by actually programming in C will always be of use. It's not like we want to do the same with tomorrow's computing capacity as we can do now, we want to do more!
The gold standard? Aren't kittens cute? ;)
Actually, costing at all is pretty dangerous as far as breaking is concerned. With your transmission in gear, the engine takes over a lot of the breaking for you. If you would need to break from 50 mph in neutral by just applying your brakes, they will probably overheat and fail. If you get hit from the back while in neutral, you are a projectile. That's probably why my driving instructor, though learning how to get good mileage, learned me not to press the clutch at a traffic light until just the moment where the engine starts complaining about low rpms.
Watch the "bloody volvo driver" commercials on youtube! :)
tables! Now I remember! Tables have driven me nuts with Openoffice. I had a table at the end of my page, and inserted a newline. There was no way to remove the newline without the table. For some reason they got fixed together for ever and always. That and getting the background color of a table cell took me a long time. The old granddaddy of tables is also not perfect: I did have MS Office crash on me last week just removing a table row! The equation editor of OO is excellent however. MS really messed up that one, especially if you are using different office versions at some point, and the equations may or may not show up... Overall, Openoffice is ready for light to normal use at the moment, much more so than two years ago, and will probably surpass MS office in usability and stability in the not to distant future.
Would the head of accounting from the 60's ever have the idea to make copies of all binders and bring them home, in case the office would burn down? Electronic data really is "smaller" than its paper counterpart, and also more easily moved to other devices, laptops, pcs, etc. BTW I'm sorry for you that you have to take over the questionable practice of taking the tapes home, just because someone else did it in a worse way. Are you sure that you want to carry the liability in case the tapes get stolen from your home?
You might not need a british ID card, but just by the fact that you are a foreigner you do need a passport or equivalent. I am not sure if england is in schengen, I guess not, in which case you will be checked at the border. Owning an ID card is compulsory for all german citizens, since 2007 also with a fingerprint. By reading the wikipedia entry for Personalausweis I discovered that you don't actually have to carry it.
Furthermore privacy is on the slippery slope in germany as it is everywhere else. There is a toll-collecting system of cameras on almost all highways, currently just for trucks and not searchable by the police. But after some policeman got killed at a parking spot last year, there was the outcry to make it searchable, as the murderer COULD HAVE been seen by such a camera. Probably the paranoid minister of interior Schäuble would be all to happy to see that. Otherwise every now and then it is proposed to extend the electronic toll system for all cars.
Overall, however, I would agree. The situation in Germany is pretty ok at the moment at leeast. Databases of public services are not connected. And the higher court is pretty efficient in defending privacy laws. One thing I noticed is important is the division of governmental power between the state "Bund" and the provinces "Bundesländer". On many laws suggested by the state, each bundesland is free to implement it or not, or how they implement it. There is also a lot of economic independence to do this. It might seem confusing at first to have so many different laws, but as a citizen it really is an extra layer of protection against insane laws.
well, I tried to get reliable numbers. In a BBC article from 2007 I found a mention of 14.2 million cameras. I don't know how many of these are government owned, I would be interested in knowing how many there are, and how many people are employed to do the surveillance. Just imagine that every camera was actually a police officer or private security person, you'd need 14.2 million people constantly checking out the rest.
And wtf is garden vandalism and why are you leaving in the same house as a drug dealer? It seems that the UK has severe problems in society, and using CCTV is seen as a cure to all, and a way out to actually have to solve the problems. At the same time it is stimulating these problems by stimulating teen pregnancies (free flat for a teen mother, etc.), which of course works out in increasing the low-educated, low-income class.