I ran a clean install (mostly because I was replacing the hard drive) on my HP nx7300 laptop and it works perfectly (just to add another anecdote to the data!) - the part which took the longest was copying the data from the old drive to the new one - but then 50 gig over a USB link takes a while.
The reason I'm replying to your post though is the battery issue. I've just checked, and I do get an estimated time remaining when I unplug. I suspect it might be that the OS has to get an idea of how quickly it uses the battery up and how quickly it charges before it can start to estimate time, so you might find that it spontaneously starts working in a day or two.
Oh, actually, I have seen a couple of bugs... One is that the Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin seems to now be really unreliable, the other is that the battery monitor in Gnome-Do's dock doesn't seem to work properly - it claims I don't have a battery at all. Otherwise, rock solid.:-)
Kinetic energy is a good point - maybe speed limits should actually be KE limits, so given 1/2 mv, my 1 tonne MX-5 should be allowed to go 1.7 times as fast as a 3 tonne soft roader...
This has been done to a very small extent in a lot of countries - in the UK, cars can do 70mph on the motorway, trucks are only allowed to do 60.
Or maybe it should be based on stopping distances... Again, the MX-5 with wide tyres, low weight and so forth should be allowed to go much faster!
I know exactly what you mean - I space out quite a lot when I'm driving as well, and it used to worry me a bit... Until something happened where I needed to react while I was spaced out (someone braking hard in front of me, or something) and I responded correctly, and realised I'd already responded properly as I spaced back in again (which as you said, happens damn quickly!)
This is, of course, different from dozing at the wheel, which is entirely different and very much more dangerous!
Neither of my (as in mine and my girlfriend's) cars have an 800 mile range... I can imagine some big saloons which are designed with that in mind having that range, but the vast majority of cars seem to be in the 300-500 mile range, but that said I don't think I've ever driven the maximum range of my fuel tank without wanting to stop for a while, whether it's for a meal or to try to get some circulation in my legs again!
How about driving for 250-300 miles, then stopping for dinner for an hour while the car charges?
Also bear in mind that this is a sports roadster, it's not really designed for epic road trips. If you wanted that, you'd get something bigger (and probably cheaper!) which would have more batteries, so a longer range.
My irony meter is going beserk... And if I wasn't posting this from work then I'd be leaving the perfect opportunity for someone to say exactly the same to me.
You can get two cinema tickets for $9.95? Blimey... Over here in ripoff Britain, it's about £9.95 for ONE ticket!
If it wasn't for the "Orange Wednesday" scheme (essentially 2 tickets for the price of 1 on Wednesdays, if you have a phone with Orange), I'd never go to the cinema...
I had similar problems with playing 720p mkv videos on my media server (2GHz P4) and I think the graphics card's too old for VDPAU (it's a Quadro FX 540), however a reasonable work around was to reencode all the videos I had to xvid with mencoder. The files grew very slightly, and I suspect I might have lost a little quality, but I honestly can't see any difference. I knocked up a script to hunt through my entire library for mkv files, and just left it running over night. And then for another day or two. Now I feed any new HD videos I grab through it as well, and I can happily play them.
In fact, a more drastic version of this... You're right, there's no point in lugging a 500 mile battery for your 10 mile commute to and from work, so you might as well leave that in the garage. Why not also have a small (1l, say) petrol engine on a trailer, so when you're going for a 1000 mile drive (or whatever the "I can't wait 30 minutes per 500 miles for a charge" people do), you tow the trailer, and it kicks in as your main battery gets low.
Best of both worlds!
Even better, if you don't do long journeys very often, you could just hire the generator trailer when you're planning a long trip.
Also, I don't understand the "500 miles, then an hour charging isn't good enough!" mentality. 500 miles is certainly 7 hours at motorway speed, and I'd certainly want a break from sitting in a car after 7 hours. You just need a charging station with a restaurant, then you can combine it with dinner. Granted, this assumes you always set off with full batteries, but then you could do the overnight charge whenever you're at home, so you always would be setting off with it fully charged.
To throw more anecdotes into the mix away from the land of giant cars...
My other half's 1 litre Vauxhall Corsa (2001) gets about 400 - 500 miles from a 40 litre tank. 500 is exceptional - one person in it, all motorways, but it gets 400 most of the time. However, the performance leaves a lot to be desired!
My 1.8 litre Mazda MX-5 (2000) gets about 300 miles from just over 40 litres. I suspect I'd get a bit more if I drove more carefully, but it's too much fun.
Ooops, forgot to mention that your point 2 was quite right though - it's still no protection against rubber hose cryptoanalysis. Although, you'll look relatively innocent in that you're just a "random person" carrying a spare card or two for their digital camera, which would hopefully make you relatively unlikely to get tortured. Even in America.
Problem 1 isn't a problem. Your server back in at your "base" isn't crossing borders, so doesn't have to be secure. This means you can have an unencrypted copy of the data on it. In order to get the data safely across the border without The Man being able to get a copy, you need to get two things across separately - the encrypted data and the one time pad. As long as the agents don't get a copy of both of them, the data is safe.
So, you encrypt the data, giving you data(1) and key(1), and try to cross the border with key(1). If you get stopped, and it's confiscated/copied/looked at in a strange way/whatever, then you delete it, go back and repeat the first stage with a different key to get data(2) and key(2). You can do this as many times as is necessary - it doesn't matter how many different keys they get as long as they don't get a matching pair of data(n) and key(n).
Once you've managed to get a key across without it being inspected, you can then pull the data for that key over the net. At this point, it doesn't matter if they get a copy of the data - without the key it's useless. Once you've got that, you then use the key to decrypt the data, and bam. You have your original data on the other side of the border.
(note that you could also carry the data across on another trip on another SD card, instead of using the net, and as long as it doesn't get confiscated, you've still succeeded)
Also bear in mind that the Empire sees low level, front line troops as expendable, and that it's better to throw hundreds of cheap troops in than train up a few more expensive ones.
They have exactly the same attitude with space fighters - the TIE fighter is unshielded, has no hyperdrive and less weapons than an X-Wing. However, they get deployed in large numbers.
I've only had a chip in my windscreen once (we don't have many gravel roads in the UK, but we frequently get cheap councils sticking "chippings" on tarmacked roads, which is almost as bad!) and that was from a truck travelling in the opposite direction. I assume the wheels must have flicked the stone sideways.
Fortunately, it could be repaired by the handy "squirt glue into the chip" method, which the insurance covered free of charge. I'd've felt really bad if it'd cracked 'cos it wasn't my car.
I use the "are you sure you want to delete this file?" dialogue box in a similar way. If I actually want to delete a file, then I've got into the habit of pressing delete and then return pretty much in one keystroke, and it means if I accidentally hit delete, the file doesn't go.
Downside is if the computer's running really slowly, the return can be picked up before the dialogue box opens, so it opens the file I'm trying to delete. Also, I need to stop pressing ctrl+alt+left to switch desktop, then pressing backspace to delete some text without letting go of ctrl and alt first. >.
Have you considered using a Wiimote to control your HTPC? That's what I do, and it works very nicely. The agent on the PC can be run in demon mode, meaning it stays loaded, so you can turn the wiimote off when the film starts, to save battery, then just hit the buttons on it to reconnect them. Pointing at the sensor bar works rather nicely, and for HTPC stuff, like starting a file playing or clicking occasional menus it's quite adequate.
I'm currently using it under Ubuntu 8.04, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in any Distro.
Mmmm, I feel the same way (about the last bit!). I bought a Garmin a year or so ago, and within a week, I was wishing I'd got a TomTom instead.
It's not so much the the Garmin is actively bad... It's just that the TomTom is much much better. That said, the Garmin is good enough that I'm not going to replace the Garmin as long as it works, however the next one I get is certainly going to be a TomTom.
I've been drunk enough that I wouldn't want to drive and yet not shown any of those symptoms plenty of times... Yes, if you're really drunk then you'll be staggering, slurring etc, but you can be "too drunk to drive" and not have got to the "staggering and slurring" stage.
Thing is, that's exactly the same in Windows. You install XP, stick a DVD in, and it doesn't play. You then have to find a media player which will, most of which cost money.
With Linux, you install, stick a disc in, find it doesn't work, install libdvdcss from the repositories and play it.
I disagree. I've not been using Linux for that long (maybe 2 or 3 years) which means I started after tools like apt were mature enough to be used, so I don't see downloading the source and compiling to be the standard Linux way to do things. Before that, I was a Windows user (probably Power User, tbh) and DOS before that, so the command line doesn't scare me, but being able to type "sudo apt-get install " seemed so much easier than the Windows way.
I haven't used the gui add/remove much, simply 'cos I got used to apt, and it seem easier/to me/, however I've just opened it to have a look, and as a test searched for "openoffice". 8 entries have appeared in the list, one for each app (word processor, spreadsheet etc) and one for the complete suite. There's no horde of libraries and unrelated files as you implied and I suspect if I tried to install another app there'd be no dependency problems (I've never had a dependency problem installing from apt, certainly not from the Canonical repositories).
The only problem with the Linux way of installing things (at least when it's as polished as Ubuntu) is that if you don't know what the app is called, it's difficult to find it, but the same's true with any OS!
I've not tried OS X, but from your description, it still sounds harder than the Ubuntu way (at the very least because you have to find the website to download the program from) and as someone said upthread, the only reason the author of the article had problems installing things was because he was trying to use the Windows way on Linux. If someone had pointed him to the add/remove gui, he'd probably have been fine.
(incidentally, when I told the gui to show all available applications and searched for "flash", "Macromedia Flash plugin: Installer for the Macromedia Flash plugin for Mozilla" was the second entry in the list. Granted it could have been named more helpfully, but it's still pretty obvious)
But that's not the case. It would be if the companies had, say, hired cars - to buy the cars back and sell/lease them to someone else is better than just writing them all off - but they were selling software licenses and the actual unit costs of producing the software is inconsequential.
So. It should've been: 3: If we insist on payment, they will declare bankruptcy, if they do bankrupt, we don't get any money out of them. 4: If we buy back the unused contracts, we spend money and therefore lose even more!
This is all very short term, of course and doesn't take the future into account. But it seems business don't do that these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran a clean install (mostly because I was replacing the hard drive) on my HP nx7300 laptop and it works perfectly (just to add another anecdote to the data!) - the part which took the longest was copying the data from the old drive to the new one - but then 50 gig over a USB link takes a while.
The reason I'm replying to your post though is the battery issue. I've just checked, and I do get an estimated time remaining when I unplug. I suspect it might be that the OS has to get an idea of how quickly it uses the battery up and how quickly it charges before it can start to estimate time, so you might find that it spontaneously starts working in a day or two.
Oh, actually, I have seen a couple of bugs... One is that the Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin seems to now be really unreliable, the other is that the battery monitor in Gnome-Do's dock doesn't seem to work properly - it claims I don't have a battery at all. Otherwise, rock solid. :-)
Kinetic energy is a good point - maybe speed limits should actually be KE limits, so given 1/2 mv, my 1 tonne MX-5 should be allowed to go 1.7 times as fast as a 3 tonne soft roader... This has been done to a very small extent in a lot of countries - in the UK, cars can do 70mph on the motorway, trucks are only allowed to do 60. Or maybe it should be based on stopping distances... Again, the MX-5 with wide tyres, low weight and so forth should be allowed to go much faster!
I know exactly what you mean - I space out quite a lot when I'm driving as well, and it used to worry me a bit... Until something happened where I needed to react while I was spaced out (someone braking hard in front of me, or something) and I responded correctly, and realised I'd already responded properly as I spaced back in again (which as you said, happens damn quickly!)
This is, of course, different from dozing at the wheel, which is entirely different and very much more dangerous!
Neither of my (as in mine and my girlfriend's) cars have an 800 mile range... I can imagine some big saloons which are designed with that in mind having that range, but the vast majority of cars seem to be in the 300-500 mile range, but that said I don't think I've ever driven the maximum range of my fuel tank without wanting to stop for a while, whether it's for a meal or to try to get some circulation in my legs again!
How about driving for 250-300 miles, then stopping for dinner for an hour while the car charges?
Also bear in mind that this is a sports roadster, it's not really designed for epic road trips. If you wanted that, you'd get something bigger (and probably cheaper!) which would have more batteries, so a longer range.
My irony meter is going beserk... And if I wasn't posting this from work then I'd be leaving the perfect opportunity for someone to say exactly the same to me.
You can get two cinema tickets for $9.95? Blimey... Over here in ripoff Britain, it's about £9.95 for ONE ticket!
If it wasn't for the "Orange Wednesday" scheme (essentially 2 tickets for the price of 1 on Wednesdays, if you have a phone with Orange), I'd never go to the cinema...
I had similar problems with playing 720p mkv videos on my media server (2GHz P4) and I think the graphics card's too old for VDPAU (it's a Quadro FX 540), however a reasonable work around was to reencode all the videos I had to xvid with mencoder. The files grew very slightly, and I suspect I might have lost a little quality, but I honestly can't see any difference. I knocked up a script to hunt through my entire library for mkv files, and just left it running over night. And then for another day or two. Now I feed any new HD videos I grab through it as well, and I can happily play them.
In fact, a more drastic version of this... You're right, there's no point in lugging a 500 mile battery for your 10 mile commute to and from work, so you might as well leave that in the garage. Why not also have a small (1l, say) petrol engine on a trailer, so when you're going for a 1000 mile drive (or whatever the "I can't wait 30 minutes per 500 miles for a charge" people do), you tow the trailer, and it kicks in as your main battery gets low.
Best of both worlds!
Even better, if you don't do long journeys very often, you could just hire the generator trailer when you're planning a long trip.
Also, I don't understand the "500 miles, then an hour charging isn't good enough!" mentality. 500 miles is certainly 7 hours at motorway speed, and I'd certainly want a break from sitting in a car after 7 hours. You just need a charging station with a restaurant, then you can combine it with dinner. Granted, this assumes you always set off with full batteries, but then you could do the overnight charge whenever you're at home, so you always would be setting off with it fully charged.
To throw more anecdotes into the mix away from the land of giant cars...
My other half's 1 litre Vauxhall Corsa (2001) gets about 400 - 500 miles from a 40 litre tank. 500 is exceptional - one person in it, all motorways, but it gets 400 most of the time. However, the performance leaves a lot to be desired!
My 1.8 litre Mazda MX-5 (2000) gets about 300 miles from just over 40 litres. I suspect I'd get a bit more if I drove more carefully, but it's too much fun.
Ooops, forgot to mention that your point 2 was quite right though - it's still no protection against rubber hose cryptoanalysis. Although, you'll look relatively innocent in that you're just a "random person" carrying a spare card or two for their digital camera, which would hopefully make you relatively unlikely to get tortured. Even in America.
Problem 1 isn't a problem. Your server back in at your "base" isn't crossing borders, so doesn't have to be secure. This means you can have an unencrypted copy of the data on it. In order to get the data safely across the border without The Man being able to get a copy, you need to get two things across separately - the encrypted data and the one time pad. As long as the agents don't get a copy of both of them, the data is safe.
So, you encrypt the data, giving you data(1) and key(1), and try to cross the border with key(1). If you get stopped, and it's confiscated/copied/looked at in a strange way/whatever, then you delete it, go back and repeat the first stage with a different key to get data(2) and key(2). You can do this as many times as is necessary - it doesn't matter how many different keys they get as long as they don't get a matching pair of data(n) and key(n).
Once you've managed to get a key across without it being inspected, you can then pull the data for that key over the net. At this point, it doesn't matter if they get a copy of the data - without the key it's useless. Once you've got that, you then use the key to decrypt the data, and bam. You have your original data on the other side of the border.
(note that you could also carry the data across on another trip on another SD card, instead of using the net, and as long as it doesn't get confiscated, you've still succeeded)
I believe "Great success" is a Boratism, unlike the far better known "Huge success" of Portal.
Also bear in mind that the Empire sees low level, front line troops as expendable, and that it's better to throw hundreds of cheap troops in than train up a few more expensive ones.
They have exactly the same attitude with space fighters - the TIE fighter is unshielded, has no hyperdrive and less weapons than an X-Wing. However, they get deployed in large numbers.
I've only had a chip in my windscreen once (we don't have many gravel roads in the UK, but we frequently get cheap councils sticking "chippings" on tarmacked roads, which is almost as bad!) and that was from a truck travelling in the opposite direction. I assume the wheels must have flicked the stone sideways.
Fortunately, it could be repaired by the handy "squirt glue into the chip" method, which the insurance covered free of charge. I'd've felt really bad if it'd cracked 'cos it wasn't my car.
Are these the same barbarian tribes who sacked the Roman Empire when it got complacent and lazy?
Don't cross the streams!
I use the "are you sure you want to delete this file?" dialogue box in a similar way. If I actually want to delete a file, then I've got into the habit of pressing delete and then return pretty much in one keystroke, and it means if I accidentally hit delete, the file doesn't go.
Downside is if the computer's running really slowly, the return can be picked up before the dialogue box opens, so it opens the file I'm trying to delete. Also, I need to stop pressing ctrl+alt+left to switch desktop, then pressing backspace to delete some text without letting go of ctrl and alt first. >.
Didn't it have Bat Nipples?
Have you considered using a Wiimote to control your HTPC? That's what I do, and it works very nicely. The agent on the PC can be run in demon mode, meaning it stays loaded, so you can turn the wiimote off when the film starts, to save battery, then just hit the buttons on it to reconnect them. Pointing at the sensor bar works rather nicely, and for HTPC stuff, like starting a file playing or clicking occasional menus it's quite adequate.
I'm currently using it under Ubuntu 8.04, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in any Distro.
Mmmm, I feel the same way (about the last bit!). I bought a Garmin a year or so ago, and within a week, I was wishing I'd got a TomTom instead.
It's not so much the the Garmin is actively bad... It's just that the TomTom is much much better. That said, the Garmin is good enough that I'm not going to replace the Garmin as long as it works, however the next one I get is certainly going to be a TomTom.
Looks Welsh...
I've been drunk enough that I wouldn't want to drive and yet not shown any of those symptoms plenty of times... Yes, if you're really drunk then you'll be staggering, slurring etc, but you can be "too drunk to drive" and not have got to the "staggering and slurring" stage.
Thing is, that's exactly the same in Windows. You install XP, stick a DVD in, and it doesn't play. You then have to find a media player which will, most of which cost money.
With Linux, you install, stick a disc in, find it doesn't work, install libdvdcss from the repositories and play it.
Actually very similar!
I disagree. I've not been using Linux for that long (maybe 2 or 3 years) which means I started after tools like apt were mature enough to be used, so I don't see downloading the source and compiling to be the standard Linux way to do things. Before that, I was a Windows user (probably Power User, tbh) and DOS before that, so the command line doesn't scare me, but being able to type "sudo apt-get install " seemed so much easier than the Windows way.
I haven't used the gui add/remove much, simply 'cos I got used to apt, and it seem easier /to me/, however I've just opened it to have a look, and as a test searched for "openoffice". 8 entries have appeared in the list, one for each app (word processor, spreadsheet etc) and one for the complete suite. There's no horde of libraries and unrelated files as you implied and I suspect if I tried to install another app there'd be no dependency problems (I've never had a dependency problem installing from apt, certainly not from the Canonical repositories).
The only problem with the Linux way of installing things (at least when it's as polished as Ubuntu) is that if you don't know what the app is called, it's difficult to find it, but the same's true with any OS!
I've not tried OS X, but from your description, it still sounds harder than the Ubuntu way (at the very least because you have to find the website to download the program from) and as someone said upthread, the only reason the author of the article had problems installing things was because he was trying to use the Windows way on Linux. If someone had pointed him to the add/remove gui, he'd probably have been fine.
(incidentally, when I told the gui to show all available applications and searched for "flash", "Macromedia Flash plugin: Installer for the Macromedia Flash plugin for Mozilla" was the second entry in the list. Granted it could have been named more helpfully, but it's still pretty obvious)
But that's not the case. It would be if the companies had, say, hired cars - to buy the cars back and sell/lease them to someone else is better than just writing them all off - but they were selling software licenses and the actual unit costs of producing the software is inconsequential.
So. It should've been:
3: If we insist on payment, they will declare bankruptcy, if they do bankrupt, we don't get any money out of them.
4: If we buy back the unused contracts, we spend money and therefore lose even more!
This is all very short term, of course and doesn't take the future into account. But it seems business don't do that these days.