With your plan no one does anything because the future is never guaranteed. Look around you and tell me again that this is a viable option. I don't think so.
To be able to progress one has to risk a little. Buying a house is not risking much, by and large this is a large but sound investment. Starting a family is what society expects of people. There are societies right now who don't produce enough children, such as Japan or Italy. They are putting their very future into jeopardy.
And yes people except to be able to have children. Talk to someone from China where families are expected to have at most one child and ask them what their number one reason for wanting to leave China is.
If one were a perfect parent then of course the need for TV as a baby sitter would be low. The compromise is between a fight with your children because the parents are tired and the children are bored, and a bit of dead time while the kids are entertained and the parents can relax a bit or do the dishes and whatnot.
The key, I've found, is to not let children watch live TV, *especially* the children channel with lots of adds on. Recorded shows are OK, when you can skip over the commercials, videos or DVDs are better still. There is a lot of good material available, so why let the children watch crap?
Many people comment how these things are good in the long run and for the economy are correct from a global perspective but not at the level of the individual.
It is the privilege of the young to be able to adapt. They start from scratch, have a high ability to learn and expect little at the beginning but to be able to leverage their skills in the middle to long term.
Few people realize that adapting often means starting from scratch again. When you have a home loan and a family this may not be an option *at all* or at least a very damaging one.
The vast majority of older but still active people have adapted to a new situation when they were younger and are now at the phase when they expect the leveraging to occur. If it doesn't it truly sucks because they are by nature slighly less able to learn than younger people and also far more commited down the path of life.
The only way to avoid this is to choose a path/career where adaptation to a new situation is the norm, but it is difficult to maintain as it is quite tiring, or to choose a career that is by nature pretty much unchanging irrespective of the field of application such as management or accountancy. Not everyone can be a manager though, especially a good one.
The fissionable material in question is Plutonium. Many countries would like to build breeders because it is easy to produce pure enough plutonium for A-bombs with those. Also breeders are much harder to build, operate and are less economically viable today than conventional reactors. They are also less secure.
In fact there are only a handful of commercial breeders in operation around the world today, and none in the US.
Of course after the war Heisenberg claimed that the only reason why the Germans couldn't get a reactor going was that he was making sure their efforts wouldn't succeeed, and thus Nazi Germany would not develop nuclear weapons.
His claim didn't convince everyone. Many think he did his best and failed.
This controversy is the topic of the play "Copenhagen". If it plays in your city do yourself a favor and go and see it.
Average process memory usage has been doubling every 18 months or so following Moore's law.
I have 1GB in my home machine, I expect to have 4GB in 3 years time. The 32-bit architecture of the Pentium-M and P-IV allows for more *total* memory in the system than 4GB, but is still limited to 4GB per process (even less in practice).
In my work I already run some processes that easily require more than 4GB. Unsurprisingly I run those on an Opteron. Before those processors I used an Alpha.
Very soon the 32-bit limitation will become very real for mere users of Photoshop, Matlab, and even simply the next version of Windows.
The version of GCC that comes with macs is optimized by Apple. Of course the changes are open-source but they have not been integrated in the main branch of GCC yet.
In my experience Apple's GCC optimizes better on Macs than the IBM compiler for PowerPC CPUS.
One of the most powerful books I've read is the book "Death is my trade" by Robert Merle. It details how the officer in charge of Ravensbruck (I think) ran his camp. How he met his objectives, i.e. killing lots and lots of people quickly, efficiently, without fuss and mess, how to get rid of the bodies, etc. He was trying to put together a neat death factory the Führer would be proud of.
The attention to detail and the deshumanization of the task is absolutely horrifying.
So in a weird, and I agree, sick sort of way a "concentration camp simulator" would be very educational altough one would hope one would feel utterly sick playing it rather than entertained.
I have a similar setup but my Zalman runs at a fixed pace. The cooler comes with this little doohickey with a potentiometer that makes the fan go slow or fast but it's a manual setting.
How did you get the fan on the Zalman to change speed with the load ? Does your mobo support that?
If consistency and backwards compatibility was so valued at Sun they they would still be running NeWS and BSD Unix. Instead we now have had almost unchanging CDE and SysV.
Sun does update and change their O/S in very significant ways. I've worked with Sun stations since the mid-80s (the 3- series) and they've gone from being the reference for fast and advanced Unix station and a joy to work with to utterly backwards and slow in the space of about 15 years, not just due to their hardware.
I used to spend days and days compiling and installing all the Free stuff on Sun workstations so my colleagues and myself could simply work. I used to have to fight with the sysadmins at my site to get access to a central location where I could put the result of my work for others to enjoy.
If sysadmin were so wedded to their scripts it would be bad for their ability to use the best available platform for the job. AFAIK a large number of them have moved to Windows or Linux. Good luck getting your carefully tailored scripts to work on the former.
If your post is the reason why Sun doesn't improve the desktop experience on their station *by default* then by definition they are catering to an ever shrinking population who will eventually disappear, and Sun with them.
You are right, the Kuznetsov (only carrier in the Russian navy) is the same size at the Charles-de-Gaulle (the French carrier). However the CdG propulsion is nuclear whereas the K is conventional. I don't know if it has any bearing on its classification.
Your list is interesting. There are quite a number of not particularly nice people amongst soldiers and policemen from my experience. I don't think those I'm thinking about chose their profession for benefitting mankind. More because they like to play with various bits of hardware, they like to order around people and they don't seem to have too much of an inner life.
There is a wide variety of games developpers and some of them, those who develop games for young children, do a remarkably similar job as teachers. Most of them do a good job as entertainers, is there anything wrong with that?
Finally I think the vast majority of people do a job which in some way or another benefits mankind, from the entrepreneur to the tool machinist via scientists, doctors, air pilots, playwright etc. Even some laywers are not in there for the money.
Trying to establish a hierarchy of jobs according to their perceived usefulness is somewhat misguided.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sorry, wrong example. France is the only country besides the US which has in fact recently built and now operates true aircraft carriers. Brazil runs one of the old French carrier, and another 7 countries: India, Russia, Spain, Italy, Thailand, and the United Kingdom operate light, short carriers from which either helicopters or VSTOL aircrafts like the Harrier can take off.
See the wikipedia list with the usual caveat regarding Wikipedia.
True aircraft carriers are much longer and bigger than the other variety and generally carry navalized version of aircrafts also operating from land.
Notice that Japan neither operates nor has recently built any aircraft carrier of any description.
Furthermore the fusion reactor will not be built by the host country but by the same collection of countries irrespective of where it is hosted. The point of the location of the reactor is (a) political, (b) prestige, (c) economic (more jobs, fewer transport costs for the host country and its neighbours, etc) but not a question of who will build it.
I'm not sure about the US system but in Europe or Australia you would not be able to patent a black box that produces Anti-Gravity.
You'd have to describe the innards of the box in such a way as to "someone skilled in the art" would be able to reproduce it, i.e. make their own anti-gravity devices that work (but the Law would not allow them to use their own devices for anything, let alone sell them).
I'm not sure what a "patent by process" is, would you be so kind as to describe it, perhaps with another example.
What you describe has everything to do with the way Mandrake manages its packages and nothing with RPM itself.
I use FC2 and I have none of the problems you describe. FC has apt-get for RPM and yum, both of which solve the problem of upgrades and dependencies in exactly the same way apt-get for DEB does for Debian and derivatives.
Debian and derivatives have more varied packages than FC at this stage because of the larger community involvment and with the stable release they do a splendid job of QA, but with testing and unstable you can run into the same sort of problem as you are describing.
It's not the packaging format, RPM or DEB, it's the packages distribution and maintenance.
A bit sad of some of the reactions in this forum
on
EA Games: The Human Story
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
First of all these hours are insane, voluntary or not. This practice ensures the end product is going to be utter crap, that everyone will leave if they can and that precious experience will go down the drain, ensuring that future products will be crap too. Now EA is also getting bad press.
This is terrible management practice.
Second of all I'm a bit sad of the "stop whingeing" reactions and general lack of empathy in this forum. There are reasons why there are labor laws and why they should be applied. In this instance EA is exposing itself to consumer backlash and possible lawsuits, hardly something smart. This reeks of 19th century mining company practices.
People shouldn't be forced to work long hours for extended periods of time, period. Some people might choose to do it if they are able and have the motivation in return for appreciable benefits, but to *force* people to work in this fashion for nothing invites very real negative effects such as poor health, divorces, possible violence, accidents in and out of the office, etc, all of which have costs for the entire society associated with them.
We know corporations have no morals and don't care about the above. This is precisely why labor laws exist and must be enforced.
So the woman victim just has to grin a bear it, right?
With all due respect, get off your high horse and just think of the victim herself.
There isn't any comparison with breaking your nose and committing rape leading to a clearly unwanted pregnancy over which the woman had no choice. The latter has lifelong serious consequences that can very easily wreck the life of the woman and her unwanted child.
If you can't understand why the woman wouldn't want to carry the result of the rape to term then I surmise that you have no empathy. If you think that in today's society it is easy for a single mum to raise any child, let alone an unwanted one, you are simply severely mistaken. If you think that foster care/adoption is the answer then be reminded that foster care is a minefield where many foster parents do it for the money with zero respect for the child.
If you still need cold-blooded statistics to convince you, think two lives wrecked (the woman and the child) instead of one (the foetus).
Personnally I think Konfabulator is a bit of nickel-and-dime-ware that eats up your resources, but there is a place for eye candy in the world.
The choices for small innovative independent developers are not great these days. You can either wait for your OS distributor to steal your idea if you are ever successful, or you can work on Free software and hope someone sponsors you. Anything in between looks a bit like survival economics.
Fedora distributions get obsoleted very fast by RH. FC1 is already obsolete. FC2 will be by the time FC4-rc3 is out.
Support is supposed to come from the "community" after that, like with Debian. I don't know whether this is actually working.
FC is for enthusiasts who like new software that come with a release schedule and who need good hardware support, not stability. For utter stability similar to BSD try Debian (but don't try it on hardware that is too new). For ultra-new software try source-based distros like Gentoo. FC is sort of in the middle in the sense they do some QA but not too much, and their hardware support is good.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the standard answer except it doesn' gel.
With your plan no one does anything because the future is never guaranteed. Look around you and tell me again that this is a viable option. I don't think so.
To be able to progress one has to risk a little. Buying a house is not risking much, by and large this is a large but sound investment. Starting a family is what society expects of people. There are societies right now who don't produce enough children, such as Japan or Italy. They are putting their very future into jeopardy.
And yes people except to be able to have children. Talk to someone from China where families are expected to have at most one child and ask them what their number one reason for wanting to leave China is.
If one were a perfect parent then of course the need for TV as a baby sitter would be low. The compromise is between a fight with your children because the parents are tired and the children are bored, and a bit of dead time while the kids are entertained and the parents can relax a bit or do the dishes and whatnot.
The key, I've found, is to not let children watch live TV, *especially* the children channel with lots of adds on. Recorded shows are OK, when you can skip over the commercials, videos or DVDs are better still. There is a lot of good material available, so why let the children watch crap?
Many people comment how these things are good in the long run and for the economy are correct from a global perspective but not at the level of the individual.
It is the privilege of the young to be able to adapt. They start from scratch, have a high ability to learn and expect little at the beginning but to be able to leverage their skills in the middle to long term.
Few people realize that adapting often means starting from scratch again. When you have a home loan and a family this may not be an option *at all* or at least a very damaging one.
The vast majority of older but still active people have adapted to a new situation when they were younger and are now at the phase when they expect the leveraging to occur. If it doesn't it truly sucks because they are by nature slighly less able to learn than younger people and also far more commited down the path of life.
The only way to avoid this is to choose a path/career where adaptation to a new situation is the norm, but it is difficult to maintain as it is quite tiring, or to choose a career that is by nature pretty much unchanging irrespective of the field of application such as management or accountancy. Not everyone can be a manager though, especially a good one.
The fissionable material in question is Plutonium. Many countries would like to build breeders because it is easy to produce pure enough plutonium for A-bombs with those. Also breeders are much harder to build, operate and are less economically viable today than conventional reactors. They are also less secure.
In fact there are only a handful of commercial breeders in operation around the world today, and none in the US.
Of course after the war Heisenberg claimed that the only reason why the Germans couldn't get a reactor going was that he was making sure their efforts wouldn't succeeed, and thus Nazi Germany would not develop nuclear weapons.
His claim didn't convince everyone. Many think he did his best and failed.
This controversy is the topic of the play "Copenhagen". If it plays in your city do yourself a favor and go and see it.
Average process memory usage has been doubling every 18 months or so following Moore's law.
I have 1GB in my home machine, I expect to have 4GB in 3 years time. The 32-bit architecture of the Pentium-M and P-IV allows for more *total* memory in the system than 4GB, but is still limited to 4GB per process (even less in practice).
In my work I already run some processes that easily require more than 4GB. Unsurprisingly I run those on an Opteron. Before those processors I used an Alpha.
Very soon the 32-bit limitation will become very real for mere users of Photoshop, Matlab, and even simply the next version of Windows.
Productivity is *not* GDP per capita, it is GDP per hour worked, see this site
The version of GCC that comes with macs is optimized by Apple. Of course the changes are open-source but they have not been integrated in the main branch of GCC yet.
In my experience Apple's GCC optimizes better on Macs than the IBM compiler for PowerPC CPUS.
This is good work, but what is so special about it?
Using image analysis, "computers" these days do:
- Automatisation of drug discovery screening tests
- Diagnosis of skin cancer
- Detection of early breast cancers
- All sorts of QA in assembly lines
- And much much more, these are just examples you can find googling a bit.
Why is this news? If you go to any computer vision, image analysis or pattern recognition conference, you'll find many similar applications.
One of the most powerful books I've read is the book "Death is my trade" by Robert Merle. It details how the officer in charge of Ravensbruck (I think) ran his camp. How he met his objectives, i.e. killing lots and lots of people quickly, efficiently, without fuss and mess, how to get rid of the bodies, etc. He was trying to put together a neat death factory the Führer would be proud of.
The attention to detail and the deshumanization of the task is absolutely horrifying.
So in a weird, and I agree, sick sort of way a "concentration camp simulator" would be very educational altough one would hope one would feel utterly sick playing it rather than entertained.
I have a similar setup but my Zalman runs at a fixed pace. The cooler comes with this little doohickey with a potentiometer that makes the fan go slow or fast but it's a manual setting.
How did you get the fan on the Zalman to change speed with the load ? Does your mobo support that?
If consistency and backwards compatibility was so valued at Sun they they would still be running NeWS and BSD Unix. Instead we now have had almost unchanging CDE and SysV.
Sun does update and change their O/S in very significant ways. I've worked with Sun stations since the mid-80s (the 3- series) and they've gone from being the reference for fast and advanced Unix station and a joy to work with to utterly backwards and slow in the space of about 15 years, not just due to their hardware.
I used to spend days and days compiling and installing all the Free stuff on Sun workstations so my colleagues and myself could simply work. I used to have to fight with the sysadmins at my site to get access to a central location where I could put the result of my work for others to enjoy.
If sysadmin were so wedded to their scripts it would be bad for their ability to use the best available platform for the job. AFAIK a large number of them have moved to Windows or Linux. Good luck getting your carefully tailored scripts to work on the former.
If your post is the reason why Sun doesn't improve the desktop experience on their station *by default* then by definition they are catering to an ever shrinking population who will eventually disappear, and Sun with them.
Sun needs to learn to keep up with the times now.
Yes and if the vendor suddenly goes belly up open-source drivers ensure the hardware will continue to run.
This is suspicious. Are they going to pretend to go to Mars then? I suggest they use OJ Simpson on the cast. It would improve ratings.
You are right, the Kuznetsov (only carrier in the Russian navy) is the same size at the Charles-de-Gaulle (the French carrier). However the CdG propulsion is nuclear whereas the K is conventional. I don't know if it has any bearing on its classification.
Your list is interesting. There are quite a number of not particularly nice people amongst soldiers and policemen from my experience. I don't think those I'm thinking about chose their profession for benefitting mankind. More because they like to play with various bits of hardware, they like to order around people and they don't seem to have too much of an inner life.
There is a wide variety of games developpers and some of them, those who develop games for young children, do a remarkably similar job as teachers. Most of them do a good job as entertainers, is there anything wrong with that?
Finally I think the vast majority of people do a job which in some way or another benefits mankind, from the entrepreneur to the tool machinist via scientists, doctors, air pilots, playwright etc. Even some laywers are not in there for the money.
Trying to establish a hierarchy of jobs according to their perceived usefulness is somewhat misguided.
Hence the question: why isn't Sun doing that?
Sorry, wrong example. France is the only country besides the US which has in fact recently built and now operates true aircraft carriers. Brazil runs one of the old French carrier, and another 7 countries: India, Russia, Spain, Italy, Thailand, and the United Kingdom operate light, short carriers from which either helicopters or VSTOL aircrafts like the Harrier can take off.
See the wikipedia list with the usual caveat regarding Wikipedia.
True aircraft carriers are much longer and bigger than the other variety and generally carry navalized version of aircrafts also operating from land.
Notice that Japan neither operates nor has recently built any aircraft carrier of any description.
Furthermore the fusion reactor will not be built by the host country but by the same collection of countries irrespective of where it is hosted. The point of the location of the reactor is (a) political, (b) prestige, (c) economic (more jobs, fewer transport costs for the host country and its neighbours, etc) but not a question of who will build it.
Talk to the Armenians about the Turks. "Genocide" is the word most commonly used to described what happened.
I'm not sure about the US system but in Europe or Australia you would not be able to patent a black box that produces Anti-Gravity.
You'd have to describe the innards of the box in such a way as to "someone skilled in the art" would be able to reproduce it, i.e. make their own anti-gravity devices that work (but the Law would not allow them to use their own devices for anything, let alone sell them).
I'm not sure what a "patent by process" is, would you be so kind as to describe it, perhaps with another example.
What you describe has everything to do with the way Mandrake manages its packages and nothing with RPM itself.
I use FC2 and I have none of the problems you describe. FC has apt-get for RPM and yum, both of which solve the problem of upgrades and dependencies in exactly the same way apt-get for DEB does for Debian and derivatives.
Debian and derivatives have more varied packages than FC at this stage because of the larger community involvment and with the stable release they do a splendid job of QA, but with testing and unstable you can run into the same sort of problem as you are describing.
It's not the packaging format, RPM or DEB, it's the packages distribution and maintenance.
First of all these hours are insane, voluntary or not. This practice ensures the end product is going to be utter crap, that everyone will leave if they can and that precious experience will go down the drain, ensuring that future products will be crap too. Now EA is also getting bad press.
This is terrible management practice.
Second of all I'm a bit sad of the "stop whingeing" reactions and general lack of empathy in this forum. There are reasons why there are labor laws and why they should be applied. In this instance EA is exposing itself to consumer backlash and possible lawsuits, hardly something smart. This reeks of 19th century mining company practices.
People shouldn't be forced to work long hours for extended periods of time, period. Some people might choose to do it if they are able and have the motivation in return for appreciable benefits, but to *force* people to work in this fashion for nothing invites very real negative effects such as poor health, divorces, possible violence, accidents in and out of the office, etc, all of which have costs for the entire society associated with them.
We know corporations have no morals and don't care about the above. This is precisely why labor laws exist and must be enforced.
So the woman victim just has to grin a bear it, right?
With all due respect, get off your high horse and just think of the victim herself.
There isn't any comparison with breaking your nose and committing rape leading to a clearly unwanted pregnancy over which the woman had no choice. The latter has lifelong serious consequences that can very easily wreck the life of the woman and her unwanted child.
If you can't understand why the woman wouldn't want to carry the result of the rape to term then I surmise that you have no empathy. If you think that in today's society it is easy for a single mum to raise any child, let alone an unwanted one, you are simply severely mistaken. If you think that foster care/adoption is the answer then be reminded that foster care is a minefield where many foster parents do it for the money with zero respect for the child.
If you still need cold-blooded statistics to convince you, think two lives wrecked (the woman and the child) instead of one (the foetus).
Which help are you giving now to victims of rape?
Personnally I think Konfabulator is a bit of nickel-and-dime-ware that eats up your resources, but there is a place for eye candy in the world.
The choices for small innovative independent developers are not great these days. You can either wait for your OS distributor to steal your idea if you are ever successful, or you can work on Free software and hope someone sponsors you. Anything in between looks a bit like survival economics.
Fedora distributions get obsoleted very fast by RH. FC1 is already obsolete. FC2 will be by the time FC4-rc3 is out.
Support is supposed to come from the "community" after that, like with Debian. I don't know whether this is actually working.
FC is for enthusiasts who like new software that come with a release schedule and who need good hardware support, not stability. For utter stability similar to BSD try Debian (but don't try it on hardware that is too new). For ultra-new software try source-based distros like Gentoo. FC is sort of in the middle in the sense they do some QA but not too much, and their hardware support is good.
If you are a company try RHEL or SuSE