Personally, I would never see nor care any sum of money > 1 million dollars. If I was in some situation where I received 10 million dollars, I would take care of my family, put a few hundred thousand aside for my kids, keep 1-1.5 million, and give the rest to Amnesty International or some other worthy charity.
People who hoard money, while other people around the world starve half to death, really make me sick. Who cannot live an excellent lifestyle on the interest alone on a million dollars? No one.
It irritates me even more when someone like Bill Gates or some incredibly weathly celebirty donats something like a few tens of thousand to someone or a charity. WTF? Gates could donate 20 billion and still be worth billions. Whats he need it for? bragging rights?
Money is just money. You can't take it with you, and it won't make you immortal. But it could save many other people's lives. So next time you run out to buy that newest hottest DVD, just think about how that 20 bucks could feed someone in Africa for a whole month. I am not saying impoverish youself to give to others, but if everyone just donated a small portion of their income, something they wouldn't even miss, you could pretty much wipe out worldwide hunger.
Er... If you're flying a plane and in a situation where the cabin is de-pressurizing, a few tiny flames doing damage to the innards of your laptop should be the LEAST of your worries.
I don't know about you, but I would be more concerned with dying of asphyxia, or crashing, or the terrorist who shot the hole in the plane, or whatever the hell else made the cabin de-pressurize.
The reason I brought up the number of people who died has nothing to do with body count, it has to do with guts and sheer determination as a society. Say the first 5 times a space launch was attempted, all personel on board had died. Do you honestly think the US space program would have continued as rapidly?
Dying while trying to cross the Atlantic was commonplace and a well known risk. If you were going on the voyage, chances were greatert han 50/50 you were never coming back. But people did it anywas.
The British Commonwealth controlled way more land the Roman Empire but as far as power the US did send men to the moon, built the first atomic bomb, etc.
The US sent a man to the moon, but the UK (and others) sent explorers to the "new world", which - any way you cut it - money wise (taking into account inflation), risk wise, lives lost wise, was much more of a dramatic accomplishment at the time.
Going to the moon was great, but you have to take it in context. How many people died *trying* to get to the moon before one succeeded? How many US astronauts died in test flights?
Now compare that to the number of sailors who died trying to discover the as-yet undiscovered "new world".
The US is no more of a "hyperpower" now than it was 30 years ago. The only difference between then and now is that there is no one to currently oppose them, but that will change quickly
Give it 50 years and the US will have competition on two fronts - China and the EU. The EU becomes more and more unified every year, and as it does so, the economic and military power of the area comes closer and closer to that of the US (the EU as a whole already surpasses the US in terms of GDP). So on one hand, you have the "friendly" EU competition. On the other hand, you have China - growing incredibly rapidly both technologically and militarily. Plus, they have the population to back up the technology on the ground if it ever came to that.
If you project out, by 2050 you have three huge global superpowers. All nuclear, all space-capable. And who knows what the global political scene will be like - tensions between the US and Europe have never been higher in recent memory, and the true goals of China in areas like Space are yet to be seen.
It's going to be an interesting 50 years for all of us, and rest assured, the US will not remain the "sole superpower" for very long in a historical sense. I mean, just 150 years ago ( a small blip on the global timeline ) the UK was the worlds superpower. 100 years ago the US was in such a depression people wondered if the whole nation was going to collapse. 50 years ago half the western world was under the control of Hitler.
The point is that in historical terms, the length of time the US has been dominant is miniscule. Let me know when the US has been the dominant global superpower for a thousand years ( see: Rome ) then we can start talking about "hyperpower".
Essentially Coke was the biggest cola company on the block, until they acknowledged Pepsi as a competitor.
You say this as if they aren't still the biggest on the block. Coke is still (as it has always been) well ahead of Pepsi in both global market share and global market value. Their stock price is higher, and they still ship many more units / yaar then Pepsi. Sure Pepsi may have more flashy ads in the US, but that doesn't mean squat to their international presence. Just do a Google on the cola wars.
This said, if Linux ever got to the point that it was as much of a competitor to MS as Pepsi is to Coke, I'd be damn happy.
The problem is that those large, heavy, tall vehicles, while arguably safer when in an accident...,/i>
Don't even try to pull this one. Huge bulky cars are only safer for those that *drive* them ( and even that's debatable). God forbid you are the person in the sub-compact getting run over by those god awful things and their idiot drivers.
Anyone who uses email frequently cannot live without threaded messaging once exposed to it. This and this alone will keep me off of webmail forever (sure, you *could* thread in webmail, but it would either result in many trips back / forth to the server to expand / collapse the threads, or it would need fancy JS and DHTML magic which I have never seen in a webmail app.).
I access my email solely through IMAP, and while I *do* occasionally use my webmail access while away from the desk, it is far from my first choice.
Other things client side email can give you - Better spam filtering than webmail, since you can run your own and fine tune it - Don't have to worry about your email account suddenly being terminated due to the whim of a company - Privacy issues - Infinite GB per email account (in theory) - Better integration with your desktop calendar and addressbook - Ability to easily sync with your PDA / Cell phone - Ability to click "mailto:" in your web browser and have it work etc...
Don't want mysql to startup on boot? In SysV init you mave to rename six symbolic links to begin with the leter "K", and possibly reorder them. In BSD init, you just remove the executable permission from rc.mysql.
For one, this is totally false. All you have to do is remove the SXXservice symlink from your current runlevel, or make its/etc/init.d copy non-executable as you say (this is really wrong though; by making an init script non-executable you are also preventing shutdown scripts to work). The KXXservice links are shutdown links, they have nothing to do with starting a service.
For another, every distro has GUI tools to do this for you anyway. You just see the list of services and basically check and uncheck boxes.
B) Allow automagical setup tools to make changes in system initialization (something a control freak hates).
Personally I like the fact that when I run "apt-get install mysql", it will install the package *and* ensure it is run at boot time, rather than me having to screw around hand-editing conf files.
Slackware -- with its BSD-style init -- is easy to configure.
I would take issue with this. IMO SysV init is much simpler to use and administer one you understand what it is doing. Since each daemon has its own startup and shutdown script, and since the order they are being executed in can be determined by a glance. It is also very easy to re-order daemon startups, and to start / stop/restart individual processes while the system is running through/etc/init.d. BSD style init does not have this benefit, and since everying is all mismached together it is also often quite cumbersome to manage dependancies.
From my experience the people who prefer BSD init because it is "simpler" are just people who do not want to take the 5 mins to understand SysV and set it up properly. Investing a few mins setting up your SysV will save you hours of headaches you'd have later on with BSD style.
If just enabling these already existing options / adjusting these value samke Mozilla so much fster, why aren't they on by default??? Is there some downside?
The results are very non-intuitive. An extra layer between the program -> CPU implies an extra amount of overhead - be it any layer (VM at the Application layer, VM at the OS layer, or even at the CPU layer (hyperthreading)).
People often cite this as a downfall of Java, when it is in fact this virtualization that can make Java faster than C++, and in some cases, even faster than C.
On the other hand, code paths that are never used do not get the same attention, and are thus not optimized as much. However, a code path that is never used is likely not as time critical; and you can always instruct the JVM to follow those paths and optimize them if you want.
Modern JVMs re-compile and re-optimize bytecodes continuously during execution, until no significant gains are noticed by the optimizing compiler. The result of this is a program that gets faster and faster the longer you use it. The longer you use it, the more efficient the instructions, until you end up at a point where the bytecode is being interperted so efficiently that the only way to match it in terms of performance would be custom hand-coded assembly.
It's a lot harder to lift a pocketwatch off someone walking down the road than it is to lift someone's wallet out of their back pocket. It takes much more sill, and thus the number of crooks you run into who could get away with it would be smaller.
Also, it would be relatively easy to include on the back of the watch a small thermal sensor. When you put the watch on in the morning, it asks for your PIN to activate the RFID credit card. Then, if the watches thermal sensor ever detects that it is off the skin for more than 3 or 4 seconds, disable the credit card until the PIN is again entered.
Thermal sensors are cheap and small. This would give you quite reasonable security, no less than that of an ATM card at least, and much more convince.
I honestly don't understand the concept behind this e-voting. Why do Americans think that voting constantly needs to be mechanized? First, the goofy mechanical lever system. Then the goofy punch cards. now the goofy computers. And all in all none of it ends up ever being any cheaper or faster than just filling out paper ballots by marking an X.
Now everyone is talking about printing out a paper receipt for recounts etc. So now we are using at least as much paper as paper votes.
You *know* the first time these machines are used in any contested election, one of the parties will cry foul. And there will be a recount. Which will take just as much time with paper votes.
So why the *hell* not just use paper votes in the first place? Empty boxes, you mark an X. We have been doing this in Canada forever, and we are still doing it this year. Why? Cause it is cheap, and it works. There's no hanging chaffes, no computer error, no security issues, it's totally transparent to the public.
Those coupons are usually provided by the manufacturer. Their purpose is not to get you into the store, but to encourage you to buy their brand, in the hopes that you will like it and then later buy it at the normal price.
Windows XP is (or at least seems to be) FASTER on the SAME HARDWARE compared to Gnome and KDE.
What's your point?
Can I type "sftp://" in IE and browse a remote SFTP site? No.
Can I type "cdaudio://" in IE and copy MP3s or OGGs directly off of the CD, with track names and all, as if they were right there, and have them encoded on the fly? No.
Can I open a file in notepad over ftp and edit it as if it was local? No.
Do I have translucent menus on my windows? No.
Can I send messages from the command line to nearly any running program to issue remote commands (DCOP) ? No.
Can I make the task panel look and feel exactly how I want, including translucent and using only 75% width and being centered? Can I take my favorite editor and embed it inside my email client to edit things how I see fit? Does IE have inline spell checking in textarea controls? Does every single input box in windows have auto-completion? Does IE even *support* PNG images???
Windows XP is faster than KDE because it does orders of magnitude less stuff. If you want compare KDE to XP, you'd have tp go back a few generations to get a fair comparison feature-wise.
"3) Coupons - a person's cell phone (once again) could be configured to receive (or not) coupons at the grocery store upon entering."
Stores do not issue coupons for your health and well being. You get coupons in the mail, newspaper, and flyers because the grocery store is trying to get you in there. It's called a "loss leader". You sell a few items at a loss, in the hopes that the customer will purchase many other items you will make profit on. It also encourages brand loyalty.
If you are already *in* the store, the store no longer has any incentive to offer you discounts on items.
Now, what *would* make sense is broadcasting sales / coupons to your phone when you walk into a common area, like a mall. One store broadcasting a good deal might entice you to go into that store and check it out, when otherwise you might not have.
KDE has much larger core libraries. Nearly every KDE app only needs to link to five things... libqt.so, libdcop, libkdecore.so, libkdeui.so, and libkio.so. Nearly all core KDE functions come out of these.
Gnome is quite different. It is broken in to a myrid of libraries - Glib, GTK, Gnomelib, bonobo, various RTF libraries, various widget libraries, various graphics libraries...
The end result is, loading up a single KDE app and a single gnome app will almost always result in Gnome havig a smaller footprint. But load a few of each, and the footprint will be much closer. Run two full environments ( Run KDE, the run Gnome ), and they'll be almost identical - Note the results from TOP are not an indication, use "free" instead.
Basically, KDE is designed and developed around the idea that it *is* a desktop. Applications are all tightly integrated, and any bit of code that is used in more than one app is shared in the core libraries.
This has the result that, if you don't run KDE as a whole ( and thus don't have kdeinit pre-loading your libraries ), you will have worse performance than running single GNome apps. However, because not as much code is in one core library, launching many gnome apps that all load different libraries can take longer than launching several KDE apps that all link against the same libraries.
You can agree or disagree with the KDE model of "integrate as much as possible", but you can't really claim that KDE is "more bloated" than Gnome - Gnome is just "spreading the bloat around", so to speak.
Slashdot Mirror
..and me (and the parent), however.
Personally, I would never see nor care any sum of money > 1 million dollars. If I was in some situation where I received 10 million dollars, I would take care of my family, put a few hundred thousand aside for my kids, keep 1-1.5 million, and give the rest to Amnesty International or some other worthy charity.
People who hoard money, while other people around the world starve half to death, really make me sick. Who cannot live an excellent lifestyle on the interest alone on a million dollars? No one.
It irritates me even more when someone like Bill Gates or some incredibly weathly celebirty donats something like a few tens of thousand to someone or a charity. WTF? Gates could donate 20 billion and still be worth billions. Whats he need it for? bragging rights?
Money is just money. You can't take it with you, and it won't make you immortal. But it could save many other people's lives. So next time you run out to buy that newest hottest DVD, just think about how that 20 bucks could feed someone in Africa for a whole month. I am not saying impoverish youself to give to others, but if everyone just donated a small portion of their income, something they wouldn't even miss, you could pretty much wipe out worldwide hunger.
Only the dumb criminals get caught. The authorities don't even know the smart criminals are committing crimes, let alone catching them.
Also, white lists dont deal with the fact that a lot of email is from first time corresponders such as online retail outlets.
Er, if an "online retial outlet" is sending me email I did not sign up for, then that is SPAM and is exactly the thing this is supposed to prevent!.
If you *do* want email from a certain company, and you signed up for it, then you should add that domain/email to your white list. Simple as that.
Er... If you're flying a plane and in a situation where the cabin is de-pressurizing, a few tiny flames doing damage to the innards of your laptop should be the LEAST of your worries.
I don't know about you, but I would be more concerned with dying of asphyxia, or crashing, or the terrorist who shot the hole in the plane, or whatever the hell else made the cabin de-pressurize.
The reason I brought up the number of people who died has nothing to do with body count, it has to do with guts and sheer determination as a society. Say the first 5 times a space launch was attempted, all personel on board had died. Do you honestly think the US space program would have continued as rapidly?
Dying while trying to cross the Atlantic was commonplace and a well known risk. If you were going on the voyage, chances were greatert han 50/50 you were never coming back. But people did it anywas.
Filter bypass
Filter bypass
The British Commonwealth controlled way more land the Roman Empire but as far as power the US did send men to the moon, built the first atomic bomb, etc.
The US sent a man to the moon, but the UK (and others) sent explorers to the "new world", which - any way you cut it - money wise (taking into account inflation), risk wise, lives lost wise, was much more of a dramatic accomplishment at the time.
Going to the moon was great, but you have to take it in context. How many people died *trying* to get to the moon before one succeeded? How many US astronauts died in test flights?
Now compare that to the number of sailors who died trying to discover the as-yet undiscovered "new world".
The US is no more of a "hyperpower" now than it was 30 years ago. The only difference between then and now is that there is no one to currently oppose them, but that will change quickly
Give it 50 years and the US will have competition on two fronts - China and the EU. The EU becomes more and more unified every year, and as it does so, the economic and military power of the area comes closer and closer to that of the US (the EU as a whole already surpasses the US in terms of GDP). So on one hand, you have the "friendly" EU competition. On the other hand, you have China - growing incredibly rapidly both technologically and militarily. Plus, they have the population to back up the technology on the ground if it ever came to that.
If you project out, by 2050 you have three huge global superpowers. All nuclear, all space-capable. And who knows what the global political scene will be like - tensions between the US and Europe have never been higher in recent memory, and the true goals of China in areas like Space are yet to be seen.
It's going to be an interesting 50 years for all of us, and rest assured, the US will not remain the "sole superpower" for very long in a historical sense. I mean, just 150 years ago ( a small blip on the global timeline ) the UK was the worlds superpower. 100 years ago the US was in such a depression people wondered if the whole nation was going to collapse. 50 years ago half the western world was under the control of Hitler.
The point is that in historical terms, the length of time the US has been dominant is miniscule. Let me know when the US has been the dominant global superpower for a thousand years ( see: Rome ) then we can start talking about "hyperpower".
Err...
Barqs > Mug for root beer
Sprite > 7up for lemon-lime
Really, the only Pepsi product I *ever* buy is AquaFina water. And that is just because it seems to be more prevalent, not that it tastes better.
Seriously, nearly all Pepsi soft drinks to me just taste like ass. They're too sweet and not enough flavour.
As for geek drinks... wtf? Mountain Dew is for wimps. Drink coffee or Bawls, Dew is useless.
Essentially Coke was the biggest cola company on the block, until they acknowledged Pepsi as a competitor.
You say this as if they aren't still the biggest on the block. Coke is still (as it has always been) well ahead of Pepsi in both global market share and global market value. Their stock price is higher, and they still ship many more units / yaar then Pepsi. Sure Pepsi may have more flashy ads in the US, but that doesn't mean squat to their international presence. Just do a Google on the cola wars.
This said, if Linux ever got to the point that it was as much of a competitor to MS as Pepsi is to Coke, I'd be damn happy.
Filter bypass...
Filter bypass..
The problem is that those large, heavy, tall vehicles, while arguably safer when in an accident...,/i>
Don't even try to pull this one. Huge bulky cars are only safer for those that *drive* them ( and even that's debatable). God forbid you are the person in the sub-compact getting run over by those god awful things and their idiot drivers.
Anyone who uses email frequently cannot live without threaded messaging once exposed to it. This and this alone will keep me off of webmail forever (sure, you *could* thread in webmail, but it would either result in many trips back / forth to the server to expand / collapse the threads, or it would need fancy JS and DHTML magic which I have never seen in a webmail app.).
I access my email solely through IMAP, and while I *do* occasionally use my webmail access while away from the desk, it is far from my first choice.
Other things client side email can give you
- Better spam filtering than webmail, since you can run your own and fine tune it
- Don't have to worry about your email account suddenly being terminated due to the whim of a company
- Privacy issues
- Infinite GB per email account (in theory)
- Better integration with your desktop calendar and addressbook
- Ability to easily sync with your PDA / Cell phone
- Ability to click "mailto:" in your web browser and have it work
etc...
Don't want mysql to startup on boot? In SysV init you mave to rename six symbolic links to begin with the leter "K", and possibly reorder them. In BSD init, you just remove the executable permission from rc.mysql.
For one, this is totally false. All you have to do is remove the SXXservice symlink from your current runlevel, or make itsFor another, every distro has GUI tools to do this for you anyway. You just see the list of services and basically check and uncheck boxes.
B) Allow automagical setup tools to make changes in system initialization (something a control freak hates).
Personally I like the fact that when I run "apt-get install mysql", it will install the package *and* ensure it is run at boot time, rather than me having to screw around hand-editing conf files.
Slackware -- with its BSD-style init -- is easy to configure.
I would take issue with this. IMO SysV init is much simpler to use and administer one you understand what it is doing. Since each daemon has its own startup and shutdown script, and since the order they are being executed in can be determined by a glance. It is also very easy to re-order daemon startups, and to start / stop /restart individual processes while the system is running through /etc/init.d. BSD style init does not have this benefit, and since everying is all mismached together it is also often quite cumbersome to manage dependancies.
From my experience the people who prefer BSD init because it is "simpler" are just people who do not want to take the 5 mins to understand SysV and set it up properly. Investing a few mins setting up your SysV will save you hours of headaches you'd have later on with BSD style.
If just enabling these already existing options / adjusting these value samke Mozilla so much fster, why aren't they on by default??? Is there some downside?
The results are very non-intuitive. An extra layer between the program -> CPU implies an extra amount of overhead - be it any layer (VM at the Application layer, VM at the OS layer, or even at the CPU layer (hyperthreading)).
People often cite this as a downfall of Java, when it is in fact this virtualization that can make Java faster than C++, and in some cases, even faster than C.
On the other hand, code paths that are never used do not get the same attention, and are thus not optimized as much. However, a code path that is never used is likely not as time critical; and you can always instruct the JVM to follow those paths and optimize them if you want.
Modern JVMs re-compile and re-optimize bytecodes continuously during execution, until no significant gains are noticed by the optimizing compiler. The result of this is a program that gets faster and faster the longer you use it. The longer you use it, the more efficient the instructions, until you end up at a point where the bytecode is being interperted so efficiently that the only way to match it in terms of performance would be custom hand-coded assembly.
So you'd rather carry around a palm m500 *and* a phone, rather than just a sightly larger phone that does everything your plam does and more?
You have an odd sense of "compact".
For one, you cannot connect devices like keyboards, gpses etc. etc.
Wrong. You can use bluetooth keyboards with many phones.
Can you install a diet program in a phone as easily as in a pda?
Yes. Most phones run either Java, or Symbian, both of which have free SDKs. And there are thousands of apps available.
Can you program your pda?
Yes, see above.
A pda is a programmable computer, can be said the same for a phone (running maybe a proprietary OS) ?
Yes it can. See above.
It's a lot harder to lift a pocketwatch off someone walking down the road than it is to lift someone's wallet out of their back pocket. It takes much more sill, and thus the number of crooks you run into who could get away with it would be smaller.
Also, it would be relatively easy to include on the back of the watch a small thermal sensor. When you put the watch on in the morning, it asks for your PIN to activate the RFID credit card. Then, if the watches thermal sensor ever detects that it is off the skin for more than 3 or 4 seconds, disable the credit card until the PIN is again entered.
Thermal sensors are cheap and small. This would give you quite reasonable security, no less than that of an ATM card at least, and much more convince.
I honestly don't understand the concept behind this e-voting. Why do Americans think that voting constantly needs to be mechanized? First, the goofy mechanical lever system. Then the goofy punch cards. now the goofy computers. And all in all none of it ends up ever being any cheaper or faster than just filling out paper ballots by marking an X.
Now everyone is talking about printing out a paper receipt for recounts etc. So now we are using at least as much paper as paper votes.
You *know* the first time these machines are used in any contested election, one of the parties will cry foul. And there will be a recount. Which will take just as much time with paper votes.
So why the *hell* not just use paper votes in the first place? Empty boxes, you mark an X. We have been doing this in Canada forever, and we are still doing it this year. Why? Cause it is cheap, and it works. There's no hanging chaffes, no computer error, no security issues, it's totally transparent to the public.
Those coupons are usually provided by the manufacturer. Their purpose is not to get you into the store, but to encourage you to buy their brand, in the hopes that you will like it and then later buy it at the normal price.
What's your point?
Can I type "sftp://" in IE and browse a remote SFTP site? No.
Can I type "cdaudio://" in IE and copy MP3s or OGGs directly off of the CD, with track names and all, as if they were right there, and have them encoded on the fly? No.
Can I open a file in notepad over ftp and edit it as if it was local? No.
Do I have translucent menus on my windows? No.
Can I send messages from the command line to nearly any running program to issue remote commands (DCOP) ? No.
Can I make the task panel look and feel exactly how I want, including translucent and using only 75% width and being centered? Can I take my favorite editor and embed it inside my email client to edit things how I see fit? Does IE have inline spell checking in textarea controls? Does every single input box in windows have auto-completion? Does IE even *support* PNG images???
Windows XP is faster than KDE because it does orders of magnitude less stuff. If you want compare KDE to XP, you'd have tp go back a few generations to get a fair comparison feature-wise.
Most of these make sense, except...
"3) Coupons - a person's cell phone (once again) could be configured to receive (or not) coupons at the grocery store upon entering."
Stores do not issue coupons for your health and well being. You get coupons in the mail, newspaper, and flyers because the grocery store is trying to get you in there. It's called a "loss leader". You sell a few items at a loss, in the hopes that the customer will purchase many other items you will make profit on. It also encourages brand loyalty.
If you are already *in* the store, the store no longer has any incentive to offer you discounts on items.
Now, what *would* make sense is broadcasting sales / coupons to your phone when you walk into a common area, like a mall. One store broadcasting a good deal might entice you to go into that store and check it out, when otherwise you might not have.
KDE has much larger core libraries. Nearly every KDE app only needs to link to five things... libqt.so, libdcop, libkdecore.so, libkdeui.so, and libkio.so. Nearly all core KDE functions come out of these.
Gnome is quite different. It is broken in to a myrid of libraries - Glib, GTK, Gnomelib, bonobo, various RTF libraries, various widget libraries, various graphics libraries...
The end result is, loading up a single KDE app and a single gnome app will almost always result in Gnome havig a smaller footprint. But load a few of each, and the footprint will be much closer. Run two full environments ( Run KDE, the run Gnome ), and they'll be almost identical - Note the results from TOP are not an indication, use "free" instead.
Basically, KDE is designed and developed around the idea that it *is* a desktop. Applications are all tightly integrated, and any bit of code that is used in more than one app is shared in the core libraries.
This has the result that, if you don't run KDE as a whole ( and thus don't have kdeinit pre-loading your libraries ), you will have worse performance than running single GNome apps. However, because not as much code is in one core library, launching many gnome apps that all load different libraries can take longer than launching several KDE apps that all link against the same libraries.
You can agree or disagree with the KDE model of "integrate as much as possible", but you can't really claim that KDE is "more bloated" than Gnome - Gnome is just "spreading the bloat around", so to speak.