That was a TERRIBLE counter-example. It fails the premise of the GP's point, which was:
"Unlike shrinkwrap licenses, you get to read this notice ahead of time, you may choose not to enter the premises, and you do receive consideration in that you're allowed to enter their establishment."
How does your stupid example of, "by reading the first word of this sentence you have agreed to my terms", meet any of these criteria? I already read the first word, thus it fails the "notice ahead of time" and "you may choose not to enter the premesis" (or in this example, read the word) tests. And what consideration does your sentence give me (in other words, what do I get out of it?). Nothing. You fail on all three points.
Your example was stupid. You have not made the point you think you have made.
I don't like shrink-wrap licenses and I don't like stores that want to search me on exit (and I always refuse this, and have had numerous encounters with store employees as a result). But I don't base my reasoning on complete logical fallacies.
Come up with some better arguments so that I can agree with you, please!
I read the article in question. There is obviously much disagreement about the value of the Really Fair Scheduler, and so I must assume that "derrida" and the Slashdot editors are once again just trying to invite more people to the flame-fest as usual.
The comments on the article at the linked-to site suggest that there are potentially flaws in the logic behind the Really Fair Scheduler, and that its author has ignored advancements in the CFS that make most (or all?) of its improvements irrelevent. Also there are many suggestions that the author of the Really Fair Scheduler, some guy named Roman something-or-other, is raging on the kernel lists rather than working cooperatively to improve the Linux scheduler.
Given what I have seen, I suspect that the Really Fair Scheduler is going nowhere, and that "derrida" knows that and is just trying to add more fuel to the flame-fire by posting about it on Slashdot.
Many of us indeed cannot wait until 2008 to find out. I've left the USA entirely (currently living in New Zealand) while I wait out the Bush era. After he's gone I'll hopefully be able to return to my native country with some shred of respect for its government. We'll see.
I built a home server in 2002 out of a PCChips VIA CPU integrated board (a Samuel 2 at 667 Mhz), 128 MB of RAM, and a hard drive, and RedHat Linux 7.3. The board had everything else integrated into it. It used to do more in my old apartment (print server, file server, firewall, backup server) but now all it does is act as a backup server for my hosted-at-a-datacenter main server. Runs rsync nightly to incrementally back up the master. It's been running since 2002 without crashing or hanging one single time (although it has been shut down on numerous occasions because of power outages, system maintainance, moving house, etc). It is the single most reliable computer I have ever built. A bit over a year ago the CPU fan died and I just took it off. It's just running with the tiny CPU heatsink, and never gets very hot. And I added a power supply that spins the fan up only when needed. So far I have never heard the power supply fan spin up. The system is silent (except for the teeny bit of hard drive noise) and I can't imagine it draws much power, to not even require the power supply fan to come on.
Oh and the whole thing cost about $200 in 2002. Just a data point for you; these types of systems can be built and they work very, very well.
On a mostly unrelated note, when I was in Japan in 2001 they still had good arcades. Arcades have mostly died in the USA due to home consoles; the only arcades left are full of big machines that have controls that cannot be duplicated on a home system (things like recreations of rafts with paddles, skiing slopes, horses, flight cockpits, race car cockpits, etc) that cost $2.00 to play, last 30 seconds, and basically suck. The only good American arcade I have been to in this decade is the one in Chinatown (Manhattan).
Anyhoo, Japan in 2001 still had really cool arcades, I have no idea if they still do today. My proudest moment was playing Last Blade 2 versus a couple of Japanese teenagers and whooping their asses. I had practiced that game for hours on MAME at home with a Hot Rod Pro arcade joystick setup, but had never played another human. It was really satisfying to beat Japanese teenagers at the game (I don't know why, maybe because I think of Japanese teenagers as being more into video games or something, and also maybe because the game was from Japan). I still look for Last Blade 2 every time I go into an arcade but I *never* see it (except I did see it at that Chinatown arcade but it was right before I moved away from NYC and only got to play it once).
I did a brief bit of consulting for a company developing cell phone apps. They had ties to some Korean cell phone manufacturers. Somehow they had gotten a hold of some Korean arcade systems as a trial to see if they would want to market them in the USA. One was called something like "Butt Smacker" and it was an upright arcade console with a screen and a recreation of a person's butt (made out of foam and plastic) protruding just below the screen. There was a paddle attached to the side of the cabinet.
I never saw the machine turned on but I can only imagine what the "game" was...
Modding this as flamebait was really unfair, whoever did that. It's actually a pretty good short summary of all of the problems that led up to the crash. I read some of them and wondered how they could have ever made those mistakes (like not drop-testing the ground shutoff code, something that would be very cheap and easy to do and give much greater confidence in that critical part of the system), but I am going to have to assume that there is much more to the development and testing of these things than is obvious from Carmack's posting. There are probably a million variables to consider and it's probably not possible to do everything that would have seemed obvious after the fact.
But anyway, the post is not flamebait in any way shape or form. Someone with mod points, please correct this.
But the fact is that you're using that 2200 Mhz dual-core processor with a modern operating system and applications instead of the 1.8 Mhz Z-80 with Electric Pencil. Why? If the circa 1980 computing experience was better, why not just fire up your old Z-80 and throw your AMD in the trash? Heck you could probably find a Z-80 emulator that would let you run all of your old Z-80 programs. Just run it full-screen and it would be just like you were back in 1980.
The fact is that you are also getting orders of magnitude more features out of the modern software, that you do not want to give up, so you won't go back to the Z-80 and Electric Pencil. Maybe you don't use every single feature of the new software, but each feature is useful to somebody, or else it wouldn't be in the product. And the fact that Open Office has so many features is what makes it useful to orders of magnitude more people than your old Electric Pencil was. There is a reason that computers are used by billions more people than they were in 1980. It's because modern software is vastly more feature-rich, and vastly more useable. If it weren't, home computer use would be about where it was back then.
Your TRS-80 used to boot up in a matter of a few seconds to a command shell that had very minimal features. I am sure a modern computer could boot to the same state in a tiny fraction of the time. The thing is, nobody wants a computer that boots to a TRS-80 command prompt really quickly. People want featureful operating systems and programs. And these things naturally are bigger and slower (they don't have to be - but because modern programs are vastly more complex beasts, the only way to keep them cheap is to offload development cost to runtime cost).
As to not paying for programs, expand your concept of "pay". You would be "paying" by having less software to run because FOSS developers would all be spending their time optimizing their code instead of creating new and interesting software.
Anyway, I'm not trying to say that there are lazy programmers out there or that modern software couldn't be just as featureful and great and still be faster and more efficient. There is *alot* of poorly written code out there. I know, I am a software developer, I deal with it every day (some of it my own!). I just wanted to make the point that sometimes, inefficiency is a *good* thing, because it represents a trade-off that got you more than you would have had otherwise (i.e. got you extra features and more software at the expense of burning more CPU cycles, most of which you never notice).
Often "less and less efficient code" is cheaper code, in time and money, to write. If your processor can make up the difference, why not speed up development process by writig less efficient code? Do you really want to pay more for programs that don't run noticeably faster? Or have fewer choices of software to use because more developers were devoted to optimizing unnecessarily than to creating new products?
Note that there is a difference between "sloppy" and "inefficient". You lump them together, but I'm talking about code that is inefficient by design - making a trade off between development time and runtime costs - not sloppy code, which is inefficient not by design, but by unfortunate accident of the laziness/incompetence of the developer writing it. Sloppy code is bad, but inefficient is not necessarily bad.
Just as your system has only a few processes that want to be scheduled simultaneously (and so your observation that "not all of those processes are in [a] runnable state" is correct), those Java Swing applications you are talking about very rarely have more than a thread or two wanting to do work at the same time. The web server is a better example of concurrent execution but those are most often I/O limited as much as CPU limited, and in the vast majority of cases the bottleneck is not the number of threads that can execute concurrently.
It's very hard to take advantage of multiple cores because very often, there isn't more than one thing for a program to be doing at the same time, and for most desktop users, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 programs running actively at a time. Many code paths are not explicitly parallelizable, and many more are parallelizable but not easily so. Just as clock speed is not the holy grail of processor performance, core count isn't either.
He didn't say the money would have been spent on something stupid. He just said that it would have been spent on something else besides the Internet infrastructure. Which is absolutely correct. Probably it would have been distributed across a bunch of government services.
Is that why when I was a young teenager in the late 80's it was common knowledge that you had to put the sliders of your "graphic equalizer" in a U-shaped configuration, with the lowest frequency maxed out, the next lowest halfway down, the middle one at the middle, the the next one halfway up, and the last one all the way up? Actually I think the "correct" configuration had the high-frequency sliders pushed down a bit so the base was boosted the most and the high-frequency somewhat less so. The middle frequences were not boosted much if at all.
Although no one really knew why we did this, it was just the "right" way to do it, as passed from one clueless teenager to another.
Of course, the crappy tapes I played, half of them dubs-of-dubs-of-dubs, and the other half recordings of LP records made on my friend's dad's hi-fi system, probably meant that no amount of frequency-fixing was likely to improve the shitty sound quality. Still I loved blasting the Ramones and Buzzcocks on my awesome 1984 Ford Tempo speaker system.
I can verify this from personal experience. When I was a teenager I had a bad drug experience that messed up my thought processes. I had a panic reaction that fed itself; a fear of being afraid. Because the fear was of fear itself, I found myself unable to control it because the moment I believed I might be starting to panic, panic immediately ensued because I was panicking about panicking. It sounds weird I know but it was a feedback loop of fear and panic that was very difficult to control. People talk about "panic attacks" and I am not sure if this is the same thing, but I can tell you that it was a really awful thing to go through. I can say without hesitation that it was the worst feeling I have ever had in my life; in fact I believe that it is the worst feeling I am capable of feeling, because my entire mental faculty was devoted to feeling panic. There was nothing else. I told myself that if I couldn't get over it, I would kill myself because it would be better to be dead. And I believe I would have carried through on that. But luckily the young mind (I was 15) is pretty malleable and I was able to figure a way out of it.
Because these panic attacks happened only once every couple of days, I focused on the time between the attacks. The attacks were precipitated by a fear that they were going to happen, so if I got myself into the wrong frame of mind, and allowed myself to start to panic (a sort of aura would come over my mind as the panic started, like I could feel it descending on me), and if I didn't act quickly to distract myself, there was no hope of getting out of it. So I decided to stop fighting it and just "let it happen", sort of convincing myself that "I survived the last one so I can survive this one". And it helped immensely to realize that even if it did keep happening, it wouldn't kill me (unless I killed myself!), and I would have a couple of days to live relatively normally again. I focused on feeling like it didn't matter that I would panic, like it was something to just get over with and move back on with normal life, and once I was able to convince myself of that, I had a tool to take the edge off of the panic once it started happening. And that was enough to often times prevent the panic attack entirely. And once I could prevent a panic attack once in a while, I gained confidence because I thought "well not only do these panic attacks not matter, they are actually preventable". And once I started gaining that confidence, it became easier and easier to avoid them.
Just as the feedback loop of fear was causing the panic attacks, a feedback loop of confidence (where the confidence caused more confidence because the confidence itself was the tool for preventing the panic attacks) was the solution. Eventually I stopped having the attacks. I did relapse a couple of times throughout my teen years, but only briefly. I also had some months-long duration of minor depression, which I attribute to my brain having to devote so many "feel good" neurons to preventing the attacks, and having less left over to keep my general happiness at a normal level. But by the time I went to college, I was for all intents and purposes over it completely.
I am 35 now and haven't had a panic attack in 10 years or so. Although it does make me a little nervous to talk about in depth, even writing this felt a little like skirting the edge of fear. But I have no doubt that once I move onto the next Slashdot article I will have relaxed my nerves entirely.
It probably ends with you actually reading the article and getting a clue about what this case was about, and why your sharing of a newspaper story with a co-worker is completely irrelevent.
Re:i live in times square
on
Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
When I lived in Manhattan (2nd floor above a restaurant at 22 & Park) we would get 2 - 3 garbage trucks per night (between 1 am and 4 am) noisily collecting trash. I mean really, really noisily. The crashing of bins of glass bottles alone was deafening. My wife thought it was charming. I thought it was very, very annoying.
Now we live next to a park in New Zealand and it's so quiet it's eerie.
As much as I agree with most of the points you are making, I don't think you help your arguments much by constantly going back to the effects of the Islamic religion hundreds or thousands of years ago. These are really not very relevent to the problems we are facing today. Similarly, if we were to talk about Christians and their effect on the modern world, I wouldn't find it very useful to bring up stuff that happened a long time ago.
For what it's worth, I have gotten to know a few Muslim friends and they are all cool people that are as decent as anyone else I have met. In particular I find their devotion to a "pure" lifestyle (no drinking, smoking, swearing, etc) commendable, if not because I agree necessarily with the premise, at least because I admire their committment and self-control.
One friend, however, has a grudge against Israel and I felt like he wasn't really able to talk about the topic objectively; he constantly demonized Israel in our discussion of the topic of Israel versus Palestine. But he is from Palestine originally so I suppose he can't be expected to see things too objectively.
My point in our discussion was that I think that Isreal and Palestine are both very culpable in their shared problems, but my friend refused to admit that the Palestineans (sp?) ever did anything wrong.
That's really the only thing I felt like I could fault him on though. He was really an outstanding person otherwise.
SUVs are more dangerous to other non-SUV vehicles on the road. Their bumpers are higher, their weight is greater, they carry their weight higher, and correspondingly they have worse performance characteristics in an emergency situation. Not to mention the visibility problems SUVs cause for other drivers. Some SUV drivers go so far as to put bars on the front of the front grill to maximize the damage their vehicle will do to another vehicle or pedestrian in an accident.
This is disgusting to me; it's the ultimate example of selfishness and self-centeredness, where one's own comfort/safety/style outweigh any consideration of the consequence to others.
I think SUVs should be banned for these reasons. I agree about letting the market decide how fuel efficient a vehicle should be (and correspondingly, I agree that the artificially low gas prices in the USA should be eliminated to allow this mechanism to work properly), but I don't agree that the market should decide how safe a vehicle should be to others. We can and should legislate against unnecessarily dangerous vehicles.
However, I have taken a different approach to solving this problem in my own life. I left the USA and moved to New Zealand, where although there are some SUVs on the road (and to my disgust, I have even seen a Hummer or two around town), they are nowhere near the epidemic proportions they are in the USA. Also gas prices are much higher here (although they are still cheaper than European prices) which I think helps to mitigate this issue.
My memory is wrong about the dialog. Maybe I misrepresented the actual messages I was getting. The point remains that the modem never worked, and I could not get it to work. Even if I did get an opportunity to debug the device driver or whatever it is you are suggesting, it did not help.
I really don't understand why you refuse to believe that a bleeding edge operating system from 10 years ago might have had some difficulty with a particular piece of hardware, or why you refuse to believe that it was not solvable given the tools of the operating system at the time. I WANTED Be to work. I put HOURS into trying to get it to work. It didn't work for me.
If it makes you feel any better, I have had tons of problems getting hardware to work in Linux too. And just because I can't remember the exact error messages I was getting in Linux, doesn't mean I am confusing it with some other operating system either.
Yes, I used it. I paid $100 or more for it if I remember correctly. I was very excited about it, thinking it would be really cool. It definitely had nice demos. I don't know why it didn't open a debugger when I got errors trying to use the modem. I really don't. Who knows, maybe it did, and I've forgotten - it was 8 years ago. But in any regard, whereas I expected to be able to find documentation on how to configure the modem, how to manually force IRQs and DMA addresses and stuff, I found nothing. If it wasn't covered by one of the few GUI controls for that particular device, I couldn't do it. I gave up.
Maybe there were workarounds that I didn't know about. I am not sure. All I know is I was never able to figure it out, and I went back to Linux in a hurry. It's possible that the problem was with me and that BeOS was an absolutely perfect, completely polished and bug-free product. People seem to be suggesting that's so. But my vote is "not worth it", and apparently the market agreed with me...
Slashdot Mirror
That was a TERRIBLE counter-example. It fails the premise of the GP's point, which was:
"Unlike shrinkwrap licenses, you get to read this notice ahead of time, you may choose not to enter the premises, and you do receive consideration in that you're allowed to enter their establishment."
How does your stupid example of, "by reading the first word of this sentence you have agreed to my terms", meet any of these criteria? I already read the first word, thus it fails the "notice ahead of time" and "you may choose not to enter the premesis" (or in this example, read the word) tests. And what consideration does your sentence give me (in other words, what do I get out of it?). Nothing. You fail on all three points.
Your example was stupid. You have not made the point you think you have made.
I don't like shrink-wrap licenses and I don't like stores that want to search me on exit (and I always refuse this, and have had numerous encounters with store employees as a result). But I don't base my reasoning on complete logical fallacies.
Come up with some better arguments so that I can agree with you, please!
I read the article in question. There is obviously much disagreement about the value of the Really Fair Scheduler, and so I must assume that "derrida" and the Slashdot editors are once again just trying to invite more people to the flame-fest as usual.
The comments on the article at the linked-to site suggest that there are potentially flaws in the logic behind the Really Fair Scheduler, and that its author has ignored advancements in the CFS that make most (or all?) of its improvements irrelevent. Also there are many suggestions that the author of the Really Fair Scheduler, some guy named Roman something-or-other, is raging on the kernel lists rather than working cooperatively to improve the Linux scheduler.
Given what I have seen, I suspect that the Really Fair Scheduler is going nowhere, and that "derrida" knows that and is just trying to add more fuel to the flame-fire by posting about it on Slashdot.
Many of us indeed cannot wait until 2008 to find out. I've left the USA entirely (currently living in New Zealand) while I wait out the Bush era. After he's gone I'll hopefully be able to return to my native country with some shred of respect for its government. We'll see.
I built a home server in 2002 out of a PCChips VIA CPU integrated board (a Samuel 2 at 667 Mhz), 128 MB of RAM, and a hard drive, and RedHat Linux 7.3. The board had everything else integrated into it. It used to do more in my old apartment (print server, file server, firewall, backup server) but now all it does is act as a backup server for my hosted-at-a-datacenter main server. Runs rsync nightly to incrementally back up the master. It's been running since 2002 without crashing or hanging one single time (although it has been shut down on numerous occasions because of power outages, system maintainance, moving house, etc). It is the single most reliable computer I have ever built. A bit over a year ago the CPU fan died and I just took it off. It's just running with the tiny CPU heatsink, and never gets very hot. And I added a power supply that spins the fan up only when needed. So far I have never heard the power supply fan spin up. The system is silent (except for the teeny bit of hard drive noise) and I can't imagine it draws much power, to not even require the power supply fan to come on.
Oh and the whole thing cost about $200 in 2002. Just a data point for you; these types of systems can be built and they work very, very well.
You had to type in a captcha to submit your Slashdot posts? I don't get it. I've never had to do that.
On a mostly unrelated note, when I was in Japan in 2001 they still had good arcades. Arcades have mostly died in the USA due to home consoles; the only arcades left are full of big machines that have controls that cannot be duplicated on a home system (things like recreations of rafts with paddles, skiing slopes, horses, flight cockpits, race car cockpits, etc) that cost $2.00 to play, last 30 seconds, and basically suck. The only good American arcade I have been to in this decade is the one in Chinatown (Manhattan).
Anyhoo, Japan in 2001 still had really cool arcades, I have no idea if they still do today. My proudest moment was playing Last Blade 2 versus a couple of Japanese teenagers and whooping their asses. I had practiced that game for hours on MAME at home with a Hot Rod Pro arcade joystick setup, but had never played another human. It was really satisfying to beat Japanese teenagers at the game (I don't know why, maybe because I think of Japanese teenagers as being more into video games or something, and also maybe because the game was from Japan). I still look for Last Blade 2 every time I go into an arcade but I *never* see it (except I did see it at that Chinatown arcade but it was right before I moved away from NYC and only got to play it once).
I did a brief bit of consulting for a company developing cell phone apps. They had ties to some Korean cell phone manufacturers. Somehow they had gotten a hold of some Korean arcade systems as a trial to see if they would want to market them in the USA. One was called something like "Butt Smacker" and it was an upright arcade console with a screen and a recreation of a person's butt (made out of foam and plastic) protruding just below the screen. There was a paddle attached to the side of the cabinet.
...
I never saw the machine turned on but I can only imagine what the "game" was
Modding this as flamebait was really unfair, whoever did that. It's actually a pretty good short summary of all of the problems that led up to the crash. I read some of them and wondered how they could have ever made those mistakes (like not drop-testing the ground shutoff code, something that would be very cheap and easy to do and give much greater confidence in that critical part of the system), but I am going to have to assume that there is much more to the development and testing of these things than is obvious from Carmack's posting. There are probably a million variables to consider and it's probably not possible to do everything that would have seemed obvious after the fact.
But anyway, the post is not flamebait in any way shape or form. Someone with mod points, please correct this.
But the fact is that you're using that 2200 Mhz dual-core processor with a modern operating system and applications instead of the 1.8 Mhz Z-80 with Electric Pencil. Why? If the circa 1980 computing experience was better, why not just fire up your old Z-80 and throw your AMD in the trash? Heck you could probably find a Z-80 emulator that would let you run all of your old Z-80 programs. Just run it full-screen and it would be just like you were back in 1980.
The fact is that you are also getting orders of magnitude more features out of the modern software, that you do not want to give up, so you won't go back to the Z-80 and Electric Pencil. Maybe you don't use every single feature of the new software, but each feature is useful to somebody, or else it wouldn't be in the product. And the fact that Open Office has so many features is what makes it useful to orders of magnitude more people than your old Electric Pencil was. There is a reason that computers are used by billions more people than they were in 1980. It's because modern software is vastly more feature-rich, and vastly more useable. If it weren't, home computer use would be about where it was back then.
Your TRS-80 used to boot up in a matter of a few seconds to a command shell that had very minimal features. I am sure a modern computer could boot to the same state in a tiny fraction of the time. The thing is, nobody wants a computer that boots to a TRS-80 command prompt really quickly. People want featureful operating systems and programs. And these things naturally are bigger and slower (they don't have to be - but because modern programs are vastly more complex beasts, the only way to keep them cheap is to offload development cost to runtime cost).
As to not paying for programs, expand your concept of "pay". You would be "paying" by having less software to run because FOSS developers would all be spending their time optimizing their code instead of creating new and interesting software.
Anyway, I'm not trying to say that there are lazy programmers out there or that modern software couldn't be just as featureful and great and still be faster and more efficient. There is *alot* of poorly written code out there. I know, I am a software developer, I deal with it every day (some of it my own!). I just wanted to make the point that sometimes, inefficiency is a *good* thing, because it represents a trade-off that got you more than you would have had otherwise (i.e. got you extra features and more software at the expense of burning more CPU cycles, most of which you never notice).
Often "less and less efficient code" is cheaper code, in time and money, to write. If your processor can make up the difference, why not speed up development process by writig less efficient code? Do you really want to pay more for programs that don't run noticeably faster? Or have fewer choices of software to use because more developers were devoted to optimizing unnecessarily than to creating new products?
Note that there is a difference between "sloppy" and "inefficient". You lump them together, but I'm talking about code that is inefficient by design - making a trade off between development time and runtime costs - not sloppy code, which is inefficient not by design, but by unfortunate accident of the laziness/incompetence of the developer writing it. Sloppy code is bad, but inefficient is not necessarily bad.
Just as your system has only a few processes that want to be scheduled simultaneously (and so your observation that "not all of those processes are in [a] runnable state" is correct), those Java Swing applications you are talking about very rarely have more than a thread or two wanting to do work at the same time. The web server is a better example of concurrent execution but those are most often I/O limited as much as CPU limited, and in the vast majority of cases the bottleneck is not the number of threads that can execute concurrently.
It's very hard to take advantage of multiple cores because very often, there isn't more than one thing for a program to be doing at the same time, and for most desktop users, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 programs running actively at a time. Many code paths are not explicitly parallelizable, and many more are parallelizable but not easily so. Just as clock speed is not the holy grail of processor performance, core count isn't either.
He didn't say the money would have been spent on something stupid. He just said that it would have been spent on something else besides the Internet infrastructure. Which is absolutely correct. Probably it would have been distributed across a bunch of government services.
Is that why when I was a young teenager in the late 80's it was common knowledge that you had to put the sliders of your "graphic equalizer" in a U-shaped configuration, with the lowest frequency maxed out, the next lowest halfway down, the middle one at the middle, the the next one halfway up, and the last one all the way up? Actually I think the "correct" configuration had the high-frequency sliders pushed down a bit so the base was boosted the most and the high-frequency somewhat less so. The middle frequences were not boosted much if at all.
Although no one really knew why we did this, it was just the "right" way to do it, as passed from one clueless teenager to another.
Of course, the crappy tapes I played, half of them dubs-of-dubs-of-dubs, and the other half recordings of LP records made on my friend's dad's hi-fi system, probably meant that no amount of frequency-fixing was likely to improve the shitty sound quality. Still I loved blasting the Ramones and Buzzcocks on my awesome 1984 Ford Tempo speaker system.
I can verify this from personal experience. When I was a teenager I had a bad drug experience that messed up my thought processes. I had a panic reaction that fed itself; a fear of being afraid. Because the fear was of fear itself, I found myself unable to control it because the moment I believed I might be starting to panic, panic immediately ensued because I was panicking about panicking. It sounds weird I know but it was a feedback loop of fear and panic that was very difficult to control. People talk about "panic attacks" and I am not sure if this is the same thing, but I can tell you that it was a really awful thing to go through. I can say without hesitation that it was the worst feeling I have ever had in my life; in fact I believe that it is the worst feeling I am capable of feeling, because my entire mental faculty was devoted to feeling panic. There was nothing else. I told myself that if I couldn't get over it, I would kill myself because it would be better to be dead. And I believe I would have carried through on that. But luckily the young mind (I was 15) is pretty malleable and I was able to figure a way out of it.
Because these panic attacks happened only once every couple of days, I focused on the time between the attacks. The attacks were precipitated by a fear that they were going to happen, so if I got myself into the wrong frame of mind, and allowed myself to start to panic (a sort of aura would come over my mind as the panic started, like I could feel it descending on me), and if I didn't act quickly to distract myself, there was no hope of getting out of it. So I decided to stop fighting it and just "let it happen", sort of convincing myself that "I survived the last one so I can survive this one". And it helped immensely to realize that even if it did keep happening, it wouldn't kill me (unless I killed myself!), and I would have a couple of days to live relatively normally again. I focused on feeling like it didn't matter that I would panic, like it was something to just get over with and move back on with normal life, and once I was able to convince myself of that, I had a tool to take the edge off of the panic once it started happening. And that was enough to often times prevent the panic attack entirely. And once I could prevent a panic attack once in a while, I gained confidence because I thought "well not only do these panic attacks not matter, they are actually preventable". And once I started gaining that confidence, it became easier and easier to avoid them.
Just as the feedback loop of fear was causing the panic attacks, a feedback loop of confidence (where the confidence caused more confidence because the confidence itself was the tool for preventing the panic attacks) was the solution. Eventually I stopped having the attacks. I did relapse a couple of times throughout my teen years, but only briefly. I also had some months-long duration of minor depression, which I attribute to my brain having to devote so many "feel good" neurons to preventing the attacks, and having less left over to keep my general happiness at a normal level. But by the time I went to college, I was for all intents and purposes over it completely.
I am 35 now and haven't had a panic attack in 10 years or so. Although it does make me a little nervous to talk about in depth, even writing this felt a little like skirting the edge of fear. But I have no doubt that once I move onto the next Slashdot article I will have relaxed my nerves entirely.
Weak Analogy
It probably ends with you actually reading the article and getting a clue about what this case was about, and why your sharing of a newspaper story with a co-worker is completely irrelevent.
When I lived in Manhattan (2nd floor above a restaurant at 22 & Park) we would get 2 - 3 garbage trucks per night (between 1 am and 4 am) noisily collecting trash. I mean really, really noisily. The crashing of bins of glass bottles alone was deafening. My wife thought it was charming. I thought it was very, very annoying.
Now we live next to a park in New Zealand and it's so quiet it's eerie.
As much as I agree with most of the points you are making, I don't think you help your arguments much by constantly going back to the effects of the Islamic religion hundreds or thousands of years ago. These are really not very relevent to the problems we are facing today. Similarly, if we were to talk about Christians and their effect on the modern world, I wouldn't find it very useful to bring up stuff that happened a long time ago.
For what it's worth, I have gotten to know a few Muslim friends and they are all cool people that are as decent as anyone else I have met. In particular I find their devotion to a "pure" lifestyle (no drinking, smoking, swearing, etc) commendable, if not because I agree necessarily with the premise, at least because I admire their committment and self-control.
One friend, however, has a grudge against Israel and I felt like he wasn't really able to talk about the topic objectively; he constantly demonized Israel in our discussion of the topic of Israel versus Palestine. But he is from Palestine originally so I suppose he can't be expected to see things too objectively.
My point in our discussion was that I think that Isreal and Palestine are both very culpable in their shared problems, but my friend refused to admit that the Palestineans (sp?) ever did anything wrong.
That's really the only thing I felt like I could fault him on though. He was really an outstanding person otherwise.
For what it's worth, your personal attacks mean nothing to me.
The Pit? Are you referring to the LPMUD of the early 1990's? Or something else.
The Pit LPMUD almost flunked me out of CMU freshman year. Fun times.
SUVs are more dangerous to other non-SUV vehicles on the road. Their bumpers are higher, their weight is greater, they carry their weight higher, and correspondingly they have worse performance characteristics in an emergency situation. Not to mention the visibility problems SUVs cause for other drivers. Some SUV drivers go so far as to put bars on the front of the front grill to maximize the damage their vehicle will do to another vehicle or pedestrian in an accident.
This is disgusting to me; it's the ultimate example of selfishness and self-centeredness, where one's own comfort/safety/style outweigh any consideration of the consequence to others.
I think SUVs should be banned for these reasons. I agree about letting the market decide how fuel efficient a vehicle should be (and correspondingly, I agree that the artificially low gas prices in the USA should be eliminated to allow this mechanism to work properly), but I don't agree that the market should decide how safe a vehicle should be to others. We can and should legislate against unnecessarily dangerous vehicles.
However, I have taken a different approach to solving this problem in my own life. I left the USA and moved to New Zealand, where although there are some SUVs on the road (and to my disgust, I have even seen a Hummer or two around town), they are nowhere near the epidemic proportions they are in the USA. Also gas prices are much higher here (although they are still cheaper than European prices) which I think helps to mitigate this issue.
My memory is wrong about the dialog. Maybe I misrepresented the actual messages I was getting. The point remains that the modem never worked, and I could not get it to work. Even if I did get an opportunity to debug the device driver or whatever it is you are suggesting, it did not help.
I really don't understand why you refuse to believe that a bleeding edge operating system from 10 years ago might have had some difficulty with a particular piece of hardware, or why you refuse to believe that it was not solvable given the tools of the operating system at the time. I WANTED Be to work. I put HOURS into trying to get it to work. It didn't work for me.
If it makes you feel any better, I have had tons of problems getting hardware to work in Linux too. And just because I can't remember the exact error messages I was getting in Linux, doesn't mean I am confusing it with some other operating system either.
Fine, you got me. The dialog had more than just numbers.
Yes, I used it. I paid $100 or more for it if I remember correctly. I was very excited about it, thinking it would be really cool. It definitely had nice demos. I don't know why it didn't open a debugger when I got errors trying to use the modem. I really don't. Who knows, maybe it did, and I've forgotten - it was 8 years ago. But in any regard, whereas I expected to be able to find documentation on how to configure the modem, how to manually force IRQs and DMA addresses and stuff, I found nothing. If it wasn't covered by one of the few GUI controls for that particular device, I couldn't do it. I gave up.
...
Maybe there were workarounds that I didn't know about. I am not sure. All I know is I was never able to figure it out, and I went back to Linux in a hurry. It's possible that the problem was with me and that BeOS was an absolutely perfect, completely polished and bug-free product. People seem to be suggesting that's so. But my vote is "not worth it", and apparently the market agreed with me
I don't know why not, but I certainly didn't. It was definitely BeOS, I paid $100 or so for it and it was the official product.