Yep, that's the plan. And once we reach those other solar systems we'll use their resources to ensure our continued survival, too...
At some point as we expand across the galaxy, we'll either:
1) Destroy ourselves 2) Meet up with aliens who destroy us. 3) Meet up with aliens to elevate us to a higher plane of existence in which all these questions are meaningless and/or irrelevant. or 4) Discover such a plane of existence ourselves.
I haven't been reading too much sci-fi, have I? Oh no, not at all... Oh, and if all you want to do is "leave the planet", there are plenty of cheap ways to do that...:-)
I don't know about "pretty well". Not noticeably worse than the alternatives I suppose... 224 years isn't that long, anyway. Confuscianism did "pretty well" for a lot longer.
Seriously, I think democracy as practiced in its current form in the "free world" leaves a *lot* to be desired. Yes it beats totalitarian alternatives (I suppose - depends on your criteria), but even so, I wonder if/how it could be improved upon...
This is straying somewhat from the original point I was trying to make - partially ironically, partially not - which is that the body politic is, in general, an ass.
-Andy
PS: Where does the number 224 come from? Are you suggesting America invented democracy when it declared independence? Surely not!
> "Give the anarchist a cigarette" > - Alice Nutter, Chumbawamba
Did you know it was Bob Dylan who originally said that, and who Chumbawumbe are referring to?
I'm hazy on the details, but it's something like: He was in the back of a limo being carted away from a gig and someone (his manager?) told him (referring to the crowds outside) "hey, they think you're an anarchist". Dylan replied, "come on then, give the anarchist a cigarette".
Sorry, I've been wanting to write this every time I see your sig. I finally cracked!
I don't know if it's fair to say the web isn't as highly connected as we first thought... It's still highly connected - but everything isn't connected with everything else, which is what people often mean when they speak of the web being "highly connected".
Okay, getting waaay off topic here, but I figure no-ones gonna read this reply now except maybe brassrat77, so what the heck.:-)
I checked this out last night, and the whole moon-mission story is called "Venture To The Moon". It consists of six short stories, each only a few pages long. They are:
1. The Starting Line (brassrat77's "early-burn" story) 2. Robin Hood, F.R.S. 3. Green Fingers 4. All That Glitters 5. Watch This Space 6. A Question of Residence
Number 5, "Watch This Space" is the logo one. The experiment uses a "sodium bomb" which shoots a cloud of sodium atoms into the moon's atmosphere, and when they rise into sunlight (the experiment is conducted just after lunar sunset) they flouresce, glitter, etc.
And it *is* the Coke logo. Quote: "The O's and A's had given them a bit of trouble, but the C's and L's were perfect."
:-)
But enough pedantry - I really just wanted to tell you the name of the story. Re-read! Enjoy!
Arthur C Clarke wrote short story on a similar theme... IIRC it involved an experiment in which a fine powder was ejected from a bottle on the moon's surface, and the dissipation of the powder was to be observed from Earth in order to learn something about the moon's sparse atmosphere. As the dust rose, spreading out but not really getting stirred up, it became obvious that someone had been paid a large sum of money to place a stencil of the "Coca Cola" logo on top of the bottle, so as the particles rose and spread out further and further they formed a very large, very widely visible advert for said beverage.
No idea if this was before Heinlein or not... Probably mid 50s at a guess.
> This issue is one that will become increasingly > important in the future as we are currently in > the last throes of the Industrial Age and > we're now moving into the so-called > "Information Age", in which information will > become the most valuable commodity of them all.
I see this written *so* often and I still don't know what it means or if I believe it.
In particular I'm sure sex will remain the most valuable commodity of them all for a long time to come yet...
> After the contest most of the teams were aware > of the problem - one team had submitted a > program designed to go into an infinite loop > if the input graph was not strongly connected, > thus working out what error the judges had > made. In any case, we took our printouts to
But how would they know that it *had* gone into an infinite loop? Isn't that the essence of the halting problem?;-)
-Andy
Light Pollution (was Re:American Biggotry)
on
G3 Solar Storm
·
· Score: 1
Um...
I assumed that comment referred to light pollution, ie "it still matters" if you're somewhere where it's *worth* looking at the sky, which doesn't strike me as a particularly good example of bigotry, to be honest.
> This describes the typical Unix situation, which > is not the typical Linux situation. There, more > people have installed their own system and have > root priviliges. And the less savvy the user, > the bigger the chance that the root user is the > only account on the system.
However, the "less savvy" user will be clearly instructed, by their distribution's installation process, that they *really* *really* should set up a "normal" user account and use that.
Apps can help by warning the user when they're running as root that this might be a really bad idea - eg I believe the Gnome file manager does something like.
> This is one area that the microsoft windows > crowd have an advantage in - from my research > the partially sighted find it easier to use a > split screen to use the computer, the top half > shows a normal view, which is good enough for > seeing if something is flashing or a new window > has popped up and the bottom half shows a > magnified view area taken from the top.
This could be a good application of multi-head technology, such as XFree86's new "xinerama": "Overview" desktop on the left, "magnified" desktop on the right.
Slightly more expensive than splitting a single monitor, but possibly more comfortable?
It's not true that there is no intention to add Stored Procedures! Check appendix F of the online manual (the TODO list) and you'll see it there.
They're not high priority right now but they're under the heading "Things that have to be done some time", and that "have to be done" certainly implies that there *is* an intent to add them, if you ask me...
Remember, this is software in development. These things will come. That's what open source is all about, isn't it?
Firstly, one-way replication is at the *top* of the MySQL TODO list (appendix F of the online manual). It's their highest-priority new feature. Which is nice.
And secondly...
The "mysqlsync" perl script appears to be a neater way of accessing the "update log" method of replication, allowing finer-grained control of exactly what gets duplicated and where it goes.
I say "appears to be" because I haven't actually used it, but I've taken a look at the source code and that certainly seems to be what's going on.
You can get it from the "contrib" section of the MySQL downloads page.
Sorry, I can't be bothered to drop the URLs in here.;)
How about if those TV stations were transmitting their content as packets over the IP network? Then you could have even more of them and an "even worse" society!
It *is* possible to write readable, maintainable C and Perl. But it's a discipline. You have to resist some of the fancy tricks and place the value of readability over the value of squeezing your code onto a single line.
I've seen some suggestions for "Learning Perl" here, and I'd agree. But you might also want to think about "Learning Python", also from O'Reilly.
This is straying onto religious war territory, but Python's possibly an "easier" language to learn than Perl for a newcomer to programming, and it's certainly as powerful (and anyway, they have a lot in common).
> I know with gnome + enlightenment, you can > alt+tab between windows (or any other key > combination you choose).
True, but...
There doesn't seem to be much sense to the order in which the windows cycle. I find it's OK if you're just tabbing between two windows, but try it with three. Sometimes I have to hit alt-tab seven or eight times to get to the window I want: it just sits there cycling between the other two! It's kinda funny but kinda frustrating too.
I think this is just one example of the kind of "little thing" that can make working with X frustrating, particularly for people coming from Windoze. Don't get me wrong, I love my Gnome desktop and wouldn't go back to Windoze ever, and I don't really have any complaints about mouse behaviour, but when it comes to keyboard shortcuts, I think we have lots of catching up and standardisation to do. Like I say, it's a "little thing" but it's the kind of thing that can be frustrating, tiring, and disheartening over a long period.
A couple of small examples...
Why does Netscape insist on Alt-C/Alt-V for copy & paste???
Why doesn't gnotepad allow you to cycle between open files using the keyboard?
Why doesn't KDevelop? (For that matter, and slightly unrelated to my present rant, I'd like an easier way of doing this with the mouse!).
Again, don't get me wrong - I'm not flaming and not really moaning, and I'd love to get to the point where I'm competent to contribute to these projects (especially kdevelop), I'm just using them as examples of the kind of little thing I think we need to remember to sort out.
I read Egan's short story collection "Axiomatic" earlier this year and was totally blown away. His ideas about human evolution through technology are astounding... How about remodelling DNA to use different bases from ACGT? Total immunity to all known viruses - nice!
Highly recommended to anyone who likes getting their brains bent into strange new shapes...
I was in Cornwall for the recent total eclipse of the sun, staying with my parents, and it was while I was there that I decided to take the Linux plunge...
In honour of these two great events, I resolved that the first box I bought would be honoured with the name of "eclipse". Sure enough, a couple of weeks later I bought a crusty old 486, installed Debian, and eclipse was up and running.
It wasn't until a month later that I noticed what name was embossed by the manufacturer on the little square badge on the left of the case... "Eclipse".
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, that's the plan. And once we reach those other solar systems we'll use their resources to ensure our continued survival, too...
:-)
At some point as we expand across the galaxy, we'll either:
1) Destroy ourselves
2) Meet up with aliens who destroy us.
3) Meet up with aliens to elevate us to a higher plane of existence in which all these questions are meaningless and/or irrelevant.
or
4) Discover such a plane of existence ourselves.
I haven't been reading too much sci-fi, have I? Oh no, not at all... Oh, and if all you want to do is "leave the planet", there are plenty of cheap ways to do that...
-Andy
Ah, I see.
But I'm not an American.
I don't know about "pretty well". Not noticeably worse than the alternatives I suppose... 224 years isn't that long, anyway. Confuscianism did "pretty well" for a lot longer.
Seriously, I think democracy as practiced in its current form in the "free world" leaves a *lot* to be desired. Yes it beats totalitarian alternatives (I suppose - depends on your criteria), but even so, I wonder if/how it could be improved upon...
This is straying somewhat from the original point I was trying to make - partially ironically, partially not - which is that the body politic is, in general, an ass.
-Andy
PS: Where does the number 224 come from? Are you suggesting America invented democracy when it declared independence? Surely not!
> "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
> - Alice Nutter, Chumbawamba
Did you know it was Bob Dylan who originally said that, and who Chumbawumbe are referring to?
I'm hazy on the details, but it's something like: He was in the back of a limo being carted away from a gig and someone (his manager?) told him (referring to the crowds outside) "hey, they think you're an anarchist". Dylan replied, "come on then, give the anarchist a cigarette".
Sorry, I've been wanting to write this every time I see your sig. I finally cracked!
:-)
Exactly - democracy doesn't work.
I don't know if it's fair to say the web isn't as highly connected as we first thought... It's still highly connected - but everything isn't connected with everything else, which is what people often mean when they speak of the web being "highly connected".
Just my 2p. Still an interesting study!
-Andy
Okay, getting waaay off topic here, but I figure no-ones gonna read this reply now except maybe brassrat77, so what the heck. :-)
I checked this out last night, and the whole moon-mission story is called "Venture To The Moon". It consists of six short stories, each only a few pages long. They are:
1. The Starting Line (brassrat77's "early-burn" story)
2. Robin Hood, F.R.S.
3. Green Fingers
4. All That Glitters
5. Watch This Space
6. A Question of Residence
Number 5, "Watch This Space" is the logo one. The experiment uses a "sodium bomb" which shoots a cloud of sodium atoms into the moon's atmosphere, and when they rise into sunlight (the experiment is conducted just after lunar sunset) they flouresce, glitter, etc.
And it *is* the Coke logo. Quote: "The O's and A's had given them a bit of trouble, but the C's and L's were perfect."
:-)
But enough pedantry - I really just wanted to tell you the name of the story. Re-read! Enjoy!
L8r,
Andy
Arthur C Clarke wrote short story on a similar theme... IIRC it involved an experiment in which a fine powder was ejected from a bottle on the moon's surface, and the dissipation of the powder was to be observed from Earth in order to learn something about the moon's sparse atmosphere. As the dust rose, spreading out but not really getting stirred up, it became obvious that someone had been paid a large sum of money to place a stencil of the "Coca Cola" logo on top of the bottle, so as the particles rose and spread out further and further they formed a very large, very widely visible advert for said beverage.
No idea if this was before Heinlein or not... Probably mid 50s at a guess.
-Andy
> This issue is one that will become increasingly
> important in the future as we are currently in
> the last throes of the Industrial Age and
> we're now moving into the so-called
> "Information Age", in which information will
> become the most valuable commodity of them all.
I see this written *so* often and I still don't know what it means or if I believe it.
In particular I'm sure sex will remain the most valuable commodity of them all for a long time to come yet...
;-)
> This is rather amusing hehehe.
:-)
Indeed it is, but check your links!
Should be http://www.paylars.com/paranoia.jpg
Cheers,
Andy
> After the contest most of the teams were aware
;-)
> of the problem - one team had submitted a
> program designed to go into an infinite loop
> if the input graph was not strongly connected,
> thus working out what error the judges had
> made. In any case, we took our printouts to
But how would they know that it *had* gone into an infinite loop? Isn't that the essence of the halting problem?
-Andy
Um...
I assumed that comment referred to light pollution, ie "it still matters" if you're somewhere where it's *worth* looking at the sky, which doesn't strike me as a particularly good example of bigotry, to be honest.
Maybe I'm just naive, sweet, and innocent though.
:-)
-Andy
> This describes the typical Unix situation, which
> is not the typical Linux situation. There, more
> people have installed their own system and have
> root priviliges. And the less savvy the user,
> the bigger the chance that the root user is the
> only account on the system.
However, the "less savvy" user will be clearly instructed, by their distribution's installation process, that they *really* *really* should set up a "normal" user account and use that.
Apps can help by warning the user when they're running as root that this might be a really bad idea - eg I believe the Gnome file manager does something like.
Just my 2p,
Andy
> This is one area that the microsoft windows
> crowd have an advantage in - from my research
> the partially sighted find it easier to use a
> split screen to use the computer, the top half
> shows a normal view, which is good enough for
> seeing if something is flashing or a new window
> has popped up and the bottom half shows a
> magnified view area taken from the top.
This could be a good application of multi-head technology, such as XFree86's new "xinerama": "Overview" desktop on the left, "magnified" desktop on the right.
Slightly more expensive than splitting a single monitor, but possibly more comfortable?
Sounds good to me, anyway!
-Andy
It's not true that there is no intention to add Stored Procedures! Check appendix F of the online manual (the TODO list) and you'll see it there.
They're not high priority right now but they're under the heading "Things that have to be done some time", and that "have to be done" certainly implies that there *is* an intent to add them, if you ask me...
Remember, this is software in development. These things will come. That's what open source is all about, isn't it?
-Andy
Two points:
;)
Firstly, one-way replication is at the *top* of the MySQL TODO list (appendix F of the online manual). It's their highest-priority new feature. Which is nice.
And secondly...
The "mysqlsync" perl script appears to be a neater way of accessing the "update log" method of replication, allowing finer-grained control of exactly what gets duplicated and where it goes.
I say "appears to be" because I haven't actually used it, but I've taken a look at the source code and that certainly seems to be what's going on.
You can get it from the "contrib" section of the MySQL downloads page.
Sorry, I can't be bothered to drop the URLs in here.
Cheers,
Andy
Take a look at the to do list... Transactions are the number two item, after replication.
-Andy
Subject line says it all, geek-boy. ;-)
And don't forget Julian May's Saga Of The Exiles and (more specifically) Intervention & The Mileu Trilogy. Major Teilhard de Chardin namechecking!
How about if those TV stations were transmitting their content as packets over the IP network? Then you could have even more of them and an "even worse" society!
It *is* possible to write readable, maintainable C and Perl. But it's a discipline. You have to resist some of the fancy tricks and place the value of readability over the value of squeezing your code onto a single line.
:-(
But of course, obfuscated code is cool, etc.
Andy
I've seen some suggestions for "Learning Perl" here, and I'd agree. But you might also want to think about "Learning Python", also from O'Reilly.
This is straying onto religious war territory, but Python's possibly an "easier" language to learn than Perl for a newcomer to programming, and it's certainly as powerful (and anyway, they have a lot in common).
Hope This Helps,
Andy
> I know with gnome + enlightenment, you can
:-)
> alt+tab between windows (or any other key
> combination you choose).
True, but...
There doesn't seem to be much sense to the order in which the windows cycle. I find it's OK if you're just tabbing between two windows, but try it with three. Sometimes I have to hit alt-tab seven or eight times to get to the window I want: it just sits there cycling between the other two! It's kinda funny but kinda frustrating too.
I think this is just one example of the kind of "little thing" that can make working with X frustrating, particularly for people coming from Windoze. Don't get me wrong, I love my Gnome desktop and wouldn't go back to Windoze ever, and I don't really have any complaints about mouse behaviour, but when it comes to keyboard shortcuts, I think we have lots of catching up and standardisation to do. Like I say, it's a "little thing" but it's the kind of thing that can be frustrating, tiring, and disheartening over a long period.
A couple of small examples...
Why does Netscape insist on Alt-C/Alt-V for copy & paste???
Why doesn't gnotepad allow you to cycle between open files using the keyboard?
Why doesn't KDevelop? (For that matter, and slightly unrelated to my present rant, I'd like an easier way of doing this with the mouse!).
Again, don't get me wrong - I'm not flaming and not really moaning, and I'd love to get to the point where I'm competent to contribute to these projects (especially kdevelop), I'm just using them as examples of the kind of little thing I think we need to remember to sort out.
OK, enough rambling for now.
-Andy
I read Egan's short story collection "Axiomatic" earlier this year and was totally blown away. His ideas about human evolution through technology are astounding... How about remodelling DNA to use different bases from ACGT? Total immunity to all known viruses - nice!
Highly recommended to anyone who likes getting their brains bent into strange new shapes...
-Andy
I was in Cornwall for the recent total eclipse of the sun, staying with my parents, and it was while I was there that I decided to take the Linux plunge...
:-)
In honour of these two great events, I resolved that the first box I bought would be honoured with the name of "eclipse". Sure enough, a couple of weeks later I bought a crusty old 486, installed Debian, and eclipse was up and running.
It wasn't until a month later that I noticed what name was embossed by the manufacturer on the little square badge on the left of the case... "Eclipse".
I shat my pants.
-Andy