But a normal user would have quit when the first install failed at a blinking cursor after POST. Many first time Linux installs are on handmedown hardware so proper handling of a bad disks or outdated cards is kind of important.
If a newb shouldn't try LVM because it can mess up the installer, it shouldn't be listed as standard install option. Stick it in the advanced options like custom partitions.
So yeah, I'm a wannabe power user. Who the hell else sets out to learn Linux?
The installation is just an example from my experience as a new user.
The issue I had with the command line installation? Trivial once you learn how to use it, but a 30 minute time investment the first time I needed to do it. The question is, how many of those 30 minute investments is a typical user willing to accept before they run out of patience and revert back to Windows?
There are a lot of reasons why I'm forcing myself to learn Linux, and it is important to note that I said "Forcing myself to learn Linux". There is a real cost for anyone learning to use a new OS. If they give up before fully invested in the new OS, it's a downhill frictionless path back to Windows. So when people advocate switching to Linux because it is 'Faster' or more 'Secure', or configurable, it isn't just enough for them to be slightly better; it is important to show that not only is Linux better, but that it is so much better that it's worth investing a significant chunk your time to make the switch stick.
Hell, it's why I won't touch the new versions of MS office and the damned Ribbon. I'm quite sure that if I stuck to it, I'd get used to it, but I have work that I know how to do now. If it isn't sufficiently broke...
Again, my own personal experience, but what got me into some binds was the 'autopilot' nature of it all. Some drivers were loaded which weren't quite compatible with my hardware. The result was that while everything appeared to be working out of the box, it really wasn't something I would consider 'up and running'. Figuring out which devices were working well (and not just reporting well) is my next task.
I also got into a hell of a bind during the install when I installed to the wrong HDD. The first time through I enabled LVM and the installer balked at removing or overwriting the installation on that HDD. My understanding is that GParted can't handle LVs yet, but it completely blocked my installation until I booted up the liveCD, learned how LVs work in linux, and manually removed them via the terminal. After that GParted could finish the process.
It's just a trick of guided installation vs autopilot installation. Autopilot is great when it works, but when it doesn't it can be really intimidating to fix.
I suppose the real issue is that Ubuntu is the first exposure to Linux for a lot of people, and while I'm willing to put up with it since I'm doing this because I LIKE troubleshooting problems to learn a system, it's really easy to turn off someone who isn't really into it.
Ironically I've found some of the feature-sparse versions of linux a lot friendlier to start out on. Sure, it isn't a "windows alternative desktop", but simple functionality with the capability to gradually add in features as needed seems less risky than the Ubuntu everything at once approach.
I may try Mint tonight, since I hear that's a much more configurable or simpler environment.
So wait, am I a twit/moron that should stick to Windows, or should I use Centos?
I started mucking about with Ubuntu because it had one of the larger (largest?) userbases and thus I'm banking on the fact that someone else had the issue before I did, posted, and got a response. You know, what people on forums rant about, I like to use the Search function.
(actually I started mucking about with linux from scratch, then pretty much every major redhat release, some suse, and so on. As I mentioned earlier, I've tried this many times only to discover some personal roadblock like an unsupported card, etc)
I'd like to take the time to learn Linux, and it is my goal because I want to learn it so I can help improve it, even if improving it is just documenting my experience of trying to learn it and using that to improve the user manuals. Ideally I'd love to get into working on drivers, but I'll keep it realistic for now and plan for just improving the documentation.
Evolution would suggest that its biochemistry would probably be very much like that of earth life, since evolution favors the "path of least resistance" - biochemistries unsuited for survival will tend to die off, biochemistries efficient at survival will tend to flourish.
Consider the wavelengths of light absorbed by Earth's photosynthesizing plants. Now consider the wavelengths NOT absorbed by plants. These rejected wavelengths (green, mostly) are actually the most abundant, so it is counterintuitive that plants would evolve to effectively discard a useful energy source. It is very odd when you consider that pretty much every bit of free energy is capitalized by some form of life, yet the most abundant wavelengths are rejected.
The going theory is that originally archaea DID make use of the green wavelength and didn't waste energy trying to capture the less valuable reds and blues. Cyanobacteria's ancestors (and the predecessor to our modern green plants) is theorized to have taken advantage of this 'discarded' spectrum where competition was lessened.
Big deal, you may think. However, when you realize that our planet is pretty 'green' rather 'purple' you have to come to terms with the fact that the dominant plant life on Earth actually evolved along the more difficult path, scrounging 'scrap' energy. We aren't completely sure WHY cyanobacteria beat out archaea, because if you were to look at it from an unbiased perspective when life first emerged on the Earth, a betting man would have bet on archaea. It had monopolized the most valuable wavelengths in terms of available energy, was fairly dominant, and by all typical measures, was more 'fit' to its environment. Theories abound that perhaps being forced to use the 'dregs' of light forced early cyanobacteria to be more efficient in its energy usage, evolving processes which wasted less, allowed simpler reproduction, etc, and then a global stressor caused the purple life to falter, the green life took up the slack and never gave back its dominant position.
There are lots of theories to why, but the important fact here is that for some reason, the less likely lifeform became dominant.
Very likely there exists a patent which covers some aspect of the board design for fitting in that slot, or interfacing with the remaining mechanism, etc.
You probably could easily design a board to fit, but it would be seconds before Onity filed an infringement lawsuit, voided support contracts, etc. I'd be willing to bet some of the terminal equipment for programming the cards is leased as well.
Using a Windows machine will always be like this: Trapped face-up, under the urinal in Steve Ballmer's personal piss-dungeon.
Last time I installed Windows I grabbed an old machine of mine, wiped it, and installed windows.
Last time I installed Ubuntu I grabbed an old machine of mine, wiped it, installed Ubuntu, and then looked into the process of deactivating/removing the Amazon lens stuff.
It's not a Windows thing, its a PC thing, I think we can just assume that we should continue consider the first step after unboxing a computer to be 'WIPE'.
Caveat: I'm a 99% windows user with just about enough unix experience to traverse a directory structure.
I'm not sure how you quantify faster, there are a lot of things which mean 'faster' to me:
From the initiation of the OS boot process to when my scripts start loading VHDs it takes about 15 seconds. (I use that as a benchmark because that's approximately where the system becomes responsive to a user on a clean install) I've not yet timed Ubuntu for booting, so I can't compare that directly (I don't think loading from the USB is a fair comparison since my OS is loading from RAID0 SSDs)
However, in terms of actual performance once the OS is up and running or installed on a machine... It doesn't seem nearly as fast. Certainly not the freaking Dash application search thing. The UI design on that is horrible. I find myself wondering if I actually clicked it, I assume yes because the rest of the screen dimmed, but I've been having nothing but trouble with it so I typically just launch everything from the terminal now.
I'll be installing Ubuntu directly to the machine later today, so I'll get a good comparison on boot times and a clean install, but in terms of pure 'faster' performance from the user perspective, not based on what I've seen. Anecdotal evidence, but that's all that matters to me because I don't care if it works better in theory or in general, I only care if it works better for me.
The thing is: I WANT to like linux. It's why I have a semi-annual install fest on my machines (which slowly migrate back to Windows over several months), but there is no way I can consider it 'faster' if the instant I run into an issue there isn't an intuitive way to correct the issue. That eats up my time, and that colors my perception of the speed of the system. Right now, Linux seems to be much like a F1 race car. Sure, when it goes, it goes fast, but in between those periods of speed are significant chunks of time where a team of experts is rebuilding, tuning, and prepping the system for it's next sprint.
I know this is probably pretty obvious, but I run into an issue with a machine that is running an ATI R300x video card. Unity does not play well with it. So right now I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with it, and reading the tech threads mentions things like "This issue is known, and may be worked on" Of course, these threads are 2-3 years old, so I wonder if I'm just missing the obvious fix/patch/update/setting which resolves the issue. I haven't found it yet, I haven't looked hard though, but it's already taken up more time than I care to invest when I KNOW I could just install XP and have the system running well in 90 minutes. I'll probably toss some more time into it this weekend, but in the meantime that system will just be my hobby/learning system and that's a big issue for the perception of linux. Again, I bet it will be fast... after it's running (which may just involve me buying a whole new piece of hardware)
Heck, I wanted to install a python environment/stack (enthought), and it took me a good bit of time to just get it to install (chmod to make it executable, proper syntax to run the.sh file) Then I had to double check the appropriate path since that isn't intuitive to me yet (do I put it in/bin? Or somewhere in home?) So I install it, and then I'm told to make sure my PATH is updated... do I do that in.profile,.bashrc, somewhere else? How do I make I make that stick? Once I do it, I'll know it but...
Remember I'm a newbie to this, and thus all of this tweaking around the backend just to get things to the point where they would be faster costs me time, and every minute I spend looking up arcane error messages, or wondering how the hell do I do..., is a minute that I'm thinking "I could be done already if I had just stuck with Windows"
So faster comes to mean a lot of different things, and the fact that a mail client or firefox loads up 0.3s faster than the windows equivalent doesn't mean much (to me).
Internet sales were somewhat new when I was in college. Back then, you didn't have the shipping like you do now, and many online stores would list 2-4 weeks for delivery. That's not much of an excuse now, but this is:
My school had an option where I could send them my courselist over the summer, and come the start of the semester I could walk to the bookstore, pickup a box of books which consisted of all the books I needed for my classes. They would even use up the 'used' inventory first. (which gave me first pick over most people actually shopping in the store).
However the biggest killer for me for online stores, was that I had to WAIT until class started and sit in the first lecture before I would find out exactly which books were required, which were mostly required, and which ones were just something the professor thought was a kind of neat read and while listed as required, really isn't. That saved me money, the problem was that shipping on the online books was then too long for me to take advantage of, or risk the company emailing me in 2 weeks telling me they ran out of stock.
Of course, now, it's all online codes. Or if it isn't, it soon will be. I'm just glad that except for my matrices book, my professors seemed to go with 'Just grab the Haliday Resnick and Walker version whatever. Just make sure to check that you are working on the same homework problems as version xyz'
* It's anonymous and therefore it is hard to trust * Transactions are not traceable to real world identities and therefore it is hard to trust, and impossible to trace theft properly * It is impossible to insure properly against theft and loss, because there are not traceable transactions and anonymous transactions are allowed
* Savings are not guaranteed by law as they are in national currencies
Cash, when compared to bitcoins is: 1. anonymous 2. non-traceable 3. not easily insured against theft/fire/loss 4. savings in cash are not guaranteed by law
Other items you mention: Transactions ARE traceable to real-world entities if you want it to be so. I can publish my address with my name (and I do) and thus my transactions are pretty well linked to my identity. If you want traceability, don't do business with an entity who demands anonymity. I currently won't accept cash from unknown individuals, so I wouldn't for bitcoins.
The fact that you can identify several companies who were hit with fraud isn't a condemnation of the currency, but a problem with a nacent industry. The same arguement can be made for storing ANYTHING of worth with a third party. In fact, I'm storing $20,000 with some guy I just met this morning when I handed him the keys to my car. Even worse, they explicitly make a statement that they AREN'T liable for any damage, theft, loss, etc. So that company is actually worse!
You also reiterate what he stated as cons, so I'm not sure if you were just trying to bulk out your list. (specifically adoption of the currency)
I'm guessing that it would vanish into the aether and become an amusing footnote in history. Much like Alcohol when it, and all distribution methods were banned and never heard from again.
On an unrelated note, using direct electricity to heat your home is environmentally irresponsible. Get a heat pump.
A heat pump. In Quebec. How droll.
(On a now related note: I used incandescent bulbs to light my home when I lived in a northern climate. The options for heat in my home were: 1. Wood burning furnace 2. Electric 3. Gas (low efficiency due to the northern climate, the high efficiency models would break down on colder nights due to condensation and freezing)
Solar wasn't an option because the area was overcast more often than the average, and the southern exposure was limited. Geothermal was a cost I couldn't afford.
The incandescent bulbs were the most efficient form of lighting I could use. Less waste in manufacture, long life based on my usage, and 100% of their 'waste' became heat in my home so I wouldn't need to burn as much wood. I only used the light when I needed light (skylights during the day). Most nights dropped below 60, so the extra heat was welcome.
For a while, I stated using the CFLs, but they wouldn't last in my crawlspace or around my home due to the cold weather/humidity, I eventually replaced all the exterior lights with a few parking lot style halogens (or sodium vapor... can't quite remember the explicit type). Inside they worked ok, but never got close to the marketed lifespan (I marked the base with the date whenever I installed a new CFL). Now I'm trying to do the right thing, and I have a box full of dead CFLs to recycle... but there are no centers nearby and the trash can is looking more and more tempting with each year's spring cleaning.
If things were to 'go down'. I'd say the best investment NOW would be in weapons and tangible useful items.
Trade some of those 'tangible useful items' for as much gold as you like once things do 'go down'. Just be sure to also trade some other 'tangible useful items' for 'sufficient trusted labor' to man those 'tangible useful items' that fire 'tangible soft metals' at the people who would seek out your remaining 'tangible useful items'.
Gold will have value, but it seems to me that the best time to invest in it is either 'yesteryear' or the 'year after things go down', never 'today'.
Because humankind's mind is too simple to work in numbers exceeding the original herd of 5-20 beings that we used to work in back when we were still wandering the plains. Nothing has changed. Nothing at all. We may form states and countries comprising millions of us, but we're still by no means any more socially advanced than the stone age clans.
That doesn't make sense. We may not behave in the manner which you may find to be ideal, but the idea that there has been no evolutionary pressure since the emergence of humans, to the advent of farming communities, to contemporary society seems highly improbable.
We can already observe changes taking place from early humans and modern humans due to dietary, environmental, and other factors. It would be absolutely astounding to discover that something as influential as civilization would not already be influencing human evolution.
I don't mean to say that any of that has been expressed in genetics in a significant manner (to the extent to declare that initial humans would be a separate species from contemporary humans), but I disagree with the notion that 'we' are identical to the first few generations of humans.
The exact some logic could be used to say we should not imprison people, or punish them in any way. "Because they might be innocent".
For that to be an issue, you must first accept that the argument is valid and true for the Death Penalty. If you accept that premise to be valid and accept it, only then may you extend it to evaluate imprisonment as a punishment.
So, if you wish to pursue this line of discussion, you must first accept that the original premise is valid, and therfore agree that the Death Penalty is unethical because innocent people killed.
The thought of the person who killed their family or friends sitting in relative comfort in jail may not sit well with the survivors.
Neither does the thought that their friend or family is dead sit well with them. Nothing will change or ameliorate that fact. That condition is immutable.
Revenge does not improve the situation. Dead is dead. The only thing we should be considerned about is rehabilitation or protection. Once you have either of those two items covered, anything additional serves no useful public interest. If anything, a revenge-focused justice system exacerbates the culture of violence which breeds the exact type of behavior we want to see curtailed.
That a small group of people may wish additional harm upon an individual may appeal to them, but it does not serve the public interest. The justice system is not intended to 'make whole' a victim of a crime.
There is more money to be had in selling mining tools for companies which already sell mining related equipment.
Consider your gold rush example. The companies selling the mining tools were already in the business of selling pickaxes, shovels, and other hardware. What were their costs to sell 'gold mining' tools? A newspaper ad announcing that they were selling mining tools. However, if they decided to get INTO the mining business, what would be their cost? Land to mine, the exact same tools, decreased market for their existing products, manual labor, expertise in selecting the land, etc...
In otherwords, if you have a business model that works (selling electronics), it may not make sense to divert your profit into a short-term, high-risk, venture rather than using your profit to enhance your current business. There are plenty of companies who sell oil-drilling equipment and don't extract the oil themselves, and drilling for oil isn't exactly unprofitable.
I currently don't have an electronics business. But I do have a set-aside of cash for 'hobby-investement'.
Comp sci is laughably easy compared to physics, in part because physics is necessarily inclusive of everything up to second year comp sci because if you can't do basic electronics and programming you can't do any sort of science. That's why I switched. If you can do first year calculus without having a heart attack you're doing better than 50% of the comp sci grads.
Where on Earth is this place you went to school? At my University Comp Sci grads could dual major in math without much of a workload increase. Not because the math degree was easy, but it was so deeply built into the comp sci program.
If a 13-yr old commits murder, then the 13 year old committed murder. Unless the parents told him to do it, or helped him plan the murder, they did NOT commit the murder.
That's the key thing here that really makes these lawsuits against IPs or account holders asinine: The law breaker is liable for the law breaker's actions. The key facet is that the person who broke the law, is the person who should be punished for breaking the law.
Parental responsiblity for crimes only applies if it can be proven that the parent knew that a crime was about to be committed. Even then, if the parent took action to deter the crime, it is VERY difficult to show that such action was insufficient. It is very difficult to prove because you can't just say "Well, they did this, and since that didn't work, it was insufficient." You have to prove that not only was the parent aware of the impending crime, but that the parent knew that the deterrent they applied would be insufficient to stop such behavior. That's a very difficult thing to prove.
Back on topic, what happened here isn't that someone is not being punished for a crime, but that someone who didn't commit the crime is not being punished for the crime.
Most things would break in a relatively short timeframe if operated at their maximum rate. A human heart would expend it's average lifetime beat count in a little more than 3 years if it operated at 1200 bpm and only 22 years at 200bpm(target max rate for a human heart).
Consider an RF electro-mechanical switch. They tend to be pretty robust (as far as mechanical items go), but you won't see many manufacturers list a life of greater than 1,000,000 cycles. Thats on a very simple, highly mature design. So a device which has been in high volume manufacture since the 60s, is a highly competitive market and thus manufacturers would do well to improve the design, and it is a component which is a single point of failure by virtue of the fact that it is in-line with the RF path (in most configurations) so a failed RF switch often means the entire system (or systems) depending on it fail (or are at least degraded). As you can see, increasing the cycle count for these things is HUGE selling point, yet again, we only see a 1M cycle count advertised on a mature design.
1 million cycles on a new technology is actually pretty damned impressive. I certainly wouldn't use it in a heart replacement yet, but almost any other muscle in the human body would certainly be able to support a 1 million cycle lifetime (assumptions that most other muscle replacements would be accessible and replaceable in event of a failure or would be controlled in a manner to minimize extraneous movements and thus wasted cycles)
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I was thinking of things like the POS hw or the software system that manages all the keys, accesses, etc.
Such a system would manage employee access logins, assigning keys, revoking, inventory, logs.
Its not that complicated, but it isn't trivial.
The door locks are probably just one part of a comprehensive system.
Wannabe power user? Well yeah.
But a normal user would have quit when the first install failed at a blinking cursor after POST. Many first time Linux installs are on handmedown hardware so proper handling of a bad disks or outdated cards is kind of important.
If a newb shouldn't try LVM because it can mess up the installer, it shouldn't be listed as standard install option. Stick it in the advanced options like custom partitions.
So yeah, I'm a wannabe power user. Who the hell else sets out to learn Linux?
The installation is just an example from my experience as a new user.
The issue I had with the command line installation? Trivial once you learn how to use it, but a 30 minute time investment the first time I needed to do it. The question is, how many of those 30 minute investments is a typical user willing to accept before they run out of patience and revert back to Windows?
There are a lot of reasons why I'm forcing myself to learn Linux, and it is important to note that I said "Forcing myself to learn Linux". There is a real cost for anyone learning to use a new OS. If they give up before fully invested in the new OS, it's a downhill frictionless path back to Windows. So when people advocate switching to Linux because it is 'Faster' or more 'Secure', or configurable, it isn't just enough for them to be slightly better; it is important to show that not only is Linux better, but that it is so much better that it's worth investing a significant chunk your time to make the switch stick.
Hell, it's why I won't touch the new versions of MS office and the damned Ribbon. I'm quite sure that if I stuck to it, I'd get used to it, but I have work that I know how to do now. If it isn't sufficiently broke...
Again, my own personal experience, but what got me into some binds was the 'autopilot' nature of it all. Some drivers were loaded which weren't quite compatible with my hardware. The result was that while everything appeared to be working out of the box, it really wasn't something I would consider 'up and running'. Figuring out which devices were working well (and not just reporting well) is my next task.
I also got into a hell of a bind during the install when I installed to the wrong HDD. The first time through I enabled LVM and the installer balked at removing or overwriting the installation on that HDD. My understanding is that GParted can't handle LVs yet, but it completely blocked my installation until I booted up the liveCD, learned how LVs work in linux, and manually removed them via the terminal. After that GParted could finish the process.
It's just a trick of guided installation vs autopilot installation. Autopilot is great when it works, but when it doesn't it can be really intimidating to fix.
I suppose the real issue is that Ubuntu is the first exposure to Linux for a lot of people, and while I'm willing to put up with it since I'm doing this because I LIKE troubleshooting problems to learn a system, it's really easy to turn off someone who isn't really into it.
Ironically I've found some of the feature-sparse versions of linux a lot friendlier to start out on. Sure, it isn't a "windows alternative desktop", but simple functionality with the capability to gradually add in features as needed seems less risky than the Ubuntu everything at once approach.
I may try Mint tonight, since I hear that's a much more configurable or simpler environment.
So wait, am I a twit/moron that should stick to Windows, or should I use Centos?
I started mucking about with Ubuntu because it had one of the larger (largest?) userbases and thus I'm banking on the fact that someone else had the issue before I did, posted, and got a response. You know, what people on forums rant about, I like to use the Search function.
(actually I started mucking about with linux from scratch, then pretty much every major redhat release, some suse, and so on. As I mentioned earlier, I've tried this many times only to discover some personal roadblock like an unsupported card, etc)
I'd like to take the time to learn Linux, and it is my goal because I want to learn it so I can help improve it, even if improving it is just documenting my experience of trying to learn it and using that to improve the user manuals. Ideally I'd love to get into working on drivers, but I'll keep it realistic for now and plan for just improving the documentation.
Evolution would suggest that its biochemistry would probably be very much like that of earth life, since evolution favors the "path of least resistance" - biochemistries unsuited for survival will tend to die off, biochemistries efficient at survival will tend to flourish.
Consider the wavelengths of light absorbed by Earth's photosynthesizing plants. Now consider the wavelengths NOT absorbed by plants. These rejected wavelengths (green, mostly) are actually the most abundant, so it is counterintuitive that plants would evolve to effectively discard a useful energy source. It is very odd when you consider that pretty much every bit of free energy is capitalized by some form of life, yet the most abundant wavelengths are rejected.
The going theory is that originally archaea DID make use of the green wavelength and didn't waste energy trying to capture the less valuable reds and blues. Cyanobacteria's ancestors (and the predecessor to our modern green plants) is theorized to have taken advantage of this 'discarded' spectrum where competition was lessened.
Big deal, you may think. However, when you realize that our planet is pretty 'green' rather 'purple' you have to come to terms with the fact that the dominant plant life on Earth actually evolved along the more difficult path, scrounging 'scrap' energy. We aren't completely sure WHY cyanobacteria beat out archaea, because if you were to look at it from an unbiased perspective when life first emerged on the Earth, a betting man would have bet on archaea. It had monopolized the most valuable wavelengths in terms of available energy, was fairly dominant, and by all typical measures, was more 'fit' to its environment. Theories abound that perhaps being forced to use the 'dregs' of light forced early cyanobacteria to be more efficient in its energy usage, evolving processes which wasted less, allowed simpler reproduction, etc, and then a global stressor caused the purple life to falter, the green life took up the slack and never gave back its dominant position.
There are lots of theories to why, but the important fact here is that for some reason, the less likely lifeform became dominant.
It will take over a thousand years to get there, assuming you're a photon (are you?).
Since I am a photon:
I am already was there.
Very likely there exists a patent which covers some aspect of the board design for fitting in that slot, or interfacing with the remaining mechanism, etc.
You probably could easily design a board to fit, but it would be seconds before Onity filed an infringement lawsuit, voided support contracts, etc. I'd be willing to bet some of the terminal equipment for programming the cards is leased as well.
Using a Windows machine will always be like this: Trapped face-up, under the urinal in Steve Ballmer's personal piss-dungeon.
Last time I installed Windows I grabbed an old machine of mine, wiped it, and installed windows.
Last time I installed Ubuntu I grabbed an old machine of mine, wiped it, installed Ubuntu, and then looked into the process of deactivating/removing the Amazon lens stuff.
It's not a Windows thing, its a PC thing, I think we can just assume that we should continue consider the first step after unboxing a computer to be 'WIPE'.
Caveat: I'm a 99% windows user with just about enough unix experience to traverse a directory structure.
I'm not sure how you quantify faster, there are a lot of things which mean 'faster' to me:
From the initiation of the OS boot process to when my scripts start loading VHDs it takes about 15 seconds. (I use that as a benchmark because that's approximately where the system becomes responsive to a user on a clean install) I've not yet timed Ubuntu for booting, so I can't compare that directly (I don't think loading from the USB is a fair comparison since my OS is loading from RAID0 SSDs)
However, in terms of actual performance once the OS is up and running or installed on a machine... It doesn't seem nearly as fast. Certainly not the freaking Dash application search thing. The UI design on that is horrible. I find myself wondering if I actually clicked it, I assume yes because the rest of the screen dimmed, but I've been having nothing but trouble with it so I typically just launch everything from the terminal now.
I'll be installing Ubuntu directly to the machine later today, so I'll get a good comparison on boot times and a clean install, but in terms of pure 'faster' performance from the user perspective, not based on what I've seen. Anecdotal evidence, but that's all that matters to me because I don't care if it works better in theory or in general, I only care if it works better for me.
The thing is: I WANT to like linux. It's why I have a semi-annual install fest on my machines (which slowly migrate back to Windows over several months), but there is no way I can consider it 'faster' if the instant I run into an issue there isn't an intuitive way to correct the issue. That eats up my time, and that colors my perception of the speed of the system. Right now, Linux seems to be much like a F1 race car. Sure, when it goes, it goes fast, but in between those periods of speed are significant chunks of time where a team of experts is rebuilding, tuning, and prepping the system for it's next sprint.
I know this is probably pretty obvious, but I run into an issue with a machine that is running an ATI R300x video card. Unity does not play well with it. So right now I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with it, and reading the tech threads mentions things like "This issue is known, and may be worked on" Of course, these threads are 2-3 years old, so I wonder if I'm just missing the obvious fix/patch/update/setting which resolves the issue. I haven't found it yet, I haven't looked hard though, but it's already taken up more time than I care to invest when I KNOW I could just install XP and have the system running well in 90 minutes. I'll probably toss some more time into it this weekend, but in the meantime that system will just be my hobby/learning system and that's a big issue for the perception of linux. Again, I bet it will be fast... after it's running (which may just involve me buying a whole new piece of hardware)
Heck, I wanted to install a python environment/stack (enthought), and it took me a good bit of time to just get it to install (chmod to make it executable, proper syntax to run the .sh file) Then I had to double check the appropriate path since that isn't intuitive to me yet (do I put it in /bin? Or somewhere in home?) So I install it, and then I'm told to make sure my PATH is updated... do I do that in .profile, .bashrc, somewhere else? How do I make I make that stick? Once I do it, I'll know it but...
Remember I'm a newbie to this, and thus all of this tweaking around the backend just to get things to the point where they would be faster costs me time, and every minute I spend looking up arcane error messages, or wondering how the hell do I do..., is a minute that I'm thinking "I could be done already if I had just stuck with Windows"
So faster comes to mean a lot of different things, and the fact that a mail client or firefox loads up 0.3s faster than the windows equivalent doesn't mean much (to me).
Internet sales were somewhat new when I was in college. Back then, you didn't have the shipping like you do now, and many online stores would list 2-4 weeks for delivery. That's not much of an excuse now, but this is:
Revisions, versions, Online Codes, alternate versions, etc...
My school had an option where I could send them my courselist over the summer, and come the start of the semester I could walk to the bookstore, pickup a box of books which consisted of all the books I needed for my classes. They would even use up the 'used' inventory first. (which gave me first pick over most people actually shopping in the store).
However the biggest killer for me for online stores, was that I had to WAIT until class started and sit in the first lecture before I would find out exactly which books were required, which were mostly required, and which ones were just something the professor thought was a kind of neat read and while listed as required, really isn't. That saved me money, the problem was that shipping on the online books was then too long for me to take advantage of, or risk the company emailing me in 2 weeks telling me they ran out of stock.
Of course, now, it's all online codes. Or if it isn't, it soon will be. I'm just glad that except for my matrices book, my professors seemed to go with 'Just grab the Haliday Resnick and Walker version whatever. Just make sure to check that you are working on the same homework problems as version xyz'
* It's anonymous and therefore it is hard to trust
* Transactions are not traceable to real world identities and therefore it is hard to trust, and impossible to trace theft properly
* It is impossible to insure properly against theft and loss, because there are not traceable transactions and anonymous transactions are allowed
* Savings are not guaranteed by law as they are in national currencies
Cash, when compared to bitcoins is:
1. anonymous
2. non-traceable
3. not easily insured against theft/fire/loss
4. savings in cash are not guaranteed by law
Other items you mention:
Transactions ARE traceable to real-world entities if you want it to be so. I can publish my address with my name (and I do) and thus my transactions are pretty well linked to my identity. If you want traceability, don't do business with an entity who demands anonymity. I currently won't accept cash from unknown individuals, so I wouldn't for bitcoins.
The fact that you can identify several companies who were hit with fraud isn't a condemnation of the currency, but a problem with a nacent industry. The same arguement can be made for storing ANYTHING of worth with a third party. In fact, I'm storing $20,000 with some guy I just met this morning when I handed him the keys to my car. Even worse, they explicitly make a statement that they AREN'T liable for any damage, theft, loss, etc. So that company is actually worse!
You also reiterate what he stated as cons, so I'm not sure if you were just trying to bulk out your list. (specifically adoption of the currency)
I'm guessing that it would vanish into the aether and become an amusing footnote in history. Much like Alcohol when it, and all distribution methods were banned and never heard from again.
On an unrelated note, using direct electricity to heat your home is environmentally irresponsible. Get a heat pump.
A heat pump. In Quebec. How droll.
(On a now related note: I used incandescent bulbs to light my home when I lived in a northern climate. The options for heat in my home were: 1. Wood burning furnace 2. Electric 3. Gas (low efficiency due to the northern climate, the high efficiency models would break down on colder nights due to condensation and freezing)
Solar wasn't an option because the area was overcast more often than the average, and the southern exposure was limited. Geothermal was a cost I couldn't afford.
The incandescent bulbs were the most efficient form of lighting I could use. Less waste in manufacture, long life based on my usage, and 100% of their 'waste' became heat in my home so I wouldn't need to burn as much wood. I only used the light when I needed light (skylights during the day). Most nights dropped below 60, so the extra heat was welcome.
For a while, I stated using the CFLs, but they wouldn't last in my crawlspace or around my home due to the cold weather/humidity, I eventually replaced all the exterior lights with a few parking lot style halogens (or sodium vapor... can't quite remember the explicit type). Inside they worked ok, but never got close to the marketed lifespan (I marked the base with the date whenever I installed a new CFL). Now I'm trying to do the right thing, and I have a box full of dead CFLs to recycle... but there are no centers nearby and the trash can is looking more and more tempting with each year's spring cleaning.
This is why I deal in Lead. If someone tries to skimp by filling my lead bars with tungsten or gold...
If things were to 'go down'. I'd say the best investment NOW would be in weapons and tangible useful items.
Trade some of those 'tangible useful items' for as much gold as you like once things do 'go down'. Just be sure to also trade some other 'tangible useful items' for 'sufficient trusted labor' to man those 'tangible useful items' that fire 'tangible soft metals' at the people who would seek out your remaining 'tangible useful items'.
Gold will have value, but it seems to me that the best time to invest in it is either 'yesteryear' or the 'year after things go down', never 'today'.
Because humankind's mind is too simple to work in numbers exceeding the original herd of 5-20 beings that we used to work in back when we were still wandering the plains. Nothing has changed. Nothing at all. We may form states and countries comprising millions of us, but we're still by no means any more socially advanced than the stone age clans.
That doesn't make sense. We may not behave in the manner which you may find to be ideal, but the idea that there has been no evolutionary pressure since the emergence of humans, to the advent of farming communities, to contemporary society seems highly improbable.
We can already observe changes taking place from early humans and modern humans due to dietary, environmental, and other factors. It would be absolutely astounding to discover that something as influential as civilization would not already be influencing human evolution.
I don't mean to say that any of that has been expressed in genetics in a significant manner (to the extent to declare that initial humans would be a separate species from contemporary humans), but I disagree with the notion that 'we' are identical to the first few generations of humans.
The exact some logic could be used to say we should not imprison people, or punish them in any way. "Because they might be innocent".
For that to be an issue, you must first accept that the argument is valid and true for the Death Penalty. If you accept that premise to be valid and accept it, only then may you extend it to evaluate imprisonment as a punishment.
So, if you wish to pursue this line of discussion, you must first accept that the original premise is valid, and therfore agree that the Death Penalty is unethical because innocent people killed.
The thought of the person who killed their family or friends sitting in relative comfort in jail may not sit well with the survivors.
Neither does the thought that their friend or family is dead sit well with them. Nothing will change or ameliorate that fact. That condition is immutable.
Revenge does not improve the situation. Dead is dead. The only thing we should be considerned about is rehabilitation or protection. Once you have either of those two items covered, anything additional serves no useful public interest. If anything, a revenge-focused justice system exacerbates the culture of violence which breeds the exact type of behavior we want to see curtailed.
That a small group of people may wish additional harm upon an individual may appeal to them, but it does not serve the public interest. The justice system is not intended to 'make whole' a victim of a crime.
There is more money to be had in selling mining tools for companies which already sell mining related equipment.
Consider your gold rush example. The companies selling the mining tools were already in the business of selling pickaxes, shovels, and other hardware. What were their costs to sell 'gold mining' tools? A newspaper ad announcing that they were selling mining tools. However, if they decided to get INTO the mining business, what would be their cost? Land to mine, the exact same tools, decreased market for their existing products, manual labor, expertise in selecting the land, etc...
In otherwords, if you have a business model that works (selling electronics), it may not make sense to divert your profit into a short-term, high-risk, venture rather than using your profit to enhance your current business. There are plenty of companies who sell oil-drilling equipment and don't extract the oil themselves, and drilling for oil isn't exactly unprofitable.
I currently don't have an electronics business. But I do have a set-aside of cash for 'hobby-investement'.
I don't think the FCC cares once you are outside of the USA.
Out of curiosity, what exactly do you consider the 'infrastructure of cyberspace' to be?
I don't believe that AI 'code' is going to be particularly portable, small, or light on the CPU.
Comp sci is laughably easy compared to physics, in part because physics is necessarily inclusive of everything up to second year comp sci because if you can't do basic electronics and programming you can't do any sort of science. That's why I switched. If you can do first year calculus without having a heart attack you're doing better than 50% of the comp sci grads.
Where on Earth is this place you went to school? At my University Comp Sci grads could dual major in math without much of a workload increase. Not because the math degree was easy, but it was so deeply built into the comp sci program.
You are almost there, just keep looking at it.
If a 13-yr old commits murder, then the 13 year old committed murder. Unless the parents told him to do it, or helped him plan the murder, they did NOT commit the murder.
That's the key thing here that really makes these lawsuits against IPs or account holders asinine: The law breaker is liable for the law breaker's actions. The key facet is that the person who broke the law, is the person who should be punished for breaking the law.
Parental responsiblity for crimes only applies if it can be proven that the parent knew that a crime was about to be committed. Even then, if the parent took action to deter the crime, it is VERY difficult to show that such action was insufficient. It is very difficult to prove because you can't just say "Well, they did this, and since that didn't work, it was insufficient." You have to prove that not only was the parent aware of the impending crime, but that the parent knew that the deterrent they applied would be insufficient to stop such behavior. That's a very difficult thing to prove.
Back on topic, what happened here isn't that someone is not being punished for a crime, but that someone who didn't commit the crime is not being punished for the crime.
Most things would break in a relatively short timeframe if operated at their maximum rate. A human heart would expend it's average lifetime beat count in a little more than 3 years if it operated at 1200 bpm and only 22 years at 200bpm(target max rate for a human heart).
Consider an RF electro-mechanical switch. They tend to be pretty robust (as far as mechanical items go), but you won't see many manufacturers list a life of greater than 1,000,000 cycles. Thats on a very simple, highly mature design. So a device which has been in high volume manufacture since the 60s, is a highly competitive market and thus manufacturers would do well to improve the design, and it is a component which is a single point of failure by virtue of the fact that it is in-line with the RF path (in most configurations) so a failed RF switch often means the entire system (or systems) depending on it fail (or are at least degraded). As you can see, increasing the cycle count for these things is HUGE selling point, yet again, we only see a 1M cycle count advertised on a mature design.
1 million cycles on a new technology is actually pretty damned impressive. I certainly wouldn't use it in a heart replacement yet, but almost any other muscle in the human body would certainly be able to support a 1 million cycle lifetime (assumptions that most other muscle replacements would be accessible and replaceable in event of a failure or would be controlled in a manner to minimize extraneous movements and thus wasted cycles)