focussed Usenet group searching via Google groups especially (eg,: Has anyone gotten oddball video card X to work?).
LDP. Howto's, mini-howto's. Often the general category has specific mention of caveats and gotchas that commonly plague people.
User manuals that came with your distro.
Bleat to a more knowledgeable local user, if they exist. Don't worry too much about imposing because sooner or later someone else will come to you asking for help. But, as with the newsgroups, it looks better to your local guru if you have a concise question and researched the problem fully, showing your wounds proving that you've already crawled over the broken glass of the TFM.
Start by considering an economical language, based on the powers of two, which you'll have to agree as being more suitable for computers than some 105 key piece of junk.
For instance, start with only 8 letters, say,
asdfjkl;
and you should be able to improve your typing speed immensely.
Also, pressing the space bar lots of times b e t w e e n chara c te rs will push your word count up quite a b i t, too!
Sorry I can't provide more tips now, but I'm really busy producing some new CPU benchmark figures.
I have to wonder if Intel is just shooting itself in the leg, spending needlessly large amounts on R&D to produce chips that no one actually needs.
I have to wonder, too.
If you're right, then there's money to be made in using current state of the art chip design to create old style processors with less performance, less cost, and less heat dissipation.
If they start producing such beasts, and they sell, then your skepticism will have been proven correct.
That "marketing matters" is indisputable, though. Cars with much greater performance than can be legally exercised still sell.
The parent post makes the mistake of identifying bubble formation with the cavitation damage, where as you point out, it is the bubble collapse that is the dangerous part.
Another important thing to note is that bubble collapse is more of a problem when there is a large disparity between the bubble pressure and the ambient liquid pressure. Lots of liquids, like beer, sustain CO_2 bubbles nicely for lengths of time, without the beer glasses sustaining lots of chipping damage from microjets. The pressure of the gases in beer bubbles can be higher than atmospheric pressure.
Under the ocean, however, where props rotate at high speed, the bubbles that are created have little more than water vapor in them (that's what cavitation is all about - causing the water pressure to drop below its vapor pressure). Those bubbles are highly unstable and short-lived.
Liquid fuels, hydrocarbons, can be easily pumped from one container to another.
Energy density is huge, too.
They don't need to be kept under high pressure.
A wise old professor educated me about just how indispensible liquid fuel hydrocarbons are to our modern economy about two decades ago.
He also contrasted that heavy reliance on liquid hydrocarbons to the inevitability of their limited supply.
I doubt solids or gases will displace liquid hydrocarbons soon. But I'm glad to see research into the alternatives because a day will come when the economics will force the transition to happen.
Given how much time Sun has lost on the Linux revolution compared to rivals IBM, HP and even Dell, they need to make a concerted push in less than two directions.
I think the Solaris/x86 effort dilutes the strength of Sun's commitment to Linux. They can say that there's cross fertilization, but they're sending a mixed message to their customers. Those customers, like me, have appreciated Sun's UNIX experience, their leading the way with things like NFS, RPC, NIS and Java, and their emphasis on hardware reliability and performance.
Those customers are looking at the economics of Linux/x86 and like what they see. That's bad for Solaris/SPARC, except where the big iron hangs out. And the cut-off transition from where x86 won't suffice to mainframes that will do the job keeps moving up the food chain. Sun's food chain. The lucrative high end is becoming an ever shrinking market.
What does Linux need that Sun can do better than others?
Where Sun can make a big difference is in enterprise level management. Big directory/authentication services; interoperable services for managing heterogeneous LANS. Performance tuned next generation NAS/SAN services.
While I understand parents' need to monitor their children and to train them for inappropriate behavior, at a certain age kids have got to learn how to handle their own affairs: trust 'em with the responsibility, trust `em to take the consequences if they make a mistake.
The world is full of adults that didn't learn those lessons as children: and those adults keep trying the same tactics they learned as children as adults (if I whine to judge enough they'll let me go).
I'd hate, though, when I'm 80, to live in a world run by those kids who've had their privacy summarily erased for the sake of temporary convenience to service parental paranoia; they'll think nothing of running society with so many privacy invasions that we'll wish for the lesser measures described in 1984.
stated clearly that the Iraqi people WILL be in charge of this democracy regardless of the current US administration's agenda.
Proof positive of a democratic Iraqi government acting autonomously will be when it finally does act contrary to the current US administrations agenda.
When that happens, the new Iraqi government will acquire greater legitimacy in the eyes of the world at large (not being just a puppet government), while at the same time being viewed as ungrateful by many in the United States.
"as close to 100% as we can make it -- we can't release sources that belong to other companies."
Sounds semi-reasonable.
I kind of wish that nVidia would do something similar with its graphics drivers for Linux, which, from what I've read, have been sequestered as closed source due to the presence of Other Companies Property in the code.
I wonder if it's too late for my company to put in a patent application for printf()?
what does it take for a current US citizen to emigrate and become a Canadian citizen
Usually what it takes is an unpopular war to which the US citizen in question is opposed.
I'm an American, spent a semester at a Canadian school and took a class that was taught by an expatriate American professor.
Vietnam sparked one exodus of Americans to Canada about 30 years ago.
It will be interesting to see how the United States' Middle East venture in Iraq plays out over the long run; there's still plenty of opportunity for it, too, to spark a similar migration of Americans to Canada.
One term won't do it. It can be argued that many computer support personnel are of a few categories:
Curmudgeons that Cuss Machines. Can't talk to warm blooded creatures.
Clue Evangelists (User support techs: "puhleeze don't open those attachments!")
Hide N Seek Experts - (network's down; can't find nobody; they must be hiding in the Sacred Server Room.)
Buzzword Barnyard Animals ("I've been working on the Layer 9 switch for the new OC-192 backbone of the SAN. It's more impressive, important than your piddly problem. Go away now.")
temps at MS are clearly of a lesser, inferior breed and they should be treated as such..
Ego maintenance is an expensive proposition any way you look at it.
Companies that support the huge internal costs and overall reduced productivity and average reduced morale deserve the consequences of their policies, whether they are made explicit or not.
Don't know if it's still true anymore, but for a while the Intel Hyperthreading mode caused Windows to think you needed a special multiprocessor license.
However, all these monopoly games are getting tiresome.
Why doesn't the U.S. government simply declare win32 a de jure standard (it is a standard in every other regard), have the government take it by the doctrine of eminent domain and have a special microsoft tax funnel a compensatory $5bn/year to MS shareholders (which is what happens now anyway).
The net effect would
probably be an improvement on the current state of affairs if it meant the win32 code base were liberated.
For that reason I wouldn't dare attempt it while there are two options that trade just a little of that sense of immediacy for a more digestable format.
The DMCA has just been applied naturally in this case. The problem is not that the DMCA has been absued, but rather that the DMCA is abuse.
New technology has not been immune to misguided legislation.
I thought all these issues had been hashed out earlier with regard to crowbars as burglary tools (crowbars aren't illegal, but breaking into a house is, etc.), the VCR case (people are allowed to make copies for private home viewing), headshops (drug paraphenalia is OK, possession of certain drugs is not OK (sorry, bad example)).
Those earlier legal precedents were seem largely reasonable and it would have been logical if recently-enacted legislation didn't try to use new technology as a tool to fix what is really a social problem. Now that's an inappropriate use of a tool if ever there was!
Don't prosecute people making or possessing tools or technologies. Instead, prosecute the people that directly use them to genuinely violate a copyright law (say, by selling illicit copies). Equivalently, they should simply install speed governors on automobiles so no one exceeds the posted limit. Removing your speed governor or selling means to defeat a speed governor would be crimes under the DMCA mindset.
For any given individual, a good place to start would be to sample the judgements of everyone on the receiving end of actions by that individual.
The more of those acquaintances there are that judge you favorably and the greater their own level of assessed responsibility, then the greater would be the trust placed in you to wield power.
Given my experience, I'd be very skeptical of trying to incorporate self-assessments of responsibility (or of anything measure of character) into any judgement of "responsibility" that has effects on society at large.
It's a difficult problem to solve and I'm open to suggestions of better ways to distribute power, not only to ensure the viability of society, but even to make it thrive, providing greater benefit to its members.
why, oh why, would they suddenly decide to give up this machine
Fair question. For the functions you describe it's perfectly adequate. And if people don't have much discretionary income they'll probably stick with it. But there are still reasons to give it up for something better.
It's big, noisy and has a medusa of dusty cables festering in the backside of it.
I can see where new desktops that incorporate all the guts into a fan-less box hidden on the back side of an LCD panel would be appealing.
Basically, a laptop with a reasonable keyboard and mouse and bigger monitor would be a nice upgrade for many PC users.
That, and secure high BW wireless connectivity to CE devices in the stereo cabinet would be something nice, a reason to give up the old.
[Something in the same direction that current Macs are going correctly gauges where there are reasons for switching.]
If we're going to have any hope of surviving a future in which many citizens have the power to create dangerous virii or in any way cause widespread death and devastation, then we're going to have to do a helluva a lot better job than we are now of creating responsible citizens.
Rather than adopt the authoritarian solution of removing all power from as many people as possible and investing as much power as possible with a single "trusted" individual in the hopes of reducing the risks associated with an empowered citizenry, I'd much rather we at least implement better measures to given and take power from individuals based on their demonstrated level of responsibility. Not all or nothing, but a graded continuum. Some of that exists now: felons aren't supposed to get access to firearms in the U.S., for example.
However, there are far too many exceptions to an ideal:
Probably the proponents of privacy invasion were those kids that in grade school that talked loudly, joked, farted, scraped chairs, cut up with each other, and generally made all kinds of obnoxious noises in the library and ticked off the librarians.
Come to think of it, those kids, now grown up and in positions of authority, are still making all kinds of obnoxious noises!
I can hardly believe that Microsoft would activate millions of installations of Windows 2003 with a single key.
With all the trouble to put a unique identifier on each CD, it seems like it would be little enough hassle to require the user to enter the identifier on the web or over the phone to completely activate the OS. You know, give me your key and I'll give you Your Unique Magic Key.
Didn't they even read the articles about how all DVDs were encrypted with a single key and got liberated in one fell swoop from that fantastic piece of copyright protection when the key was discovered and made public?
My paranoid side says it's all a conspiracy to illustrate the perils of widespread piracy/terrorism/hackers (MS has enough cash to take a hit on the revenue loss) so that TCPA/Palladium gets a more receptive audience with lawmakers and the gullible public at large.
Besides, "A Diamond is Forever" is a DeBeers marketing sloagan created in the 1920s, not some ancient piece of wisdom.
DeBeers has recognized that it needs to market more effectively to the Slashdot crowd, many of whom have yet to make a substantial investment in a diamond.
Their new slogan will be
"Diamonds May be Thermodynamically Unfavorable at 1 atm and 300K, But Decay on a Time Scale Much Longer Than Your Marriage."
Slashdot Mirror
general Google searching.
focussed Usenet group searching via Google groups especially (eg,: Has anyone gotten oddball video card X to work?).
LDP. Howto's, mini-howto's. Often the general category has specific mention of caveats and gotchas that commonly plague people.
User manuals that came with your distro.
Bleat to a more knowledgeable local user, if they exist. Don't worry too much about imposing because sooner or later someone else will come to you asking for help. But, as with the newsgroups, it looks better to your local guru if you have a concise question and researched the problem fully, showing your wounds proving that you've already crawled over the broken glass of the TFM.
Start thinking outside the box, dude.
Start by considering an economical language, based on the powers of two, which you'll have to agree as being more suitable for computers than some 105 key piece of junk.
For instance, start with only 8 letters, say,
and you should be able to improve your typing speed immensely.Also, pressing the space bar lots of times b e t w e e n chara c te rs will push your word count up quite a b i t, too!
Sorry I can't provide more tips now, but I'm really busy producing some new CPU benchmark figures.
I have to wonder if Intel is just shooting itself in the leg, spending needlessly large amounts on R&D to produce chips that no one actually needs.
I have to wonder, too.
If you're right, then there's money to be made in using current state of the art chip design to create old style processors with less performance, less cost, and less heat dissipation.
If they start producing such beasts, and they sell, then your skepticism will have been proven correct.
That "marketing matters" is indisputable, though. Cars with much greater performance than can be legally exercised still sell.
Your explanation of microjets is good.
The parent post makes the mistake of identifying bubble formation with the cavitation damage, where as you point out, it is the bubble collapse that is the dangerous part.
Another important thing to note is that bubble collapse is more of a problem when there is a large disparity between the bubble pressure and the ambient liquid pressure. Lots of liquids, like beer, sustain CO_2 bubbles nicely for lengths of time, without the beer glasses sustaining lots of chipping damage from microjets. The pressure of the gases in beer bubbles can be higher than atmospheric pressure.
Under the ocean, however, where props rotate at high speed, the bubbles that are created have little more than water vapor in them (that's what cavitation is all about - causing the water pressure to drop below its vapor pressure). Those bubbles are highly unstable and short-lived.
Liquid fuels, hydrocarbons, can be easily pumped from one container to another.
Energy density is huge, too.
They don't need to be kept under high pressure.
A wise old professor educated me about just how indispensible liquid fuel hydrocarbons are to our modern economy about two decades ago.
He also contrasted that heavy reliance on liquid hydrocarbons to the inevitability of their limited supply.
I doubt solids or gases will displace liquid hydrocarbons soon. But I'm glad to see research into the alternatives because a day will come when the economics will force the transition to happen.
Pirating Microsoft software is much like stealing from your crack dealer.
How right you are.
They've got goons from the BSA to protect their interests, too!
Reminds me of the recent ad campaign, too. I can see the revised version....(voice of 6th grader)
"Mom, Dad, someone's gonna offer me Office XP!
Don't like it?
Too bad!
You're gonna have to ask me where, what, when, who, and where's the license key?
Given how much time Sun has lost on the Linux revolution compared to rivals IBM, HP and even Dell, they need to make a concerted push in less than two directions.
I think the Solaris/x86 effort dilutes the strength of Sun's commitment to Linux. They can say that there's cross fertilization, but they're sending a mixed message to their customers. Those customers, like me, have appreciated Sun's UNIX experience, their leading the way with things like NFS, RPC, NIS and Java, and their emphasis on hardware reliability and performance.
Those customers are looking at the economics of Linux/x86 and like what they see. That's bad for Solaris/SPARC, except where the big iron hangs out. And the cut-off transition from where x86 won't suffice to mainframes that will do the job keeps moving up the food chain. Sun's food chain. The lucrative high end is becoming an ever shrinking market.
What does Linux need that Sun can do better than others?
Where Sun can make a big difference is in enterprise level management. Big directory/authentication services; interoperable services for managing heterogeneous LANS. Performance tuned next generation NAS/SAN services.
You're dead on center.
While I understand parents' need to monitor their children and to train them for inappropriate behavior, at a certain age kids have got to learn how to handle their own affairs: trust 'em with the responsibility, trust `em to take the consequences if they make a mistake.
The world is full of adults that didn't learn those lessons as children: and those adults keep trying the same tactics they learned as children as adults (if I whine to judge enough they'll let me go).
I'd hate, though, when I'm 80, to live in a world run by those kids who've had their privacy summarily erased for the sake of temporary convenience to service parental paranoia; they'll think nothing of running society with so many privacy invasions that we'll wish for the lesser measures described in 1984.
stated clearly that the Iraqi people WILL be in charge of this democracy regardless of the current US administration's agenda.
Proof positive of a democratic Iraqi government acting autonomously will be when it finally does act contrary to the current US administrations agenda.
When that happens, the new Iraqi government will acquire greater legitimacy in the eyes of the world at large (not being just a puppet government), while at the same time being viewed as ungrateful by many in the United States.
"as close to 100% as we can make it -- we can't release sources that belong to other companies."
Sounds semi-reasonable.
I kind of wish that nVidia would do something similar with its graphics drivers for Linux, which, from what I've read, have been sequestered as closed source due to the presence of Other Companies Property in the code.
I wonder if it's too late for my company to put in a patent application for printf() ?
what does it take for a current US citizen to emigrate and become a Canadian citizen
Usually what it takes is an unpopular war to which the US citizen in question is opposed.
I'm an American, spent a semester at a Canadian school and took a class that was taught by an expatriate American professor.
Vietnam sparked one exodus of Americans to Canada about 30 years ago.
It will be interesting to see how the United States' Middle East venture in Iraq plays out over the long run; there's still plenty of opportunity for it, too, to spark a similar migration of Americans to Canada.
One term won't do it. It can be argued that many computer support personnel are of a few categories:
temps at MS are clearly of a lesser, inferior breed and they should be treated as such..
Ego maintenance is an expensive proposition any way you look at it.
Companies that support the huge internal costs and overall reduced productivity and average reduced morale deserve the consequences of their policies, whether they are made explicit or not.
Don't know if it's still true anymore, but for a while the Intel Hyperthreading mode caused Windows to think you needed a special multiprocessor license.
However, all these monopoly games are getting tiresome.
Why doesn't the U.S. government simply declare win32 a de jure standard (it is a standard in every other regard), have the government take it by the doctrine of eminent domain and have a special microsoft tax funnel a compensatory $5bn/year to MS shareholders (which is what happens now anyway).
The net effect would probably be an improvement on the current state of affairs if it meant the win32 code base were liberated.
an email comes in several times a minute
For that reason I wouldn't dare attempt it while there are two options that trade just a little of that sense of immediacy for a more digestable format.
The famous Kernel Traffic by Zack Brown.
Web Archive of kernel mailing list.
The DMCA has just been applied naturally in this case. The problem is not that the DMCA has been absued, but rather that the DMCA is abuse.
New technology has not been immune to misguided legislation.
I thought all these issues had been hashed out earlier with regard to crowbars as burglary tools (crowbars aren't illegal, but breaking into a house is, etc.), the VCR case (people are allowed to make copies for private home viewing), headshops (drug paraphenalia is OK, possession of certain drugs is not OK (sorry, bad example)).
Those earlier legal precedents were seem largely reasonable and it would have been logical if recently-enacted legislation didn't try to use new technology as a tool to fix what is really a social problem. Now that's an inappropriate use of a tool if ever there was!
Don't prosecute people making or possessing tools or technologies. Instead, prosecute the people that directly use them to genuinely violate a copyright law (say, by selling illicit copies). Equivalently, they should simply install speed governors on automobiles so no one exceeds the posted limit. Removing your speed governor or selling means to defeat a speed governor would be crimes under the DMCA mindset.
Who decides?
For any given individual, a good place to start would be to sample the judgements of everyone on the receiving end of actions by that individual.
The more of those acquaintances there are that judge you favorably and the greater their own level of assessed responsibility, then the greater would be the trust placed in you to wield power.
Given my experience, I'd be very skeptical of trying to incorporate self-assessments of responsibility (or of anything measure of character) into any judgement of "responsibility" that has effects on society at large.
It's a difficult problem to solve and I'm open to suggestions of better ways to distribute power, not only to ensure the viability of society, but even to make it thrive, providing greater benefit to its members.
why, oh why, would they suddenly decide to give up this machine
Fair question. For the functions you describe it's perfectly adequate. And if people don't have much discretionary income they'll probably stick with it. But there are still reasons to give it up for something better.
It's big, noisy and has a medusa of dusty cables festering in the backside of it.
I can see where new desktops that incorporate all the guts into a fan-less box hidden on the back side of an LCD panel would be appealing.
Basically, a laptop with a reasonable keyboard and mouse and bigger monitor would be a nice upgrade for many PC users.
That, and secure high BW wireless connectivity to CE devices in the stereo cabinet would be something nice, a reason to give up the old.
[Something in the same direction that current Macs are going correctly gauges where there are reasons for switching.]
That would be "Mr. Bastardized HTML" to you, thank you very much.
IE now sets the standard for bastardization and no weasel browser doing new bastardization of HTML should get the uppity idea that it can do the same.
If we're going to have any hope of surviving a future in which many citizens have the power to create dangerous virii or in any way cause widespread death and devastation, then we're going to have to do a helluva a lot better job than we are now of creating responsible citizens.
Rather than adopt the authoritarian solution of removing all power from as many people as possible and investing as much power as possible with a single "trusted" individual in the hopes of reducing the risks associated with an empowered citizenry, I'd much rather we at least implement better measures to given and take power from individuals based on their demonstrated level of responsibility. Not all or nothing, but a graded continuum. Some of that exists now: felons aren't supposed to get access to firearms in the U.S., for example.
However, there are far too many exceptions to an ideal:
- responsible people without power,
- irresponsible people with power.
Got a ways to go.Even the damn librarians are against it!
Probably the proponents of privacy invasion were those kids that in grade school that talked loudly, joked, farted, scraped chairs, cut up with each other, and generally made all kinds of obnoxious noises in the library and ticked off the librarians.
Come to think of it, those kids, now grown up and in positions of authority, are still making all kinds of obnoxious noises!
No question that this kind of piece represents a landmark in the progress of open source software.
For me, the most significant landmark will be when the Linux kernel dev mailing list starts getting contributions from someone at microsoft.com.
A few other things (involving pigs and snowballs) will probably transpire before that time comes, though, I'm sure.
I can hardly believe that Microsoft would activate millions of installations of Windows 2003 with a single key.
With all the trouble to put a unique identifier on each CD, it seems like it would be little enough hassle to require the user to enter the identifier on the web or over the phone to completely activate the OS. You know, give me your key and I'll give you Your Unique Magic Key.
Didn't they even read the articles about how all DVDs were encrypted with a single key and got liberated in one fell swoop from that fantastic piece of copyright protection when the key was discovered and made public?
My paranoid side says it's all a conspiracy to illustrate the perils of widespread piracy/terrorism/hackers (MS has enough cash to take a hit on the revenue loss) so that TCPA/Palladium gets a more receptive audience with lawmakers and the gullible public at large.
Besides, "A Diamond is Forever" is a DeBeers marketing sloagan created in the 1920s, not some ancient piece of wisdom.
DeBeers has recognized that it needs to market more effectively to the Slashdot crowd, many of whom have yet to make a substantial investment in a diamond.
Their new slogan will be
I've got a TiVo, upgraded the disk drives and love it.
This weekend, though, I was looking at various HDTV options and was informed that PVRs are generally not yet ready to record high definition shows.
Does anyone know what kinds of offerings when will permit me to record HDTV (say 1080i) on my PVR?
TIA