I think you may have missed the point of Android, which was to run on mobile phones, where your input and output hardware is quite a bit different than on most, if not all, portable computers. Sure, you could run Debian on the hardware in an HTC phone, but that isn't the hard part. The bulk of the work would be in the UI programs, and most of the programs that are part of Gnome or KDE wouldn't work too well with the phone's hardware. You'd end up needing to rewrite most of the user applications anyway.
"...you can only write to a certain sector so many times till it becomes read-only"
Gee. This sounds like a potential problem for me. Rotating hard drives suffer the same problem, but the incidence is measured in years. How long might an SSD be expected to be used for the OS before sectors (bits, actually) become read-only? Half as long? A third?
The number of writes in the lifetime of a sector on an SSD is up in the 100k range now, which is one write per day for a few hundred years. For most normal applications, you pretty much never have to worry about sectors becoming read-only.
In order to get the best results, you need one large enough to keep the OS and all your apps on.
I'm certainly not a heavy applications user, but my / partition is using less than 4 GB. Most people could easily fit the entire operating system and applications on a 16 or 32 GB disk, then put all of their space-intensive files on a 500 GB magnetic disk.
but flash memory is guaranteed to die after a sufficient number of writes.
No, it's guaranteed to become read-only, and the "sufficient number of writes" is up into the 100k range, which would mean writing over the entire disk every day for a few hundred years.
Yup, they're called hybrid disk drives. Slashdot had a few articles about them a couple years ago- http://www.google.com/search?q=hybrid+disk+drive+site%3Aslashdot.org. I can't find any with a quick look through Newegg or Pricewatch, so I'm not sure if any makes them anymore.
The reason for having at least double your RAM for swap space is for suspend/hibernate (whichever is the one that dumps RAM to disk). Desktop computers rarely use this function, so your point would hold, but laptops do this quite frequently to save battery power.
Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains.
I would say the key word/words/initials there is OS. You're using 650 GB of space on a disk that obviously isn't the OS. My / partition only has about 3.5 GB used, so a small SSD would be plenty of space. Documents and media, which take up much more space but don't usually need the same read/write speed, could go on a separate magnetic disk.
That would be quite pointless, given the number of IPs available. Why shouldn't the ISP just hand out a/64? There are plenty of them to go around.
Because ISPs exist to make money, not to provide a civil service to people. ISPs (especially the bigger ones) are going to do whatever they can to maximize profits. Just because there's essentially an unlimited number of IPv6 addresses available doesn't mean that the value of a public IP will disappear.
Doing something like that might get (and would most likely deserve) an investigation by the FTC and/or federal Department of Justice. If every major ISP charged extra money for a resource that has no practical limit, you'd have a fairly easy collusion and price-fixing case. If you can have such a case against memory manufacturers, who deal with creating physical items that are obviously much more limited than IPv6 addresses and actually require money and resources to create, even a Slashdot I-am-not-a-lawyer could win a case over something like IPv6 addresses.
So they have a run-off election in the event that the votes came down: 49%, 49%, 1%, 1% ?
Pretty unlikely, but yeah. Of course, who knows how accurate those 1% numbers are. I remember reading somewhere that Mousavi thought that a more realistic goal would be to force a run-off between him and Ahmadinejad, I think around June 27th
I'm actually still not entirely convinced that Ahmadinejad is as batshit crazy as he often seems to be. When he's done interviews with American journalists, he's very calm and polite. Obviously he's acting for the American viewers, but is he also acting for the Iranian viewers? Is he really pure evil, or is it possible that he's just an American-style, power-hungry politician who will say anything to get people to vote for him and let him keep his power? Of course, the obvious follow-up to that question would be whether that makes him more or less evil.
Yes, yes, and well, just about every country has threatened every other country at one time or another. Israel doesn't have the military strength for any significant conflict with a country the size of Iran. Israel can't really do much beyond its immediate neighbors. They just aren't the military superpower that some people think they are, and their military is worrying about other things at the moment. As a rule, Israel also doesn't initiate conflicts, but will use full force as a response. With the most recent conflict in Lebanon, you can certainly argue whether they overreacted or not, but it was still a reaction and not a completely unprovoked attack. The previous major wars (1948, 1967, 1973) were all started by neighboring countries.
For all the hate the US gets I still can't recall a single nation having as much power (and let's be fair, compare nations to peers of the time) and wielding it so fairly. Sure, you can bitch about the current Iraq war, and some support and aid for some overthrows you might now agree with. Boo hoo! It's all-n-all pretty damn good. And still trying to get better.
Not being quite as bad as other empires have been in the past does not make us good, it only makes us less bad.
As someone who lives in a country which uses paper ballots, I find no lack of plausibility in the speed of the result. We usually know the result of the election within 4-6 hours of the booths closing. Although it takes longer to get final figures (especially if recounts are triggered) it would have to be an extremely close election to have to wait for the final figure to know who won (and indeed for the loser to conceed).
There's a difference between having enough ballots counted to make a statistical prediction of who will win and the ones running the election officially declaring a winner.
In many parts of the world voting is not a two horse race or a highest vote wins system (I don't know which applies to Iran).
Iran requires a true majority of votes (50% of all votes, not just more than any other candidate). The other two candidates only got about 1% each, so the election was effectively whichever of Ahmadinejad and Mousavi got more votes.
That's just the point. It have had some metabolic function and internal chemical reactions.
Is that true though? If the bacteria's temperature is dropped low enough, all metabolic functions would stop (it's hard to say that all chemical reactions would stop, but that's the case for nearly everything, living or not). When the temperature is raised, the reactions would start occurring again and metabolism would start up.
Jeeze, don't anyone learn from history? Last time they dug up a frozen creature from the ice it began killing its way through the Norwegian base and then the American one! Burn it! You have to burn it!
Just for curiosity's sake, what exactly do you consider to be the hard part of software development? Testing? Debugging? Because writing in C# tends to make the debugging easier as well......
For me, it would be reading and maintaining someone else's code. Some languages may encourage more readable code than others, but a bad programmer will write terrible code no matter what language you give them.
You see, Linux/Unix/BSD don't need Mono! What can you achieve using Mono which you wouldn't achieve with Perl, Python, C++ or Java?
Wouldn't, or couldn't? They're all Turing-complete languages. If you mean couldn't, then by your argument, Linux doesn't need Perl, Python, C++, or Java, either, because it has assembly. If you meant what you wouldn't do, I can think of plenty of things that I would much rather use C#/.Net for than Perl or Python (Java is a bit harder of course, since Java and C# are such closely-related languages). I can also think of several things where I'd rather use Perl or C instead of C# or Java. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses, plus the fact that different programmers have different preferences.
I still go for pull-through spaces too, but that's more because I'm lazy. I haven't had to parallel park since my driving test, though; I haven't lived right in a real urban area (currently in a suburb of Boston), so I've always had off-street parking, and I take public transportation when I'm going in to the city.
Are you suggesting that these are things computers should have, or things that would be design mistakes? I would think that having the parts of the OS that are read-often/write-rarely in flash memory would be a good thing, but having no user-accessible parts would be very bad. A unique machine identifier would be okay if it were never transmitted over the network, but making it part of the networking protocols would be just as ineffective as assuming that MAC addresses are unique and perfect identifiers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you may have missed the point of Android, which was to run on mobile phones, where your input and output hardware is quite a bit different than on most, if not all, portable computers. Sure, you could run Debian on the hardware in an HTC phone, but that isn't the hard part. The bulk of the work would be in the UI programs, and most of the programs that are part of Gnome or KDE wouldn't work too well with the phone's hardware. You'd end up needing to rewrite most of the user applications anyway.
"...you can only write to a certain sector so many times till it becomes read-only"
Gee. This sounds like a potential problem for me. Rotating hard drives suffer the same problem, but the incidence is measured in years. How long might an SSD be expected to be used for the OS before sectors (bits, actually) become read-only? Half as long? A third?
The number of writes in the lifetime of a sector on an SSD is up in the 100k range now, which is one write per day for a few hundred years. For most normal applications, you pretty much never have to worry about sectors becoming read-only.
Do you know whats even better? Spending the $300 you save buying a hard drive as opposed to an SSD on 8gb of ram. Even more performance.
But how much does it cost for the battery that keeps all the data in RAM when you turn off the computer?
In order to get the best results, you need one large enough to keep the OS and all your apps on.
I'm certainly not a heavy applications user, but my / partition is using less than 4 GB. Most people could easily fit the entire operating system and applications on a 16 or 32 GB disk, then put all of their space-intensive files on a 500 GB magnetic disk.
but flash memory is guaranteed to die after a sufficient number of writes.
No, it's guaranteed to become read-only, and the "sufficient number of writes" is up into the 100k range, which would mean writing over the entire disk every day for a few hundred years.
It was tried a couple years ago. I just post another reply right above this about it- http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1273501&cid=28376221
Yup, they're called hybrid disk drives. Slashdot had a few articles about them a couple years ago- http://www.google.com/search?q=hybrid+disk+drive+site%3Aslashdot.org. I can't find any with a quick look through Newegg or Pricewatch, so I'm not sure if any makes them anymore.
The reason for having at least double your RAM for swap space is for suspend/hibernate (whichever is the one that dumps RAM to disk). Desktop computers rarely use this function, so your point would hold, but laptops do this quite frequently to save battery power.
Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains.
I would say the key word/words/initials there is OS. You're using 650 GB of space on a disk that obviously isn't the OS. My / partition only has about 3.5 GB used, so a small SSD would be plenty of space. Documents and media, which take up much more space but don't usually need the same read/write speed, could go on a separate magnetic disk.
That would be quite pointless, given the number of IPs available. Why shouldn't the ISP just hand out a /64? There are plenty of them to go around.
Because ISPs exist to make money, not to provide a civil service to people. ISPs (especially the bigger ones) are going to do whatever they can to maximize profits. Just because there's essentially an unlimited number of IPv6 addresses available doesn't mean that the value of a public IP will disappear.
Doing something like that might get (and would most likely deserve) an investigation by the FTC and/or federal Department of Justice. If every major ISP charged extra money for a resource that has no practical limit, you'd have a fairly easy collusion and price-fixing case. If you can have such a case against memory manufacturers, who deal with creating physical items that are obviously much more limited than IPv6 addresses and actually require money and resources to create, even a Slashdot I-am-not-a-lawyer could win a case over something like IPv6 addresses.
So they have a run-off election in the event that the votes came down: 49%, 49%, 1%, 1% ?
Pretty unlikely, but yeah. Of course, who knows how accurate those 1% numbers are. I remember reading somewhere that Mousavi thought that a more realistic goal would be to force a run-off between him and Ahmadinejad, I think around June 27th
I'm actually still not entirely convinced that Ahmadinejad is as batshit crazy as he often seems to be. When he's done interviews with American journalists, he's very calm and polite. Obviously he's acting for the American viewers, but is he also acting for the Iranian viewers? Is he really pure evil, or is it possible that he's just an American-style, power-hungry politician who will say anything to get people to vote for him and let him keep his power? Of course, the obvious follow-up to that question would be whether that makes him more or less evil.
Yes, yes, and well, just about every country has threatened every other country at one time or another. Israel doesn't have the military strength for any significant conflict with a country the size of Iran. Israel can't really do much beyond its immediate neighbors. They just aren't the military superpower that some people think they are, and their military is worrying about other things at the moment. As a rule, Israel also doesn't initiate conflicts, but will use full force as a response. With the most recent conflict in Lebanon, you can certainly argue whether they overreacted or not, but it was still a reaction and not a completely unprovoked attack. The previous major wars (1948, 1967, 1973) were all started by neighboring countries.
For all the hate the US gets I still can't recall a single nation having as much power (and let's be fair, compare nations to peers of the time) and wielding it so fairly. Sure, you can bitch about the current Iraq war, and some support and aid for some overthrows you might now agree with. Boo hoo! It's all-n-all pretty damn good. And still trying to get better.
Not being quite as bad as other empires have been in the past does not make us good, it only makes us less bad.
As someone who lives in a country which uses paper ballots, I find no lack of plausibility in the speed of the result. We usually know the result of the election within 4-6 hours of the booths closing. Although it takes longer to get final figures (especially if recounts are triggered) it would have to be an extremely close election to have to wait for the final figure to know who won (and indeed for the loser to conceed).
There's a difference between having enough ballots counted to make a statistical prediction of who will win and the ones running the election officially declaring a winner.
Wait, CNN still does reporting? I thought they switched to just reading whatever crap people send them over Twitter?
In many parts of the world voting is not a two horse race or a highest vote wins system (I don't know which applies to Iran).
Iran requires a true majority of votes (50% of all votes, not just more than any other candidate). The other two candidates only got about 1% each, so the election was effectively whichever of Ahmadinejad and Mousavi got more votes.
Death is when nothing (beyond a crit roll on a d20) can bring the lifeform back.
Wait, you have to roll a 20 when you cast Raise Dead now? Man, I must be a few editions behind.
That's just the point. It have had some metabolic function and internal chemical reactions.
Is that true though? If the bacteria's temperature is dropped low enough, all metabolic functions would stop (it's hard to say that all chemical reactions would stop, but that's the case for nearly everything, living or not). When the temperature is raised, the reactions would start occurring again and metabolism would start up.
Jeeze, don't anyone learn from history? Last time they dug up a frozen creature from the ice it began killing its way through the Norwegian base and then the American one! Burn it! You have to burn it!
Or even worse, it might become a lawyer.
Just for curiosity's sake, what exactly do you consider to be the hard part of software development? Testing? Debugging? Because writing in C# tends to make the debugging easier as well......
For me, it would be reading and maintaining someone else's code. Some languages may encourage more readable code than others, but a bad programmer will write terrible code no matter what language you give them.
Or, for that matter, what can you achieve using insert-any-programming-language-here that you wouldn't achieve with Common Lisp?
Finishing a program without having horrible nightmares about being attacked by hordes of closing parentheses?
You see, Linux/Unix/BSD don't need Mono! What can you achieve using Mono which you wouldn't achieve with Perl, Python, C++ or Java?
Wouldn't, or couldn't? They're all Turing-complete languages. If you mean couldn't, then by your argument, Linux doesn't need Perl, Python, C++, or Java, either, because it has assembly. If you meant what you wouldn't do, I can think of plenty of things that I would much rather use C#/.Net for than Perl or Python (Java is a bit harder of course, since Java and C# are such closely-related languages). I can also think of several things where I'd rather use Perl or C instead of C# or Java. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses, plus the fact that different programmers have different preferences.
I still go for pull-through spaces too, but that's more because I'm lazy. I haven't had to parallel park since my driving test, though; I haven't lived right in a real urban area (currently in a suburb of Boston), so I've always had off-street parking, and I take public transportation when I'm going in to the city.
Are you suggesting that these are things computers should have, or things that would be design mistakes? I would think that having the parts of the OS that are read-often/write-rarely in flash memory would be a good thing, but having no user-accessible parts would be very bad. A unique machine identifier would be okay if it were never transmitted over the network, but making it part of the networking protocols would be just as ineffective as assuming that MAC addresses are unique and perfect identifiers.