Yes I did: I summarised it as "etc".

We both agree military spending is out of control.

And how exactly is meme investigation "basic research"?

It's pretty solid social science as far as I see it. It's about better understanding of people.

I'd really like to know how cutting frivolous grants like this will damage future meme propagation on the internet.

It won't harm meme propagation, and if you believe that you seriously misunderstand the research (which is why decisions on such things should not be left to lay people). It's about better understanding of human behaviour.

I'm perfectly fine with federal dollars being judiciously spent on science which may have a real impact on our society or fundamental technology, or even of our understanding of the universe. This isn't it.

It's understanding of people, how they behave and so on. I don't see why the study of human behaviour is not a worthy topic of research.

Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit.

No, not even slightly. The reason you're running a massive defecit is because you have dumped trillions into two pointless wars and the military industrial complex. It was such a dumb idea that even previous presidents have warned about such things.

Cutting back on basic research is a sure-fire way to hobble long term future development. The only way to do this successfully and on the scale and longevity required is via government funding.

etc...

Yes government spending is out of control. About the worst way of reignin it in is to cut down on basic research.

Gaming and culture documentaries. So, hackers, right?

Off to hack the gibson. BRB.

Confused people will start talking about things like "cow farts" or "trees" or similar. These have nothing to do with global warming - the climate thing - because these do not represent sequestered carbon.

Not quite right. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So, taking existing atmospheric carbon in the form of CO2 and turning it into methane will increase warming.

Betteridge says no.

We'll just have to fine somewhere else to stick them.

Besides, the deterrant actually lives at sea. It's the ones not currently being a deterrent which are berthed.

I do find the anti-nuke stance naive and a bit pathetic personally. Sure, the world would be a nicer place without nukes. However, it's late 1940s tech and people who don't like you also have them.

If one wants to be all "nice" and "give them up" you're implicitly asking the US, UK/England and France to basically step in if something bad happens. It's basically freeloading since they know that the other countries will step in (as they have before) if they really have to.

Then again, a good part of King Salmond's personal independence movement seems to be about freeloading so that figures.

TSRs

Yeah, people did use DOS for the filesystem access, so providing a TSR that hacked that layer allowed any program to access files on the CD.

I forgot about the mouse driver. That was some what standard by the end.

From memory, sound cards notably didn't have drivers built-in, or rather the only startup programs they had just set the ports and interrupts the cards used. (i.e. sb16set)

And then the programs tweaked the registers of the cards manually given that info. IOW they had the drivers built into the programs.

You're missing a letter my friend, I said UX31LA..

Nope :) You had a typo, I believe.

Anyway that's curious. The UX21 works flawlessly with 14.04. The wifi was buggy before but the driver was fixed some time in 2013. Are you using stock ubnutu or using a different desktop environment?

Out of interest, how well does OSX work on that laptop?

My guess is the experience will be even worse than with Linux.

The lesson here is that if you want a Linux or OSX laptop, you buy one that's known to run the OS of choice. In OSX's case, you go to an Apple shop. In Linux's case, you go to a Linux laptop shop like Dell or System 76 or a bunch of others.

It doesn't require an engineering degree you see, just a little nouse with purchases.

I'm curious which model you actually have: the UX41A does not exist as far as I can tell. Unbuntu 14.04 works perfectly on the UX21.

if DOS needed them, then you would expect them to be provided with the hardware, you would install them, and then your applications would use them through the OS API.

Er have you ever used DOS. It provided almost no API at all. And the ones it did no one used. It certainly didn't provide any graphics. The BIOS provided a spectacularly slow interface to the VGA card.

The fact that you had to configure games specifically for your hardware means they were not "DOS drivers" but "game drivers".

No not really. The DOS model was it did fuck-all so if you wanted to use any hardware beyond the small range that was directly supported by the dos APIs and the BIOS then you had to provide all the drivers yourself.

Basically DOS did an OK job at files. And text out to the console. Everything else, graphics, sound, a mouse, joysticks, printers, scanners and so on was provided by drivers in the application program.

The only reason VGA worked uniformly is a whole bunch of manufacturers reverse engineered the VGA register map so that the specially written VGA drivers for dos stuff would work with their clone cards.

This means that you have to have code review from the Linux kernel team. And you have to divulge any amateur or buggy code embodied in the source. Which may compromise the imaginary advantage your marketdroids think they have on other platforms.

God yes this. 1000 times this.

One particular example I remember well was TV capture cards in the early/mid 2000s.

Basically the chipset was the Brooktree BT878, which was actually pretty good though remarably cheap. I ended up with a few capture cards what people gave to me because "they didn't work".

That meant they didn't work on Windows. Every manufacturer wrote their own buggy, unstable, system crashy drivers and put effort into some god-awful shiny TV program which made heavy use of gradients and nonstandard TV controls.

On Linux, they all. just. worked. There was one BT878 driver that was well written and well debugged and "shitty" capture cards that "didn't work" gave years of stable, flawless performance.

The same thing cycled around with webcams. It was a wild-west of chipsets. They'd all work after a fashion on Windows. On Linux, they either worked perfectly or not at all due to lack of drivers. The ones that did work were invariable more stable and more featureful because the driver would be written to expose the full functionality of the chipset.

These days the situation is better on all platforms since the standards people have realised that having standard driver interface makes for a much better experience. xHCI means that any random USB chipset works. Same for bluetooth now too. UVC means any camer works and so on and so forth. It's like magic. You can buy a cheap-ass piece of crap from any random vendor and it will just work, no drivers, no hassle on Windows, Linux and OSX.

The thing is vendors are almost uniformly bad at writing drivers. On Linux this means they don't bother. On Windows the drivers are a pile of crap. Having centrally maintained drivers is in fact a large improvement on BOTH operating systems.

The parent is grand bitching because he thinks th unstable API is the reason for the lack of drivers, rather than the reason being that manufacturers don't care for targeting Linux.

How is that deprecated auto_ptr working out for you?

Er huh? Old code using it still works does it not? Now you get a warning if you use it. I imagine you will have something approaching infinite time to remove it after you upgrade your compiler.

So it's fine. No problem in fact. I'm not sure what your point is?

The lambda syntax is hideous. Hell even Javascript makes it easy to declare anonymous functions!

Hideous is in the eye of the beholder, but hard to create anonymous functions in C++, it is not.

[&](auto x){ do something with x};

If you think that's hard, you should seriously consider another career.

An honest person wouldn't be afraid to admit that.

Where has he been dishonest? He's always admitted C++ has flaws. An HONEST person wouldn't cast false accusations.

Not really. The critical mass for U235 is 50 kg or so, while for PU240 it's about 40 kg.

As the other poster pointed out, it's Pu 239 with a critical mass of 10Kg. The Fat Man pit weighed only 6Kg however. You can enhance criticality by compressing the pit (the implosion stage) and reflecting the neutrons back, to increase the per-neutron fission yield.

Yeah but there's the memory penalty, and the conflicting CPU schedulers.

If you have 20VMs basically running the same code, then all of the code segments are going to be the same. So, people are doing memory deduplication. Of course that's inefficient, so I expect people are looking at paravirtualising that too.

That way you'll be able to inform the VM sysrem that you're loading an immutable chunk of code and if anyone else want's to use it their free to. So it becomes an object of some sort which is shared.

And thus people will have inefficiently reinvented shared objects, and will probably index them by hash or something.

The same will happen with CPU scheduling too. The guest and host both have ideas who wants CPU when. The guests can already yield. Sooner or later they'll be able to inform the host that they want some CPU too.

And thus was reinvented the concept of a process with threads.

And sooner or later, people will start running apps straight on the VM because all these things it provides are basically enough to run a program so why bother with the host OS. Or perhaps they won't.

But either way people will find that the host OS becomes a bit tied down to a particular host (or not---and thus people reinvent portability layers) and that makes deployment hard so wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow share just the essentials of the hardware between multiple hosts to fully utilise our machines.

Except that's inefficient and there's a lot of guess work so if we allow the hosts and the host-hosts to share just a liiiiiiiitle bit of information we'll be able to make things much more efficient.

And so it continues.

u mad bro?