Comment Re:Captain Trips? (Score 1) 236
How much do you think it would take to get Kareem to march around as the harbinger again with the bell?
LOL...
How much do you think it would take to get Kareem to march around as the harbinger again with the bell?
LOL...
Ok. But I prefer an more dispersed solution at an ultimate goal. Living on Mars might be a useful intermediate step, though.
That said, we really need to disperse well beyond the solar system to be approximately safe (for a reasonably long time). And planets are not the right place to hold an industrial civilization. (But we probably need controlled fusion to do it properly. Fission is too hard to refuel.) I think a dispersal rate of about 0.1C, or possibly a bit slower, is optimal...which means the habitats need to be durable and maintainable, and able to survive on stuff harvested in passing. So we've a ways to go before that becomes possible. And Mars might be a good intermediate step. (OTOH, if FTL is possible, all bets are off. But I don't expect that, or we'd have believable visitors.)
All well and good, but you have to master crawling before you can walk, and master walking before you have any chance of becoming an Olympic sprinter.
Science makes no distinction between every living human dying, and nobody dying.
If you want some reason for action on that, you'll have to look elsewhere.
Or, just go with what you've already socially assimilated, theism, as you attack yourself.
Survival is not mandatory. - Edwards Deming
Perhaps it's time to get that airline ticket to Madagascar before they shut down everything.
If the great oracle, Mr. King, is accurate, we might need a little more distance than Madagascar.
And Elon Musk is right, too: "[which do we want,] Lipstick or a colony on Mars?"
This virus is bad, but it's not Captain Trips. This is a wake-up call to remind us that extinction-level events remain possible and arguably become more likely as our technology reduces our individual isolation.
ATM0.
Turns off the speaker. First thing you do on any modem. Thereafter you only hear the clicks as the line is picked up and dropped. You're welcome.
Spoken like a true greybeard firing up the modem at 2AM to download porn. Wouldn't want to wake the wife up.
LOL... At 300 baud, it took basically all night to download one GIF. When JPEGs and 1200 baud modems appeared, I was in heaven.
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It's a unibody design so it needs the sail pillars to mitigate torsion on the frame when pulling a load.
The load when towing is a definite issue for the design of unibody trucks. The Cybertruck will be a light-duty pickup truck, but I believe it will be a very respectable truck for most pickup buyers.
Sure but you can't access the truck bed from the sides; that's pretty important for many "truck things".
I've owned many pickup trucks. Most of them can't be accessed from the sides; they have a cargo box. Rarely do they get removed.
The limitation of the Cybertruck's unibody structure will be that it cannot be sold as a chassis cab setup; in other words, a driveable frame with a cab where the buyer attaches the necessary equipment (from an RV body to a salt spreader, etc) to the bare frame.
The vast majority of pickup trucks sell with an attached box, and the vast majority of worn-out pickup trucks at the junkyard still have their boxes. So, for most people who buy pickup trucks, the design should be fine.
Aftermarket truck caps will appear for the Cybertruck, if it is a success in the market. I'm sure lots of cap companies already have sketches on the drawing board.
I doubt Tesla is targeting the serious truck market with this vehicle. Based on the specs, it is a very viable pickup truck for most pickup truck buyers - but it's not something where you can bolt on a snow plow blade and a salt spreader and use it to clear the parking lot of your local Wal*Mart. It needs to make the compromise of fuel efficiency (ie. battery range) of a real frame for those tasks.
I applaud Tesla for the design and the styling. It looks angry and aggressive, which does sell trucks. I like the unibody design, because it's inherently better for *most* vehicles. I love the stainless steel body, but that just might be the former Delorean owner in me, and stainless is ideal for a truck carrying gravel or other abrasives in its box. It's not a vehicle for towing (there'd be no side clearance for a 5th wheel hitch) or other heavy-duty use. But as a general-purpose pickup truck, it's impressive.
How would their electrical distribution system hold up if these people were to actually use them - you know, all arriving home in the evening at about peak residential usage time, and plugging their cars in?
Oh, man. It's the same problem *everywhere* where electric cars are being pushed. Where is the electricity coming from in the first place? How will the grid handle it - especially at peak demand hours? Where is the cobalt and the lithium in the batteries coming from? So yeah, no tailpipe emissions, out of sight and out of mind.
Okay, so, if 90% of those charging stations never get used, what's the environmental impact of making - and hard-wiring the copper! - for all those boxes?
This is a bold strategy on the UK's part. I am a car guy - look at my username - and I studied Electrical Engineering in University because I love electricity even more than food and sex, but I am not sure that net environmental benefits are there yet.
And then, there's the Prince of Darkness. Don't let the magic smoke out. You can make fun of the American car industry all you want, but all the Chevy Vegas and Ford Pintos in the world don't make up for this: British cars are renowned for really reprehensibly bad electrical systems. I'd never set foot in a British car with a Lithium-Ion battery. So let's hope they're just charging imports.
That always irritates me. It's not that visual thinkers don't exist, it's that people who describe themselves that way are usually just too lazy to do much thinking at all. They like pictures because they can glance at them and jump to conclusions.
Wait? What? You mean this road sign isn't for a place where I can go to have something heavy dropped on my vehicle?
How about The Willies?
It's like the cast and crew of the TV show Growing Pains got together to make a campy B-movie. One of my favorite scenes involves the classic dog in a microwave. Just listen to that great music.
You're right, but you're looking in the wrong place. People do not use the Windows Kernel, people use Windows.
I know. People don't use Linux. They use Debian Linux, or Gentoo Linux, or SuSE Linux. For mass adoption, we need to combine the forks, so that AutoCAD and a few other desktop/workstation apps will join us. The brand name is "Linux", and while we've had massive innovation based on the previous fragmentation of the Open Source community but that fragmentation comes with a huge cost in speed of response to the user. Linus may have an ego now, imagine him after he usurps Bill Gates... and places a real Unix-like operating system with the capacity to run a bank or airport-level mainframe on every desktop. With the reliability, security, and availability to dominate the TOP500 list.
Linux is capable of doing this like no other operating system, and doing it with serious quality for most users from cellphones to mainframes, and easy compatibility with competitors who need to run a different Unix-like architecture.
Linux dominates the smartphone. Linux dominates the server. Linux dominates the supercomputer.
Linux fails on the desktop for the exact same reason Blender has issues: the desktop/workstation space is saturated with incompatible forks and silly user-interface issues that lead to a frustrating user experience in the "I usually use a mouse" space.
The problem is not Linux, per se. The problem is Linux, as branded, has a million variants.
Don't be concerned whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Ask if Ubuntu is ready for the desktop. Which it is.
Ubuntu is ready for the desktop. So is SuSE, so is Debian, so is....
Ask if VHS is ready for Blockbuster.
Look, there was a time when renting a video at Blockbuster meant you'd see a VHS logo. If the cassette had a VHS logo and it was from your country, it would work. The movie would play on your VHS VCR. We've replaced the VHS versus Beta format wars with incompatible Linux binary package systems and Gnome/KDE, and "do I click on the right or left mouse key here?" in Blender.
The Linux name no longer means standardization. That's why I indicated that the Android platform is Linux in your pocket - and most people don't even know it because Google shields the users from the coathanger abortion of incompatible switches and upgrades and compilers and everything else in the Unix Hater's Handbook that the admins of the big stuff consider to be trivial and even virtues. But will annoy and confuse and make life hell for anyone who just needs it to work and whose expectation is a system that doesn't involve the command line at all.
Any time I search Google Images for Linux desktops and see the prominent terminal window open, it's a sign that the person who took the screenshot and is showing it off has absolutely no interest in supporting Linux as a real desktop operating system. While a computer without a terminal window is scary to me, a terminal window is scary to most people; the people at Xerox Parc knew it, Steve Jobs knew that in 1983, the world changed under his influence in 1984, and the next year, Bill Gates strapped granite countertops to an outhouse called DOS, and we still haven't taken the clue?
For Linux (or *BSD, etc) to be a viable desktop operating system, the user interface must be standardized. The binary distribution format must be standardized. The VHS cassette you rented from Autodesk must play in the VHS VCR. And the Play button must not be a square but a right-pointed triangle.
When you focus on Ubuntu, there is no more fragmentation, no more fosstards, no more optimizing the JPEG algorithms while mp3 files won't play.
Ubuntu is VHS-C. The VHS-C videocassette of a movie called Autodesk will run on my SVHS VCR. I got lucky and had an adapter kicking around.
The movie called Autodesk available at the Blockbuster at my place is only in VHS-C. I can use an adapter to run it in my SVHS VCR, but since it won't run natively, I'm screwed to a pain in the ass version that is lower resolution than my machine supports. I spent a lot of money on my video projector to have to play a low-res basic VHS version?
The Blockbuster up the street, on Debian Avenue, has an SVHS version of the Director's Cut of Autodesk, but it's hobbled so it requires my scan converter to play it only one frame every eleven seconds because of copyright issues.
I'll go to the Blockbuster on Apple Street, but that won't play in my VHS VCR, they only offer the tecnically-superior Betamax which costs twice as much, demands a DNA sample from my first-born son, and which requires me to ritually burn my VHS machine as a condition of membership. But hey, the picture's really good on my video projector.
And so we have another format war...
I actually cannot stand Ubuntu, or gnome, but I advocate its use for just this reason.
I run KDE on SuSE 15. If Autodesk released binaries at midnight tonight, could we both be using files with the same MD5s tomorrow?
No? Then the video store has a Windows section, a Mac section, an Ubuntu section, a SuSE section, a Debian section, a Gentoo section, a Red Hat section, a...
Pardon me for a second in my analogy, but how many copies of Porky's is this place supposed to keep on the shelf gathering dust?
Why the Blender Foundation took nearly a decade to revise the software's UI is anybody's guess.
Fair enough.
The vast majority of artists I've worked with will struggle and complain rather than learning a single fucking thing about how to improve their situation. Also, most of them could never come up with the idea "Hey, we can just pay someone to fix it." as they're usually broke.
You know, the funny thing about people who BUY software is that they usually get heard by the developers. "Sure, we'll tack a McMansion onto this little outhouse called DOS, we know the foundation is shaky and the basement stinks really bad, but we'll call it Windows 10! That'll be $199 for your copy!"
About 20 years ago, I wrote a rant about how Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It still isn't.
The issue is with Open Source development. Somehow, the development model needs to combine the best of unified design from having (ugh...) a CEO with the best of the Open Source model of "I love to optimize the algorithms that render JPEGs, so that's where I VOLUNTEER".
Except for the containment of the Open Source community that Google provides in Android, Linux still isn't ready for general use outside of PVRs and elevator controllers.
It hurts me, as someone who has been a Linux fan and running it for well over 20 years now, that the general desktop user experience remains so fragmented and fraught with frustration. Do I have viruses and ransomware? When I accidentally launch Wine, maybe. Do I have licenses to deal with? No, because AutoCAD doesn't release a Linux version because it can't figure out whether to support Red Hat or SuSE or Debian or Gentoo or Ubuntu, and they know everyone will squawk if they still believe in a proprietary software business model. What I have is 1,500 different distributions out there, each with at least 6 live ISOs to download. The choices alone are death by a million papercuts. And I've been running Linux since 1996!
What would a Newbie feel, who just needs to browse the web? At first it was setting the IRQs on network adapters... which you usually had to do blind because until you got it right, your one and only computer was down. When Knoppix came along with its then-revolutionary hardware detection, you couldn't use it at work for troubleshooting - all the way down to tacky graphics and sound effects, it looked like Klaus was a horny 14-year-old. At the time, I had access to the main computer room at the 5th-biggest airport in the world, I could have used Knoppix, but I couldn't run Knoppix because it truly looked and sounded like it was written by a virgin.
User interface issues persist. I know Blender is not Linux, the user-interface and development assumptions point right back to something about the Open Source model, mindset, and methodology.
It's 2019. Computing is infrastructure, and has been for at least 30 years. It's time we have computers and software with reliability and consistency befitting of electrical, plumbing, and voice telephony. 99.999% uptimes. Consistent, standardized user interfaces. The HOT water is always on the left, the COLD water is always on the right. Mass adoption will follow, so many of the issues with Open Source software are not proprietary features or file formats but are self-inflicted stupid issues like K3B's "Probably a buffer underrun..." error message caused by no volunteer being motivated to fix what is easy to fix. (And don't send me hate telling me to start programming, I'm good at component-level hardware.)
We need to get this right, or it could well be time to enforce a National Computing Code, just like Building Code, Electrical Code, Plumbing Code, etc...
(And either way, it's a horrible solution. "Dude! There's a bug in the kernel that means it goes to shit when it runs out of memory!" "OMG, are you an idiot? Just connect your phone to the Wifi, run ConnectBot, connect to your laptop's IP address - YOU DO REMEMBER THE IP ADDRESS RIGHT? - and type "killall 'Web Content' ; killall 'firefox'", duh!")
It's friggin' embarrassing. I run a mainframe operating system on my primary desktop. An operating system that runs SAP instances and the national banks of G7 countries. Even on my modest hardware, a userspace application should not be able to stop the clock on Plasmashell. And yet Firefox and Chrome can spike the CPU load to over 25. I've been late for work because I glanced at the desktop of my enterprise-grade operating system, glanced at the clock on my desktop, and not realized it was hung.
And so, I keep a machine running 24/7 just to do $killall -9 firefox when I need to.
I've Googled issues with this a million times, but not seen the problem explained as clearly as I just have through reading this Slashdot discussion. Thank you.
It doesn't give me a lot of faith to know that my ATM card might not work because someone was reading Facebook. It's a failure of Linux that must be addressed quickly because there is no way a user program, especially not one which lives under the scrutiny for security as a web browser, should be able to stall the system.
I've been running Linux for over 20 years and damned proud of the accomplishments and the quality of the software that I run.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz
