orib

22 ms·

211.
by orib 18y ago
Another good option is to ask around schools or businesses for computers that they're going to throw out. You won't get a blazingly fast quad-core machine out of this, but there's a good chance you can get something usable, or at least get
212.
by orib 18y ago
Ask work to pay for (or at least subsidize) a computer for you. Even if they say no.. well, they'll have said no. You're no worse off than you were, and they should theoretically be paying for everything you need to get your work done.
213.
by orib 18y ago
Ironic how the criticize "critical thinking" (at least, what they think it means -- they abuse the term) for not providing solutions, only problems. Yet at the same time, they don't suggest any solutions to these traps, they only list them.
214.
"Switzerland" ISP Protocol Meddling Detection Software(eff.org)
12 points by orib 18y ago|1 comments
215.
by orib 18y ago
Who says you're making necessarily making oxygen gas? I don't know the details of current industrial processes, but you can easily free hydrogen by displacing it with something that binds more tightly (eg, Sodium: 2H2O + 2Na => H2 + 2Na
216.
by orib 18y ago
Not without large amounts of waste energy. This energy cost makes electrolysis impractical for efficient energy storage. If you could reduce the amount of energy required to electrolyze water, then it would make an extremely good energy sto
217.
by orib 18y ago
What makes you think I have a browser open all the time? At least on my system, I'm far more likely to have a terminal open. And no, I don't want to read feeds in a browser. (Actually, ideally they'd show up in my inbox as emails, but that'
218.
by orib 18y ago
As far as I can tell, he's saying that history repeats itself, and the same sort of itch that Ruby on Rails scratches was also scratched in Cobol. This is definitely a recurring theme in computing -- "what's old is new again", "those who do
219.
Native Theora/Vorbis in Firefox(bluishcoder.co.nz)
2 points by orib 18y ago|0 comments
220.
by orib 18y ago
The biggest question in my mind when reading this article is "how are the relative costs and values actually being calculated?" How can we say that $1.00 spent on clean energy will bring $11.00 in benefits, when $1.00 on counter-terrorism w
221.
by orib 18y ago
It's an interesting mind game. Don't expect it to be happening any time.. uh.. more or less ever. From the article: ...were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available ... about 10^45 joules How mu
222.
by orib 18y ago
The developers still have to interact with people to figure out what they need to create. The people that they're extracting the information from may still be techies, but determining what you need to build is still key. And this is where I
223.
by orib 18y ago
What the green lobby can't do, it looks like economic pressures might be able to do. It's a pity that the gas prices will probably drive higher usage of cheap coal, instead of more environmentally friendly alternatives like geothermal, wind
224.
Repository Formats Matter(keithp.com)
2 points by orib 18y ago|0 comments
225.
by orib 18y ago
Let me be the first to say "WTF is this guy rambling about?" He doesn't seem to be talking about piracy... he seems to be talking about instant messaging. Mental breaks from the work we're doing. Not sitting and watching compiles scroll up
226.
by orib 18y ago
More like, they don't care about it, and accidentally forgot to update a table entry. This is why Linux lies and says it's Windows to ACPI. I strongly doubt that it's malicious, they just don't care enough to test it and keep it up to date
227.
by orib 18y ago
I found myself reading faster without this. It doesn't account for variations in how quickly I can recognize a word, or whether I had to think about what was just said. It just blats out the words in a monotone emphasis, demands complete at
228.
by orib 18y ago
What's different? I don't have to trust committers. People can commit to the repository without having their changes affect my work until I want them to. It's a pull model, instead of a push model, when you use it the way it was intended. T
229.
by orib 18y ago
"Assuming again that said student is excellent" That's a pretty big assumption. Realistically, they'll be about average. If you have significant numbers of immigrants, many of them will be below average (and many will be above) Besides, tha
230.
by orib 18y ago
Linux claims to support the ACPI standard. This motherboard claims to support the ACPI standard. Ergo, Linux support is implicitly claimed by transitivity, barring bugs. If you bought a desk that was rated for holding 100 pounds of stuff, a
231.
by orib 18y ago
http://news.ycombinator.org/formatdoc
232.
On Math Teaching: Lockhart's Lament(maa.org)
46 points by orib 18y ago|21 comments
233.
by orib 18y ago
It was prepared for an in-person talk at GUADEC (a Gnome conference). Documents don't work very well for presentations.
234.
by orib 18y ago
For my mobile devices, I'd rather see a modest computing power increase, and (assuming power per transistor shrinks such that power usage for a top-of-the-line CPU is approximately constant) we end up using around 5 to 10% of the current de
235.
by orib 18y ago
Or alternatively, they will have similar amounts of computing power, but will be much smaller, lighter, cheaper, and have a better battery life. If we're more careful programming, we can easily do all sorts of interesting stuff on the limit
236.
by orib 18y ago
No, I think that Google's lack of crap is their strong spot. When I want to search, a text box to type stuff into is exactly the design that I need. Any more than that, and you're sliding into irrelevant fluff. A good design means I get to
237.
by orib 18y ago
Possible, although it would be rather difficult to do well in a flexible manner, and would be unusable by every app that currently exists. More or less, it would be a replacement of the entire X event handling model, entire X drawing model,
238.
by orib 18y ago
That's the point. It's far easier to simply tack on more code to special case something than it is to come up with a simple solution that will gracefully handle all input. To take your example of the Windows scheduler, I would expect that t
239.
by orib 18y ago
Setting up the TLB and handling the page faults, then doing the interprocess synchronization can be expensive compared a write() for small one-shot transfers (which is what the bulk of X protocol traffic is). A write() is more or less a mem
240.
by orib 18y ago
Hm, I can't think of a good overview off the top of my head (maybe I should sit down and write a good one sometime), but the way it works is: An application will typically use a GUI toolkit like GTK or QT to do it's UI. This library will us

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