Last time I read that nanotech would replace hard disks, it was only five years away. That was two years ago. I'm very happy to see this story tagged "again".
The question I'm left with is this: If it was going to take five years two years ago, and now it will take ten years, will it take fifteen years or twenty years in two years time? Answer me that and I may bother to RTFA. Hey, explain my own question to me in comprehensible terms and I'll be impressed.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove, but who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
I'll wager a vinyl groove contains far more accurate information than a CD - at least the new HDLP format I'm pushing. I'm holding out for 33000 rpm 144 inch disks at 25 minutes per side.
Sure, you need a blobk and tackle to flip the record, but imagine the crispness of the hi hats.
And in the unlikely hypothesis developers succeed, Microsoft may call in all their patents and make half of Gnome illegal in the US.
While in the short term that would suck for the US, long term it could be a blessing.
What happens if Europe and Asia (particularly Europe) mandates the use of open and transparent software and standards in computing within government? Companies wanting government contracts may well find it cheaper and easier to adopt a strategy of switching over to F/OSS OSes. Then companies that have switched for government work may agree to communicate in the same open formats. I know I find it easier developing software for Unix environments on a unix like desktop - my brain wastes fewer cycles switching modes.
So in this hypothetical scenario, Europian and maybe Asian companies and governments switch largely to F/OSS - those that don't go under. The US stays with Windows and Gnome/Linux are illegal. US companies do business in the US and find it hard to gain entry into any overseas markets while the rest of the world thrives on cheaper open standards based software.
If you think this is a doom and gloom scenario for the US, think about it some more. How long would a situation like this last? Either the US then nukes the rest of the world for obstructing US commercial interests, or laws get changed, software patents are abolished and open standards are accepted if not endorsed by government elected by people who are sick of being isolated from the international community. This scenario is likely why Microsoft is buying up standards bodies around the world, particularly in poorer European states.
Sure there's some pain, but it's the inevitable pain caused by so emphatically embracing a single ideology (in the US case market driven capitalism) over more balanced policy. The pain should be relatively short lived.
Sometimes the default setting aren't right and you need to change a spec file or maybe the pachage it too old and you need to install a newer package.
Of course. Proves my point in part. The dependancy issues I was talking about were not so much the "can't satisfy that dependancy", but more along the lines of "installing this latest version of A depends on this version of B which depends on a version of C which depends on a different version of A then the one I'm installing and I didn't find out the depth of the problem until after I forced install. Then the rollback died in the arse, and I spent hours getting everything back to normal.
I could well have been doing it wrong, but despite the recalcitrant reputation of Debian users/devs, I found the information required to solve my problems easier to come by and I really never came across package situtations quite like I did with Mandrake.
I'm not trolling here, I encountered real problems and genuinely found them more difficult to fix. It has of course been ~5 years since I ditched Mandrake, so my memory of specifics is out, but it doesn't change the fact that I recall Mandrake with frustration and Debian with satisfaction.
I seem to have made a mistake in replying to the GGP, an off-topic troll who could have posted a "Why don't you just install Amiga OS?" type comment in response to a story about BBC Acorns to same effect. Replies will inevitably draw hordes of religious Amiga zealots, regardless of their relevance. Any comment along the lines of "it wasn't right for me" will be greeted with derision. Using colourful language will be called trolling.
URPMI is mandrake's package manager that resolves most of the problems people have with rpms. Usually You can use it directly on an RMP built for simular setup like redhat or whatever. In short, it was available since 7.2 or 8.0 times and already did what you liked about debian causing you to end up sticking with debian for some time. Just like with debian and Ubuntu, you have the different repositories that you can set up. There is even a website that has been setup to help find repositories including official and non official ones.
And yet I found it easier to solve dependancy issues without breaking something else. Last Mandrake I used was around 10 IIRC. It may be better now, but I'm not all that interested in looking anymore.
As a long time Mandriva user (since 1999) I never really saw the draw of Ubuntu.
Back in '99 I didn't use Mandriva, but I did use Mandrake. Tried a few versions, but after 10 I decided to check Debian out.
Debian was a little trickier to set up, but maintaining the system and installing packages was so much simpler. None of the sadistic insanity of rpm.
Unfortunately I found myself wanting to run bleeding edge stuff on Debian and that really sucked, so after hearing a bit about this "Ubuntu" thing, I switched. I haven't lokoed back.
Don't know where Mandriva is up to now, but I do know that Ubuntu has the best of the ease of use school (like Mandriva) with the best of sane package management (Debian) and that has me sold. That and the fact that Mandriva is a stupid, stupid name.
By the by, if you really want to pay money for commercial codecs and extra software badness, XandrOS is really worth a look.
People who have used SPDIF fiber optic audio will all agree that analog audio is obsolete.
That's for sure. Only I still can't figure out why my headphones seem to work fine when I plug them into my phone, but they don't work when I jam them into the spdif out on my soundcard....
It's not such a bad idea. I wonder what the copyright or patent implications of releasing software as "traditional" in the same way that old folk songs are marked traditional when they are scored?
Come on, don't be a simpleton. You don't see the difference in the reversal of cause and effect?
I actually think this whole argument is a load of BS. Saying "Technology breeds crime" is like saying "cutlery breeds obesity".
There's a relationship between obesity and cutlery, in that eating is neater with cutlery, but cutlery doesn't necessarily cause obesity any more than obesity requires cutlery to occur. There is no direct causal or effectual link.
"Will this prove any more successful than the two previous iterations of this offering?"
What piece of obvious and simple functionality that any reasonable person may expect to have included in such a device by default will be lacking?
Will I have to buy the entire Nokia VPN just to run a VPN client on this? Will I be able to charge it while I am transferring data to it? Will the software on the device be sufficient for me to manage the entire device without needing a copy of Microsoft Windows, and if not, will the package include a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows along with the "PC suite"?
I have owned a number of phones from a number of manufacturers, and while this is an "internet tablet" rather than a phone, my experience of Nokia is that they always omit some basic and fundamental piece of functionality.
In some cases they don't even offer their usual 5x acceptable price accessory - you have to buy after market and pray.
I really do like their stuff, but they sometimes do things that make me think they are brain dead.
Be careful there. Once you start applying exceptions to everything as if they are standard, you begin on a slippery slope, the stepth of which should not be underestimaterized.
So I suppose British English is the be-all and end-all of proper grammar, then?
British English has excellent grammar and spelling, but it lacks the word "trackie-dacks" and that's where it dies in the arse.
You can complain about American English when you guys figure out the concept of collective nouns and subject/verb agreement.
The entire gaggle of british subjects complain about anything and everything and invariably agree that none of it is quite up to scratch. Your use of the noun agreement, rather than the verb agree, is incorrect and demonstrates the point that Americans will unecessarily create overenounerations of verbs and extraverberaterize nouns.
Eh, isn't that simply the long s you're referring to?
I specifically referred to a page on a reproduction of a genuine contempory (to ol' Bill) print of a Shakespearian play. The word "suck" doesn't and didn't have a long s. On the page it is definitely spealt with "f" and there is a foreword which explains the frequent use of "f" instead of "s".
Yes, but they're all American dictionaries, so they don't really count, do they?
You'll also find "burglarize" in American dictionaries. There's already a prefectly good verb - burgle - from which comes burglar, but you guys get all confused about shortening a noun to verberize it, so you have to make a new, bigger verb so you can feel safe about conjugaterizationerizing that. Does my head in.
16th century - Shakespeare, more or less readable for modern English speakers without much editing.
The printing press was a major incentive to standardise spelling, but also let to one of the few problems translating/transcribing Shakespeare.
Early fonts put a curl to the left on the bottom of the lower case "f" making it look a bit like a letter "s". Because s is much more common than "f", early printers would run out of esses before effs and would substitute an eff for an ess when neceffary.
My dad has a reproduction of early prints of Shakspeare's plays and the Midsummer Nights Dream song "Where the bees suck, there suck I" is on one such page. This caused a bit of a stir backstage and had to be explained, apparently.
A similar thought occurred to me when I read ths summary.
Although I took it a bit further into the apparent repetition of certain features in nature. For example, when I grew up we had jumping ants with a really nasty sting that always lived near a plant which was a perfect anditote to the sting, and stinging trees always lived near their antidote, etc.
I digress. The initial thought was that cloves make a good local anesthetic for dental problems, but they burn like hell when you first chew them until the anesthetic kicks in. I'm wondering whether the mechanism that creates the burning sensation is similar to the burning of chili and whether they too open cell walls? Anyone have any insight into this?
Yeah, and there could be a huge Linux virus epidemic.
There is. Just about every Linux distro you could name, apart from Studio64 because it's stupid, leads users to install and recommend Linux distros to other users. As far as I know, they all include ed.
There's your malware propagation right there. Whilst ed doesn't harm your actual PC, it is so horrendously damaging to the PEBKAC (Person or Entity Between... etc) that it is by far the most dangerous malware in all history.
Slashdot Mirror
...that this time it will take ten years.
Last time I read that nanotech would replace hard disks, it was only five years away. That was two years ago. I'm very happy to see this story tagged "again".
The question I'm left with is this: If it was going to take five years two years ago, and now it will take ten years, will it take fifteen years or twenty years in two years time? Answer me that and I may bother to RTFA. Hey, explain my own question to me in comprehensible terms and I'll be impressed.
I'll wager a vinyl groove contains far more accurate information than a CD - at least the new HDLP format I'm pushing. I'm holding out for 33000 rpm 144 inch disks at 25 minutes per side.
Sure, you need a blobk and tackle to flip the record, but imagine the crispness of the hi hats.
Hahahahahahahahahaahaha!.
Lean, wel-Hahahahahahahahahaha!
Wait - wait - fas-Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Thanks kdawson, you made my day. Should have given it that foot icon though....
While in the short term that would suck for the US, long term it could be a blessing.
What happens if Europe and Asia (particularly Europe) mandates the use of open and transparent software and standards in computing within government? Companies wanting government contracts may well find it cheaper and easier to adopt a strategy of switching over to F/OSS OSes. Then companies that have switched for government work may agree to communicate in the same open formats. I know I find it easier developing software for Unix environments on a unix like desktop - my brain wastes fewer cycles switching modes.
So in this hypothetical scenario, Europian and maybe Asian companies and governments switch largely to F/OSS - those that don't go under. The US stays with Windows and Gnome/Linux are illegal. US companies do business in the US and find it hard to gain entry into any overseas markets while the rest of the world thrives on cheaper open standards based software.
If you think this is a doom and gloom scenario for the US, think about it some more. How long would a situation like this last? Either the US then nukes the rest of the world for obstructing US commercial interests, or laws get changed, software patents are abolished and open standards are accepted if not endorsed by government elected by people who are sick of being isolated from the international community. This scenario is likely why Microsoft is buying up standards bodies around the world, particularly in poorer European states.
Sure there's some pain, but it's the inevitable pain caused by so emphatically embracing a single ideology (in the US case market driven capitalism) over more balanced policy. The pain should be relatively short lived.
When thinking about Microsoft and patents on algorithms, I cant't help remembering the way toast goes black when I burn it - or paint it black.
Maybe I'm off-topic, or maybe you just can't see the meta4.
One thing about elections is people vote. Then sometimes the votes are counted. That's what I like about toast... and GloboCorp. Got me?
Then again, maybe some Australians are just Turkeys - y'know, the ones who get their values from the US?
Of course. Proves my point in part. The dependancy issues I was talking about were not so much the "can't satisfy that dependancy", but more along the lines of "installing this latest version of A depends on this version of B which depends on a version of C which depends on a different version of A then the one I'm installing and I didn't find out the depth of the problem until after I forced install. Then the rollback died in the arse, and I spent hours getting everything back to normal.
I could well have been doing it wrong, but despite the recalcitrant reputation of Debian users/devs, I found the information required to solve my problems easier to come by and I really never came across package situtations quite like I did with Mandrake.
I'm not trolling here, I encountered real problems and genuinely found them more difficult to fix. It has of course been ~5 years since I ditched Mandrake, so my memory of specifics is out, but it doesn't change the fact that I recall Mandrake with frustration and Debian with satisfaction.
I seem to have made a mistake in replying to the GGP, an off-topic troll who could have posted a "Why don't you just install Amiga OS?" type comment in response to a story about BBC Acorns to same effect. Replies will inevitably draw hordes of religious Amiga zealots, regardless of their relevance. Any comment along the lines of "it wasn't right for me" will be greeted with derision. Using colourful language will be called trolling.
And yet I found it easier to solve dependancy issues without breaking something else. Last Mandrake I used was around 10 IIRC. It may be better now, but I'm not all that interested in looking anymore.
Back in '99 I didn't use Mandriva, but I did use Mandrake. Tried a few versions, but after 10 I decided to check Debian out.
Debian was a little trickier to set up, but maintaining the system and installing packages was so much simpler. None of the sadistic insanity of rpm.
Unfortunately I found myself wanting to run bleeding edge stuff on Debian and that really sucked, so after hearing a bit about this "Ubuntu" thing, I switched. I haven't lokoed back.
Don't know where Mandriva is up to now, but I do know that Ubuntu has the best of the ease of use school (like Mandriva) with the best of sane package management (Debian) and that has me sold. That and the fact that Mandriva is a stupid, stupid name.
By the by, if you really want to pay money for commercial codecs and extra software badness, XandrOS is really worth a look.
That's for sure. Only I still can't figure out why my headphones seem to work fine when I plug them into my phone, but they don't work when I jam them into the spdif out on my soundcard....
It's not such a bad idea. I wonder what the copyright or patent implications of releasing software as "traditional" in the same way that old folk songs are marked traditional when they are scored?
I actually think this whole argument is a load of BS. Saying "Technology breeds crime" is like saying "cutlery breeds obesity".
There's a relationship between obesity and cutlery, in that eating is neater with cutlery, but cutlery doesn't necessarily cause obesity any more than obesity requires cutlery to occur. There is no direct causal or effectual link.
'So? What i's your point?
To answer a question with a question:
What piece of obvious and simple functionality that any reasonable person may expect to have included in such a device by default will be lacking?
Will I have to buy the entire Nokia VPN just to run a VPN client on this? Will I be able to charge it while I am transferring data to it? Will the software on the device be sufficient for me to manage the entire device without needing a copy of Microsoft Windows, and if not, will the package include a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows along with the "PC suite"?
I have owned a number of phones from a number of manufacturers, and while this is an "internet tablet" rather than a phone, my experience of Nokia is that they always omit some basic and fundamental piece of functionality.
In some cases they don't even offer their usual 5x acceptable price accessory - you have to buy after market and pray.
I really do like their stuff, but they sometimes do things that make me think they are brain dead.
s/re/fuck/g
Hey fucktard, thefucks nothing wrong with fuckvising the English language. In fact, you'fuck already been left behind! ROFLCOPTFUCK!
The phrase I believe you'fuck looking for is "I could cafuck less"!!!
Be careful there. Once you start applying exceptions to everything as if they are standard, you begin on a slippery slope, the stepth of which should not be underestimaterized.
British English has excellent grammar and spelling, but it lacks the word "trackie-dacks" and that's where it dies in the arse.
The entire gaggle of british subjects complain about anything and everything and invariably agree that none of it is quite up to scratch. Your use of the noun agreement, rather than the verb agree, is incorrect and demonstrates the point that Americans will unecessarily create overenounerations of verbs and extraverberaterize nouns.
I specifically referred to a page on a reproduction of a genuine contempory (to ol' Bill) print of a Shakespearian play. The word "suck" doesn't and didn't have a long s. On the page it is definitely spealt with "f" and there is a foreword which explains the frequent use of "f" instead of "s".
Has your house ever been burglared?
Yes, but they're all American dictionaries, so they don't really count, do they?
You'll also find "burglarize" in American dictionaries. There's already a prefectly good verb - burgle - from which comes burglar, but you guys get all confused about shortening a noun to verberize it, so you have to make a new, bigger verb so you can feel safe about conjugaterizationerizing that. Does my head in.
No, American dictionaries don't count, sorry.
The printing press was a major incentive to standardise spelling, but also let to one of the few problems translating/transcribing Shakespeare.
Early fonts put a curl to the left on the bottom of the lower case "f" making it look a bit like a letter "s". Because s is much more common than "f", early printers would run out of esses before effs and would substitute an eff for an ess when neceffary.
My dad has a reproduction of early prints of Shakspeare's plays and the Midsummer Nights Dream song "Where the bees suck, there suck I" is on one such page. This caused a bit of a stir backstage and had to be explained, apparently.
The version I heard was about a wombat. For those who don't know, a wombat is smallish four legged burrowing marsipual which eats roots and leaves.
How can there be any debate? The only answer is Boating and Sailing Distribution.
A similar thought occurred to me when I read ths summary.
Although I took it a bit further into the apparent repetition of certain features in nature. For example, when I grew up we had jumping ants with a really nasty sting that always lived near a plant which was a perfect anditote to the sting, and stinging trees always lived near their antidote, etc.
I digress. The initial thought was that cloves make a good local anesthetic for dental problems, but they burn like hell when you first chew them until the anesthetic kicks in. I'm wondering whether the mechanism that creates the burning sensation is similar to the burning of chili and whether they too open cell walls? Anyone have any insight into this?
There is. Just about every Linux distro you could name, apart from Studio64 because it's stupid, leads users to install and recommend Linux distros to other users. As far as I know, they all include ed.
There's your malware propagation right there. Whilst ed doesn't harm your actual PC, it is so horrendously damaging to the PEBKAC (Person or Entity Between ... etc) that it is by far the most dangerous malware in all history.