Stitching these together requires 0 effort in any modern photographic editing software.
I actually wrote a little piece of software to automate the stitching process. Just feed the script a bunch of scanned images and it'll align and stitch the images for you. Never got around to make a proper OSS project for it or advertise it, though.
It looks like PySide are huge (3x the size of PyQt and 6x the size of SMOKE-generated bindings!) and there is very little improvement they can do if they keep on using Boost::Python to generate PySide.
You're right: the current size of PySide is an issue, especially if you consider mobile environments such as Maemo, let alone the S60 platform. However, that's also why we are working on Shiboken, an alternate binding component which would create CPython extensions directly instead of using Boost.Python as an intermediate layer. Shiboken is still in its infancy, but we expect we'll be able to solve the size issues for once and all, while retaining full Python-level compatibility with the current bindings.
Unfortunately, there's not much info on this yet, but check our repo for the source code: qt.gitorius.org/pyside.
I'm not sure I'll take horticultural advice from someone who has a _rubber_ plant on his desk...
Uh, rubber plants (Ficus elastica) are common household plants, and while they might not be the most difficult plants to keep alive, they still are real, living entities, instead of being made of rubber, as you seem to suggest. I'm not sure I'd listen to critique of one's horticultural knowledge from someone who doesn't even know the rubber plant...
Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to run the Flash stuff in its own process? You could either use Macromedia's own standalone player or make your own standalone Flash player program using the Flash player plugin. This program could then be embedded in your browser of choice. That way you could run 32-bit browser plugins in x86-64.
Actually, I would prefer having browser plugins in their on processes even on pure 32-bit environments, so that you couldn't crash the browser with ill-behaved plugins.
Two billion years ago there existed only prokaryotic bacteria. The impact the articles are talking about was the end of the Permian era. It happened about 250 million years ago (as stated in the article). Both the Guardian's and Slashdot's articles are mistitled.
Re:How much was operating revenue?
on
MandrakeSoft Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
[...] but their page asks for personal info
so I went away and soon switched distros for this
and other reasons.
As MandrakeSoft is a European company, I don't think their request for personal information is really a good reason for not choosing them. European privacy legislature is actually quite strict and pro-consumer, and any entity collecting personal information must have a clear and valid reason for doing so. The information also cannot be sold to 3rd parties without the customer's consent, nor can it be sold/transferred to countries with insufficient privacy legislature (e.g. USA). There might be other reasons for not choosing Mandrake, but I don't think privacy concern is one of them.
Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?
Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?
But that is telecommunications, where the prefixes have been always powers of ten. If your data is lying still (or maybe rotating 60 rounds per second), it's powers of two, but if it's travelling through wires or thin air, it's powers of ten. Simple, ne?
The article at Tom's specifically mentions that the Mobile Athlon 4 will be available in a ball-grid array (BGA) package as well, so the processor certainly will be usable in the less than 2 kg segment as well.
Probably Anand just didn't check his facts carefully enough.
But if the DSP sources would have been open-sourced as well, it would have been possible to port them to other Winmodem (and ISDN4Linux) hardware as well. That would have made a huge difference.
Well, if those fans were spinning at a million RPM, as suggested by the article, any noise they did generate would be in the ultrasonic range, don'cha think?
The blade noise indeed might be. However, you would be pressing large amounts of air through a narrow hole, and that forced flow would still create audible effects. Air moving at a fast speed tends to create noise, as completely non-turbulent airflow is hard (impossible?) to achieve. And turbulence equals to rapid air pressure variations which, well, equals to sound.
I doubt those microfans really would reduce the noise generated by the fans. First of all, the efficiency of air cooling is determined mainly by the volume velocity of the airflow, and you'll still have to blow the same amount of air with the microfan technology -- with fans with no aerodynamic/acoustic design. Size of the fan does matter, though. Usually bigger is better (quieter). Blade noise is easier to handle with big, slowly rotating blades. Microfans seem to move into opposite direction, suggesting they might be even noisier than conventional fans.
There are ways to get rid of the noise, though. This site is a good starting point for screwing that silencer on your PC. Particularly, there was an interesting link to a Korean company, which is going to introduce a free-flow refridgeration system for computers. With that, you can throw away every (except the power source) fan from your computer. Hopefully it'll work as well as they tell.
I wonder why this thing was not built around a recumbent bicycle. When trying to re-invent a bicycle, it would make sense to base the design around a recumbent frame, thanks to their better efficiency and comfort (diamond-frame bicycles do cause impotence by hindering blood-flow in your groin, after all).
There are a lot of different applications where you can publicly perform software without distributing it. We need to have the source distribution requirement connected to public performance or making the software available for use rather than distribution.
In practice, I do not see that as much of an issue. No sensible ASP would make any modifications to a GPL'd software without intention to publish the changes, even though the license allows it.
Any significant use of modified GPL code would severely devalue the company, since in case of a company merger or purchase, you would lose that code. For any software company, selling the individual licenses or selling the whole company are just different sides of the coin. Essentially, in both cases you are only selling same software. In former case, you are selling limited rights to use the product, but in the latter, you are selling the software, the technological know-how and the brand associated with that software.
For the reasons above, any company sale would in my opinion count as distribution of software, at least when the company is selling any service directly dependent on that software. If that was not the case, it would be trivial to sell modified GPL code by separating the code to a subsidiary and then selling that subsidiary.
I think the main point here is not about dominating the PDA field, it is about which operating system gets chosen for the mobile multimedia terminals. Face it, mobile wide-band technologies are here in 2-3 years. First there will be GPRS (GSM Packet Radio Service), which provides connectionless data transmission through GSM networks with a reasonable bandwidth. A couple of year from that, 3rd gen. mobile networks will be emerging, and they will provide 256 Kb/s - 2 Mb/s of bandwidth. Think about it, that will make continuous real-time multimedia streaming feasible. Streaming Mp3 or even MPEG4 to your mobile terminal! Now when you think that in the most advanced countries (Finland, that is), already 85% of the active population have cellular phones, and current mobile phones will be gradually upgraded to mobile multimedia terminals, dominance on that market begins to look pretty important. The PDA, or even the desktop market, seems almost insignificant in comparison. Since ALL of the major mobile players are with Symbian, and none (AFAIK) with Microsoft, it -- at the moment, at least -- seems like MS is missing their launch window to the major market of the future! Interesting, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Stitching these together requires 0 effort in any modern photographic editing software.
I actually wrote a little piece of software to automate the stitching process. Just feed the script a bunch of scanned images and it'll align and stitch the images for you. Never got around to make a proper OSS project for it or advertise it, though.
It's here: http://mairas.net/wiki/Mapstitch
Hi,
I'm the Nokia guy responsible for the project.
It looks like PySide are huge (3x the size of PyQt and 6x the size of SMOKE-generated bindings!) and there is very little improvement they can do if they keep on using Boost::Python to generate PySide.
You're right: the current size of PySide is an issue, especially if you consider mobile environments such as Maemo, let alone the S60 platform. However, that's also why we are working on Shiboken, an alternate binding component which would create CPython extensions directly instead of using Boost.Python as an intermediate layer. Shiboken is still in its infancy, but we expect we'll be able to solve the size issues for once and all, while retaining full Python-level compatibility with the current bindings.
Unfortunately, there's not much info on this yet, but check our repo for the source code: qt.gitorius.org/pyside.
Ctrl-Tab? No. Alt-Tab? No. Ctrl-Backspace? No. Alt-Backspace? No. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace? Arrrr!
Actually that is a daily issue for us EMACS users with poor memory. Sigh.
I'm not sure I'll take horticultural advice from someone who has a _rubber_ plant on his desk ...
Uh, rubber plants (Ficus elastica) are common household plants, and while they might not be the most difficult plants to keep alive, they still are real, living entities, instead of being made of rubber, as you seem to suggest. I'm not sure I'd listen to critique of one's horticultural knowledge from someone who doesn't even know the rubber plant...
Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to run the Flash stuff in its own process? You could either use Macromedia's own standalone player or make your own standalone Flash player program using the Flash player plugin. This program could then be embedded in your browser of choice. That way you could run 32-bit browser plugins in x86-64.
Actually, I would prefer having browser plugins in their on processes even on pure 32-bit environments, so that you couldn't crash the browser with ill-behaved plugins.
Two billion years ago there existed only prokaryotic bacteria. The impact the articles are talking about was the end of the Permian era. It happened about 250 million years ago (as stated in the article). Both the Guardian's and Slashdot's articles are mistitled.
[...] but their page asks for personal info so I went away and soon switched distros for this and other reasons.
As MandrakeSoft is a European company, I don't think their request for personal information is really a good reason for not choosing them. European privacy legislature is actually quite strict and pro-consumer, and any entity collecting personal information must have a clear and valid reason for doing so. The information also cannot be sold to 3rd parties without the customer's consent, nor can it be sold/transferred to countries with insufficient privacy legislature (e.g. USA). There might be other reasons for not choosing Mandrake, but I don't think privacy concern is one of them.
As is so often the case, it's humans that are the weakest link.
So true. That's why I never, ever have given my email address to anyone!
m.
Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?
Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?
But that is telecommunications, where the prefixes have been always powers of ten. If your data is lying still (or maybe rotating 60 rounds per second), it's powers of two, but if it's travelling through wires or thin air, it's powers of ten. Simple, ne?
Indeed. One might even consider using lossy compression for packing the DNA.
The article at Tom's specifically mentions that the Mobile Athlon 4 will be available in a ball-grid array (BGA) package as well, so the processor certainly will be usable in the less than 2 kg segment as well.
Probably Anand just didn't check his facts carefully enough.
But if the DSP sources would have been open-sourced as well, it would have been possible to port them to other Winmodem (and ISDN4Linux) hardware as well. That would have made a huge difference.
This is a good beginning, though.
Well, if those fans were spinning at a million RPM, as suggested by the article, any noise they did generate would be in the ultrasonic range, don'cha think?
The blade noise indeed might be. However, you would be pressing large amounts of air through a narrow hole, and that forced flow would still create audible effects. Air moving at a fast speed tends to create noise, as completely non-turbulent airflow is hard (impossible?) to achieve. And turbulence equals to rapid air pressure variations which, well, equals to sound.
I doubt those microfans really would reduce the noise generated by the fans. First of all, the efficiency of air cooling is determined mainly by the volume velocity of the airflow, and you'll still have to blow the same amount of air with the microfan technology -- with fans with no aerodynamic/acoustic design. Size of the fan does matter, though. Usually bigger is better (quieter). Blade noise is easier to handle with big, slowly rotating blades. Microfans seem to move into opposite direction, suggesting they might be even noisier than conventional fans.
There are ways to get rid of the noise, though. This site is a good starting point for screwing that silencer on your PC. Particularly, there was an interesting link to a Korean company, which is going to introduce a free-flow refridgeration system for computers. With that, you can throw away every (except the power source) fan from your computer. Hopefully it'll work as well as they tell.
plenty of humans now have radio phones and organs they weren't born with
Heck, I even have clothes I wasn't born with...
I wonder why this thing was not built around a recumbent bicycle. When trying to re-invent a bicycle, it would make sense to base the design around a recumbent frame, thanks to their better efficiency and comfort (diamond-frame bicycles do cause impotence by hindering blood-flow in your groin, after all).
See IHPVA home page for more details.
There are a lot of different applications where you can publicly perform software without distributing it. We need to have the source distribution requirement connected to public performance or making the software available for use rather than distribution.
In practice, I do not see that as much of an issue. No sensible ASP would make any modifications to a GPL'd software without intention to publish the changes, even though the license allows it.
Any significant use of modified GPL code would severely devalue the company, since in case of a company merger or purchase, you would lose that code. For any software company, selling the individual licenses or selling the whole company are just different sides of the coin. Essentially, in both cases you are only selling same software. In former case, you are selling limited rights to use the product, but in the latter, you are selling the software, the technological know-how and the brand associated with that software.
For the reasons above, any company sale would in my opinion count as distribution of software, at least when the company is selling any service directly dependent on that software. If that was not the case, it would be trivial to sell modified GPL code by separating the code to a subsidiary and then selling that subsidiary.
Just my 2 €,
mairas
I think the main point here is not about dominating the PDA field, it is about which operating system gets chosen for the mobile multimedia terminals. Face it, mobile wide-band technologies are here in 2-3 years. First there will be GPRS (GSM Packet Radio Service), which provides connectionless data transmission through GSM networks with a reasonable bandwidth. A couple of year from that, 3rd gen. mobile networks will be emerging, and they will provide 256 Kb/s - 2 Mb/s of bandwidth. Think about it, that will make continuous real-time multimedia streaming feasible. Streaming Mp3 or even MPEG4 to your mobile terminal! Now when you think that in the most advanced countries (Finland, that is), already 85% of the active population have cellular phones, and current mobile phones will be gradually upgraded to mobile multimedia terminals, dominance on that market begins to look pretty important. The PDA, or even the desktop market, seems almost insignificant in comparison. Since ALL of the major mobile players are with Symbian, and none (AFAIK) with Microsoft, it -- at the moment, at least -- seems like MS is missing their launch window to the major market of the future! Interesting, isn't it?