What I find weird here is that this is being construed as "woo, Intel takes on RISC", whereas the actual situation is "woo, commodity microprocessors can now take on the low-volume, high-margin, high-availability big business end of the computer market". RISC has nothing to do with it - in an alternate universe*, it could have been VAXes running Ultrix that Intel was going up against, and the language would be completely identical. The big deal is that Intel Xeons can now go into systems that compete on high-end features with large, enterprise SPARC and Power systems, and just as importantly, that you can run workloads on the Xeons that you used to run on SPARC or Power systems. This is as much about the fact that Xeons can run Linux or Solaris about as well as SPARC or Power can run their respective Unices, and that the software is available across all three platforms. Not to mention, Xeons can now supplant Itaniums, but let's just dance around that subject thanks very much.:-)
What has happened though, is that in the lazy shorthand of business computing journalism, RISC has become equated with "large SMP machines with lots of HA features produced by vertically integrated companies like IBM, Oracle, HP and Fujitsu." It's a bit like equating V8 with "heavy car with terrible handling and fuel economy" because you happened to be writing about the American car market in the 1950s.
* a universe in which DEC managed to make VAXes actually go fast somehow
Yes... the doctor I saw for my amazingly painful and enormous bursitis, that happened to be next to a skin graze that wasn't healing quickly, implied that I was a panicky wimp when I asked him for an antibiotic prescription in case it happened to turn out to be infected. So I didn't get the prescription filled, and instead drove back out of town to the farm where I live.
Two hours later I was running a fever and driving back into town to get the antibiotics, and a month later I was still taking antibiotics trying to fight off the cellulitis that left my elbow and upper forearm looking like Popeye's from the swelling. I'm glad I got the antibiotics when I did, as a year or so later, a neighbour ended up in hospital for months after getting pretty damn close to multiple organ failure when he tried to to tough out a persistent infection by himself. He needed skin grafts to replace all the skin that died. Got to love this clean country living...
Keeping a cancer cell culture alive indefinitely is not quite the same challenge as keeping a organised colony of differentiated cells performing very different roles alive. For cells to turn cancerous, they must suppress the programmed cell death mechanisms that exist to kill off cells with damaged DNA. Cancer cells don't care about DNA damage at all - they are little defectors in the long-running prisoner's dilemma game that all cells play in a multicellular organism, and the cancer cells with too much damage just get crowded out by the cells that are still able to divide and run their metabolism. The individual cells sure aren't immortal - just like individual bacteria aren't immortal.
It would be interesting to know how often HeLa cultures end up genetically distinct from their parent cultures - how fitting, if a cancer were itself to get cancer...
A few years back, when last I looked, the BSAA (local Australian tentacle/surrogate of the BSA) were treating each PC sold as representing a certain quantity of licensed software that would be in use. They then compared this with some software license sales figures (the accuracy of which is another question), and if there were more deemed licenses in use through new PC sales than there were actual license sales, (guess what! there were!!) then that was their damning evidence that teh piratez were stealing Christmas.
This meant that some 40 staff desktops and 120 teaching laboratory computers at my workplace (a university CS department) which were bought with no OS license and installed with Debian, actually contributed to the BSAA's frothy-mouthed argument that rampant piracy was costing Australia many quality local jobs employing drones to process purchases of software produced overseas by US companies... that incidentally booked most of their profits via subsidiaries based in Ireland, thanks to its low low rate of corporate tax at that time.
So there you have it: - I am a pirate - my work was full of piracy - you probably are a pirate too
because I/they/you have the temerity to buy machines with no OS to run free operating systems and free applications.
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
7kWh x $0.20 x 365 = $511/year. That looks like 7.63 years to get to $3900. To "match" that, your $3900 would need to be invested to get a 13.1% yearly return in order to generate $511. 13% is not easy to come by.
One often overlooked factor for energy saving or generating investments is that money saved is equivalent to a tax-free income. If you take your $3900 and manage to get a return of $511/year you would have to pay taxes on that income. I don't really know what the average tax rate is in Australia, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that for every dollar earned over $3700, it is 30% (15% at $6k, 30% at $37k, 37% at $80k and 45% at 180k). Assuming your income is between $37k and $80k, you actually need an investment return of $730 so that when you pay your 30% ($219) you are left with the desired $511. $730 is a bit more than 17.1% of $3900 by the way.
D'oh - thanks for spotting my arithmetic screwup. Serves me right for posting in haste. And you have a great point about how the savings work out w.r.t. marginal tax rates. Consider me corrected...
I gather that solar water heating is the real way to make a "safe" investment for most moderate climates like the USA. The systems are very simple and relatively inexpensive. Even in upstate NY, estimates are that 50% of one's water heating can be provided by a solar system. Particularly for those who heat their water with electricity those can be pretty significant cost savings.
But as you say - before any new system is installed, caulking of cracks and insulation (with maybe some shade tree planting for the long term) has an even quicker return on investment.
Yes, after stopping up cracks and installing insulation, solar water heating is the best thing that we can do here in Australia as well - using thermal solar energy to supplant electrical resistive heating is incredibly appropriate. For places without enough sun, there are air-to-water heat pump hot water systems which make more sense than resistive heating for the coastal regions of Australia; they aren't much good for winter in the high country though - we get down to -8 deg C at night, which is nothing compared to lots of Europe and North America, but much lower than the coastal areas. I suspect that the higher humidity at the coast may help a bit too with how much heat you can extract from the (above-freezing) air.
This is not surprising, but not that encouraging either. If you pay for a bit of fancy landscaping and planting around your house before you sell it, you can often improve your house resale value by much more than the cost of the work. Solar also offers a warm glow of righteousness far out of proportion with energy generated.
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
For years, I was holding out for Nanosolar or First Solar to get domestic panels out at somewhere nearer to $2/kW and without so much embodied energy in the panels, but they don't look to be interested in domestic sales. Until then, the only reason that panels are cheap in Australia is because of very high government regulated feed-in tariffs and purchase subsidies, which are just middle-class welfare masquerading as a renewable energy policy.
Until the government killed the program, there were businesses here doing energy efficiency assessments to see if houses qualified for interest free government loans to improve energy efficiency or install solar systems. An interview I heard with one assessor gave the impression that most houses had considerable inefficiency to rectify before it made any sense installing generating capacity. New Australian houses are still much less insulated than new houses in northern Europe or North America, rely too much on resistive electrical heating for the house and for the hot water supply, and the current fashion for building faux-Mediterranean rendered boxes with no roof overhang guarantees high cooling costs in summer. Old Australian houses often had no (as in, ZERO) insulation in them. Visitors from northern Europe are amazed at how uncomfortable and slapdash many of our houses are.
Or perhaps you were meant to write that by vast forces beyond your control, which acted through you to correct that misuse?
Seriously, folks, it's best to read your posting carefully if the whole reason for your posting is to encourage correct English usage.
Enough with the meta-pedantry, on with the nerdy reminiscences of old-school CGI... anyone who thinks that the original Tron graphics look cheesy should read more about what went into that film; when I saw that film in 1982, it was far ahead of anything else that had been done with computer animation in the mainstream media.
When you understand how much traditional effects and animation handiwork went into fusing the CGI with the actors and animation, it's clear that the film effects were as good as you could make them with that technology at that time. With a bit better script, it could have been a much better film.
You obviously never used the Sun Member Support Center. Getting a report on your installed base felt like one of those children's book with the 45rpm record that would read a few words to you and then play a xylophone note when you should turn the page:
20 rows of results... ding! Turn the page! Another 20 rows... ding! Losing will to live... ding!
...with no apparent way to export the data as a big file. Wow, who would have thought that the big future of computing was somebody copying and pasting rows of data from a #$)@ Web app.
If only Sun had spent less time on all their zero-revenue "Project [some fancy name]" boondoggles, and more on Project Let's Not Piss Off Our Existing Customers.
Linux fdisk or GNU parted - change the units to sectors and you can then print the partition table out in raw sector LBA offsets.
There's another gotcha for FAT filesystems on SDHC, in that the filesystem metadata at the start of the partition has no natural power-of-two alignment. If you look into the FAT filesystem that a digital camera puts on an SD card when you format it, I suspect that you'll see a bunch of reserved sectors as padding before the FATs, to ensure that the first data sector lines up nicely with a flash write cell.
Clusters are numbered beginning after the root directory with cluster 2. The following formula will convert the file start cluster (X) in 0x1a to the number of sectors from the beginning of the partition using the Boot Sector fields:
The reserved sectors field is 2 bytes, which allows padding of the alignment of the start of the data clusters to NAND flash write blocks, or even possible an erase block if that would somehow help. (erase blocks on a cheaper Intel SSD are 512kB, not sure about the sizes on SDHC cards or thumb drives).
More than a decade after hard drives stopped internally using a fixed cylinder/head/sector geometry, we finally get mass market deployment of a partitioning scheme that completely gets rid of this big, dumb lie.
All the hoo-haa over new drives with 4kB sectors and the way that DOS-compatible operating systems partitioning tools want you to lay out your disk has actually already been experienced by sysadmins for years, when they attempt to come up with partitioning schemes for those operating systems that align filesystem blocks with the underlying geometry of SSD write blocks or RAID 5 stripe segments.
Next time you buy an SD card or thumb drive, stick it into a box with a decent formatting tool and look at the actual start sector for the partitions. You will find that the manufacturers have quietly been using sane partition start sector values (i.e., power of two, not "first sector of second track of cylinder 0") because they know that the performance of the device would be horrible if almost every VFAT cluster write spanned multiple flash write blocks.
And all this stuffing around has been forced upon us because Microsoft never had the balls to say, "you want to rock out with Borland Sidekick or Netware 3.0? Sure, use a frickin' VM, or use a new version of DOS that speaks native LBA to the BIOS. Those are your choices."
All the brainpower and effort that has been wasted on workarounds for the effects of the brain damaged MBR partitioning table could have been much better used actually improving how computers worked, rather than treading water.
Unless you actually need to update the entire screen at 60Hz, the method scales pretty well.
Video compression works great for a talking head or pan shots in movies, but try watching HD video of surf breaking, or the tracking shots of (round) football stars running around after scoring a goal, with the fans all going crazy behind them, and you will see from all the lovely blocking artifacts that HD video compression is built on some pretty narrow assumptions.
In fact, a friend of mine has for many years made many sorts of computer animation with lots of twiddly stuff evolving all over the screen, and for a long time it was a toss up whether it was better to distribute it on a VHS tape or compressed with the codecs of the day.
If you think that Tokay is a poor name for an Australian fortified wine made "in the Tokay style", you'll be happy to know that an Australian wine industry body, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to rebrand Tokayoid Australian wines as "Topaque".
FSM knows where they got that name from... I guess you are supposed to drink it while sitting on leatherette sofas, wearing diamonique jewelery.
The level of understanding of Internet issues displayed by the Australian Communications Minister is stunning.
Ted Stevens: the Internet is a series of tubes. Stephen Conroy: unsecured wireless access points are transparent tubes that it is a deep invasion of privacy to look through.
Dear Minister: Driving past a house and picking up traffic on an unsecured wireless network is like walking past the house of a stupid person who is using his hands-free phone by standing on the roof of his house and shouting a conversation down to where his phone is lying. You are bound to hear something that ought to have been private had the person not been communicating in a stupid way.
But this privacy beatup has caused the Minister to bring forth this gem, taken from Conroy slams "creepy" Google:
"I think that the approach taken by Mr Schmidt is a bit creepy, frankly," Senator Conroy said.
"When it comes to their attitude to their own censorship, their response is simply, 'trust us'. That is what they actually state on their website: 'Trust us'."
Indeed. Well, I think the approach taken by Stephen Conroy to Internet censorship is a bit creepy, frankly.
When it comes to his attitude to the Australian Government's own censorship scheme and its secret list of forbidden sites, his response is simply, 'trust us'.
It is increasingly clear that we can trust Minister Conroy to act on his gut feelings.
Snooping fragments of unsecured wireless comms feels like an invasion of privacy, therefore must be bad.
Websites which offend against his sense of decency feels bad, therefore he must prevent as many people as possible from seeing them.
AUD$43B National Broadband Network? Feels so good that a cost/benefit analysis is clearly superfluous.
Yeah, I'm getting a pretty good idea of what I can trust Minister Conroy to do.
I expect they are now regretting that the barriers they put in place to prevent IE6 being displaced by Firefox, Opera, and other browsers is now effective at preventing IE6 from being displaced by another browser from themselves.
-- Terry
Yes, and if they think that everybody uses IE6 is is misguided, or stupid, and would be so much better running IE9 instead of IE6, they they're kidding themselves. The only reason I EVER use Internet Explorer is when I need to use some broken POC corporate web (site/app) that doesn't work under Firefox/Seamonkey. The version of IE with maximum chance of behaving right with those brain damaged web sites is IE6. So tell me again why I want IE9 instead of IE6?
Perhaps a petition: "Dear Microsoft - please understand that many people still use IE6 because they need to use the web sites that you encouraged web developers to create way back when IE6 was supposed to take over the world. Stop ranting at users to upgrade to IE9; instead apologize to web developers for leading them up the garden path, and ask them to fix their broken web sites to comply with genuine cross-platform standards."
If the broken web sites got fixed, Microsoft could upgrade my installation of IE6 to IE13 for all I care. It's not like I would actually use it as my main browser out of choice.
I just don't like the idea of the justice system being subverted in such a way that a corporation can sue someone anonymously, and I don't like the idea of a family being destroyed financially because their kid downloaded a movie, when otherwise shoplifting the movie would be a petty theft charge.
I see what you mean, but I also find it incredible that people should be surprised when torrenting a recently released Oscar-winning film draws down an almightly shitstorm upon their heads.
It's not like the people who made the film are being particularly greedy. Look at the takings for the film, compared to the budget: it doesn't take a genius to guess that if the grosses barely add to the estimated movie budget, the people who made the film are probably still trying to break even. Is it any surprise that they're a bit touchy about piracy of the movie?
I would rather see them out of business if this is the only way they can make money. I'm a model mpaa customer. I have over 200 bluray movies purchased, but they would still label me a criminal because I have taken (at considerable effort) the evil step of digitizing all my movies (ripped and encoded to my fileserver in mkv). I have a live copy, and a backup, and the physical copy sits in a closet. They have never been shared. If I lived in America, they would undoubtedly sue me if they discovered what I have done.
Allowing me to rip movies harms their business plan of reselling the same movie every format change.
Fuck them.
Well, yes, to the extent that rightsholders froth at the mouth about how people who subvert region coding or format shift are filthy pirates, fuck that, or them, big time. I too am tired of being called a pirate for playing the content I bought legal copies of, in the privacy of my own home, or own head(phones). It is a particular insult when nobody gives enough of a damn about a movie to release it in this region (4, FWIW), or if the local release is done by clowns who screw the DVD authoring process and get the interlacing wrong. Yes, fuck that.
But, frankly, if people are so impatient to gobble up new shiny things that they torrent brand new movies and music, it is naive of them not to expect some trouble to come out of it sooner or later. A person who draws courage from the fact that they have already torrented a pile of new releases without getting sued is like a person deciding that nobody can catch them shoplifting because they have pulled it off a few times. How are either of them to know whether their efforts have gone unnoticed?
People, if you want to watch the film for little or no money, there is a sure-fire way:
JUST
GODDAM
WAIT.
There is such a flood of new stuff coming out, courtesy of our collective fetish for endless growth, that most games, albums and DVDs get heavily discounted within a year of release. Not only that, but the older a film gets, the more second-hand copies float around, or if you still want to hoist the jolly roger, you could get a cheap bunch of weekly rentals, and then, y'know... [looking around furtively] rip them yourself.
Bear in mind that for most of recorded history, incredibly harsh punishments have been meted to ordinary folk for trivial crimes, just to set an example. None of this trouble is new, or unexpected. For the moment, the laws are what they are; arguing over their justice is almost impossible when there is so much hypocrisy and willful confusion coming from both sides of the debate.
But nobody gets arrested for waiting to see whether a thing they want gets cheaper.
Breaking a business model is not the same as piracy.
Buying a video games device and using it as a paperweight may cost the manufacturer money, *if* their business model depends on selling lots of software per console sold to recoup the cost of the hardware. This was true for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I doubt that Nintendo is losing money on DS sales. It is a legal use of the console in any case.
Running independently developed (i.e. not using restricted SDKs or devkits) homebrew software on a DS is not piracy. It is the same to Nintendo as if I bought the DS to hold down some paper.
I bought a Nintendo DS. I bought one cartridge: Korg Ds-10. I will probably buy another cartridge: Korg DS-10 Plus. I am not a pirate, even if I don't buy as many cartridges as Nintendo would like me to buy. I also have a DS TT cart, for if I get motivated to write or run homebrew on the DS. Again, not pirating, but not giving Nintendo a whole lot of extra dollars.
Am I stealing from Nintendo simply by not fitting their model of how somebody should use a legally bought DS? What is the difference to them between me buying it to hold down paper, and to run software that they did not license? Is it that I'm having too much fun by running homebrew on my DS instead of using it to hold down paper? How do they know how much happiness a paperweight brings to me?
As for future devices, I look forward to when there is a little more choice of general purpose, open devices in the DS form factor and with similar features. I'll be quite happy to abandon "piracy" and Nintendo's hardware platform altogether to run homebrew on something made by people who don't call me a criminal. But my moving to a different homebrew platform won't make me buy any more DS cartridges. In fact, eventually my DS might well end up (legally) holding down some paper.
If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites. I used to have a hell of a time finding the download I needed — and I was a Sun employee.
I did always wonder if there was somebody inside Sun who thought their incoherent "choose your own adventure" web presence was actually the best that they could manage, or whether it was the product of a fragmented and dysfunctional organisation that didn't actually care.
But once I realised that the Sun management loved Java so much that they insisted on calling everything "Java [mumble]", even their Linux environment which AFAIK contained precious little actual Java, I knew that there was a lot of self delusion going on at that company. I had to reassure a number of people old enough to remember the wretched "Javastations" that there was none of that "Java crap" in the Java Desktop System. It seems that the corporate memory of Sun's failures has been maintained mostly outside the company.
The C128 did, but the reasons for it doing so are mind-bendingly awful.
There were references to a Z80 CP/M cartridge in the C64 Programmer's Reference Manual. Not sure how well it worked or whether it made it to market.
The VIC certainly had a mechanism for attaching multiple expansion cartridges to an external expander, but my memory fails me on whether the C64 had similar. Here in.au, any interesting C64 accessories made in the USA tended to be expensive and hence rare.
Think about it; if devs were required to provide everything needed to run a GPL program, then they would have to provide a Windows license for every GPL program written to run on Windows.
Not to mention a PC on which to run that Windows license, and a generator or other plausible power source to run the machine. Maybe a desk and chair, too. Boy, I can see why Microsoft hates the GPL! They already lose money on the Xbox hardware, imagine how much money they would lose if they started selling GPL-licensed software!
But seriously, the parent post is on the money. The GPL was first applied to software that was written for very expensive UNIX boxes, and RMS wrote Emacs before GCC, so the first GPL-licensed program probably required a licensed C compiler to build on most platforms, and back then C compilers costed a lot more than $99...
Indeed, the FSF used to sell tapes of GPL software (source included of course), to which multiple authors had contributed, not just FSF people. If the FSF was _free_ to make money by offering a distribution service, surely these folks are _free_ to charge money for building and distributing XPilot via the Apps Store, just as any of their customers are _free_ to obtain the corresponding sources and do whatever they feel like with them.
strncpy() always bothered me. If len is too short, dst winds up unterminated, and if too long, as you say, you have a bunch of extra nulls at the end. What was the point of that? "Oh, we'll null fill it in case strlen() et al. miss the first one?"
I heard that the back-story of strncpy() was that it was originally used for filling in fixed length fields in structures that get written to disk (like, say, utmp) or go out on the wire. For that purpose, the absence of automatic null termination of an overlong string is no problem, because the field length itself provides a delimiter on a string that fills the field. This also explains the puzzling null filling behaviour for strings shorter than the destination string length.
It would have been nicer if it returned the number of non-null bytes copied, so you could do a quick compare with len to check for the unterminated case.
For that matter, I always wondered why strcat did not return a pointer to the trailing null on the destination string... multiple strcat()s on the same string could run in linear time instead of O(n^2), as well as letting you find how long the destination string was without a separate call to strlen(). It wasn't like returning the pointer to the trailing null (wherever that ended up!) could make strcat() less safe...:^)
strlcpy() (if you have it) does return the source string length, which is at least more useful than getting a pointer to the destination string as a return value.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find weird here is that this is being construed as "woo, Intel takes on RISC", whereas the actual situation is "woo, commodity microprocessors can now take on the low-volume, high-margin, high-availability big business end of the computer market". RISC has nothing to do with it - in an alternate universe*, it could have been VAXes running Ultrix that Intel was going up against, and the language would be completely identical. The big deal is that Intel Xeons can now go into systems that compete on high-end features with large, enterprise SPARC and Power systems, and just as importantly, that you can run workloads on the Xeons that you used to run on SPARC or Power systems. This is as much about the fact that Xeons can run Linux or Solaris about as well as SPARC or Power can run their respective Unices, and that the software is available across all three platforms. Not to mention, Xeons can now supplant Itaniums, but let's just dance around that subject thanks very much. :-)
What has happened though, is that in the lazy shorthand of business computing journalism, RISC has become equated with "large SMP machines with lots of HA features produced by vertically integrated companies like IBM, Oracle, HP and Fujitsu." It's a bit like equating V8 with "heavy car with terrible handling and fuel economy" because you happened to be writing about the American car market in the 1950s.
* a universe in which DEC managed to make VAXes actually go fast somehow
Yes... the doctor I saw for my amazingly painful and enormous bursitis, that happened to be next to a skin graze that wasn't healing quickly, implied that I was a panicky wimp when I asked him for an antibiotic prescription in case it happened to turn out to be infected. So I didn't get the prescription filled, and instead drove back out of town to the farm where I live.
Two hours later I was running a fever and driving back into town to get the antibiotics, and a month later I was still taking antibiotics trying to fight off the cellulitis that left my elbow and upper forearm looking like Popeye's from the swelling. I'm glad I got the antibiotics when I did, as a year or so later, a neighbour ended up in hospital for months after getting pretty damn close to multiple organ failure when he tried to to tough out a persistent infection by himself. He needed skin grafts to replace all the skin that died. Got to love this clean country living...
Keeping a cancer cell culture alive indefinitely is not quite the same challenge as keeping a organised colony of differentiated cells performing very different roles alive. For cells to turn cancerous, they must suppress the programmed cell death mechanisms that exist to kill off cells with damaged DNA. Cancer cells don't care about DNA damage at all - they are little defectors in the long-running prisoner's dilemma game that all cells play in a multicellular organism, and the cancer cells with too much damage just get crowded out by the cells that are still able to divide and run their metabolism. The individual cells sure aren't immortal - just like individual bacteria aren't immortal.
It would be interesting to know how often HeLa cultures end up genetically distinct from their parent cultures - how fitting, if a cancer were itself to get cancer...
A few years back, when last I looked, the BSAA (local Australian tentacle/surrogate of the BSA) were treating each PC sold as representing a certain quantity of licensed software that would be in use. They then compared this with some software license sales figures (the accuracy of which is another question), and if there were more deemed licenses in use through new PC sales than there were actual license sales, (guess what! there were!!) then that was their damning evidence that teh piratez were stealing Christmas.
This meant that some 40 staff desktops and 120 teaching laboratory computers at my workplace (a university CS department) which were bought with no OS license and installed with Debian, actually contributed to the BSAA's frothy-mouthed argument that rampant piracy was costing Australia many quality local jobs employing drones to process purchases of software produced overseas by US companies... that incidentally booked most of their profits via subsidiaries based in Ireland, thanks to its low low rate of corporate tax at that time.
So there you have it:
- I am a pirate
- my work was full of piracy
- you probably are a pirate too
because I/they/you have the temerity to buy machines with no OS to run free operating systems and free applications.
Australia - rhymes with failya. :-)
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
7kWh x $0.20 x 365 = $511/year. That looks like 7.63 years to get to $3900. To "match" that, your $3900 would need to be invested to get a 13.1% yearly return in order to generate $511. 13% is not easy to come by.
One often overlooked factor for energy saving or generating investments is that money saved is equivalent to a tax-free income. If you take your $3900 and manage to get a return of $511/year you would have to pay taxes on that income. I don't really know what the average tax rate is in Australia, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that for every dollar earned over $3700, it is 30% (15% at $6k, 30% at $37k, 37% at $80k and 45% at 180k). Assuming your income is between $37k and $80k, you actually need an investment return of $730 so that when you pay your 30% ($219) you are left with the desired $511. $730 is a bit more than 17.1% of $3900 by the way.
D'oh - thanks for spotting my arithmetic screwup. Serves me right for posting in haste. And you have a great point about how the savings work out w.r.t. marginal tax rates. Consider me corrected...
I gather that solar water heating is the real way to make a "safe" investment for most moderate climates like the USA. The systems are very simple and relatively inexpensive. Even in upstate NY, estimates are that 50% of one's water heating can be provided by a solar system. Particularly for those who heat their water with electricity those can be pretty significant cost savings.
But as you say - before any new system is installed, caulking of cracks and insulation (with maybe some shade tree planting for the long term) has an even quicker return on investment.
Yes, after stopping up cracks and installing insulation, solar water heating is the best thing that we can do here in Australia as well - using thermal solar energy to supplant electrical resistive heating is incredibly appropriate. For places without enough sun, there are air-to-water heat pump hot water systems which make more sense than resistive heating for the coastal regions of Australia; they aren't much good for winter in the high country though - we get down to -8 deg C at night, which is nothing compared to lots of Europe and North America, but much lower than the coastal areas. I suspect that the higher humidity at the coast may help a bit too with how much heat you can extract from the (above-freezing) air.
This is not surprising, but not that encouraging either. If you pay for a bit of fancy landscaping and planting around your house before you sell it, you can often improve your house resale value by much more than the cost of the work. Solar also offers a warm glow of righteousness far out of proportion with energy generated.
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
For years, I was holding out for Nanosolar or First Solar to get domestic panels out at somewhere nearer to $2/kW and without so much embodied energy in the panels, but they don't look to be interested in domestic sales. Until then, the only reason that panels are cheap in Australia is because of very high government regulated feed-in tariffs and purchase subsidies, which are just middle-class welfare masquerading as a renewable energy policy.
Until the government killed the program, there were businesses here doing energy efficiency assessments to see if houses qualified for interest free government loans to improve energy efficiency or install solar systems. An interview I heard with one assessor gave the impression that most houses had considerable inefficiency to rectify before it made any sense installing generating capacity. New Australian houses are still much less insulated than new houses in northern Europe or North America, rely too much on resistive electrical heating for the house and for the hot water supply, and the current fashion for building faux-Mediterranean rendered boxes with no roof overhang guarantees high cooling costs in summer. Old Australian houses often had no (as in, ZERO) insulation in them. Visitors from northern Europe are amazed at how uncomfortable and slapdash many of our houses are.
From the summary: "prototype phonic gear" - are they going back to speaking tubes like the ones on old ships?
Perhaps you meant to write "perhaps you meant"?
Or perhaps you were meant to write that by vast forces beyond your control, which acted through you to correct that misuse?
Seriously, folks, it's best to read your posting carefully if the whole reason for your posting is to encourage correct English usage.
Enough with the meta-pedantry, on with the nerdy reminiscences of old-school CGI... anyone who thinks that the original Tron graphics look cheesy should read more about what went into that film; when I saw that film in 1982, it was far ahead of anything else that had been done with computer animation in the mainstream media.
When you understand how much traditional effects and animation handiwork went into fusing the CGI with the actors and animation, it's clear that the film effects were as good as you could make them with that technology at that time. With a bit better script, it could have been a much better film.
You obviously never used the Sun Member Support Center. Getting a report on your installed base felt like one of those children's book with the 45rpm record that would read a few words to you and then play a xylophone note when you should turn the page:
20 rows of results... ding! Turn the page!
Another 20 rows... ding!
Losing will to live... ding!
If only Sun had spent less time on all their zero-revenue "Project [some fancy name]" boondoggles, and more on Project Let's Not Piss Off Our Existing Customers.
Linux fdisk or GNU parted - change the units to sectors and you can then print the partition table out in raw sector LBA offsets.
There's another gotcha for FAT filesystems on SDHC, in that the filesystem metadata at the start of the partition has no natural power-of-two alignment. If you look into the FAT filesystem that a digital camera puts on an SD card when you format it, I suspect that you'll see a bunch of reserved sectors as padding before the FATs, to ensure that the first data sector lines up nicely with a flash write cell.
Wikipedia gives this lovely formula in their description of the FAT filesystem:
Clusters are numbered beginning after the root directory with cluster 2. The following formula will convert the file start cluster (X) in 0x1a to the number of sectors from the beginning of the partition using the Boot Sector fields:
For FAT32
FileStartSector = ReservedSectors(0x0e) + (NumofFAT(0x10) * Sectors2FAT(0x24)) + ((X 2) * SectorsPerCluster(0x0d))
For FAT16/12
FileStartSector = ReservedSectors(0x0e) + (NumofFAT(0x10) * Sectors2FAT(0x16)) + (MaxRootEntry(0x11) * 32 / BytesPerSector(0x0b)) + ((X 2) * SectorsPerCluster(0x0d))
The reserved sectors field is 2 bytes, which allows padding of the alignment of the start of the data clusters to NAND flash write blocks, or even possible an erase block if that would somehow help. (erase blocks on a cheaper Intel SSD are 512kB, not sure about the sizes on SDHC cards or thumb drives).
Ummm, nothing? I already got whacked by the cluebat, but I'd be happy if others could be spared the same pain.
More than a decade after hard drives stopped internally using a fixed cylinder/head/sector geometry, we finally get mass market deployment of a partitioning scheme that completely gets rid of this big, dumb lie.
All the hoo-haa over new drives with 4kB sectors and the way that DOS-compatible operating systems partitioning tools want you to lay out your disk has actually already been experienced by sysadmins for years, when they attempt to come up with partitioning schemes for those operating systems that align filesystem blocks with the underlying geometry of SSD write blocks or RAID 5 stripe segments.
Next time you buy an SD card or thumb drive, stick it into a box with a decent formatting tool and look at the actual start sector for the partitions. You will find that the manufacturers have quietly been using sane partition start sector values (i.e., power of two, not "first sector of second track of cylinder 0") because they know that the performance of the device would be horrible if almost every VFAT cluster write spanned multiple flash write blocks.
And all this stuffing around has been forced upon us because Microsoft never had the balls to say, "you want to rock out with Borland Sidekick or Netware 3.0? Sure, use a frickin' VM, or use a new version of DOS that speaks native LBA to the BIOS. Those are your choices."
All the brainpower and effort that has been wasted on workarounds for the effects of the brain damaged MBR partitioning table could have been much better used actually improving how computers worked, rather than treading water.
Unless you actually need to update the entire screen at 60Hz, the method scales pretty well.
Video compression works great for a talking head or pan shots in movies, but try watching HD video of surf breaking, or the tracking shots of (round) football stars running around after scoring a goal, with the fans all going crazy behind them, and you will see from all the lovely blocking artifacts that HD video compression is built on some pretty narrow assumptions.
In fact, a friend of mine has for many years made many sorts of computer animation with lots of twiddly stuff evolving all over the screen, and for a long time it was a toss up whether it was better to distribute it on a VHS tape or compressed with the codecs of the day.
If you think that Tokay is a poor name for an Australian fortified wine made "in the Tokay style", you'll be happy to know that an Australian wine industry body, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to rebrand Tokayoid Australian wines as "Topaque".
FSM knows where they got that name from... I guess you are supposed to drink it while sitting on leatherette sofas, wearing diamonique jewelery.
Just like Ray Kurzweil.
The level of understanding of Internet issues displayed by the Australian Communications Minister is stunning.
Ted Stevens: the Internet is a series of tubes.
Stephen Conroy: unsecured wireless access points are transparent tubes that it is a deep invasion of privacy to look through.
Dear Minister: Driving past a house and picking up traffic on an unsecured wireless network is like walking past the house of a stupid person who is using his hands-free phone by standing on the roof of his house and shouting a conversation down to where his phone is lying. You are bound to hear something that ought to have been private had the person not been communicating in a stupid way.
But this privacy beatup has caused the Minister to bring forth this gem, taken from Conroy slams "creepy" Google:
"I think that the approach taken by Mr Schmidt is a bit creepy, frankly," Senator Conroy said.
"When it comes to their attitude to their own censorship, their response is simply, 'trust us'. That is what they actually state on their website: 'Trust us'."
Indeed. Well, I think the approach taken by Stephen Conroy to Internet censorship is a bit creepy, frankly.
When it comes to his attitude to the Australian Government's own censorship scheme and its secret list of forbidden sites, his response is simply, 'trust us'.
It is increasingly clear that we can trust Minister Conroy to act on his gut feelings.
Yeah, I'm getting a pretty good idea of what I can trust Minister Conroy to do.
Karma is a bitch...
I expect they are now regretting that the barriers they put in place to prevent IE6 being displaced by Firefox, Opera, and other browsers is now effective at preventing IE6 from being displaced by another browser from themselves.
-- Terry
Yes, and if they think that everybody uses IE6 is is misguided, or stupid, and would be so much better running IE9 instead of IE6, they they're kidding themselves. The only reason I EVER use Internet Explorer is when I need to use some broken POC corporate web (site/app) that doesn't work under Firefox/Seamonkey. The version of IE with maximum chance of behaving right with those brain damaged web sites is IE6. So tell me again why I want IE9 instead of IE6?
Perhaps a petition:
"Dear Microsoft - please understand that many people still use IE6 because they need to use the web sites that you encouraged web developers to create way back when IE6 was supposed to take over the world. Stop ranting at users to upgrade to IE9; instead apologize to web developers for leading them up the garden path, and ask them to fix their broken web sites to comply with genuine cross-platform standards."
If the broken web sites got fixed, Microsoft could upgrade my installation of IE6 to IE13 for all I care. It's not like I would actually use it as my main browser out of choice.
I just don't like the idea of the justice system being subverted in such a way that a corporation can sue someone anonymously, and I don't like the idea of a family being destroyed financially because their kid downloaded a movie, when otherwise shoplifting the movie would be a petty theft charge.
I see what you mean, but I also find it incredible that people should be surprised when torrenting a recently released Oscar-winning film draws down an almightly shitstorm upon their heads.
It's not like the people who made the film are being particularly greedy. Look at the takings for the film, compared to the budget: it doesn't take a genius to guess that if the grosses barely add to the estimated movie budget, the people who made the film are probably still trying to break even. Is it any surprise that they're a bit touchy about piracy of the movie?
I would rather see them out of business if this is the only way they can make money. I'm a model mpaa customer. I have over 200 bluray movies purchased, but they would still label me a criminal because I have taken (at considerable effort) the evil step of digitizing all my movies (ripped and encoded to my fileserver in mkv). I have a live copy, and a backup, and the physical copy sits in a closet. They have never been shared. If I lived in America, they would undoubtedly sue me if they discovered what I have done.
Allowing me to rip movies harms their business plan of reselling the same movie every format change.
Fuck them.
Well, yes, to the extent that rightsholders froth at the mouth about how people who subvert region coding or format shift are filthy pirates, fuck that, or them, big time. I too am tired of being called a pirate for playing the content I bought legal copies of, in the privacy of my own home, or own head(phones). It is a particular insult when nobody gives enough of a damn about a movie to release it in this region (4, FWIW), or if the local release is done by clowns who screw the DVD authoring process and get the interlacing wrong. Yes, fuck that.
But, frankly, if people are so impatient to gobble up new shiny things that they torrent brand new movies and music, it is naive of them not to expect some trouble to come out of it sooner or later. A person who draws courage from the fact that they have already torrented a pile of new releases without getting sued is like a person deciding that nobody can catch them shoplifting because they have pulled it off a few times. How are either of them to know whether their efforts have gone unnoticed?
People, if you want to watch the film for little or no money, there is a sure-fire way:
JUST
GODDAM
WAIT.
There is such a flood of new stuff coming out, courtesy of our collective fetish for endless growth, that most games, albums and DVDs get heavily discounted within a year of release. Not only that, but the older a film gets, the more second-hand copies float around, or if you still want to hoist the jolly roger, you could get a cheap bunch of weekly rentals, and then, y'know... [looking around furtively] rip them yourself.
Bear in mind that for most of recorded history, incredibly harsh punishments have been meted to ordinary folk for trivial crimes, just to set an example. None of this trouble is new, or unexpected. For the moment, the laws are what they are; arguing over their justice is almost impossible when there is so much hypocrisy and willful confusion coming from both sides of the debate.
But nobody gets arrested for waiting to see whether a thing they want gets cheaper.
Breaking a business model is not the same as piracy.
Buying a video games device and using it as a paperweight may cost the manufacturer money, *if* their business model depends on selling lots of software per console sold to recoup the cost of the hardware. This was true for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I doubt that Nintendo is losing money on DS sales. It is a legal use of the console in any case.
Running independently developed (i.e. not using restricted SDKs or devkits) homebrew software on a DS is not piracy. It is the same to Nintendo as if I bought the DS to hold down some paper.
I bought a Nintendo DS. I bought one cartridge: Korg Ds-10. I will probably buy another cartridge: Korg DS-10 Plus. I am not a pirate, even if I don't buy as many cartridges as Nintendo would like me to buy. I also have a DS TT cart, for if I get motivated to write or run homebrew on the DS. Again, not pirating, but not giving Nintendo a whole lot of extra dollars.
Am I stealing from Nintendo simply by not fitting their model of how somebody should use a legally bought DS? What is the difference to them between me buying it to hold down paper, and to run software that they did not license? Is it that I'm having too much fun by running homebrew on my DS instead of using it to hold down paper? How do they know how much happiness a paperweight brings to me?
As for future devices, I look forward to when there is a little more choice of general purpose, open devices in the DS form factor and with similar features. I'll be quite happy to abandon "piracy" and Nintendo's hardware platform altogether to run homebrew on something made by people who don't call me a criminal. But my moving to a different homebrew platform won't make me buy any more DS cartridges. In fact, eventually my DS might well end up (legally) holding down some paper.
If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites. I used to have a hell of a time finding the download I needed — and I was a Sun employee.
I did always wonder if there was somebody inside Sun who thought their incoherent "choose your own adventure" web presence was actually the best that they could manage, or whether it was the product of a fragmented and dysfunctional organisation that didn't actually care.
But once I realised that the Sun management loved Java so much that they insisted on calling everything "Java [mumble]", even their Linux environment which AFAIK contained precious little actual Java, I knew that there was a lot of self delusion going on at that company. I had to reassure a number of people old enough to remember the wretched "Javastations" that there was none of that "Java crap" in the Java Desktop System. It seems that the corporate memory of Sun's failures has been maintained mostly outside the company.
The C128 did, but the reasons for it doing so are mind-bendingly awful.
There were references to a Z80 CP/M cartridge in the C64 Programmer's Reference Manual. Not sure how well it worked or whether it made it to market.
The VIC certainly had a mechanism for attaching multiple expansion cartridges to an external expander, but my memory fails me on whether the C64 had similar. Here in .au, any interesting C64 accessories made in the USA tended to be expensive and hence rare.
Think about it; if devs were required to provide everything needed to run a GPL program, then they would have to provide a Windows license for every GPL program written to run on Windows.
Not to mention a PC on which to run that Windows license, and a generator or other plausible power source to run the machine. Maybe a desk and chair, too. Boy, I can see why Microsoft hates the GPL! They already lose money on the Xbox hardware, imagine how much money they would lose if they started selling GPL-licensed software!
But seriously, the parent post is on the money. The GPL was first applied to software that was written for very expensive UNIX boxes, and RMS wrote Emacs before GCC, so the first GPL-licensed program probably required a licensed C compiler to build on most platforms, and back then C compilers costed a lot more than $99...
Indeed, the FSF used to sell tapes of GPL software (source included of course), to which multiple authors had contributed, not just FSF people. If the FSF was _free_ to make money by offering a distribution service, surely these folks are _free_ to charge money for building and distributing XPilot via the Apps Store, just as any of their customers are _free_ to obtain the corresponding sources and do whatever they feel like with them.
strncpy() always bothered me. If len is too short, dst winds up unterminated, and if too long, as you say, you have a bunch of extra nulls at the end. What was the point of that? "Oh, we'll null fill it in case strlen() et al. miss the first one?"
I heard that the back-story of strncpy() was that it was originally used for filling in fixed length fields in structures that get written to disk (like, say, utmp) or go out on the wire. For that purpose, the absence of automatic null termination of an overlong string is no problem, because the field length itself provides a delimiter on a string that fills the field. This also explains the puzzling null filling behaviour for strings shorter than the destination string length.
It would have been nicer if it returned the number of non-null bytes copied, so you could do a quick compare with len to check for the unterminated case.
For that matter, I always wondered why strcat did not return a pointer to the trailing null on the destination string... multiple strcat()s on the same string could run in linear time instead of O(n^2), as well as letting you find how long the destination string was without a separate call to strlen(). It wasn't like returning the pointer to the trailing null (wherever that ended up!) could make strcat() less safe... :^)
strlcpy() (if you have it) does return the source string length, which is at least more useful than getting a pointer to the destination string as a return value.
I'd reply in detail to your post, but I would rather have a good time playing TF2 on Steam.
(when it is working)
Don't like it, don't buy it. Me and the rest of the normal people in the world are going to have a good time
(when it is working)
playing games on a service that adds benefits to the game playing experience.
(when it is working.)
See my other post in this topic for the details.