I use FreeBSD on NTP servers as it keeps time better than Linux, but damn it makes me wretch every time I have to use the utterly hateful FreeBSD installer.
I couldn't get FreeBSD 9.0 to boot via. iLO virtual media either.
Are you kidding? "Region free" hacks for DVD players were there from the very beginning. The very first player I bought (and it turns out the only one I ever bought, and which I still have!), back in something like 1997, was a Samsung DVD 709. I bought it specifically because it was trivial to put it into "regionless" mode and play Region 1 DVD's even though I'm in Region 2 (Bless you, Play247.com).
These days it's even easier; you can walk into a supermarket and pick up a cheap Asian player that can be put into "regionless" mode with the remote that's in the box. Hell, sometimes they're even advertised as such.
Roast beef should never, ever, be well done. Any more than a fillet steak should never be well done. A roast joint of beef should be as pink in the centre as a rare steak.
Not since POSIX invented time_t. time_t is 64 bit long on most systems these days. You'll only be in trouble if you're still running a UNIX with a 32bit time_t in 2038; the chances seem remote.
The license is non-transferable but AMD as a legal entity is. Not only that, but Intel rely so heavily on patents owned by AMD that they'd never even consider attempting to revoke the x86 license.
If everyone wants to live in South East, what's the point of building a high speed rail to a place where people don't want to live?
Because then you increase the probably that people will want to live in those places rather than the South East, and that businesses will want to establish offices in places other than London.
If it really is beneficial to have more people live in Manchester and Birmingham rather than South East (and use the train), then they'll be willing to pay for the location change in one way or another.
Which they will, through ticket sales. However your simplistic reasoning doesn't take a lot of factors into account. If the UK government don't make it attractive for people to live and work in places outside of the South East, they're going to have invest heavily in infrastructure in the South East: transport, power generation, water and housing being the obvious ones. That infrastructure will have to be paid for. Will it cost less, or more, than HS2?
Think of reducing pressure on London and the South East as a "loss leader" to break the vicious circle of investing huge amounts of money in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the UK, which then makes the South East a more attractive place to live, which then increases the demand for investment in infrastructure in the South East, which...
You asked about High Speed Rail, not the specific (apparently extremely brain dead) plans in the United States. Perhaps a better question is why is the USA now failing to implement major infrastructure projects?
I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly. That's crazy. Infrastructure is a sunk cost that has secondary benefits; for example, building HS2 will allow more people to live in places like Manchester & Birmingham instead of the South East, which reduces the pressures on infrastructure in the South East, which means you don't need to invest so heavily in things like transport, housing, water and power in an already densely populated area.
I fail to believe the the content of The DailyWTF is sourced entirely from self-taught programmers. From experience, morons will be morons whether or not they have a CS degree.
DRM was never the issue. Streaming media is hard. Real offered products like RealMedia Server, which handled the encoding and streaming for you. They were the only game in town until Microsoft launched their streaming media (ASF) platform. MP3 never hadthe tooling around it that RealMedia did. End of story.
...the BBC have been using RealPlayer streams for radio services almost ever since they started putting shows online.
They did indeed use RealPlayer when they launched on radio streaming (it's Flash based again these days). You know what? I was damn glad they did use RealPlayer, too. Because like it it or not, RealPlayer worked on Linux with Netscape, which meant I could listen to BBC Radio 1. The alternative was Windows Media, which certainly didn't work on Linux (not withstanding some horrible and very unstable hacks or reverse-engineered libraries).
So yes, RealPlayer was the best of a bad bunch, but it was the right decision.
Incidentally I knew the guy who worked at the BBC and created the experimental Ogg Vorbis streams. They seriously considered offering Vorbis streams as an official option, but there really were technical issues with it that meant the idea was dropped. Sadly that was over ten years ago and I can't remember what they were. Ho hum.
If you genuinely believe that Haiku is in a similar state to GNU HURD, you're insane.
News from Haiku is interesting because they're one of the few truly alternative operating systems out there that are actually progressing. That's the sort of thing that Slashdotters used to be interested in. If you're not interested in it, I'm sure there are another hundred "Your Rights Online" posts just waiting to gush out of the Firehose that you can go vote up.
It's incredibly sad, isn't it? I'm not even going to claim US bias here: out of the entire UK user base of Slashdot, you would have hoped that more than 10 or so people would have shown some interest in Sir Bernard and his work.
I'm proud to say I attended the Sir Bernard Lovell School in Oldland Common, where he was born. Sadly I suspect that the majority of students attending these days won't know who Sir Bernard Lovell is or what he did, which is a shame.
So Ethernet standardised the local interconnect. So what? Prior to that people just built custom interfaces: sites with IMPs built a custom interface between whatever computer(s) they had and the Honeywell 516. It wasn't like it was impossible to connect two computers together before the advent of Ethernet.
Slashdot Mirror
They wouldn't, obviously. Linux has tools like Puppet & Chef.
I use FreeBSD on NTP servers as it keeps time better than Linux, but damn it makes me wretch every time I have to use the utterly hateful FreeBSD installer.
I couldn't get FreeBSD 9.0 to boot via. iLO virtual media either.
Are you kidding? "Region free" hacks for DVD players were there from the very beginning. The very first player I bought (and it turns out the only one I ever bought, and which I still have!), back in something like 1997, was a Samsung DVD 709. I bought it specifically because it was trivial to put it into "regionless" mode and play Region 1 DVD's even though I'm in Region 2 (Bless you, Play247.com).
These days it's even easier; you can walk into a supermarket and pick up a cheap Asian player that can be put into "regionless" mode with the remote that's in the box. Hell, sometimes they're even advertised as such.
The good reason not too is that I don't need to log in at 3am to type the root password and watch it fsck should it need an unclean reboot. Use XFS.
Roast beef should never, ever, be well done. Any more than a fillet steak should never be well done. A roast joint of beef should be as pink in the centre as a rare steak.
Not since POSIX invented time_t. time_t is 64 bit long on most systems these days. You'll only be in trouble if you're still running a UNIX with a 32bit time_t in 2038; the chances seem remote.
The license is non-transferable but AMD as a legal entity is. Not only that, but Intel rely so heavily on patents owned by AMD that they'd never even consider attempting to revoke the x86 license.
You can't see why anyone might be interested in acquiring their vast patent portfolio, x86 license and cross-licensing agreement with Intel?
Let's all just hope they don't do a Lucent and the patents end up being held by a mysteriously well funded holding company...
Because then you increase the probably that people will want to live in those places rather than the South East, and that businesses will want to establish offices in places other than London.
Which they will, through ticket sales. However your simplistic reasoning doesn't take a lot of factors into account. If the UK government don't make it attractive for people to live and work in places outside of the South East, they're going to have invest heavily in infrastructure in the South East: transport, power generation, water and housing being the obvious ones. That infrastructure will have to be paid for. Will it cost less, or more, than HS2?
Think of reducing pressure on London and the South East as a "loss leader" to break the vicious circle of investing huge amounts of money in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the UK, which then makes the South East a more attractive place to live, which then increases the demand for investment in infrastructure in the South East, which...
You asked about High Speed Rail, not the specific (apparently extremely brain dead) plans in the United States. Perhaps a better question is why is the USA now failing to implement major infrastructure projects?
I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly. That's crazy. Infrastructure is a sunk cost that has secondary benefits; for example, building HS2 will allow more people to live in places like Manchester & Birmingham instead of the South East, which reduces the pressures on infrastructure in the South East, which means you don't need to invest so heavily in things like transport, housing, water and power in an already densely populated area.
Because the ability to move people and goods around very quickly efficiently and with minimal pollution is a good thing?
I don't suppose you ever got to play with the LEO II they had there, did you?
I fail to believe the the content of The DailyWTF is sourced entirely from self-taught programmers. From experience, morons will be morons whether or not they have a CS degree.
DRM was never the issue. Streaming media is hard. Real offered products like RealMedia Server, which handled the encoding and streaming for you. They were the only game in town until Microsoft launched their streaming media (ASF) platform. MP3 never hadthe tooling around it that RealMedia did. End of story.
They did indeed use RealPlayer when they launched on radio streaming (it's Flash based again these days). You know what? I was damn glad they did use RealPlayer, too. Because like it it or not, RealPlayer worked on Linux with Netscape, which meant I could listen to BBC Radio 1. The alternative was Windows Media, which certainly didn't work on Linux (not withstanding some horrible and very unstable hacks or reverse-engineered libraries).
So yes, RealPlayer was the best of a bad bunch, but it was the right decision.
Incidentally I knew the guy who worked at the BBC and created the experimental Ogg Vorbis streams. They seriously considered offering Vorbis streams as an official option, but there really were technical issues with it that meant the idea was dropped. Sadly that was over ten years ago and I can't remember what they were. Ho hum.
If you genuinely believe that Haiku is in a similar state to GNU HURD, you're insane.
News from Haiku is interesting because they're one of the few truly alternative operating systems out there that are actually progressing. That's the sort of thing that Slashdotters used to be interested in. If you're not interested in it, I'm sure there are another hundred "Your Rights Online" posts just waiting to gush out of the Firehose that you can go vote up.
It's incredibly sad, isn't it? I'm not even going to claim US bias here: out of the entire UK user base of Slashdot, you would have hoped that more than 10 or so people would have shown some interest in Sir Bernard and his work.
I'm proud to say I attended the Sir Bernard Lovell School in Oldland Common, where he was born. Sadly I suspect that the majority of students attending these days won't know who Sir Bernard Lovell is or what he did, which is a shame.
For a more in-depth read of the origins and growth of the Internet, I can't recommend the excellent Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
Perhaps I should gift a copy to the Wall Street Journal?
So Ethernet standardised the local interconnect. So what? Prior to that people just built custom interfaces: sites with IMPs built a custom interface between whatever computer(s) they had and the Honeywell 516. It wasn't like it was impossible to connect two computers together before the advent of Ethernet.
No.
That's why you have firewalls and network ACLs between VLANs.
Ah! So you're a waffle man!