I am guessing it has to do with some contract they had with the RIAA that lapsed and they are not going to renew rather than any server cost. They could have been suckered into a bad deal thinking their service was gonna be the bomb and they would have enough new sales to make up their ongoing fees to the RIAA. This is just speculation though.
Pretty much the only people who will say you are acting against how the market is supposed to work are die-hard sociopaths who don't care that some behavior is "immoral", and want you to keep lining their pockets regardless of what evil things they do in the name of making a buck, and the argument is solely a way of tricking you into ignoring your own moral outrage. Don't forget all the graduate students in economics whose brilliant Phd theses turn out to have no bearing to reality whatsoever due to such abberant purchasing behavior.:)
I think a major issue is that some implementors assume that what is hard for a human to discern is hard for a computer to discern due to not being fully aware of the issues involved with machine vision. So they play games with colors and lines that are trivial for a computer to filter out but just make it harder for humans.
Bad CAPTCHAs are broken, they were always broken and simply security through obscurity, it is just now that there are starting to be serious attempts at exploiting the flaws. This doesn't mean that good CAPTCHAS are impossible, it just means they arn't as trivial to design as applying a random photoshop effect to some text.
There basically are no bonds, there is no water on the moon to provide a medium for chemical reactions to take place, no weather to mix up the elements, no glaciers to compact the ground. It's loose shards of moon kicked up by meteorite impacts all the way down to the bedrock.
It's market segmentation. people who own cd players generally have more money than those that only have cassete players. by selling the casette at a discount they can still sell enough to make it worthwhile and since for the most part no one with a good cd player is going to buy a cassete, it is not going to cut into their cd sales and they still come out ahead.
Joel on software wrote a nice overview of market segmentation on his blog:
Well, power doesn't come from heat, it comes from moving heat from a hot place to a cold place. so, if you are in 98 degree weather, your body can't power a thing. likewise, if you are in sub zero weather, you have a nice thermal gradient to exploit. I think the variance in environmental temperature far outweighs any contribution from abnormal body heat temperatures.
Actually, there was another important scientific discovery that sputnik allowed. It was designed to transmit on two different frequencies, 20MHz and 40MHz. Since different radio frequencies are affected differently by the ionosphere, it was possible to observe things about the ionosphere that wern't possible before such as its electron density.
The reason is that the energy coming to the earth is spread out over the spectrum, including a sizable chunk of it in the UV range. However, the earth radiates eneregy mainly in the form of IR. For instance, A hot roadway is being warmed by all the suns light that hits it, but then much of that energy is lost via reradiation in the IR wavelengths.
It happens that the atmosphere of the earth just happens to be almost completely transparent to the wavelengths of IR that the surface naturally radiates at its temperature. This is an amazingly useful thing, as it allows the energy to dissipate into space rather than sit in the atmosphere.
They took the time to design a new monetary format and didn't even make it based on a Balanced Ternary system. Balanced ternary cash would be quite nice, it would mean almost always having the exact change, you only need one coin of each denomination to ensure you can make change for any possible transaction among other nice qualities.
depending on who you talk to. (Solaris 2.6 was never officially called Solaris 6 by the company, but it is often retconed as such to follow the Solaris 7, Solaris 8, pattern..)
of course, the only true name is what 'uname' returns. SunOS 5.6. Likewise, the only true ticker for sun is what is embedded in all its package names SUNW.
Sun's marketing dept sure seems to be a one trick pony, and a pretty crappy trick at that.
not at all, humans killed off mammoths in the first place, brining them back would be righting a wrong of sorts.
Of course, what I _really_ want to see brought back is the giant ground sloth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium Imagine a huge furry clawed creature the size of a bull elephant wandering around on its hind legs towering over 20 feet tall. I can't wait.
Now, figure out the size of the number representing the offset in pi that your data is. Assuming that pi is a normal number [1] (which is believed to be true) then you end up with a number which can only be represented with as much space as your original data in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity is another interesting and related topic, as the prize is for the decompressor + the data together, the hutter prize winners are slowing approximating the kolmogorov complexity of human knowledge. Which very well might turn out to be a few field equations describing quantum mechanics that you just let run for a few billion cycles. now that is some good compression:)
Actually, although terraforming is not really feasable, venus is actually a very attractive place to build a colony. Although the surface of the planet is quite inhospitable, at cloud top level conditions are extremely well suited for earth life. In addition, breathable air is a lifting gas, so your colony naturally floats on the cloudtops and solar energy is very abundant.
indeed. this is why I use a FIPS-181 "random" password generator to generate names for my projects and their releases. Sometimes coding is the easy part, coming up with a name is hard. In any case, I would recommend one of the following as a consequence:
There is no need to fork. all that needs to happen is the adding in of the v2 "or any later version" clause. then linux code can be used with gpl2 and gpl3 code. Even if some GPL3 code gets integrated into the kernel, the GPL2 or greater code can still be used under the GPL2 if wanted.
There can be no danger of your code becoming less free by adding a GPLX or later clause no matter what the FSF does because people can always choose the abide by the GPL2 rather than a later version. The only thing that can happen is your code becomes more free. Nothing the FSF does can make current uses of your code disallowed.
So, when writing new code, you have a choice now. say GPL2 or greater if you don't care about the patent restrictions or say GPL3 or greater if you do or 3BSD if you don't care about any restrictions at all. This way, all code can be combined with everything, which is really what is important here. Getting to utilize all the free source code resources available to you when authoring projects.
The problem is not getting at that extra information, like you say, we can already do that with RAW. the problem is that a lot of resources (such as CCD area) go into capturing this extra information which is then simply discarded. By taking a random sampling of pixels, one gets exactly as much information is needed to construct the compressed version of the image without waste. plus, with only a single CCD, you can make it incredibly sensitive, to the point where it can count single photons. Heck, you could probably have some fun with wavelengths. different wavelengths get diffracted slightly differently, if you could take advantage of that to redirect photons of different wavelengths at the sensor. you could have a camera that takes _full spectrum_ pictures. not just at the single pretty but not very informative red green and blue lines. (tetrachromats rejoice!). Full spectrum sampling in a small package would be really cool, I mean, that is tricorder technology. This is very neat research.
Rather than play catchup with the world, let's do it right and switch to base 12 counting. now suddenly the english system of measurements makes sense! I mean, base ten lets you take 5ths or halfs of something easily. not very useful. with base 12, you can easily take halfs, thirds, quarters, eigths, and sixths of things. how nice is that? very. support base 12 now.
because RISC vs CISC and microkernel vs monolithic ones were always false dichotomies, or at least ones mired in a specific time that no longer exists. Internally, modern CPUs and operating systems are a blend of different technologies due to advances in the state of the art knowledge and changes in the underlying technologies and constraints. x86 CPUs have been RISC internally for a long time now. RISC no longer means 'reduced instruction set' but usually implies a 'load-store' architecture rather than one with less instructions. for a long time, silicon was precious, saving the cost of a complex instruction decoder was worth it. nowadays, chip designers (in the desktop cpu market, embedded systems have different concerns) can't figure out what to do with all the space on the die they have available. decoding complex instructions into simple RISC ones is just a non-issue. Arguing about them nowadays is like still arguing about whether we should adopt beta vs VHS. The technologies still have meaning to compare and contrast academically. but the need for the argument itself has been obsoleted.
unison is the best thing since sliced bread. keep your mailboxes in Maildir/ format and just unison between the machines periodically. since unison is symmetric, you can pull your mail down from either your laptop or your desktop and it will propegate to the other one on the next sync.
Li-Poly batteries are extremely light. A big part of that is they don't need the "compressive" shell normal batteries have to hold everything together. So no metal casing in addition to the lighter material.
You may think the lower eneregy density leads to more volume taken up by the laptop, but that doesn't turn out to be the case. The thing about Li-Ion (and most battery types), is that they need to be created in the form of cylinders, which do not pack very well. This menas when packing them into a rectangular space ~20% of that area is wasted in the form of the space between the cells. Li-Poly have no shape constraints, and can be shaped to take up exactly the free space in your laptop, whereever it may be. a huge advantage that easily makes up for the lower energy density and then some.
A zepplin can get maybe 50km into the air. geosynchronous orbit is 42,164km. that extra 50km isn't going to make much of a difference at all compared to the technical challenges of attaching something to a zeppelin.
Also, the thickest part of the cable is in the middle, not the ends. it is not pulling away from the earth at all, so the anchor doesn't actually need to support any weight, it is just nice to have a stable place to attach your elevator cars to.
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I am guessing it has to do with some contract they had with the RIAA that lapsed and they are not going to renew rather than any server cost. They could have been suckered into a bad deal thinking their service was gonna be the bomb and they would have enough new sales to make up their ongoing fees to the RIAA. This is just speculation though.
Yes. You would have most likely wanted to call it a chazwozzer. :)
I think a major issue is that some implementors assume that what is hard for a human to discern is hard for a computer to discern due to not being fully aware of the issues involved with machine vision. So they play games with colors and lines that are trivial for a computer to filter out but just make it harder for humans.
Bad CAPTCHAs are broken, they were always broken and simply security through obscurity, it is just now that there are starting to be serious attempts at exploiting the flaws. This doesn't mean that good CAPTCHAS are impossible, it just means they arn't as trivial to design as applying a random photoshop effect to some text.
There basically are no bonds, there is no water on the moon to provide a medium for chemical reactions to take place, no weather to mix up the elements, no glaciers to compact the ground. It's loose shards of moon kicked up by meteorite impacts all the way down to the bedrock.
It's market segmentation. people who own cd players generally have more money than those that only have cassete players. by selling the casette at a discount they can still sell enough to make it worthwhile and since for the most part no one with a good cd player is going to buy a cassete, it is not going to cut into their cd sales and they still come out ahead.
Joel on software wrote a nice overview of market segmentation on his blog:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
Well, power doesn't come from heat, it comes from moving heat from a hot place to a cold place. so, if you are in 98 degree weather, your body can't power a thing. likewise, if you are in sub zero weather, you have a nice thermal gradient to exploit. I think the variance in environmental temperature far outweighs any contribution from abnormal body heat temperatures.
> They have less surface area than a normal aspect screen with the same diagonal measurement.
I prefer to think they get extra diagonal length for the same surface area. The glass is half full after all.
Actually, there was another important scientific discovery that sputnik allowed. It was designed to transmit on two different frequencies, 20MHz and 40MHz. Since different radio frequencies are affected differently by the ionosphere, it was possible to observe things about the ionosphere that wern't possible before such as its electron density.
This is actually exactly the case.
The reason is that the energy coming to the earth is spread out over the spectrum, including a sizable chunk of it in the UV range. However, the earth radiates eneregy mainly in the form of IR. For instance, A hot roadway is being warmed by all the suns light that hits it, but then much of that energy is lost via reradiation in the IR wavelengths.
It happens that the atmosphere of the earth just happens to be almost completely transparent to the wavelengths of IR that the surface naturally radiates at its temperature. This is an amazingly useful thing, as it allows the energy to dissipate into space rather than sit in the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_window
They took the time to design a new monetary format and didn't even make it based on a Balanced Ternary system. Balanced ternary cash would be quite nice, it would mean almost always having the exact change, you only need one coin of each denomination to ensure you can make change for any possible transaction among other nice qualities.
You mean like E-13B? those odd numbers at the bottom of checks that are designed to be easily machine readable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition
Want odd, see sun's numbering?
SunOS 5.6 = Solaris 2.6 = Solaris 6
depending on who you talk to. (Solaris 2.6 was never officially called Solaris 6 by the company, but it is often retconed as such to follow the Solaris 7, Solaris 8, pattern..)
of course, the only true name is what 'uname' returns. SunOS 5.6. Likewise, the only true ticker for sun is what is embedded in all its package names SUNW.
Sun's marketing dept sure seems to be a one trick pony, and a pretty crappy trick at that.
We should not take chances with such things, software bugs can be quite deadly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
not at all, humans killed off mammoths in the first place, brining them back would be righting a wrong of sorts.
Of course, what I _really_ want to see brought back is the giant ground sloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium
Imagine a huge furry clawed creature the size of a bull elephant wandering around on its hind legs towering over 20 feet tall. I can't wait.
Now, figure out the size of the number representing the offset in pi that your data is. Assuming that pi is a normal number [1] (which is believed to be true) then you end up with a number which can only be represented with as much space as your original data in general.
y is another interesting and related topic, as the prize is for the decompressor + the data together, the hutter prize winners are slowing approximating the kolmogorov complexity of human knowledge. Which very well might turn out to be a few field equations describing quantum mechanics that you just let run for a few billion cycles. now that is some good compression :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number (proving pi to be a normal number is a famous open problem)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexit
Actually, although terraforming is not really feasable, venus is actually a very attractive place to build a colony. Although the surface of the planet is quite inhospitable, at cloud top level conditions are extremely well suited for earth life. In addition, breathable air is a lifting gas, so your colony naturally floats on the cloudtops and solar energy is very abundant.
e nus/VenusColony_STAIF03.pdf
http://powerweb.grc.nasa.gov/pvsee/publications/v
There is no need to fork. all that needs to happen is the adding in of the v2 "or any later version" clause. then linux code can be used with gpl2 and gpl3 code. Even if some GPL3 code gets integrated into the kernel, the GPL2 or greater code can still be used under the GPL2 if wanted.
There can be no danger of your code becoming less free by adding a GPLX or later clause no matter what the FSF does because people can always choose the abide by the GPL2 rather than a later version. The only thing that can happen is your code becomes more free. Nothing the FSF does can make current uses of your code disallowed.
So, when writing new code, you have a choice now. say GPL2 or greater if you don't care about the patent restrictions or say GPL3 or greater if you do or 3BSD if you don't care about any restrictions at all. This way, all code can be combined with everything, which is really what is important here. Getting to utilize all the free source code resources available to you when authoring projects.
The problem is not getting at that extra information, like you say, we can already do that with RAW. the problem is that a lot of resources (such as CCD area) go into capturing this extra information which is then simply discarded. By taking a random sampling of pixels, one gets exactly as much information is needed to construct the compressed version of the image without waste. plus, with only a single CCD, you can make it incredibly sensitive, to the point where it can count single photons. Heck, you could probably have some fun with wavelengths. different wavelengths get diffracted slightly differently, if you could take advantage of that to redirect photons of different wavelengths at the sensor. you could have a camera that takes _full spectrum_ pictures. not just at the single pretty but not very informative red green and blue lines. (tetrachromats rejoice!). Full spectrum sampling in a small package would be really cool, I mean, that is tricorder technology. This is very neat research.
Rather than play catchup with the world, let's do it right and switch to base 12 counting. now suddenly the english system of measurements makes sense! I mean, base ten lets you take 5ths or halfs of something easily. not very useful. with base 12, you can easily take halfs, thirds, quarters, eigths, and sixths of things. how nice is that? very. support base 12 now.
because RISC vs CISC and microkernel vs monolithic ones were always false dichotomies, or at least ones mired in a specific time that no longer exists. Internally, modern CPUs and operating systems are a blend of different technologies due to advances in the state of the art knowledge and changes in the underlying technologies and constraints. x86 CPUs have been RISC internally for a long time now. RISC no longer means 'reduced instruction set' but usually implies a 'load-store' architecture rather than one with less instructions. for a long time, silicon was precious, saving the cost of a complex instruction decoder was worth it. nowadays, chip designers (in the desktop cpu market, embedded systems have different concerns) can't figure out what to do with all the space on the die they have available. decoding complex instructions into simple RISC ones is just a non-issue. Arguing about them nowadays is like still arguing about whether we should adopt beta vs VHS. The technologies still have meaning to compare and contrast academically. but the need for the argument itself has been obsoleted.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
unison is the best thing since sliced bread. keep your mailboxes in Maildir/ format and just unison between the machines periodically. since unison is symmetric, you can pull your mail down from either your laptop or your desktop and it will propegate to the other one on the next sync.
Li-Poly batteries are extremely light. A big part of that is they don't need the "compressive" shell normal batteries have to hold everything together. So no metal casing in addition to the lighter material.
You may think the lower eneregy density leads to more volume taken up by the laptop, but that doesn't turn out to be the case. The thing about Li-Ion (and most battery types), is that they need to be created in the form of cylinders, which do not pack very well. This menas when packing them into a rectangular space ~20% of that area is wasted in the form of the space between the cells. Li-Poly have no shape constraints, and can be shaped to take up exactly the free space in your laptop, whereever it may be. a huge advantage that easily makes up for the lower energy density and then some.
A zepplin can get maybe 50km into the air. geosynchronous orbit is 42,164km. that extra 50km isn't going to make much of a difference at all compared to the technical challenges of attaching something to a zeppelin.
Also, the thickest part of the cable is in the middle, not the ends. it is not pulling away from the earth at all, so the anchor doesn't actually need to support any weight, it is just nice to have a stable place to attach your elevator cars to.