There is no operating system that actually has speech and large print capabilities built into the core.
Actually, OS/2 did have them (or as close to 'built into the core' as you can get in a modern OS - it was on the install media for people who could be bothered to check the box to install it). Unfortunately it didn't happen until some of the very last releases, by which time nobody was using OS/2 any more (we're talking about merlin and aurora here, and you can't even get aurora unless you know exactly where to look). Also the final version of the speech stuff kinda sucked, because by that point they knew the project was getting canned so they didn't really polish it properly. Pity really.
Motion-Picture Experts Group layer 3 file. Yes, I looked that up.
And still got it wrong. mp3 is a nonsense term derived from the common file extension for mpeg-1 audio layer 3 and mpeg-2 audio layer 3 files (yes, it's two related but different formats - go idiots!). The names for mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 are derived from the name of the group that created them, which is an acronym for "motion picture experts group". You can't expand all the acronyms at once - they're a hierarchy, with 'mpeg-1' and 'mpeg-2' being the names of a whole group of specifications for various forms of video, audio, program, transport, and probably some other kinds of streams, and 'mpeg-1 audio layer 3' being one particular specification from that group.
Attempting to recursively expand an acronym can only lead to insanity. Don't do it.
What if other projects adopt "no military" clauses like we've seen lately? This certainly has to be in the list of risks that the DoD will face.
That's a risk with any vendor. It's particularly a risk with commercial vendors, in an environment where government contracts are widely known to be planned disasters that will be sabotaged by bureaucrats before they ever get off the ground. A lot of vendors don't want to have anything to do with them (because of the bad press, annoyance, and general idiocy involved) and the DoD runs a continual risk that one of their current vendors will elect not to renew a contract for these reasons. Sure, there's plenty more vendors, but most of them are just outright incompetent - the DoD regularly finds themselves in a position of having put out a contract for bidding, and all the bids that come back are from companies who never deliver working systems (and the DoD has to pick one of them *anyway*).
Good idea, but the Skype Wi-Fi Phone has this pretty much covered. Not available yet though. Even if it were, I wouldn't buy it because I wouldn't pay hundreds of bucks for a phone that's locked into somebody's proprietary protocol. If it were an open protocol I'd buy it in a second.
Go get yourself one of the dozens of 802.11 SIP phones on the market, and an account with the gizmo project or other SIP termination service of your choice (of which there are thousands). There are even several phones which can do SIP-over-802.11, analog-over-triband-cell, or even SIP-over-GPRS (for those rare occasions when your cell provider charges more for international calls than they do for GPRS data traffic), all in the same handset.
There is no reason why anybody should use skype, when you can get all the same stuff and more (what sort of idiot pays for voicemail in the 21st century?), in a non-stupidly-incompatible fashion, for less money, right now.
Morphine is a natural drug, it comes from a plant.
Since we haven't yet invented a practical form of transmutation or energy-matter conversion, everything is 'natural', in that it is made from things extracted from plants, animals, or rocks. 'Natural' is an emotive word with no scientific meaning.
Somewhat more to the point, drugs roughly equivalent to morphine (endorphins) are naturally produced by the body on its own, without any external intervention. You can even get addicted to them, if you can be bothered to engage in the heavy exercise necessary (many serious athletes become mildly addicted, and yes, it's real addiction - they show physical withdrawal symptoms if they stop exercising regularly, just like with any other opiate, and can occasionally require medical treatment to manage this if an injury prevents them from training). In no sense can you call an opiate, or any quantity of an opiate, 'unnatural'. It's a fundamental part of how the human body/mind operates (including everything from chocolate to orgasm).
People need to find something less pointless to talk about than whether something is 'natural'.
It may be an insufficient excuse in kindergarten, but it's a valid excuse in a criminal court (it's more complex in civil court, but may form part of your defense anyway). Specifically, in the form of the principle of selective prosecution - if you can show a bias on the part of the prosecution , such that others did the same thing but were not prosecuted for it, then you can't be prosecuted for it either.
If you keep doing that then the users eventually notice. The trick is to put a traffic shaper on all the bottleneck links, and decrease the maximum throughput by 100bytes/sec every day (or more if your bottlenecks are faster than DSL). Then, whenever you change the cable colours, reset the shaper to its maximum speed. The few users who were paying attention will notice a small but significant jump in the rate reported by their bittorrent client; that will be convincing enough to suppress any rumours that you're "faking it".
If your users are smartish, because it's a tech company or something, then randomise the values and never reset it to the same upper limit twice in a row.
Really, until the mantra "free" is clarified (and I don't think it is entirely), businesses and providers will only take from the Linux community, not give.
Or alternatively and preferably, until these ingrates have all been implemented around and driven out of business. Yes, I would far rather live in a world where the people who seek only to accumulate wealth and power (at the expense of all else) end up losing. And that's the only reason why these 'providers' act in this manner.
Nobody has a 'right' to endlessly increment their wealth and power, nor is it desireable for society that anybody ever do so.
Another Windows one is IE's download dialog... It takes so long before it appears, that when it starts there is already a few KBs downloaded, so it claims a 500KB/sec download rate on a dial-up modem, and only gradually goes down to about 4K, as it's really doing. People think that's accurate, and actually come up with the great idea of stopping and restarting downloads several times every minute, presumably because the server or their ISP will only allow them to download "fast" when the download first starts.
And just to confuse the issue further, some ISPs *do* do this, because it means web browsing goes fast while downloading is throttled. It's a sign of a cheap traffic shaper, though - smart ISPs use ones which aren't susceptible to such trivial attacks.
That's why people keep doing stuff like this: it works in just enough cases to maintain the myth. I wouldn't call it "voodoo" though - what we're talking about here is pure cargo-cult behaviour.
Their immediate goal is to disrupt the infidel way of life as much as possible, thereby proving that the infidel way of life is wrong. Only the stupid terrorists just want to kill people. The stupid terrorists are not a significant threat. It's the smart ones you need to worry about.
Their long term goal is to force all the infidels to convert to their way of life. Stupid terrorists want to use force; smart ones are more subtle. They want a world in which cartoons depicting Mohammed are cause for a jail sentence or worse (and are never published at all); they don't care how this is accomplished.
Going by plane in europe - which was never a joy to start with - is now so truly awful that it feels it'd be less painful and quicker to walk to your destination instead.
And somewhat more practically, it is less painful, and sometimes quicker, to catch a train instead.
Education, yes. Education is accomplished by sending them teachers. Heavy text-only cellphones? Those don't seem very high on the list of needs to me. Education is not accomplished with a web browser. And yes, the laptops have been dumbed down to the level of western luxury cellphones. They are not intended to be laptops in the sense that we understand the term; they are not the universal tool that you expect from a laptop or desktop computer.
It's unclear quite how useful these things are going to be, but they aren't going to be anywhere near as useful as education would be. Whether or not they are better value for the money spent is also unclear at this point - just keep in mind that it's not going to be a world-changing event, like some of the pundits would have you believe. At best it's going to improve their quality of life and grease the wheels a little. They'll still need proper education and a lot of work to build up a viable industrial base to the level that gets them above the poverty line (agrarian cottage industries are fine, they just need to be producing enough stuff to meet their own basic needs).
Yes. The purpose of LSB is so that proprietary software vendors can produce binaries that run on any LSB-compliant platform (it's unnecessary for anybody who is willing to ship source for the user to build on their own platform). Most of the current platforms support LSB and have done for years. The proprietary software vendors have been completely uninterested in producing binaries for it, preferring instead to produce them for Redhat and SuSE. So you have a plethora of LSB platforms and precisely zero LSB applications. Ergo, LSB is dead.
When was the last time you saw anybody being hired on the basis of an evaluation of their technical skills?
Sales skills (== lying) get you the job. They hire the person who lies the best about what they can do. I've never seen anybody hired on the basis of demonstrated ability - only claimed ability (and those claims usually turn out to be, at best, exaggerated).
Open Source means Open Source. There's a list of approved licenses. Sun are aware of this, they participate in the OSI, they've submitted licenses before for approval.
These days, OSI does little more than rubber stamp any license that smells like a free one. They don't really do a very careful job of reviewing these things. As such, their involvement doesn't really tell you anything.
Maybe it's the history of the British fight against the IRA, but it seems to me that the British people have been a little more tolerant of state intrusion than Americans.
No, it's far older than that and also the other way around. Americans started out with a free country (no government at all), and have spent the last couple of hundred years gradually eroding those freedoms. In the UK, we started with a feudal state (many centuries ago) and have been gradually eroding the state's power. There's been a fair bit of wobbling along the way for both, and a lot of fighting (political, economic, legal, military, or otherwise) at every step, but overall the trends have been in those directions. All that you're seeing here is that somewhere in the past fifty years or so, the two have crossed over.
Whether or not these trends will continue is obviously unknown - but the reason why British people have been more tolerant of state intrusion is because we've been moving away from it, so it doesn't seem as bad to us.
What I infer is happening now is that the overboard Orwellianism of the current British government is reaching a tipping point where a lot of Brits are wondering, "How much is too much?".
That's what we do to governments. Our history is full of such incidents (when not at war with the French).
Regular wheat flour is also extremely explosive when air is blown through it. It might not be enough to knock a building down, but you could probably take out an airplane if you knew what you were doing - or knock down the 'secure' cockpit door and hijack it.
Ultimately, a sufficiently intelligent and determined person can always find a whole pile of stuff in their local supermarket that will make a nice bang. The only solution is to stop flying and bury yourself under a concrete bunker (and hope the enemy doesn't know how to build a bunker-buster).
Hotdogs, being sausages, are probably made from a mixture of rat meat, pig knuckles, and anything else that they couldn't sell without mincing it first - so yeah, fingers of various animals are probably in there.
Sure, shorting any supply with output capacitors will generate a spark -- that's typical good design. The spark doesn't last long and it isn't indicative of the total energy released.
And furthermore, a spark doesn't mean a damn thing. I can generate a spark with a regular 1.5V AA-size dry cell and a bit of wire. Piezoelectric lighters make sparks from the energy you expend in pushing the button down. You can make sparks from tiny amounts of energy, and unless you're really experienced you can't determine the energy of the spark without special equipment; they all look much the same to the inexperienced eye.
The author is almost certainly referring to that, and it's bogus. There are pseudo-random number generators (L'Ecuyer's Tausworthe generators are commonly used ones) which have been proven to be as good as you can get for such statistical purposes, in that given a sequence of random numbers from that generator, you cannot tell what generator it came from or otherwise distinguish it from 'true' entropy. Given the knowledge of the generator algorithm and a sufficiently long sequence from it, you can determine its state and predict the next number, but that's the cryptographic problem - for simulation purposes, all you need is for it to be indistinguishable without knowledge of the algorithm, which is much easier.
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Actually, OS/2 did have them (or as close to 'built into the core' as you can get in a modern OS - it was on the install media for people who could be bothered to check the box to install it). Unfortunately it didn't happen until some of the very last releases, by which time nobody was using OS/2 any more (we're talking about merlin and aurora here, and you can't even get aurora unless you know exactly where to look). Also the final version of the speech stuff kinda sucked, because by that point they knew the project was getting canned so they didn't really polish it properly. Pity really.
Hey now, that's unfair. You don't know that they're lying.
They could just be stupid.
And still got it wrong. mp3 is a nonsense term derived from the common file extension for mpeg-1 audio layer 3 and mpeg-2 audio layer 3 files (yes, it's two related but different formats - go idiots!). The names for mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 are derived from the name of the group that created them, which is an acronym for "motion picture experts group". You can't expand all the acronyms at once - they're a hierarchy, with 'mpeg-1' and 'mpeg-2' being the names of a whole group of specifications for various forms of video, audio, program, transport, and probably some other kinds of streams, and 'mpeg-1 audio layer 3' being one particular specification from that group.
Attempting to recursively expand an acronym can only lead to insanity. Don't do it.
That's a risk with any vendor. It's particularly a risk with commercial vendors, in an environment where government contracts are widely known to be planned disasters that will be sabotaged by bureaucrats before they ever get off the ground. A lot of vendors don't want to have anything to do with them (because of the bad press, annoyance, and general idiocy involved) and the DoD runs a continual risk that one of their current vendors will elect not to renew a contract for these reasons. Sure, there's plenty more vendors, but most of them are just outright incompetent - the DoD regularly finds themselves in a position of having put out a contract for bidding, and all the bids that come back are from companies who never deliver working systems (and the DoD has to pick one of them *anyway*).
Go get yourself one of the dozens of 802.11 SIP phones on the market, and an account with the gizmo project or other SIP termination service of your choice (of which there are thousands). There are even several phones which can do SIP-over-802.11, analog-over-triband-cell, or even SIP-over-GPRS (for those rare occasions when your cell provider charges more for international calls than they do for GPRS data traffic), all in the same handset.
There is no reason why anybody should use skype, when you can get all the same stuff and more (what sort of idiot pays for voicemail in the 21st century?), in a non-stupidly-incompatible fashion, for less money, right now.
Since we haven't yet invented a practical form of transmutation or energy-matter conversion, everything is 'natural', in that it is made from things extracted from plants, animals, or rocks. 'Natural' is an emotive word with no scientific meaning.
Somewhat more to the point, drugs roughly equivalent to morphine (endorphins) are naturally produced by the body on its own, without any external intervention. You can even get addicted to them, if you can be bothered to engage in the heavy exercise necessary (many serious athletes become mildly addicted, and yes, it's real addiction - they show physical withdrawal symptoms if they stop exercising regularly, just like with any other opiate, and can occasionally require medical treatment to manage this if an injury prevents them from training). In no sense can you call an opiate, or any quantity of an opiate, 'unnatural'. It's a fundamental part of how the human body/mind operates (including everything from chocolate to orgasm).
People need to find something less pointless to talk about than whether something is 'natural'.
It may be an insufficient excuse in kindergarten, but it's a valid excuse in a criminal court (it's more complex in civil court, but may form part of your defense anyway). Specifically, in the form of the principle of selective prosecution - if you can show a bias on the part of the prosecution , such that others did the same thing but were not prosecuted for it, then you can't be prosecuted for it either.
If you keep doing that then the users eventually notice. The trick is to put a traffic shaper on all the bottleneck links, and decrease the maximum throughput by 100bytes/sec every day (or more if your bottlenecks are faster than DSL). Then, whenever you change the cable colours, reset the shaper to its maximum speed. The few users who were paying attention will notice a small but significant jump in the rate reported by their bittorrent client; that will be convincing enough to suppress any rumours that you're "faking it".
If your users are smartish, because it's a tech company or something, then randomise the values and never reset it to the same upper limit twice in a row.
Or alternatively and preferably, until these ingrates have all been implemented around and driven out of business. Yes, I would far rather live in a world where the people who seek only to accumulate wealth and power (at the expense of all else) end up losing. And that's the only reason why these 'providers' act in this manner.
Nobody has a 'right' to endlessly increment their wealth and power, nor is it desireable for society that anybody ever do so.
Neither north nor south America is located in Europe.
And just to confuse the issue further, some ISPs *do* do this, because it means web browsing goes fast while downloading is throttled. It's a sign of a cheap traffic shaper, though - smart ISPs use ones which aren't susceptible to such trivial attacks.
That's why people keep doing stuff like this: it works in just enough cases to maintain the myth. I wouldn't call it "voodoo" though - what we're talking about here is pure cargo-cult behaviour.
One does not normally cross the atlantic while travelling in Europe.
Their immediate goal is to disrupt the infidel way of life as much as possible, thereby proving that the infidel way of life is wrong. Only the stupid terrorists just want to kill people. The stupid terrorists are not a significant threat. It's the smart ones you need to worry about.
Their long term goal is to force all the infidels to convert to their way of life. Stupid terrorists want to use force; smart ones are more subtle. They want a world in which cartoons depicting Mohammed are cause for a jail sentence or worse (and are never published at all); they don't care how this is accomplished.
And somewhat more practically, it is less painful, and sometimes quicker, to catch a train instead.
Education, yes. Education is accomplished by sending them teachers. Heavy text-only cellphones? Those don't seem very high on the list of needs to me. Education is not accomplished with a web browser. And yes, the laptops have been dumbed down to the level of western luxury cellphones. They are not intended to be laptops in the sense that we understand the term; they are not the universal tool that you expect from a laptop or desktop computer.
It's unclear quite how useful these things are going to be, but they aren't going to be anywhere near as useful as education would be. Whether or not they are better value for the money spent is also unclear at this point - just keep in mind that it's not going to be a world-changing event, like some of the pundits would have you believe. At best it's going to improve their quality of life and grease the wheels a little. They'll still need proper education and a lot of work to build up a viable industrial base to the level that gets them above the poverty line (agrarian cottage industries are fine, they just need to be producing enough stuff to meet their own basic needs).
Yes. The purpose of LSB is so that proprietary software vendors can produce binaries that run on any LSB-compliant platform (it's unnecessary for anybody who is willing to ship source for the user to build on their own platform). Most of the current platforms support LSB and have done for years. The proprietary software vendors have been completely uninterested in producing binaries for it, preferring instead to produce them for Redhat and SuSE. So you have a plethora of LSB platforms and precisely zero LSB applications. Ergo, LSB is dead.
When was the last time you saw anybody being hired on the basis of an evaluation of their technical skills?
Sales skills (== lying) get you the job. They hire the person who lies the best about what they can do. I've never seen anybody hired on the basis of demonstrated ability - only claimed ability (and those claims usually turn out to be, at best, exaggerated).
These days, OSI does little more than rubber stamp any license that smells like a free one. They don't really do a very careful job of reviewing these things. As such, their involvement doesn't really tell you anything.
No, it's far older than that and also the other way around. Americans started out with a free country (no government at all), and have spent the last couple of hundred years gradually eroding those freedoms. In the UK, we started with a feudal state (many centuries ago) and have been gradually eroding the state's power. There's been a fair bit of wobbling along the way for both, and a lot of fighting (political, economic, legal, military, or otherwise) at every step, but overall the trends have been in those directions. All that you're seeing here is that somewhere in the past fifty years or so, the two have crossed over.
Whether or not these trends will continue is obviously unknown - but the reason why British people have been more tolerant of state intrusion is because we've been moving away from it, so it doesn't seem as bad to us.
That's what we do to governments. Our history is full of such incidents (when not at war with the French).
Regular wheat flour is also extremely explosive when air is blown through it. It might not be enough to knock a building down, but you could probably take out an airplane if you knew what you were doing - or knock down the 'secure' cockpit door and hijack it.
Ultimately, a sufficiently intelligent and determined person can always find a whole pile of stuff in their local supermarket that will make a nice bang. The only solution is to stop flying and bury yourself under a concrete bunker (and hope the enemy doesn't know how to build a bunker-buster).
Hotdogs, being sausages, are probably made from a mixture of rat meat, pig knuckles, and anything else that they couldn't sell without mincing it first - so yeah, fingers of various animals are probably in there.
And furthermore, a spark doesn't mean a damn thing. I can generate a spark with a regular 1.5V AA-size dry cell and a bit of wire. Piezoelectric lighters make sparks from the energy you expend in pushing the button down. You can make sparks from tiny amounts of energy, and unless you're really experienced you can't determine the energy of the spark without special equipment; they all look much the same to the inexperienced eye.
This site was not shut down by laws, it was shut down by reactionary plutocrats. Laws just failed to stop them, that's all.
The author is almost certainly referring to that, and it's bogus. There are pseudo-random number generators (L'Ecuyer's Tausworthe generators are commonly used ones) which have been proven to be as good as you can get for such statistical purposes, in that given a sequence of random numbers from that generator, you cannot tell what generator it came from or otherwise distinguish it from 'true' entropy. Given the knowledge of the generator algorithm and a sufficiently long sequence from it, you can determine its state and predict the next number, but that's the cryptographic problem - for simulation purposes, all you need is for it to be indistinguishable without knowledge of the algorithm, which is much easier.