Which is odd given that most hardware vendors don't write Linux drivers for their own hardware. Last I checked, the vast majority of Linux drivers were written by third parties. There's really nothing wrong with providing an Other OS feature under the expectation that somebody else will eventually provide the OS....
For anyone who doesn't know the answer and is thus confused by your comment, if the numbers I've read are correct, Sony brings in $7 per copy for every game from every publisher.
Thus, Sony stands to lose lose somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars per year if developers find that they can practically develop games for PS3 without paying the royalty fee.
Especially since if last week's story about slower JavaScript performance in apps that embed WebKit is correct, that means there's a good chance that the native browser in iOS would spank the Android browser despite being on a slower CPU.
More than that, having known people who have worked there, it looks to me like Symantec's modus operandi is to buy companies with successful products, lay off all the staff working on the products, force people to train their replacements at an outsourcing firm in India, and provide the absolute minimum amount of support required in order to fulfill their contractual obligations without getting sued, all while progressively breaking the product with every release through poorly tested updates.
Ethical? Does ethical mean "will sell their customers' and employees' souls for a dollar?" If so, then they're ethical. If Symantec is one of the most ethical companies on the planet, then I'm Mother Teresa.
And eBay? The company that took the better part of a decade of complaints before they fixed the problem of power sellers abusing the feedback system to pressure buyers to retract negative feedback? The company whose PayPal arm routinely makes decisions about who to allow to use their service based on politics or even random whims, and freezes people's accounts without warning, leaving small businesses on the hook for thousands of dollars in payments that they can no longer afford?
If eBay is one of the most ethical companies on Earth, I'm the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Did the people who wrote this story even do the slightest bit of research beyond reading the corporations' PR blurbs when deciding who to list? Seriously?
And it will be interesting to see what this does to iTunes users, given that unless something has changed recently, iTunes allows streaming to anyone on your LAN, including music ripped from CDs.
I'm assuming the law will be written in such a way that it applies only to for-profit streaming. If not, there are going to be a lot of infringers in every college dorm. And by that, I mean pretty much 100% of America's college students, at least until the first round of ten million John Doe lawsuits. Not to mention that it would bring the risk of contributory infringement lawsuits against one of only a couple of tech companies that are actually thriving in this economy.
Also, strong intellectual property rights are not in the best interests of content creators. They are only in the best interests of IP hoarders—those big enough to negotiate cross-licensing agreements with other such colossuses.
For the individual creator, it's already basically impossible to write a song that doesn't infringe somebody's copyright, thanks to the courts' exceptionally broad definition of how similar something has to be to infringe. The only question is whether you'll be the lucky one who gets sued.
Note that I am speaking with my musical composer hat on right now. I come from a long line of musical composers and performers. This isn't somebody who just wants free music saying this. It's not just the public domain that you hurt with overzealous intellectual property laws. It's the people who are actually trying to create new intellectual property.
I hope Mr. Obama has enough of a clue to realize what a terrible idea this is. Want to destroy America's ability to create and innovate? Pass this law. In a few decades, when our country is hopelessly bankrupt except for a few rich corporations, history will know who to blame for its continued death spiral.
Want to help our economy and create new markets for music? Cut the copyright term back to 28 years, provide unlimited exceptions for music streaming to open up Internet radio as a viable alternative to the monoculture that broadcast radio has become (Clear Channel and Infinity/CBS, I'm looking at you), and then continue to chip away at the excess that our copyright system has become.
Sorry to tell you this, but coal ash in Europe contains uranium, too—about 80-135 ppm, in fact. And similar levels can be found in Australian coal. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most coal deposits that are readily accessible are probably contaminated with a fair amount of uranium....
Also, the uranium problems from burning coal aren't just about smoke. If a plant does not use scrubbers, the uranium goes up into the atmosphere. However, if it does have scrubbers, the uranium still ends up in the fly ash. They dump that ash into giant ash pits that leach those heavy metals into the water supply, into rivers, etc.
Agreed that the problem is the packing, not the data. However, grouping multiple short packets together is still leaking information. The only difference is that instead of looking at the length of packets, you have to look at the timing between packets.
I would suggest that the right solution is to modify your code so that instead of sending out packets of varying length isochronously, you instead send out packets of the same length isochronously, and adjust the average length every... say ten seconds, adjusting immediately only when you realize that your encoder is getting dangerously ahead or behind. Pad the packet with null blocks as needed to maintain the average.
With such a scheme, the only information you are leaking is a weighted average length of the packets in the last few seconds of the conversation. That should be much less useful.
The problem with the "elusive 3D stacking of chips" is not that it can't be done, but that it doesn't make systems cheaper. In the technologies developed to date, each new layer of devices costs about as much as making a separate part.
Until you factor in the cost of the board space and being able to fab three motherboards out of one copper-clad sheet instead of two or using one PCB instead of two inside the device. Once you reach that point, reducing the board space by stacking chips becomes a significant win.
No, not at all the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. That fallacy doesn't apply when the definition of the term changes. The term "Democrat" has drifted considerably in its meaning. The definition of Scotsman, by contrast, is and has always been someone from Scotland.
So many people think of "nuclear meltdown" as "nuclear explosion". Not the case. Meltdown is just that; Melting down of the fuel. Gravity dictates that this fluid fuel will go down, so meltdown is of very little concern to anyone except the reactor ops.
Unless/until it burns through the reactor vessel, through the concrete containment building's floor, through the bedrock underneath, and reaches the water table. Then you have a rather large steam explosion. Not saying that's likely, of course.
The fact is that despite over half a century of intensive effort and experience engineers can not design nuclear reactors that do not self destruct in strong earthquakes.
It's really a size vs. efficiency tradeoff you're talking about here.
For example, you could build a small, entirely self-contained power-plant-in-a-box design with flexible steel hoses. You could limit yourself to a handful of very small fuel rods with small pellets of uranium so that critical mass cannot be reached. You could then float the whole thing on a giant platform with large flywheels to limit motion, and have enough battery capacity to ensure that water pumps continue to run until the reactor is fully scrammed in the unlikely even that it has to happen.
You could be reasonably confident that such a reactor design could survive anything short of a direct asteroid impact. It would also be expensive as heck per megawatt. The amount of power it produces would almost certainly not justify the cost.
Alternatively, you can build a full size power plant that produces power at a reasonable cost. When you do, you run the risk that some of those miles of pipes will break in an earthquake, that power from the diesel generators half a mile away will fail before the fuel rods can fully cool after a scram, etc.
Instead of trying to design stronger, more robust reactors, the effort should be spend on making smaller, self-contained reactors cheaper and more efficient. The smaller the reactor, the less likely it is to get so hot that it eats itself, the easier it is to get the reactor under control if things go catastrophically wrong, and the less radiation you release when things go catastrophically wrong. I'd rather have a refrigerator-sized reactor on the nearest street corner than a full-size reactor a hundred miles away.
Solar: requires a lot of space, cannot be the only method since there is no sunlight at night. Also, cannot be used everywhere, especially in places that get a lot of rain and/or snow.
Um... it is possible to... you know, store power. Also to move it around from places that are sunny to places that aren't.... Just saying.:-)
Some of the more interesting solar power plant designs based on solar chimneys actually store solar power as heat so that they can produce power 24x7. And there's also the possibility of shifting the storage problem to the local level, e.g. using a flywheel or two for each individual community to store power during the day and make it available at night.
Finally, with the new superconductive power lines that they're putting in, transmission losses are reduced substantially (as in cut in half, give or take), making longer transmission lines more practical. It would not be all that unreasonable to have a bunch of large solar power plants out in the desert somewhere and use them to provide for most of the power requirements of the U.S. by using superconductive cables to do long haul runs to a few dozen distribution points, then branching out with normal copper infrastructure from there. If there's transmission loss, so what? You're just moving the heat that would have been absorbed by one part of the planet over to a different spot. No big.
They are also the largest and most heavily entrenched, making them the hardest to damage with a boycott. Start with something smaller, then work your way up....
We haven't had one of those since at least the Carter administration. What we have now is not a Democrat, but rather a right winger who used the name of the Democratic Party to get elected. Obama is not all that far to the left of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans' deity. Show me an actual liberal in the White House, and I'll concede your point.
Indeed. It is not always necessary to "win". Often it is merely necessary to not lose. (Alternatively, often it is merely necessary to not be a loser.)
Start by taxing the people at at the top. You know, people who have pay and benefits that greatly exceed their actual needs. The ones whose kids might not get taught in public schools, but who will eventually end up having to make money by hiring the kids who were.
Wi-fi still wasn't particularly popular in 2001 when the 900s started shipping. If there was any integrated Wi-Fi at all back then, it was the exception rather than the rule. It was an optional card in Mac laptops at the time, and an external card on most Windows machines.
Now if you'd said that the 787 had problems, I'd start to worry.
Heh. I think this representative has to be high to think that anyone would actually pay money to buy such a narrow band. Even if you could get everybody off the band (which isn't likely given that it's wide open for HAM use internationally according to the ITU), the band is only 20 MHz wide. I mean, that's less than the width of a single GSM band in a single direction. That's narrower than a single 802.11 channel. Who wants a band that narrow? What practical use could such a small band have on the open market today, other than penny ante uses like pagers for restaurants, wireless microphones, or legacy analog 2-way voice? Pretty much anybody who could make use of a band that narrow already has spectrum allocation, and pretty much everybody looking for bandwidth right now is looking for larger blocks.
To be fair, the design still predates Wi-Fi by a good four years, and even the actual release of the hardware in 1998 predates the popularity of Wi-Fi by several years.
Mod parent up, not down. The 2.4 GHz band wavelength is nowhere near the size of screws. A full wave antenna is just shy of 5 inches long—hardly the same magnitude as most screws. Even a quarter wave antenna is longer than most things that we'd call screws. Structural bolts are that length, sure, and some sheetrock screws, but....
And even if you go with a fairly paranoid requirement of having no gaps in your shield more than 1/20th the wavelength, that's still a quarter inch gap we're talking about....
It seems to me that what we have here is not a case of it being hard to shield at those frequencies, but rather a case of the manufacturer shielding their gear just well enough to prevent their parts from interfering with anything else, without giving any real consideration to outside interference.
You want to know what's hard to shield against? 50/60 Hz mains hum. If you want several skin depths of shielding, you'd need inch-thick copper bars.... Compared with that, a little foil tape around the seams seems pretty darn easy.
Slashdot Mirror
We're working on it.
Which is odd given that most hardware vendors don't write Linux drivers for their own hardware. Last I checked, the vast majority of Linux drivers were written by third parties. There's really nothing wrong with providing an Other OS feature under the expectation that somebody else will eventually provide the OS....
For anyone who doesn't know the answer and is thus confused by your comment, if the numbers I've read are correct, Sony brings in $7 per copy for every game from every publisher.
Thus, Sony stands to lose lose somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars per year if developers find that they can practically develop games for PS3 without paying the royalty fee.
Especially since if last week's story about slower JavaScript performance in apps that embed WebKit is correct, that means there's a good chance that the native browser in iOS would spank the Android browser despite being on a slower CPU.
Obligatory link
More than that, having known people who have worked there, it looks to me like Symantec's modus operandi is to buy companies with successful products, lay off all the staff working on the products, force people to train their replacements at an outsourcing firm in India, and provide the absolute minimum amount of support required in order to fulfill their contractual obligations without getting sued, all while progressively breaking the product with every release through poorly tested updates.
Ethical? Does ethical mean "will sell their customers' and employees' souls for a dollar?" If so, then they're ethical. If Symantec is one of the most ethical companies on the planet, then I'm Mother Teresa.
And eBay? The company that took the better part of a decade of complaints before they fixed the problem of power sellers abusing the feedback system to pressure buyers to retract negative feedback? The company whose PayPal arm routinely makes decisions about who to allow to use their service based on politics or even random whims, and freezes people's accounts without warning, leaving small businesses on the hook for thousands of dollars in payments that they can no longer afford?
If eBay is one of the most ethical companies on Earth, I'm the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Did the people who wrote this story even do the slightest bit of research beyond reading the corporations' PR blurbs when deciding who to list? Seriously?
And it will be interesting to see what this does to iTunes users, given that unless something has changed recently, iTunes allows streaming to anyone on your LAN, including music ripped from CDs.
I'm assuming the law will be written in such a way that it applies only to for-profit streaming. If not, there are going to be a lot of infringers in every college dorm. And by that, I mean pretty much 100% of America's college students, at least until the first round of ten million John Doe lawsuits. Not to mention that it would bring the risk of contributory infringement lawsuits against one of only a couple of tech companies that are actually thriving in this economy.
Also, strong intellectual property rights are not in the best interests of content creators. They are only in the best interests of IP hoarders—those big enough to negotiate cross-licensing agreements with other such colossuses.
For the individual creator, it's already basically impossible to write a song that doesn't infringe somebody's copyright, thanks to the courts' exceptionally broad definition of how similar something has to be to infringe. The only question is whether you'll be the lucky one who gets sued.
Note that I am speaking with my musical composer hat on right now. I come from a long line of musical composers and performers. This isn't somebody who just wants free music saying this. It's not just the public domain that you hurt with overzealous intellectual property laws. It's the people who are actually trying to create new intellectual property.
I hope Mr. Obama has enough of a clue to realize what a terrible idea this is. Want to destroy America's ability to create and innovate? Pass this law. In a few decades, when our country is hopelessly bankrupt except for a few rich corporations, history will know who to blame for its continued death spiral.
Want to help our economy and create new markets for music? Cut the copyright term back to 28 years, provide unlimited exceptions for music streaming to open up Internet radio as a viable alternative to the monoculture that broadcast radio has become (Clear Channel and Infinity/CBS, I'm looking at you), and then continue to chip away at the excess that our copyright system has become.
Sorry to tell you this, but coal ash in Europe contains uranium, too—about 80-135 ppm, in fact. And similar levels can be found in Australian coal. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most coal deposits that are readily accessible are probably contaminated with a fair amount of uranium....
Also, the uranium problems from burning coal aren't just about smoke. If a plant does not use scrubbers, the uranium goes up into the atmosphere. However, if it does have scrubbers, the uranium still ends up in the fly ash. They dump that ash into giant ash pits that leach those heavy metals into the water supply, into rivers, etc.
Agreed that the problem is the packing, not the data. However, grouping multiple short packets together is still leaking information. The only difference is that instead of looking at the length of packets, you have to look at the timing between packets.
I would suggest that the right solution is to modify your code so that instead of sending out packets of varying length isochronously, you instead send out packets of the same length isochronously, and adjust the average length every... say ten seconds, adjusting immediately only when you realize that your encoder is getting dangerously ahead or behind. Pad the packet with null blocks as needed to maintain the average.
With such a scheme, the only information you are leaking is a weighted average length of the packets in the last few seconds of the conversation. That should be much less useful.
Until you factor in the cost of the board space and being able to fab three motherboards out of one copper-clad sheet instead of two or using one PCB instead of two inside the device. Once you reach that point, reducing the board space by stacking chips becomes a significant win.
No, not at all the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. That fallacy doesn't apply when the definition of the term changes. The term "Democrat" has drifted considerably in its meaning. The definition of Scotsman, by contrast, is and has always been someone from Scotland.
Unless/until it burns through the reactor vessel, through the concrete containment building's floor, through the bedrock underneath, and reaches the water table. Then you have a rather large steam explosion. Not saying that's likely, of course.
It's really a size vs. efficiency tradeoff you're talking about here.
For example, you could build a small, entirely self-contained power-plant-in-a-box design with flexible steel hoses. You could limit yourself to a handful of very small fuel rods with small pellets of uranium so that critical mass cannot be reached. You could then float the whole thing on a giant platform with large flywheels to limit motion, and have enough battery capacity to ensure that water pumps continue to run until the reactor is fully scrammed in the unlikely even that it has to happen.
You could be reasonably confident that such a reactor design could survive anything short of a direct asteroid impact. It would also be expensive as heck per megawatt. The amount of power it produces would almost certainly not justify the cost.
Alternatively, you can build a full size power plant that produces power at a reasonable cost. When you do, you run the risk that some of those miles of pipes will break in an earthquake, that power from the diesel generators half a mile away will fail before the fuel rods can fully cool after a scram, etc.
Instead of trying to design stronger, more robust reactors, the effort should be spend on making smaller, self-contained reactors cheaper and more efficient. The smaller the reactor, the less likely it is to get so hot that it eats itself, the easier it is to get the reactor under control if things go catastrophically wrong, and the less radiation you release when things go catastrophically wrong. I'd rather have a refrigerator-sized reactor on the nearest street corner than a full-size reactor a hundred miles away.
Um... it is possible to... you know, store power. Also to move it around from places that are sunny to places that aren't.... Just saying. :-)
Some of the more interesting solar power plant designs based on solar chimneys actually store solar power as heat so that they can produce power 24x7. And there's also the possibility of shifting the storage problem to the local level, e.g. using a flywheel or two for each individual community to store power during the day and make it available at night.
Finally, with the new superconductive power lines that they're putting in, transmission losses are reduced substantially (as in cut in half, give or take), making longer transmission lines more practical. It would not be all that unreasonable to have a bunch of large solar power plants out in the desert somewhere and use them to provide for most of the power requirements of the U.S. by using superconductive cables to do long haul runs to a few dozen distribution points, then branching out with normal copper infrastructure from there. If there's transmission loss, so what? You're just moving the heat that would have been absorbed by one part of the planet over to a different spot. No big.
They are also the largest and most heavily entrenched, making them the hardest to damage with a boycott. Start with something smaller, then work your way up....
Please let it be professional supermodels. I'm flying next week!
Just kidding. I'm not flying next week. But please let it be professional supermodels anyway.
We haven't had one of those since at least the Carter administration. What we have now is not a Democrat, but rather a right winger who used the name of the Democratic Party to get elected. Obama is not all that far to the left of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans' deity. Show me an actual liberal in the White House, and I'll concede your point.
Indeed. It is not always necessary to "win". Often it is merely necessary to not lose. (Alternatively, often it is merely necessary to not be a loser.)
Start by taxing the people at at the top. You know, people who have pay and benefits that greatly exceed their actual needs. The ones whose kids might not get taught in public schools, but who will eventually end up having to make money by hiring the kids who were.
Wi-fi still wasn't particularly popular in 2001 when the 900s started shipping. If there was any integrated Wi-Fi at all back then, it was the exception rather than the rule. It was an optional card in Mac laptops at the time, and an external card on most Windows machines.
Now if you'd said that the 787 had problems, I'd start to worry.
Heh. I think this representative has to be high to think that anyone would actually pay money to buy such a narrow band. Even if you could get everybody off the band (which isn't likely given that it's wide open for HAM use internationally according to the ITU), the band is only 20 MHz wide. I mean, that's less than the width of a single GSM band in a single direction. That's narrower than a single 802.11 channel. Who wants a band that narrow? What practical use could such a small band have on the open market today, other than penny ante uses like pagers for restaurants, wireless microphones, or legacy analog 2-way voice? Pretty much anybody who could make use of a band that narrow already has spectrum allocation, and pretty much everybody looking for bandwidth right now is looking for larger blocks.
Either way, it's a far cry from the 50-odd or 60-odd inch I have in my living room.
Pedantically, yes, but by "computer", most of us mean "general purpose computer", which a console is not.
By that same standard, my cell phone, my Blu-Ray player, and my wristwatch are computers.
To be fair, the design still predates Wi-Fi by a good four years, and even the actual release of the hardware in 1998 predates the popularity of Wi-Fi by several years.
Mod parent up, not down. The 2.4 GHz band wavelength is nowhere near the size of screws. A full wave antenna is just shy of 5 inches long—hardly the same magnitude as most screws. Even a quarter wave antenna is longer than most things that we'd call screws. Structural bolts are that length, sure, and some sheetrock screws, but....
And even if you go with a fairly paranoid requirement of having no gaps in your shield more than 1/20th the wavelength, that's still a quarter inch gap we're talking about....
It seems to me that what we have here is not a case of it being hard to shield at those frequencies, but rather a case of the manufacturer shielding their gear just well enough to prevent their parts from interfering with anything else, without giving any real consideration to outside interference.
You want to know what's hard to shield against? 50/60 Hz mains hum. If you want several skin depths of shielding, you'd need inch-thick copper bars.... Compared with that, a little foil tape around the seams seems pretty darn easy.
Am I missing something?