Let me repeat that, plan you lighting before you start. Again - plan you lighting before you start. If your electrician wings it and makes mistakes it is almost impossible to fix.
For example high end lighting in a dining room might have: 1) chandelier 2) halogen cans over table 3) halogen cans around sides of room 4) art light aimable cans 5) cans over buffet furniture. 6) tray lighting in the ceiling
Do you really want six dimmers in the wall of the dining room? No. What you want to do is remote all of those dimmers and have a single keypad at each opening into the room. Remoting a dimmer means putting it down by the electrical panel or in an attic. The home automation feature of the keypads then controls the remote dimmers. Doing this at wiring install time is almost free.
Repeat this in each room of the house. Think about art lights, fireplace sconces, in-cabinet lights, switched outlets, in-floor outlets in the center of rooms. Plan all of this before you let your electrician start. If you plan all of this correctly you'll never end up with 8-gang rows of dimmers. Well designed lighting is an easy way to make a major improvement to the feel of the house.
Hide the thermostats in closets and use in-wall remote temperature sensors. Disable the temp sensor inside of the hidden thermostat.
Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series does a reasonable treatment of this. All of his battle scenes involve dealing with speed of light restrictions. The characters have FTL drive but it is only useful for travel between stars. Three book series is a good read.
The way to combat this is for every website that detects the DNT header to simply respond with a page saying how to turn it off or download a different browser. How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.
Your optical cable can do two channels of uncompressed or 5.1 of highly compressed - usually AAC or MP3.
I agree that Dolby was a real benefit back in the stereo days. But the need for Dolby processing disappeared with HDTV and Blueray. Dolby doesn't want to give up the $100M/yr in licensing fees so they 'invented' pointless things to mess with HD audio. They are taking advantage of the brand awareness built back when Dolby was a valuable feature. Every device you get with a Dolby label carries $2-3 in licensing fees. Keep Dolby for stereo processing, but get rid of it on HD audio.
The purpose of these Dolby "enhancements" is to ensure that every receiver and TV manufactured has to pay Dolby a big license fee so that they can recover the source material that has been Dolby encoded. I wish they'd just leave HDMI level audio in uncompressed PCM. But then we wouldn't need to license these Dolby decoders.
An alternative approach is to limit the number of patents that the PTO can grant to something like 500 per month. Right now they are granting around 100,000 per month. Do we really have 100,000 new concepts a month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't think so. But those 100K patents a month generate huge income streams for the legal profession.
Limiting the number of patents granted makes them much more valuable and enforceable. They will also be of much high quality since they will be forced to find their way to the top of the application pile. If someone invents wormholes it will obviously receive a patent and gain full protection. For less novel ideas all of those patent lawyers can surround the PTO and fight to be one of the 500.
Now a company can choose. Submit a patent and join the giant fight to get it issued. Or ignore the whole mess and just respect the much smaller pool of patents being issued. Maybe ten of those 500 patents will be software patents. That is a manageable number of patents to read and respect. Sure the giant companies are going to end up with all of these patents. Fine, let them. They would get these patents in the current system too. It is a small price to pay for getting rid of 10M junk patents and the trolls associated with them.
They're at about 120 years under current law and Congress has shown no restraint in extending them further. Right now a work from 1923 will come out of copyright in 2019. Other circumstances can trigger longer periods.
You have to wonder if Oracle really thought about the impacts of trying to copyright APIs. Their entire business is built on APIs designed by other companies. Hmmm -- kind of sounds like Google and Java. Winning on Java will have repercussions on Oracle far in excess of what they will win.
Why do you assume SQL isn't copyrighted? Our fine copyright law makes everything copyrighted unless you specifically release it. If this decision says APIs are copyrightable IBM will automatically have that copyright since they created SQL. The court will simply be acknowledging that IBM has always had a copyright on SQL even if IBM didn't know they had it. And thanks to the Mickey Mouse in Perpetuity Act (Bono Act) IBM will probably have that copyright for several hundred years. Just because they haven't been asking for licenses and fees doesn't mean they can't start with Oracle at the front of the line.
Allowing APIs to be copyright will destroy the computing industry in the US. Can you imagine the damage of AT&T going after the C run-time library?
Yes, we should punish Citibank severely for not specifying which rounding method it was going to use in those hundred pages or so of legal fine print I got with my mortgage. Certainly this justifies harsh prison sentences for the CEO and board of directors. I bet they wished they'd added yet another page to that hundred page document - then they would have been safe from this idiotic lawsuit.
It says my mortgage payment are due by the close of business. But it doesn't seem to specify a time zone. Could be grounds for another class action!
I don't want these minor problems litigated in the first place. The mortgage case was over the rounding method used when the amount came to exactly 1/2 a cent. Do you always round up, or do you use the even/odd rule and round 22.5 up and 21.5 down. This really wasn't worth sending $65M to a lawyer to argue about. The costs passed onto me to pay for this unwanted lawyer far exceed the nickel or so I might have gained.
That's the real problem. The only winner in these class actions is the lawyers. They get $20M. The consumers get coupons and the service raises their price to collect the $20M and give it the lawyers.
I got a check for $0.02 in a mortgage case when the class action lawyer took home $65M. Funny how the account servicing fee went up $0.10 a month after that. Probably cost me over $20 to recover that $0.02 I had been "cheated" out of.
I thought of Facebook first! Mark to market, now I owe $2B in taxes! April 15 comes around, where do I get this $2B? My shares aren't liquid, I'll borrow it! Who's this Zuckerberg guy? My shares drop to zero.
Now I have a $2B loss carry forward which I can consume at $3,000 a year for the next 660,000 years. And I still owe the bank $2B. Instant bankruptcy.
Before you get excited about mark to market, mark to market accounting was one of the causes behind the banking melting down we just had and it has since been repealed. Mark to market can easily cause phantom gains. Phantom gains happen when the market crashes like it did in 2001. If you got marked to market in 2000 and then your stock crashed in early 2001 you could have ended up owing more in taxes that your stock is currently worth. That usually results in instant bankruptcy (or bank failure).
Google has ported Quake to run inside Chrome using HTML5. You just aren't seeing fully developed HTML5 apps yet.
The GUI libraries in older versions of HTML were not equivalent to their native counter parts. A lot of that had to do with Microsoft torpedoing the standardization and advancement of HTML. They seem to have stopped doing that now. Let's see how browser centric Win8 is now that the consent decree has expired.
All of these problems can be solved. I believe the rest of the world is going down the browser GUI path, so it is up to the Linux community to decide if they want to follow. Gnome/KDE are almost certainly dead ends.
This is not an overnight switch. It will take a decade to fully transition to an HTML5 plus local server model.
One reason why so many people don't like SAAS is because the server side of the app has been implemented closed source. Providing open source servers is one way to address that problem. For example convert Open Office to a HTML5 plus local server model as a response to Google docs.
HTML5 is just another GUI front-end library. In no way does it require you to write cloud based apps. If you want a native Linux application write the GUI in HTML5 and run the server on the same machine as your GUI. Hmmm.... something kind of like the Xserver model, but brought 30 years into the future?
When people whine about the ending of location transparency with the Xserver, what is going away is the Xserver as the primary GUI library, not location transparency in general. The Xserver needs to die, it is pass its prime and we need to move onto newer GUI technologies.
So stop writing native Linux applications and instead start writing HTML5 applications that ship with a built-in server. The cool thing about apps in this model is that the GUI works on Linux, Mac and Windows plus you can run the server locally or in the cloud - your choice. If you want to help out convert some native Linux apps into the HTML5 model.
Wayland is a key transition technology. It allows apps like Chrome/Firefox to be written directly to EGL. Plus you can run a user space Xserver as a legacy tool.
They run Ubuntu and are based on the Freescale iMX51. They are far more powerful than a Raspberry PI.
Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz) 3D Graphics Processing Unit WXGA display support (HDMI) Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder (currently not supported by the included software) 512MB RAM 8GB Internal SSD 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet 802.11 b/g/n WiFi SDHC card reader 2 x USB 2.0 ports Audio jack for headset Built-in speaker
10.1" TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz) 3D Graphics Processing Unit Multi-format High-Definition hardware video decoder 16GB Nand Flash External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2) Internal MicroSD slot 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch) Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR 2 x USB 2.0 ports Phone jack for headset Built-in 1.3MP video camera Built-in microphone Built-in stereo speaker
Slashdot Mirror
And i should not use copy paste with a spelling error in it.
Let me repeat that, plan you lighting before you start. Again - plan you lighting before you start. If your electrician wings it and makes mistakes it is almost impossible to fix.
For example high end lighting in a dining room might have:
1) chandelier
2) halogen cans over table
3) halogen cans around sides of room
4) art light aimable cans
5) cans over buffet furniture.
6) tray lighting in the ceiling
Do you really want six dimmers in the wall of the dining room? No. What you want to do is remote all of those dimmers and have a single keypad at each opening into the room. Remoting a dimmer means putting it down by the electrical panel or in an attic. The home automation feature of the keypads then controls the remote dimmers. Doing this at wiring install time is almost free.
Repeat this in each room of the house. Think about art lights, fireplace sconces, in-cabinet lights, switched outlets, in-floor outlets in the center of rooms. Plan all of this before you let your electrician start. If you plan all of this correctly you'll never end up with 8-gang rows of dimmers. Well designed lighting is an easy way to make a major improvement to the feel of the house.
Hide the thermostats in closets and use in-wall remote temperature sensors. Disable the temp sensor inside of the hidden thermostat.
Someone please send DMCA takedown notices to all sites currently covering the US presidential election. That might get the problem fixed.
Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series does a reasonable treatment of this. All of his battle scenes involve dealing with speed of light restrictions. The characters have FTL drive but it is only useful for travel between stars. Three book series is a good read.
The way to combat this is for every website that detects the DNT header to simply respond with a page saying how to turn it off or download a different browser. How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.
Not a VPN, but what about a IPv6 tunnel to Hurricane Electric? Much of what you are interested in is IPv6 accessible. And the HE tunnel is free.
Might check and see where the IPv6 anycast address routes to from your location. Might be in a different country.
Your optical cable can do two channels of uncompressed or 5.1 of highly compressed - usually AAC or MP3.
I agree that Dolby was a real benefit back in the stereo days. But the need for Dolby processing disappeared with HDTV and Blueray. Dolby doesn't want to give up the $100M/yr in licensing fees so they 'invented' pointless things to mess with HD audio. They are taking advantage of the brand awareness built back when Dolby was a valuable feature. Every device you get with a Dolby label carries $2-3 in licensing fees. Keep Dolby for stereo processing, but get rid of it on HD audio.
The purpose of these Dolby "enhancements" is to ensure that every receiver and TV manufactured has to pay Dolby a big license fee so that they can recover the source material that has been Dolby encoded. I wish they'd just leave HDMI level audio in uncompressed PCM. But then we wouldn't need to license these Dolby decoders.
An alternative approach is to limit the number of patents that the PTO can grant to something like 500 per month. Right now they are granting around 100,000 per month. Do we really have 100,000 new concepts a month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't think so. But those 100K patents a month generate huge income streams for the legal profession.
Limiting the number of patents granted makes them much more valuable and enforceable. They will also be of much high quality since they will be forced to find their way to the top of the application pile. If someone invents wormholes it will obviously receive a patent and gain full protection. For less novel ideas all of those patent lawyers can surround the PTO and fight to be one of the 500.
Now a company can choose. Submit a patent and join the giant fight to get it issued. Or ignore the whole mess and just respect the much smaller pool of patents being issued. Maybe ten of those 500 patents will be software patents. That is a manageable number of patents to read and respect. Sure the giant companies are going to end up with all of these patents. Fine, let them. They would get these patents in the current system too. It is a small price to pay for getting rid of 10M junk patents and the trolls associated with them.
They're at about 120 years under current law and Congress has shown no restraint in extending them further. Right now a work from 1923 will come out of copyright in 2019. Other circumstances can trigger longer periods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono_Act
You have to wonder if Oracle really thought about the impacts of trying to copyright APIs. Their entire business is built on APIs designed by other companies. Hmmm -- kind of sounds like Google and Java. Winning on Java will have repercussions on Oracle far in excess of what they will win.
Why do you assume SQL isn't copyrighted? Our fine copyright law makes everything copyrighted unless you specifically release it. If this decision says APIs are copyrightable IBM will automatically have that copyright since they created SQL. The court will simply be acknowledging that IBM has always had a copyright on SQL even if IBM didn't know they had it. And thanks to the Mickey Mouse in Perpetuity Act (Bono Act) IBM will probably have that copyright for several hundred years. Just because they haven't been asking for licenses and fees doesn't mean they can't start with Oracle at the front of the line.
Allowing APIs to be copyright will destroy the computing industry in the US. Can you imagine the damage of AT&T going after the C run-time library?
Yes, we should punish Citibank severely for not specifying which rounding method it was going to use in those hundred pages or so of legal fine print I got with my mortgage. Certainly this justifies harsh prison sentences for the CEO and board of directors. I bet they wished they'd added yet another page to that hundred page document - then they would have been safe from this idiotic lawsuit.
It says my mortgage payment are due by the close of business. But it doesn't seem to specify a time zone. Could be grounds for another class action!
I don't want these minor problems litigated in the first place. The mortgage case was over the rounding method used when the amount came to exactly 1/2 a cent. Do you always round up, or do you use the even/odd rule and round 22.5 up and 21.5 down. This really wasn't worth sending $65M to a lawyer to argue about. The costs passed onto me to pay for this unwanted lawyer far exceed the nickel or so I might have gained.
That's the real problem. The only winner in these class actions is the lawyers. They get $20M. The consumers get coupons and the service raises their price to collect the $20M and give it the lawyers.
I got a check for $0.02 in a mortgage case when the class action lawyer took home $65M. Funny how the account servicing fee went up $0.10 a month after that. Probably cost me over $20 to recover that $0.02 I had been "cheated" out of.
I thought of Facebook first!
Mark to market, now I owe $2B in taxes!
April 15 comes around, where do I get this $2B?
My shares aren't liquid, I'll borrow it!
Who's this Zuckerberg guy?
My shares drop to zero.
Now I have a $2B loss carry forward which I can consume at $3,000 a year for the next 660,000 years.
And I still owe the bank $2B.
Instant bankruptcy.
Before you get excited about mark to market, mark to market accounting was one of the causes behind the banking melting down we just had and it has since been repealed. Mark to market can easily cause phantom gains. Phantom gains happen when the market crashes like it did in 2001. If you got marked to market in 2000 and then your stock crashed in early 2001 you could have ended up owing more in taxes that your stock is currently worth. That usually results in instant bankruptcy (or bank failure).
Chrome runs fine on all versions of Windows.
Google has ported Quake to run inside Chrome using HTML5. You just aren't seeing fully developed HTML5 apps yet.
The GUI libraries in older versions of HTML were not equivalent to their native counter parts. A lot of that had to do with Microsoft torpedoing the standardization and advancement of HTML. They seem to have stopped doing that now. Let's see how browser centric Win8 is now that the consent decree has expired.
All of these problems can be solved. I believe the rest of the world is going down the browser GUI path, so it is up to the Linux community to decide if they want to follow. Gnome/KDE are almost certainly dead ends.
This is not an overnight switch. It will take a decade to fully transition to an HTML5 plus local server model.
One reason why so many people don't like SAAS is because the server side of the app has been implemented closed source. Providing open source servers is one way to address that problem. For example convert Open Office to a HTML5 plus local server model as a response to Google docs.
HTML5 is just another GUI front-end library. In no way does it require you to write cloud based apps. If you want a native Linux application write the GUI in HTML5 and run the server on the same machine as your GUI. Hmmm.... something kind of like the Xserver model, but brought 30 years into the future?
When people whine about the ending of location transparency with the Xserver, what is going away is the Xserver as the primary GUI library, not location transparency in general. The Xserver needs to die, it is pass its prime and we need to move onto newer GUI technologies.
So stop writing native Linux applications and instead start writing HTML5 applications that ship with a built-in server. The cool thing about apps in this model is that the GUI works on Linux, Mac and Windows plus you can run the server locally or in the cloud - your choice. If you want to help out convert some native Linux apps into the HTML5 model.
Wayland is a key transition technology. It allows apps like Chrome/Firefox to be written directly to EGL. Plus you can run a user space Xserver as a legacy tool.
Yes, yes, yes! You would be foolish to rebuild the hardware.
Here are 47,826 vendors in China willing to sell you Android tablets.
http://www.dhgate.com/wholesale/search.do?act=search&searchkey=android&catalog=#search
You can buy 7in Android tablets shipped to your door for $60.
http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika
Smarttop $129 thin client
Smartbook $199 laptop
They run Ubuntu and are based on the Freescale iMX51.
They are far more powerful than a Raspberry PI.
Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz)
3D Graphics Processing Unit
WXGA display support (HDMI)
Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder (currently not supported by the included software)
512MB RAM
8GB Internal SSD
10/100Mbit/s Ethernet
802.11 b/g/n WiFi
SDHC card reader
2 x USB 2.0 ports
Audio jack for headset
Built-in speaker
10.1" TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution
Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz)
3D Graphics Processing Unit
Multi-format High-Definition hardware video decoder
16GB Nand Flash
External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2)
Internal MicroSD slot
802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch)
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
2 x USB 2.0 ports
Phone jack for headset
Built-in 1.3MP video camera
Built-in microphone
Built-in stereo speaker
Because there are two 3D app contending for the hardware on Ubuntu and only one on the BSD system. Two apps cause locking and task swapping delays.
This is likely caused by Compiz interacting with the game engine on Ubuntu. Turn Compiz off and re-run the benchmarks.