Bad idea. Nuclear weapons haven't been used since the bombs dropped in the second world war. We do not want to reopen that door as a 'legitimate' military strategy.
So you want the United States to turn into the American Union? Well, I guess it's working fairly well for Europe, but I though most Americans absolutely hated the EU.
I can understand the kernel numbering issue -- the 3.0+ kernels are functionally unchanged from the late 2.6 series, but the version number change did break some userspace tools/scripts that (in a poor, but understandable, decision) relied upon the kernel version, often as being in the 2.6 series. Of course, this was a holdover from the old huge swap from 2.4 to 2.6, where almost everything changed.
With Linus suddenly deciding, "Hey, this version is now 3.0, even though there are no compatibility-breaking changes from the last 2.6 kernel.", some of those userspace tools/scripts broke in unexpected ways with version checks, but didn't actually break in effect. So re-numbering the kernel to stave off needing to immediately fix them without much warning was a fairly reasonable thing to do, for the short term.
Overall, I agree with the decision to move to the 3.0 version numbering, though a bit more warning may have helped. Considering just how much the kernel development cycle changed from the 2.4/2.6 transition (namely in there never being a 'full' development branch), making a very clear, albeit arbitrarily timed, version number swap seems sensible to me.
Does that mean that Apple is complicit in installing Carrier IQ?
Yes. It was potentially something they were told to do by carriers, but Apple has had a habit of telling anyone that went against their worldview to fuck off, so I imagine it at least doesn't conflict with their intents.
My understanding is that Radeon cards are still competing neck-and-neck with Nvidia's offerings these days, especially per-dollar. I may be mistaken, though, as my video card is still an 18-month-old ATI Radeon 5850 (back before Nvidia even had a DirectX 11 card on the market, and before the AMD-ATI buyout), which can still play everything I've thrown at it on full settings at 1920x1080.
Even if their CPUs are lack-luster (even at the lower price point, it would seem, where they used to be quite competitive), they may be able to survive mostly on the GPU market without too many troubles. For a while, at least.
I bought a bunch of 2TB drives (six Seagate 'green' drives for a NAS) about the same time you did from Newegg. They were $70; the same drives are now $230.
I'm actually fine with this idea of 'fake meat', as long as it's done well. If it tastes and behaves similarly to 'real meat', and is made from actual real animal cells... I'm just fine with the idea. I'd be more worried about genetically modified meat -- but this stuff is not modified in that way. It's just cells grown in a non-standard incubation system (i.e., a lab dish, as opposed to a sack of other meat cells).
Heck it might already be cracked, and held as a state secret, only makes sense.
I doubt this. My instincts say that any government holding the key to breaking all cryptography would, at the very least, quietly start using something more secure for their most sensitive data. If one person has solved the problem, another is bound to do so soon, even entirely independently.
Sales tax is applied to the consumer, not to the business. The business is unaffected, except in how many orders they receive as a result of having lower taxes than buying in-state.
Ironically, we're actually coming back around to the old way of doing things. Access your programs by typing their name into a text box, and hit enter.
Works through Spotlight on OSX, the search/run bar on Windows 7, apparently something similar in this Unity interface, and a good old terminal window if you never left that old way of doing it.
If true, that's an odd way of doing it. Most other browsers maintain an offline database of 'unsafe' URLs, regularly updated, and only send the URL to a 3rd-party service for checking if it matches the database (in order to 'double check' that it's still considered unsafe, in case of any changes or updates since the last download).
For a web document? You hyperlink it. "See section '<a href="section.html#something">something</a>."
PDF is great for documents that will be printed out, though. Unlike what paper-free idealists think, this is a number which is substantially larger than zero -- so the format does have its place. If you're providing it via the web, though, it would generally be polite to provide both an HTML copy and a PDF copy.
The biggest benefit is in archiving. Rip (or otherwise acquire) a song once in lossless format, and you should never need to acquire it again (well, until the world moves to a different sampling rate or number of channels). Your lossy codec of choice no longer supported on your new device? Re-encode it from the lossless files. Your lossless codec of choice getting long in the tooth? Re-encode it in the new lossless format of your choice.
Keep in mind, this isn't even purely an academic benefit -- some new devices don't support MP3, but they do support, say, M4A. This sort of thing will keep happening -- but as long as you use a lossless format that you can still decode in some manner (an open source lossless codec is probably your best choice -- though which one doesn't matter!), you can convert it to a newer lossless codec, and from there into whatever lossy format you need.
Personally, I'm using FLAC and sticking with it for the foreseeable future. I've been using it for a while (only 50 gigs of music, but that is my entire collection at the moment), it's supported where I need to play/convert my music collection, and it uses Vorbis comments (which I love the flexibility of).
The chart is a bit non-obvious. It doesn't read "past three years", it reads "three years from phone release". The claim is not that the iPhone and iPhone 3G are still updated, but that they were updated until the end of their "three year lifespan" (a fairly typical mobile phone contract term). You could argue that the depiction is unclear (and it would be better to spread out the chart over 5-6 years to demonstrate that a little clearer), but it's not actually inaccurate.
Until we get under 3-4 billion, I wouldn't worry about population shrinkage, mind you. Unless it all happens at once, then you should worry, as it probably means a zombie horde.
Hopefully Activision hasn't screwed up Diablo 3 too much, because I still love Blizzard.
Real money auction house and required to be online to play. I can't speak for you, but those two things entirely killed my interest in DIII (the former maiming it, and the latter being the merciful bullet to the head).
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering. There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
It's also extremely useful if you run into an unrecoverable read error while trying to rebuild the array.
A lot of standard mechanical drives have an unrecoverable read error rate of about 1-in-10^14 bits (or 1-in-~12TB), meaning you're getting into some pretty nasty chances of hitting an URE on at least one of your disks when you're trying to rebuild the array after a disk failure with a decently-large array. This issue is alleviated when you have storage with an URE rate of 1-in-10^15 or higher (such as some SSDs), but this won't come cheap for a comparable amount of storage.
Of course, RAID isn't a backup solution. But I'd personally rather lose a little more storage than have to restore from a backup (which, while you should have, doesn't have to be convenient) on short notice.
Ian Banks (as Iain M. Banks) is listed, specifically aggregating all his Culture novels into one list entry. An odd choice to aggregate them, given the listing of, say, two separate Discworld novels.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad idea. Nuclear weapons haven't been used since the bombs dropped in the second world war. We do not want to reopen that door as a 'legitimate' military strategy.
So you want the United States to turn into the American Union? Well, I guess it's working fairly well for Europe, but I though most Americans absolutely hated the EU.
I can understand the kernel numbering issue -- the 3.0+ kernels are functionally unchanged from the late 2.6 series, but the version number change did break some userspace tools/scripts that (in a poor, but understandable, decision) relied upon the kernel version, often as being in the 2.6 series. Of course, this was a holdover from the old huge swap from 2.4 to 2.6, where almost everything changed.
With Linus suddenly deciding, "Hey, this version is now 3.0, even though there are no compatibility-breaking changes from the last 2.6 kernel.", some of those userspace tools/scripts broke in unexpected ways with version checks, but didn't actually break in effect. So re-numbering the kernel to stave off needing to immediately fix them without much warning was a fairly reasonable thing to do, for the short term.
Overall, I agree with the decision to move to the 3.0 version numbering, though a bit more warning may have helped. Considering just how much the kernel development cycle changed from the 2.4/2.6 transition (namely in there never being a 'full' development branch), making a very clear, albeit arbitrarily timed, version number swap seems sensible to me.
Does that mean that Apple is complicit in installing Carrier IQ?
Yes. It was potentially something they were told to do by carriers, but Apple has had a habit of telling anyone that went against their worldview to fuck off, so I imagine it at least doesn't conflict with their intents.
My understanding is that Radeon cards are still competing neck-and-neck with Nvidia's offerings these days, especially per-dollar. I may be mistaken, though, as my video card is still an 18-month-old ATI Radeon 5850 (back before Nvidia even had a DirectX 11 card on the market, and before the AMD-ATI buyout), which can still play everything I've thrown at it on full settings at 1920x1080.
Even if their CPUs are lack-luster (even at the lower price point, it would seem, where they used to be quite competitive), they may be able to survive mostly on the GPU market without too many troubles. For a while, at least.
I bought a bunch of 2TB drives (six Seagate 'green' drives for a NAS) about the same time you did from Newegg. They were $70; the same drives are now $230.
No kidding. I 'disassembled' the YouTube JavaScript once, and I still have nightmares.
Honestly, it's not like that in Canada. These guys are just batshit insane.
Yup. And I can raed taht etrine tnihg mselyf, brleay soinlwg dwon.
I'm actually fine with this idea of 'fake meat', as long as it's done well. If it tastes and behaves similarly to 'real meat', and is made from actual real animal cells... I'm just fine with the idea. I'd be more worried about genetically modified meat -- but this stuff is not modified in that way. It's just cells grown in a non-standard incubation system (i.e., a lab dish, as opposed to a sack of other meat cells).
Since one party just has to inform Facebook to (probably) get both accounts shut down, locking away any 'evidence', as long as it's done quick enough.
Heck it might already be cracked, and held as a state secret, only makes sense.
I doubt this. My instincts say that any government holding the key to breaking all cryptography would, at the very least, quietly start using something more secure for their most sensitive data. If one person has solved the problem, another is bound to do so soon, even entirely independently.
Sales tax is applied to the consumer, not to the business. The business is unaffected, except in how many orders they receive as a result of having lower taxes than buying in-state.
Ironically, we're actually coming back around to the old way of doing things. Access your programs by typing their name into a text box, and hit enter.
Works through Spotlight on OSX, the search/run bar on Windows 7, apparently something similar in this Unity interface, and a good old terminal window if you never left that old way of doing it.
Google's product plan isn't about asking "why?"; it's about asking "why not?".
Of course, that why not is usually answered and then they junk the product after a few months.
If true, that's an odd way of doing it. Most other browsers maintain an offline database of 'unsafe' URLs, regularly updated, and only send the URL to a 3rd-party service for checking if it matches the database (in order to 'double check' that it's still considered unsafe, in case of any changes or updates since the last download).
For a web document? You hyperlink it. "See section '<a href="section.html#something">something</a>."
PDF is great for documents that will be printed out, though. Unlike what paper-free idealists think, this is a number which is substantially larger than zero -- so the format does have its place. If you're providing it via the web, though, it would generally be polite to provide both an HTML copy and a PDF copy.
The biggest benefit is in archiving. Rip (or otherwise acquire) a song once in lossless format, and you should never need to acquire it again (well, until the world moves to a different sampling rate or number of channels). Your lossy codec of choice no longer supported on your new device? Re-encode it from the lossless files. Your lossless codec of choice getting long in the tooth? Re-encode it in the new lossless format of your choice.
Keep in mind, this isn't even purely an academic benefit -- some new devices don't support MP3, but they do support, say, M4A. This sort of thing will keep happening -- but as long as you use a lossless format that you can still decode in some manner (an open source lossless codec is probably your best choice -- though which one doesn't matter!), you can convert it to a newer lossless codec, and from there into whatever lossy format you need.
Personally, I'm using FLAC and sticking with it for the foreseeable future. I've been using it for a while (only 50 gigs of music, but that is my entire collection at the moment), it's supported where I need to play/convert my music collection, and it uses Vorbis comments (which I love the flexibility of).
The chart is a bit non-obvious. It doesn't read "past three years", it reads "three years from phone release". The claim is not that the iPhone and iPhone 3G are still updated, but that they were updated until the end of their "three year lifespan" (a fairly typical mobile phone contract term). You could argue that the depiction is unclear (and it would be better to spread out the chart over 5-6 years to demonstrate that a little clearer), but it's not actually inaccurate.
Until we get under 3-4 billion, I wouldn't worry about population shrinkage, mind you. Unless it all happens at once, then you should worry, as it probably means a zombie horde.
But... Money! Cashing in on someone's death, it's how it's done, right?
Hopefully Activision hasn't screwed up Diablo 3 too much, because I still love Blizzard.
Real money auction house and required to be online to play. I can't speak for you, but those two things entirely killed my interest in DIII (the former maiming it, and the latter being the merciful bullet to the head).
Officer: "Where are you going?"
I imagine another good response would be "Why? Are there road closures ahead that I need to plan for?".
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering. There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
It's also extremely useful if you run into an unrecoverable read error while trying to rebuild the array.
A lot of standard mechanical drives have an unrecoverable read error rate of about 1-in-10^14 bits (or 1-in-~12TB), meaning you're getting into some pretty nasty chances of hitting an URE on at least one of your disks when you're trying to rebuild the array after a disk failure with a decently-large array. This issue is alleviated when you have storage with an URE rate of 1-in-10^15 or higher (such as some SSDs), but this won't come cheap for a comparable amount of storage.
Of course, RAID isn't a backup solution. But I'd personally rather lose a little more storage than have to restore from a backup (which, while you should have, doesn't have to be convenient) on short notice.
Ian Banks (as Iain M. Banks) is listed, specifically aggregating all his Culture novels into one list entry. An odd choice to aggregate them, given the listing of, say, two separate Discworld novels.