Though it just somehow seems "wrong" that a text document has to be compiled
This can be handled transparently. Put two windows on the screen, a text editor and a LaTeX viewer. Whenever the user saves the document in the text editor, it would tell the LaTeX viewer to refresh the view of the document.
Is it an OS issue, or a BIOS issue? Some BIOS implementations clear all RAM on each reboot. And even if it is an OS issue, what if my employer forces me to use applications that are available only as binaries for a well-known operating system that doesn't support this feature? I could just use agressive disk caching settings within the OS, but that doesn't solve the problem of Pentium and Athlon motherboards that can't hold more than 3 GB.
for the price of the Ramdrive I could get a motherboard that supported 64GB and fill a moderate chunk of it
If your operating system crashes, what happens? If your OS publisher pushes out a "security update" and asks you to restart your computer, what happens? If you lose power, will your UPS be able to power your motherboard for as long as it can power an external RAM drive?
If I already filled all the slots on my motherboard with the densest RAM modules that my motherboard supports, buying more RAM won't help because it'll just sit in its box.
Anyway, how often do people reboot their machines nowadays?
I'll answer the related question, "why would anybody need to reboot a computer?"
Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to live and work in an environment that primarily uses BSD or Linux. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, live and work in an environment that primarily uses Microsoft Windows. Therefore, I have to use Microsoft Windows.
Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to be able to afford personal copies of PC virtualization software such as VMware, so that they can run other operating systems within a window on their computer. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a VMware license. Therefore, I must run Microsoft Windows on the bare hardware, and if I want to run an operating system other than Microsoft Windows, I must reboot my computer to access it.
Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to be able to afford to buy additional hardware to shield their other computer from exploits of newly discovered vulnerabilities in its operating system. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a second motherboard, CPU, case, and keyboard on which to run BSD firewall software. Therefore, if I want to keep my computer connected to the network, I must keep my computer updated with patches from Microsoft Windows Update. Those patches often require a reboot of the computer.
Therefore, I, Damian Yerrick, cannot afford to own a computer system that does not have to be rebooted.
Personally I don't get why people always expect products to have a really necessary use;)
If a product doesn't have a wide application, it won't enter full-scale mass production. If a product doesn't enter full-scale mass production, its price won't fall. If the price of a product doesn't fall, the person posting the comment will never be able to afford one.
It has been tried in the past, but the problem was that the heads would get slightly misaligned in time and you'd have to reformat too often.
To solve rotational misalignment in a platter-level RAID system, just treat the binary stream coming from each head assembly as a separately clocked serial stream, and combine them in the controller.
It's also straightforward to solve radial misalignment, that is, when one of the heads is slightly too far from the hub or too close to the hub. While the drive is idle, non-destructively reformat the disk continuously, reading an entire cylinder/sector pair head by head and then writing it all at once.
What do you expect for a consistent connection (i.e. not really 14.4 kbps burstable to "cable" speeds)?
and also a bit slow. I think they're symmetric with a 1.5Mbit capacity. My (capped) cable modem has 2Mbit downstream already.
But what's its upstream cap? Some cable monopolies cap uploads at 28.8 kbps, the same as dial-up. Without a reasonably symmetric connection, you'll get branded as a "leech" on the p2p networks.
My Sony DAV-S500 does have digital out, as well as support for SACD.
But not at the same time. When playing a SACD disc, your Sony player is probably sending either silence or a 44.1 or 48 kHz downsampled signal on the digital output.
With this credit system, how can a user who connects to the Internet through a dial-up provider and has never used an eDonkey client get better than a 6-hour wait? Many dial-up services kick a user who has been on longer than 6 hours.
I'd prefer an answer other than "just get broadband" because the next step up from dial-up may be 128 kbps IDSL for $100/mo.
Get rid of the TM and you're A-OK
on
Micro Tetris
·
· Score: 1
Or is that blatant theft of intellectual property?
Unless the Netherlands recognizes a patent on falling tetramino games that the United States doesn't, the only government-granted monopoly that encumbers a falling tetramino game developed based on observation of the behavior of Tetris products is the trademark on "TETRIS". Once the students remove any association with the Tetris brand, they are in the clear.
You buy Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns--it's a thick, scary book--and use some of those.
How do I know which patterns in that book are or aren't safe to use under copyright law?
You think up something different.
I have tried generating melodies AT RANDOM with a qbasic program, based on a simple music-theoretic model, but half the time, I could place the result as a popular song. I would write songs based on what music theory I know, but I'm too scared of being sued.
Only Michael Nyman and Shellac get away with making music out of four notes
Handel did as well. The lawsuit that my article covered was about the four notes of "Hallelujah Chorus"'s hook being copied in "Yes! We have no bananas!".
and that calculation is supremely retarded anyway, since it ignores rhythm
The calculation does not ignore rhythm. It classifies note lengths into three categories, nominally half, quarter, and eighth.
and harmony
Judges may ignore harmony; changing an existing song's bass line doesn't create a new song. The calculation isn't intended to represent what a musicologist will think; rather, it's intended to represent what a federal judge might think. A judge doesn't look for an exact match but rather "substantial similarity" as evidence of copying.
but "50,000" sounds better than "infinity" to techie types who're obsessed with denigrating the skill and intellect of all non-dorks
I'm not trying to denigrate anybody or anything. I just wonder how songwriters can survive in the prevailing legal climate.
they forget about the independent musicians who actually want you to copy their music and distribute it as widely as possible.
Independent musical recording artists still usually have to license their underlying musical works from a songwriter, who gets a royalty of 8 cents per track in the United States.
Imagine for a second how it would be if you wrote a song and discovered a few months later that BMG had released a CD in which someone had recorded that song without your consent.
Even worse, imagine for a second how it would be if you wrote a song and discovered a few months later that BMG had released a CD in which someone had recorded that song, seventeen years before you even wrote the song, and now you're being sued for infringing the song's copyright. It has happened. It has happened again. And with four notes considered sufficient to establish "substantial similarity" of works, and with only 50,000 possible four-note melodies in the Western musical scale, how can anybody possibly write music that a court will consider original?
2. The OS checks the file and what libraries it needs.
3. The OS installs those libraries.
Then how would the OS find those libraries? It's typically not space-practical to include libraries with every app that uses the libraries without distributing the app on a physical medium such as a CD.
We have plenty of space these days, why not make everything statistically linked?
Take video codecs for example. Do you want to require every app that plays video to contain copies of every single video codec ever produced? Or are you willing to accept that parts things such as QuickTime should stay in dynamically loaded plug-ins?
I know that Mac OS X has "app bundles" and "frameworks", but how does the system resolve things if you don't have a particular "framework" or version thereof installed on your system?
Why can't I just copy a file from the CD/Net and be done with it?
Dependencies. If you could install apps by merely dragging them into place, what design would you propose to eliminate the cruft of having to install libraries that the app uses?
Slashdot Mirror
Though it just somehow seems "wrong" that a text document has to be compiled
This can be handled transparently. Put two windows on the screen, a text editor and a LaTeX viewer. Whenever the user saves the document in the text editor, it would tell the LaTeX viewer to refresh the view of the document.
You can get a fully functional Pentium I computer for less that what you spend going out one night.
Thanks for the suggestion. Do you suggest looking on eBay first? Or is there a better idea?
That's an OS issue.
Is it an OS issue, or a BIOS issue? Some BIOS implementations clear all RAM on each reboot. And even if it is an OS issue, what if my employer forces me to use applications that are available only as binaries for a well-known operating system that doesn't support this feature? I could just use agressive disk caching settings within the OS, but that doesn't solve the problem of Pentium and Athlon motherboards that can't hold more than 3 GB.
>persists data between boots.
the exact same argument holds.
How do I "set[] aside a chunk of main RAM as a file system" that "persists data between boots"?
For the price of the Ramdrive, I could easily get 2GB of DDR
I can get 4.7 GB of DDR for $36.94.
for the price of the Ramdrive I could get a motherboard that supported 64GB and fill a moderate chunk of it
If your operating system crashes, what happens? If your OS publisher pushes out a "security update" and asks you to restart your computer, what happens? If you lose power, will your UPS be able to power your motherboard for as long as it can power an external RAM drive?
Just buy more RAM.
If I already filled all the slots on my motherboard with the densest RAM modules that my motherboard supports, buying more RAM won't help because it'll just sit in its box.
Anyway, how often do people reboot their machines nowadays?
I'll answer the related question, "why would anybody need to reboot a computer?"
Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to live and work in an environment that primarily uses BSD or Linux. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, live and work in an environment that primarily uses Microsoft Windows. Therefore, I have to use Microsoft Windows.
Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to be able to afford personal copies of PC virtualization software such as VMware, so that they can run other operating systems within a window on their computer. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a VMware license. Therefore, I must run Microsoft Windows on the bare hardware, and if I want to run an operating system other than Microsoft Windows, I must reboot my computer to access it.
Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to be able to afford to buy additional hardware to shield their other computer from exploits of newly discovered vulnerabilities in its operating system. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a second motherboard, CPU, case, and keyboard on which to run BSD firewall software. Therefore, if I want to keep my computer connected to the network, I must keep my computer updated with patches from Microsoft Windows Update. Those patches often require a reboot of the computer.
Therefore, I, Damian Yerrick, cannot afford to own a computer system that does not have to be rebooted.
Personally I don't get why people always expect products to have a really necessary use ;)
If a product doesn't have a wide application, it won't enter full-scale mass production. If a product doesn't enter full-scale mass production, its price won't fall. If the price of a product doesn't fall, the person posting the comment will never be able to afford one.
And if the power cuts out, you're going to lose the RAM drive anyway.
Even with capacitor-powered refresh?
What about a UPS?
It has been tried in the past, but the problem was that the heads would get slightly misaligned in time and you'd have to reformat too often.
To solve rotational misalignment in a platter-level RAID system, just treat the binary stream coming from each head assembly as a separately clocked serial stream, and combine them in the controller.
It's also straightforward to solve radial misalignment, that is, when one of the heads is slightly too far from the hub or too close to the hub. While the drive is idle, non-destructively reformat the disk continuously, reading an entire cylinder/sector pair head by head and then writing it all at once.
Yes, but T1's are rather expensive
What do you expect for a consistent connection (i.e. not really 14.4 kbps burstable to "cable" speeds)?
and also a bit slow. I think they're symmetric with a 1.5Mbit capacity. My (capped) cable modem has 2Mbit downstream already.
But what's its upstream cap? Some cable monopolies cap uploads at 28.8 kbps, the same as dial-up. Without a reasonably symmetric connection, you'll get branded as a "leech" on the p2p networks.
My Sony DAV-S500 does have digital out, as well as support for SACD.
But not at the same time. When playing a SACD disc, your Sony player is probably sending either silence or a 44.1 or 48 kHz downsampled signal on the digital output.
I'm waiting for the "I'll pay more for the bandwidth I'm eating up but uncap my bandwidth" service
It's called a T1 line.
With this credit system, how can a user who connects to the Internet through a dial-up provider and has never used an eDonkey client get better than a 6-hour wait? Many dial-up services kick a user who has been on longer than 6 hours.
I'd prefer an answer other than "just get broadband" because the next step up from dial-up may be 128 kbps IDSL for $100/mo.
Or is that blatant theft of intellectual property?
Unless the Netherlands recognizes a patent on falling tetramino games that the United States doesn't, the only government-granted monopoly that encumbers a falling tetramino game developed based on observation of the behavior of Tetris products is the trademark on "TETRIS". Once the students remove any association with the Tetris brand, they are in the clear.
You buy Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns--it's a thick, scary book--and use some of those.
How do I know which patterns in that book are or aren't safe to use under copyright law?
You think up something different.
I have tried generating melodies AT RANDOM with a qbasic program, based on a simple music-theoretic model, but half the time, I could place the result as a popular song. I would write songs based on what music theory I know, but I'm too scared of being sued.
Only Michael Nyman and Shellac get away with making music out of four notes
Handel did as well. The lawsuit that my article covered was about the four notes of "Hallelujah Chorus"'s hook being copied in "Yes! We have no bananas!".
and that calculation is supremely retarded anyway, since it ignores rhythm
The calculation does not ignore rhythm. It classifies note lengths into three categories, nominally half, quarter, and eighth.
and harmony
Judges may ignore harmony; changing an existing song's bass line doesn't create a new song. The calculation isn't intended to represent what a musicologist will think; rather, it's intended to represent what a federal judge might think. A judge doesn't look for an exact match but rather "substantial similarity" as evidence of copying.
but "50,000" sounds better than "infinity" to techie types who're obsessed with denigrating the skill and intellect of all non-dorks
I'm not trying to denigrate anybody or anything. I just wonder how songwriters can survive in the prevailing legal climate.
Unless... you're a band or artist who writes your own material?
There are only 50,000 possible four note melodies in the Western musical scale, and almost all of those melodies are probably copyrighted to somebody by now. In light of those facts, how is it feasible to create original musical works without accidentally infringing on somebody's copyrighted musical work?
they forget about the independent musicians who actually want you to copy their music and distribute it as widely as possible.
Independent musical recording artists still usually have to license their underlying musical works from a songwriter, who gets a royalty of 8 cents per track in the United States.
Imagine for a second how it would be if you wrote a song and discovered a few months later that BMG had released a CD in which someone had recorded that song without your consent.
Even worse, imagine for a second how it would be if you wrote a song and discovered a few months later that BMG had released a CD in which someone had recorded that song, seventeen years before you even wrote the song, and now you're being sued for infringing the song's copyright. It has happened. It has happened again. And with four notes considered sufficient to establish "substantial similarity" of works, and with only 50,000 possible four-note melodies in the Western musical scale, how can anybody possibly write music that a court will consider original?
a[...]d[...]e[...]p[...]t[...]
Adept Technology Inc. might get upset about that one.
"Fenix" is taken, as the publisher of a Win32 to ARM7TDMI cross-compiler distribution used by many GBA software developers.
2. The OS checks the file and what libraries it needs.
3. The OS installs those libraries.
Then how would the OS find those libraries? It's typically not space-practical to include libraries with every app that uses the libraries without distributing the app on a physical medium such as a CD.
We have plenty of space these days, why not make everything statistically linked?
Take video codecs for example. Do you want to require every app that plays video to contain copies of every single video codec ever produced? Or are you willing to accept that parts things such as QuickTime should stay in dynamically loaded plug-ins?
or use Next/OS X
I know that Mac OS X has "app bundles" and "frameworks", but how does the system resolve things if you don't have a particular "framework" or version thereof installed on your system?
Use hard links instead of symlinks.
Hard links cannot point across partitions in most filesystems.
Why can't I just copy a file from the CD/Net and be done with it?
Dependencies. If you could install apps by merely dragging them into place, what design would you propose to eliminate the cruft of having to install libraries that the app uses?