The experiment described in the article pretty much defines the mass standard in terms of the volt standard.
Except a volt is a watt per ampere, and a watt is N*m/s, and N = kg*m/s^2, making a volt a kg*m^2/s^3 per ampere. Now an ampere is the current in two long thin parallel wires 1 m apart that produces a force of 2e-7 N, and again N = kg*m/s^2. This is where it starts to go over my head, but I can see that dividing this out cancels out the kilograms, leading roughly in the direction of the experiment.
Of the United States, true, but he is still a citizen of the planet Earth and of the human race.
Text-to-speech is offered by the Adobe software, and backups/archiving can happen in encrypted form. If you know of one good reason why you should be able to decrypt ebooks without having a valid key from the authors, let me know.
Except you do have a valid key; you got it when you licensed the eBook. Adobe's software just doesn't let you use key to fair-use your validly licensed copies.
The new standard is going to be "the ammount of mass properly balanced by XXX volts and YYY amperes in the referenced system."
SI standards based on absolute numbers (as opposed to chunks of metal) include the second (9192631770 ticks of a cesium atom) and the meter (the distance light travels in 1/299792458 second). But you can't define kilogram in terms of volt or ampere because they're already based on the kilogram. A volt is one watt per ampere. A watt will raise a 1N weight at 1m/s, while a newton will accelerate a 1kg mass at 1m/s^2. An ampere is the current in two parallel wires 1m apart that produces 2e-7N per meter of length. Therefore, defining a kilogram in terms of a volt or ampere would be circular (unless NIST skillfully arranges the equation to solve for kg); NIST must define its new version of the kilogram in terms of the second and meter.
Since I am not a music industry guru, I sit back and wonder why more independent music isn't free on the Internet.
I sit back and wonder how you managed not to discover MP3.com, Trax in Space, and other similar sites that showcase independent music.
Are most like my musician friends from high school - just waiting to make millions when they are discovered by a big recording label?
I believe that the people in the music business solely for the money do not deserve to be in the music business. Very few artists make millions of US dollars; Courney Love did the math on a typical recording contract and found that the majority of royalties that appear to go back to the artist actually go toward "recoupable" expenses.
(My largest barrier to composing music is coming up with an original melodic hook so I don't get sued. Any hints?)
I would assert that it is the ISP's right to kick you off, completely arbitrarily. Well, not completely, assuming that the terms of service were laid out such that they specify exactly what the conditions for possible disconnection are. Unfortunately, I can't quite find the actual terms of service for this specific case, but I see nothing wrong with an ISP disconnecting a customer.
Usually, ISP contracts include language to the effect: "$ISP may terminate your service at any time, with or without cause." And because "without cause" is acceptable, it's perfectly OK for them to say "You can no longer use this service now that we've discovered you're $ethnicity."
All these same [heat and form factor issues] were said about the Pentium when it came out. All are also unimportant in a server.
When you colocate a rack of web servers, not only do you pay for the Internet connection, but you also pay rent for the square feet your gear occupies on the datacenter floor. The Itanium processor dissipates more heat than its competitors, requiring a large form factor to house fans. A large form factor for a given performance level doubles the rent, as you are now using two server racks instead of one.
Hell, I once designed a custom lossless scheme for handling certain classes of bitmaps that beat lzw by a factor 5:1
It's easy to beat LZW on certain classes of bitmaps. For instance, LZW has a hard time with smooth gradations, whereas a lossless method with a good 2D predictor (like PNG's Paeth predictor plus zlib compression) will compress the image tighter because you get a lot of -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and 3 in a roughly Laplacian (a*exp(-abs(b*x))) distribution. With the (lossless) compression settings cranked up to max (no gamma, no layer offset, no physical size, no comments, zlib level 9), an indexed PNG or MNG image beats the equivalent GIF on everything but really tiny images such as bullets and web bugs.
In fact, it's really easy to beat LZW on any image, even a 1x1 transparent GIF, as you could put much of the money you put toward royalties for U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts toward converting your images to PNG and buying more storage and bandwidth.
When's the last time a D.C. newspaper did a deep and dirty expose on congress, senate or white house, that had anything to do with the politics? Nope, they're too busy to dig up sex stories, leaving the pols to do their business unaudited.
I though, at first, that this was a troll. Then I checked the posting time (11:27 am)and realised that it must be an Olog-hai. No troll would be active in sunlight.
Could have still been a troll:
The planet is round. The troll may have been in another timezone.
What exactly is it about sunlight that petrifies a troll? If it's UV, they have sunscreens for that.
And above all, unless we're dealing with 802.11, this post was probably made from indoors, where window blinds stop sunlight. Most geeks hardly ever get out in sunlight anyway.
Yeah, OK, so not even close. When I started composing my message there was only one other comment. Ninety seconds later, there were dozens. Doesn't anybody have better things to do with their time?
Most Slashdot readers don't read every comment; you have a much higher chance of being read if you post early, when there are few other comments to distract attention. Most people who try for a really early post (such as the "F1R5T PS0T!!!1!" lamers) compose several messages in advance and then adapt them to a particular story.
The reason to discontinue [405- and 441-line] standards was not the introduction of color. The PAL and SECAM color standards are compatible with the black and white standard introduced in most countries when TV broadcasts started in the 1940s and 50s. Black and white 625 line television sets bought then can still be used.
But neither black and white nor color, 525 line nor 625 line, 60 Hz nor 50 Hz, will work with digital ATSC signals without a converter box. On January 1, 2006, the FCC will pull all licenses for analog TV broadcast spectrum in favor of encrypted digital television that includes DMCA-protected flags such as "you may not record this program; decoder must insert Macrovision garbage into all analog outputs" and "you may not watch this program on sets larger than X centimeters diagonal measure because any larger sets are assumed to be used in a public performance setting."
algebraic notation is much easier for humans to comprehend than reverse polish notation
Not necessarily. Most English-like languages follow verb-object (VO) order (print x), but speakers of object-verb (OV) languages such as Japanese and Klingon tend to be more comfortable with programming languages that follow object-verb order (x print)
By the same token, infix notation (3 + 5) comes naturally only to those whose natural languages are infix, which includes most of Europe and the Americas. However, Irish and several Afroasiatic languages are prefix, which makes the (+ 3 5) syntax of Scheme more palatable, whereas Japanese is postfix (3 5 +) like Forth.
on a side note, why the hell can't M$ include the drivers and what not needed for maintaining and reading a non FAT/FAT32/NTFS partition.
Microsoft doesn't ship them because Microsoft wants to lock you into its proprietary NTFS. Third parties don't ship them because Microsoft's IFS kit is incomplete and prohibitively expensive; at US$1,000, who can afford to port ext2 or reiserfs to NT? On the other hand, OSR is selling a filesystem development kit, among other toolkits, but I could not find any pricing information (other than "e-mail sales@osr.com", which doesn't help in the fast pace of Slashdot discussion).
according to your logic, the NES, SNES, and every other machine that is non-existent in the year 2001 is a flop.
Only half right. The NES and Super NES may have lost commercial significance, but both consoles still have strong communities of independent developers. Find proof at the nesdev site; you might want to try my GNOME vs. KDE game.
Now, throw in the fact that nintendo has Pokemon, Mario and Zelda, and Ps2 has GT3, while Xbox has Halo. Nintendo is gonna have the kids market in a lockbox, with the key thrown away.
Pokemon? PS1 has Digimon. Mario? PS1 has Crash. Zelda? PS1 has Diablo. Other games? Nintendo's quality has been falling (minigames in Mario Party 3 aren't as fun as those in MP2 and MP1 with Thinsulate gloves; Dr. Mario 64 is much cheesier than the new tetris). All MS needs to do get a mascot; will it "embrace and extend" Tux?
Any group of joe schmoe hobbyists who writes a kickass game in DirectX, can easily have it ported to XBOX. Publishers obviously like that - even the shareware/cheapy CD/Game companies can get in on this. What's this mean? There's potential for decent new games at a very reasonable price.
Windows comes on the game discs. In order to use Windows on Xbox games, they'll have to license it from Microsoft. In order to use anything else, they'll probably have to get their game's loader digitally signed by Microsoft. Something similar was necessary on Dreamcast, which compared part of the boot sector (the part that displayed "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD.") against the ROM bit-for-bit.
If you import an Xbox, you won't get warranty service, and because most console games have been region coded since NES, you'll have to import all your games too.
...and the Xbox, in spite of "Halo", really doesn't have anything to compare to established game line that Nintendo is going to roll out for the Gamecube.
The only reason that Xbox or PS2 can't have a "Mario" or a "Zelda" or a "Pokemon" is that Nintendo has trademarks on those names. So Sony can call its Mario game "Crash" and its Pokemon clone "Digimon" (although in the case of digimon, it's actually the other way around).
Look in the future for the Windows OS bootloader to be part of the BIOS
So you're suggesting that Itanium machines will have a bootloader similar to the Open Firmware on PPC machines.
and for removable of support for booting "legacy" (as well as non-MS) OSes...
How will it tell the difference between Microsoft operating systems and other operating systems that conform to the "Itanium Open Firmware" standard? Will the BIOS require the kernel to bear a Microsoft digital signature or something?
No. DVD CCA invalidated Xing's first key after the first DeCSS program leaked it to the world, making it unable to decode new discs. Recent DeCSS programs brute-force the key after eliminating several possibilities. An O(n^16) or so attack on the known plaintext of MPEG headers.
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with a known amount of energy.
The energy unit (joule) depends on the mass unit (kg), as 1J = 1N*m = 1kg*m^2/s^2, where "kg" represents the mass of the old kilogram in France.
The experiment described in the article pretty much defines the mass standard in terms of the volt standard.
Except a volt is a watt per ampere, and a watt is N*m/s, and N = kg*m/s^2, making a volt a kg*m^2/s^3 per ampere. Now an ampere is the current in two long thin parallel wires 1 m apart that produces a force of 2e-7 N, and again N = kg*m/s^2. This is where it starts to go over my head, but I can see that dividing this out cancels out the kilograms, leading roughly in the direction of the experiment.
Sklyarov isn't a citizen.
Of the United States, true, but he is still a citizen of the planet Earth and of the human race.
Text-to-speech is offered by the Adobe software, and backups/archiving can happen in encrypted form. If you know of one good reason why you should be able to decrypt ebooks without having a valid key from the authors, let me know.
Except you do have a valid key; you got it when you licensed the eBook. Adobe's software just doesn't let you use key to fair-use your validly licensed copies.
The new standard is going to be "the ammount of mass properly balanced by XXX volts and YYY amperes in the referenced system."
SI standards based on absolute numbers (as opposed to chunks of metal) include the second (9192631770 ticks of a cesium atom) and the meter (the distance light travels in 1/299792458 second). But you can't define kilogram in terms of volt or ampere because they're already based on the kilogram. A volt is one watt per ampere. A watt will raise a 1N weight at 1m/s, while a newton will accelerate a 1kg mass at 1m/s^2. An ampere is the current in two parallel wires 1m apart that produces 2e-7N per meter of length. Therefore, defining a kilogram in terms of a volt or ampere would be circular (unless NIST skillfully arranges the equation to solve for kg); NIST must define its new version of the kilogram in terms of the second and meter.
Sources include NIST's current definitions.
Since I am not a music industry guru, I sit back and wonder why more independent music isn't free on the Internet.
I sit back and wonder how you managed not to discover MP3.com, Trax in Space, and other similar sites that showcase independent music.
Are most like my musician friends from high school - just waiting to make millions when they are discovered by a big recording label?
I believe that the people in the music business solely for the money do not deserve to be in the music business. Very few artists make millions of US dollars; Courney Love did the math on a typical recording contract and found that the majority of royalties that appear to go back to the artist actually go toward "recoupable" expenses.
(My largest barrier to composing music is coming up with an original melodic hook so I don't get sued. Any hints?)
I would assert that it is the ISP's right to kick you off, completely arbitrarily. Well, not completely, assuming that the terms of service were laid out such that they specify exactly what the conditions for possible disconnection are. Unfortunately, I can't quite find the actual terms of service for this specific case, but I see nothing wrong with an ISP disconnecting a customer.
Usually, ISP contracts include language to the effect: "$ISP may terminate your service at any time, with or without cause." And because "without cause" is acceptable, it's perfectly OK for them to say "You can no longer use this service now that we've discovered you're $ethnicity."
All these same [heat and form factor issues] were said about the Pentium when it came out. All are also unimportant in a server.
When you colocate a rack of web servers, not only do you pay for the Internet connection, but you also pay rent for the square feet your gear occupies on the datacenter floor. The Itanium processor dissipates more heat than its competitors, requiring a large form factor to house fans. A large form factor for a given performance level doubles the rent, as you are now using two server racks instead of one.
Hell, I once designed a custom lossless scheme for handling certain classes of bitmaps that beat lzw by a factor 5:1
It's easy to beat LZW on certain classes of bitmaps. For instance, LZW has a hard time with smooth gradations, whereas a lossless method with a good 2D predictor (like PNG's Paeth predictor plus zlib compression) will compress the image tighter because you get a lot of -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and 3 in a roughly Laplacian (a*exp(-abs(b*x))) distribution. With the (lossless) compression settings cranked up to max (no gamma, no layer offset, no physical size, no comments, zlib level 9), an indexed PNG or MNG image beats the equivalent GIF on everything but really tiny images such as bullets and web bugs.
In fact, it's really easy to beat LZW on any image, even a 1x1 transparent GIF, as you could put much of the money you put toward royalties for U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts toward converting your images to PNG and buying more storage and bandwidth.
When's the last time a D.C. newspaper did a deep and dirty expose on congress, senate or white house, that had anything to do with the politics? Nope, they're too busy to dig up sex stories, leaving the pols to do their business unaudited.
You probably meant s/too busy to dig up/too busy digging up/, but case in point: many thought of the conflict in Kosovo as a coverup for Clinton's sex scandals. Turns out the sex scandals were themselves a coverup; without them, Congress would never have got away with passing the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by a freaking voice vote.
We do have to work on our article submission system. There needs to be some sort of volunteer "slashdot council" who screens the material.
You mean like Kuro5hin, where YOU choose the stories.
Yes, I'm anticipating the obligatory jokes about Pseudo_Intellectual
I though, at first, that this was a troll. Then I checked the posting time (11:27 am)and realised that it must be an Olog-hai. No troll would be active in sunlight.
Could have still been a troll:What exactly is it about sunlight that petrifies a troll? If it's UV, they have sunscreens for that.
And above all, unless we're dealing with 802.11, this post was probably made from indoors, where window blinds stop sunlight. Most geeks hardly ever get out in sunlight anyway.
Yeah, OK, so not even close. When I started composing my message there was only one other comment. Ninety seconds later, there were dozens. Doesn't anybody have better things to do with their time?
Most Slashdot readers don't read every comment; you have a much higher chance of being read if you post early, when there are few other comments to distract attention. Most people who try for a really early post (such as the "F1R5T PS0T!!!1!" lamers) compose several messages in advance and then adapt them to a particular story.
The reason to discontinue [405- and 441-line] standards was not the introduction of color. The PAL and SECAM color standards are compatible with the black and white standard introduced in most countries when TV broadcasts started in the 1940s and 50s. Black and white 625 line television sets bought then can still be used.
But neither black and white nor color, 525 line nor 625 line, 60 Hz nor 50 Hz, will work with digital ATSC signals without a converter box. On January 1, 2006, the FCC will pull all licenses for analog TV broadcast spectrum in favor of encrypted digital television that includes DMCA-protected flags such as "you may not record this program; decoder must insert Macrovision garbage into all analog outputs" and "you may not watch this program on sets larger than X centimeters diagonal measure because any larger sets are assumed to be used in a public performance setting."
algebraic notation is much easier for humans to comprehend than reverse polish notation
Not necessarily. Most English-like languages follow verb-object (VO) order (print x), but speakers of object-verb (OV) languages such as Japanese and Klingon tend to be more comfortable with programming languages that follow object-verb order (x print)
By the same token, infix notation (3 + 5) comes naturally only to those whose natural languages are infix, which includes most of Europe and the Americas. However, Irish and several Afroasiatic languages are prefix, which makes the (+ 3 5) syntax of Scheme more palatable, whereas Japanese is postfix (3 5 +) like Forth.
See also Fith
on a side note, why the hell can't M$ include the drivers and what not needed for maintaining and reading a non FAT/FAT32/NTFS partition.
Microsoft doesn't ship them because Microsoft wants to lock you into its proprietary NTFS. Third parties don't ship them because Microsoft's IFS kit is incomplete and prohibitively expensive; at US$1,000, who can afford to port ext2 or reiserfs to NT? On the other hand, OSR is selling a filesystem development kit, among other toolkits, but I could not find any pricing information (other than "e-mail sales@osr.com", which doesn't help in the fast pace of Slashdot discussion).
according to your logic, the NES, SNES, and every other machine that is non-existent in the year 2001 is a flop.
Only half right. The NES and Super NES may have lost commercial significance, but both consoles still have strong communities of independent developers. Find proof at the nesdev site; you might want to try my GNOME vs. KDE game.
Now, throw in the fact that nintendo has Pokemon, Mario and Zelda, and Ps2 has GT3, while Xbox has Halo. Nintendo is gonna have the kids market in a lockbox, with the key thrown away.
Pokemon? PS1 has Digimon. Mario? PS1 has Crash. Zelda? PS1 has Diablo. Other games? Nintendo's quality has been falling (minigames in Mario Party 3 aren't as fun as those in MP2 and MP1 with Thinsulate gloves; Dr. Mario 64 is much cheesier than the new tetris). All MS needs to do get a mascot; will it "embrace and extend" Tux?
Any group of joe schmoe hobbyists who writes a kickass game in DirectX, can easily have it ported to XBOX. Publishers obviously like that - even the shareware/cheapy CD/Game companies can get in on this. What's this mean? There's potential for decent new games at a very reasonable price.
Windows comes on the game discs. In order to use Windows on Xbox games, they'll have to license it from Microsoft. In order to use anything else, they'll probably have to get their game's loader digitally signed by Microsoft. Something similar was necessary on Dreamcast, which compared part of the boot sector (the part that displayed "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD.") against the ROM bit-for-bit.
If you import an Xbox, you won't get warranty service, and because most console games have been region coded since NES, you'll have to import all your games too.
The only reason that Xbox or PS2 can't have a "Mario" or a "Zelda" or a "Pokemon" is that Nintendo has trademarks on those names. So Sony can call its Mario game "Crash" and its Pokemon clone "Digimon" (although in the case of digimon, it's actually the other way around).
Sure, you can make a falling blocks game; you just can't call it Tetris.
Look in the future for the Windows OS bootloader to be part of the BIOS
So you're suggesting that Itanium machines will have a bootloader similar to the Open Firmware on PPC machines.
and for removable of support for booting "legacy" (as well as non-MS) OSes...
How will it tell the difference between Microsoft operating systems and other operating systems that conform to the "Itanium Open Firmware" standard? Will the BIOS require the kernel to bear a Microsoft digital signature or something?
If it is an underclocked chip they hould point out that fact.
They probably figured that it should be obvious that any chip labeled "pentium !!!" running at 400 MHz is running less than its stated clock speed.
The first runs of PIII added only a larger cache and the new SSE vector instructions.
the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons, and rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space
If you care enough about it, write a chrome with this configuration.
that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed
IE 5.x has a similar feature, the difference being that you can change which search engine Mozilla uses; poke around a bit in the prefs.
there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their /etc/hosts anymore? hello?)
Run WinApache and get 404s (broken images or "Not Found" in an iframe) instead of "conn refused" popups.
Isn't DeCSS using a proper Xing key? :-)
No. DVD CCA invalidated Xing's first key after the first DeCSS program leaked it to the world, making it unable to decode new discs. Recent DeCSS programs brute-force the key after eliminating several possibilities. An O(n^16) or so attack on the known plaintext of MPEG headers.
Really recent versions have solved for all 400 or so player keys, forcing DVD CCA to invalidate all these keys to keep DeCSS programs for PC working. But this also invalidates all DVD players' ability to play new discs. In fact, it's possible to crack the disk key in O(24) without needing any player keys.
( Read More... |)So if Disney was thinking about family friendly materials, why did they not simply release 'Castle in the Sky' instead?
Disney didn't release Laputa because it would compete with the company's own similar Atlantis movie.
-- Fuck Disney. Fuck Sonny Bono. And fuck USA corporate puppet government. Pinocchio wasn't even this easy to manipulate.