That's the concept of Better Place which is developing tech so you drive up to to a ramp, a robot swaps out the old batteries, puts in new ones and off you go. They have pilots going on in various places though the company seems to be experiencing some difficulties with recent layoffs.
You have to "throw away" the gasoline you use to drive 1000 miles too by burning it. Of course you wouldn't be "throwing away" the battery per se - you'd exchange it for a full one like you might with a spent propane tank. Most probably you'd pay a deposit on the first battery and a refill charge thereafter.
If the battery were slung under the vehicle (as an another Israeli firm called Better Place proposes), then it could even be swapped out just by driving the car on to a ramp where a robotic arm extracts and replaces it in minutes. Also the battery is for exceptional situations so that 1000 miles might deplete very slowly since drivers would rely on rechargeable cells for the most part. So you might only have to do this once a month or once every half a year depending on your driving patterns.
Of course could be lots of reasons that this is a terrible idea. What's the energy cost of producing a battery and recycling it? What's the cost of building out an infrastructure? How many batteries would a car need to haul around to justify the additional range it supplied? Does the battery degrade when it's not in use or when it's used just once? Would other metal-air batteries be safe or cheaper to use? And so on.
There have been a few other decent titles published under the LucasArts label but usually produced by somebody else, e.g. TellTale's Lego Star Wars games, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic. As a studio they've been producing mostly duds for a long time now. I sort of liked The Force Unleashed but it just got a bit boring.
Well, no, you're ignoring the other possibility: users don't get to have both a newer kernel and a useful module at the same time. Coincidentally, I spent much of today in a meeting about a development team in very much that position, where an entire project is potentially being delayed because sorting out basic Linux functionality is now the critical path. So you're really trying that argument on the wrong guy today.:-)
Yes you do have to get the module and the kernel at the same time or all bets are off. An old module will probably work with a minor point revision but there is no guarantee it will. Anyone who uses the binary blobs against the kernel (e.g. NVidia, VirtualBox guest additions etc.) would know this all too well. And that is why the first thing most people do after an update is reinstall their proprietary drivers which usually involves running a script which compiles a shim module to compensate for any differences.
In fact the kernel documentation has a specific file to cover this point. Simply put, providing backwards compatibility or multiple APIs is a burden on the pace of development and impacts on stability and security.
I'm puzzled by your idea that paying so much attention to compatibility might not be a smart idea for open source software.
Compatibility is fine where it makes sense. But this particular thing was a major refactor. Not only that it, it was related to security and privacy. You appear to be suggesting that Firefox should maintain two APIs or some quirks mode just to keep a handful of extensions like Lazarus happy. I hope you can see that from a security perspective what a disastrously bad idea that is, especially when the extension could just be updated.
Believers and disbelievers are all in the same boat.
False equivalence I'm afraid. Randi was advising scientists to devise tests which preclude the possibility of cheating so the results reflected what the test was intended to measure.
Put another way, I suggest you read the Cargo Cult Science essay by Richard Feynman. In it he refers to an experimenter attempting to test learning in rats and ending up with useless results because the rats could achieve the results with smell, light, vibration etc. Only when he eliminated ways that rats could "cheat" his test was he sure the results reflected what he was attempting to measure in the first place.
Replace rats with paranormal subjects and the same principle applies.
Exactly. It's in JREF's interests to acquiesce and accommodate any reasonable request providing it doesn't compromise the test itself. JREF offers applicants the time to "calibrate" their powers, do trial runs, express their satisfaction with the test setup etc because it means that when they start whining later (as they invariably do) it all sounds very hollow. They agreed to everything as presented and later engage in some post hoc rationalization for their failure rather than accept the most likely explanation that their powers never existed in the first place.
I think it's funny when they occasionally complain that Randi somehow managed to suppress their powers. If Randi had the power to dampen psychics powers that would mean he exhibits far greater paranormal powers than any applicant and he deserves to keep the money.
Oh sorry my mistake. I didn't realise I was forbidden from offering my opinions on a website designed expressly for that purpose. If you prefer Twilight style zombies, or CG zombie swarms you too are free to argue that point. Even though it would be wrong.
Utter horseshit. The protocol is agreed upon by both parties. i.e. you propose a test, I make a counter proposal and we negotiate on points until it is agreed upon what you claim, how it should be demonstrated and in what conditions to our mutual satisfaction. It's actually in JREF's interests to accommodate any reasonable demand so that the applicant is entirely satisfied with the test protocol and can't trot out some bullshit excuse afterwards to explain their failure.
I'm pretty sure JREF is well used to applicants pretending that skeptical mindbeams or the position of furniture or the sun through the window somehow interfered their amazing powerz which worked in other, less controlled circumstances.
If you could demonstrate genuine telekinesis, the very last thing a government would do is chop you up because a) it wouldn't show up anything worth knowing b) you are an immensely valuable asset to keep alive and throwing millions of dollars at if that's what it takes to keep you happy. And blowjobs.
Besides we may as well apply that lame excuse to explain the non existence of other things. e.g. maybe sentient teapots don't announce their presence for fear of getting dissected in government laboratories.
I think the key word is "heyday". LucasArts has been pretty blah for the last 5 years. I still own Tie Fighter and many of their early adventure games (this article prompted me to go over and check if I still had the CDs) and they were awesome. But at the end of the day it costs money to run a studio and if they're not making money to cover their costs, what's the point of keeping it going any more?
Scientific credentials doesn't stop someone from being fooled. Read up on Project Alpha where two mentalists were able (with the assistance of Randi) to con a paranormal research group into thinking they had genuine psychic powers. The con was simply to kick up a fuss until the protocols went their way and bend things when people weren't looking. The scientists were even ready to announce their results to the world when Randi stepped in and revealed the hoax to them. Scientists are not necessarily equipped to spot frauds from occurring whereas magicians and confidence tricksters might well be. They have much to learn from each other especially when paranormal claims are being examined.
His convictions seem to get in the way of his thinking, and I am pretty sure that the money will never be awarded no matter how well the subject matter may be demonstrated.
You're flat out wrong. The challenge is very straightforward to understand - someone claims they can do something paranormal, they fill out a form to apply, they agree to a protocol that demonstrates this power in a self evident fashion and they do it (or not). If they succeed and they get a cheque for 10,000 dollars on the spot and the remainder within a period of time. The protocol would obviously be designed to prevent cheating or arriving at the result by chance alone but aside from that the important part is it's self evident. No judges, no argumentation, no subjectivity. The person either does or does not pass in an obvious way.
Besides, In the event that someone passed and the money was not forthcoming, their notoriety would go through the roof and they quickly amass a small fortune in book contracts and other deals that would enable them to sue the living daylights out of JREF and utterly ruin it.
I don't mind fast zombies and I liked the Dawn of the Dead remake. I just think this film looks lame especially the physics defying zombies. Maybe the trailer has focused on the action and there is an intelligent and deep movie underneath. I'm not putting money on it though.
Sorry, but that policy is just plain daft if you're going to push out automatic updates every five minutes.
They're once every 1 or 2 months and most of the time they have minimal impact to extensions, sites or users. This particular change involves a major refactor and was well projected to anyone in the development community or beta channel. It's too bad if this extension was caught out but I see no reason whatsoever Firefox should be backwards compatible for the sake of it. Wait the massive day or two for them to pull their finger out and fix their extension.
The rest of the software industry has been successfully using major-minor-point release or version-service pack-patch strategies for decades. Among other things, this tiered approach has clear advantages for developers, who know when APIs can be relied on to be stable and when they might break. It also tends to limit breaking changes to major versions, which means they don't happen too frequently to keep up.
The rest of the software industry eh? The Linux kernel offers no guarantee to modules that they'll work with a new point release. You know what happens if your module doesn't work with a new kernel? Tough, fix it.
Second, perhaps Microsoft can afford to write backwards compatible APIs or workaround brain damaged apps but that doesn't mean its a smart thing to do especially for open source software.
This update has been in the beta channel for at least 2 months with the feature set well publicized. It's up to extension writers to ensure their product works with the new releases, not the other way around. Alternatively extension authors, particularly security extension authors could set strictCompatibility in their manifest so the max version constraint is correctly enforced and they can take the time to QA their extension (in the beta) before bumping the max version up.
Expecting the browser to hold up just on the off chance it might break [random-extension] is ludicrous and impractical.
The book obviously needs some adaptation to make a good movie but it looks like the only things the filmmakers took from the book were its title and the basic premise.
The browser might not go out of its way to break extensions but neither should it be beholden to them either. Making private mode per-window is a major infrastructural change.
You can buy gumstick devices for $25 up on alibaba.com. Even for quantities of 1. e.g. this example. Just type "android stick" and you'll find countless other vendors selling numerous variants. They come with a faster processor, more RAM, built-in storage, wifi, case, cable and adapter.
As a package, the Pi is already obsolete and outclassed. Where it does have an advantage is it's very easy to flash (just stick an SD in it), has a large and coherent support base, and has some connectors for hooking it up to other things.
No, dishonest is where someone pretends that someone else talked about wayland in the present tense in order to justify some ludicrous demand for benchmarks. Stop being ridiculous.
What "advanced" wm features do you need, and why are these absolutely vital to perform your work with no other workflow possible.
As I said quite clearly it has flaws and frustrations but I think it's a sound desktop. It's clean, simple, work oriented, discoverable, attractive and easy to use. I share frustration at the over simplicity of the control panel but I'm not about to pretend it's "unusable" or that we should all revert to kitchen-sink style KDE or GNOME 2 for the sake of that.
GNOME 3 is perfectly usable. It certainly has flaws and frustrations but complaining that "zero thought" has gone into usability is absurd. It's also very to use. I didn't have to tell my wife or kids anything more than "click on activities to launch stuff" for them to figure it out from their existing experience of Windows 7.
Perhaps you should look at the quality and finish that most 3D plastic nozzle based printers achieve. It's awful. I also expect a lot of people would have a thing about eating off plastic plates especially ones where the uneven surface pattern ensures the accumulation of food particles and the cutlery and washing puts ugly scratches all over it in no time.
No, assuming there were a remote transport, it wouldn't be "scraping" anything since every window would be a distinct surface which could be sent as deltas and recomposed at the other end. There are numerous ways to achieve this and it's hardly different from X at the moment - most modern apps are either just shifting whole pixmaps around or complex xrender lists with bidirectional communication. And it doesn't stop vnc style servers, or X, or MX or anything else.
Second, a "monolithic" approach has obvious advantages since there aren't 3 separate processes sending messages between themselves, maintaining duplicate state and incuring context switches. Does that mean it translates into an efficient implementation? Time will tell. As for benchmarks, are you even serious? Wayland is still in development. It won't be possible to to compare like for like for some time. It does not mean that makes a valid excuse for not moving. Even seasoned X developers want the move and recognise the need for it.
It's not like X11 is going away any time soon. It will sit on top of Wayland at least until the apps which constitute the desktop are ported.
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That's the concept of Better Place which is developing tech so you drive up to to a ramp, a robot swaps out the old batteries, puts in new ones and off you go. They have pilots going on in various places though the company seems to be experiencing some difficulties with recent layoffs.
If the battery were slung under the vehicle (as an another Israeli firm called Better Place proposes), then it could even be swapped out just by driving the car on to a ramp where a robotic arm extracts and replaces it in minutes. Also the battery is for exceptional situations so that 1000 miles might deplete very slowly since drivers would rely on rechargeable cells for the most part. So you might only have to do this once a month or once every half a year depending on your driving patterns.
Of course could be lots of reasons that this is a terrible idea. What's the energy cost of producing a battery and recycling it? What's the cost of building out an infrastructure? How many batteries would a car need to haul around to justify the additional range it supplied? Does the battery degrade when it's not in use or when it's used just once? Would other metal-air batteries be safe or cheaper to use? And so on.
There have been a few other decent titles published under the LucasArts label but usually produced by somebody else, e.g. TellTale's Lego Star Wars games, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic. As a studio they've been producing mostly duds for a long time now. I sort of liked The Force Unleashed but it just got a bit boring.
Well, no, you're ignoring the other possibility: users don't get to have both a newer kernel and a useful module at the same time. Coincidentally, I spent much of today in a meeting about a development team in very much that position, where an entire project is potentially being delayed because sorting out basic Linux functionality is now the critical path. So you're really trying that argument on the wrong guy today. :-)
Yes you do have to get the module and the kernel at the same time or all bets are off. An old module will probably work with a minor point revision but there is no guarantee it will. Anyone who uses the binary blobs against the kernel (e.g. NVidia, VirtualBox guest additions etc.) would know this all too well. And that is why the first thing most people do after an update is reinstall their proprietary drivers which usually involves running a script which compiles a shim module to compensate for any differences.
In fact the kernel documentation has a specific file to cover this point. Simply put, providing backwards compatibility or multiple APIs is a burden on the pace of development and impacts on stability and security.
I'm puzzled by your idea that paying so much attention to compatibility might not be a smart idea for open source software.
Compatibility is fine where it makes sense. But this particular thing was a major refactor. Not only that it, it was related to security and privacy. You appear to be suggesting that Firefox should maintain two APIs or some quirks mode just to keep a handful of extensions like Lazarus happy. I hope you can see that from a security perspective what a disastrously bad idea that is, especially when the extension could just be updated.
Believers and disbelievers are all in the same boat.
False equivalence I'm afraid. Randi was advising scientists to devise tests which preclude the possibility of cheating so the results reflected what the test was intended to measure.
Put another way, I suggest you read the Cargo Cult Science essay by Richard Feynman. In it he refers to an experimenter attempting to test learning in rats and ending up with useless results because the rats could achieve the results with smell, light, vibration etc. Only when he eliminated ways that rats could "cheat" his test was he sure the results reflected what he was attempting to measure in the first place.
Replace rats with paranormal subjects and the same principle applies.
I think it's funny when they occasionally complain that Randi somehow managed to suppress their powers. If Randi had the power to dampen psychics powers that would mean he exhibits far greater paranormal powers than any applicant and he deserves to keep the money.
Oh sorry my mistake. I didn't realise I was forbidden from offering my opinions on a website designed expressly for that purpose. If you prefer Twilight style zombies, or CG zombie swarms you too are free to argue that point. Even though it would be wrong.
I'm pretty sure JREF is well used to applicants pretending that skeptical mindbeams or the position of furniture or the sun through the window somehow interfered their amazing powerz which worked in other, less controlled circumstances.
Besides we may as well apply that lame excuse to explain the non existence of other things. e.g. maybe sentient teapots don't announce their presence for fear of getting dissected in government laboratories.
I think the key word is "heyday". LucasArts has been pretty blah for the last 5 years. I still own Tie Fighter and many of their early adventure games (this article prompted me to go over and check if I still had the CDs) and they were awesome. But at the end of the day it costs money to run a studio and if they're not making money to cover their costs, what's the point of keeping it going any more?
Scientific credentials doesn't stop someone from being fooled. Read up on Project Alpha where two mentalists were able (with the assistance of Randi) to con a paranormal research group into thinking they had genuine psychic powers. The con was simply to kick up a fuss until the protocols went their way and bend things when people weren't looking. The scientists were even ready to announce their results to the world when Randi stepped in and revealed the hoax to them. Scientists are not necessarily equipped to spot frauds from occurring whereas magicians and confidence tricksters might well be. They have much to learn from each other especially when paranormal claims are being examined.
His convictions seem to get in the way of his thinking, and I am pretty sure that the money will never be awarded no matter how well the subject matter may be demonstrated.
You're flat out wrong. The challenge is very straightforward to understand - someone claims they can do something paranormal, they fill out a form to apply, they agree to a protocol that demonstrates this power in a self evident fashion and they do it (or not). If they succeed and they get a cheque for 10,000 dollars on the spot and the remainder within a period of time. The protocol would obviously be designed to prevent cheating or arriving at the result by chance alone but aside from that the important part is it's self evident. No judges, no argumentation, no subjectivity. The person either does or does not pass in an obvious way.
Besides, In the event that someone passed and the money was not forthcoming, their notoriety would go through the roof and they quickly amass a small fortune in book contracts and other deals that would enable them to sue the living daylights out of JREF and utterly ruin it.
Not that it's ever likely to happen of course.
I don't mind fast zombies and I liked the Dawn of the Dead remake. I just think this film looks lame especially the physics defying zombies. Maybe the trailer has focused on the action and there is an intelligent and deep movie underneath. I'm not putting money on it though.
Sorry, but that policy is just plain daft if you're going to push out automatic updates every five minutes.
They're once every 1 or 2 months and most of the time they have minimal impact to extensions, sites or users. This particular change involves a major refactor and was well projected to anyone in the development community or beta channel. It's too bad if this extension was caught out but I see no reason whatsoever Firefox should be backwards compatible for the sake of it. Wait the massive day or two for them to pull their finger out and fix their extension.
The rest of the software industry has been successfully using major-minor-point release or version-service pack-patch strategies for decades. Among other things, this tiered approach has clear advantages for developers, who know when APIs can be relied on to be stable and when they might break. It also tends to limit breaking changes to major versions, which means they don't happen too frequently to keep up.
The rest of the software industry eh? The Linux kernel offers no guarantee to modules that they'll work with a new point release. You know what happens if your module doesn't work with a new kernel? Tough, fix it.
Second, perhaps Microsoft can afford to write backwards compatible APIs or workaround brain damaged apps but that doesn't mean its a smart thing to do especially for open source software.
Expecting the browser to hold up just on the off chance it might break [random-extension] is ludicrous and impractical.
The book obviously needs some adaptation to make a good movie but it looks like the only things the filmmakers took from the book were its title and the basic premise.
World War Z looks great if you want PG-13 friendly action and CG zombies.
The browser might not go out of its way to break extensions but neither should it be beholden to them either. Making private mode per-window is a major infrastructural change.
As a package, the Pi is already obsolete and outclassed. Where it does have an advantage is it's very easy to flash (just stick an SD in it), has a large and coherent support base, and has some connectors for hooking it up to other things.
No, dishonest is where someone pretends that someone else talked about wayland in the present tense in order to justify some ludicrous demand for benchmarks. Stop being ridiculous.
No I called KDE kitchen sink though I appreciate it could have been read to include GNOME 2 too. GNOME 2's problem is more technical than usability.
As I said quite clearly it has flaws and frustrations but I think it's a sound desktop. It's clean, simple, work oriented, discoverable, attractive and easy to use. I share frustration at the over simplicity of the control panel but I'm not about to pretend it's "unusable" or that we should all revert to kitchen-sink style KDE or GNOME 2 for the sake of that.
GNOME 3 is perfectly usable. It certainly has flaws and frustrations but complaining that "zero thought" has gone into usability is absurd. It's also very to use. I didn't have to tell my wife or kids anything more than "click on activities to launch stuff" for them to figure it out from their existing experience of Windows 7.
Perhaps you should look at the quality and finish that most 3D plastic nozzle based printers achieve. It's awful. I also expect a lot of people would have a thing about eating off plastic plates especially ones where the uneven surface pattern ensures the accumulation of food particles and the cutlery and washing puts ugly scratches all over it in no time.
Second, a "monolithic" approach has obvious advantages since there aren't 3 separate processes sending messages between themselves, maintaining duplicate state and incuring context switches. Does that mean it translates into an efficient implementation? Time will tell. As for benchmarks, are you even serious? Wayland is still in development. It won't be possible to to compare like for like for some time. It does not mean that makes a valid excuse for not moving. Even seasoned X developers want the move and recognise the need for it.
It's not like X11 is going away any time soon. It will sit on top of Wayland at least until the apps which constitute the desktop are ported.