(...) renewable energy-powered, electromagnetic pulse (EMP)-protected microgrids that could provide electricity for critical infrastructure facilities (...)
Critical infrastructure facilities powered by renewable energy? So you'll be protected from extremely rare solar storms and high-altitude nuclear explosions but not from weather? That doesn't sound very clever to me, unless we're talking about hydro power. It seems that they thrown in "renewable energy powered" to be buzzword compliant. On top of that, if the goal is reliability, it's generally better not to go with bleeding edge technology.
Starting a process is extremely costly in Windows (several ms even on a modern box) so del, copy, rename, etc. are not actual programs but shell builtins, to make batch files a possibility. When executed in cmd.exe context they will work, but when used in ceratin other places (e.g. the Run box or system() call) they will not work. The workaround is to use cmd/C del somefile.txt and the like.
I saw a trivial TV test of ABS on snow. With ABS turned on, the stopping distance increased by a few meters but the car was stable when braking while turning. With ABS off, the stopping distance was shorter but braking while turning made the car unstable.
I suspect this is because when the wheel is blocked, the point of contact of the tire and the ground heats up, increasing the friction coefficient. With ABS the whole tire heats up, but the same enrgy is distributed over a larger area, so the rise in temperature is much smaller and the tire stays cool.
From my dictionary "Atheist - One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods." Yet the study says 21% of atheists believe in God. That study is total bullshit.
I believe the criterion for saying who is an atheist is the same as for saying who is a Christian. You just ask people who they consider themselves to be. If that's so, there can be atheists that believe in God, e.g. if they are misinformed what "atheism" means. There's also some percentage of people who believe in God but are opposed to the churches of Christianity based on their practices and history, and those could also describe themselves as atheists.
Really by definition ALL christians believe in ghosts. Ever heard of the holy spirit?
Holy spirit = the force of God. Ghosts = souls of dead people that haunt the living. That's not exactly the same.
You ate AlexH FUD. Read further into the comments and you'll see this:
Luc Bollen said, October 3, 2008 at 9:41 am
Here is what OpenFormula says about this (normative text):
"Implementations of formulas in an OpenDocument file shall use the epoch specified in the table-null-date attribute of the element, and shall support at least the following epoch values: 1899-12-30, 1900-01-01, and 1904-01-01.
Many applications cannot handle Date values before January 1, 1900. Some applications can handle dates for the years 1900 and on, but include a known defect: they incorrectly presume that 1900 was a leap year (1900 was not a leap year). Applications may reproduce the 1900-as-leap-year bug for compatibility purposes, but should not. Portable documents shall not include date calculations that require the incorrect assumption that 1900 was a leap year. Portable documents shall not assume that negative date values are impossible (many implementations use negative dates to represent dates before the epoch). Portable documents should use the epoch date 1899-12-30 to compensate for serial numbers originating from applications that include a 1900-02-29 leap day in their calculations."
I think we are far from "ODF 1.2 will standardise this bug as well".
The most imprtant feature of jQuery is that you can select groups of HTML nodes using CSS selectors, and modify them in bulk with a single function call instead of iterating over some array. I didn't use it too much, but this approach is extremely powerful and simplifies code a great deal. There are also simple and usable Ajax APIs and other assorted goodies, but the CSS selector idea is really brilliant.
It can be programmed easily using well known and widely used language
Fixed - I don't think any JVM based languages other than Java are anywhere near widely used, and Android has no provisions to execute "bare metal" code. I may be a good thing after all, because it ensures compatibility of all Android apps with all Android phones despite different hardware.
The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.
For God's sake, Microsoft! Stop defiling the world with this unholy abomination! Would somebody think of the children who grow up to become web designers and whose souls are going to be destroyed and their life energy drained away by sinister forces while they unfruitfully struggle to fix their layouts deformed beyond recognition by the filthy bowels of IE6? Now we have ultimate proof that Microsoft is Satan incarnate.
Why do we take the notion that space exploration and colonization is desirable as granted? Will it make us feel better, or is this some attempt to find new resources to fuel our consumerist frenzy for which the Earth is becoming too small? Would you want to live on another planet in the solar system, where you couldn't go outside without a pressure suit, where you'd have to depend on complicated machines to support every second of your fragile life?
Of course there are other important considerations, including less egoistic ones. However, the gist remains valid. The concept of colonizing other planets is exciting, and this may happen in some very distant future, but for now the fact is that Earth is the best place for us, and I for one wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Rather than finding new worlds to consume we could start caring more about our own, so it remains the best place for humans to live.
When they do something like this, they aren't thinking of the next quarter's profits or even the next year's.
Instead, they are thinking about the propaganda benefits. It's something they must do to remain in power, so in a way they are also thinking short-term. Their primary motivation is not the advancement of humanity but maintaining the iron grip on the peoples' minds. Soviets have been there before.
PS: I think this was not faked, because propaganda has not to lie at least sometimes to work.
Just listen to your bullshit. Why then is Wine not 100% reliable, and many applications don't work at all? Why is ReactOS nowhere near everyday usability? Why there is no feature-complete open source Flash player?
Copying my code without contributing back doesn't stop me or anyone else from using it.
Another fallacy. If MS takes your BSD-licensed code and makes their version deliberately incompatible with yours, your code suddenly becomes worthless because you can't use it together with any of the MS implementations, and you're effectively prevented from using it.
For instance, you can count on general ABI breakage on Linux. (...) You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.
Applications do not use the kernel ABI, they use the kernel API (system calls), and even then usually through libraries like libc. Stable kernel ABI is only of interest to closed source driver developers, and removes some of the incentive to ship open source drivers. What matters for applications is library ABI compatibility, which is completely unrelated to what Linux developers do, and depends on what your library developers do.
I'm not okay with patents on software. Most importantly, software patents contain no source code. Reproducing something based on the patent is impossible - you have to do the work that the "inventor" did all over again. Additionally, proprietary software effectively remains a trade secret forever, because the source code most often is never disclosed. Therefore, software patents are in fact patents on trade secrets. In any other field this would be considered absurd and counterproductive, but seemingly not so in the IT world.
People in power SHOULD be rich. Say what you want but rich people are less prone to lobbying and bribery. They also want to protect their possessions, so they are less likely to do something truly stupid.
Matroska is not a codec. It is a container format, and it beats any closed-source competitions hands own on features (e.g. as far as I know it is the only format that supports embedding custom TrueType fonts for subtitles).
The best video encoding combo right now is: - Matroska as the container - H.264 for video - Ogg Vorbis for audio - ASS for subtitles
Depends. lirc_sir can lock up your machine without warning in some circumstances. The fact that some drivers recover from strange conditions is only because they are written to do so.
Is it possible that current software developers are rediscovering this decades-old sort of design?
It's the Windows programmers rediscovering this. It's only now that the high Windows IPC and process management overhead is starting to get negligible on modern machines. Unices on the other hand have very fast IPC and process management, so they could use this approach from the start.
Even better would be running just the plugins in separate processes. This way you don't even lose the tab that crashes Flash, only the problematic Flash video.
Biologists creating artificial life are entirely tangential to creationism. After all, it's the *biologists* who created that artificial lifeform. It didn't appear spontaneously.
I can relate to this. My friend didn't make it to the freshman camp a year ago because some guy stole several meters of railroad track for the scrap metal.
If you look at the situation with plumbing companies in early 20th century, you'll see that in fact broadband access is a natural monopoly, because duplicating last mile infrastructure is very wasteful. What is needed is not less government involvement but careful regulation that enables competition, much like any other utilities market. I won't come up with a detailed solution - that's what MBAs are for.
re 1: They only need a small subset of the combinations, equivalent to the expected maximum number of times a given chip is to be identified. 1024 pairs should be more than enough. Network faults would also kill credit card terminals yet everyone is cool with using them. re 2: The delay is only to prevent copying all possible responses, so a few milliseconds is enough.
Slashdot Mirror
(...) renewable energy-powered, electromagnetic pulse (EMP)-protected microgrids that could provide electricity for critical infrastructure facilities (...)
Critical infrastructure facilities powered by renewable energy? So you'll be protected from extremely rare solar storms and high-altitude nuclear explosions but not from weather? That doesn't sound very clever to me, unless we're talking about hydro power. It seems that they thrown in "renewable energy powered" to be buzzword compliant. On top of that, if the goal is reliability, it's generally better not to go with bleeding edge technology.
Starting a process is extremely costly in Windows (several ms even on a modern box) so del, copy, rename, etc. are not actual programs but shell builtins, to make batch files a possibility. When executed in cmd.exe context they will work, but when used in ceratin other places (e.g. the Run box or system() call) they will not work. The workaround is to use cmd /C del somefile.txt and the like.
I saw a trivial TV test of ABS on snow. With ABS turned on, the stopping distance increased by a few meters but the car was stable when braking while turning. With ABS off, the stopping distance was shorter but braking while turning made the car unstable.
I suspect this is because when the wheel is blocked, the point of contact of the tire and the ground heats up, increasing the friction coefficient. With ABS the whole tire heats up, but the same enrgy is distributed over a larger area, so the rise in temperature is much smaller and the tire stays cool.
From my dictionary "Atheist - One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods." Yet the study says 21% of atheists believe in God. That study is total bullshit.
I believe the criterion for saying who is an atheist is the same as for saying who is a Christian. You just ask people who they consider themselves to be. If that's so, there can be atheists that believe in God, e.g. if they are misinformed what "atheism" means. There's also some percentage of people who believe in God but are opposed to the churches of Christianity based on their practices and history, and those could also describe themselves as atheists.
Really by definition ALL christians believe in ghosts. Ever heard of the holy spirit?
Holy spirit = the force of God. Ghosts = souls of dead people that haunt the living. That's not exactly the same.
You ate AlexH FUD. Read further into the comments and you'll see this:
Luc Bollen said,
October 3, 2008 at 9:41 am
Here is what OpenFormula says about this (normative text):
"Implementations of formulas in an OpenDocument file shall use the epoch specified in the table-null-date attribute of the element, and shall support at least the following epoch values: 1899-12-30, 1900-01-01, and 1904-01-01.
Many applications cannot handle Date values before January 1, 1900. Some applications can handle dates for the years 1900 and on, but include a known defect: they incorrectly presume that 1900 was a leap year (1900 was not a leap year). Applications may reproduce the 1900-as-leap-year bug for compatibility purposes, but should not. Portable documents shall not include date calculations that require the incorrect assumption that 1900 was a leap year. Portable documents shall not assume that negative date values are impossible (many implementations use negative dates to represent dates before the epoch). Portable documents should use the epoch date 1899-12-30 to compensate for serial numbers originating from applications that include a 1900-02-29 leap day in their calculations."
I think we are far from "ODF 1.2 will standardise this bug as well".
The most imprtant feature of jQuery is that you can select groups of HTML nodes using CSS selectors, and modify them in bulk with a single function call instead of iterating over some array. I didn't use it too much, but this approach is extremely powerful and simplifies code a great deal. There are also simple and usable Ajax APIs and other assorted goodies, but the CSS selector idea is really brilliant.
It can be programmed easily using well known and widely used language
Fixed - I don't think any JVM based languages other than Java are anywhere near widely used, and Android has no provisions to execute "bare metal" code. I may be a good thing after all, because it ensures compatibility of all Android apps with all Android phones despite different hardware.
The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.
For God's sake, Microsoft! Stop defiling the world with this unholy abomination! Would somebody think of the children who grow up to become web designers and whose souls are going to be destroyed and their life energy drained away by sinister forces while they unfruitfully struggle to fix their layouts deformed beyond recognition by the filthy bowels of IE6? Now we have ultimate proof that Microsoft is Satan incarnate.
Why do we take the notion that space exploration and colonization is desirable as granted? Will it make us feel better, or is this some attempt to find new resources to fuel our consumerist frenzy for which the Earth is becoming too small? Would you want to live on another planet in the solar system, where you couldn't go outside without a pressure suit, where you'd have to depend on complicated machines to support every second of your fragile life?
Of course there are other important considerations, including less egoistic ones. However, the gist remains valid. The concept of colonizing other planets is exciting, and this may happen in some very distant future, but for now the fact is that Earth is the best place for us, and I for one wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Rather than finding new worlds to consume we could start caring more about our own, so it remains the best place for humans to live.
When they do something like this, they aren't thinking of the next quarter's profits or even the next year's.
Instead, they are thinking about the propaganda benefits. It's something they must do to remain in power, so in a way they are also thinking short-term. Their primary motivation is not the advancement of humanity but maintaining the iron grip on the peoples' minds. Soviets have been there before.
PS: I think this was not faked, because propaganda has not to lie at least sometimes to work.
Binaries can be reverse engineered fairly easily
Just listen to your bullshit. Why then is Wine not 100% reliable, and many applications don't work at all? Why is ReactOS nowhere near everyday usability? Why there is no feature-complete open source Flash player?
Copying my code without contributing back doesn't stop me or anyone else from using it.
Another fallacy. If MS takes your BSD-licensed code and makes their version deliberately incompatible with yours, your code suddenly becomes worthless because you can't use it together with any of the MS implementations, and you're effectively prevented from using it.
For instance, you can count on general ABI breakage on Linux. (...) You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.
Applications do not use the kernel ABI, they use the kernel API (system calls), and even then usually through libraries like libc. Stable kernel ABI is only of interest to closed source driver developers, and removes some of the incentive to ship open source drivers. What matters for applications is library ABI compatibility, which is completely unrelated to what Linux developers do, and depends on what your library developers do.
I recall that Linux has a compile-time option for enabling CPU hotplug too: link. However I'm not sure whether it's the same thing.
I'm not okay with patents on software. Most importantly, software patents contain no source code. Reproducing something based on the patent is impossible - you have to do the work that the "inventor" did all over again. Additionally, proprietary software effectively remains a trade secret forever, because the source code most often is never disclosed. Therefore, software patents are in fact patents on trade secrets. In any other field this would be considered absurd and counterproductive, but seemingly not so in the IT world.
People in power SHOULD be rich. Say what you want but rich people are less prone to lobbying and bribery. They also want to protect their possessions, so they are less likely to do something truly stupid.
According to Wikipedia aoTuV beta 4 Vorbis encoder beats WMA, MP3 and AAC at 64-128 kbit/s.
Matroska is not a codec. It is a container format, and it beats any closed-source competitions hands own on features (e.g. as far as I know it is the only format that supports embedding custom TrueType fonts for subtitles).
The best video encoding combo right now is:
- Matroska as the container
- H.264 for video
- Ogg Vorbis for audio
- ASS for subtitles
Depends. lirc_sir can lock up your machine without warning in some circumstances. The fact that some drivers recover from strange conditions is only because they are written to do so.
Is it possible that current software developers are rediscovering this decades-old sort of design?
It's the Windows programmers rediscovering this. It's only now that the high Windows IPC and process management overhead is starting to get negligible on modern machines. Unices on the other hand have very fast IPC and process management, so they could use this approach from the start.
Even better would be running just the plugins in separate processes. This way you don't even lose the tab that crashes Flash, only the problematic Flash video.
Please mod parent Flamebait
Biologists creating artificial life are entirely tangential to creationism. After all, it's the *biologists* who created that artificial lifeform. It didn't appear spontaneously.
I can relate to this. My friend didn't make it to the freshman camp a year ago because some guy stole several meters of railroad track for the scrap metal.
If you look at the situation with plumbing companies in early 20th century, you'll see that in fact broadband access is a natural monopoly, because duplicating last mile infrastructure is very wasteful. What is needed is not less government involvement but careful regulation that enables competition, much like any other utilities market. I won't come up with a detailed solution - that's what MBAs are for.
re 1: They only need a small subset of the combinations, equivalent to the expected maximum number of times a given chip is to be identified. 1024 pairs should be more than enough. Network faults would also kill credit card terminals yet everyone is cool with using them.
re 2: The delay is only to prevent copying all possible responses, so a few milliseconds is enough.