assuming you arrange the turbines in a square grid, they would have to fall in one of the four cardinal directions to risk creating "the world's most expensive set of dominos."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I read about such windfarms, wind turbines commonly have a height of 60 to 90 meters (200-300 feet). In addition, there needs to be 250m (~750 feet) between them to prevent turbulence from messing up the efficiency of adjacent turbines.
So you're saying that if Flash was FOSS then it would be easier to write a flash player for a different CPU than to write your user interface in a different SDK?
Likely yes, if it's written in C or C++, and seeing as how a GCC port exists for ARM, it may not actually be that much work; even much more likely is that someone else would have already ported it like 5 years ago.
The problem is that now, you don't even have this choice at all; given that you can't get Macromedia^H^H^H^HAdobe interested in writing a port (and let me guess..they probably have better things to do than writing free-as-in-beer Flash clients for your convenience), you're straight out of luck.
This is probably the key to your answer; treating students as "customers". No. The goal of universities is not (or rather, in practice it often is, but it shouldn't be) to graduate as many students/year as possible. It's not supposed to be a "graduation business" where you can exchange tuition fees for a degree (that will hopefully get you a better paying job in the future).
Rather, students are supposed to be taught how to think systematically, how to approach the solving of problems, in other words how to do research (as a side effect, knowing how to go about solving problems in general is also highly valuable for future employers).
The reason why you should be there, as a student, is because you want to learn something. If that's not the case please simply don't bother showing up at all rather than distracting everyone else, kthxbye.
By the way, if you honestly believe most of those people using laptops are actually "multitasking" or somehow able to unconsciously decide just when it is important to pay attention, I'm not sure whose viewpoints are failing any "rational test", to be honest.
Of course I'm not saying there are no useless classes, by the way. So in that sense students can certainly be "right" about that. The way you vote about this is with your feet, i.e. by simply not showing up or simply not taking that course. If, however, both attendance and taking the course are obligatory, I'd tend to agree with you. That approach looks more like a high school than a university to me anyway, so yeah, screw that..
The right solution is, IMO, to simply ban laptops from being open during lectures. It sends the same message as people using laptops during meetings basically: if you can't be arsed to even pay attention (to the lecture, or the meeting), why are you there in the first place. For meetings it may be the case that you are basically "forced" to attend, however this is seldom the case for lectures (at least at my university).
So I fully understand lecturers who urge (or force) people to make a conscious decision *either* to stay in the lecture room and (at the very least pretend to) pay attention, or if you don't feel like paying attention, want to browse the internet, or absolutely *have* to chat with your neighbour about the previous weekend, can you please just go to the lunchroom next door, thank you so much and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Because it's not like anybody is *forcing* you to be there. If you think you'll do fine by reading the lecture sheets and/or the book, you're free to do so (and in many cases that's perfectly possible, too).
If you want to take notes during the lecture (the excuse everyone uses), paper still works just fine, as it has for ages.
You're just talking complete and utter bullshit now. Windows has NATIVE SUPPORT for pretty much most of the devices in any Dell laptop.
If you're talking about Windows XP SP2, this is decidedly not true *AT ALL*.
I have a 3 years old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop - so you would expect SP2 to recognize that hardware, right?
I had to download a shitload of drivers from the Dell website to make basically *anything* work at all: This includes the network cards (both wired and WiFi), bluetooth chipset support, SD cardreader support. Although the display worked with the default (unoptimized) drivers, I had to update those manually too if I wanted to play any 3D games. I think even the sound device (which is one of those default craptastic AC97 or whatever it's called things) needed to have its own driver installed. Now, I'm not even talking about the drivers for chipset/CPU support, such that frequency scaling and the like actually work. Sure Windows XP will work without those, but drain the battery about twice as fast as necessary.
So please stop talking bullshit about Windows supporting everything out of the box - that's about as far from the truth as it's possible to get. It is however true that nearly all manufacturers do supply XP drivers for most hardware - which is not always the case for Linux.
No, you don't. But if you're interested in the topic you would have already read the refutations. Indeed, you even linked to one [windowsvistablog.com] yourself.
You seem to confuse marketing double-speak with technical refutations. If you seriously think that Vistablog post refutes anything posted by Gutman, try reading the comments in that blog. Really, if that is your idea of a refutation, you're well and truly beyond hope.
Gutmann's suppositions have already been refuted multiple times.
Thanks for quoting the sources of these supposed multiple refutations, pointing out specifically why any of the things I quoted are not true. Oh, I guess I'll just have to take your word for it. Of course.
Except none of this actually happens. DLLs aren't running inactive code (by definition). Drivers aren't checking for DRM unless DRM-encumbered media is playing, etc.
Nice, that's 2 out of the 4 things I listed - so much for "none of this actually happens". So I guess you can't refute the increased cost of hardware, decreased driver stability because of changed driver model due to DRM. Then as to the first, I didn't talk about DLL's *running* any code, but about code taking up memory regardless of whether it's being executed (because of additional DRM code, DLL's get bigger). Then as to the last, thanks for quoting a source pointing out why it is not true. I at least pointed to a technical source saying that it is.
No DRM-encumbered media, no DRM. Your argument fails.
Notatall. You are assuming that the design of Windows makes sense, or that it is designed with the end user in mind. Stop making that mistake.
For one thing, the DRM code is still there in many (loaded) DLL's, thus using memory (even if it may not be actively in use in the absence of DRM-encumbered media). The increased costs for hardware and driver development to make all this stuff even work, are paid for by you, the end user. Decreased driver stability due to the entirely new driver model (necessary to support DRM)? Guess who can deal with the problems it causes...yup...that would be you. Laptop battery draining faster because drivers are checking all the time whether protected media is present and whether the system is uncompromised (also happening while no DRM'ed media is actually present)?
I refuse to use Paypal because I am not convinced it is covered by banking regulations.
They definitely are not covered by banking regulations. Until someone is willing to start a trial process about this, at the very least...
These may not be perfect (understatement of year to date) but are surely better than nothing.
Where I live, in case a bank goes bankrupt, the government fully guarantees an amount (per person per bank) of up to EUR 50,000 (above that it gets more tricky but it doesn't necessarily mean you lose it all). So unless the government goes bankrupt as well, you should be relatively OK - or at least you won't lose it all. (and in case the government does go bankrupt, you are likely to have more pressing problems than your bank account balance anyway..)
Not really though. A good team of social engineers (con men) and CS people can accomplish many many things...How can you prevent such things? Ridiculously strong security?
It looks to me like having ridiculously *weak* security every step of the way is what made it so easy for these social engineers to be effective. Countering this by saying "well yeah, but what are we supposed to do, they can break it anyway!!" is not a valid argument, IMO.
Of course it will always be possible if someone is really determined and is willing to spend significant resources and take a lot of risk (such as bribing people, blackmailing, hiring PI's, breaking and entering the physical building), but that does not mean it's ok to say "well, someone could break our security system anyways so let's just not bother with placing any security constraints in place whatsoever".
Because if both risk and cost are close to zero (investing 1 day of time and probably some equipment doesn't sound *that* expensive to me), you're practically inviting something bad to happen.
Concretely, it is ridiculous that the same terminals that can be used to control the power plant, are also directly connected to the internet. Had this not been the case, I'm sure it would have taken a lot more effort to do anything interesting (like, shutting down the plant).
This seems to be where (web) application development is heading: quick prototyping, no or hardly any deployment, storage or scalability issues. It's quite tempting, to say the least. Now compare that to the development environment Microsoft currently offers...
If I where working at Microsoft development I'd be shitting my pants right about now (imagine pictures of Ballmer dancing and screaming "developers! developers! developers!" here). This is clearly what google's after now that they own search (and web advertising). They have been building huge datacenters for a while now, they own probably one of the largest distributed computing systems on earth (and know how to keep it up and running), *and* they own parts of the netwerk that connects it all together (fibre etc.).
And now they are offering all web developers the ability to use this infrastructure..
On the other hand, I do see some important privacy and security concerns here. If I owned a company, I'm not sure I'd trust all my source code, data etc. to be stored on Google's servers, which are (in my case) even in a completely different country with different laws, jurisdiction etc. Not to mention, what if I later want to migrate because I don't like the terms of service, etc. Or, what happens if you would create anything that takes off and Google decides that they like it..
What was the last German movie to gain any kind of international attention? Run Lola Run?
How about these for example:
- Good Bye Lenin! (2003) - nominated for Golden Globe (ok, perhaps that doesn't amount to much, but it's a nice movie) - Der Untergang (2004) - oscar nomination for "best foreign language film of the year" (where "foreign" means "not english") - Das Leben der Anderen (2006) - won the oscar for "best foreign language film", as well as many other awards in several international film festivals (Great Britain and Canada among those)
That's quite a few movies since Lola rennt (1998). Looks like there are quite a few German directors who are actually doing better after all... those movies are all very much worthwhile watching, by the way (though quite disturbing).
P.S. I'm not German so I'm bound to have missed several more good movies.
Microsoft may be down quite a bit, but Apple is not even on that list at all.
IBM is at spot #18, which is quite surprising really - as far as I noticed there are no other software companies that high on the list at all. Most of the top 25 seems to be car companies, food/drinks/restaurant franchises and the like.
I got Safari as part of the iTunes update. I have a non-Apple Windows machine, running Safari. They basically forced the software on me, and the EULA says I can't use it.
Does that answer your question?
I agree that the situation is quite ridiculous and stupid. My point is however, that the headline of this story "does not compute".
An End User License Agreement can only be accepted, rejected, or violated by...guess what, "End Users". The one way in which software could possibly violate its own EULA, is, quite logically, if the software is its own "End User".
So, when is the last time you watched your browser browsing the internet on its own?;)
Can someone please explain to me how software could possible "violate its own EULA" (even theoretically, not necessarily restricted to this case)?
I agree that the EULA makes no sense, assuming that Apple wants as many Windows users as possible to use Safari. But that's an entirely different matter.
In fact, the EULA can be adhered to without any problem: afterall, you can install Windows just fine on Mac hardware these days. So you can actually run Safari for Windows on "Apple labeled hardware".
I seriously doubt the way it is stated in the EULA is really Apples intention though;)
In the end it turned out to be one of the security guards. No one would have caught him [..except he did something really stupid]
Actually this is rather strange.
In such a situation I'd expect security guards to be among the prime suspects, along with janitors - simply because they have access/keys to nearly all rooms in your office building out of necessity. Security guards especially can easily come up with just about any excuse as to why they have to walk around wherever they feel like on the premises of your company. There are not many other people who could as easily come up with a plausible excuse when being found at a place where they don't really have any business being.
If I want to look at high-res, high-FPS content, I'll just go outside in the real world, thank you very much. In addition that $1200 you didn't spend on a GPU could probably make for some quite nice "real life" experiences as well..
Or, God forbid, we just ask the user's permission to load a potentially unsafe driver!
Yes, you see, this often used to be Microsofts approach to such matters. It doesn't work well (so I'm glad they figured that out). Some of the reasons have already been explained by others in this thread. I'd like to add that basically, the system would be asking a question to which there is no correct answer. "Using this driver may affect your systems stability or not work at all. Continue regardless yes/no?" is a question that I, as a user, should never have to answer.
I mean, how should I know!? Maybe I'll say yes, and my system may not boot the next time because the driver crashes. Then again, if I say no, the system may not boot the next time, because it might have been the video driver, and without one there's not much one can do in Windows.
Adding such a dialog would only make matters worse.
Now yes, I realise you can buy aftermarket parts, but that defeats part of the point of getting an OEM system and certainly an Apple: support. You get everything from the OEM, they are your one stop for support, particularly with Apple who also makes the OS. You start buying aftermarket, that is no longer the case.
This is not true. You can replace harddisk & RAM in most Macs without voiding the warranty (except those that are really built like appliances, but that's similar to how you typically can't replace the harddisk in an USB harddisk enclosure..). So you still have full support.
That said, the prices Apple is charging for extra RAM are indeed completely and utterly ridiculous. Their base systems are priced quite decently though these days. Indeed, they don't sell the rock bottom craptops, but try setting up a Dell with the same specs as the $1200 medium Macbook model...(even disregarding the part where you have to install Ubuntu or pay double MS taxes for an extra copy of Windows XP on the Dell to make it usable)
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I read about such windfarms, wind turbines commonly have a height of 60 to 90 meters (200-300 feet). In addition, there needs to be 250m (~750 feet) between them to prevent turbulence from messing up the efficiency of adjacent turbines.
So this is a completely moot point anyway.
Likely yes, if it's written in C or C++, and seeing as how a GCC port exists for ARM, it may not actually be that much work; even much more likely is that someone else would have already ported it like 5 years ago.
The problem is that now, you don't even have this choice at all; given that you can't get Macromedia^H^H^H^HAdobe interested in writing a port (and let me guess..they probably have better things to do than writing free-as-in-beer Flash clients for your convenience), you're straight out of luck.
This is probably the key to your answer; treating students as "customers". No. The goal of universities is not (or rather, in practice it often is, but it shouldn't be) to graduate as many students/year as possible. It's not supposed to be a "graduation business" where you can exchange tuition fees for a degree (that will hopefully get you a better paying job in the future).
Rather, students are supposed to be taught how to think systematically, how to approach the solving of problems, in other words how to do research (as a side effect, knowing how to go about solving problems in general is also highly valuable for future employers).
The reason why you should be there, as a student, is because you want to learn something. If that's not the case please simply don't bother showing up at all rather than distracting everyone else, kthxbye.
By the way, if you honestly believe most of those people using laptops are actually "multitasking" or somehow able to unconsciously decide just when it is important to pay attention, I'm not sure whose viewpoints are failing any "rational test", to be honest.
Of course I'm not saying there are no useless classes, by the way. So in that sense students can certainly be "right" about that. The way you vote about this is with your feet, i.e. by simply not showing up or simply not taking that course. If, however, both attendance and taking the course are obligatory, I'd tend to agree with you. That approach looks more like a high school than a university to me anyway, so yeah, screw that..
The right solution is, IMO, to simply ban laptops from being open during lectures. It sends the same message as people using laptops during meetings basically: if you can't be arsed to even pay attention (to the lecture, or the meeting), why are you there in the first place. For meetings it may be the case that you are basically "forced" to attend, however this is seldom the case for lectures (at least at my university).
So I fully understand lecturers who urge (or force) people to make a conscious decision *either* to stay in the lecture room and (at the very least pretend to) pay attention, or if you don't feel like paying attention, want to browse the internet, or absolutely *have* to chat with your neighbour about the previous weekend, can you please just go to the lunchroom next door, thank you so much and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Because it's not like anybody is *forcing* you to be there. If you think you'll do fine by reading the lecture sheets and/or the book, you're free to do so (and in many cases that's perfectly possible, too).
If you want to take notes during the lecture (the excuse everyone uses), paper still works just fine, as it has for ages.
If you're talking about Windows XP SP2, this is decidedly not true *AT ALL*.
I have a 3 years old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop - so you would expect SP2 to recognize that hardware, right?
I had to download a shitload of drivers from the Dell website to make basically *anything* work at all: This includes the network cards (both wired and WiFi), bluetooth chipset support, SD cardreader support. Although the display worked with the default (unoptimized) drivers, I had to update those manually too if I wanted to play any 3D games. I think even the sound device (which is one of those default craptastic AC97 or whatever it's called things) needed to have its own driver installed. Now, I'm not even talking about the drivers for chipset/CPU support, such that frequency scaling and the like actually work. Sure Windows XP will work without those, but drain the battery about twice as fast as necessary.
You don't have to take my word for it either, you can go rigdht to Dells driver page for this laptop and look it up yourself.
So please stop talking bullshit about Windows supporting everything out of the box - that's about as far from the truth as it's possible to get. It is however true that nearly all manufacturers do supply XP drivers for most hardware - which is not always the case for Linux.
Apart from not crashing randomly all the time and actually doing a halfway decent job at multitasking and memory managament, you mean?
I can't help wondering, since you had to ask this apparently, whether you have ever used a Windows CE-based device?
You seem to confuse marketing double-speak with technical refutations. If you seriously think that Vistablog post refutes anything posted by Gutman, try reading the comments in that blog. Really, if that is your idea of a refutation, you're well and truly beyond hope.
Yes, a DX2/66 with 4 MB of RAM actually.
I'm not saying that it worked particularly fast, but then again, installing Windows 95 on that thing would not even work at all.
Thanks for quoting the sources of these supposed multiple refutations, pointing out specifically why any of the things I quoted are not true. Oh, I guess I'll just have to take your word for it. Of course.
Nice, that's 2 out of the 4 things I listed - so much for "none of this actually happens". So I guess you can't refute the increased cost of hardware, decreased driver stability because of changed driver model due to DRM. Then as to the first, I didn't talk about DLL's *running* any code, but about code taking up memory regardless of whether it's being executed (because of additional DRM code, DLL's get bigger). Then as to the last, thanks for quoting a source pointing out why it is not true. I at least pointed to a technical source saying that it is.
Not at all. You are assuming that the design of Windows makes sense, or that it is designed with the end user in mind. Stop making that mistake.
For one thing, the DRM code is still there in many (loaded) DLL's, thus using memory (even if it may not be actively in use in the absence of DRM-encumbered media). The increased costs for hardware and driver development to make all this stuff even work, are paid for by you, the end user. Decreased driver stability due to the entirely new driver model (necessary to support DRM)? Guess who can deal with the problems it causes...yup...that would be you. Laptop battery draining faster because drivers are checking all the time whether protected media is present and whether the system is uncompromised (also happening while no DRM'ed media is actually present)?
I guess you can spot the trend by now.
I think you misspelled "DRM".
If caffeine counts as well I'm sure the percentage would be close to 100% :P
(it is a brain-boosting drug, isn't it...?)
They definitely are not covered by banking regulations. Until someone is willing to start a trial process about this, at the very least...
Where I live, in case a bank goes bankrupt, the government fully guarantees an amount (per person per bank) of up to EUR 50,000 (above that it gets more tricky but it doesn't necessarily mean you lose it all). So unless the government goes bankrupt as well, you should be relatively OK - or at least you won't lose it all. (and in case the government does go bankrupt, you are likely to have more pressing problems than your bank account balance anyway..)
It looks to me like having ridiculously *weak* security every step of the way is what made it so easy for these social engineers to be effective. Countering this by saying "well yeah, but what are we supposed to do, they can break it anyway!!" is not a valid argument, IMO.
Of course it will always be possible if someone is really determined and is willing to spend significant resources and take a lot of risk (such as bribing people, blackmailing, hiring PI's, breaking and entering the physical building), but that does not mean it's ok to say "well, someone could break our security system anyways so let's just not bother with placing any security constraints in place whatsoever".
Because if both risk and cost are close to zero (investing 1 day of time and probably some equipment doesn't sound *that* expensive to me), you're practically inviting something bad to happen.
Concretely, it is ridiculous that the same terminals that can be used to control the power plant, are also directly connected to the internet. Had this not been the case, I'm sure it would have taken a lot more effort to do anything interesting (like, shutting down the plant).
This seems to be where (web) application development is heading: quick prototyping, no or hardly any deployment, storage or scalability issues. It's quite tempting, to say the least. Now compare that to the development environment Microsoft currently offers...
If I where working at Microsoft development I'd be shitting my pants right about now (imagine pictures of Ballmer dancing and screaming "developers! developers! developers!" here). This is clearly what google's after now that they own search (and web advertising). They have been building huge datacenters for a while now, they own probably one of the largest distributed computing systems on earth (and know how to keep it up and running), *and* they own parts of the netwerk that connects it all together (fibre etc.).
And now they are offering all web developers the ability to use this infrastructure..
On the other hand, I do see some important privacy and security concerns here. If I owned a company, I'm not sure I'd trust all my source code, data etc. to be stored on Google's servers, which are (in my case) even in a completely different country with different laws, jurisdiction etc. Not to mention, what if I later want to migrate because I don't like the terms of service, etc. Or, what happens if you would create anything that takes off and Google decides that they like it..
How about these for example:
- Good Bye Lenin! (2003) - nominated for Golden Globe (ok, perhaps that doesn't amount to much, but it's a nice movie)
- Der Untergang (2004) - oscar nomination for "best foreign language film of the year" (where "foreign" means "not english")
- Das Leben der Anderen (2006) - won the oscar for "best foreign language film", as well as many other awards in several international film festivals (Great Britain and Canada among those)
That's quite a few movies since Lola rennt (1998). Looks like there are quite a few German directors who are actually doing better after all... those movies are all very much worthwhile watching, by the way (though quite disturbing).
P.S. I'm not German so I'm bound to have missed several more good movies.
Try thepiratebay.org and search for 'fitna', you'll find plenty of mirrors - and a lot of people are seeding it, too.
It's also still available on google video, but you'd have to rip the stream if you want to rehost it I guess.
Microsoft may be down quite a bit, but Apple is not even on that list at all.
IBM is at spot #18, which is quite surprising really - as far as I noticed there are no other software companies that high on the list at all. Most of the top 25 seems to be car companies, food/drinks/restaurant franchises and the like.
I agree that the situation is quite ridiculous and stupid. My point is however, that the headline of this story "does not compute".
An End User License Agreement can only be accepted, rejected, or violated by...guess what, "End Users". The one way in which software could possibly violate its own EULA, is, quite logically, if the software is its own "End User".
So, when is the last time you watched your browser browsing the internet on its own?
Can someone please explain to me how software could possible "violate its own EULA" (even theoretically, not necessarily restricted to this case)?
;)
I agree that the EULA makes no sense, assuming that Apple wants as many Windows users as possible to use Safari. But that's an entirely different matter.
In fact, the EULA can be adhered to without any problem: afterall, you can install Windows just fine on Mac hardware these days. So you can actually run Safari for Windows on "Apple labeled hardware".
I seriously doubt the way it is stated in the EULA is really Apples intention though
Actually this is rather strange.
In such a situation I'd expect security guards to be among the prime suspects, along with janitors - simply because they have access/keys to nearly all rooms in your office building out of necessity. Security guards especially can easily come up with just about any excuse as to why they have to walk around wherever they feel like on the premises of your company. There are not many other people who could as easily come up with a plausible excuse when being found at a place where they don't really have any business being.
Depends. You could try Paintball, for example
If I want to look at high-res, high-FPS content, I'll just go outside in the real world, thank you very much. In addition that $1200 you didn't spend on a GPU could probably make for some quite nice "real life" experiences as well..
Yes, you see, this often used to be Microsofts approach to such matters. It doesn't work well (so I'm glad they figured that out). Some of the reasons have already been explained by others in this thread. I'd like to add that basically, the system would be asking a question to which there is no correct answer. "Using this driver may affect your systems stability or not work at all. Continue regardless yes/no?" is a question that I, as a user, should never have to answer.
I mean, how should I know!? Maybe I'll say yes, and my system may not boot the next time because the driver crashes. Then again, if I say no, the system may not boot the next time, because it might have been the video driver, and without one there's not much one can do in Windows.
Adding such a dialog would only make matters worse.
This is not true. You can replace harddisk & RAM in most Macs without voiding the warranty (except those that are really built like appliances, but that's similar to how you typically can't replace the harddisk in an USB harddisk enclosure..). So you still have full support.
That said, the prices Apple is charging for extra RAM are indeed completely and utterly ridiculous. Their base systems are priced quite decently though these days. Indeed, they don't sell the rock bottom craptops, but try setting up a Dell with the same specs as the $1200 medium Macbook model...(even disregarding the part where you have to install Ubuntu or pay double MS taxes for an extra copy of Windows XP on the Dell to make it usable)