Well, they currently charge a per property fee, unless you are in full time education, then they multiply the charge by the number of bedrooms. Bizarre and immoral, but true.
The BBC is also required by law to provide a variety of programming and not just what is very popular. It means channel 4 gets the crap but popular stuff like "big brother", and the BBC gives us great, but virtually unheard of stuff like "the mighty boosh".
The BBC is now providing its content online for PC viewing. As long as there is a need for the BBC online (and there currently is), I believe a license fee (read "tax") should be payable on all computers wired up and capable of decoding and displaying BBC content at an acceptable quality. If you don't have the software though, or your computer is too slow, or it doesn't have a monitor, or your network connectivity is spotty, then I don't think you should have to pay anything.
> You would not, ever, at any time, seem to be moving faster than light.
Yes you would. The viewer would see the light from when you were at the start of your journey just a few moments before they see the light from where you are now, they would see you as a great streak, travelling from the start of your journey to the end in just a few moments. Thus you would *appear* to have travelled much, much faster. If you were travelling away, you would appear to be travelling much, much slower (as the light from later moments has much further to travel, and thus *arrives* much later).
> Because they could make a little MORE money if there was no second hand market!
That is not greed, it is stupidity. If there was no second hand market, they would sell fewer units. This is because the content they sell has a lower value to the purchaser than the current retail price for many purchasers. That defference is made up for by the owner selling his property on again, albeit for a reduced price. Without the ability to sell second hand, there would be fewer people prepared to pay current prices.
If I should have to put up with developerworks or shut up about it, then you should have to put up with me or shut up about it. There is a third alternative: we can talk freely about it, telling people what we each think of the quality of a source without barking commands at each other ("Put up or shut up" is an imperative utterance and a rude one at that).
And I stand by my statement on the rarity of articles like the one you just linked to (which is, indeed, insightful - if a little underwhelming) - I developed my opinion based on reading through a bunch of recent articles and finding very few worth thinking about.
MSN Messenger with a touchscreen would be prior art, and I *know* people have used MSN Messenger with a touchscreen - the problem is, I can't *prove* it so they'll have to stop doing it now.
> We are talking here about battery life. Not engineering specs on a data sheet for one of the components in the laptop.
That was exactly my point. An accurate measurement of the heat dissipated by two CPUs of similar performance showed that the Turion64 dissipated a couple of Watts less than the Pentium M (even though the datasheets claim the Pentium M is better in this respect). If the half hour difference in battery life represented a difference in the power dissipated between the CPUs then, for any expected difference in heat dissipated, the CPU would have to account for more than half of the power consumed in the laptop. That is nowhere near what happens.
> The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power...
No they don't. They have a higher quoted TDP, but that number is an engineering choice, AMD typically quotes a higher TDP for the same power consumption. AMD is crrently shipping two versions, one of which has a TDP of 25W that under typical use comes in at about 17W (slightly better than the equivalent Intel part even though the AMD part has its memory controller counted in that while the Intel part doesn't). Practically this means no difference to battery life given that the rest of the system is the same (except the northbridge, of course). And you get better performance with a Turion 64 processor for everything except video transcoding. When we see 64 bit optimised encoders, I expect that to change too. It is pissing me off how long it is taking to get hand-optimised AMD64 routines for tight inner loops in various common algorithms.
That's not a meeting, that's a training session. These are always good. The developers get a rubby ducky to prove their designs against, and you expand your skillset. That is a very different beast indeed.
> We have a class of old (say 10-13 billion year old)stars that are metal-poor, and a bunch of newer stars (like the Sun) that have much higher concentrations of heavy elements.
How do you determine their ages? And how is our sun supposed to get so much in the way of heavy elements from the old stars, when the old stars don't have much to provide? Also, a star with little in the way of heavy elements is likely to eject more matter than a heavy star with lots of iron, which is likely to collapse and start spitting out the neutrons and protons that formed the iron.
I've never seen any discussion about what ratios this buffer mechanism will tend to maintain, but in an infinite universe a steady ratio would have to be maintained (otherwise everything would tend towards iron, which would be gravitationally attracted without reacting to produce energy, and the universe would disappear which would be a contradiction.
So I think both the closed big bang and infinite universe with natural element ratio buffering may be self consistent, the question is whether they predict what we see, and whether they possess fantastical and untestable features (such as inflation). I am not expert enough to know if they both predict what we see very well. Unfortunately, there is little public discussion on the matter of agreement with empirical evidence.
> I don't see why you get that impression. Among other things, he apparently advocates an infinitely old universe. But we haven't discovered objects older than roughly the claimed age of the universe, ie, on the order of 13 billion years.
How do you know how old they are? From the redshift. The big bang predicts the bodies are flying away from us, and the rate they are moving (degree of redshift) indicates the distance they have accrued from the location of the event. Finally, from that distance you calculate how long ago their light was emitted (using the known speed of light). But that age depends upon the assumption that superclusters are all flying away from the same point in spacetime (ie, depends on the big bang theory being substantially correct). Eric Lerner suggests (as you say) that there was no big bang, therefore the redshift doesn't directly correlate with distance, so you no longer know how old those most "distant" things are.
The team believes the plane could have formed in several ways. In one scenario, the galaxies may have fallen towards Andromeda along an invisible filament of dark matter. Computer simulations show these filaments can form a cosmic web along which galaxies flow.'
Eric Lerner is looking less and less like a crank with every new cosmological experiment, I think this is exactly what his plasma filament theory of the intergalactic medium has been predicting.
I expect "movie quality games" will refer to the pseudo AI processing used to determine the positioning and articulation of things like the hordes or orcs in the lord of the rings films, rather than the rendering quality (although, in a "never the same render twice" situation, I'm sure the next crop of consoles will have background scenes that look just like movies - but the foregrounds probably won't).
> Instead of ad-hoc security sandboxes (jails, chroot, now apparmor) wouldn't it be better to just transition to a managed runtime where all apps get all of this for free?
You can run your apps under qemu if you want, I however will go with the security module. All those apps are already compiled to the bytecode interpreted by some CPU, so your managed runtime needs to jit compile that as if it were an IL (intermediate language).
Also, nowadays low-level languages like the intel architecture 32 and amd64 instruction sets actually *are* interpreted and jit compiled by a managed runtime in the CPU. The managed runtime calls back into plug-in code (the kernel, running in ring 0) written in the interpreted language itself. This call-back implements policy decisions and some functionality that doesn't need to be hardcoded into the managed runtime itself. A modern OS on a modern CPU is just like a really flexible managed runtime with a powerful policy and library plug-in, so I don't know what you are asking for exactly.
> Who do Slashdot readers turn to when technology goes wrong?
Dell.
> Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?"
Yes.
There is a reason why they are such a big and popular supplier, and it isn't due to suspension of disbelief. Of course, you may need to have favourable terms in your contract to get the kind of service you want, as they probably don't offer it to every little company around.
There is no such thing as a reference variable, you clearly don't know the C++ language. references are not variables. references are newly defined identifiers that refer to an object that already has identifiers referencing it, they don't change, ever, hence are not variable... But I see that you *really* meant *pass* by reference, if you want to ensure that the function can have no side effects, cast the parameter to const. Otherwise, if you expect to write software without knowing what the functions do, you should not be writing software.
BTW, when you say "fancy allowing standard operators to be overloaded" I think you mean "overrided". C has overloaded operators (+ is defined for int, char, short, long, float, double, etc). overriding lets you tell the compiler how to do addition for your custom bigint library, or whatever. You can misuse operator overriding, or you can misuse macros, each are there for a purpose, and each get misused by bad programmers.
> And now garbage collection? That just a feature to fix poorly written code.
No it isn't, it is a feature to simplify the determination of object lifetime when that lifetime depends on complex (or more likely, merely chaotic) runtime factors. Bad programmers use it to fix poorly written code. Sure, every lifetime can (maybe) be determined by some complicated equation, but when you have limits on how much CPU you can use and limits on how much time you can spend on maths, you use garbage collection.
The trick is only to use garbage collection when you know that you need it and what it means. There's the problem with most dynamic languages.
The light from the nearer horizon is younger, that light is from the horizon as it was in more recent times and so should seem to come from cooler matter.
> but nothing actually done about the problem as long as we can continue to buy enough surplus nuclear power from the French.
Excellent idea, build nuclear power stations in France and export the electricity. Better yet, build them in Jersey and Gibraltar. It'll give Bergerac a new job as a nuclear facilities inspector - imagine the subtitle of John Nettles new series: "The Singeing Detective"
> I just hate the GNU zealots. Qt just can't win can they. The entire GNU project is founded on the idea that proprietary software is bad (Stallman even wrote an essay on why you shouldn't use the LGPL, and renamed the first L from "Library" to "Lesser" to discourage use). But when Qt is using GPL, suddenly the GNU zealots turn around and say, hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it!
That's not the GNU zealots saying that, GNU zealots love that QT is not LGPL. It's some other people that don't approve of GPL libraries.
Why do you think there are only two viewpoints in this world? Do you have a bipolar mind or something?
The world is not just KDE Foundation vs Free Software Foundation, there are far more groups with far more varied opinions and agendas. The opinions of the KDE Foundation and FSF are tiny, tiny minorities, so it is not suprising that you hear a lot of opinions that don't seem to fit into those categories properly. I find your shock at hearing a new voice to be bizarre in the extreme.
Actually you're probably best off doing a RAID 5 like scheme, so you end up using more storage, but having twice as many bits damaged in a localised region of tape is not twice as likely to prevent recovery of a given bit.
Of course, having said what I have said, while the chance of damage causing unrecoverable losses can be reduced to almost nothing, if you are using compression then (depending on the scheme), those losses in that unlikely scenario could be totally devastating - while intellect can be applied to recover most of the data when you're not using compression. Overall, I think the risk/cost ratio is improved the most by using compression, ECC, and a RAID5-like scheme, but I'd like to see if somebody has done a thourough mathematical analysis of this. It would be interesting to see, and good to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they currently charge a per property fee, unless you are in full time education, then they multiply the charge by the number of bedrooms. Bizarre and immoral, but true.
The BBC is also required by law to provide a variety of programming and not just what is very popular. It means channel 4 gets the crap but popular stuff like "big brother", and the BBC gives us great, but virtually unheard of stuff like "the mighty boosh".
The BBC is now providing its content online for PC viewing. As long as there is a need for the BBC online (and there currently is), I believe a license fee (read "tax") should be payable on all computers wired up and capable of decoding and displaying BBC content at an acceptable quality. If you don't have the software though, or your computer is too slow, or it doesn't have a monitor, or your network connectivity is spotty, then I don't think you should have to pay anything.
> You would not, ever, at any time, seem to be moving faster than light.
Yes you would. The viewer would see the light from when you were at the start of your journey just a few moments before they see the light from where you are now, they would see you as a great streak, travelling from the start of your journey to the end in just a few moments. Thus you would *appear* to have travelled much, much faster. If you were travelling away, you would appear to be travelling much, much slower (as the light from later moments has much further to travel, and thus *arrives* much later).
Does that mean you have to go to bed at about 5pm in the middle of the winter to avoid cancer (at this latitude - about the same as New York)?
Nope
> Because they could make a little MORE money if there was no second hand market!
That is not greed, it is stupidity. If there was no second hand market, they would sell fewer units. This is because the content they sell has a lower value to the purchaser than the current retail price for many purchasers. That defference is made up for by the owner selling his property on again, albeit for a reduced price. Without the ability to sell second hand, there would be fewer people prepared to pay current prices.
> Put up or shut up.
If I should have to put up with developerworks or shut up about it, then you should have to put up with me or shut up about it. There is a third alternative: we can talk freely about it, telling people what we each think of the quality of a source without barking commands at each other ("Put up or shut up" is an imperative utterance and a rude one at that).
And I stand by my statement on the rarity of articles like the one you just linked to (which is, indeed, insightful - if a little underwhelming) - I developed my opinion based on reading through a bunch of recent articles and finding very few worth thinking about.
MSN Messenger with a touchscreen would be prior art, and I *know* people have used MSN Messenger with a touchscreen - the problem is, I can't *prove* it so they'll have to stop doing it now.
IBM developerworks rarely acheives anything else.
> We are talking here about battery life. Not engineering specs on a data sheet for one of the components in the laptop.
That was exactly my point. An accurate measurement of the heat dissipated by two CPUs of similar performance showed that the Turion64 dissipated a couple of Watts less than the Pentium M (even though the datasheets claim the Pentium M is better in this respect). If the half hour difference in battery life represented a difference in the power dissipated between the CPUs then, for any expected difference in heat dissipated, the CPU would have to account for more than half of the power consumed in the laptop. That is nowhere near what happens.
> The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power ...
No they don't. They have a higher quoted TDP, but that number is an engineering choice, AMD typically quotes a higher TDP for the same power consumption. AMD is crrently shipping two versions, one of which has a TDP of 25W that under typical use comes in at about 17W (slightly better than the equivalent Intel part even though the AMD part has its memory controller counted in that while the Intel part doesn't). Practically this means no difference to battery life given that the rest of the system is the same (except the northbridge, of course). And you get better performance with a Turion 64 processor for everything except video transcoding. When we see 64 bit optimised encoders, I expect that to change too. It is pissing me off how long it is taking to get hand-optimised AMD64 routines for tight inner loops in various common algorithms.
Sun Microsystems Boasts "We're not quite good enough."
That's not a meeting, that's a training session. These are always good. The developers get a rubby ducky to prove their designs against, and you expand your skillset. That is a very different beast indeed.
> We have a class of old (say 10-13 billion year old)stars that are metal-poor, and a bunch of newer stars (like the Sun) that have much higher concentrations of heavy elements.
How do you determine their ages? And how is our sun supposed to get so much in the way of heavy elements from the old stars, when the old stars don't have much to provide? Also, a star with little in the way of heavy elements is likely to eject more matter than a heavy star with lots of iron, which is likely to collapse and start spitting out the neutrons and protons that formed the iron.
I've never seen any discussion about what ratios this buffer mechanism will tend to maintain, but in an infinite universe a steady ratio would have to be maintained (otherwise everything would tend towards iron, which would be gravitationally attracted without reacting to produce energy, and the universe would disappear which would be a contradiction.
So I think both the closed big bang and infinite universe with natural element ratio buffering may be self consistent, the question is whether they predict what we see, and whether they possess fantastical and untestable features (such as inflation). I am not expert enough to know if they both predict what we see very well. Unfortunately, there is little public discussion on the matter of agreement with empirical evidence.
> I don't see why you get that impression. Among other things, he apparently advocates an infinitely old universe. But we haven't discovered objects older than roughly the claimed age of the universe, ie, on the order of 13 billion years.
How do you know how old they are? From the redshift. The big bang predicts the bodies are flying away from us, and the rate they are moving (degree of redshift) indicates the distance they have accrued from the location of the event. Finally, from that distance you calculate how long ago their light was emitted (using the known speed of light). But that age depends upon the assumption that superclusters are all flying away from the same point in spacetime (ie, depends on the big bang theory being substantially correct). Eric Lerner suggests (as you say) that there was no big bang, therefore the redshift doesn't directly correlate with distance, so you no longer know how old those most "distant" things are.
Eric Lerner is looking less and less like a crank with every new cosmological experiment, I think this is exactly what his plasma filament theory of the intergalactic medium has been predicting.
I expect "movie quality games" will refer to the pseudo AI processing used to determine the positioning and articulation of things like the hordes or orcs in the lord of the rings films, rather than the rendering quality (although, in a "never the same render twice" situation, I'm sure the next crop of consoles will have background scenes that look just like movies - but the foregrounds probably won't).
> Instead of ad-hoc security sandboxes (jails, chroot, now apparmor) wouldn't it be better to just transition to a managed runtime where all apps get all of this for free?
You can run your apps under qemu if you want, I however will go with the security module. All those apps are already compiled to the bytecode interpreted by some CPU, so your managed runtime needs to jit compile that as if it were an IL (intermediate language).
Also, nowadays low-level languages like the intel architecture 32 and amd64 instruction sets actually *are* interpreted and jit compiled by a managed runtime in the CPU. The managed runtime calls back into plug-in code (the kernel, running in ring 0) written in the interpreted language itself. This call-back implements policy decisions and some functionality that doesn't need to be hardcoded into the managed runtime itself. A modern OS on a modern CPU is just like a really flexible managed runtime with a powerful policy and library plug-in, so I don't know what you are asking for exactly.
> Who do Slashdot readers turn to when technology goes wrong?
Dell.
> Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?"
Yes.
There is a reason why they are such a big and popular supplier, and it isn't due to suspension of disbelief. Of course, you may need to have favourable terms in your contract to get the kind of service you want, as they probably don't offer it to every little company around.
> And reference variables?
There is no such thing as a reference variable, you clearly don't know the C++ language. references are not variables. references are newly defined identifiers that refer to an object that already has identifiers referencing it, they don't change, ever, hence are not variable... But I see that you *really* meant *pass* by reference, if you want to ensure that the function can have no side effects, cast the parameter to const. Otherwise, if you expect to write software without knowing what the functions do, you should not be writing software.
BTW, when you say "fancy allowing standard operators to be overloaded" I think you mean "overrided". C has overloaded operators (+ is defined for int, char, short, long, float, double, etc). overriding lets you tell the compiler how to do addition for your custom bigint library, or whatever. You can misuse operator overriding, or you can misuse macros, each are there for a purpose, and each get misused by bad programmers.
> And now garbage collection? That just a feature to fix poorly written code.
No it isn't, it is a feature to simplify the determination of object lifetime when that lifetime depends on complex (or more likely, merely chaotic) runtime factors. Bad programmers use it to fix poorly written code. Sure, every lifetime can (maybe) be determined by some complicated equation, but when you have limits on how much CPU you can use and limits on how much time you can spend on maths, you use garbage collection.
The trick is only to use garbage collection when you know that you need it and what it means. There's the problem with most dynamic languages.
The light from the nearer horizon is younger, that light is from the horizon as it was in more recent times and so should seem to come from cooler matter.
> but nothing actually done about the problem as long as we can continue to buy enough surplus nuclear power from the French.
Excellent idea, build nuclear power stations in France and export the electricity. Better yet, build them in Jersey and Gibraltar. It'll give Bergerac a new job as a nuclear facilities inspector - imagine the subtitle of John Nettles new series: "The Singeing Detective"
> I just hate the GNU zealots. Qt just can't win can they. The entire GNU project is founded on the idea that proprietary software is bad (Stallman even wrote an essay on why you shouldn't use the LGPL, and renamed the first L from "Library" to "Lesser" to discourage use). But when Qt is using GPL, suddenly the GNU zealots turn around and say, hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it!
That's not the GNU zealots saying that, GNU zealots love that QT is not LGPL. It's some other people that don't approve of GPL libraries.
Why do you think there are only two viewpoints in this world? Do you have a bipolar mind or something?
The world is not just KDE Foundation vs Free Software Foundation, there are far more groups with far more varied opinions and agendas. The opinions of the KDE Foundation and FSF are tiny, tiny minorities, so it is not suprising that you hear a lot of opinions that don't seem to fit into those categories properly. I find your shock at hearing a new voice to be bizarre in the extreme.
Actually you're probably best off doing a RAID 5 like scheme, so you end up using more storage, but having twice as many bits damaged in a localised region of tape is not twice as likely to prevent recovery of a given bit.
Of course, having said what I have said, while the chance of damage causing unrecoverable losses can be reduced to almost nothing, if you are using compression then (depending on the scheme), those losses in that unlikely scenario could be totally devastating - while intellect can be applied to recover most of the data when you're not using compression. Overall, I think the risk/cost ratio is improved the most by using compression, ECC, and a RAID5-like scheme, but I'd like to see if somebody has done a thourough mathematical analysis of this. It would be interesting to see, and good to know.
> all the problems you mention with data coruption can be solved by backing up the information more than once.
You are better off not compressing and then storing ECCs. Although you are better off still by compressing and *still* storing ECCs.