The moon has a pretty circular orbit. The theory that the moon formed from a collision with earth is the leading theory since it's composition bares out this claim. I would assume the same effects that circularized it's orbit do apply to planets.
The pure BS is it is a complete copy. It isn't. Nice troll Mr Coward, I'd mod you flamebait if it wasn't too late.
Win7 taskbar is not a straight cut copy of OSXs Dock. It has become a little Dockish, but your forgetting quicklaunch has been part of this for a long long time, you can even have large pretty icons with it. It seems to me the boundaries between Quicklaunch, task managerment and the tray have been removed. This does make it Dock like, but these staples of the windows taskbar have been there a long time, predating the Dock by a long way.
The windows taskbar has long had the quicklaunch bar, as well as the ability to add other folders as toolbars pointing to whatever folder. So it has been both a application launcher (you could set large icons too) and a window manager for a long time. This goes way back. Now it seems the application launcher areas of the taskbar are less limited. Considering this, the changes in Windows 7 are only a very small step in the direction of the OSX Dock.
In TFV in TFA, it looks more like there is some metal sheet in the bottom of the tank which is obviously the opposite electrode. Which makes me wonder if this is really that practical - would there be any net propulsive with both electrodes on the vessel?
Due to the nature of surface tension I don't see this also scaling up to well, beyond something insect sized. I also wonder about efficiency, which may not beat a spinning propeller.
There have already been wave-powered boats powered by vertical motion, that have been sucessfully shown to work - no egines or sails - especially well in a head wind!.
It would not be difficult to generate a surface tension when deep under water, you just need bubbles, thus it could possibly be applied to a submersible. The mechanics of how that might work I'm not to sure about, perhaps moving bubbles along a surface by changing electrical potential, thus moving some water with them for thrust.
Vista created backlash largely from people who are not great computer users.
It comes down to 'us' and 'them': we/us like to tinker with stuff that is new and cool, for example myself I tinker with a new linux distro or something every second day it seems. I like learning and I get bored when I've mastered something or completed a project and move on. You know the kind of person. Now, I installed Vista, had no problems, or at least any problems I had were overcome without thinking. I also had no problems negotiating the new interface without having previously studied up or read anything. I Good. Infact, for someone fairly new to computers, Vista would be excellent.
The problem is "them", the people that don't like comptuers, can't use them well, and have stuggled for years to make it do anything they need to do. You know the kind of people, they still have the Bliss XP background, after years of owning their computer. Or they call the Office IT deptartment twice a day. These people have a different first reaction to us when you go and do something like change, oh, just about everything in the interface of your OS.
Where we may see a challenge when presented with something new and difficult, they may experience unfamiliarity, anger, frustration, and they will decide their opinion of vista based on this. Back in my support days, after a XP roll out, we had calls from users claiming their pc had been hacked because the menus had changed and they were looking at green hills and blue sky.
So while Vista was actually good, but troubled, there is still a huge user base who were going to complain if anything was changed, regardless if it was better or not. Because we know these kind of people, any change, even if a huge improvement is bad, because they have already once struggled to learn to use The Computer or IntraWebs at all, let alone have to learn new things.
You need to bear in mind these people are often baby boomers, who grew up in a world where there wasn't the pace of change we see today. They had decades before disruptive IT tech tipped up.
Now I understand the us/them thing, what I don't understand is the implied viewpoint from the blogosphere on Vista? How do expert bloggers complain about the kinds of things that none experts have a valid gripe about?
Why bother dropping in a custom BIOS chip? Many mainboard bioses can be flashed via software from within a running operating system.
Once you've written to the ROM you then need your code to force a reboot. On the next boot your bios code runs with disabled cache and does the cache dump. (Heck RAM too while you're at it). Interestingly the original bios could be restored leaving the machine functional.
I imagine what prevents this kind of attack being useful is the limitation to a specific make and model of the motherboard at a time. This is why there isn't a plethora of viruses bricking expensive hardware by attacking the BIOS ROM. But I've often wondered if there is some sloppiness to be exploited -- I wouldn't be surprised the instructions to write to the BIOS flash memory are probably identical across a range of boards from one manufacturer. It certainly is the case with graphics adapters. A simple software tool can flash the bios of any ATI/NVidia graphics chipset (and interestingly the graphics bios is always initialized first before POST.. hmm... idea) In any event, you'd need to reverse engineer the mainboard bios flash software as [one hopes] the manufacturers don't hand out that kind of information.
With the continual increase in the capacity of storage, exponentially decreasing cost per size, and ever increasing bandwidth to link it all together, I wonder if there is there any use worrying about piracy.
You could say piracy moved to the internet because floppy disks were useless and CD/DVD burning costly, even when it's now rather cheap. Generally piracy has been scaling with availability of bandwidth and storage. But is there a point where it gets so stupidly cheap and powerful that old world business models become completely untenable?
KDE4 and Win7 are only superficially similar in looks. There are similarities, but not enough to even justify the implication that someone copied someone of course.
Both seemed to have drawn ideas by looking at the popular themes from the OS skinning community associated with each interfaces. It's a shame that this wasn't done back in the Win9x+WindowsBlinds days when Microsoft thought Luna would impress everyone.
New Zealanders certainly act as if we have our rights protected by a constitution. We speak our minds and generally take a lot of liberty as if we were entitled to it. Yet most Kiwis would be shocked to learn they don't have the legal protection they think they do, it's a rather well kept secret.
Section 92A - "cut off anyone who *might* be breaking the law"
Minister Judith Tizard made comments related to Section 92A of the Copyright Act half-way through a bfm radio interview on 10 November 2008. It required a response. Here's a transcript and my comments:
Interviewer: "The concern with the IT people though is that when they came and expressed concerns about, say, the potential that people would be disconnected from the Internet for civil offences - it perhaps was not the exchange of ideas which caused the main problem, but the feeling that you'd almost sort-of prejudged the case when you'd came and sat down with them."
Judith Tizard: "We'd made - the law had changed, they came about a year too late - and I tried to explain the process by which laws are made - and to be, to be, um, [sigh] to be specific there are a couple of people who are upset,..."
Judith Tizard: "...most of the rest - and to be blunt they're talking bullshit - um, you know, if - yes it is easier for ISPs, Internet Service Providers, to cut off anyone who might be breaking the law, um, but you know, you can go to a library and use the Internet, and you can go to another ISP.
So my argument was that there was commercial sense in having a process, ar, by which we could - it's a combination of education and enforcement.
You can't say to copyright owners we will legalize the theft of your creative work, nor, could we say to citizens you can't use music that you own and, you know, an ipod together."
No, gravity still applies within the giant straw sticking out in space. There would still be a pressure gradient from usual sea level pressure to nothing at the top.
But if the MacGirl was hot enough though, would it be worth pretending you are a MacHead? If your a linux guy you could show her a Bash shell in OSX and she's yours.
Considering that more and more of the human endeavour is taking place in cyberspace, and eventually pretty much nothing of interest will happen in meatspace alone... this is a disturbing precedent giving free run for governments to spy on everything you do. Its worrying that the public doesn't grasp the gravity of the situation.
What the real problem is, once liberty is given away it's very very hard to get back.
A while ago games like Crysis would gain ~10% FPS in XP over Vista on my hardware. Now I find that Vista 64 beats 32-bit XP for gaming by 10-15%. That is with 4gb RAM and above. The gap was a little closer with 2gb. It seems the 64 code path is finally showing it's stuff.
Lively is not intended to be a game, but it was intended to be used by humans. Which I don't think Google anticipated.
Why games of any kind fun is because fundamentally humans enjoy learning. If you remove the complexity from a game or quasi-game in terms of the interface, tasks and challenges presented you a simple removing things that are enjoyable.
In the case of complexity alone, you are removing depth. But from what I found with lively it was so stripped bare it had NOTHING.
I'm all for making things accessible to people who are not so quick to figure things out, or perhaps just have a low tolerance for wasting time fighting a confusing interface. Dumbing down is what you do in lieu of designing the interface properly in the first place and in this case Lively was just plain Dumb(tm) right off the bat. Lets making a carefull distinction here: dumbing down implies there was once a smart idea at all.
Come on Google, do something like lively, with interesting physics sandbox and it's google earth and twitter and gtalk all mashed up and linked to my GPS and webcam so my avatar can walk around the world in real time as I do. I'll send you my job application.
If you do a search of source forge for open game development kits you will be spoiled for choice.
There are plenty of gamers who are pretty smart, and ready to make content using modeling and content creation tools, (www.racer.nl - huge libraries of fan-made performance cars and stuff imported from other games).
Gamers are highly conditioned to not paying money for games... and ready to bit torrent anything they want at the drop of a hat.
So I think all the ingredients for a OSS gaming revolution is there.
What we need is a few killer projects to get things going. The few OSS games now aren't very good - they pale in comparison to some excellent indie games out there.
Slashdot Mirror
The moon has a pretty circular orbit. The theory that the moon formed from a collision with earth is the leading theory since it's composition bares out this claim. I would assume the same effects that circularized it's orbit do apply to planets.
Parts of that at least, sound like my experiences with many systems.
We call it a operating system because it actually operates, most of the time. We have much more colorful terminology for when system fails to operate.
The pure BS is it is a complete copy. It isn't. Nice troll Mr Coward, I'd mod you flamebait if it wasn't too late.
Win7 taskbar is not a straight cut copy of OSXs Dock. It has become a little Dockish, but your forgetting quicklaunch has been part of this for a long long time, you can even have large pretty icons with it. It seems to me the boundaries between Quicklaunch, task managerment and the tray have been removed. This does make it Dock like, but these staples of the windows taskbar have been there a long time, predating the Dock by a long way.
The windows taskbar has long had the quicklaunch bar, as well as the ability to add other folders as toolbars pointing to whatever folder. So it has been both a application launcher (you could set large icons too) and a window manager for a long time. This goes way back. Now it seems the application launcher areas of the taskbar are less limited. Considering this, the changes in Windows 7 are only a very small step in the direction of the OSX Dock.
In TFV in TFA, it looks more like there is some metal sheet in the bottom of the tank which is obviously the opposite electrode. Which makes me wonder if this is really that practical - would there be any net propulsive with both electrodes on the vessel?
Due to the nature of surface tension I don't see this also scaling up to well, beyond something insect sized. I also wonder about efficiency, which may not beat a spinning propeller.
There have already been wave-powered boats powered by vertical motion, that have been sucessfully shown to work - no egines or sails - especially well in a head wind!.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4254404.html
It would not be difficult to generate a surface tension when deep under water, you just need bubbles, thus it could possibly be applied to a submersible. The mechanics of how that might work I'm not to sure about, perhaps moving bubbles along a surface by changing electrical potential, thus moving some water with them for thrust.
Vista created backlash largely from people who are not great computer users.
It comes down to 'us' and 'them':
we/us like to tinker with stuff that is new and cool, for example myself I tinker with a new linux distro or something every second day it seems. I like learning and I get bored when I've mastered something or completed a project and move on. You know the kind of person. Now, I installed Vista, had no problems, or at least any problems I had were overcome without thinking. I also had no problems negotiating the new interface without having previously studied up or read anything. I Good. Infact, for someone fairly new to computers, Vista would be excellent.
The problem is "them", the people that don't like comptuers, can't use them well, and have stuggled for years to make it do anything they need to do. You know the kind of people, they still have the Bliss XP background, after years of owning their computer. Or they call the Office IT deptartment twice a day. These people have a different first reaction to us when you go and do something like change, oh, just about everything in the interface of your OS.
Where we may see a challenge when presented with something new and difficult, they may experience unfamiliarity, anger, frustration, and they will decide their opinion of vista based on this. Back in my support days, after a XP roll out, we had calls from users claiming their pc had been hacked because the menus had changed and they were looking at green hills and blue sky.
So while Vista was actually good, but troubled, there is still a huge user base who were going to complain if anything was changed, regardless if it was better or not. Because we know these kind of people, any change, even if a huge improvement is bad, because they have already once struggled to learn to use The Computer or IntraWebs at all, let alone have to learn new things.
You need to bear in mind these people are often baby boomers, who grew up in a world where there wasn't the pace of change we see today. They had decades before disruptive IT tech tipped up.
Now I understand the us/them thing, what I don't understand is the implied viewpoint from the blogosphere on Vista? How do expert bloggers complain about the kinds of things that none experts have a valid gripe about?
Why bother dropping in a custom BIOS chip? Many mainboard bioses can be flashed via software from within a running operating system. Once you've written to the ROM you then need your code to force a reboot. On the next boot your bios code runs with disabled cache and does the cache dump. (Heck RAM too while you're at it). Interestingly the original bios could be restored leaving the machine functional.
I imagine what prevents this kind of attack being useful is the limitation to a specific make and model of the motherboard at a time. This is why there isn't a plethora of viruses bricking expensive hardware by attacking the BIOS ROM. But I've often wondered if there is some sloppiness to be exploited -- I wouldn't be surprised the instructions to write to the BIOS flash memory are probably identical across a range of boards from one manufacturer. It certainly is the case with graphics adapters. A simple software tool can flash the bios of any ATI/NVidia graphics chipset (and interestingly the graphics bios is always initialized first before POST.. hmm... idea) In any event, you'd need to reverse engineer the mainboard bios flash software as [one hopes] the manufacturers don't hand out that kind of information.
Naturally, the sources for those brains are not well publicized.
I suspect they'd be from inside heads.
Those are female brains then.
With the continual increase in the capacity of storage, exponentially decreasing cost per size, and ever increasing bandwidth to link it all together, I wonder if there is there any use worrying about piracy.
You could say piracy moved to the internet because floppy disks were useless and CD/DVD burning costly, even when it's now rather cheap. Generally piracy has been scaling with availability of bandwidth and storage. But is there a point where it gets so stupidly cheap and powerful that old world business models become completely untenable?
KDE4 and Win7 are only superficially similar in looks. There are similarities, but not enough to even justify the implication that someone copied someone of course.
Both seemed to have drawn ideas by looking at the popular themes from the OS skinning community associated with each interfaces. It's a shame that this wasn't done back in the Win9x+WindowsBlinds days when Microsoft thought Luna would impress everyone.
You need to reinstall your sarcasm detection package.
There's a serious lack of sarcasm tags, and it's required when it's not immediately obvious.
Where is your irony tag...
"To be fair, we have just got a new Government, headed by men."
Our out-going female leader had more balls than most male politicians.
New Zealanders certainly act as if we have our rights protected by a constitution. We speak our minds and generally take a lot of liberty as if we were entitled to it. Yet most Kiwis would be shocked to learn they don't have the legal protection they think they do, it's a rather well kept secret.
Section 92A - "cut off anyone who *might* be breaking the law"
..."
Minister Judith Tizard made comments related to Section 92A of the Copyright Act half-way through a bfm radio interview on 10 November 2008. It required a response. Here's a transcript and my comments:
Interviewer: "The concern with the IT people though is that when they came and expressed concerns about, say, the potential that people would be disconnected from the Internet for civil offences - it perhaps was not the exchange of ideas which caused the main problem, but the feeling that you'd almost sort-of prejudged the case when you'd came and sat down with them."
Judith Tizard: "We'd made - the law had changed, they came about a year too late - and I tried to explain the process by which laws are made - and to be, to be, um, [sigh] to be specific there are a couple of people who are upset,
Judith Tizard: "...most of the rest - and to be blunt they're talking bullshit - um, you know, if - yes it is easier for ISPs, Internet Service Providers, to cut off anyone who might be breaking the law, um, but you know, you can go to a library and use the Internet, and you can go to another ISP.
So my argument was that there was commercial sense in having a process, ar, by which we could - it's a combination of education and enforcement.
You can't say to copyright owners we will legalize the theft of your creative work, nor, could we say to citizens you can't use music that you own and, you know, an ipod together."
Since there are no repercussions for false complaints... this will be the most popular prank of 2009.
Scratch that I wonder if there is a capillary effect, having a narrow tube extending to space may draw air up against gravity?
No, gravity still applies within the giant straw sticking out in space. There would still be a pressure gradient from usual sea level pressure to nothing at the top.
Do mac girls only have one nipple?
But if the MacGirl was hot enough though, would it be worth pretending you are a MacHead? If your a linux guy you could show her a Bash shell in OSX and she's yours.
Considering that more and more of the human endeavour is taking place in cyberspace, and eventually pretty much nothing of interest will happen in meatspace alone... this is a disturbing precedent giving free run for governments to spy on everything you do. Its worrying that the public doesn't grasp the gravity of the situation.
What the real problem is, once liberty is given away it's very very hard to get back.
A while ago games like Crysis would gain ~10% FPS in XP over Vista on my hardware. Now I find that Vista 64 beats 32-bit XP for gaming by 10-15%. That is with 4gb RAM and above. The gap was a little closer with 2gb. It seems the 64 code path is finally showing it's stuff.
Lively is not intended to be a game, but it was intended to be used by humans. Which I don't think Google anticipated.
Why games of any kind fun is because fundamentally humans enjoy learning. If you remove the complexity from a game or quasi-game in terms of the interface, tasks and challenges presented you a simple removing things that are enjoyable.
In the case of complexity alone, you are removing depth. But from what I found with lively it was so stripped bare it had NOTHING.
I'm all for making things accessible to people who are not so quick to figure things out, or perhaps just have a low tolerance for wasting time fighting a confusing interface. Dumbing down is what you do in lieu of designing the interface properly in the first place and in this case Lively was just plain Dumb(tm) right off the bat. Lets making a carefull distinction here: dumbing down implies there was once a smart idea at all.
Come on Google, do something like lively, with interesting physics sandbox and it's google earth and twitter and gtalk all mashed up and linked to my GPS and webcam so my avatar can walk around the world in real time as I do. I'll send you my job application.
If you do a search of source forge for open game development kits you will be spoiled for choice.
There are plenty of gamers who are pretty smart, and ready to make content using modeling and content creation tools, (www.racer.nl - huge libraries of fan-made performance cars and stuff imported from other games). Gamers are highly conditioned to not paying money for games... and ready to bit torrent anything they want at the drop of a hat. So I think all the ingredients for a OSS gaming revolution is there. What we need is a few killer projects to get things going. The few OSS games now aren't very good - they pale in comparison to some excellent indie games out there.