With both incandescents and CFLs, for every one that fails prematurely there will be one that lasts unusually longer than average. Citing statistical outliers is a poor arguement.
I have a couple of old Phillips CFLs that are coming up on five years of use and abuse. I've had a handful fail in months. Not a problem, on average they still pay for themselves many times over - but even so, I did something you can't do with an incandescent - claim on the manurfacturer's warranty.
Moral panic over the internet seems to stem from convetional news media, who find stories of hackers and predators on the internet rather easy sensationalism, especially on a slow news day. Indeed the moral panic is confined to people who seem to get their opinion from the 6pm news. I can't think how many (usually older) people I met who were actually genuinely affraid of going on the internet.
The traditional media's business model depends somewhat on people not using the internet, remaining fearful and insecure, it's all about the advertisers.
To this day mainstream news carries endless stories about internet and gadgets harming our productivity, children, and the moral decline of society. In just about the same breath from a news anchor you'll hear a story that was clearly sourced by lazy journalist surfing celebrity twitter feeds.
Avoiding lung and eye damage I once cut various circuit boards motherboards by scoring a grove and snapping the board in a vice. Breaks along the scored grove weren't bad. It was surprising how strong mobos are and how far they'll bend before breaking. Had some luck with a hammer and chisel to snap clean through various electronic components. I hope your art turns out better than my halfwit attempt.
Then use the patent(s) as leverage to go after companies that don't honour the GPL. For everyone else grant a blanket licence to use the patent provided they honour the open source licence properly.
It's derived from Linux Mint which is derived from Ubuntu, so is far removed from Ubuntu's quirks and adds many enhancements that make it easy to manage. It's set up more like how a power desktop user would tweak their Linux distro with all the most common nice GUI tools for getting things done. Although it would be more familiar for a OSX user with it's mac-like dock.
For me it just saves time having to tweak things and install lots of packages.
Actually don't really like some aspects of way of life - the food and suffering and death from diabetes, heart disease for example. Oh and Reality TV, that's unforgivable.
Android Apps *can* be coded for the virtual machine (which uses JIT compiling anyway) but it doesn't have to be that way, you can have native code in your Android Apps, and many do. http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/
Find Roundabouts scary? You should be scared. But shouldn't the question be, why don't you find intersections scary enough normally?
Roundabouts solve a few of the key problems that face drivers at intersections. That is, slowing down, looking, and being courteous. Roundabouts force drivers to be pay attention by being slightly more dangerous.
There is no Red light to ignore, and no green light that means all-clear-to-plant-foot-without-looking.
However they are still vulernable to people who don't use their turn signals, and really cannot follow rules. At least when an accident happens drivers have room to avoid, is at lower speed, and avoids t-bone and head on collsions. Overall result: they are superior to traffic lights and un-regulated intersections for most conditons.
(I live in a country that makes heavy use of roundabouts and has drivers that are similar if not worse than American drivers in terms of paying attention, being courteous and generally needless death and destruction.)
Apple's design is so generic the patent reads more like the description of a form factor than any unique look at feel. Just about every point has an "obvious" factor to it. Most of them show up elsewhere in the computing world, the only thing novel is packaging it in a handheld device.
This sh1t should not be patentable. I wonder if a small company tried, it they would have got it granted? I wonder how integrity the patent system has anymore.
This is the real "climategate". Of the emails stolen from CRU that the best climate skeptics could do was a couple of quotes out of context in the the roughly 70mb of emails. I even downloaded the torrent to see for myself*. This was heralded as proof of the climate change hoax. It was not, rather it proved everything was legit.
THIS is worthy of the title Climategate, the real scandal is in the millions spent or trying to seed doubt and stall planet-saving policy. (After initial expenditure, hords of useful idiots and wackjobs take over - they are desperate for something to fight since the cold war, there are no longer commies under their beds).
Once again the data doesn't support what the deniers claim. Once again, caught red handed, lying for money.
Deniers: Please please present examples of scientists caught out doing false science for money from whoever has a vested interest in saving the world rather than wrecking it for short term profit, I dunno... EV battery company?
*(In actual fact the volume of emails showed nothing untoward, just genuine scientists doing their usual thing).
I've always thought that we'd have viable fusion rockets long before we have practical fusion power generation. The reasoning being, power could come from another source (fission reactor) to trigger the fusion, the resulting high-velocity particles would be a source of thrust alone. This seems to be exactly what TFA describes. Proton-boron fusion spits out high-energy alpha particles that are easily deflected into thrust... clever.
With todays tech something like electrostatic inertial confinement fusion (like an Ion drive, but can reach energy levels for some fusion) could gain a bit of extra thrust from fusion, even if it was a long way off being able to generate useful power. But using a laser is novel... and "The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. " (!) the efficiency sounds awesome.
I always thought it would be a great indie game project to create a game that could only be played once and would self-modify as you play and eventually wipe itself off your system. It would be a interesting piece of art intended to make people consider the consequences of a DRM'd world.
However, this would be free or inexpensive. It would also ask for the users explicit consent and lay out exactly how it was going to prevent running a second time on your machine (so you could reverse the changes, but not without spending time and effort doing so).
Self-eating software has already been invented unintentially though, usually this is at the operating system level.
The world would have been different place if software had any kind of warranty or guarantee. Software world is privledged in how little liability it faces compared to any other industry. We'd have less complex, feature-heavy software, and it would take much longer to get to market. However it has some benefits it would be more robust, reliable and simple. It would encourage better design for security and stability before all sorts of bleeding edge features.
Frankly software developers could do with a bit more liability and consumers of software much more protection. It's unfortunate but such law would protect the industry more than the consumer, since confidence in paid software products these days is very low. I can't think how many times I've paid for a game or software package and wholeheartedly regretted it.
I live in NZ and NZ's main consumer protection law, the "Consumer Guarantees Act 1993" actually covers software (although it's almost never enforced to the same level as phsyical goods, and few consumers know their rights fully). I missed my chance to try it out with Windows Vista. In hindsight there are many games and software packages I've bought over the years that were clearly substandard compared to how they were marketted that the law would have applied. It seems the software industry finds a balance, if customers are too disillusioned they just won't buy software and will resort to piracy, to get ahead industry players have to restore confidence and push quality (Apple has done this masterfully).
Infact our consumer law reads like a wishlist of software users ideal solution to their software nightmares.
1) A guarantee that the software is of âoeacceptable qualityâ (interpretted as "fit for a purpose")
2) A guarantee that the software will comply with any description provided by the developer (does what it says it does on the box).
3) A guarantee that the developer will facilititate repair or replacement of the goods (difficult to interpret with software, but the developer can't just do nothing for the user).
Yep that means I would have got a refund for Vista... and Duke Nukem Forever maybe.
I don't support Google in this case, rather than behaving like a petulant child they should have sought some compromise, an exclusion on games, movies, ebooks perhaps? Shutting yourself out of a market isn't a good look and you'd lose more if you stayed put and weathered the impact of scammers. Google could consider kicking developers off the market that have a way too higher percent of product returns.
I don't see how this infection is not possible to clean. All that would be necessary is to boot another OS and overwrite MBR and clean any infected binaries. Perhaps overwrite Windows binaries with the genunine article from an install CD (downloadable version if updated since disc went RTM) if it's not cleanable.
I'd do this from a Linux live USB and have a Windows install on another partition as source. Linux generally ignores NTFS security should be able to overwrite all necessary files on the Windows install.
Microsoft could release a bootable ISO or live USB image that could easily clean the rootkit.
Probably much more effective to utilise spare capacity of datacentres and server farms.
For in-browser crunching it would be straightforward to implement this in Javascript. As soon as the page loads it starts crunching data in your browser. Not as efficient as native code but it would be easy enough to get something crude working. Given enough clients this would be an effective supercomputer.
1) Use the resulting supercomputer to simulate a neural network.
2) ???
3) Call it "Skynet"
Zeolite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite#Medical as used in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_concentrator - However it isn't "consumed" since it is acting as a kind of filter, with an indefinate lifespan (of they top of my head they don't handle humid air too well without something done to mitigate that).
No factoring into MPG needed unless of course the "lightweight" one uses a consumable medium. Zeolite isn't exactly lightweight, so I assume that's where the they have made weight savings.
Unless the 11yo has emphysema what is the purpose of the Oxygen Concentrator? I'd love to know.
QTTFA:"The oxygen generator system was originially developed to treat injured soldiers, but in the car it is powered by an innovative micro-diesel-engine."
Does it provide a power boost instead of throttling (which incurrs pumping losses) - or is there an efficiency gain over and above the parasitic loss of running an oxygen concentrator? Usually the presence of a non-combustable gas such as nitrogen or cooled exhaust gas in EGR system allows higher compression and super lean mixtures without high EGT and melting/burning the inside of your cylinder head.
Yes, before you ask I have killed a turbo engine by too leaner mixture. Aparently metal components don't like super heated compressed oxygen...
Here's a problem. I remember when it took an age to download a 700mb movie file or a 350mb TV episode, and a handful would fill up your spacious 80gb HDD. Now it might zip down in about 5-10 minutes. Also now you could fit 2000 movies on a $100 hard drive.... and quite a few on a bargain bin USB thumb drive.
The problem is adancements in bandwidth, not just of internet, but of portable-harddrive-swapnet (you know what i mean), mean that it's ever easier to share existing pirated collections.
So we better get big fat pipes and an explosion of legit on-demand TV and movie services soon, because it seems that file sharing is just getting started. Legit services need to pick up the pace in reaching people (hulu, netflix etc just aren't available in my country, so piracy is the only option) or there really will be a piracy problem.
Slashdot Mirror
With this and GNU Hurd possible in Debian 7, are we finally going to see mainstream OSes with microkernel architecture?
With both incandescents and CFLs, for every one that fails prematurely there will be one that lasts unusually longer than average. Citing statistical outliers is a poor arguement.
I have a couple of old Phillips CFLs that are coming up on five years of use and abuse. I've had a handful fail in months. Not a problem, on average they still pay for themselves many times over - but even so, I did something you can't do with an incandescent - claim on the manurfacturer's warranty.
Moral panic over the internet seems to stem from convetional news media, who find stories of hackers and predators on the internet rather easy sensationalism, especially on a slow news day. Indeed the moral panic is confined to people who seem to get their opinion from the 6pm news. I can't think how many (usually older) people I met who were actually genuinely affraid of going on the internet.
The traditional media's business model depends somewhat on people not using the internet, remaining fearful and insecure, it's all about the advertisers.
To this day mainstream news carries endless stories about internet and gadgets harming our productivity, children, and the moral decline of society. In just about the same breath from a news anchor you'll hear a story that was clearly sourced by lazy journalist surfing celebrity twitter feeds.
Avoiding lung and eye damage I once cut various circuit boards motherboards by scoring a grove and snapping the board in a vice. Breaks along the scored grove weren't bad. It was surprising how strong mobos are and how far they'll bend before breaking. Had some luck with a hammer and chisel to snap clean through various electronic components. I hope your art turns out better than my halfwit attempt.
Then use the patent(s) as leverage to go after companies that don't honour the GPL. For everyone else grant a blanket licence to use the patent provided they honour the open source licence properly.
It's derived from Linux Mint which is derived from Ubuntu, so is far removed from Ubuntu's quirks and adds many enhancements that make it easy to manage. It's set up more like how a power desktop user would tweak their Linux distro with all the most common nice GUI tools for getting things done. Although it would be more familiar for a OSX user with it's mac-like dock.
For me it just saves time having to tweak things and install lots of packages.
Actually don't really like some aspects of way of life - the food and suffering and death from diabetes, heart disease for example. Oh and Reality TV, that's unforgivable.
It's the young hooligans in T-16s that worry me.
Android Apps *can* be coded for the virtual machine (which uses JIT compiling anyway) but it doesn't have to be that way, you can have native code in your Android Apps, and many do. http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/
Find Roundabouts scary? You should be scared. But shouldn't the question be, why don't you find intersections scary enough normally?
Roundabouts solve a few of the key problems that face drivers at intersections. That is, slowing down, looking, and being courteous. Roundabouts force drivers to be pay attention by being slightly more dangerous.
There is no Red light to ignore, and no green light that means all-clear-to-plant-foot-without-looking.
However they are still vulernable to people who don't use their turn signals, and really cannot follow rules. At least when an accident happens drivers have room to avoid, is at lower speed, and avoids t-bone and head on collsions. Overall result: they are superior to traffic lights and un-regulated intersections for most conditons.
(I live in a country that makes heavy use of roundabouts and has drivers that are similar if not worse than American drivers in terms of paying attention, being courteous and generally needless death and destruction.)
Apple's design is so generic the patent reads more like the description of a form factor than any unique look at feel. Just about every point has an "obvious" factor to it. Most of them show up elsewhere in the computing world, the only thing novel is packaging it in a handheld device.
This sh1t should not be patentable. I wonder if a small company tried, it they would have got it granted? I wonder how integrity the patent system has anymore.
I enjoyed the eloquent phrase "Digital Iron Curtain" in TFA. So right.
They seem to scale well, reading a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1500Gbytes took 0.1 seconds longer.
This is the real "climategate". Of the emails stolen from CRU that the best climate skeptics could do was a couple of quotes out of context in the the roughly 70mb of emails. I even downloaded the torrent to see for myself*. This was heralded as proof of the climate change hoax. It was not, rather it proved everything was legit.
THIS is worthy of the title Climategate, the real scandal is in the millions spent or trying to seed doubt and stall planet-saving policy. (After initial expenditure, hords of useful idiots and wackjobs take over - they are desperate for something to fight since the cold war, there are no longer commies under their beds).
Once again the data doesn't support what the deniers claim. Once again, caught red handed, lying for money.
Deniers: Please please present examples of scientists caught out doing false science for money from whoever has a vested interest in saving the world rather than wrecking it for short term profit, I dunno... EV battery company?
*(In actual fact the volume of emails showed nothing untoward, just genuine scientists doing their usual thing).
Since there are more Android users now than iPhone users, by far... and increasingly so... I think the bias will be the other way.
I've always thought that we'd have viable fusion rockets long before we have practical fusion power generation. The reasoning being, power could come from another source (fission reactor) to trigger the fusion, the resulting high-velocity particles would be a source of thrust alone. This seems to be exactly what TFA describes. Proton-boron fusion spits out high-energy alpha particles that are easily deflected into thrust... clever.
... and "The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. " (!) the efficiency sounds awesome.
With todays tech something like electrostatic inertial confinement fusion (like an Ion drive, but can reach energy levels for some fusion) could gain a bit of extra thrust from fusion, even if it was a long way off being able to generate useful power. But using a laser is novel
I always thought it would be a great indie game project to create a game that could only be played once and would self-modify as you play and eventually wipe itself off your system. It would be a interesting piece of art intended to make people consider the consequences of a DRM'd world.
However, this would be free or inexpensive. It would also ask for the users explicit consent and lay out exactly how it was going to prevent running a second time on your machine (so you could reverse the changes, but not without spending time and effort doing so).
Self-eating software has already been invented unintentially though, usually this is at the operating system level.
The world would have been different place if software had any kind of warranty or guarantee. Software world is privledged in how little liability it faces compared to any other industry. We'd have less complex, feature-heavy software, and it would take much longer to get to market. However it has some benefits it would be more robust, reliable and simple. It would encourage better design for security and stability before all sorts of bleeding edge features.
Frankly software developers could do with a bit more liability and consumers of software much more protection. It's unfortunate but such law would protect the industry more than the consumer, since confidence in paid software products these days is very low. I can't think how many times I've paid for a game or software package and wholeheartedly regretted it.
I live in NZ and NZ's main consumer protection law, the "Consumer Guarantees Act 1993" actually covers software (although it's almost never enforced to the same level as phsyical goods, and few consumers know their rights fully). I missed my chance to try it out with Windows Vista. In hindsight there are many games and software packages I've bought over the years that were clearly substandard compared to how they were marketted that the law would have applied. It seems the software industry finds a balance, if customers are too disillusioned they just won't buy software and will resort to piracy, to get ahead industry players have to restore confidence and push quality (Apple has done this masterfully).
Infact our consumer law reads like a wishlist of software users ideal solution to their software nightmares.
1) A guarantee that the software is of âoeacceptable qualityâ (interpretted as "fit for a purpose")
2) A guarantee that the software will comply with any description provided by the developer (does what it says it does on the box).
3) A guarantee that the developer will facilititate repair or replacement of the goods (difficult to interpret with software, but the developer can't just do nothing for the user).
Yep that means I would have got a refund for Vista... and Duke Nukem Forever maybe.
I don't support Google in this case, rather than behaving like a petulant child they should have sought some compromise, an exclusion on games, movies, ebooks perhaps? Shutting yourself out of a market isn't a good look and you'd lose more if you stayed put and weathered the impact of scammers. Google could consider kicking developers off the market that have a way too higher percent of product returns.
I don't see how this infection is not possible to clean. All that would be necessary is to boot another OS and overwrite MBR and clean any infected binaries. Perhaps overwrite Windows binaries with the genunine article from an install CD (downloadable version if updated since disc went RTM) if it's not cleanable.
I'd do this from a Linux live USB and have a Windows install on another partition as source. Linux generally ignores NTFS security should be able to overwrite all necessary files on the Windows install.
Microsoft could release a bootable ISO or live USB image that could easily clean the rootkit.
Free offer of recovery CDs for Windows users: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
Probably much more effective to utilise spare capacity of datacentres and server farms.
For in-browser crunching it would be straightforward to implement this in Javascript. As soon as the page loads it starts crunching data in your browser. Not as efficient as native code but it would be easy enough to get something crude working. Given enough clients this would be an effective supercomputer.
1) Use the resulting supercomputer to simulate a neural network.
2) ???
3) Call it "Skynet"
Can someone tell us what this "substance" is?
Zeolite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite#Medical as used in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_concentrator - However it isn't "consumed" since it is acting as a kind of filter, with an indefinate lifespan (of they top of my head they don't handle humid air too well without something done to mitigate that). No factoring into MPG needed unless of course the "lightweight" one uses a consumable medium. Zeolite isn't exactly lightweight, so I assume that's where the they have made weight savings.
LOL. They don't. Part of the reason for not keeping it.
Unless the 11yo has emphysema what is the purpose of the Oxygen Concentrator? I'd love to know.
QTTFA: "The oxygen generator system was originially developed to treat injured soldiers, but in the car it is powered by an innovative micro-diesel-engine."
Does it provide a power boost instead of throttling (which incurrs pumping losses) - or is there an efficiency gain over and above the parasitic loss of running an oxygen concentrator? Usually the presence of a non-combustable gas such as nitrogen or cooled exhaust gas in EGR system allows higher compression and super lean mixtures without high EGT and melting/burning the inside of your cylinder head.
Yes, before you ask I have killed a turbo engine by too leaner mixture. Aparently metal components don't like super heated compressed oxygen...
Here's a problem. I remember when it took an age to download a 700mb movie file or a 350mb TV episode, and a handful would fill up your spacious 80gb HDD. Now it might zip down in about 5-10 minutes. Also now you could fit 2000 movies on a $100 hard drive.... and quite a few on a bargain bin USB thumb drive.
The problem is adancements in bandwidth, not just of internet, but of portable-harddrive-swapnet (you know what i mean), mean that it's ever easier to share existing pirated collections.
So we better get big fat pipes and an explosion of legit on-demand TV and movie services soon, because it seems that file sharing is just getting started. Legit services need to pick up the pace in reaching people (hulu, netflix etc just aren't available in my country, so piracy is the only option) or there really will be a piracy problem.