So it's kinda far fetched to plan on 0wnzoring your opponent's radars remotely by sending out data packets taking advantage of an exploit that your opponent can just patch with a firmware upgrade.
Yeah, it's kind of far-fetched. OTOH, if there is something exploitable in the electronics of an enemy system, it could be very useful to use that for a combat advantage. Imagine a comms system that can get overloaded with corrupt packets, and reboots itself. Even if you can only make an enemy radio unreliable instead of taking it out completely, he might miss out on key intel or orders.
Why the heck is he paying anything? Just use MySql and be done with it. It is certainly easier to use/setup/maintain than that crappy SQL Server stuff. And it is free to boot! sheesh.
I have n great love of MS SQL Server, but it does have a place. There is a ton of "Enterprisey" software that requires it. (Or is only additionally supported on Oracle.) When the options are: 1 - Spend a few grand on a server and software 2 - Spend (a few - 2) grand on a server, then millions of dollars to have something custom developed, and wait three years before you can use it
Sometimes, option #1 is the sensible choice. Especially if you get into a use case where MS SQL Server performs better than MySQL.
That said, I'm currently working on some software for film post production that is being developed primarily with MySQL. For my use, I can't see any reason that MS SQL Server or Oracle would help the project. Of course, it will be pretty much trivial for me to migrate to Postgres or any of the others with a minimum of development effort because I'm not a psychotic brain-damaged puppy like genuine "Enterprisey" developers.
Incidentally, I'm using Qt in c++. If anybody else starting a database client type application is wondering, the Qt SQL stuff has worked really well on all my projects. Moving from MySQL to MSSQL or whatever is pretty much trivial in terms of application code. The only real PITA is building the right Qt database driver on your required platform(s). Just a matter of tracking down all the right dependencies and whatnot. Even if you aren't using the GUI stuff, you may want to check out Qt. For smaller stuff, I use python, which has a consistent db-api, which also makes it pretty much trivial to migrate between databases.
But, sadly, I'm still stuck supporting stuff that requires MS SQL Server because it was made by those damned "experts."
It may also result in the party deciding not to back you at the next election (less common in the US, I believe, but in the UK it's not unheard of for the party to decide to run a candidate other than the sitting member).
The national party threatening to revoke support during the election is one of the primary ways to keep party members in-line. And, sitting members have been known to lose their primary elections. John McCain is currently a sitting member of the Senate having a remarkably tough time getting nominated so that he can run as the Republican candidate in the next election.
They do. This is a known phenomenon which has been measured. But the difference between, say, Denver and NYC isn't substantial enough that you would notice a difference with your personal electronics.
True, OTOH, you can actually notice a significant difference in cooler performance in Denver due to air pressure difference. Cooling systems that are marginal at lower altitude are quite likely to be inadequate at > 5000 ft.
Since the biggest Toyota runaway story has turned out to be a problem exists between seat and pedals situation... is this all hype with no science behind it?
Yeah, pretty much. Besides, error correcting systems are relatively well-uderstood technology. ECC hasn't been the best available option for RAM for ages, and even the imperfect gains of ECC will work around occasional single-bit corruptions in memory. Flash can be used with extensive checksums. Executables can have hashes like MD5 and SHA checked before being allowed to execute, etc. People just don't bother with that sort of stuff because the error rate usually isn't high enough to justify being truly OCD about it. Spending X million dollars of R+D effort, or adding X hundred dollars of per-unit cost, you can probably improve safety in better ways that obsessing over cosmic rays and whatnot.
...of course that wouldn't work given that smaller fonts would mean fewer dark foreground pixels and more bright background pixels. Switching from white backgrounds to gray backgrounds would be more likely to have any impact (assuming that modern monitors use more electricity when displaying bright images).
LCD's use ever-so-slightly more power for dark than they do for bright. The backlight is always-on, and the LCD goes active to block out that light for dark spots, passive for bright spots. White background with a lowered brightness setting for the backlight would accomplish what you want.
OTOH, OLED's will work the way you assume, with individual lamps for every pixel. Lowest power usage with a mostly black screen. Go old-skool white text on black screen, console style, for best case power usage. Expect most handhelds with OLED's to use dark themes for this reason.
On an E-Ink display, best case will be a very small font, simply because you can fit more of the text on a single screen and have to do fewer refreshes. If you try to "live scroll" an E-Ink line by line like we are used to on a more common monitor, the power from all the refreshes will be far more significant than any power difference of light vs. dark.
AFAIK, CRT's will have fairly intuitive power behavior, like OLED's.
Another thing is the lack of math history being taught. Yes 1+0=1. But why? Where did zero come from? Where did numerals come from? Why was Algebra invented and where did it come from? What use is it? What about geometry? Who was Euclid? I could go on and on with fascinating topics related to math. These things are rarely answered. It's all about teaching you to understand one function, one algorithm, one technique, etc. Never to understand _why_. It downright sucks, they take all the fun out of a spectacular field. Thanks to their "teaching" me, I thought math had no room for expansion. Boy was I wrong. It's an abstract fun house where you can do whatever you dream up. To a kid, that itself should be reason enough to love any math.
The "where did zero come from" question is a really great one. One that I never encountered until years after school. The book, "The Nothing That Is, A Natural History Of Zero," is what made me appreciate how interesting the history of math is, and how important it is. I probably learned as much math from that (tiny!) book as I did in about 25% of my full 12 years of public school education. Teaching a book like that in high school would do more good for math education than almost anything else, and it would be so damned quick and easy.
Having read this, it doesn't surprise me that the students who took no mathematics were able to catch up so fast. You hardly did anything at all.
OK, attempting to jury rigging the K-12 system around the one over here (Ireland), this is how I remember things going(My memory is fuzzy and I wasn't keeping a record at the time. But I think this is fairly representative.).
grades -1,0 - naming numbers 1-10, possibly some teens. Very basic addition. Shapes. grades 1-2 - General addition, subtraction. Introduction of base number system, unit, tens, hundreds, etc. (Fractions?) Multiplication. Times table, perhaps basic geometry. grades 3-4 - More times tables. Fractions I presume. Division. Decimals. Long division. More geometry. grades 5-6 - More decimals. More long division. More geometry(Pi gets badly introduced here). (square roots?). Word problems.
grade 7 - Basic algebra. Exponents. Co-ordinate geometry. Set Theory. Euclidean Geometry. Polynomial Long Division. Simultaneous linear equations. grades 8-9 - Functions. Basic Trigonometry. Quadratic equations. Basic Statistics. Logarithms. Even more Euclidean Geometry. (Differentiation?)
And my understanding is that what I is somewhat less than that done in the English GCSEs, and apparently pales in comparision to the mathematics curricula in Russia and post Soviet states. I honestly don't know how the US expects to maintain an adequate presences in STEM if the basic mathematics curriculum is so deficient. The notion of an able student of 18 completing 12 years of formal education without being able to differentiate seems very odd to me.
I'm an American. I went to one of the best school districts in my state. My High School was consistently at the the State competition for "Scholastic Bowl." I was in a special math program in elementary school for "Talented and Gifted," students in elementary school. (Grade 1-5.) I was in a special "Fast Paced Math" program in middle school. (In grades 7-8.) In High School, I took every available math elective. In other words, among American students, I probably had access to one of the best public educations available. I had opportunities that students in other districts around the country wouldn't have had access to.
I got nearly as much math as you did. Not quite as much. Statistics was only a single course in 12th Grade. There wasn't really an option for "More Statistics" short of if I had chosen to go to a community college on my own to try and get more education. It's kind of sad how terrible education in America is. I didn't really discover history as an interesting subject until years after school. My 9th grade biology teacher was a creationist. The year I was supposed to start taking German, there wasn't enough interest from the students, so they canceled the language. Really nice football field, though. They weren't going to spend much money on teachers or education, but they were glad to spend it on grass.
Couldn't one lead to the other? Would averaging 4 noisy pixels give you a better light sensitivity than just having the one?
To a certain extent, yes. But, there is a certain minimum overhead for every pixel. The more pixels you cram onto a sensor, the more space on the sensor is dedicated to overhead instead of picking up light. Consequently, there are real limits to how much resolution you would want to have on a sensor.
1. Install VirtualBox. 2. Install Windows as a guest (preferably the same version as host if it is Windows, or some believable version if the host is a *nix or whatever). 3. Start the virtual machine in full-screen mode, with automatic USB and CD pass-through. 4. Let them install all the crap they want, smiling and thanking them for it. 5. Save the sate of the virtual machine just in case it's suddenly needed sometime in the future. 6. ??? 7. Prifot, and a crap-free computer with a good VM system installed for other uses.
Whenever they give out mandatory computers, they include monitoring software which phones home. If it stops phoning home, they'll come and fix it. Consequently, you'd need to use P2V migration tools to migrate the live OS image into your VM, which is a pain. But, at that point, the monitoring software will start reporting changed hardware specs because the configuration of the VM won't match the physical laptop exactly. HDD size, video card type, amount of RAM, probably access to SMBIOS information, etc., will all be reported as wrong or having changed. Then, they'll come and fix it.
Also, they'll threaten you with enormous penalties for having tampered with their property. Possibly expulsion, and refusing to let you graduate.
It's pretty simple, it's because I've worked in those fields, and I can tell you: there aren't very many white Americans who A) are willing to do so and B) are any good at it. I've seen similar problems in construction, although it is not as pronounced. It makes sense though: in America, anyone with any kind of work ethic will be able to get a college degree or learn some kind of skilled trade (plumber, ag inspector). The only ones left to work in the fields are lazy people or immigrants who don't have similar opportunities in their own countries.
Of course there aren't many Americans who are good at it. Not many Americans do it. If Americans were doing those jobs, there would be lots of Americans who were good at it. And, it isn't that Americans aren't willing to do the work. It's that they aren't willing to do the work at the offered wage.
We have a second class sub-society of illegals in America who are willing to work for peanuts because they can't risk getting on the grid. If immigration were more open and less paranoid in America so that all the immigrants could just pay their taxes and work openly, then there would be no desperate underclass to break any attempt at reform in those industries currently dominated by illegals. Consequently, those industries would have to pay a more normal wage, and you would see Americans working those jobs. And blueberries would cost ten percent more or whatever.
Technically thats same platform, different devices. Cross platform would be if they had the running on iPhone, Windows 7, Playstation and Linux. THAT would have been impressive (not to mention newsworthy).
We expect them to be pushing studd across their own platforms. Not news.
The device is part of the platform, so it is cross platform, just weakly so. OTOH, I have no idea why you think what you describe would be 'newsworthy.' I can run a GUI app with OpenGL written in python on my Mac, Windows, and Linux PC's of any CPU architecture, and then move the same application to my mobile phone and run it unmodified. It wouldn't be as fast as native binaries for each platform, but if portability is what you really want to show off, then running the exact same thing on each platform is the first level where it starts to get at all impressive.
I thought the point was to have a small sector size. With large sectors, say 4096K, a 1K file will actually take up the full 4096K. A 4097K file will take up 8194K. A thousand 1K files will end up taking up 4096000K. I understand that with larger HDD's that this becomes less of an issue, but unless you are dealing with a fewer number of large files, I don't see how this can be more efficient when the size of every file is rounded up to the next 4096K.
The filesystem's minimum allocation unit size doesn't necessarily need to have a strong relationship with the physical sector size. Some filesystems don't have the behavior of rounding up the consumed space for small files because they will store multiple small files inside a single allocation unit. (IIRC, Reiser is such an FS.)
Also, we are actually talking about 4 kilobyte sectors. TFS refers to it as 4096k, which would be a 4 megabyte sector. (Which is wildly wrong.) So, worst case for your example of a thousand 1k files is actually 4 megabytes, not 4 gigabytes as you suggest. And, really, if my 2 terabyte drive gets an extra 11% from the more efficient ECC with the 4k sectors, that gives me a free 220000 megabytes, which pretty adequately compensates for the 3 MB I theoretically lose in a worst case filesystem from your example thousand files.
Why would Google have to be IN China for the "scientists" to use it as a search engine? Just because Google has no offices or data centers in China would not mean it would be unavailable there. Censored perhaps, but how difficult would it be for "Scientists" to get around that, or be exempted from it?
By "censored," you mean blocked. Google's ability to operate in China was dependent on censoring all search results to make sure nothing slipped out. Trying to do that kind of content filtering on the national firewall level would be impractical. Where the physical data centers are located is almosta complete non-issue. It's whether or not Google will restrict their content offerings to Chinese central government standards.
If/When humans first encounter extraterrestrial life forms they'll be so blown away that everything goes out the window. And if they even think they smell a hint of danger they'll kill anything and everything... and if it's anything like in Twilight Zone, they'll kill each other, too.
Yeah, any of the major steps in discovering aliens will instantly make a lot of people lose their shit, and insist, "but things are different now!" Sadly, part of me expects that the discovery of a microbe on Mars would result in a crazy fervor whipped up by a modern McCarthy and a new Red Scare. The end game would be something ompletely nonsensical, like 100% government surveilance of every person at all times, tomake sure they aren't really a secret alien invader. "Because we face unprecedented dangers now..."
And, oddly, it'll be somewhat justified. If we actually had a NrNgvunt BattleBall show up in orbit, we'd have no real way of understanding their intentions, or motivations, or what the real context of the visit was. Consequently, almost any course of action would be potentially correct. Maybe the global Mexican Hat Dance at 1:33 pm is actually the only thing that can save us!
But how does H.264 decoder hardware actually work? Does it involve putting an H.264 stream on one pin and getting decompressed RGB video on another? Or is the codec split between a CPU that parses the bit stream and a DSP that performs things like cosine transform and YUV conversion, operations that should be reusable for other codecs like MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, and Theora?
No simple answer. Some stuff basically takes the full compressed video into the hardware, and then you trust it when it says that video is being output. You may not even have direct CPU access to the frame buffer with the resulting uncompressed frames of video. Other stuff gives uncompressed frames back to the CPU. Other stuff accelerates some of the steps.
AIUI, my n900 has a DSP on the SOC which is used for MPEG4 stuff, but could just as well be used to accelerate other codecs. It also has an OpenGL 2 ES GPU, which has support for pixel shaders. One can imagine a future firmware revision on a device like an n900 with full support for OpenCL on the GPU being able to use that to accelerate fairly arbitrary codecs in "semi-hardware." A more hardcore GPGPU guy than myself could probably accomplish quite a lot just using the pixel shader functionality to dump intermediate steps into a FBO.
Given how common pixel shader capable GPU hardware is becoming in the mobile space, I fully expect that we'll see OpenCL become very common for GPGPU stuff in handheld devices for DSP-like things. It'll take a little while, but eventually the wheel of reinvention will reduce video codecs back to software and it will become a moot point.
But what about times where one is talking about police operations in space? How will we get our LEOs into LEO?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Cops>Star Cops. The result of what you propose will be sadly underappreciated and forgotten, despite being one of the few examples of relatively good hard-ish sci-fi ever put on TV.
I'm not a programmer myself so can someone tell me if C# really easier to use than C or Objective C as stated in TFA? Or is it just a matter of there being more people who are familiar with it?
C# is easier to work with than C for many people, but not significantly easier than Objective C. C expects that you have some awareness of memory allocations and whatnot, but higher level languages insulate you from a lot of the details and let you worry more about your actual application.
The advantage that C# has over Objective C on iPad is not anything inherent about the language. Parentage aside, there is nothing extraordinarily wrong or amazingly good with C#. It just has hordes of Windows developers who learned C# for some reason, who want to migrate their windows specific skillset to additional platforms, but don't feel like learning new tools.
What the... Since when? I had no trouble with GLSL. And that's basically the only important thing.
GLSL started as an extension to OpenGL 1.4, and was promoted to a part of the core API spec in 2.0. It's consequently not a very good example of what's new in 3.x.
The constitution doesn't give you, or a business formed by you and a friend, any rights.
People have inherent human rights which are protected by the constitution. Corporations have no inherent rights because they are constructions of law. Because they are created by law, they can be created with whatever restrictions and permissions one chooses. It's dangerous to assume that a corporation is an inherent entity which has fundamental rights independent of law.
This OT but quite some of the posts I read recently (not only in this thread) that mention QOS of mobile operators in US make me wonder - are they so bad as not being able to provide basic service throughout the country (something that seems to be put in license laws in Europe i.e. operators must provide service almost everywhere where humans are or their license is gone) or is it simply skewed view of a technically demanding audience of/. or something else? Anybody has a view on that?
I live in the state of Colorado. This State is about half sparsely populated flatland, and about half sparsely populated Mountains, with a thin strip of quite dense population running down the middle where the two sides meet. (The I-25 Corridor). In the city of Denver coverage is just fine but up in the mountains, trying to cover every single little town with a population 100, and occasional family cabin would not just be incredibly expensive. It would be such a large construction effort that it would ruin the wilderness which is why people live in those parts of the mountains in the first place. This doesn't even get into the fact that Americans generally avoid robust government regulation, insted hoping that the "free" market will save us all and be more efficient. America also made a heavy early investment in copper telephone lines, so we never had an actual need for wireless service like a lot of developing nations without legacy infrastructure to depend on. Despite all this, when you compare us to other large Countries with uneven population distribution like Canada, Russia, China, I think cell coverage is actually probably not too terribly bad in comparison.
The technical, political, financial, and ecological difficulties of trying to have 100% coverage just in this one state make it basically impossible to seriously consider. The idea of a single mobile network operator actually having 100% coverage in America just isn't seriously considered.
In the last 10 years, portable GPS navigation has become ubiquitous in cars. They're so cheap nowadays that I got one as a gift. I'm sure there's one that could be pointed to as the breakout device./I still have in the car paper maps for ~5 States
GPS is also notable for the fact that it absolutely won't be a defining gadget of the next decade. While predictions are always hard, and I can't be very specific about what will be the gadget of the next decade, I expect that GPS technology will become so common in cars, phones, shoelaces, etc., that it completely recedes from concious thought as a significant feature. Already, GPS isn't a very big selling point for a phone any more than "man-portable", or "has an antenna." Because almost nobody will specifically buy a GPS unit, the technology is likely to become so onmipresent that nobody cares about it.
Whenever mobile phones are mentioned on Slashdot, something akin to the following comment will inevitably appear:
'All I want is a phone that makes calls.'
I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do. You rarely [never?] hear this with other technology on this site:
'I wish Windows 7 had less features. All I want is the ability to write a letter' 'This 4Ghz Core 2 Due Hyperfighting Special Edition is too fast for me. I want a 68030 at 25Mhz'... instead we get 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...'
Is it because the non-techie crowd have embraced mobile tech, in some instances more than us (given that some teenagers seem to text more than they speak) and we've been out done? Are the non-techies better at mobile tech than us?
(Yes, I know that Slashdot doesn't speak with one voice, but I bet the comment appears somewhere in this article).
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping? I don't need a whole damned OS like EMACS. Dammit, all I want is a text editor that lets me edit text.
Who the hell thought all this useless visual bling was a good idea? You shouldn't need a video card with pixel shader support just to boot a bloody OS without missing out on the standard display mode. Installing Vista was a mistake, I just want an OS that I can use to run my apps.
Reliance on Flash harms the web. You can't index it properly, you can't use it with text to speech easily. I just want a web page that lets me read some text.
Many people on slashdot do love shiny new things at any cost. Many others see enormous inherent value in something simple, sensible and reliable which embraces the UNIX Way of doing one thing well. Personally, I edit in vi, my newest Windows box runs XP, and... Oh, I just got my shiny new Nokia n900 a few days ago.
But, until I got the n900, I used an ancient little phone that worked great, had a black and white screen, and let me make phone calls. At least my phone does run vi.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's kind of far-fetched. OTOH, if there is something exploitable in the electronics of an enemy system, it could be very useful to use that for a combat advantage. Imagine a comms system that can get overloaded with corrupt packets, and reboots itself. Even if you can only make an enemy radio unreliable instead of taking it out completely, he might miss out on key intel or orders.
I have n great love of MS SQL Server, but it does have a place. There is a ton of "Enterprisey" software that requires it. (Or is only additionally supported on Oracle.) When the options are:
1 - Spend a few grand on a server and software
2 - Spend (a few - 2) grand on a server, then millions of dollars to have something custom developed, and wait three years before you can use it
Sometimes, option #1 is the sensible choice. Especially if you get into a use case where MS SQL Server performs better than MySQL.
That said, I'm currently working on some software for film post production that is being developed primarily with MySQL. For my use, I can't see any reason that MS SQL Server or Oracle would help the project. Of course, it will be pretty much trivial for me to migrate to Postgres or any of the others with a minimum of development effort because I'm not a psychotic brain-damaged puppy like genuine "Enterprisey" developers.
Incidentally, I'm using Qt in c++. If anybody else starting a database client type application is wondering, the Qt SQL stuff has worked really well on all my projects. Moving from MySQL to MSSQL or whatever is pretty much trivial in terms of application code. The only real PITA is building the right Qt database driver on your required platform(s). Just a matter of tracking down all the right dependencies and whatnot. Even if you aren't using the GUI stuff, you may want to check out Qt. For smaller stuff, I use python, which has a consistent db-api, which also makes it pretty much trivial to migrate between databases.
But, sadly, I'm still stuck supporting stuff that requires MS SQL Server because it was made by those damned "experts."
The national party threatening to revoke support during the election is one of the primary ways to keep party members in-line. And, sitting members have been known to lose their primary elections. John McCain is currently a sitting member of the Senate having a remarkably tough time getting nominated so that he can run as the Republican candidate in the next election.
True, OTOH, you can actually notice a significant difference in cooler performance in Denver due to air pressure difference. Cooling systems that are marginal at lower altitude are quite likely to be inadequate at > 5000 ft.
Yeah, pretty much. Besides, error correcting systems are relatively well-uderstood technology. ECC hasn't been the best available option for RAM for ages, and even the imperfect gains of ECC will work around occasional single-bit corruptions in memory. Flash can be used with extensive checksums. Executables can have hashes like MD5 and SHA checked before being allowed to execute, etc. People just don't bother with that sort of stuff because the error rate usually isn't high enough to justify being truly OCD about it. Spending X million dollars of R+D effort, or adding X hundred dollars of per-unit cost, you can probably improve safety in better ways that obsessing over cosmic rays and whatnot.
LCD's use ever-so-slightly more power for dark than they do for bright. The backlight is always-on, and the LCD goes active to block out that light for dark spots, passive for bright spots. White background with a lowered brightness setting for the backlight would accomplish what you want.
OTOH, OLED's will work the way you assume, with individual lamps for every pixel. Lowest power usage with a mostly black screen. Go old-skool white text on black screen, console style, for best case power usage. Expect most handhelds with OLED's to use dark themes for this reason.
On an E-Ink display, best case will be a very small font, simply because you can fit more of the text on a single screen and have to do fewer refreshes. If you try to "live scroll" an E-Ink line by line like we are used to on a more common monitor, the power from all the refreshes will be far more significant than any power difference of light vs. dark.
AFAIK, CRT's will have fairly intuitive power behavior, like OLED's.
The "where did zero come from" question is a really great one. One that I never encountered until years after school. The book, "The Nothing That Is, A Natural History Of Zero," is what made me appreciate how interesting the history of math is, and how important it is. I probably learned as much math from that (tiny!) book as I did in about 25% of my full 12 years of public school education. Teaching a book like that in high school would do more good for math education than almost anything else, and it would be so damned quick and easy.
I'm an American. I went to one of the best school districts in my state. My High School was consistently at the the State competition for "Scholastic Bowl." I was in a special math program in elementary school for "Talented and Gifted," students in elementary school. (Grade 1-5.) I was in a special "Fast Paced Math" program in middle school. (In grades 7-8.) In High School, I took every available math elective. In other words, among American students, I probably had access to one of the best public educations available. I had opportunities that students in other districts around the country wouldn't have had access to.
I got nearly as much math as you did. Not quite as much. Statistics was only a single course in 12th Grade. There wasn't really an option for "More Statistics" short of if I had chosen to go to a community college on my own to try and get more education. It's kind of sad how terrible education in America is. I didn't really discover history as an interesting subject until years after school. My 9th grade biology teacher was a creationist. The year I was supposed to start taking German, there wasn't enough interest from the students, so they canceled the language. Really nice football field, though. They weren't going to spend much money on teachers or education, but they were glad to spend it on grass.
To a certain extent, yes. But, there is a certain minimum overhead for every pixel. The more pixels you cram onto a sensor, the more space on the sensor is dedicated to overhead instead of picking up light. Consequently, there are real limits to how much resolution you would want to have on a sensor.
Whenever they give out mandatory computers, they include monitoring software which phones home. If it stops phoning home, they'll come and fix it. Consequently, you'd need to use P2V migration tools to migrate the live OS image into your VM, which is a pain. But, at that point, the monitoring software will start reporting changed hardware specs because the configuration of the VM won't match the physical laptop exactly. HDD size, video card type, amount of RAM, probably access to SMBIOS information, etc., will all be reported as wrong or having changed. Then, they'll come and fix it.
Also, they'll threaten you with enormous penalties for having tampered with their property. Possibly expulsion, and refusing to let you graduate.
Of course there aren't many Americans who are good at it. Not many Americans do it. If Americans were doing those jobs, there would be lots of Americans who were good at it. And, it isn't that Americans aren't willing to do the work. It's that they aren't willing to do the work at the offered wage.
We have a second class sub-society of illegals in America who are willing to work for peanuts because they can't risk getting on the grid. If immigration were more open and less paranoid in America so that all the immigrants could just pay their taxes and work openly, then there would be no desperate underclass to break any attempt at reform in those industries currently dominated by illegals. Consequently, those industries would have to pay a more normal wage, and you would see Americans working those jobs. And blueberries would cost ten percent more or whatever.
The device is part of the platform, so it is cross platform, just weakly so. OTOH, I have no idea why you think what you describe would be 'newsworthy.' I can run a GUI app with OpenGL written in python on my Mac, Windows, and Linux PC's of any CPU architecture, and then move the same application to my mobile phone and run it unmodified. It wouldn't be as fast as native binaries for each platform, but if portability is what you really want to show off, then running the exact same thing on each platform is the first level where it starts to get at all impressive.
The filesystem's minimum allocation unit size doesn't necessarily need to have a strong relationship with the physical sector size. Some filesystems don't have the behavior of rounding up the consumed space for small files because they will store multiple small files inside a single allocation unit. (IIRC, Reiser is such an FS.)
Also, we are actually talking about 4 kilobyte sectors. TFS refers to it as 4096k, which would be a 4 megabyte sector. (Which is wildly wrong.) So, worst case for your example of a thousand 1k files is actually 4 megabytes, not 4 gigabytes as you suggest. And, really, if my 2 terabyte drive gets an extra 11% from the more efficient ECC with the 4k sectors, that gives me a free 220000 megabytes, which pretty adequately compensates for the 3 MB I theoretically lose in a worst case filesystem from your example thousand files.
By "censored," you mean blocked. Google's ability to operate in China was dependent on censoring all search results to make sure nothing slipped out. Trying to do that kind of content filtering on the national firewall level would be impractical. Where the physical data centers are located is almosta complete non-issue. It's whether or not Google will restrict their content offerings to Chinese central government standards.
Yeah, any of the major steps in discovering aliens will instantly make a lot of people lose their shit, and insist, "but things are different now!" Sadly, part of me expects that the discovery of a microbe on Mars would result in a crazy fervor whipped up by a modern McCarthy and a new Red Scare. The end game would be something ompletely nonsensical, like 100% government surveilance of every person at all times, tomake sure they aren't really a secret alien invader. "Because we face unprecedented dangers now..."
And, oddly, it'll be somewhat justified. If we actually had a NrNgvunt BattleBall show up in orbit, we'd have no real way of understanding their intentions, or motivations, or what the real context of the visit was. Consequently, almost any course of action would be potentially correct. Maybe the global Mexican Hat Dance at 1:33 pm is actually the only thing that can save us!
No simple answer. Some stuff basically takes the full compressed video into the hardware, and then you trust it when it says that video is being output. You may not even have direct CPU access to the frame buffer with the resulting uncompressed frames of video. Other stuff gives uncompressed frames back to the CPU. Other stuff accelerates some of the steps.
AIUI, my n900 has a DSP on the SOC which is used for MPEG4 stuff, but could just as well be used to accelerate other codecs. It also has an OpenGL 2 ES GPU, which has support for pixel shaders. One can imagine a future firmware revision on a device like an n900 with full support for OpenCL on the GPU being able to use that to accelerate fairly arbitrary codecs in "semi-hardware." A more hardcore GPGPU guy than myself could probably accomplish quite a lot just using the pixel shader functionality to dump intermediate steps into a FBO.
Given how common pixel shader capable GPU hardware is becoming in the mobile space, I fully expect that we'll see OpenCL become very common for GPGPU stuff in handheld devices for DSP-like things. It'll take a little while, but eventually the wheel of reinvention will reduce video codecs back to software and it will become a moot point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Cops>Star Cops. The result of what you propose will be sadly underappreciated and forgotten, despite being one of the few examples of relatively good hard-ish sci-fi ever put on TV.
C# is easier to work with than C for many people, but not significantly easier than Objective C. C expects that you have some awareness of memory allocations and whatnot, but higher level languages insulate you from a lot of the details and let you worry more about your actual application.
The advantage that C# has over Objective C on iPad is not anything inherent about the language. Parentage aside, there is nothing extraordinarily wrong or amazingly good with C#. It just has hordes of Windows developers who learned C# for some reason, who want to migrate their windows specific skillset to additional platforms, but don't feel like learning new tools.
GLSL started as an extension to OpenGL 1.4, and was promoted to a part of the core API spec in 2.0. It's consequently not a very good example of what's new in 3.x.
Just stick around for a while. Somebody will come up with a good car analogy to explain all of this to you.
People have inherent human rights which are protected by the constitution. Corporations have no inherent rights because they are constructions of law. Because they are created by law, they can be created with whatever restrictions and permissions one chooses. It's dangerous to assume that a corporation is an inherent entity which has fundamental rights independent of law.
That's absurd. Creationists, Linguists, and Liberal Arts Majors don't try to breed cows! They try to breed with them.
I live in the state of Colorado. This State is about half sparsely populated flatland, and about half sparsely populated Mountains, with a thin strip of quite dense population running down the middle where the two sides meet. (The I-25 Corridor). In the city of Denver coverage is just fine but up in the mountains, trying to cover every single little town with a population 100, and occasional family cabin would not just be incredibly expensive. It would be such a large construction effort that it would ruin the wilderness which is why people live in those parts of the mountains in the first place. This doesn't even get into the fact that Americans generally avoid robust government regulation, insted hoping that the "free" market will save us all and be more efficient. America also made a heavy early investment in copper telephone lines, so we never had an actual need for wireless service like a lot of developing nations without legacy infrastructure to depend on. Despite all this, when you compare us to other large Countries with uneven population distribution like Canada, Russia, China, I think cell coverage is actually probably not too terribly bad in comparison.
The technical, political, financial, and ecological difficulties of trying to have 100% coverage just in this one state make it basically impossible to seriously consider. The idea of a single mobile network operator actually having 100% coverage in America just isn't seriously considered.
GPS is also notable for the fact that it absolutely won't be a defining gadget of the next decade. While predictions are always hard, and I can't be very specific about what will be the gadget of the next decade, I expect that GPS technology will become so common in cars, phones, shoelaces, etc., that it completely recedes from concious thought as a significant feature. Already, GPS isn't a very big selling point for a phone any more than "man-portable", or "has an antenna." Because almost nobody will specifically buy a GPS unit, the technology is likely to become so onmipresent that nobody cares about it.
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping? I don't need a whole damned OS like EMACS. Dammit, all I want is a text editor that lets me edit text.
Who the hell thought all this useless visual bling was a good idea? You shouldn't need a video card with pixel shader support just to boot a bloody OS without missing out on the standard display mode. Installing Vista was a mistake, I just want an OS that I can use to run my apps.
Reliance on Flash harms the web. You can't index it properly, you can't use it with text to speech easily. I just want a web page that lets me read some text.
Many people on slashdot do love shiny new things at any cost. Many others see enormous inherent value in something simple, sensible and reliable which embraces the UNIX Way of doing one thing well. Personally, I edit in vi, my newest Windows box runs XP, and... Oh, I just got my shiny new Nokia n900 a few days ago.
But, until I got the n900, I used an ancient little phone that worked great, had a black and white screen, and let me make phone calls. At least my phone does run vi.