"The Linux community is notorious for thumbing their noses at standards."
You are correct, but only for proprietary standards. Open standards are generally gladly welcomed by the Linux community.
The Linux Standard Base is becoming more and more popular with distributions, since following the guidelines means that a package created for one distribution should install and work smoothly on all compliant distros. All Linux distributions will eventually have to follow the LSB recommendations, or risk not being compatible with commonly released packages, and losing their user base.
I think the LSB's work is a Good Thing all round both for the distributors and for end users and developers.
"...these kids balked at mega-hype, rediscovered earnestness, simplicity, the love story, some patriotism..."
For a minute there, I was hopeful that somebody had actually made their own independant film through their own initiative, and marketed it over the net without the involvement of any of the big distribution companies.
Then I read on and realised you were talking about how one Hollywood blockbuster had outsold another Hollywood blockbuster. Oh well. Yawn. I am sure Spiderman is a good film.
Surely it's better to extract raw materials from an uninhabited ball of rock than from our own planet. I think the Chinese have the right idea. Start mining the moon, and maybe we won't screw up the Earth so much.
Anyone remember Bugsy Malone ? It's a gangster film where all the roles are played by child actors; and no, it isn't too corny, but as I remember it it's a pretty good 'Untouchables' style romp (except the guns fire pies I think - it's been a long time since I last saw it).
Actually you can limit the number of filehandles and memory. You can do it (as root) using setrlimit(). You can also limit the cpu time, maximum file size, and the number of processes.
I don't know if the movie venture they mean is FF: Spirits Within, but I thought that was a pretty good film - good enough to make me want to go out and buy a copy on DVD.
I don't think automatic porting would be possible.
You'd have to have a compiler that was smart enough to recognise when a pointer was cast to an int and then instead cast it to a long.
But now your code has changed, instead of a variable being an int, it's now a long - this is bound to cause problems elsewhere in your code !
I learnt this lesson long ago when somebody tried to compile a C program I'd written on an Alpha machine, and it complained about casting pointers to ints (I'd wrongly assumed pointers and ints would be the same size on every architecture).
What I do now is to typedef a pointer_t which can be either int or long, and make sure to use that everywhere pointer arithmetic is required.
"The main problem i see is in the transit of the electrons/energy across several atoms etc..."
Already been done - that's how a transistor works. With a transistor though, the gap is on a much smaller scale (cross section), so any cooling effects will be far outweighed by other inefficiencies in the system.
Ooops, Slashdot doesn't seem to like less-than signs in posts.
So here goes again.
It could work in theory I think, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The electrons could 'borrow' some energy on the cold side, which allows them to tunnel through the gap. They then return the borrowed energy on the hot side. Provided the amount of 'borrowed' energy * the time they borrow it for is less than h (Planck's constant) then this is allowed by physics.
A potential gradient across the gap reduces the chance that electrons can tunnel back in the other direction. You have to provide power to create this potential gradient, which is where the 80% efficient figure comes from.
The company's breakthrough is apparently making this gap with enough area that electrons can move en masse through it, thus providing a large cooling effect.
It could work in theory I think, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The electrons could 'borrow' some energy on the cold side, which allows them to tunnel through the gap. They then return the borrowed energy on the hot side. Provided the amount of 'borrowed' energy * the time they borrow it for is A potential gradient across the gap reduces the chance that electrons can tunnel back in the other direction. You have to provide power to create this potential gradient, which is where the 80% efficient figure comes from.
The company's breakthrough is apparently making this gap with enough area that electrons can move en masse through it, thus providing a large cooling effect.
You notice occasionally in the press, reports of odd explosions which are normally put down to gas leaks and such, and in most cases this is probably the truth.
However, a small fraction of these *could* be due to strangelets hitting the Earth. It's not very scientific, but a search on Google for 'unexplained explosion' comes up with over 14,000 items...
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but only for proprietary standards. Open standards are generally gladly welcomed by the Linux community.
The Linux Standard Base is becoming more and more popular with distributions, since following the guidelines means that a package created for one distribution should install and work smoothly on all compliant distros. All Linux distributions will eventually have to follow the LSB recommendations, or risk not being compatible with commonly released packages, and losing their user base.
I think the LSB's work is a Good Thing all round both for the distributors and for end users and developers.
For a minute there, I was hopeful that somebody had actually made their own independant film through their own initiative, and marketed it over the net without the involvement of any of the big distribution companies.
Then I read on and realised you were talking about how one Hollywood blockbuster had outsold another Hollywood blockbuster. Oh well. Yawn. I am sure Spiderman is a good film.
Surely it's better to extract raw materials from an uninhabited ball of rock than from our own planet. I think the Chinese have the right idea. Start mining the moon, and maybe we won't screw up the Earth so much.
So I take it you won't be using Opera any more ? After all, it would be extremely stupid to use a product that you think should die.
Anyone remember Bugsy Malone ? It's a gangster film where all the roles are played by child actors; and no, it isn't too corny, but as I remember it it's a pretty good 'Untouchables' style romp (except the guns fire pies I think - it's been a long time since I last saw it).
Why would you buy something that sounds crappier than a CD ?
And 'They Might be Giants' ? Yeah I remember them, they were big when I was at school - which was about 15 years ago.
I was writing my own binary search array handling routines and I needed to return signed values and so on.
But thanks for the tip about using longs :-)
That is a sign of very poorly designed software.
You'd have to have a compiler that was smart enough to recognise when a pointer was cast to an int and then instead cast it to a long.
But now your code has changed, instead of a variable being an int, it's now a long - this is bound to cause problems elsewhere in your code !
I learnt this lesson long ago when somebody tried to compile a C program I'd written on an Alpha machine, and it complained about casting pointers to ints (I'd wrongly assumed pointers and ints would be the same size on every architecture).
What I do now is to typedef a pointer_t which can be either int or long, and make sure to use that everywhere pointer arithmetic is required.
"The main problem i see is in the transit of the electrons/energy across several atoms etc..."
Already been done - that's how a transistor works. With a transistor though, the gap is on a much smaller scale (cross section), so any cooling effects will be far outweighed by other inefficiencies in the system.
So here goes again.
It could work in theory I think, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The electrons could 'borrow' some energy on the cold side, which allows them to tunnel through the gap. They then return the borrowed energy on the hot side. Provided the amount of 'borrowed' energy * the time they borrow it for is less than h (Planck's constant) then this is allowed by physics.
A potential gradient across the gap reduces the chance that electrons can tunnel back in the other direction. You have to provide power to create this potential gradient, which is where the 80% efficient figure comes from.
The company's breakthrough is apparently making this gap with enough area that electrons can move en masse through it, thus providing a large cooling effect.
The company's breakthrough is apparently making this gap with enough area that electrons can move en masse through it, thus providing a large cooling effect.
That doesn't mean this memo didn't have an effect, maybe Microsoft just got what they wanted.
However, a small fraction of these *could* be due to strangelets hitting the Earth. It's not very scientific, but a search on Google for 'unexplained explosion' comes up with over 14,000 items...
Have you seen Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design it's also similar and a very good read.