You know, Wal Mart is able to sell a cheap linux computer for $200 and claim to not be making profit with each sale. Well, that $200 thing can decode any Divx film you can throw at it, decode DVDs and all that, and it also has a pretty big hard drive, floppy drive and an expandable motherboard. This leads me to think that a (fanless) VIA cpu on a stripped-down mobo, a few cheap memory chips and a DVD drive is all that you need for an all-purpose living room player. If it has onboard LAN it should also be able to hook up to your home network and play your DivX'es from your computer's drive. My guess, based on the WalMart price, is that the whole thing should cost about US$160.
Of course, if you design a special pared-down motherboard for it, the costs would go down further. It could be tiny, because it wouldn't have to really do much--so it could fit into a simple DVD-player-sized case. My question is: why aren't computer distributors falling over themselves to make these? A chip that can do DVD/DivX/Xvid/Ogg/APE decoding in software can be had for about $20. Special hardware decoding solutions will just seem moot at this price, given the usability limitations they impose.
Well, it will be called 3.0 and it won't be out by June. The re-numbering will be a ceremonial excuse to attone for the feature creep and the resulting lateness in shipping.
...well, probably. I mean, I don't have any insider information; I just pay attention to kernel release schedules. I really like the idea of calling it 2.6 because it lets contributers know that it's not supposed to be a miraculous improvement--so it might ship sooner that way.
Fine, I admit I was thinking more of L4 and L5, and my point applies to them. However, L1, as it is defined, is also a point--which I suppose isn't the same as saying that the station will hover over that point. I can imagine a real catastrophe, though, if a whole bunch of things with orbit-correcting rockets are hovering around L1.
On L4 and L5, though, you cannot have multiple occupancy--stuff there would clump together. Because those points inuitively belong equally to all the world, the UN seems like the natural body to regulate their use. I think if the UN made some laws about it now, it might help individual space agencies with making long-term plans.
I bet you the pages of these idiots got more visits from all the people whose curiosity was piqued by the bad. They must be thrilled to be banned! I bet you there are some Nazi sites and "Holocaust Never Happened" sites and "Bush is Smart" sites that are like "hey, what a rip! How come we didn't get banned! That's bloody favoritism!"
[What gives NASA the right to squat on what is probably one of the five most valuable places in the universe]
Because they will get there first!
What sort of moronic principle is that? Just because NASA can get there first doesn't mean they have any right to squat there. I mean, it wouldn't be very expensive to stick something into a liberation point (L4 and L5 make more sense, but whatever). In two months, China could gunk up all the liberation points if they wanted to by sticking some useless crap there. But that doesn't mean it would be right--I mean, for one thing, it would completely kill our planned telescopes and space stations. So it's not about who gets there first. There is an obligation that if you occupy a liberation point, you have to have some 1) peaceful 2) scientifically important 3) internationally open and 4) big project. I'm not saying the space station or the telescope don't qualify, though I'd like to see details. In any case, countries can't just have the right to stick anything there. Like I said, there should be a comission like right now that makes a ruling on the responsible use of our liberation points.
I don't think you understand how Lagrange points work: once you put something there, it stays! That's the whole point! So it will stay up, automatically, even long after it's been rendered totally useless.
You know, a couple of rounds of budget cuts later, their next grand space station will be another useless pile of expensive junk just like the first one. The problem is that it will be squatting one of only five stable points at which long-term space projects can be built.
Well, I don't like it. What gives NASA the right to squat on what is probably one of the five most valuable places in the universe (from our perspective)? Will there be a deal arranged that in 50 years, when a better space agency comes up with a better project for the liberation point, they'll move their junk out of there? There had better be. Seriously, the UN has to get on this fast. Right now, the USA has basically called dibs on two of the five liberation lunar liberation points, plus there's that second-generation telescope that they want to put into the liberation point behind the earth, where it is always shielded from the sun. Well, this is the ideal place to build a telescope, and once something is there, everybody else, even people with a better telescope idea, are shit out of luck. They'll have to spend billions to make heat shielding because NASA is squatting on the one spot where the heat shielding is natural (permanently in the shadow of Earth).
If I were the UN, I would set a squatting limit of 30 years on any given liberation point. If somebody wants to use it after that, whoever was there before has to get the fuck out and clean up after themselves. I think it's likely that in 30 years all the liberation points will have something, and in another 30, countries will be duking it out over who gets to go there next. The people who want it most will have to compensate the other people who want it. In any case, this is not too soon to be thinking about making international laws about this.
After reading a bunch of the website, I think that a big part of the ratings has to do with how journalists as professional people are treated in the various countires. In Israel, they get shot at and locked up, in the USA they get clubbed and arrested, and in Canada... well, they get asked to go somewhere else. (Reminds me of a joke: "How do you get 50 Canadians out of a swimming pool? You yell: Could everyone please get out of the pool?").
I think if the study was more content-based rather than reporter-rights based, the USA would be far worse than 17th. For example, if you were to measure the quantity of information and range of analysis in the mainstream US press, we would not only be doing worse than Costa Rica and Slovenia, but we might be behind a good chunk of Africa.
I hope you're catching on to the dialectic here: this move will fail miserably. because NIC addresses are trivially easy to spoof. The next dialectical step: "We need some sort of unspoofable hardware key--maybe processor-based DRM." People will buy it if you can't play games without it. The end result will be a computer that protects you from yourself.
Whether it's in the name of catching cheaters or catching terrorists, our freedom and autonomy are about to evaporate.
Even deionized water is somewhat conductive because water is a polar molecule. Oil is a totally different story. Oil is non-polar. It doesn't respond to an elecric field at all.
Uuuh... lemme guess--you're not a history major. Do you remember Reagan's attack on Quaddafi (bombing his house)? The countless state-sponsored assassinations of the 50's through 70's? And other stuff? (I'm not a history major either, but everybody who keeps their eyes open knows that Clinton's missilies were not the first US attacks against foreign individuals.
Well, I just wanted to clear up that factual thing. Otherwise, I think your point about Bill Joy is an interesting one.
The building that Hitler accused the Communists of burning was the Reichstag (I don't know the laterst research, but last I checked, historians thought he may have been right).
Hitler also claimed that Poland attacked him. I wonder if Bush will make the the parallel perfect by claiming that Iraq attacked the USA, and declare that "starting this morning, we are shooting back" as Hitler said. That would be really spooky!
I'm glad the USA has shown enough decency to not bomb Bahrain during this match. I admire their restraint and hope they have the wherewithal to hold off any future bombing until at least tomorrow evening, at which point this match will be over. The fact we have not seen nor heard a single bomb land on or even near the tournament gounds is a clear sign that the USA is fully prepared to respect the rights of the people of Bahrain to host a chess match without being killed in the process. My hat's off!
I hope it's more than a gimmick. Somehow I am dubious about all in-case analog sound solutions because there is just so much damn noise. If you listen to your computer with headphones, you can actually hear things like the closing of desktop windows, because all that electricity swishing around in the case causes fields that mess with the signal once it's converted to analog.
It seems dumb to put those tubes on the motherboard. I would much rather see that space used for three more PCI slots--the sorts of things that audiophiles and amateur musicians always find some use for. No matter how you do it, doing the D/A sound conversion inside the case will always suck. I don't know why the market for PCI cards that connect to D/A-A/D break-out boxes is so small.
Just as I read down to the part with the screenshots from the new scenes, I got this terrible sense that what I was doing was wrong, and I should not be spoiling this with these low quality, out of context previews. Thankfully, the server cooperated and was unable to load most of the images I was trying to protect myself from. For the first time ever, slashdotting did some good!
What the hell is up with that theme? I tried installing it on Linux and it said I have to be running OSX. But why? Isn't the skin API totally cross-platform? I use the same skins on Linux and Windows, why are we making an exception out of OSX?
You know, the state of North American railways is in many ways worse than in some third world countries. Why can't we get proper electic locomotives like everyone else has? And while we're at it, we might try to weld our rail segments instead of bolting them together! Sheesh, some rails in Europe that have been abandoned since Hitler's day are in better shape than most of our transcontinental rails. How shameful!
Re:block images from this server
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is a Mozilla feature too, and a very nice one. It's also reversible--you can also UNblock images from this server by clicking on the blank space where an image should be. More clever sites like this one and NYT run all their ads from their general graphics server, but most websites still don't. This is an awesome feature. If you use this in conjunction with the plugin that blocks images of specific "banner ad" sizes, you get some pretty clean propaganda protection. I like this much better than setting an ad-filtering proxy becuse the people who run the proxy know exactly who you request packets from. Who knows where this info will end up?
What? What kind of chip 'you got? I don't notice any slowdown in rendering the chrome, and my computer is pushing four years. Besides, Mozilla is from the start a cross-platform app, and the developers are right to maximize the size of the common trunk.
In the 1.2 Windows builds we are starting to see native widgets like buttons, and the classic theme has had native scrollbars for a while. This does not speed anything up, but it looks cool! The menus are not native--but do they feel slow to you?
And I for one love the skinnability. I just wish there were more available skins! I see no evidence that the skins slow anything down. I bet you that Phoenix will be skinnable pretty soon, and that it will not slow down one bit.
I know I might be feeding a troll, but honestly, here is what I hear from various users--and some objective tests bear this out: Recent builds of Mozilla on Windows usually render pages faster, but it depends on what's on the pages. Certain content seems to suit IE better, and it renders that content faster. That's why it's relatively trivial to cook up a test that makes MSIE look faster, and vice versa. For most CSS stuff, Mozilla kills MSIE in rendering speed.
On second read-through of your comment it seems you are talking about startup speed, which is totally beside the point, and in any case, off the topic of this thread. I only start Mozilla once every few days--usually because I'm installing a new build. A four second difference in startup speed is a non-issue. Much more significant is wasting a second with each page load waiting for the page rendering to finish. This adds up over the course of the day, because you load many pages. In general, Mozilla wins on rendering speed head-to-head against MSIE. The difference is noticable even on nice machines. Opera might be better still; I haven't tested it for a while.
When you talk about speed, the question is about which application wastes less of your time. The answer, based on raw performance is probably Mozilla. However, when you consider all the other awesome time-saving features like the preferences bar, superior bookmark management, popup blocking (so you don't have to waste time hunting for windows to close), ad blocking, MOUSE GESTURES(!), right-click pie menues, wheel-click for new window (or tab), etc. (wow, that's quite an inventory!). When you take all this great stuff into account, MSIE users waste an incredible amount of time compared to Mozilla users when they browse the internet.
Ireland is not where most of the redheads are. In fact, Scotland has far more per-capita redheads, and IIRC even Belgium has more. It's just a stereotype in the USA, because here, most of the redheads really are of Irish descent. But that's only because Ireland has sent so many more immigrants to the US than the countries more densely populated with redheads. (Irish-Americans far outnumber the entire population of Ireland!)
Yeah, you know, one of the problems in these troll wars is exactly that they are totally dominated by North Americans and Europeans. I honestly think things would improve if the rest of the world got involved. Sure, there would be a greater net sum of trolling, but at least it would get more interesting, and potentially more productive.
Also, the KDE/Gnome troll war needs a third-party arbiter. Everybody knows that in general KDE is a German/Norwegian project while Gnome is generally a US/Mexican project. Anyway, that's where the centers of authority are for these project, and also many (though certainly not all) of the actual coders. I really do wish that Asia could just come in and bully one of the sides into submission, or better, bully them to merge their work and create a GUI standard for X. Or, better still, bully them into hacking together a replacement for X!
Look, you're wrong. Just deal with it. The post you're replying to explained it about as well as anyone could. If you still don't get it, go ask someone who knows about this to explain it to you.
Until then, think about this: if you had a sail and were moving at a constant velocity with a wind blowing perpendicular to your direction of motion, would you be able to take any steps to slow yourself down? Of course you would! You would turn the sail at 45 degrees so that the resultant force of the wind pushes you away and simultaneously slows you down. Now, in orbital mechanics, when your orbit slows, it decays. If it slows to zero, you fall directly into the thing you're orbiting. Sure, a part of the resultant force will be to push you away from the source of the wind, but this will be more than offset by the gravitational attraction of the sun, which will be pulling you in as you gradually lose angular velocity. It does not matter how far away you are from the sun. If your angular velocity is zero, you will fall straight into it. If it's a bit more than zero, you will fall towards it but (at least on your first pass) just miss it. The more your orbital velocity decreases, the closer you come to the sun.
I think you're under the illusion that in order to get away from the sun, you should apply thrust with the rocket exhaust pointing at the sun itself. This is not so. The most efficient way to increase your orbit is accelerate along the path you are actually traveling. Conversely, the most efficient way to make your orbit decay is to apply force in the opposite direction of the orbit you are on, to literally put on the brakes. I think you should see that both of these maneuvers are quite doable with a solar sail.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if you design a special pared-down motherboard for it, the costs would go down further. It could be tiny, because it wouldn't have to really do much--so it could fit into a simple DVD-player-sized case. My question is: why aren't computer distributors falling over themselves to make these? A chip that can do DVD/DivX/Xvid/Ogg/APE decoding in software can be had for about $20. Special hardware decoding solutions will just seem moot at this price, given the usability limitations they impose.
On L4 and L5, though, you cannot have multiple occupancy--stuff there would clump together. Because those points inuitively belong equally to all the world, the UN seems like the natural body to regulate their use. I think if the UN made some laws about it now, it might help individual space agencies with making long-term plans.
I bet you the pages of these idiots got more visits from all the people whose curiosity was piqued by the bad. They must be thrilled to be banned! I bet you there are some Nazi sites and "Holocaust Never Happened" sites and "Bush is Smart" sites that are like "hey, what a rip! How come we didn't get banned! That's bloody favoritism!"
Because they will get there first!
What sort of moronic principle is that? Just because NASA can get there first doesn't mean they have any right to squat there. I mean, it wouldn't be very expensive to stick something into a liberation point (L4 and L5 make more sense, but whatever). In two months, China could gunk up all the liberation points if they wanted to by sticking some useless crap there. But that doesn't mean it would be right--I mean, for one thing, it would completely kill our planned telescopes and space stations. So it's not about who gets there first. There is an obligation that if you occupy a liberation point, you have to have some 1) peaceful 2) scientifically important 3) internationally open and 4) big project. I'm not saying the space station or the telescope don't qualify, though I'd like to see details. In any case, countries can't just have the right to stick anything there. Like I said, there should be a comission like right now that makes a ruling on the responsible use of our liberation points.
I don't think you understand how Lagrange points work: once you put something there, it stays! That's the whole point! So it will stay up, automatically, even long after it's been rendered totally useless.
Well, I don't like it. What gives NASA the right to squat on what is probably one of the five most valuable places in the universe (from our perspective)? Will there be a deal arranged that in 50 years, when a better space agency comes up with a better project for the liberation point, they'll move their junk out of there? There had better be. Seriously, the UN has to get on this fast. Right now, the USA has basically called dibs on two of the five liberation lunar liberation points, plus there's that second-generation telescope that they want to put into the liberation point behind the earth, where it is always shielded from the sun. Well, this is the ideal place to build a telescope, and once something is there, everybody else, even people with a better telescope idea, are shit out of luck. They'll have to spend billions to make heat shielding because NASA is squatting on the one spot where the heat shielding is natural (permanently in the shadow of Earth).
If I were the UN, I would set a squatting limit of 30 years on any given liberation point. If somebody wants to use it after that, whoever was there before has to get the fuck out and clean up after themselves. I think it's likely that in 30 years all the liberation points will have something, and in another 30, countries will be duking it out over who gets to go there next. The people who want it most will have to compensate the other people who want it. In any case, this is not too soon to be thinking about making international laws about this.
I think if the study was more content-based rather than reporter-rights based, the USA would be far worse than 17th. For example, if you were to measure the quantity of information and range of analysis in the mainstream US press, we would not only be doing worse than Costa Rica and Slovenia, but we might be behind a good chunk of Africa.
Whether it's in the name of catching cheaters or catching terrorists, our freedom and autonomy are about to evaporate.
Even deionized water is somewhat conductive because water is a polar molecule. Oil is a totally different story. Oil is non-polar. It doesn't respond to an elecric field at all.
Well, I just wanted to clear up that factual thing. Otherwise, I think your point about Bill Joy is an interesting one.
Hitler also claimed that Poland attacked him. I wonder if Bush will make the the parallel perfect by claiming that Iraq attacked the USA, and declare that "starting this morning, we are shooting back" as Hitler said. That would be really spooky!
Kramnik is not going to play Berlin as white.
I'm glad the USA has shown enough decency to not bomb Bahrain during this match. I admire their restraint and hope they have the wherewithal to hold off any future bombing until at least tomorrow evening, at which point this match will be over. The fact we have not seen nor heard a single bomb land on or even near the tournament gounds is a clear sign that the USA is fully prepared to respect the rights of the people of Bahrain to host a chess match without being killed in the process. My hat's off!
It seems dumb to put those tubes on the motherboard. I would much rather see that space used for three more PCI slots--the sorts of things that audiophiles and amateur musicians always find some use for. No matter how you do it, doing the D/A sound conversion inside the case will always suck. I don't know why the market for PCI cards that connect to D/A-A/D break-out boxes is so small.
This thing belongs inside a digital video camera. I mean, all that work on jitter resistance must have some point....
Just as I read down to the part with the screenshots from the new scenes, I got this terrible sense that what I was doing was wrong, and I should not be spoiling this with these low quality, out of context previews. Thankfully, the server cooperated and was unable to load most of the images I was trying to protect myself from. For the first time ever, slashdotting did some good!
What the hell is up with that theme? I tried installing it on Linux and it said I have to be running OSX. But why? Isn't the skin API totally cross-platform? I use the same skins on Linux and Windows, why are we making an exception out of OSX?
You know, the state of North American railways is in many ways worse than in some third world countries. Why can't we get proper electic locomotives like everyone else has? And while we're at it, we might try to weld our rail segments instead of bolting them together! Sheesh, some rails in Europe that have been abandoned since Hitler's day are in better shape than most of our transcontinental rails. How shameful!
This is a Mozilla feature too, and a very nice one. It's also reversible--you can also UNblock images from this server by clicking on the blank space where an image should be. More clever sites like this one and NYT run all their ads from their general graphics server, but most websites still don't. This is an awesome feature. If you use this in conjunction with the plugin that blocks images of specific "banner ad" sizes, you get some pretty clean propaganda protection. I like this much better than setting an ad-filtering proxy becuse the people who run the proxy know exactly who you request packets from. Who knows where this info will end up?
In the 1.2 Windows builds we are starting to see native widgets like buttons, and the classic theme has had native scrollbars for a while. This does not speed anything up, but it looks cool! The menus are not native--but do they feel slow to you?
And I for one love the skinnability. I just wish there were more available skins! I see no evidence that the skins slow anything down. I bet you that Phoenix will be skinnable pretty soon, and that it will not slow down one bit.
On second read-through of your comment it seems you are talking about startup speed, which is totally beside the point, and in any case, off the topic of this thread. I only start Mozilla once every few days--usually because I'm installing a new build. A four second difference in startup speed is a non-issue. Much more significant is wasting a second with each page load waiting for the page rendering to finish. This adds up over the course of the day, because you load many pages. In general, Mozilla wins on rendering speed head-to-head against MSIE. The difference is noticable even on nice machines. Opera might be better still; I haven't tested it for a while.
When you talk about speed, the question is about which application wastes less of your time. The answer, based on raw performance is probably Mozilla. However, when you consider all the other awesome time-saving features like the preferences bar, superior bookmark management, popup blocking (so you don't have to waste time hunting for windows to close), ad blocking, MOUSE GESTURES(!), right-click pie menues, wheel-click for new window (or tab), etc. (wow, that's quite an inventory!). When you take all this great stuff into account, MSIE users waste an incredible amount of time compared to Mozilla users when they browse the internet.
Ireland is not where most of the redheads are. In fact, Scotland has far more per-capita redheads, and IIRC even Belgium has more. It's just a stereotype in the USA, because here, most of the redheads really are of Irish descent. But that's only because Ireland has sent so many more immigrants to the US than the countries more densely populated with redheads. (Irish-Americans far outnumber the entire population of Ireland!)
Also, the KDE/Gnome troll war needs a third-party arbiter. Everybody knows that in general KDE is a German/Norwegian project while Gnome is generally a US/Mexican project. Anyway, that's where the centers of authority are for these project, and also many (though certainly not all) of the actual coders. I really do wish that Asia could just come in and bully one of the sides into submission, or better, bully them to merge their work and create a GUI standard for X. Or, better still, bully them into hacking together a replacement for X!
Until then, think about this: if you had a sail and were moving at a constant velocity with a wind blowing perpendicular to your direction of motion, would you be able to take any steps to slow yourself down? Of course you would! You would turn the sail at 45 degrees so that the resultant force of the wind pushes you away and simultaneously slows you down. Now, in orbital mechanics, when your orbit slows, it decays. If it slows to zero, you fall directly into the thing you're orbiting. Sure, a part of the resultant force will be to push you away from the source of the wind, but this will be more than offset by the gravitational attraction of the sun, which will be pulling you in as you gradually lose angular velocity. It does not matter how far away you are from the sun. If your angular velocity is zero, you will fall straight into it. If it's a bit more than zero, you will fall towards it but (at least on your first pass) just miss it. The more your orbital velocity decreases, the closer you come to the sun.
I think you're under the illusion that in order to get away from the sun, you should apply thrust with the rocket exhaust pointing at the sun itself. This is not so. The most efficient way to increase your orbit is accelerate along the path you are actually traveling. Conversely, the most efficient way to make your orbit decay is to apply force in the opposite direction of the orbit you are on, to literally put on the brakes. I think you should see that both of these maneuvers are quite doable with a solar sail.