If Ballmer's comments have any meaning at all, it means Microsoft's virtualization project will be devoted to breaking Linux when it runs on a Microsoft host so MS can claim Linux is broken.
I'm not so sure that little ploy will work... Microsoft is adding Linux support so they can compete with VMWare, and VMWare already runs Linux properly. So if Microsoft's app can't run Linux properly, it will be obvious to anyone familiar with VMWare (i.e. most of the market at this point) that the problem is with Microsoft and not Linux.
AFAIK some (most?) players have this now. At least, my player has surprised me more than once by "remembering" the seek point at which I had previously stopped playing a DVD, the next time I put same DVD in again, and resuming playback from the same point.
So I think the problem isn't a technical one, but rather a political one -- DVD players can remember this stuff, but are the DVD makers sufficiently motivated to take advantage of it?
What I don't understand is how copyright law is involved. A DVD with an auto-editing script is not copying anything. If auto-edit scripts for DVD players are illegal, then the fast-forward button on your VCR is probably illegal as well!
What do you mean by energy? Of course farming produces more energy than is consumed by machinery. The sun provides most of the power.
Farming conceivably could be used as a way to capture solar power, but from all I've read, current farming methods use much more fuel (to make fertilizer, power the tractors, transport the product, create and apply pesticides, etc) than can be practically extracted from the resulting crops.
Perhaps more efficient farming and extraction techniques will someday change that, but I'm not holding my breath.
If the average yahoo doesn't maintain his car and breaks down, the damage is minimal. If its flying then its not.
Perhaps that fact will motivate the average yahoo to maintain his aircar properly. People generally try to avoid dying, but they know that if their groundcar's engine dies, they probably won't die.
So long as oil consumption is left to market forces we will never run out of oil. That doesn't mean it might not get very expensive
In a scenario where oil is too expensive to purchase for use as fuel, I don't see much practical difference between that and having "run out of oil". In either case, oil is no longer usable as an energy source, and we will have either (a) found an alternative energy source, or (b) had to learn to do without mechanization.
vegetable oil would do. How about that for renewal.
Not very good -- where are you going to get enough vegetable oil to power a society? Farming (at least with present methods) uses more energy than it could ever hope to produce.
In terms of energy, we're like a kid who inherited a big fortune and is about halfway through spending it all. Let's hope we can learn a decent way to earn more before the inheritance runs out!
What is so special about this thing? It is just an ultralight. Seen them before.
Have you seen an ultralight with VTOL capability and controls that are intuitive enough to be guided by an unlicensed pilot? I think that is what is new here.
You cannot honestly tell me that the OSS Community couldn't develop something to support AX and maintain security.
They certainly could, but why should they when the general consensus is that ActiveX was a bad idea? To make you happy? What's in it for them? Perhaps if you (or your locked-in company) paid them $$$ to do it.
The fact is that on any operating system when you have a single, important user who runs malicious code, it doesn't matter much whether they're root or not
As far as malicious activity goes, you may have a point... but there is also the danger of the user to himself. If the user can easily delete/overwrite important parts of the operating system, he eventually will. If he can't, then he won't.
When Bill Clinton appointed Monica to his, uh, staff, he showed the kids of the day that it's not how sleazy you are that matters; it's whether you lie to congress about it
Heh, I can't wait until this AOL breaks down on the witness stand:
"It's a fair cop, guv'na, but Bill Clinton is to blame".
I would say so... if you were to rank the characters in order of their importance to the plot, Trillian comes out around 5th... after Arthur, Ford, Marvin, and Zaphod. I haven't seen the movie so I can't judge it, but I don't think the books would have been damaged too badly if Trillian had been removed from them.
I suspect this movie will suck, and will only do slightly better than if every theater showing it was blanketed in an SEP field.
.... and yet you are doomed to go see it anyway, and bitch about it afterwards on Slashdot. Doomed I say!:^)
Do most theaters have the $5.50 for a matinee ticket? (If you go see it before 6 PM)
Not around here (Los Angeles)... the matinee price is $6.50-7.50, and it's only available for the first showing of the day (i.e. around noon). Regular price is $8.50-$10, and a few "high end" theaters charge $14 (although at those you get reserved seating and an employee comes out before the movie starts to give a little welcoming speech... whether that is worth an extra $5 I won't comment on)
IMHO Google is just another 100% red-blooded capitalist business, doing what they have to do, no matter what they claim to the contrary
What evidence do you have to support your opinion?
I'm not saying that's a 'wrong' thing to be, but they should at least drop the BS and the fake bonhomie
If it is indeed fake, then I agree... but perhaps it is real? Perhaps it is only your own cynicism that keeps you from seeing that this one is the genuine article. Stranger things have happened...
There are tards and cretins out the day after April 15th brazenly advocating higher taxes
Speaking as a non-tard/cretin (at least in the eyes of some), I don't mind paying taxes and wouldn't even mind paying more, provided that my tax money is well spent. It is possible for tax money to be used productively to improve the lives of the citizenry, if the people in charge are competent and responsible. Unfortunately, in the USA, neither major party is much of either. The Republican Party has even made a "feature" out of this problem -- they campaign by telling you how corrupt and inefficient the government is, and then once they are elected they spend their terms in office living down to that lowered expectation.
If you studied just war theory, you would know that preemptive war is just
...And in many cases, it's "just a good excuse to invade a country that we want to invade".
From your link:
A preemptive attack (or preemptive war) is waged in an attempt to repel or defeat an imminent offensive or invasion, or to gain a strategic advantage in an impending (usually unavoidable) war.
The beauty of the preemptive war is that the other side's "imminent invasion" need only exist in the minds of the populace -- it doesn't need any actual grounding in reality. So all you need is a good PR machine and you've got political license to invade wherever and whenever you want.
The drawback is that once it becomes common practice for countries to invade wherever and whenever they want, it's very easy for the situation to devolve into a land grab by all sides, and, err, World War (n).
And yet, somehow it's Google that we focus our scrutiny on?!
Well, it is Google that is changing our beloved Internet (for better or worse), and we see those changes happening before our eyes every day. I think it's only natural that people get a little concerned, even if those concerns turn out to be unfounded (as I expect they are -- at least, I haven't seen anything yet to make me doubt Google's good intentions).
GE's nukes, on the other hand, are seen by no one outside of the military, so in the public mind they exist only as a vague abstraction. Rest assured, after the big nuclear war, the survivors will be criticizing GE more intensely;^)
Well, how about a rich PC industry that didn't cheat/steal/monoculture
It seems to me like this is all just a bunch of pointless navel gazing -- we can imagine how the world might have been better or worse with our without Microsoft, but the facts are that (A) we really don't have any idea how things might have turned out differently, because the chains of cause and effect over a twenty year period are simply too complex to analyze with any degree of confidence, and (B) it doesn't matter anyway -- we live in the world we live in, and we aren't going to be jumping to any alternate timelines anytime soon.
Therefore, I say we just encourage all companies and individuals to do as many philanthropic good deeds as they are willing and able to do, and leave it at that.
Imagine an n-dimensional graph, with each possible bug quality expressed as one axis on the graph. In fact, to make it easier to visualize, let's simplify the problem down to just two dimensions for now: spininess and helmet size. We'll have have spininess indicated by the position along the X axis, and helmet size indicated by the position along the Y axis.
Any particular bug will have a given amount of spininess and a given size helmet, and thus we can assign it a point on the 2-D graph. Now, when that bug has children, its children will either be identical to it (and thus be represented by the same point on the graph), or slightly different (in which case they will be represented by nearby points). We'll assume that since the differences in the children are due to chance (i.e. random gene mutations, luck of the draw in selecting a mate, etc), that the childrens' locations on the graph will show up as a small "cloud" of points, roughly centered on the parent's point.
Now we throw some predators into the mix. These predators will (for whatever reason) have a preference for eating bugs of a certain quality -- in this case, they prefer bugs with smaller helmets and less spines, since they are easier to swallow. So, to represent the predators eating the bugs, we will randomly erase some of the dots on the graph -- and the key point is -- we will make it so that the closer the bug's dot is to the lower left (i.e. low spininess and small helmet size) the more likely that bug is to get eaten and his dot erased.
Now, run the simulation for a few generations, and it should become clear what happens -- at each generation, each bug spawns, causing his dot to be surrounded by his children's dots, in a small cloud centered on him. But the dots in the lower left portion of the cloud get eaten more than the dots at the upper right portion of the cloud. So, when it's time for the next generation to spawn children, the grandchildren are (on average) a bit farther up and to the right than before.
Now speed up the simulation to a good 30fps, and here's what you will see: it looks like the little clouds of dots are moving up and to the right! Of course, none of the dots themselves ever actually move... a bug isn't able to change his spininess or helmet size. But the clouds move, because dots are being created randomly, but destroyed with a bias based on the predators' preferences.
... and the one day people dredged the lake (or whatnot) and the predators were mostly killed. Suddenly having giant spines and a big helmet no longer make any difference to the bugs -- they won't get eaten either way. What makes a difference now is energy efficiency -- bugs that can survive the longest on the least food are the ones that can reproduce the most. In this new scenario, it's the bugs who spend extra calories growing giant (useless) spines and helmets that are more likely to die without reproducing, and now the point-clouds are being "pushed" back to the lower left of the graph.
And of course in reality the graph has any number of dimensions, not just two... and I'm sure I'm oversimplifying a number of other factors as well... but that is the gist of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure that little ploy will work... Microsoft is adding Linux support so they can compete with VMWare, and VMWare already runs Linux properly. So if Microsoft's app can't run Linux properly, it will be obvious to anyone familiar with VMWare (i.e. most of the market at this point) that the problem is with Microsoft and not Linux.
So I think the problem isn't a technical one, but rather a political one -- DVD players can remember this stuff, but are the DVD makers sufficiently motivated to take advantage of it?
What I don't understand is how copyright law is involved. A DVD with an auto-editing script is not copying anything. If auto-edit scripts for DVD players are illegal, then the fast-forward button on your VCR is probably illegal as well!
Farming conceivably could be used as a way to capture solar power, but from all I've read, current farming methods use much more fuel (to make fertilizer, power the tractors, transport the product, create and apply pesticides, etc) than can be practically extracted from the resulting crops.
Perhaps more efficient farming and extraction techniques will someday change that, but I'm not holding my breath.
Perhaps that fact will motivate the average yahoo to maintain his aircar properly. People generally try to avoid dying, but they know that if their groundcar's engine dies, they probably won't die.
In a scenario where oil is too expensive to purchase for use as fuel, I don't see much practical difference between that and having "run out of oil". In either case, oil is no longer usable as an energy source, and we will have either (a) found an alternative energy source, or (b) had to learn to do without mechanization.
Not very good -- where are you going to get enough vegetable oil to power a society? Farming (at least with present methods) uses more energy than it could ever hope to produce.
In terms of energy, we're like a kid who inherited a big fortune and is about halfway through spending it all. Let's hope we can learn a decent way to earn more before the inheritance runs out!
Have you seen an ultralight with VTOL capability and controls that are intuitive enough to be guided by an unlicensed pilot? I think that is what is new here.
They certainly could, but why should they when the general consensus is that ActiveX was a bad idea? To make you happy? What's in it for them? Perhaps if you (or your locked-in company) paid them $$$ to do it.
As far as malicious activity goes, you may have a point... but there is also the danger of the user to himself. If the user can easily delete/overwrite important parts of the operating system, he eventually will. If he can't, then he won't.
Heh, I can't wait until this AOL breaks down on the witness stand:
"It's a fair cop, guv'na, but Bill Clinton is to blame".
I would say so... if you were to rank the characters in order of their importance to the plot, Trillian comes out around 5th... after Arthur, Ford, Marvin, and Zaphod. I haven't seen the movie so I can't judge it, but I don't think the books would have been damaged too badly if Trillian had been removed from them.
I suspect this movie will suck, and will only do slightly better than if every theater showing it was blanketed in an SEP field.
Not just one, but several.
Not around here (Los Angeles)
Believe it or not, Moviefone was a happily operating business long before it was ever referenced on "Seinfeld"....
Actually, the Mac isn't even necessary, they do it pretty reliably on their own...
(just kidding! hold your fire!)
It seems reality would disagree with you...
What evidence do you have to support your opinion?
I'm not saying that's a 'wrong' thing to be, but they should at least drop the BS and the fake bonhomie
If it is indeed fake, then I agree... but perhaps it is real? Perhaps it is only your own cynicism that keeps you from seeing that this one is the genuine article. Stranger things have happened...
Speaking as a non-tard/cretin (at least in the eyes of some), I don't mind paying taxes and wouldn't even mind paying more, provided that my tax money is well spent. It is possible for tax money to be used productively to improve the lives of the citizenry, if the people in charge are competent and responsible. Unfortunately, in the USA, neither major party is much of either. The Republican Party has even made a "feature" out of this problem -- they campaign by telling you how corrupt and inefficient the government is, and then once they are elected they spend their terms in office living down to that lowered expectation.
From your link:
A preemptive attack (or preemptive war) is waged in an attempt to repel or defeat an imminent offensive or invasion, or to gain a strategic advantage in an impending (usually unavoidable) war.
The beauty of the preemptive war is that the other side's "imminent invasion" need only exist in the minds of the populace -- it doesn't need any actual grounding in reality. So all you need is a good PR machine and you've got political license to invade wherever and whenever you want.
The drawback is that once it becomes common practice for countries to invade wherever and whenever they want, it's very easy for the situation to devolve into a land grab by all sides, and, err, World War (n).
Well, it is Google that is changing our beloved Internet (for better or worse), and we see those changes happening before our eyes every day. I think it's only natural that people get a little concerned, even if those concerns turn out to be unfounded (as I expect they are -- at least, I haven't seen anything yet to make me doubt Google's good intentions).
GE's nukes, on the other hand, are seen by no one outside of the military, so in the public mind they exist only as a vague abstraction. Rest assured, after the big nuclear war, the survivors will be criticizing GE more intensely
It seems to me like this is all just a bunch of pointless navel gazing -- we can imagine how the world might have been better or worse with our without Microsoft, but the facts are that (A) we really don't have any idea how things might have turned out differently, because the chains of cause and effect over a twenty year period are simply too complex to analyze with any degree of confidence, and (B) it doesn't matter anyway -- we live in the world we live in, and we aren't going to be jumping to any alternate timelines anytime soon.
Therefore, I say we just encourage all companies and individuals to do as many philanthropic good deeds as they are willing and able to do, and leave it at that.
So to you, nothing is real except for some mathematical theorems? I wonder how you are able to get out of bed in the morning...
Hmm... by that definition, Stephen Hawking is a zooplankton.... so I think the definition is a bit broad....
Imagine an n-dimensional graph, with each possible bug quality expressed as one axis on the graph. In fact, to make it easier to visualize, let's simplify the problem down to just two dimensions for now: spininess and helmet size. We'll have have spininess indicated by the position along the X axis, and helmet size indicated by the position along the Y axis.
Any particular bug will have a given amount of spininess and a given size helmet, and thus we can assign it a point on the 2-D graph. Now, when that bug has children, its children will either be identical to it (and thus be represented by the same point on the graph), or slightly different (in which case they will be represented by nearby points). We'll assume that since the differences in the children are due to chance (i.e. random gene mutations, luck of the draw in selecting a mate, etc), that the childrens' locations on the graph will show up as a small "cloud" of points, roughly centered on the parent's point.
Now we throw some predators into the mix. These predators will (for whatever reason) have a preference for eating bugs of a certain quality -- in this case, they prefer bugs with smaller helmets and less spines, since they are easier to swallow. So, to represent the predators eating the bugs, we will randomly erase some of the dots on the graph -- and the key point is -- we will make it so that the closer the bug's dot is to the lower left (i.e. low spininess and small helmet size) the more likely that bug is to get eaten and his dot erased.
Now, run the simulation for a few generations, and it should become clear what happens -- at each generation, each bug spawns, causing his dot to be surrounded by his children's dots, in a small cloud centered on him. But the dots in the lower left portion of the cloud get eaten more than the dots at the upper right portion of the cloud. So, when it's time for the next generation to spawn children, the grandchildren are (on average) a bit farther up and to the right than before.
Now speed up the simulation to a good 30fps, and here's what you will see: it looks like the little clouds of dots are moving up and to the right! Of course, none of the dots themselves ever actually move
And of course in reality the graph has any number of dimensions, not just two... and I'm sure I'm oversimplifying a number of other factors as well... but that is the gist of it.