I assume you know that a watt *is* a joule/second...
As to the rest of your question, I imagine it was either a typo or just a poorly worded statement. However this being slashdot, I can't discount a simple lack of understanding of the basic principles (no offence to the OP, I see it *all the time* in comments on science articles; in fact it's been so bad at times that I've gone through periods of not reading the comments at all)
Other people have already talked about volume vs percentage, so I'll ask a different question: might it not be that those areas with lots of cameras but no better crime solving rate, are in fact only keeping up with the areas with fewer cameras *because* they have cameras? That is, if you took away the cameras, would their crime solving rate drop even lower?
Note that I'm no fan of a surveillance society, but I am even more against bogus logic and misuse of statistics. We're supposed to be better than that.
Puerto Rico, though not a country, is still an currently existing political entity.
The same could be said of any area with a political body representing it, eg each of the states, the counties in England, each of the cities, most of the towns, hell even *parts* of London (the Boroughs) have councils. I don't see a lot of reason to give the London Borough of Havering a tld of its own...
He's not talking about desktop look and feel, he's talking about where stuff actually gets installed to I think. As a trivial example, where should the installer create a symlink/shortcut so that it appears on the user's desktop?
I've not used Linux on the desktop in a couple of years now, but back then the answer would be "For what desktop environment?", which illustrates the OP's point perfectly.
Speaking of semantics, of course you can be wrong when you say "I think that...". It may or may not be correct that that is what you think, but a response of "you're wrong" is clearly in reply to the bit after the "that", not the fact that you think it.
As for this specific example, yeah I'd heard that Vista wouldn't support OGL too. Difference is I knew that it was a meaningless statement. Every 3D graphics card manufacturer has shipped their own OGL implementation as part of their drivers almost since the beginning. The support that used to be in some versions of Windows was *software* support, which even with today's processors is almost entirely pointless.
That's all fine and well, but I seem to have missed the part where this is web browser specific. I was under the impression that this is supposed to be a replacement for anti-virus software - that is, that all executables will have to be white-listed.
So what happens about updating programs? Will the software I'm trying to use be prevented from running because I applied an update and the whitelist entry no longer matches? What if the whitelist is updated, but not the software, and it's hit that way round?
What about software from hobbiests? If I download something from sourceforge or freshmeat or somewhere similar, will it be prevented from running because it's not in the whitelist?
What about stuff I write myself? How do I get it added to the whitelists? How do I run it myself while I'm developing it?
So what'll happen is that there will have to be a way to tell the whitelist software that yes, I really do want to run this piece of software. But then what's to prevent me from downloading some innocent-looking trojan-laden piece of malware, and allowing that to run?
I can't see whitelisting working anywhere but in places where workstations can be locked down and updates controlled. That leaves out the home market completely, where I simply can't see it working but where most people most need protection from malware
As for good OS design, in 25 years of using computers I've yet to use an OS that wasn't burnt to ROM and couldn't be subverted by a user with administrative access. If the user sat at the machine has the administrative password, there's nothing the OS can do to prevent him from (accidentally) rooting it. Blacklisting is bad, but as far as I can see whitelisting is worse in a lot of situations.
That's like saying that the cost of software is just the cost of creating the installation CD.
Which of course is something else that you will see here.
People seem to forget that just because you can make copies at as close to zero cost as makes no practical difference, that doesn't mean that the first one wasn't insanely expensive to produce.
The GNU/Linux thing was kind of retarded given that Linux distributions feature code from a lot of different licenses, and GNU is the only one that's mentioned?
The justification I've usually seen for that is that GNU is the single biggest "contributor", as it were, particularly with respect to gcc, the command tools, etc. More than just that, though, it could be argued that without GNU, Linux would just be a kernel, with no user space to run. Of course, it could equally be argued that without Linux, the GNU user space tools would just be a nice collection of tools with no OS to run on...
How about a third possibility - it was done to tie the iPod to iTunes because of the tight integration with iTMS and the possibility of impulse buying of content?
After all, if you're using iTunes, then buying stuff is just a few clicks away. Using some other software buying stuff might *still* be only a few clicks away, but it most likely won't be from Apple.
Wow. I am constantly amazed at the crap US mobile phone users seem to have to put up with.
If I want to get a file on to my phone (Sony Ericsson K800i with Orange in the UK), I connect it to my PC using the supplied USB cable and drag and drop it using Explorer. If it's playable, I can use it as a ring tone.
Pay for ring tones? I understand that people do, I've just never really understood *why*.
They also suffer from the "chicken and egg" support problem.
So did GPUs when they first came out, of course. What happened then (if you remember) is that games shipped with the option for software rendering or hardware-accelerated rendering for quite a long time. Some older games had patches released to enable hardware rendering (eg Quake, Tomb Raider). I still remember the first time I saw GLQuake running on my housemate's PC. Of course, he didn't have an accelerator, so while it was beautiful, the one frame every few seconds he got was totally unplayable...
Anyway, that said I do tend to agree that physics accelerators simply aren't going to go anywhere any time soon, if ever. GPUs make a huge difference, but PPUs? I don't see it.
Well, I don't know about the preamble (it's been a long time since I last read the GPL), and I agree that the FSF don't require you to assign copyright to them. However, they definitely do recommend that you do, as then they can go after GPL violations involving the code. If you retain copyright, then you'd have to do it yourself, and most people don't have the FSF's resources.
While I don't doubt that, nVidia at least has been caught cheating in their drivers before now to get better scores in benchmarking software, and I certainly remember them releasing new drivers to improve performance in popular games that reportedly broke other, less popular ones.
Even now, the latest nVidia drivers (which the Bioshock demo recommends you install) has caused a few minor glitches in Oblivion (for me at least), and that's hardly an old game.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds awfully similar to a race condition (it clearly isn't one, but it certainly *looks* like one), which would seem to me to mean that it would have all the same dependencies on the vagaries of system load. I'm not saying that this would be impossible to pull off, just difficult to do so consistently.
Of course, depending on what you're actually trying to achieve, consistency may not be an issue.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
My first PC came "pre-installed" (bought second-hand) with the original release of Win 95. I progressed from there through Win 98, to a variety of Linuxes, then Win 2k and now XP Pro, with a view to getting Vista next time I upgrade my system.
I went almost all-Linux for a couple of years - all-Linux at work, dual-booting at home to play games. I went back to Windows, as a matter of personal choice.
Not everyone agrees with you, your opinions, or your preferences. As other posters have pointed out, some of us really do choose Windows, even with reasonably extensive experience of at least some of the alternatives.
I believe MS deems itself a "trusted site" even if you specifically tell Vista it isn't.
I imagine that the reasoning behind that would be to prevent malware from setting MS's sites as untrusted, thus potentially screwing with your machine's ability to download and install updates, thus leaving it open to further exploitation in the future.
Or it could be part of an Evil Plan for World Domination; I can tell which you've already chosen.
It gets annoying long before the tenth "my computer rebooted and I have updates turned off - did we have power/network/useless sysadmin problems" conversation.
Then there's something else going on, because I have never had any PC reboot mysteriously because of an update.
If you install an update but keep hitting "restart later", eventually it'll give you the "restart now or later" dialogue with a timer on it. However, you do have to keep hitting "later" for that to happen, as I've seen ad-hoc servers (ie desktop machines running XP used as ad hoc dev servers by project team) prompting for a restart for literally months.
Whenever [Your Country] laws get harmonized with international laws, it's usually because the international laws are weaker.
Well in this particular case, I agree that that's what Google is pushing for. However, in my experience the opposite is generally true - see for example copyright laws.
I think in the case of businesses pushing for harmonisation of laws it would be more generally true to say that push to harmonise in the direction that most benefits them. Hence the US and WTO pushing for companies to sign up to the Berne convention and/or implement their own version of the DMCA, Google pushing for privacy laws to be harmonised to a lower common denominator (if not the lowest), etc.
i'm amazed that a pc world customer had heard of linux, nevermind installed it
I've bought two PCs from PC World over the course of the last 5 years or so. I don't use Linux now, but for a couple of years it was my primary OS. In my time I've upgraded my kernel and gcc from source, manually upgrade from libc5 to glibc, hand-hacked modeline entries in my XF86Config file when my monitor wasn't detected properly, etc.
So, having established some geek credibility, why'd I buy from PC World? Simple - they had a sale on and were offering "buy now, pay in a year" finance. I didn't need their help, advice or support, I just needed a PC and didn't have the money right then.
The annoying thing is that most people who buy from them do need advice, and the sales staff (in my limited experience) simply aren't qualified to give any.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you know that a watt *is* a joule/second...
As to the rest of your question, I imagine it was either a typo or just a poorly worded statement. However this being slashdot, I can't discount a simple lack of understanding of the basic principles (no offence to the OP, I see it *all the time* in comments on science articles; in fact it's been so bad at times that I've gone through periods of not reading the comments at all)
You can use them to "prove" anything.
Other people have already talked about volume vs percentage, so I'll ask a different question: might it not be that those areas with lots of cameras but no better crime solving rate, are in fact only keeping up with the areas with fewer cameras *because* they have cameras? That is, if you took away the cameras, would their crime solving rate drop even lower?
Note that I'm no fan of a surveillance society, but I am even more against bogus logic and misuse of statistics. We're supposed to be better than that.
Puerto Rico, though not a country, is still an currently existing political entity.
The same could be said of any area with a political body representing it, eg each of the states, the counties in England, each of the cities, most of the towns, hell even *parts* of London (the Boroughs) have councils. I don't see a lot of reason to give the London Borough of Havering a tld of its own...
He's not talking about desktop look and feel, he's talking about where stuff actually gets installed to I think. As a trivial example, where should the installer create a symlink/shortcut so that it appears on the user's desktop?
I've not used Linux on the desktop in a couple of years now, but back then the answer would be "For what desktop environment?", which illustrates the OP's point perfectly.
Speaking of semantics, of course you can be wrong when you say "I think that...". It may or may not be correct that that is what you think, but a response of "you're wrong" is clearly in reply to the bit after the "that", not the fact that you think it.
As for this specific example, yeah I'd heard that Vista wouldn't support OGL too. Difference is I knew that it was a meaningless statement. Every 3D graphics card manufacturer has shipped their own OGL implementation as part of their drivers almost since the beginning. The support that used to be in some versions of Windows was *software* support, which even with today's processors is almost entirely pointless.
That'll be PC Plod rather than Joe Trooper, given that we're talking about the UK.
Although it'll depend on where the bottleneck actually is, of course.
But easier? How would it make using external HDDs easier?
That's all fine and well, but I seem to have missed the part where this is web browser specific. I was under the impression that this is supposed to be a replacement for anti-virus software - that is, that all executables will have to be white-listed.
So what happens about updating programs? Will the software I'm trying to use be prevented from running because I applied an update and the whitelist entry no longer matches? What if the whitelist is updated, but not the software, and it's hit that way round?
What about software from hobbiests? If I download something from sourceforge or freshmeat or somewhere similar, will it be prevented from running because it's not in the whitelist?
What about stuff I write myself? How do I get it added to the whitelists? How do I run it myself while I'm developing it?
So what'll happen is that there will have to be a way to tell the whitelist software that yes, I really do want to run this piece of software. But then what's to prevent me from downloading some innocent-looking trojan-laden piece of malware, and allowing that to run?
I can't see whitelisting working anywhere but in places where workstations can be locked down and updates controlled. That leaves out the home market completely, where I simply can't see it working but where most people most need protection from malware
As for good OS design, in 25 years of using computers I've yet to use an OS that wasn't burnt to ROM and couldn't be subverted by a user with administrative access. If the user sat at the machine has the administrative password, there's nothing the OS can do to prevent him from (accidentally) rooting it. Blacklisting is bad, but as far as I can see whitelisting is worse in a lot of situations.
"Bypass", v: to avoid something by going around it.
I think the word you're looking for is "surpass" (to do or be better than).
(Definitions taken from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary.)
That's like saying that the cost of software is just the cost of creating the installation CD.
Which of course is something else that you will see here.
People seem to forget that just because you can make copies at as close to zero cost as makes no practical difference, that doesn't mean that the first one wasn't insanely expensive to produce.
The GNU/Linux thing was kind of retarded given that Linux distributions feature code from a lot of different licenses, and GNU is the only one that's mentioned?
The justification I've usually seen for that is that GNU is the single biggest "contributor", as it were, particularly with respect to gcc, the command tools, etc. More than just that, though, it could be argued that without GNU, Linux would just be a kernel, with no user space to run. Of course, it could equally be argued that without Linux, the GNU user space tools would just be a nice collection of tools with no OS to run on...
How about a third possibility - it was done to tie the iPod to iTunes because of the tight integration with iTMS and the possibility of impulse buying of content?
After all, if you're using iTunes, then buying stuff is just a few clicks away. Using some other software buying stuff might *still* be only a few clicks away, but it most likely won't be from Apple.
Wow. I am constantly amazed at the crap US mobile phone users seem to have to put up with.
If I want to get a file on to my phone (Sony Ericsson K800i with Orange in the UK), I connect it to my PC using the supplied USB cable and drag and drop it using Explorer. If it's playable, I can use it as a ring tone.
Pay for ring tones? I understand that people do, I've just never really understood *why*.
Apparently you missed the GP's point. Have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoencephalography and see if you think that we'll be doing it remotely (and covertly, remember) any time soon.
That's "non-invasive" in the medical sense of not having to cut you open and/or implant something, not in the sense that you mean.
So did GPUs when they first came out, of course. What happened then (if you remember) is that games shipped with the option for software rendering or hardware-accelerated rendering for quite a long time. Some older games had patches released to enable hardware rendering (eg Quake, Tomb Raider). I still remember the first time I saw GLQuake running on my housemate's PC. Of course, he didn't have an accelerator, so while it was beautiful, the one frame every few seconds he got was totally unplayable...
Anyway, that said I do tend to agree that physics accelerators simply aren't going to go anywhere any time soon, if ever. GPUs make a huge difference, but PPUs? I don't see it.
Well, I don't know about the preamble (it's been a long time since I last read the GPL), and I agree that the FSF don't require you to assign copyright to them. However, they definitely do recommend that you do, as then they can go after GPL violations involving the code. If you retain copyright, then you'd have to do it yourself, and most people don't have the FSF's resources.
While I don't doubt that, nVidia at least has been caught cheating in their drivers before now to get better scores in benchmarking software, and I certainly remember them releasing new drivers to improve performance in popular games that reportedly broke other, less popular ones.
Even now, the latest nVidia drivers (which the Bioshock demo recommends you install) has caused a few minor glitches in Oblivion (for me at least), and that's hardly an old game.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds awfully similar to a race condition (it clearly isn't one, but it certainly *looks* like one), which would seem to me to mean that it would have all the same dependencies on the vagaries of system load. I'm not saying that this would be impossible to pull off, just difficult to do so consistently.
Of course, depending on what you're actually trying to achieve, consistency may not be an issue.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
My first PC came "pre-installed" (bought second-hand) with the original release of Win 95. I progressed from there through Win 98, to a variety of Linuxes, then Win 2k and now XP Pro, with a view to getting Vista next time I upgrade my system.
I went almost all-Linux for a couple of years - all-Linux at work, dual-booting at home to play games. I went back to Windows, as a matter of personal choice.
Not everyone agrees with you, your opinions, or your preferences. As other posters have pointed out, some of us really do choose Windows, even with reasonably extensive experience of at least some of the alternatives.
If they're using a desktop operating system for server tasks, whether it be XP, OS X or Ubuntu, then yes, I think they should be avoided if possible.
I believe MS deems itself a "trusted site" even if you specifically tell Vista it isn't.
I imagine that the reasoning behind that would be to prevent malware from setting MS's sites as untrusted, thus potentially screwing with your machine's ability to download and install updates, thus leaving it open to further exploitation in the future.
Or it could be part of an Evil Plan for World Domination; I can tell which you've already chosen.
It gets annoying long before the tenth "my computer rebooted and I have updates turned off - did we have power/network/useless sysadmin problems" conversation.
Then there's something else going on, because I have never had any PC reboot mysteriously because of an update.
If you install an update but keep hitting "restart later", eventually it'll give you the "restart now or later" dialogue with a timer on it. However, you do have to keep hitting "later" for that to happen, as I've seen ad-hoc servers (ie desktop machines running XP used as ad hoc dev servers by project team) prompting for a restart for literally months.
Whenever [Your Country] laws get harmonized with international laws, it's usually because the international laws are weaker.
Well in this particular case, I agree that that's what Google is pushing for. However, in my experience the opposite is generally true - see for example copyright laws.
I think in the case of businesses pushing for harmonisation of laws it would be more generally true to say that push to harmonise in the direction that most benefits them. Hence the US and WTO pushing for companies to sign up to the Berne convention and/or implement their own version of the DMCA, Google pushing for privacy laws to be harmonised to a lower common denominator (if not the lowest), etc.
i'm amazed that a pc world customer had heard of linux, nevermind installed it
I've bought two PCs from PC World over the course of the last 5 years or so. I don't use Linux now, but for a couple of years it was my primary OS. In my time I've upgraded my kernel and gcc from source, manually upgrade from libc5 to glibc, hand-hacked modeline entries in my XF86Config file when my monitor wasn't detected properly, etc.
So, having established some geek credibility, why'd I buy from PC World? Simple - they had a sale on and were offering "buy now, pay in a year" finance. I didn't need their help, advice or support, I just needed a PC and didn't have the money right then.
The annoying thing is that most people who buy from them do need advice, and the sales staff (in my limited experience) simply aren't qualified to give any.