The problem, the way that I see it, is that a lot of people out there are making a lot of money off of people whom need accessibility by providing the promise of accessibility, but not actually providing the quality itself. What do I mean by this? Look at the following quote:
Freedom Scientific supports Office, Notes and Corel's WordPerfect Office with its market-leading Job Access With Speech screen reader, said Eric Damery, vice president of software product management at the company. Supporting applications in its screen reader -- typically referred to by its acronym, JAWS -- is "a big undertaking," Damery said. He added that the demand for OpenDocument-compatible office software "has not been that great."
Think about it for a minute now, why does this need to be difficult? The answer is that it doesn't. If actual accessibility were being provided it would be application independent, not tied to a specific software application or application vendor. This is indeed the real meat of the problem. So what do we need then? How about accessibility support built into the underlying APIs that applications on any particular platform or environment (I really don't care which, all have their merits and problems) can quickly, cheaply, and easily be made accessible by coders whom don't understand all of the nit-picky things about accessibility that a differently abled (I know it sounds PC, but it is closer to the truth, trust me) user would quickly notice. In short, users should not have to wait until application vendors and programmers have millions of dollars and man-hours available to spend making their program play nicely with one specific so-called accessibility interface (which won't help users using some other interface) just to be able to use software the rest of us can easily make use of. As is often said about websites: Accessibility needs to be designed in from the ground up--a lesson which should apply to all computer-related systems. I already apply accessibility practices to all of my work (in the web sphere), so I know it isn't that difficult. So really now, whom in the API-level programming world is ready to stop complaining and take this issue on in a truly complete an meaningful manner?
Sorry hypocrites, you can't have it both ways. China is a sovereign state, so while you may disagree, YOU have no right sticking your nose in their business, or spreading so-called "American values".
So I suppose that Americans (or more properly, USA-ians) shouldn't buy Chinese goods (or stop buying them--take you pick as it doesn't matter which example you want to use) either, because doing so changes the economic balance of China?
Which is more disrespectful of Eastern Cultures and Peoples: Providing "help" that isn't wanted, or failing to provide it when it is wanted?
It is thought by supporters of digital audio that the fans of vinyl got so used to it they think it is actually a more "faithful" to the real sound, when it is actually the other way around.
Ok, I'll bite.
If you've ever played a musical instrument in a room with a bunch of other people doing the same thing, or sung as part of a well-trained chorus then you know that anything which is not completely analog in nature cannot reproduce sound perfectly. The reason that older analog systems got a bad rap was indeed due to the SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the equipment and the fact that the physical contact needed to read the medium tended to degrade the storage medium over time.
cgenman actually does seem to have a decent (if not completely correctly explained) understanding of the forces at work. This Wikipedia chunk deals more with the perception than with the core problems of a time division quantization system as related to reproducing music.
The core issue (as I see it) which makes digital audio sound "funny" (other than morons compressing the audio--the audio/signals term, which does not have the same meaning as digital compression, reffering to signal distortion applied to a signal to keep it from having an abrupt "digital" peak and therefore allowing more "swing" between high and low amplitude on average, making the apparent volume higher) is that even with the companding (decrease in audio bandwidth) of the audio by the digital system (something that most people--read most 40-something males, as that is indeed the common target market--can't hear) somehow compensated for (think high-quality MIDI) there is still the problem that the sounds can only begin or end 44,100,000 times a second--something which is actually noticable to anybody whom is or has been an active musician.
To understand this it is helpful to look to the eye (which has the same types of limitations applied to it in this example). We are assuming that the frequency reproduction is 100% faithful (something which regular speakers just are not capable of but a good set of reference horns can do more than just reasonably well) in this example (as the eye is much more forgiving in the frequency realm than the time realm). If a rod/core in the eye fires off it then takes ~1/20th of a second to "precharge" before it can "fire" again (this is really an oversimplification, but it is good enough for government work). This is where the idea that the eye can't perceive change faster than 20 times per second comes from--itself an oversimplification of an oversimplification. Indeed any one unit of perception in the eye cannot refresh faster than 20 times per second--but that does not mean that the eye as a whole cannot percieve changes faster than 20 times per second. The motion blur in analog capture (film or digital storage) movies softens this perceptual edge--but does not eliminate it (as you will find if you attempt to go watch a movie in a cinema with a migrane I am told--same applies to those fluorescent lights at work).
How does this lesson apply to the ear? Well, the same type of perceptual backend is at work in both cases--with nearly the same limitations. In both cases the processing engine attached to them is capable of dealing with those limits and making a cohesive perception out of the input. The key reason why this works is because inputs can arrive asynchronously (the antithesis of how most modern digital systems work). This is also why increasing the frame-rate on true digital stop-motion animation matters (something which can even be noted while watching Wallace and Gromit)--not all of the sensor elements report at once.
The same happens to be true of audio that is true of video in this case--the timbre of the sound (and the interaction between multiple sources) is better reproduced at higher sample rates even if the percievable raw frequency range is not increased, and many humans can percieve this chang
"Praytell, what exactly in the skin was so flammable?" The outer skin of the Hindenburg was coated with an aluminum-based powder paint. This is the so-called "rocket fuel" everyone keeps referring to. It burned first, and it burned hot--but it didn't ignite immediately due to the fact that the whole thing was held together with steel cables (which grounded the charge). Oh, and as for the burn rate one simple term can explain it clearly: surface area. "Praytell, why did even Bain's own experiment take a Jacob's ladder to ignite and the material extinguished itself?" The skin itself wasn't nearly as flammable as the aluminum powder coating. In fact it was treated to be flame retardant. "Praytell, why is there so much skin left over?" Again, much of the skin itself didn't burn--the coating did. "Praytell, why did it burn along gas cell lines?" Huh? Gas cells were not terminated at the surface of the craft. Sure, close inspection of the photographic evidence makes it look like the burning is only taking place along certian fronts--but this is what one would expect anyway.
Also, the flame reported by bystanders was a yellow flame (indicative of aluminum burning) and not a blue-violet (and also mostly ultraviolet) flame (which would have been indicative of the hydrogen itself burning). Another thing most people wouldn't think of in these modern days: the picture (so often used--we all know which one) would not have shown as bright a flame if it were indeed just a blue hydrogen flame. Black and White photographic processes have always been much more sensitive to yellow light than blue light. Another thing that you note is the heat of the hydrogen flame--which in an of itself is correct. There is one problem with your assertion about incandecence, however--the flame front for the hydrogen was NOT the surface of the dirigible (nor could it have been for more than a couple of miliseconds--due to the temperature of the flame itself, the craft's surface would have been obliterated in the burn region; something which would not happen with the aluminum paint burning).
The main problem with x86 chips and true virtualization (taking one of something and pretending to have many of it) is that some rather commonly used instructions modify global properties of the processor. What VMWare (and everybody else, for that matter) does is checks for those instructions and emulates them out of the bytestream executed on the real CPU. Some projects/products have tried for a "safe execution" mode, where all branches lead to known safe destinations (this is how the original Plex86 works--and why it can be quite slow at times), but I don't know if VMWare does this or not. For all I know, VMWare could just be encapsulating code run at each ring-level (ring0 is kernel mode, and has the world as its oyster--ring3 is user mode, and is mostly CPU bound) and only dealing with the "unvirtulizable" instructions commonly used in each ring-level (which would virtualize a hell of a lot faster than checking the for the whole set of unvirtualizable instructions, as you may have guessed)--and then catching hardware access attempts in some other manner. In the case of Plex86, I know that what slowed it down most was the time it spent in userland emulating the hardware and pre-scanning the code for improper addresses (and chaning them) or touchy instructions (breaks, jumps, idles, state changes, etc.)--the kernelspace execution was reasonably zippy. In any case, to overcome the need to pre-scan the code for globally reaching instructions one would effectively need to partition the CPU (in a true x86 implementation) and have some way of letting code run in one partition be aware of code run in the "slave" partition (and meanwhile also not letting the slave talk directly to the real hardware devices, mind you). I'm guessing that AMD/Intel are going to make a minor adjustment to their multi-core dies (and the firmware/microcode they run on....yes CPUs can have both firmware and microcode now) to allow this--and probably supply the outside world with access to this property via some sort of BIOS/ACPI endpoint/virtual device to talk to.
True, these are not minor developments in the world of XEN. I, however also have a training in CPU design and can tell you that there is a whole hey of a lot more than meets the eye with all of this.
While the project has kinda been in extended hibernation while I figure out how to make it compile on newer kernels with newer GCC versions, Plex86 (the original, on savannah) would run unmodified guest OS code. It wasn't fast mind you, but it was/is elegant (and I hope that it will be again--Kevin Lawton & Co. wrote some really cool code that mere mortals like myself now have to figure out what to do with....). Now that I have a real job, and am working on putting together a development machine with a little more horsepower I hope to make it work again--and to make it faster. The other unmodified guest hosting options out there are QEMU and Bochs (also by Kevin Lawton) both of I which have have also used at various times. They both use different technologies (and bochs was code-compatible with the original Plex86 for a while--until they made the UI too heavy....oh well). I've been wanting to make a lightweight Plex86-based host for a while now, but that will probably go kinda slowly......
"Once the market is actually deregulated and SBC actually has to compete for local service, things will be much better." Unfortunately you don't seem to know whom owns your phone lines, or if you do you don't grasp the full significance of the reason WHY they do. The fact of the matter is that it does not make a whole hell of a lot of sense to run phone lines for multiple companies along each set of telephone poles out there. Sure, this would provide the true "last mile" competition that we so dearly would need in a truly market-driven system--but telephone and telco economics actually has very little to do with the economy of the micro-market of any one locality. Unless and until telecommunications is handled the way that roads are, "last mile" competition will be a pipe dream. What do I mean by this? Roads are owned by the "public" but are built by a private contractor and maintained by one or several private contractors in a not exacly open bidding system. It isn't a perfect solution, but it is progress compared to the days of the Toll Roads in the stagecoach days (the same Toll Roads that give us Toll House Cookies, coincidentally enough)--when each and every actually maintained large roadway was privately owned. Now roads are considered local, state, and national infrastructure (despite that is a horrible misuse of the term "national"), but for some reason two major "infrastructure" items are still privately owned: Telephone/Internet and Electrical Power Distribution--leaving supposedly critical infrastructure up to the whims of a profit-driven entity without much (if any) true oversight. This is why the model of roadways is so important--in effect power lines and phone lines are the roadways of electricity and information respectively. Does it not make sense for such "roadways" to be held in the public trust (but maintained and serviced by individual companies, possibly local--to avoid the obvious evil of a national telco or national power company)? Deregulation, per se, will not fix this problem--but do we have the stomach to do what is necessary to fix the problem (as opposed to bandy about broad terms of economic ideals that don't apply to the real world)?
Just a little correction.... The LEC is not always one of the big "baby bells," it is sometimes a small one. Note, this does not mean that "last mile" service is any better--especially with respect to broadband.
>How does that not break the "1 person, 1 vote" rule?
Ummm......., you seem to be confusing the original idea (which was that you should not be able to express your will more than any other person) with the slogan attached to that idea. Remember if you (and all other eligible voters) were to have n-1 "vote tokens" to allocate to n candidates and you only did that once per election that would still hold true to the ideal behind the "1 person, 1 vote" slogan.
Another system that would work would be to ask each voter to rate each candidate on a 0 to 10 (or 9, if you only want 10 options) scale, possibly including a "no oppinion box" (which would cause no change to the relevant candidate's "tally") as well. Again, so long as each individual only completes the election process once per election the ideal behind "1 person, 1 vote" is upheld.
The real reason that some academics usually tout for not chaging the system is that change is bad because people will have to adapt (as if they don't already) and that any change to the voting system will disenfranchise poor voters (again, if all is done carefully--which it isn't right now--then the votes will manage to complete their ballots anyway).
Does that translate "The common sense itself is not common?" Just checking... If it does, then Voltaire has given yet another quotable to add to the list.
I think the real question is: "When does something become standard Public infrastructure?"
Remeber, for a good long while all long maintained roads in the USA were privately owned. Eventually the people realized why this was no longer a good idea (making the endlessly debatable assumption that it was a good idea to create new roads in this fashon in the first place)--larger critical roads were bought and/or expropriated and are now public property in most cases.
If you work for them then tell them to fix their firewalls so that they stop excessively tracerouting machines out on the general internet. I (and other admins) find this horribly annoying.
"Touring is expensive and is usually done to promote an album release."
Apparently you haven't done your research either. Touring was, until recently, a way for artists to raise money that was entirely their own (which then, paradoxically, often went to pay off their debts to the record companies). Clear Channel Communications has been working with at least one of the record companies to change this practice--so the artist is getting screwed three times and not just twice (one:royalties,two:debts for publishing,three:having the ability to pay off those debts compromised). This discussion doesn't even begin to cover the rest of what is wrong with the industry--payola for example. SO yes, the problem is the RIAA and the record companies--the artists likely lost money in the publishing deal, and are not going to make any royalties at all until the record company has "recouped its losses," something which could take the rest of the artists' natural lives to happen. In case it wasn't clear already, most artists make their money performing--they do not make money selling CDs. (If you are at all familiar with the history of the recording industry, then you likely already knew all of this. The Carter Family was a perfect example of this misinterpretation of the public as to how the artist get paid. They didn't get rich, there were no royalties at the time--only one time payments.)
True As Stated. That said, a few changes, despite the expense of making them, should have been made a hell of a long time ago. Currently, domestic flights in the USA all use AM radio for communication, both air-to-air and air-to-ground by default. I seem to recall it being noted in Salon.com's Ask the Pilot at one point in time that Single Side Band (SSB) radio is now being used for some international flights, but for the most part everything is still plain old AM. This is the case despite the fact that the worst ever On-the-ground (and at the airport, to be clear--as if I should need to) airplane accident ever was caused by a well-known radio-system related problem that has been with us since the beginning. The problem (for those too lazy to read): if two or more people try to talk at once all speakers are drowned out by interference (when both have equal or near-equal signal strength at the recieving antenna). SSB radio does not suffer quite so strongly from this problem (but it is not completely immune), and it is not notably expensive. In fact, any aircraft set up for international travel already has the correct radio equipment to make the change from AM to SSB. So, if you really must fix something, this should be it. If only it didn't require lots of human changes (things like rules and assigned airport tower frequencies) to put in place this would likely have been done a good long time ago. Again, the cost is not in the airplane, but it is in the society that wants air travel at the lowest cost (and without having to know anything about why it should cost a little bit more--just to be safe).
Now if only enjoying Engineering and being decently good at it would get one hired. Unfortunately HR folks rely on the GPA (of recent graduates, and people without "substantive corporate experience") to weed people out. That would be great, but in my experience only a few of the Engineering majors with good GPAs had any idea what they were doing. Most of us with shitty ones could tell you at least a year later where we started to solve a particular problem--because we actually learned how to do it instead of cramming on everything.
A problem that I don't expect all of this to sort out is that unlike most other infrastructure required for the daily function of the USA (roads, water mains, sewers, airways, seaways, canals & rivers, and others) Telecommunications and Power Distribution are still owned by private companies wholly and completely on a local monopoly basis. (Railways are the other exception that I am aware of. I don't know how the subways are managed, but I suspect those are government owned and run.) This was a good way to build these systems out when they were meerly a luxury of those whom could pay the fees (like the old toll roads of the 1800's), but the time has come to centrallize the ownership of these essential portions of the country's infrastructure. These are no longer optional systems in the infrastructure of the USA. I do not think, however, that we should have a single government telco or power company. What would make a great deal of sense would be to take a cue from how roads are currently maintained in many places, and have the various telcos and power companies bid to maintain the infrastructure of each locality and the backbone for each region in a competitive fashion every 3-4 years. Current owners of infrastructure would be compensated (most likely over time) for the cash value of the resources that are turned over to local and regional ownership. This would be the base tier of the system--and interoperability would need to be mandated by law.
The middle teir of services would still be provided for by the existing telcos and power companies (mapping phone numbers to endpoints, for instance--and controlling energy flows)--as would the customer service, "optional services" (call waiting, voice mail, etc. for phone service), and metering at the "front end" of things. There would technically be no requirement that the two actually be done by the same people (and they often aren't at this point anyway). There's more rant where that came from, but I'll hold on it for now. Any better ideas out there? (Please hold on the free-market ideology--it obviously didn't fix the problem now did it?)
True, but for demonstration purposes it makes sense to be able to just run a pre-written script and show the result to the students for immediate discussion when time is of the essence as it is in a high school environment.
It is not about spoon feeding them--it is about not wasting time that could be spent talking about what is going on and answering their questions by instead putting little dots on a graph (something that I learned how to do early in the 7th grade, and you don't need to be shown how to do repeatedly)
As somebody whom has had to correct the work of students before, I can tell you that it is enormously frustating work when you know that the student has down the concept that you are currently working on but is making mistakes (often of the simple careless type) in less complex or related concepts--causing the student to get the wrong answer, become frustated, and often fail to realize (now matter how much you reassure them) that they did it right the first time and messed something else up--not the concept that they were trying to learn (and therefore the concept that they assume is the source of all errors). Calculators can help, if used properly, to lessen the number of arithmetic errors that the students make in the hurried frenzy to get the problem done and find out if the answer they have devised (but not yet calculated the numeric value of) is correct. Working slower would be a solution to the problem if it were not for the fact that students in general are being assigned more homework in the very conceptual and complicated classes (that we are talking about) than ever before (while the students in less advanced classes are doing a lot less homework than in the past, despite the fact that it would actually benefit them more). Allowing the students to use technology is a way around the perceived need to drown students in work to teach them new concepts.
I seem to recall that Socrates was reported as saying (by his disciple, Plato) to another orator something to the order of: "Why should any man interested in learning pay you to hear you talk?" I feel basically the same way about my college degree.
Slashdot Mirror
What do I mean by this? Look at the following quote:Think about it for a minute now, why does this need to be difficult? The answer is that it doesn't.
If actual accessibility were being provided it would be application independent, not tied to a specific software application or application vendor. This is indeed the real meat of the problem.
So what do we need then? How about accessibility support built into the underlying APIs that applications on any particular platform or environment (I really don't care which, all have their merits and problems) can quickly, cheaply, and easily be made accessible by coders whom don't understand all of the nit-picky things about accessibility that a differently abled (I know it sounds PC, but it is closer to the truth, trust me) user would quickly notice.
In short, users should not have to wait until application vendors and programmers have millions of dollars and man-hours available to spend making their program play nicely with one specific so-called accessibility interface (which won't help users using some other interface) just to be able to use software the rest of us can easily make use of.
As is often said about websites: Accessibility needs to be designed in from the ground up--a lesson which should apply to all computer-related systems.
I already apply accessibility practices to all of my work (in the web sphere), so I know it isn't that difficult. So really now, whom in the API-level programming world is ready to stop complaining and take this issue on in a truly complete an meaningful manner?
So I suppose that Americans (or more properly, USA-ians) shouldn't buy Chinese goods (or stop buying them--take you pick as it doesn't matter which example you want to use) either, because doing so changes the economic balance of China?
Which is more disrespectful of Eastern Cultures and Peoples: Providing "help" that isn't wanted, or failing to provide it when it is wanted?
Ok, I'll bite.
If you've ever played a musical instrument in a room with a bunch of other people doing the same thing, or sung as part of a well-trained chorus then you know that anything which is not completely analog in nature cannot reproduce sound perfectly. The reason that older analog systems got a bad rap was indeed due to the SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the equipment and the fact that the physical contact needed to read the medium tended to degrade the storage medium over time.
cgenman actually does seem to have a decent (if not completely correctly explained) understanding of the forces at work. This Wikipedia chunk deals more with the perception than with the core problems of a time division quantization system as related to reproducing music.
The core issue (as I see it) which makes digital audio sound "funny" (other than morons compressing the audio--the audio/signals term, which does not have the same meaning as digital compression, reffering to signal distortion applied to a signal to keep it from having an abrupt "digital" peak and therefore allowing more "swing" between high and low amplitude on average, making the apparent volume higher) is that even with the companding (decrease in audio bandwidth) of the audio by the digital system (something that most people--read most 40-something males, as that is indeed the common target market--can't hear) somehow compensated for (think high-quality MIDI) there is still the problem that the sounds can only begin or end 44,100,000 times a second--something which is actually noticable to anybody whom is or has been an active musician.
To understand this it is helpful to look to the eye (which has the same types of limitations applied to it in this example). We are assuming that the frequency reproduction is 100% faithful (something which regular speakers just are not capable of but a good set of reference horns can do more than just reasonably well) in this example (as the eye is much more forgiving in the frequency realm than the time realm). If a rod/core in the eye fires off it then takes ~1/20th of a second to "precharge" before it can "fire" again (this is really an oversimplification, but it is good enough for government work). This is where the idea that the eye can't perceive change faster than 20 times per second comes from--itself an oversimplification of an oversimplification. Indeed any one unit of perception in the eye cannot refresh faster than 20 times per second--but that does not mean that the eye as a whole cannot percieve changes faster than 20 times per second. The motion blur in analog capture (film or digital storage) movies softens this perceptual edge--but does not eliminate it (as you will find if you attempt to go watch a movie in a cinema with a migrane I am told--same applies to those fluorescent lights at work).
How does this lesson apply to the ear? Well, the same type of perceptual backend is at work in both cases--with nearly the same limitations. In both cases the processing engine attached to them is capable of dealing with those limits and making a cohesive perception out of the input. The key reason why this works is because inputs can arrive asynchronously (the antithesis of how most modern digital systems work). This is also why increasing the frame-rate on true digital stop-motion animation matters (something which can even be noted while watching Wallace and Gromit)--not all of the sensor elements report at once.
The same happens to be true of audio that is true of video in this case--the timbre of the sound (and the interaction between multiple sources) is better reproduced at higher sample rates even if the percievable raw frequency range is not increased, and many humans can percieve this chang
"Praytell, what exactly in the skin was so flammable?"
The outer skin of the Hindenburg was coated with an aluminum-based powder paint. This is the so-called "rocket fuel" everyone keeps referring to. It burned first, and it burned hot--but it didn't ignite immediately due to the fact that the whole thing was held together with steel cables (which grounded the charge). Oh, and as for the burn rate one simple term can explain it clearly: surface area.
"Praytell, why did even Bain's own experiment take a Jacob's ladder to ignite and the material extinguished itself?"
The skin itself wasn't nearly as flammable as the aluminum powder coating. In fact it was treated to be flame retardant.
"Praytell, why is there so much skin left over?"
Again, much of the skin itself didn't burn--the coating did.
"Praytell, why did it burn along gas cell lines?"
Huh? Gas cells were not terminated at the surface of the craft. Sure, close inspection of the photographic evidence makes it look like the burning is only taking place along certian fronts--but this is what one would expect anyway.
Also, the flame reported by bystanders was a yellow flame (indicative of aluminum burning) and not a blue-violet (and also mostly ultraviolet) flame (which would have been indicative of the hydrogen itself burning). Another thing most people wouldn't think of in these modern days: the picture (so often used--we all know which one) would not have shown as bright a flame if it were indeed just a blue hydrogen flame. Black and White photographic processes have always been much more sensitive to yellow light than blue light.
Another thing that you note is the heat of the hydrogen flame--which in an of itself is correct. There is one problem with your assertion about incandecence, however--the flame front for the hydrogen was NOT the surface of the dirigible (nor could it have been for more than a couple of miliseconds--due to the temperature of the flame itself, the craft's surface would have been obliterated in the burn region; something which would not happen with the aluminum paint burning).
The main problem with x86 chips and true virtualization (taking one of something and pretending to have many of it) is that some rather commonly used instructions modify global properties of the processor.
What VMWare (and everybody else, for that matter) does is checks for those instructions and emulates them out of the bytestream executed on the real CPU. Some projects/products have tried for a "safe execution" mode, where all branches lead to known safe destinations (this is how the original Plex86 works--and why it can be quite slow at times), but I don't know if VMWare does this or not. For all I know, VMWare could just be encapsulating code run at each ring-level (ring0 is kernel mode, and has the world as its oyster--ring3 is user mode, and is mostly CPU bound) and only dealing with the "unvirtulizable" instructions commonly used in each ring-level (which would virtualize a hell of a lot faster than checking the for the whole set of unvirtualizable instructions, as you may have guessed)--and then catching hardware access attempts in some other manner.
In the case of Plex86, I know that what slowed it down most was the time it spent in userland emulating the hardware and pre-scanning the code for improper addresses (and chaning them) or touchy instructions (breaks, jumps, idles, state changes, etc.)--the kernelspace execution was reasonably zippy.
In any case, to overcome the need to pre-scan the code for globally reaching instructions one would effectively need to partition the CPU (in a true x86 implementation) and have some way of letting code run in one partition be aware of code run in the "slave" partition (and meanwhile also not letting the slave talk directly to the real hardware devices, mind you). I'm guessing that AMD/Intel are going to make a minor adjustment to their multi-core dies (and the firmware/microcode they run on....yes CPUs can have both firmware and microcode now) to allow this--and probably supply the outside world with access to this property via some sort of BIOS/ACPI endpoint/virtual device to talk to.
True, these are not minor developments in the world of XEN.
I, however also have a training in CPU design and can tell you that there is a whole hey of a lot more than meets the eye with all of this.
I'll believe it when I see it.
While the project has kinda been in extended hibernation while I figure out how to make it compile on newer kernels with newer GCC versions, Plex86 (the original, on savannah) would run unmodified guest OS code. It wasn't fast mind you, but it was/is elegant (and I hope that it will be again--Kevin Lawton & Co. wrote some really cool code that mere mortals like myself now have to figure out what to do with....). Now that I have a real job, and am working on putting together a development machine with a little more horsepower I hope to make it work again--and to make it faster.
The other unmodified guest hosting options out there are QEMU and Bochs (also by Kevin Lawton) both of I which have have also used at various times. They both use different technologies (and bochs was code-compatible with the original Plex86 for a while--until they made the UI too heavy....oh well).
I've been wanting to make a lightweight Plex86-based host for a while now, but that will probably go kinda slowly......
"Once the market is actually deregulated and SBC actually has to compete for local service, things will be much better."
Unfortunately you don't seem to know whom owns your phone lines, or if you do you don't grasp the full significance of the reason WHY they do. The fact of the matter is that it does not make a whole hell of a lot of sense to run phone lines for multiple companies along each set of telephone poles out there. Sure, this would provide the true "last mile" competition that we so dearly would need in a truly market-driven system--but telephone and telco economics actually has very little to do with the economy of the micro-market of any one locality.
Unless and until telecommunications is handled the way that roads are, "last mile" competition will be a pipe dream.
What do I mean by this? Roads are owned by the "public" but are built by a private contractor and maintained by one or several private contractors in a not exacly open bidding system. It isn't a perfect solution, but it is progress compared to the days of the Toll Roads in the stagecoach days (the same Toll Roads that give us Toll House Cookies, coincidentally enough)--when each and every actually maintained large roadway was privately owned.
Now roads are considered local, state, and national infrastructure (despite that is a horrible misuse of the term "national"), but for some reason two major "infrastructure" items are still privately owned: Telephone/Internet and Electrical Power Distribution--leaving supposedly critical infrastructure up to the whims of a profit-driven entity without much (if any) true oversight. This is why the model of roadways is so important--in effect power lines and phone lines are the roadways of electricity and information respectively. Does it not make sense for such "roadways" to be held in the public trust (but maintained and serviced by individual companies, possibly local--to avoid the obvious evil of a national telco or national power company)?
Deregulation, per se, will not fix this problem--but do we have the stomach to do what is necessary to fix the problem (as opposed to bandy about broad terms of economic ideals that don't apply to the real world)?
Just a little correction....
The LEC is not always one of the big "baby bells," it is sometimes a small one. Note, this does not mean that "last mile" service is any better--especially with respect to broadband.
>How does that not break the "1 person, 1 vote" rule?
Ummm......., you seem to be confusing the original idea (which was that you should not be able to express your will more than any other person) with the slogan attached to that idea. Remember if you (and all other eligible voters) were to have n-1 "vote tokens" to allocate to n candidates and you only did that once per election that would still hold true to the ideal behind the "1 person, 1 vote" slogan.
Another system that would work would be to ask each voter to rate each candidate on a 0 to 10 (or 9, if you only want 10 options) scale, possibly including a "no oppinion box" (which would cause no change to the relevant candidate's "tally") as well. Again, so long as each individual only completes the election process once per election the ideal behind "1 person, 1 vote" is upheld.
The real reason that some academics usually tout for not chaging the system is that change is bad because people will have to adapt (as if they don't already) and that any change to the voting system will disenfranchise poor voters (again, if all is done carefully--which it isn't right now--then the votes will manage to complete their ballots anyway).
Does that translate "The common sense itself is not common?" Just checking...
If it does, then Voltaire has given yet another quotable to add to the list.
I think the real question is: "When does something become standard Public infrastructure?"
Remeber, for a good long while all long maintained roads in the USA were privately owned. Eventually the people realized why this was no longer a good idea (making the endlessly debatable assumption that it was a good idea to create new roads in this fashon in the first place)--larger critical roads were bought and/or expropriated and are now public property in most cases.
If you work for them then tell them to fix their firewalls so that they stop excessively tracerouting machines out on the general internet. I (and other admins) find this horribly annoying.
I thought that Verizon bought GTE...
"Touring is expensive and is usually done to promote an album release."
Apparently you haven't done your research either. Touring was, until recently, a way for artists to raise money that was entirely their own (which then, paradoxically, often went to pay off their debts to the record companies). Clear Channel Communications has been working with at least one of the record companies to change this practice--so the artist is getting screwed three times and not just twice (one:royalties,two:debts for publishing,three:having the ability to pay off those debts compromised). This discussion doesn't even begin to cover the rest of what is wrong with the industry--payola for example. SO yes, the problem is the RIAA and the record companies--the artists likely lost money in the publishing deal, and are not going to make any royalties at all until the record company has "recouped its losses," something which could take the rest of the artists' natural lives to happen.
In case it wasn't clear already, most artists make their money performing--they do not make money selling CDs.
(If you are at all familiar with the history of the recording industry, then you likely already knew all of this. The Carter Family was a perfect example of this misinterpretation of the public as to how the artist get paid. They didn't get rich, there were no royalties at the time--only one time payments.)
True As Stated. That said, a few changes, despite the expense of making them, should have been made a hell of a long time ago.
Currently, domestic flights in the USA all use AM radio for communication, both air-to-air and air-to-ground by default. I seem to recall it being noted in Salon.com's Ask the Pilot at one point in time that Single Side Band (SSB) radio is now being used for some international flights, but for the most part everything is still plain old AM. This is the case despite the fact that the worst ever On-the-ground (and at the airport, to be clear--as if I should need to) airplane accident ever was caused by a well-known radio-system related problem that has been with us since the beginning.
The problem (for those too lazy to read): if two or more people try to talk at once all speakers are drowned out by interference (when both have equal or near-equal signal strength at the recieving antenna). SSB radio does not suffer quite so strongly from this problem (but it is not completely immune), and it is not notably expensive. In fact, any aircraft set up for international travel already has the correct radio equipment to make the change from AM to SSB.
So, if you really must fix something, this should be it. If only it didn't require lots of human changes (things like rules and assigned airport tower frequencies) to put in place this would likely have been done a good long time ago. Again, the cost is not in the airplane, but it is in the society that wants air travel at the lowest cost (and without having to know anything about why it should cost a little bit more--just to be safe).
I have a Win98SE with 768MB of RAM, and it does both see and use all of it, trust me.
Now if only enjoying Engineering and being decently good at it would get one hired. Unfortunately HR folks rely on the GPA (of recent graduates, and people without "substantive corporate experience") to weed people out. That would be great, but in my experience only a few of the Engineering majors with good GPAs had any idea what they were doing. Most of us with shitty ones could tell you at least a year later where we started to solve a particular problem--because we actually learned how to do it instead of cramming on everything.
Agreed. Anybody want to venture speculation as to why people under the age of forty so rarely bother to vote?
A problem that I don't expect all of this to sort out is that unlike most other infrastructure required for the daily function of the USA (roads, water mains, sewers, airways, seaways, canals & rivers, and others) Telecommunications and Power Distribution are still owned by private companies wholly and completely on a local monopoly basis. (Railways are the other exception that I am aware of. I don't know how the subways are managed, but I suspect those are government owned and run.) This was a good way to build these systems out when they were meerly a luxury of those whom could pay the fees (like the old toll roads of the 1800's), but the time has come to centrallize the ownership of these essential portions of the country's infrastructure. These are no longer optional systems in the infrastructure of the USA.
I do not think, however, that we should have a single government telco or power company. What would make a great deal of sense would be to take a cue from how roads are currently maintained in many places, and have the various telcos and power companies bid to maintain the infrastructure of each locality and the backbone for each region in a competitive fashion every 3-4 years. Current owners of infrastructure would be compensated (most likely over time) for the cash value of the resources that are turned over to local and regional ownership. This would be the base tier of the system--and interoperability would need to be mandated by law.
The middle teir of services would still be provided for by the existing telcos and power companies (mapping phone numbers to endpoints, for instance--and controlling energy flows)--as would the customer service, "optional services" (call waiting, voice mail, etc. for phone service), and metering at the "front end" of things. There would technically be no requirement that the two actually be done by the same people (and they often aren't at this point anyway).
There's more rant where that came from, but I'll hold on it for now. Any better ideas out there? (Please hold on the free-market ideology--it obviously didn't fix the problem now did it?)
True, but for demonstration purposes it makes sense to be able to just run a pre-written script and show the result to the students for immediate discussion when time is of the essence as it is in a high school environment.
It is not about spoon feeding them--it is about not wasting time that could be spent talking about what is going on and answering their questions by instead putting little dots on a graph (something that I learned how to do early in the 7th grade, and you don't need to be shown how to do repeatedly)
As somebody whom has had to correct the work of students before, I can tell you that it is enormously frustating work when you know that the student has down the concept that you are currently working on but is making mistakes (often of the simple careless type) in less complex or related concepts--causing the student to get the wrong answer, become frustated, and often fail to realize (now matter how much you reassure them) that they did it right the first time and messed something else up--not the concept that they were trying to learn (and therefore the concept that they assume is the source of all errors).
Calculators can help, if used properly, to lessen the number of arithmetic errors that the students make in the hurried frenzy to get the problem done and find out if the answer they have devised (but not yet calculated the numeric value of) is correct. Working slower would be a solution to the problem if it were not for the fact that students in general are being assigned more homework in the very conceptual and complicated classes (that we are talking about) than ever before (while the students in less advanced classes are doing a lot less homework than in the past, despite the fact that it would actually benefit them more). Allowing the students to use technology is a way around the perceived need to drown students in work to teach them new concepts.
I seem to recall that Socrates was reported as saying (by his disciple, Plato) to another orator something to the order of: "Why should any man interested in learning pay you to hear you talk?"
I feel basically the same way about my college degree.