In (Soviet) Finland, it's illegal to bind the sales of cell phones to a certain network. It's exactly the same logic as with computers and operating systems.
It isn't really applied to computers though; when I bought my current laptop last year, I made a vague attempt at Windows refund, only to get a reply along the lines that computer+OS is a single product. I'm mainly pissed off of the fact that this probably counts for the Windows market share, even if I never accepted the EULA.
However, there is a recent exception to allow such binding for 3G phones. It's meant to accelerate the adoption of new technology, since the 3G phones are comparatively expensive. So instead of paying the full price of the phone, it's spread over a, say, 24-month service contract.
Hard disks also have maximum lifetimes. Both HDDs and flash drives reallocate damaged blocks to compensate for the problem. The question is how the two compare in practical use.
FTA:
But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game.
Incidentally, I saw a lecture on the topic quite recently, and learned that Muslims do believe in Jesus Christ. He is a highly regarded prophet, second only to Mohammed, and he plays a key role in the end-of-times scenario of Islam.
Of all the major religions in the world, Islam is the only non-Christian faith that recognises Jesus.
He didn't even bother to touch on rewritable media. I imagine they'd be much more resistant.
He did mention briefly that RW media are out of the question for archival purposes.
To make a completely unscientific point, I'd imagine there's a reason for having different technologies for R and RW. If RW media outlasted R, why would there be R media at all? For example, many audio CD players don't play CD-RW, but they play CD-R perfectly. This should tell something about the relative merits of the media.
I don't think your idea would actually improve his energy consumption. I don't have a 486 to test with, but some of my older Pentium systems use only ~40W fully running and loaded. My laptop uses about 80W in this state. I don't have a Mini-ITX system to test with, but suspect that the processor alone would consume than his entire 486 PC.
My laptop has a 1.6 GHz Pentium M, and the power supply is rated at 60 watts max. I've undervolted the processor so it should consume even less. Of course, most of the time it's not fully loaded.
Remember that 486's were passively cooled. There's a reason they could get away with that.
So is my Mini-ITX machine (VIA Nehemiah 1 GHz). The total max consumption of the machine is somewhere around 60 watts as well (it has a 80 watt laptop-style power supply), not counting the LCD. Most of the time it's only running as a server and the display is blanked.
Now I can turn my 4Ghz energy hog off at night, and do my downloading on the 486, which uses about as much electricity as a light bulb.
Alternatively, you could use a modern Mini-ITX machine or laptop as your only machine. It would consume about the same power as the 486 while being much more powerful as a computer.
I admit it's pretty cool that you can make use of a 486, but it's not the best solution for saving energy.
Good point. However, there's also the recycling of plastics, which is another environmentally sound practice that would increase hugely in popularity if this happened.
Back to global warming-- it seems there are lots of questions here, but it seems to me that global warming distracts from the larger issue: pollution is real, and the scarcity of energy resources is real.
Agreed. In fact it would be great if we ran out of oil right now. It would immediately kill a lot of the pollution including CO2 emissions, and force us to consider the alternatives. No amount of political reality distortion is going to create oil out of thin air.
The Nyquist rate, or twice the highest frequency, is adequate for a signal that doesn't change. However, audio consists of a set of frequencies that are constantly changing, and this reduces the highest frequency that is accurately represented at a given sampling rate.
While I don't have any reference to give you, I find it a matter of common sense.
I'm afraid you are wrong on this one. The sampling theorem is a little more complicated than what it looks like, and it requires Fourier analysis to prove properly. The whole idea of Fourier analysis is that you can represent changing frequencies as a sum of unchanging ones. That field of mathematics is a couple of centuries old and well proven in real life.
Well given that the range of frequencies that are audible is between ~20Hz to around 18-20KHz, you don't really need 96KHz for anything but mixing.
Nyquist theorem much?
Nyquist is fine and dandy if you have infinitely many signal levels. Since digital systems have only a finite number of them, you get quantization error. You can compensate for that by oversampling; for example 16 bits, 192 kHz corresponds to 17 bits, 48 kHz (ignoring fancy things like noise shaping). It's because the noise power (amplitude^2) is spread over a higher bandwidth, so you only hear the audible fraction of it.
So, oversampling is not useless, but it's probably more practical to increase the bitness. If you get into noise shaping, oversampling could be more useful because you can then push more of the noise into the ultrasound range.
My doctor is an armchair anthropologist and is more than happy to ramble on about how the human musculatory, skeletal, and even pulmonary systems are designed for standing and walking, not for sitting.Then shouldn't he be a standing anthropologist?
TFA says the most promising method of getting the air cushion is to build cavities on the underside of the ship. It takes some energy to maintain the cavities full of air, but it's a lot less than the energy required for the other methods.
However, the Vikings used the same principle centuries ago. Their way of building ships creates longitudinal grooves along the bottom of the hull, which form cushions of air at higher speeds. The overall shape of the hull also contributes to low resistance. I don't have any proper references, as I only saw this in a documentary once, but for example here is a brief mention of the idea.
so what would you do if someone started selling your work for 75% cheaper than what you sell it for, and as a result, your income dropped 50% or more?
In a world with no IP, everyone could sell anyone's work, so there would be no point in selling it anymore.
What would remain is a special relationship between the creator and the work, which can be used for selling support services, for example. In an open IP-less world people should recognize the creator as someone who knows the product best. On the other hand, if someone else is better at the support work, then more power to them. In that kind of a world, you'd have to actually work for profit, instead of relying on artificial monopolies.
An older New Scientist article on a related technique reports 7 to 25 times less light reflected, compared to optical black paint. NS also reports on the current laser-based technology.
The web today is built on transferring documents and everything else is a hack on that...
Yeah, it's funny that we use a file access metaphor to work with complex, dynamic entities.
Seriously, I think the web is a nice example of Unix philosophy in action. You have the idea of files as a transport medium, which makes things rather simple, even though you're not really dealing with files. Besides, even Windows servers and browsers use forward slash as the directory separator, so it looks like we got them pwned;)
I tried Mutt at some point, but I got frustrated at how much customization it would require to get working the way I like. It seemed like it would be easier for me to write my own mail client (as I've already worked with textmode interfaces and there are tons of libraries for the network side). Besides, after things like threaded view and maildir format came into Pine, I had no need feature-wise to use anything else but Pine.
IMHO, Pine has pretty good UI design in that it's quite easy and intuitive for beginners, but also quite customizable for experienced users. So as you grow into a power user, the software can grow with you. (It's a bit like learning Linux with a desktop environment, and gradually proceeding into deeper things like kernel hacking. Try doing the same with the beginner-only design of Windows.)
This is probably why Pine is still the recommended mail client in many universities. The only problem these days must be that text mode is often perceived as inherently difficult or outdated.
I'm not up on the pine scene but why aren't the patches folded into the upstream? Seems if you're checking out, you'd submit them all before you turn off the lights, but perhaps there is some legal reason.
These patches have been around for a long time, and I'm sure the author has suggested them for upstream merger already.
You're on the right track concerning legal reasons, which is why there's so much fuss about Pine patches compared to other software patches. In my understanding, the license forbids the distribution of unofficial versions, except for local use. You can only distribute your own version of Pine as a set of patches against the official version.
Distributions like Gentoo get around this nicely by automatically patching and compiling upon install. But the fact remains that Pine is not Free software in the sense that you would be free to distribute your improvements.
Personally, I'm not too worried as I believe the patches will find another home. I've used Pine since 1998, I think it strikes a very good balance between convenience of use and customizability, and I haven't found a decent alternative.
Also, DPMS has lost a lot of virtue with the advent of desktop lcds. It's still worthwile but you aren't going to be seeing any 50% reductions in power utilization anymore.
On the other hand, LCDs respond much faster to power on/off, so you can set a shorter delay. Since CRTs take a comparatively long time to warm up, there's a tendency to keep the delay rather long (at least 15 minutes). So with LCDs you should get more power saved than what you expect from the wattage difference.
I second the idea that you need calculus for many CS applications, for example probability and DSP, but there are also less obvious reasons to take calculus. For example, understanding the Fourier transform framework (with convolution theorem etc.) is a great eye-opener in many ways, and it comes up in surprising places. For example, Shor's factorizing algorithm depends on FT.
It's all about bandwidth, which is not the same thing as date rate. Unfortunately there's a huge marketroid conspiracy trying to teach us otherwise.
Data rate (in bps) is proportional to bandwidth (in Hz). The factor between them depends on the modulation and coding schemes, which in turn are limited by the signal/noise ratio of the medium. Anyway, the system of light sources, fiber, and receivers has a certain limited bandwidth. For example, if you're using visible light from about 400 to 750 THz, you have a bandwidth of 350 THz, assuming the fiber works across the whole spectrum.
For a naive example, imagine that it takes 35 THz of bandwidth to achieve 10 Gbps over a certain fiber. Then you can have a maximum of 10 of these channels using visible light, if you shift the center (carrier) frequencies accordingly (i.e. different colors) to avoid channel overlap.
For another explanation, imagine using a single frequency of light to send information. As soon as you start switching it on and off, you're introducing other frequencies; the spectrum gets wider, the faster you switch (see also: Fourier transform). So, if you try to use zillion distinct colors to get zillion channels, they will start to overlap at some point if you try to send any information.
Products named after the producing corporation? Holy shit!!111
You pointed out yourself that 'Linux' is the unixification of 'Linus'... therefore it is named _after_ him, which is not the same thing as being named equal to him. Wouldn't it be confusing to have an operating system with a person's name, such as... Bob?-)
Slashdot Mirror
In (Soviet) Finland, it's illegal to bind the sales of cell phones to a certain network. It's exactly the same logic as with computers and operating systems.
It isn't really applied to computers though; when I bought my current laptop last year, I made a vague attempt at Windows refund, only to get a reply along the lines that computer+OS is a single product. I'm mainly pissed off of the fact that this probably counts for the Windows market share, even if I never accepted the EULA.
However, there is a recent exception to allow such binding for 3G phones. It's meant to accelerate the adoption of new technology, since the 3G phones are comparatively expensive. So instead of paying the full price of the phone, it's spread over a, say, 24-month service contract.
Hard disks also have maximum lifetimes. Both HDDs and flash drives reallocate damaged blocks to compensate for the problem. The question is how the two compare in practical use.
Incidentally, I saw a lecture on the topic quite recently, and learned that Muslims do believe in Jesus Christ. He is a highly regarded prophet, second only to Mohammed, and he plays a key role in the end-of-times scenario of Islam.
Of all the major religions in the world, Islam is the only non-Christian faith that recognises Jesus.This is from http://www.itl.org.uk/Jesus/. Googling for "jesus islam" gives lots of further reading.
He did mention briefly that RW media are out of the question for archival purposes.
To make a completely unscientific point, I'd imagine there's a reason for having different technologies for R and RW. If RW media outlasted R, why would there be R media at all? For example, many audio CD players don't play CD-RW, but they play CD-R perfectly. This should tell something about the relative merits of the media.
My laptop has a 1.6 GHz Pentium M, and the power supply is rated at 60 watts max. I've undervolted the processor so it should consume even less. Of course, most of the time it's not fully loaded.
Remember that 486's were passively cooled. There's a reason they could get away with that.So is my Mini-ITX machine (VIA Nehemiah 1 GHz). The total max consumption of the machine is somewhere around 60 watts as well (it has a 80 watt laptop-style power supply), not counting the LCD. Most of the time it's only running as a server and the display is blanked.
Alternatively, you could use a modern Mini-ITX machine or laptop as your only machine. It would consume about the same power as the 486 while being much more powerful as a computer.
I admit it's pretty cool that you can make use of a 486, but it's not the best solution for saving energy.
Good point. However, there's also the recycling of plastics, which is another environmentally sound practice that would increase hugely in popularity if this happened.
Agreed. In fact it would be great if we ran out of oil right now. It would immediately kill a lot of the pollution including CO2 emissions, and force us to consider the alternatives. No amount of political reality distortion is going to create oil out of thin air.
Yeah, because if you're right about this God thing, then one day Jesus will come.
While I don't have any reference to give you, I find it a matter of common sense.
I'm afraid you are wrong on this one. The sampling theorem is a little more complicated than what it looks like, and it requires Fourier analysis to prove properly. The whole idea of Fourier analysis is that you can represent changing frequencies as a sum of unchanging ones. That field of mathematics is a couple of centuries old and well proven in real life.
Nyquist theorem much?
Nyquist is fine and dandy if you have infinitely many signal levels. Since digital systems have only a finite number of them, you get quantization error. You can compensate for that by oversampling; for example 16 bits, 192 kHz corresponds to 17 bits, 48 kHz (ignoring fancy things like noise shaping). It's because the noise power (amplitude^2) is spread over a higher bandwidth, so you only hear the audible fraction of it.
So, oversampling is not useless, but it's probably more practical to increase the bitness. If you get into noise shaping, oversampling could be more useful because you can then push more of the noise into the ultrasound range.
My doctor is an armchair anthropologist and is more than happy to ramble on about how the human musculatory, skeletal, and even pulmonary systems are designed for standing and walking, not for sitting.Then shouldn't he be a standing anthropologist?
TFA says the most promising method of getting the air cushion is to build cavities on the underside of the ship. It takes some energy to maintain the cavities full of air, but it's a lot less than the energy required for the other methods.
However, the Vikings used the same principle centuries ago. Their way of building ships creates longitudinal grooves along the bottom of the hull, which form cushions of air at higher speeds. The overall shape of the hull also contributes to low resistance. I don't have any proper references, as I only saw this in a documentary once, but for example here is a brief mention of the idea.
.ogg
If my gfWith the power consumption figures of PS3, I sure hope not.
In a world with no IP, everyone could sell anyone's work, so there would be no point in selling it anymore.
What would remain is a special relationship between the creator and the work, which can be used for selling support services, for example. In an open IP-less world people should recognize the creator as someone who knows the product best. On the other hand, if someone else is better at the support work, then more power to them. In that kind of a world, you'd have to actually work for profit, instead of relying on artificial monopolies.
I don't think I've ever seen a beige box computer. Most of them are some light shade of gray. Beige is more like light brown.
An older New Scientist article on a related technique reports 7 to 25 times less light reflected, compared to optical black paint. NS also reports on the current laser-based technology.
Yeah, it's funny that we use a file access metaphor to work with complex, dynamic entities.
Seriously, I think the web is a nice example of Unix philosophy in action. You have the idea of files as a transport medium, which makes things rather simple, even though you're not really dealing with files. Besides, even Windows servers and browsers use forward slash as the directory separator, so it looks like we got them pwned ;)
I tried Mutt at some point, but I got frustrated at how much customization it would require to get working the way I like. It seemed like it would be easier for me to write my own mail client (as I've already worked with textmode interfaces and there are tons of libraries for the network side). Besides, after things like threaded view and maildir format came into Pine, I had no need feature-wise to use anything else but Pine.
IMHO, Pine has pretty good UI design in that it's quite easy and intuitive for beginners, but also quite customizable for experienced users. So as you grow into a power user, the software can grow with you. (It's a bit like learning Linux with a desktop environment, and gradually proceeding into deeper things like kernel hacking. Try doing the same with the beginner-only design of Windows.)
This is probably why Pine is still the recommended mail client in many universities. The only problem these days must be that text mode is often perceived as inherently difficult or outdated.
These patches have been around for a long time, and I'm sure the author has suggested them for upstream merger already.
You're on the right track concerning legal reasons, which is why there's so much fuss about Pine patches compared to other software patches. In my understanding, the license forbids the distribution of unofficial versions, except for local use. You can only distribute your own version of Pine as a set of patches against the official version.
Distributions like Gentoo get around this nicely by automatically patching and compiling upon install. But the fact remains that Pine is not Free software in the sense that you would be free to distribute your improvements.
Personally, I'm not too worried as I believe the patches will find another home. I've used Pine since 1998, I think it strikes a very good balance between convenience of use and customizability, and I haven't found a decent alternative.
On the other hand, LCDs respond much faster to power on/off, so you can set a shorter delay. Since CRTs take a comparatively long time to warm up, there's a tendency to keep the delay rather long (at least 15 minutes). So with LCDs you should get more power saved than what you expect from the wattage difference.
I second the idea that you need calculus for many CS applications, for example probability and DSP, but there are also less obvious reasons to take calculus. For example, understanding the Fourier transform framework (with convolution theorem etc.) is a great eye-opener in many ways, and it comes up in surprising places. For example, Shor's factorizing algorithm depends on FT.
It's all about bandwidth, which is not the same thing as date rate. Unfortunately there's a huge marketroid conspiracy trying to teach us otherwise.
Data rate (in bps) is proportional to bandwidth (in Hz). The factor between them depends on the modulation and coding schemes, which in turn are limited by the signal/noise ratio of the medium. Anyway, the system of light sources, fiber, and receivers has a certain limited bandwidth. For example, if you're using visible light from about 400 to 750 THz, you have a bandwidth of 350 THz, assuming the fiber works across the whole spectrum.
For a naive example, imagine that it takes 35 THz of bandwidth to achieve 10 Gbps over a certain fiber. Then you can have a maximum of 10 of these channels using visible light, if you shift the center (carrier) frequencies accordingly (i.e. different colors) to avoid channel overlap.
For another explanation, imagine using a single frequency of light to send information. As soon as you start switching it on and off, you're introducing other frequencies; the spectrum gets wider, the faster you switch (see also: Fourier transform). So, if you try to use zillion distinct colors to get zillion channels, they will start to overlap at some point if you try to send any information.
Products named after the producing corporation? Holy shit!!111
You pointed out yourself that 'Linux' is the unixification of 'Linus'... therefore it is named _after_ him, which is not the same thing as being named equal to him. Wouldn't it be confusing to have an operating system with a person's name, such as... Bob?-)