Most languages have a no-op statement. C allows just a plain ";" as a do nothing statement. Even going back to Fortran, there was CONTINUE. It's a very old concept.
I had been pledging $1/month to several different creators. With the new fee structure, it's better to only fund one creator each month and rotate that creator every month. That's ridiculous.
I canceled all my pledges this morning in protest.
Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants
That's actually not true. When you look at the Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor, it's being designed to be small enough to fit on an airplane. It's a lot bigger than a "Mr. Fusion", but compared to a typical fission reactor, it's tiny.
I think you've confused RMS with ESR. Those statements sound like chapter three of The Magic Cauldron. This sort of argument is typical of "Open Source" types, who tend to promote open source on the basis of economic arguments, as opposed to "Free Software" types, who promote free software on moral/ethical grounds.
Just for the edification of the other readers here, which parts specifically do you feel you don't have to follow?
For the record, I know exactly which ones I would choose, but I'm interested to know what exactly you think makes Stallmann a 'crazy outlier'. Because, in my estimation, it would take a lot for someone to qualify for that kind of labeling.
On a number of occasions RMS has been asked how professional software developers can make enough money to earn a normal middle class income using only Free software licensing, and his response has been that earning money should not be a priority, to the extent that if a developer cannot earn enough money to support a family, that's ok. Software developers shouldn't have children. (example link)
If he had said that most software developers shouldn't expect to have as much money as Gates/Ballmer/Zuckerberg/Jobs/Ellison type people, I'd have been ok with that, but to take it to the extreme that you should deny developers the ability to have children, one of the most basic and fundamental life experiences, that was what tipped the balance into 'crazy outlier' in my opinion.
V2V isn't just for collision avoidance. You need this kind of communication to safely narrow the following distance to form "road trains" at highway speed. This both allows more cars to fit on the same road and reduces fuel consumption due to reduced air resistance in the following cars.
The idea is not to scale the whole image down to 300x400, but to crop it down. There isn't space on a phone to include a mechanical zoom lens, so you either need to use "digital zoom", or just take a wide shot and crop it down to the part you want later. A higher than necessary resolution sensor for full image shots is what allows a cropped image to still look sharp.
As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.
The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.
Doesn't the fact that it includes an "Inconclusive" category pretty much mean that it absolutely does not try to solve the halting problem?
The halting problem doesn't state that you can never determine if any specific algorithm halts or not, just that there exists some algorithms which will be inconclusive for any finite bound on the time used to determine if it halts or not.
A pdf file is a program, written in the postscript language, directing a 2D printer to create some 2D object. I can't print copies of someone's book and sell them without permission based on the argument that the book is the output of the PDF program.
You can't print someone's book because the book is a work of literary authorship. If you get a non-copyrightable pdf, such as a simple list of facts or ingredients, then you can print that and sell it. We will likely see something similar happen in the 3D printing world.
At issue here is not whether or not the printer has two dimensions or three, but rather if the underlying object would be considered an original work of authorship. Probably not.
If you compare this to the fashion industry, for example, where a designs for clothing are *not* eligible for copyright. The fashion industry has responded to this by elevating trademarkable labels to be elements of fashion themselves. I can take a Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt and produce another shirt with its dimensions exactly, but I can't put that logo on it.
It seems to do just about anything but unscrew screws
Actually, in the first episode in which it appears, the Doctor uses it to turn a screw. All the silliness that comes later is really a running joke in the series.
#2 - Initialize all variables to known values. int i; doesn't cut it. int i=0; does.
True dat. Lots security pitfalls here too -- not just garden variety bugs.
This is a pet peeve of mine. It's very bad advice to throw in meaningless initializations. If a variable has no meaningful value, you want tools like valgrind to be able to recognize this and catch code that tries to use this value. If you set it to 0, but then don't mean that variable to be read without being set to something else first, you've done yourself a disservice.
Basically it looks like we don't need any higher resolution than what the iPhone and others have achieved, anything more would be pointless.
Unless you happen to have a $5 pair of magnifying eyeglasses that is.
The biggest problem with viewing web pages on a cell phone is that you can't see enough pixels at the same time. If you want to keep a 1920x1080 display in your pocket, you need to go beyond retinal and use a lens to magnify it.
The bigger *any* organization gets, the less efficient it becomes.
Is that why Walmart has to charge such high prices? To cover all that inefficiency?
It's not size that leads to government inefficiency, it's a lack of competition. If you could pick one of three governments to pay your taxes to, you'd see efficiency shoot way up.
The choice is not between "content with DRM" and "content with no DRM", but "content with DRM" and "less content with no DRM".
That's only true in the short term. Those who advocate boycotting DRM infected media are concerned with the long term. If enough consumers avoid products with DRM, then the market will adapt and cease to sell works with DRM and content with no DRM will become available. That's how boycotts work.
Well written applications will tell the memory manager what their expected usage pattern will be using functions like posix_madvise and posix_fadvise.
If an application is uploading a 4GB data file and uses POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL followed by POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED for the bits it's done with, then the memory manager shouldn't do stupid things like "trying to cache a 4 GB data file which was uploaded the other night".
Of course, this presupposes well written applications, which may be a bit much to ask...
1) My PC based DVR can record encrypted content. Tivo's edge here is gone now.
What hardware/software do you use for this? Something new must have come out recently... As recently as a year ago I was unable to find a legal device that would allow me to record encrypted QAM from my cable connection.
I use a Motorola DCH-3200, provided by Comcast, to handle the decryption. The decrypted signal is sent via firewire to my mythtv box. See the MythTv FireWire page for details.
In the US, FCC regulations require cable operators to provide working firewire decoders to any HD subscriber that asks for one.
There is no solar neutrino noise level to speak of.
Solar neutrinos are very low energy. Typically 1-3 MeV. Focussed neutrino beams will be much higher energy, typically 1-50 GeV. Since detectors can measure the neutrino energy, and there's such a wide difference between the two, solar noise is pretty much non-existent. Neutrino detectors designed for high energy neutrinos couldn't even see the solar neutrinos if they wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
Most languages have a no-op statement. C allows just a plain ";" as a do nothing statement. Even going back to Fortran, there was CONTINUE. It's a very old concept.
I had been pledging $1/month to several different creators. With the new fee structure, it's better to only fund one creator each month and rotate that creator every month. That's ridiculous.
I canceled all my pledges this morning in protest.
Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants
That's actually not true. When you look at the Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor, it's being designed to be small enough to fit on an airplane. It's a lot bigger than a "Mr. Fusion", but compared to a typical fission reactor, it's tiny.
"Hacker's Keyboard" has a number row, tab, and arrows.
You had to make change in my head,. I could do it without error. Most others could not.
I was never able to master making change in your head.
I think you've confused RMS with ESR. Those statements sound like chapter three of The Magic Cauldron. This sort of argument is typical of "Open Source" types, who tend to promote open source on the basis of economic arguments, as opposed to "Free Software" types, who promote free software on moral/ethical grounds.
Just for the edification of the other readers here, which parts specifically do you feel you don't have to follow?
For the record, I know exactly which ones I would choose, but I'm interested to know what exactly you think makes Stallmann a 'crazy outlier'. Because, in my estimation, it would take a lot for someone to qualify for that kind of labeling.
On a number of occasions RMS has been asked how professional software developers can make enough money to earn a normal middle class income using only Free software licensing, and his response has been that earning money should not be a priority, to the extent that if a developer cannot earn enough money to support a family, that's ok. Software developers shouldn't have children. (example link)
If he had said that most software developers shouldn't expect to have as much money as Gates/Ballmer/Zuckerberg/Jobs/Ellison type people, I'd have been ok with that, but to take it to the extreme that you should deny developers the ability to have children, one of the most basic and fundamental life experiences, that was what tipped the balance into 'crazy outlier' in my opinion.
V2V isn't just for collision avoidance. You need this kind of communication to safely narrow the following distance to form "road trains" at highway speed. This both allows more cars to fit on the same road and reduces fuel consumption due to reduced air resistance in the following cars.
For example, see the SARTRE project.
185TB is the uncompressed size, as noted in the last word of the summary.
The idea is not to scale the whole image down to 300x400, but to crop it down. There isn't space on a phone to include a mechanical zoom lens, so you either need to use "digital zoom", or just take a wide shot and crop it down to the part you want later. A higher than necessary resolution sensor for full image shots is what allows a cropped image to still look sharp.
As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.
The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.
Doesn't the fact that it includes an "Inconclusive" category pretty much mean that it absolutely does not try to solve the halting problem?
The halting problem doesn't state that you can never determine if any specific algorithm halts or not, just that there exists some algorithms which will be inconclusive for any finite bound on the time used to determine if it halts or not.
A pdf file is a program, written in the postscript language, directing a 2D printer to create some 2D object. I can't print copies of someone's book and sell them without permission based on the argument that the book is the output of the PDF program.
I don't see how adding an extra D changes that.
It doesn't. But not all pdf's are copyrightable.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
You can't print someone's book because the book is a work of literary authorship. If you get a non-copyrightable pdf, such as a simple list of facts or ingredients, then you can print that and sell it. We will likely see something similar happen in the 3D printing world.
At issue here is not whether or not the printer has two dimensions or three, but rather if the underlying object would be considered an original work of authorship. Probably not.
If you compare this to the fashion industry, for example, where a designs for clothing are *not* eligible for copyright. The fashion industry has responded to this by elevating trademarkable labels to be elements of fashion themselves. I can take a Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt and produce another shirt with its dimensions exactly, but I can't put that logo on it.
There is no line to draw Android uses the Linux kernel the same as Ubuntu and every other GNU/Linux distro.
It's a bit murkier than that. Debian can actually run without Linux. (See Debian GNU/kfreebsd.)
Graduate Record Examination
What could be more honest than, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."?
Sun CEO Scott McNealy
It seems to do just about anything but unscrew screws
Actually, in the first episode in which it appears, the Doctor uses it to turn a screw. All the silliness that comes later is really a running joke in the series.
#2 - Initialize all variables to known values. int i; doesn't cut it. int i=0; does.
True dat. Lots security pitfalls here too -- not just garden variety bugs.
This is a pet peeve of mine. It's very bad advice to throw in meaningless initializations. If a variable has no meaningful value, you want tools like valgrind to be able to recognize this and catch code that tries to use this value. If you set it to 0, but then don't mean that variable to be read without being set to something else first, you've done yourself a disservice.
Basically it looks like we don't need any higher resolution than what the iPhone and others have achieved, anything more would be pointless.
Unless you happen to have a $5 pair of magnifying eyeglasses that is.
The biggest problem with viewing web pages on a cell phone is that you can't see enough pixels at the same time. If you want to keep a 1920x1080 display in your pocket, you need to go beyond retinal and use a lens to magnify it.
I am not seeing any phone that currently supports the whole flash experience: http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices/ Just the Flash Lite option.
That list is a little out of date. The Nokia N900 runs the desktop version of Flash 9.
On the other hand, many flash games require more CPU than a mobile device can really provide at the moment.
The latest release of MythTV (.23RC1) contains a new plugin called MythNetVision which specifically enables browsing of online videos.
It's still a little rough yet, but is under active development.
The bigger *any* organization gets, the less efficient it becomes.
Is that why Walmart has to charge such high prices? To cover all that inefficiency?
It's not size that leads to government inefficiency, it's a lack of competition. If you could pick one of three governments to pay your taxes to, you'd see efficiency shoot way up.
The choice is not between "content with DRM" and "content with no DRM", but "content with DRM" and "less content with no DRM".
That's only true in the short term. Those who advocate boycotting DRM infected media are concerned with the long term. If enough consumers avoid products with DRM, then the market will adapt and cease to sell works with DRM and content with no DRM will become available. That's how boycotts work.
Well written applications will tell the memory manager what their expected usage pattern will be using functions like posix_madvise and posix_fadvise.
If an application is uploading a 4GB data file and uses POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL followed by POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED for the bits it's done with, then the memory manager shouldn't do stupid things like "trying to cache a 4 GB data file which was uploaded the other night".
Of course, this presupposes well written applications, which may be a bit much to ask...
I use a Motorola DCH-3200, provided by Comcast, to handle the decryption. The decrypted signal is sent via firewire to my mythtv box. See the MythTv FireWire page for details.
In the US, FCC regulations require cable operators to provide working firewire decoders to any HD subscriber that asks for one.
There is no solar neutrino noise level to speak of.
Solar neutrinos are very low energy. Typically 1-3 MeV. Focussed neutrino beams will be much higher energy, typically 1-50 GeV. Since detectors can measure the neutrino energy, and there's such a wide difference between the two, solar noise is pretty much non-existent. Neutrino detectors designed for high energy neutrinos couldn't even see the solar neutrinos if they wanted to.