"Device cables are becoming a thing of the past, and that development couldn't come soon enough"
My personal experience has been less positive... you can have my wired, balled, Logitech mouse when you pry it from my cold, dead, bloody, dismembered hand. It's lighter and more responsive than my wireless optical Logitech mouse and I can't say the cable ever bothers me. The wireless mouse jumps all over the place when it is more than about 5ft from the receiver. The Logitech wireless keyboard is a bit better - it has excellent battery life but still tends to drop keypresses too often unless its sitting very near the receiver.
Bluetooth is handy for syncing my phone to my PowerBook, but that's a different case - the phone only occasionally needs a connection, and the rest of the time I turn Bluetooth off so it doesn't drain the battery ten times more quickly. It's nice not having to search for a USB/phone cable. But for always-connected, always-present devices, nothing beats a cable.
From TFA: He added: 'You can breathe pure oxygen. There are some trace gases mixed with the oxygen we produced but they're in very small amounts. There is nothing dangerous.'
Doesn't pure oxygen markedly increase combustibility? I'm not a chemist, but I do remember reading that aluminium will burn almost as easily as wood in a pure oxygen environment. Which sounds dangerous enough, so how would a moon base obtain a whole heap of nitrogen to mix with the oxygen? Or since our bodies probably don't absorb that much nitrogen, is it not a huge problem because we'd only have to ship it up once?
It might sound reasonable to expect prospective Aussies to speak English, but given Australia's history of extensive racism it makes some of us understandably nervous. The first thing we did after federating was to create a way (the dictation test) to keep out anyone we didn't like. I remember my old high school history teacher saying that back in the bad old days of the White Australia Policy, a professor of English from somewhere in Asia was refused, by giving him a dictation test in Finnish.
This language/culture/history test is just the same thing in a subtle new guise: 'if you're not "just like us", we don't want you here.'
That's more or less it, yeah. AAC has those minor evolutionary design advantages you'd expect over MPEG1-Layer3 (ie MP3) like better compression, much wider frequency range, etc -- in other words, better quality for the same filesize. It's also supposed to be a lot nicer to human voices than MP3's compression.
The DRM isn't a part of any AAC or MPEG4 Audio standard. What Apple does to their AAC files to run their music store basically extends to (from memory) [1] encrypting the audio atom within the container file, [2] including another atom to contain information about the encryption, maybe the purchase too, and [3] changing the usual filename extension from.m4a to.m4p (for Protected).
AAC on its own is hardly the devil's own favourite codec. Like a lot of technology, it's only gotten such a bad rep because of what we have done with it.
1) and 2) can be summed up as "Apple decided to use a nonstandard format
Even the grandparent mentioned this about 1), but it's worth reiterating since you appear to have ignored it. AAC is a standard codec. Part of the MPEG-4 suite of codecs. The first 'A' stands for 'Advanced', not for 'Apple'.
I must be missing something: the KPCC site just seems to link to a.pls file that lists one http url... an ordinary mp3 stream, with some plain text output before it which doesn't seem to bother my players. curl is working just fine, though it's only half-done:
So much of FreeBSD's kernel was shoehorned into XNU that it's doubtful you could call it a microkernel anymore -- they don't usually contain networking stacks and firewalls and things, or at least that how much theory I remember about them. I've seen people call XNU a Frankenkernel though.
"Reality: We have only used nuclear weapons twice, both in Japan, to end World War II."
That's a very selective view of reality. Not to mention off-topic.
The USA has used nuclear weapons hundreds of times - around 480 I think. Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Mississippi, the Aleutian Islands, the Marshall Islands, Christmas Island, Johnston Atoll, and various places in the South Atlantic too. People have both died and been forcibly removed from their homelands as a result of those 'test' nukings, so they're surely significant enough to be remembered.
And historians are still divided about the motivations behind the USA nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- there's a good argument that they were trying to scare the USSR with their shiny new weapons.
Obviously this so called 'evidence' has been planted on Wikipedia by the real Creator in order to disguise the true fact that iTunes is only 6000 hours old.
Actually, by 1993 WorldWideWeb displayed images inline. (Development of NCSA Mosaic 0.1a began that same year.) WorldWideWeb may not have been first, but if not, it wasn't far behind.
2. It definitely doesn't work on Mac OS X as-is, though I've been wondering for a few months how much effort would be required to get it working, just for kicks.
Yes, there are differences between gases and fluids. It's been a while for me since high school science, so I'll just point to the wikipedia:
Fluid: "A subset of the phases of matter, fluids include liquids, gases, plasmas and, to some extent, plastic solids."
Gas: "Like liquids, gases are fluids: they have the ability to flow and do not resist deformation, although they do have viscosity. Unlike liquids, however, unconstrained gases do not occupy a fixed volume, but instead expand to fill whatever space they occupy."
"The day someone makes a knockoff of Slashdot that's a bit more computer-science oriented and isn't solely aimed at producing the same tired old trolling every day"
Have you seen Technocrat.net? Looks to be just starting, but I'm already impressed: slashdot ran an article on a nanotech textiles protest - technocrat ran one on a group of scientists demonstrating a refined iteration of a carbon nanotube CPU. Comments are on-topic too, touch wood.
(Or there's always ars for CS stuff, but they're hardly a/. knockoff.)
Yup, we know. The OFLC can refuse to classify Literature if it exceeds certain guidelines (PDF). Which includes child porn or explicit depictions of children, violent sex, incest, bestiality, the encouragement of violence or criminal activity, et cetera. Most people would call that acceptable. But of concern is that it can just refuse classification of a book because it thinks most adults would find it indecent.
In practice though, it's not that bad -- on the OFLC site you can search for those items which were refused classification, and most of the ones since 2000 were submitted by "AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE - OPERATION AUXIN", which was a big pedophile bust. We haven't banned James Joyce or Brave New World for over half a century.
"As for the other features, real old news. Integrating them with the desktop just means you can't get rid of them."
That'd be true in OS X if these things were integrated in the way that Microsoft tends to integrate things (IE comes to mind). When Apple integrates something like these items, it's not usually tough to get rid of most of it.
Search: Integration here is probably good and useful, I'm thinking.
Scripting: Automator looks like a program - a GUI frontend to a GUI scripting system. Don't like it? Delete it. AppleScript support remains, but it's been there since 1995 and it's used by so many useful things that it'd be like removing perl from linux.
Built-in RSS support: It's integrated into the program (Safari) and not the OS. Delete Safari.app and it's gone. The WebKit library remains, but again it's used by many programs (among them my RSS reader and my instant messenger, and the stock Mail and Help apps). But it too can go if you like.
Info-Display Panel: Just set the activation key for Dashboard to nothing, and forget about it. It's not on screen until you hit that key, so unlike Longhorn's sidebar there's no chance of activating it with a sloppy mouse wave. (Also unlike Longhorn, each widget-type runs in its own process, as opposed to having third party code running inside explorer.exe, which just sounds like a recipe for instability.)
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Don't like iChat? Delete it already. I did on my 10.3 install and the system hasn't cared that it isn't there.
Slashdot Mirror
And Windows developers are descended from convicts!!
There's always iPodLinux...
"Device cables are becoming a thing of the past, and that development couldn't come soon enough"
My personal experience has been less positive... you can have my wired, balled, Logitech mouse when you pry it from my cold, dead, bloody, dismembered hand. It's lighter and more responsive than my wireless optical Logitech mouse and I can't say the cable ever bothers me. The wireless mouse jumps all over the place when it is more than about 5ft from the receiver. The Logitech wireless keyboard is a bit better - it has excellent battery life but still tends to drop keypresses too often unless its sitting very near the receiver.
Bluetooth is handy for syncing my phone to my PowerBook, but that's a different case - the phone only occasionally needs a connection, and the rest of the time I turn Bluetooth off so it doesn't drain the battery ten times more quickly. It's nice not having to search for a USB/phone cable. But for always-connected, always-present devices, nothing beats a cable.
From TFA: He added: 'You can breathe pure oxygen. There are some trace gases mixed with the oxygen we produced but they're in very small amounts. There is nothing dangerous.'
Doesn't pure oxygen markedly increase combustibility? I'm not a chemist, but I do remember reading that aluminium will burn almost as easily as wood in a pure oxygen environment. Which sounds dangerous enough, so how would a moon base obtain a whole heap of nitrogen to mix with the oxygen? Or since our bodies probably don't absorb that much nitrogen, is it not a huge problem because we'd only have to ship it up once?
"Let's hope the website makes proper mention of the all-important crate. ^_^"
See GIDb: First Use of Barrels and Crates in a Game.
Linked page has blue links on a blue background... Sometimes it'd be nice to encounter some Natural Intelligence.
It might sound reasonable to expect prospective Aussies to speak English, but given Australia's history of extensive racism it makes some of us understandably nervous. The first thing we did after federating was to create a way (the dictation test) to keep out anyone we didn't like. I remember my old high school history teacher saying that back in the bad old days of the White Australia Policy, a professor of English from somewhere in Asia was refused, by giving him a dictation test in Finnish.
This language/culture/history test is just the same thing in a subtle new guise: 'if you're not "just like us", we don't want you here.'
That's more or less it, yeah. AAC has those minor evolutionary design advantages you'd expect over MPEG1-Layer3 (ie MP3) like better compression, much wider frequency range, etc -- in other words, better quality for the same filesize. It's also supposed to be a lot nicer to human voices than MP3's compression.
.m4a to .m4p (for Protected).
The DRM isn't a part of any AAC or MPEG4 Audio standard. What Apple does to their AAC files to run their music store basically extends to (from memory) [1] encrypting the audio atom within the container file, [2] including another atom to contain information about the encryption, maybe the purchase too, and [3] changing the usual filename extension from
AAC on its own is hardly the devil's own favourite codec. Like a lot of technology, it's only gotten such a bad rep because of what we have done with it.
Even the grandparent mentioned this about 1), but it's worth reiterating since you appear to have ignored it. AAC is a standard codec. Part of the MPEG-4 suite of codecs. The first 'A' stands for 'Advanced', not for 'Apple'.
OS X does offer that feature. It's not on by default.
So much of FreeBSD's kernel was shoehorned into XNU that it's doubtful you could call it a microkernel anymore -- they don't usually contain networking stacks and firewalls and things, or at least that how much theory I remember about them. I've seen people call XNU a Frankenkernel though.
It's probably unique to Australia yeah. Roughly synonymous with 'cheated', 'ripped off', etc.
http://rort.urbanup.com/
"But it does a lousy job with the southern hemisphere."
... aww screw it.
No kidding. I for one welcome our new tentacled Antarctic overlo-
"Reality: We have only used nuclear weapons twice, both in Japan, to end World War II."
That's a very selective view of reality. Not to mention off-topic.
The USA has used nuclear weapons hundreds of times - around 480 I think. Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Mississippi, the Aleutian Islands, the Marshall Islands, Christmas Island, Johnston Atoll, and various places in the South Atlantic too. People have both died and been forcibly removed from their homelands as a result of those 'test' nukings, so they're surely significant enough to be remembered.
And historians are still divided about the motivations behind the USA nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- there's a good argument that they were trying to scare the USSR with their shiny new weapons.
Obviously this so called 'evidence' has been planted on Wikipedia by the real Creator in order to disguise the true fact that iTunes is only 6000 hours old.
Actually, by 1993 WorldWideWeb displayed images inline. (Development of NCSA Mosaic 0.1a began that same year.) WorldWideWeb may not have been first, but if not, it wasn't far behind.
1. Yes, the source code to the original (1990/1991?) version of WorldWideWeb can be found in the W3.org history section.
2. It definitely doesn't work on Mac OS X as-is, though I've been wondering for a few months how much effort would be required to get it working, just for kicks.
Surface tension is a characteristic of liquids.
Yes, there are differences between gases and fluids. It's been a while for me since high school science, so I'll just point to the wikipedia:
Fluid: "A subset of the phases of matter, fluids include liquids, gases, plasmas and, to some extent, plastic solids."
Gas: "Like liquids, gases are fluids: they have the ability to flow and do not resist deformation, although they do have viscosity. Unlike liquids, however, unconstrained gases do not occupy a fixed volume, but instead expand to fill whatever space they occupy."
Gases are fluids also. You probably wanted to say that 'Whales do just fine with a liquid'.
"The day someone makes a knockoff of Slashdot that's a bit more computer-science oriented and isn't solely aimed at producing the same tired old trolling every day"
/. knockoff.)
Have you seen Technocrat.net? Looks to be just starting, but I'm already impressed: slashdot ran an article on a nanotech textiles protest - technocrat ran one on a group of scientists demonstrating a refined iteration of a carbon nanotube CPU. Comments are on-topic too, touch wood.
(Or there's always ars for CS stuff, but they're hardly a
Yup, we know. The OFLC can refuse to classify Literature if it exceeds certain guidelines (PDF). Which includes child porn or explicit depictions of children, violent sex, incest, bestiality, the encouragement of violence or criminal activity, et cetera. Most people would call that acceptable. But of concern is that it can just refuse classification of a book because it thinks most adults would find it indecent.
In practice though, it's not that bad -- on the OFLC site you can search for those items which were refused classification, and most of the ones since 2000 were submitted by "AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE - OPERATION AUXIN", which was a big pedophile bust. We haven't banned James Joyce or Brave New World for over half a century.
That'd be true in OS X if these things were integrated in the way that Microsoft tends to integrate things (IE comes to mind). When Apple integrates something like these items, it's not usually tough to get rid of most of it.
Search: Integration here is probably good and useful, I'm thinking.
Scripting: Automator looks like a program - a GUI frontend to a GUI scripting system. Don't like it? Delete it. AppleScript support remains, but it's been there since 1995 and it's used by so many useful things that it'd be like removing perl from linux.
Built-in RSS support: It's integrated into the program (Safari) and not the OS. Delete Safari.app and it's gone. The WebKit library remains, but again it's used by many programs (among them my RSS reader and my instant messenger, and the stock Mail and Help apps). But it too can go if you like.
Info-Display Panel: Just set the activation key for Dashboard to nothing, and forget about it. It's not on screen until you hit that key, so unlike Longhorn's sidebar there's no chance of activating it with a sloppy mouse wave. (Also unlike Longhorn, each widget-type runs in its own process, as opposed to having third party code running inside explorer.exe, which just sounds like a recipe for instability.)
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Don't like iChat? Delete it already. I did on my 10.3 install and the system hasn't cared that it isn't there.
64-Bit Support: Probably very integrated.
Not really that tough hey.
I'd love to someday be able to point to the Earth and tell my granddaughter there are people there.
Mac OS X save dialogs and sheets don't usually have questions in them to start with -- that's part of what's wrong here.
Most look a bit like this:
Save as: [my slashdot post.txt]
Where: [Documents]
File Format: [Plain Text]
<Cancel> <Save>
Well then you take a pod outside and replace the AE-35 control unit. Nothing to it.