Okay for those "initially" confused like me. Here's a link to what I believe NFC stands for. The Wikipedia redirect page for NFC lists 11 possible expansions, including at least two other computer related terms and one possibly related to Finance (F), something called the National Finance Center.
I missed the second link in the story, which does point to Kernel Newbies. (Blame it on my browser which doesn't color links in red or some other obscene color.) However, my comment about USB 3 still stands. I'm still trying to find a "news" source that highlights the new XHCI power management feature. Failure to hibernate/suspend because of non-working USB 3 power management is an issue that's been discussed in a number of forums.
The link in the story just points to the list post announcing a new major version of the Linux kernel. Note that the changes listed in the post are for changes from the last release candidate (-rc8) and not from the last major kernel release (2.6.36). For an overview, it's better to head over to Kernel Newbies. It even has a section which summarizes the "cool stuff", major features that the new kernel brings.
Interestingly, the overview appears to overlook what I believe is a major feature introduced in 2.6.37: power management for USB 3. I may have to do some more digging through the actual kernel changelogs. Maybe the change was reverted during the last few candidate releases, but I remember reading about it in H-Online, particularly this part:
The XHCI driver for USB 3.0 controllers now offers power management support (1, 2, 3, 4); this makes it possible to suspend and resume without temporarily having to unload the driver.
(In the original, the parenthetical numbers are links to the kernel commits.)
Power management for USB 3 would have been the most important new feature for me. Without it, you have to resort to a number of ugly hacks to hibernate or suspend a laptop or a motherboard with USB 3 enabled. (Turning off USB 3 in the BIOS is a hardware hack that allows you to bypass the software hacks.)
Since it's Sunday, and I have nothing better to do. Let me humor you with a long reply.
Yes, it would be great if we can have everything free. That's called the Star Trek economy. Once we have production-grade replicators or nth-generation Repraps, that will become a reality, indistinguishable from magic. Now, if all that we need to manufacture something is the work to haul some amorphous lump of matter and dump it into the replicator, then the value of money degrades to that of a household chores bribe: Hey, Junior, can you fetch me some dirt from the back yard. I promise, I'll drive you to the ballgame this Sunday.
That's it, as far as goods that we can hold in our hands are concerned. We're not yet at the Star Trek level as far as physical objects are concerned. Every single iPhone or Prius has to go through some form of manual intervention, a worker who has to assemble the bits and bolts. You can't just download the blueprint for a laptop and feed the binary data to any of today's state-of-the-art 3D printers. And even if you can, you still need special materials that you can't ask Junior to fetch from your back yard.
On the other hand, duplicating an eBook or an Mp3 is as easy as typing "cp *mp3/media/My_Copy" or simply plugging in your iPod Touch and clicking the appropriate prompt button. As far as digital goods and objects are concerned, we are already at the Star Trek level. So the work needed to product a piece of music is limited to the very act of making the actual recording, not the reproduction. Once the master has been made, endless copies can be made.
So, I'm sure you'll ask, who'll pay for the initial step? Those hungry for novelty and innovation. If nobody wants to pay to hear a new version of the Goldberg Variations, then we're stuck to listening to the old recordings by, say, Glenn Gould, or until some bored amateur decides to record and foist on us her atonal version of Bach.
Don't underestimate boredom as a motive for innovation and progress. It's what made Wikipedia the dominant source of information in the Internet, millions of bored users deciding to contribute their little tidbits of information.
Yes, Wikipedia still needs money to operate its servers. But that is minuscule compared to the quantity of "free" editing and writing work contributed by bored users, trolls, and government agents. We don't pay for the pizza but for the pizza delivery.
Industrialisation will make a few Chinese people rich but if the wealth doesn't trickle down (I don't think it can) then the political situation will become very unstable.
So it seems that the RPOC (Rich Peoples of China) are lording it over the PROC (People's Republic of China). As a one-party state, it "should" be easier and cheaper for China to force a simple redistribution of wealth a la old-fashioned socialism. But now it seems the Politburo is actually afraid of antagonizing the capitalists. Chairman Mao must be turning over in his grave.
The last time "sophisticated" was attached to the word malware, a certain Middle East country had problems with its uranium-enrichment program. So what are the chances of this being the mobile version of the Stuxnet worm?
That doesn't mean, of course, that China isn't becoming a superpower. They may be, or may not, I don't know the future. Military, they already are...
I think you've overrated China's status as a military power. Sure they have the capability of attacking and perhaps overrunning neighboring countries like, say, Taiwan and Vietnam, with whom they waged a brief but bloody war in the late 1970s. But the Chinese lack the ability to deploy their forces across continents and the two largest oceans, an ability which the Russians, as the main heirs of the former Soviet war machine, still have. In fact, after the end of World War 2, the US remains the only country to have waged multiple large scale wars overseas: the Vietnam War and the two Iraq Wars. (A possible exception might be the UK, which won the Falkland Islands war against Argentina, but was merely part of the supporting cast in the Iraq wars.)
While undoubtedly enough of a deterrent to avert a US invasion, China's nuclear might is just on a par with the other permanent members of the Security Council. So, no, barring the political disintegration of the US, China is still a long way to go from becoming a Cold War class superpower.
I hope these statistical cheat detection systems don't gain traction. I see the danger of a self-fulfilling scenario that tends toward mediocrity rather than excellence. Don't exert any effort, son. Don't bother studying hard for your exams. Statistics say you're bound to fail.
History, of course, is replete with examples to the contrary. Japan managed to industrialize within a generation. Dark horses win horse races. The thirteen states managed to expel the British empire (with a little help from the French). And the New York Mets managed to win the World Series.
Assange has no goal, and that is part of his problem. His treatise is to make the world more open, as if the very nature of classified conversations and secret deals between nations offends him, so he is to bring a giant flashlight to things regardless of what happens.
You seem to give Assange too much credit. Assange is simply a part of the bigger wave, the same wave that has brought us the privacy transgressions of Google and Facebook. He is simply riding the wave to a more "open" information regime. Whether such openness is a good thing (tm) or an evil that deserves to be nuked or sued to extinction is a different question. (Glastnost brought differing results across the countries of the former Soviet bloc.) But if Assange and WikiLeaks go down, another, more likely less scrupulous organization will rise, like a submarine in the night. And that will make WikiLeaks look like Napster to the Pirate Bay.
Sorry, to blow up your bubble. But copyright isn't a conservative problem, as implied by your qualifier "even the most conservative media outlets". If anything, it's liberals that favor a stronger copyright regime (I'm not talking about the more radical elements that choose to label themselves "left" or even, horrors, "socialist") since IP laws tend to favor the supposedly less traditional industries that pollute less, exploit the "working" (middle or lower) classes less, etc. With a few notable exceptions, media and software companies should be more liberal than oil companies or banks. And guess what, to stay afloat, these "progressive" companies need copyright protection for better or worse.
Not counting Google Translate, I think the "difficult" reputation of German writers comes either from bad translators or, more likely, good translators trying their hardest not to lose the nuances of the German language. I think the best translators are the translators that attempt to find equivalent concepts in the target and source languages. Is it okay to lose something in the translation in the effort to make the translation read right? If a translation is too opaque, then you lose any chance of the work being read by readers who can't understand the original language.
There's an interesting article over at Distrowatch about the binary blob issue. The author poses, like you have suggested, the rhetorical question of whether it's better to have the kernel load non-free firmware (e.g. from hard disk) or have the chip load the same from its internal memory. So is it better (1) to have binary-only firmware that you might hack even if with difficulty by using, say, a hex editor, or (2) to have burnt-in firmware that nobody but a hardcore hardware hacker can modify?
I've always assumed that females are more durable than males (long life span, more resistant to diseases, etc). If there's one sex in danger of extinction, it's the males of the species. So I think it's more valuable research to try and figure out how to create male babies from the eggs or stem cells of two donor mothers. Of course, we can always resort to cloning, but that would not lead to the diversity that's the main benefit of sexual reproduction (aside from pleasures of the one-night stand that is).
You're joking of course. But seriously everyone (humans in any case) needs at least one X chromosome. No Y means you're female. More than two sex chromosomes (X or Y) will result in varying degrees of physical femininity or masculinity. A man with two X chromosomes (XXY) will look more female than a man with two Y chromosomes (XYY).
If we follow the template of software + hardware (Windows/Android + Intel/Qualcomm), why not call the mutant daughter Aqua (with the advantage we don't have to coin a word).
I'm divided between these two private launch pioneers. If you're looking for the rocket scientist, I'd pick Rutan, who engineered the first successfully reused private suborbital spacecraft. While not a rocket designer, Musk has the youth and glamor factor going for him (as an ex-dot-com multimillionaire). His vision seems to be longer range, opting for real (read "orbital") space.
Musk wins by a hair for me simply because he could have chosen to start another dot.company after PayPal. Instead he chose to take real (as against virtual) risks and start a brick-and-mortar, or should I say, nuts-and-bolts business.
Netwalker? The name alone tells me that Sharp lacks a good marketing department. Search engines crawl. People browse. Who'd want to walk the web, Spiderman?
Ubuntu needs to hire a desktop designer to smooth the rough edges, and there still are many
The design's fine. Or do you expect a desktop to be a work of art. It's the implementation that's wanting. The main selling point of the Mac experience is that the OS works consistently or at least more consistently than even a well-designed GNU/Linux desktop like Ubuntu. Incidentally, I find OpenSUSE to be a better designed desktop.
I never did see the point in freaking out about any super-powerful titan "taking over the web" since there is no web to take over, there's just islands that people can build up as high as they like in order to entice people to visit.
If anything these bloggers who cry wolf let us know there's a problem, even if the problem isn't critical. Malthusian overpopulation didn't happen, but it helped keep world population from rising much higher than it is now.
Agreed. You don't need to be overly secretive about your OS (hello, MS!). For example, there's practically no secret to building a typical jail house, bricks and metal bars. Only in extra special cases (perhaps a maximum security prison for war criminals and other arch villains) do you need to deviate from the norm. So, unless, the India's goal is to craft a real-time OS for missile systems and other highly destructive military gear, adapting (after some serious code review) an already existent FOSS/OS is the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay for those "initially" confused like me. Here's a link to what I believe NFC stands for. The Wikipedia redirect page for NFC lists 11 possible expansions, including at least two other computer related terms and one possibly related to Finance (F), something called the National Finance Center.
I missed the second link in the story, which does point to Kernel Newbies. (Blame it on my browser which doesn't color links in red or some other obscene color.) However, my comment about USB 3 still stands. I'm still trying to find a "news" source that highlights the new XHCI power management feature. Failure to hibernate/suspend because of non-working USB 3 power management is an issue that's been discussed in a number of forums.
The link in the story just points to the list post announcing a new major version of the Linux kernel. Note that the changes listed in the post are for changes from the last release candidate (-rc8) and not from the last major kernel release (2.6.36). For an overview, it's better to head over to Kernel Newbies. It even has a section which summarizes the "cool stuff", major features that the new kernel brings.
Interestingly, the overview appears to overlook what I believe is a major feature introduced in 2.6.37: power management for USB 3. I may have to do some more digging through the actual kernel changelogs. Maybe the change was reverted during the last few candidate releases, but I remember reading about it in H-Online, particularly this part:
The XHCI driver for USB 3.0 controllers now offers power management support (1, 2, 3, 4); this makes it possible to suspend and resume without temporarily having to unload the driver.
(In the original, the parenthetical numbers are links to the kernel commits.)
Power management for USB 3 would have been the most important new feature for me. Without it, you have to resort to a number of ugly hacks to hibernate or suspend a laptop or a motherboard with USB 3 enabled. (Turning off USB 3 in the BIOS is a hardware hack that allows you to bypass the software hacks.)
Since it's Sunday, and I have nothing better to do. Let me humor you with a long reply.
Yes, it would be great if we can have everything free. That's called the Star Trek economy. Once we have production-grade replicators or nth-generation Repraps, that will become a reality, indistinguishable from magic. Now, if all that we need to manufacture something is the work to haul some amorphous lump of matter and dump it into the replicator, then the value of money degrades to that of a household chores bribe: Hey, Junior, can you fetch me some dirt from the back yard. I promise, I'll drive you to the ballgame this Sunday.
That's it, as far as goods that we can hold in our hands are concerned. We're not yet at the Star Trek level as far as physical objects are concerned. Every single iPhone or Prius has to go through some form of manual intervention, a worker who has to assemble the bits and bolts. You can't just download the blueprint for a laptop and feed the binary data to any of today's state-of-the-art 3D printers. And even if you can, you still need special materials that you can't ask Junior to fetch from your back yard.
On the other hand, duplicating an eBook or an Mp3 is as easy as typing "cp *mp3 /media/My_Copy" or simply plugging in your iPod Touch and clicking the appropriate prompt button. As far as digital goods and objects are concerned, we are already at the Star Trek level. So the work needed to product a piece of music is limited to the very act of making the actual recording, not the reproduction. Once the master has been made, endless copies can be made.
So, I'm sure you'll ask, who'll pay for the initial step? Those hungry for novelty and innovation. If nobody wants to pay to hear a new version of the Goldberg Variations, then we're stuck to listening to the old recordings by, say, Glenn Gould, or until some bored amateur decides to record and foist on us her atonal version of Bach.
Don't underestimate boredom as a motive for innovation and progress. It's what made Wikipedia the dominant source of information in the Internet, millions of bored users deciding to contribute their little tidbits of information.
Yes, Wikipedia still needs money to operate its servers. But that is minuscule compared to the quantity of "free" editing and writing work contributed by bored users, trolls, and government agents. We don't pay for the pizza but for the pizza delivery.
The fact is, that the west needs to say enough is enough. I support free trade, but not when it is one sided.
How's that for Newspeak, free trade that's not free? Free as in ... freeloading?
Industrialisation will make a few Chinese people rich but if the wealth doesn't trickle down (I don't think it can) then the political situation will become very unstable.
So it seems that the RPOC (Rich Peoples of China) are lording it over the PROC (People's Republic of China). As a one-party state, it "should" be easier and cheaper for China to force a simple redistribution of wealth a la old-fashioned socialism. But now it seems the Politburo is actually afraid of antagonizing the capitalists. Chairman Mao must be turning over in his grave.
The last time "sophisticated" was attached to the word malware, a certain Middle East country had problems with its uranium-enrichment program. So what are the chances of this being the mobile version of the Stuxnet worm?
That doesn't mean, of course, that China isn't becoming a superpower. They may be, or may not, I don't know the future. Military, they already are...
I think you've overrated China's status as a military power. Sure they have the capability of attacking and perhaps overrunning neighboring countries like, say, Taiwan and Vietnam, with whom they waged a brief but bloody war in the late 1970s. But the Chinese lack the ability to deploy their forces across continents and the two largest oceans, an ability which the Russians, as the main heirs of the former Soviet war machine, still have. In fact, after the end of World War 2, the US remains the only country to have waged multiple large scale wars overseas: the Vietnam War and the two Iraq Wars. (A possible exception might be the UK, which won the Falkland Islands war against Argentina, but was merely part of the supporting cast in the Iraq wars.)
While undoubtedly enough of a deterrent to avert a US invasion, China's nuclear might is just on a par with the other permanent members of the Security Council. So, no, barring the political disintegration of the US, China is still a long way to go from becoming a Cold War class superpower.
I hope these statistical cheat detection systems don't gain traction. I see the danger of a self-fulfilling scenario that tends toward mediocrity rather than excellence. Don't exert any effort, son. Don't bother studying hard for your exams. Statistics say you're bound to fail.
History, of course, is replete with examples to the contrary. Japan managed to industrialize within a generation. Dark horses win horse races. The thirteen states managed to expel the British empire (with a little help from the French). And the New York Mets managed to win the World Series.
Assange has no goal, and that is part of his problem. His treatise is to make the world more open, as if the very nature of classified conversations and secret deals between nations offends him, so he is to bring a giant flashlight to things regardless of what happens.
You seem to give Assange too much credit. Assange is simply a part of the bigger wave, the same wave that has brought us the privacy transgressions of Google and Facebook. He is simply riding the wave to a more "open" information regime. Whether such openness is a good thing (tm) or an evil that deserves to be nuked or sued to extinction is a different question. (Glastnost brought differing results across the countries of the former Soviet bloc.) But if Assange and WikiLeaks go down, another, more likely less scrupulous organization will rise, like a submarine in the night. And that will make WikiLeaks look like Napster to the Pirate Bay.
Sorry, to blow up your bubble. But copyright isn't a conservative problem, as implied by your qualifier "even the most conservative media outlets". If anything, it's liberals that favor a stronger copyright regime (I'm not talking about the more radical elements that choose to label themselves "left" or even, horrors, "socialist") since IP laws tend to favor the supposedly less traditional industries that pollute less, exploit the "working" (middle or lower) classes less, etc. With a few notable exceptions, media and software companies should be more liberal than oil companies or banks. And guess what, to stay afloat, these "progressive" companies need copyright protection for better or worse.
Not counting Google Translate, I think the "difficult" reputation of German writers comes either from bad translators or, more likely, good translators trying their hardest not to lose the nuances of the German language. I think the best translators are the translators that attempt to find equivalent concepts in the target and source languages. Is it okay to lose something in the translation in the effort to make the translation read right? If a translation is too opaque, then you lose any chance of the work being read by readers who can't understand the original language.
There's an interesting article over at Distrowatch about the binary blob issue. The author poses, like you have suggested, the rhetorical question of whether it's better to have the kernel load non-free firmware (e.g. from hard disk) or have the chip load the same from its internal memory. So is it better (1) to have binary-only firmware that you might hack even if with difficulty by using, say, a hex editor, or (2) to have burnt-in firmware that nobody but a hardcore hardware hacker can modify?
I've always assumed that females are more durable than males (long life span, more resistant to diseases, etc). If there's one sex in danger of extinction, it's the males of the species. So I think it's more valuable research to try and figure out how to create male babies from the eggs or stem cells of two donor mothers. Of course, we can always resort to cloning, but that would not lead to the diversity that's the main benefit of sexual reproduction (aside from pleasures of the one-night stand that is).
You're joking of course. But seriously everyone (humans in any case) needs at least one X chromosome. No Y means you're female. More than two sex chromosomes (X or Y) will result in varying degrees of physical femininity or masculinity. A man with two X chromosomes (XXY) will look more female than a man with two Y chromosomes (XYY).
If we follow the template of software + hardware (Windows/Android + Intel/Qualcomm), why not call the mutant daughter Aqua (with the advantage we don't have to coin a word).
If you're looking for that old, why not pick the rocket scientist, Werner von Braun.
I'm divided between these two private launch pioneers. If you're looking for the rocket scientist, I'd pick Rutan, who engineered the first successfully reused private suborbital spacecraft. While not a rocket designer, Musk has the youth and glamor factor going for him (as an ex-dot-com multimillionaire). His vision seems to be longer range, opting for real (read "orbital") space.
Musk wins by a hair for me simply because he could have chosen to start another dot.company after PayPal. Instead he chose to take real (as against virtual) risks and start a brick-and-mortar, or should I say, nuts-and-bolts business.
Netwalker? The name alone tells me that Sharp lacks a good marketing department. Search engines crawl. People browse. Who'd want to walk the web, Spiderman?
The design's fine. Or do you expect a desktop to be a work of art. It's the implementation that's wanting. The main selling point of the Mac experience is that the OS works consistently or at least more consistently than even a well-designed GNU/Linux desktop like Ubuntu. Incidentally, I find OpenSUSE to be a better designed desktop.
I didn't Gnu that!
If anything these bloggers who cry wolf let us know there's a problem, even if the problem isn't critical. Malthusian overpopulation didn't happen, but it helped keep world population from rising much higher than it is now.
You forgot the most famous one.
Agreed. You don't need to be overly secretive about your OS (hello, MS!). For example, there's practically no secret to building a typical jail house, bricks and metal bars. Only in extra special cases (perhaps a maximum security prison for war criminals and other arch villains) do you need to deviate from the norm. So, unless, the India's goal is to craft a real-time OS for missile systems and other highly destructive military gear, adapting (after some serious code review) an already existent FOSS/OS is the way to go.
Damn and I wanted to emigrate. So any nominess for a nice peaceful country with the strong possibility of anonymity?