The mere existance of non-Nikon software won't hurt you.
It won't hurt me directly, but it could hurt Nikon's reputation if shoddy pictures altered by non-Nikon software are used to demonstrate Nikon product. That hurts me as a user of Nikon products.
In a few years, at least one of the following will be true, so free software to decode NEF doesn't matter to me: a) I will own a new camera, so I don't care if Nikon discontinues support for my current one. b) My current Nikon software will work with my current operating system, on my current hardware, or any number of functioning analogous machines. c) My current Nikon software will work with whatever hardware and operating system is available (without much effort, CP/M software will run on IA-64, and a G5 will run almost anything written for Mac OS).
Also, while software and hardware obsolete rather quickly, file formats (well documented or not) stick around for a long time. PhotoShop CS2 (released two weeks ago) still supports image file formats that were obsolete in 1990...
Anyone who can afford a Nikon camera that produces NEF files can afford the good software to go with it. Few who buy Nikon bodies or glass on a regular basis are swayed more by a philosophical free software argument, than say, reviews of the products by their professional peers.
As a Nikon and Canon dSLR/SLR user, I don't mind Nikon's crapfilter in this case. Tieing the image format to a particular SDK that requires minimal effort to obtain ensures that third-party software interoperates correctly with the camera output (colour surprises are bad when printing >1 million copies) or that the authors of the software are skilled enough with image formats that they can figure out a trivial encoding scheme. This keeps random Joe programmer out of the game and gives Nikon (and the photographer) some assurance that good photos don't get unnecessarily wrecked by shoddy software. By comparison, look at all the complaints about image faults on the ROM-hacked Canon 6MP digital Rebels and the wonderful things happening to Canon's reputation among pro-sumers as a result of improper software being used with great hardware to produce poor images.
... Unless the tar is magically atracted just to one lense/laser...
CDs and DVDs are read at different wavelengths, so it is possible, even likely that the lenses used to read them are made of different materials. So yes, it's possible that tar components adhere more firmly to one type of lense but not another right next to it.
Yes... Now either store a token encrypted with each (or many) of those 10^38 keys on each media disc (massive storage limits) or encrypt with all possible keys (pointless) to ensure compatibility with future, not as yet exant, players.
Connect these dots: 1) Finder (and other apps) automatically shows thumbnails of image files without user intervention 2) postscript and EPS files are image files than must be executed to generate thumbnails 3) postscript is Turing complete
So, if you wanted to get an attachment to auto-execute on reciept, what file format would you use?
19: Estimated number of days before we see all kinds of exploitable holes in Apple's and various other postscript interpreters...
The way GDP is measured in the US is wildly different from Europe.
And your point is?
Those are all GDP numbers as calculated using whatever method the CIA chooses to use, and it's the same method for all the countries listed, so therefore there is no Europe/US bias. You might be able to try an argument that there is bias built in to the set goods and services produced and measured for GDP, since Europe and the U.S. produce different goods and services in different proportions.
1) Hopefully you're not debugging early-stage IP apps on an open network. 1a) If your app sucks enough that it can't tolerate a bit of packet loss, it shouldn't yet be on an open network. 2) If your app is big enough that it gets profiled, you will already have many other networks to test on.
To the ISPs, I say: Fine. Tag your own packets. I'll just saturate the pipe with non-tagged, but massively redundant packets. I'm sure the profits from the premium VoIP service will more than make up for the additional bandwidth costs...
Even assuming "ECS factories is where ASUS boards are made" to be true (you've presented no evidence):
0) Half the crap is still crap. 1) Different production lines and runs can use different standards of quality. 2) Binning: P IVs and Celerons come from the same factory, and sometimes the same wafer. Components can be similarly binned. 3) The marketing director can write a novel at the same factory, that doesn't mean it's good by default.
Feeding different information to a search engine (with more keywords) is currently frowned upon, as people have abused it.
The differences between a cached page and a current page is interesting but insufficient evidence that they tweak their pages for search engines. I can create the same kind of differences in any of my 10,000 pages cached on Google by simply editing my own content.
Nice, but implementing such a thing would be... uhm... difficult and it wouldn't be much different from the avorgado idea, or what we have now which is a cylinder of metal being accelerated the Earth at 9.8 m/s^2. For the masses you're considering, X is approximately 0 for any amount of platinum (or anything) we could fashion into a perfect sphere with current technology (ignoring the Pt/Ir supply issues).
Plus, perfect spheres made of soft metals have a tendency to deform when handled. Presumably this happens in a vaccum so that we don't have air friction, and also in freefall or low gravity so that we can ignore the friction of rolling.
While we're looking into the future, why not tie the kilogram to the amount of 1H required to convert into some specified quantity of energy?
But when we've figured out how to selectively destroy the contents of a container without destroying the container itself using antimatter, fabricating arbitrary life-free spacecraft from particles is no longer an engineering challenge.
Bringing back a sample of anything that isn't frozen/dormant would require figuring out what substrates these things need to survive and what waste products need to be removed before they become toxic, which isn't always easy even on Earth. If we've already sent a sterile container to Mars, it should be comparatively easy to strap a rocket to it for a trip back (I am not a rocket scientist...).
Chances are, we won't pack the correct life-sustaining juices on the outbound spacecraft on the first few tries (we still don't know how to culture in a lab everything that grows in a human body), so it would be much easier to return a block of ice/rock in a shielded container that we could activate/examine with more tools.
All this assuming that we *want* to put Martain bugs on Earth. Not knowing how these things could interact with Terran life, nor knowing how to kill them makes me *not* want them anywhere near our biosphere until we know them inside out. Granted, things living in the specialized environment of a frozen Mars lake shouldn't be well adapted to living on Earth.
I am not a materials scientist, just a microbiologist.
We want to build several 1 cc sample spaces, and possibly a probe/scraper/collector of some kind, that is completely sterile of Terran life (and living compounds) that we know about, and exclude the possibility of anything living on our instrument. Also, the material used to build this can't be antibiotic (broad sense) or we risk killing Martian life with our kit, so it can't be made of highly radioactive material.
Assuming an unlimited lander (power and space), I would equip the lander so that it is able to expose this sample space to all the environmental extremes we know of and then some, in an autoclave-like contraption that would probably destroy other autoclaves. The instrument would be exposed to extreme heat, cold, acid/base (careful selection of non-organic acid/base required), pressure, vacuum, light, electricity, desiccation, other radiation, etc that would kill each of the extremophiles that we know about. This expoure needs to happen at least once on Earth, and once after landing. Exposing the package to cosmic radiation along the way to Mars, without contaminating it with space dust, would be a plus.
I'd love to strip a layer of atoms from the surface of this instrument after launch using something like 20 molar H2SO4, but we know of spores that might survive that particular acid. Perhaps a concentrated binary acid with pH < 0.
For a simple solution that accomplishes most of this, perhaps a block of magnesium given all the listed non-chemical treatments, with the actual sample space and instrument fashioned with controlled redox while on the surface. A reaction that carves a hole in solid metal and is exothermic to a couple thousand degrees will destroy most organic particles.
Of course, we'll also need to sterilize the liquid solutions the probe will need to test for life if we are doing more than just melting Martian ice samples. The starting materials for any kind of metabolite test will need to be clean (I don't know that we can currently do this for all but the most simple SM without simutaneously destroying our SM since most of our tests are for the production of Earth organics from other Earth organics). Perhaps we could focus on gas exchange tests which do not depend as much on touching/reacting the sample, but inorganic processes also convert gases.
Looking a bit into the future, I would build the entire mission out of space dust, bootstrapping with nanites so that there is no possibility of directly contaminating the instrument with Terran life. (If life as we know it exists in open space, well, that's an important discovery, but for different reasons.)
Of course, all this is moot if we've already contaminated the surface with Terran life. And if we have not already, current practices are likely sufficient to maintain a sterile environment.
The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland is an international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services.
It's a bit difficult to have the ITU involved in this without also having the UN. Granted, the General Assembly likely won't ever be asked to vote on an ITU (or Internet) standard if rational minds prevail.
There's a fine line here. The ITU does some wonderful things by setting standards so that different phone systems can connect to each other. They DO NOT regulate or control the content of the conversations that go over the phone systems because the several sovereign states of the world have not given ITU regulatory or police authority over telephones.
Similarly, under an ITU-like UN structure, the UN Internet task group may do fun things that disturb ARIN, Internic et al, but they will have no influence whatsoever over spam, because that is content, not infrastructure. Trying to de-spam the Internet with a UN body is like trying to do spam filtering at layer 2...
Admittedly, a greater international influence at W3C would make dealing with double-byte languages easier in the future.
[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress....
2. You cannot dictate what any internet user puts on their own website, this is called the right to free speech and is embodied in almost every constitution in the world, even if some countries seem determined to undermine it with legislation.
Sadly, even if most constitutions protect free speech, most of the world's population cannot excercise it. If you look at population by country breakdown, only 7-8 of the top 25 countries have free speech as we know it in Anglo North America. It's closer to population pairity between free speech and not free speech when you consider the total populations of massively Internet-enabled countries, but still not great.
Slashdot Mirror
Ethernet cables and ports do not map to IP addresses on strictly a one-to-one basis. Think about your router for a moment.
The mere existance of non-Nikon software won't hurt you.
It won't hurt me directly, but it could hurt Nikon's reputation if shoddy pictures altered by non-Nikon software are used to demonstrate Nikon product. That hurts me as a user of Nikon products.
In a few years, at least one of the following will be true, so free software to decode NEF doesn't matter to me:
a) I will own a new camera, so I don't care if Nikon discontinues support for my current one.
b) My current Nikon software will work with my current operating system, on my current hardware, or any number of functioning analogous machines.
c) My current Nikon software will work with whatever hardware and operating system is available (without much effort, CP/M software will run on IA-64, and a G5 will run almost anything written for Mac OS).
Also, while software and hardware obsolete rather quickly, file formats (well documented or not) stick around for a long time. PhotoShop CS2 (released two weeks ago) still supports image file formats that were obsolete in 1990...
eWeek descended from PC WEEK...
In any case, TigerDirect's action here seems to be a classic case of defending a failing business model with threats of lawsuits.
The average consumer is unlikely to confuse cereal, fuel, or football with whatever the Disney entertainment product is.
Anyone who can afford a Nikon camera that produces NEF files can afford the good software to go with it. Few who buy Nikon bodies or glass on a regular basis are swayed more by a philosophical free software argument, than say, reviews of the products by their professional peers.
As a Nikon and Canon dSLR/SLR user, I don't mind Nikon's crapfilter in this case. Tieing the image format to a particular SDK that requires minimal effort to obtain ensures that third-party software interoperates correctly with the camera output (colour surprises are bad when printing >1 million copies) or that the authors of the software are skilled enough with image formats that they can figure out a trivial encoding scheme. This keeps random Joe programmer out of the game and gives Nikon (and the photographer) some assurance that good photos don't get unnecessarily wrecked by shoddy software. By comparison, look at all the complaints about image faults on the ROM-hacked Canon 6MP digital Rebels and the wonderful things happening to Canon's reputation among pro-sumers as a result of improper software being used with great hardware to produce poor images.
... Unless the tar is magically atracted just to one lense/laser...
CDs and DVDs are read at different wavelengths, so it is possible, even likely that the lenses used to read them are made of different materials. So yes, it's possible that tar components adhere more firmly to one type of lense but not another right next to it.
Yes... Now either store a token encrypted with each (or many) of those 10^38 keys on each media disc (massive storage limits) or encrypt with all possible keys (pointless) to ensure compatibility with future, not as yet exant, players.
1993 called. They want their FUD back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
Back in the day, you needed some seriously expensive beefy (and sometimes exotic) hardware to do anything meaningful with Windows NT on PPC.
If I recall correctly, the Xbox2 development platform runs an NT derivative on 970.
... if it executes in a contained environment. Malicious code can only harm what it has access to, by definition.
.ps and .eps (among other) files.
1. PDFs can embed
2. I don't need access to anything outside the sandbox if the sandbox is flawed in the right ways.
Connect these dots:
1) Finder (and other apps) automatically shows thumbnails of image files without user intervention
2) postscript and EPS files are image files than must be executed to generate thumbnails
3) postscript is Turing complete
So, if you wanted to get an attachment to auto-execute on reciept, what file format would you use?
19: Estimated number of days before we see all kinds of exploitable holes in Apple's and various other postscript interpreters...
The way GDP is measured in the US is wildly different from Europe.
And your point is?
Those are all GDP numbers as calculated using whatever method the CIA chooses to use, and it's the same method for all the countries listed, so therefore there is no Europe/US bias. You might be able to try an argument that there is bias built in to the set goods and services produced and measured for GDP, since Europe and the U.S. produce different goods and services in different proportions.
1) Hopefully you're not debugging early-stage IP apps on an open network.
1a) If your app sucks enough that it can't tolerate a bit of packet loss, it shouldn't yet be on an open network.
2) If your app is big enough that it gets profiled, you will already have many other networks to test on.
To the ISPs, I say: Fine. Tag your own packets. I'll just saturate the pipe with non-tagged, but massively redundant packets. I'm sure the profits from the premium VoIP service will more than make up for the additional bandwidth costs...
Google is your friend. There's at least one development kit for USB on NT:
http://www.jungo.com/kdusb_nt.html
Even assuming "ECS factories is where ASUS boards are made" to be true (you've presented no evidence):
0) Half the crap is still crap.
1) Different production lines and runs can use different standards of quality.
2) Binning: P IVs and Celerons come from the same factory, and sometimes the same wafer. Components can be similarly binned.
3) The marketing director can write a novel at the same factory, that doesn't mean it's good by default.
Feeding different information to a search engine (with more keywords) is currently frowned upon, as people have abused it.
The differences between a cached page and a current page is interesting but insufficient evidence that they tweak their pages for search engines. I can create the same kind of differences in any of my 10,000 pages cached on Google by simply editing my own content.
Stupid question:
If the output of this contraption is MIDI, why is there no (much smaller) MIDI version of this file?
Nice, but implementing such a thing would be... uhm... difficult and it wouldn't be much different from the avorgado idea, or what we have now which is a cylinder of metal being accelerated the Earth at 9.8 m/s^2. For the masses you're considering, X is approximately 0 for any amount of platinum (or anything) we could fashion into a perfect sphere with current technology (ignoring the Pt/Ir supply issues).
Plus, perfect spheres made of soft metals have a tendency to deform when handled. Presumably this happens in a vaccum so that we don't have air friction, and also in freefall or low gravity so that we can ignore the friction of rolling.
While we're looking into the future, why not tie the kilogram to the amount of 1H required to convert into some specified quantity of energy?
Antimatter Lysol would do it.
But when we've figured out how to selectively destroy the contents of a container without destroying the container itself using antimatter, fabricating arbitrary life-free spacecraft from particles is no longer an engineering challenge.
Bringing back a sample of anything that isn't frozen/dormant would require figuring out what substrates these things need to survive and what waste products need to be removed before they become toxic, which isn't always easy even on Earth. If we've already sent a sterile container to Mars, it should be comparatively easy to strap a rocket to it for a trip back (I am not a rocket scientist...).
Chances are, we won't pack the correct life-sustaining juices on the outbound spacecraft on the first few tries (we still don't know how to culture in a lab everything that grows in a human body), so it would be much easier to return a block of ice/rock in a shielded container that we could activate/examine with more tools.
All this assuming that we *want* to put Martain bugs on Earth. Not knowing how these things could interact with Terran life, nor knowing how to kill them makes me *not* want them anywhere near our biosphere until we know them inside out. Granted, things living in the specialized environment of a frozen Mars lake shouldn't be well adapted to living on Earth.
I am not a materials scientist, just a microbiologist.
We want to build several 1 cc sample spaces, and possibly a probe/scraper/collector of some kind, that is completely sterile of Terran life (and living compounds) that we know about, and exclude the possibility of anything living on our instrument. Also, the material used to build this can't be antibiotic (broad sense) or we risk killing Martian life with our kit, so it can't be made of highly radioactive material.
Assuming an unlimited lander (power and space), I would equip the lander so that it is able to expose this sample space to all the environmental extremes we know of and then some, in an autoclave-like contraption that would probably destroy other autoclaves. The instrument would be exposed to extreme heat, cold, acid/base (careful selection of non-organic acid/base required), pressure, vacuum, light, electricity, desiccation, other radiation, etc that would kill each of the extremophiles that we know about. This expoure needs to happen at least once on Earth, and once after landing. Exposing the package to cosmic radiation along the way to Mars, without contaminating it with space dust, would be a plus.
I'd love to strip a layer of atoms from the surface of this instrument after launch using something like 20 molar H2SO4, but we know of spores that might survive that particular acid. Perhaps a concentrated binary acid with pH < 0.
For a simple solution that accomplishes most of this, perhaps a block of magnesium given all the listed non-chemical treatments, with the actual sample space and instrument fashioned with controlled redox while on the surface. A reaction that carves a hole in solid metal and is exothermic to a couple thousand degrees will destroy most organic particles.
Of course, we'll also need to sterilize the liquid solutions the probe will need to test for life if we are doing more than just melting Martian ice samples. The starting materials for any kind of metabolite test will need to be clean (I don't know that we can currently do this for all but the most simple SM without simutaneously destroying our SM since most of our tests are for the production of Earth organics from other Earth organics). Perhaps we could focus on gas exchange tests which do not depend as much on touching/reacting the sample, but inorganic processes also convert gases.
Looking a bit into the future, I would build the entire mission out of space dust, bootstrapping with nanites so that there is no possibility of directly contaminating the instrument with Terran life. (If life as we know it exists in open space, well, that's an important discovery, but for different reasons.)
Of course, all this is moot if we've already contaminated the surface with Terran life. And if we have not already, current practices are likely sufficient to maintain a sterile environment.
From the ITU home page:
The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland is an international organization within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services.
It's a bit difficult to have the ITU involved in this without also having the UN. Granted, the General Assembly likely won't ever be asked to vote on an ITU (or Internet) standard if rational minds prevail.
There's a fine line here. The ITU does some wonderful things by setting standards so that different phone systems can connect to each other. They DO NOT regulate or control the content of the conversations that go over the phone systems because the several sovereign states of the world have not given ITU regulatory or police authority over telephones.
Similarly, under an ITU-like UN structure, the UN Internet task group may do fun things that disturb ARIN, Internic et al, but they will have no influence whatsoever over spam, because that is content, not infrastructure. Trying to de-spam the Internet with a UN body is like trying to do spam filtering at layer 2...
Admittedly, a greater international influence at W3C would make dealing with double-byte languages easier in the future.
You might be refering to this:
...
[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
2. You cannot dictate what any internet user puts on their own website, this is called the right to free speech and is embodied in almost every constitution in the world, even if some countries seem determined to undermine it with legislation.
Sadly, even if most constitutions protect free speech, most of the world's population cannot excercise it. If you look at population by country breakdown, only 7-8 of the top 25 countries have free speech as we know it in Anglo North America. It's closer to population pairity between free speech and not free speech when you consider the total populations of massively Internet-enabled countries, but still not great.