This suggests that Pluto and Charon are simply bodies within another asteriod belt and shouldn't have been classified as planets. And thus we shouldn't make the mistake of classifying this, too, as a planet, even though it is larger.
Charon is Pluto's moon so it's never been classified as a planet. One of those links of yours is about Chiron (which is a Centaur object - a sort of cross between an asteroid and a comet), but that has never been classified as a major planet either.
Also note that this object may be slightly larger than Charon but it is considerably smaller than Pluto (Charon is slightly over half the diameter and about 1/7 of the mass of Pluto). The arguments for and against Pluto being a major planet are both compelling and this discovery really doesn't add anything to either side of the debate.
Part of the entire problem has been that names of commonly used applications have become so standardized and entrenched in the minds of casual users that they have gone the way of Dry Ice®, Band Aid® and Kleenex®...
Honestly, how often have you heard generic computer users say to one another words like
...so I got an Outlook attachment from Bob in marketing that I couldn't open in Powerpoint and had to use Excel instead. I think if he saved it in Word2000 or let me open it from Explorer this wouldn't have happened...
Those aren't generic names for types of applications they are specific names of Microsoft applications. I have never heard anyone use "Outlook" to mean "email program", they always mean Microsoft Outlook. Similarly Excel and Powerpoint. Word you might have a point, but it's debatable.
Now, this next part is crucial-- if they see the words "linux" and "virus" in the same sentence, you can bet that their 6'oclock-news-conditioned brains are going to latch on to that real tight.
They see "Outlook" and "virus" in the same sentence all the time and that doesn't have any impact.
But that is just phase one of Napster's plan. Phase two is the pay service. Napster has licensed MusicNet's new software to allow paying users to share blessed files (those from labels Napster has bought off, like this week's deal with European labels). The catch is that files will be "limited in quality" and users will be "unable to burn downloads to CD". Basically, the new software which they are beta testing right now shares little to no resemblence to Napster's current software.
I doubt I need to point this out to anyone here but this is suicide for Napster. People may be willing to pay a subscription for Napster as it was but a pay-per-download system will not fly unless it's extremely cheap. Especially with the sorts of limitations the RIAA obviously want to impose.
That was the part that I don't quite get, to use napster you had to know either the song or the artist; which if you are looking for new indie music which you hadn't heard before... well you were screwed
Hotlist. You search for some music you like. You add people who have that song to your hotlist and then see what else they have.
Nah, the Atari ST wins this easily. Seen one? Remember the extremely LARGE (even worse on PAL than NTSC) black borders around the usable screen area?
Removing the black borders? Gimme a break, that was trivial stuff on an Amiga. One bit in one of the custom chips' registers, IIRC. Or you could just redefine the resolution of your screen to get rid of them (I used to run my screen in 652x272 PAL). Amiga's copper lists allowed some stunning hacks. Probably the best one was in the OS itself: multiple real resolutions displayed simultaneously on one monitor. Or changing the palette of colors on every scanline. Or changing sprites on each line to simulate more hardware sprites.
Also, parts of AMD's architecture has been converging with parts of the Alpha's (even on Athlons), so AMD might be able to integrate it into the high end of a "family" of processors.
Athlon and Alpha share the same front-side bus architecture. Chipsets for the two processors are potentially compatible (I've heard that people managed to get Athlon SMP systems working using Alpha motherboards). So AMD might be interested in the chipset technology that Compaq owns. OTOH they've repeatedly claimed to be uninterested in chipsets so maybe not. Might be a good move for VIA, as you say.
As far as processors go I don't think Alpha has much that AMD would want, technology-wise. However they are looking to get into the server market so they might be interested in Alpha's existing marketshare. It'd give them a good headstart.
I kind of doubt Sun would - last I heard they're still not big Linux/OSS fans (perhaps "cautiously interested" would be a better description).
Yeah, but then it occured to me that Sun's OSS enthusiasm might well be inversely proportional to Microsoft's and that taking over SourceForge might be the sort of PR move that would appeal.
The problem is getting machines and bandwidth. Especially bandwidth. Even if there are tons of people who will help work on/admin sourceforge-II, without a bunch of $$$ it won't happen.
IBM, Sun or Compaq could pick it up. They wouldn't even notice the sort of cash required to support SourceForge. I don't know if they would or not - so far they've been reluctant to do anything that might be seen as attempting to "take over" the Open Source movement.
Tux 1.0 ran in the kernel because the enhancements that made it fast (e.g. zero copy networking) needed to be in the kernel. But many of those enhancements were not specific to webserving. So they've been slowly making their way into the main kernel code. Now with Tux 2.0 very little time is spent in the Tux specific part of the kernel: only 2% of CPU time. In fact Tux doesn't really require kernel integration anymore, indeed X15 manages very similar performance running entirely in userspace. You could look at Tux as a "proof of concept" that resulted in several performance enhancements in Linux 2.4.
Well, congrats on a good troll. Surprisingly well-written. But if it was your intention to have me fooled, you should've left out Full House.
That's the beauty of it. Controversial but reasonable arguments and then something completely off. I've seen a few good trolls around here lately, and this is one of the better ones.
Everyone who reads hardware sites should check it out "Benchmarking: The Money Game" at RealWorldTech.com. They make similar points about how meaningless many hardware site reviews are.
One counter example doesn't mean it's not 99.9%. Frankly I'd be suprised if you could find one piece of hardware in a thousand which has poor support under Win 2000.
I've had to physically move a NIC from one pci slot to another just to get w2k to recognize the damn thing. Nothing else would get the OS to recognize the hardware.
Well I'm not saying Win2000's support is perfect. But the fact is that I personally own hardware that isn't even supported under OS X. Your issue might be a BIOS or motherboard problem, too.
Same point as in Round 1, OSX deals with its hardware better, but it
has a much more limited range of configurations that it has to deal with.
I don't agree with the article's conclusion on hardware compatibility. Windows 2000 supports a far greater range of hardware and 99.9% of it works perfectly. Even outside the box stuff like USB devices are not always supported by OS X.
I don't have unlimited bandwidth. I have a 512k (download) limit which I regularly hit. Explain to me how a volume cap is going to make my service better when I don't have any problem using the full bandwidth I'm allowed.
I think if you're downloading more than 100MB *every day* then you should pay for the privilege.
I do pay for the privilege. I pay for the most expensive (by fixed monthly charges) account Telstra provide. I got that account because it was fixed-rate, unlimited volume. Now I don't have a particular problem with the idea of a volume limit but IMO 3GB is too low. The latest set of RedHat ISOs come in at 2GB. I'd probably only get them every 6 months or so but now I have to worry about exceeding my monthly quota. Telstra have claimed (not in the email) that those 5% of "problem" users average 10GB per month so why make the limit so low?
My university (I am studying/working) has done something similar in restricting total bandwidth usage (admittedly we don't have broadband connection to the uni) - all bandwidth costs money to an organisation somewhere along the line.
Universities are not in the ISP business, Telstra is. Telstra sold me an 18 month contract for an unlimited volume account and now they are going to cap it. They offered to let me out of the contract (although they didn't offer to refund the installation cost), but there is no other broadband option available to me.
you conveniently forgot to include:
Xena, Warrior Princess, Hercules, Cleopatra 2525, Jack of all Trades...
Crocodile Dundee - granted, kind of a collaboration
Fosters - no, wait; its good - it takes the edge off the stuff you listed under your US culture list.
Xena and Hercules are US productions filmed in New Zealand.
As for Fosters, well it's a standing joke that no one in Australia drinks it.
Take 3 GB/mo, divide by (31days/mo)*(24hrs/day)*(60min/hr)*(60sec/min) and multiply by 8 bits/byte, and you get 26882 bits/sec - on average, a little less than a v.34 modem. Could it be that ISP infrastructure is designed for 28.8 kbps, even though the technology exists through DSL to increase the peak data rate?
Nice reasoning but no. This is a cable network (well cable and ASDL but cable was first and that's what 90% of customers use). The claim is that they are trying to improve conditions for most users. They claim 5% of users are using 35% of available bandwidth. But they're not capping bandwidth they're capping volume, which has little impact on service quality. Besides the Freedom plan already has bandwidth restrictions of 512k/128k, and I've never had any trouble hitting those speeds to the US so I question whether any improvement is possible. This change won't help the service quality at all. Rather Telstra are simply looking to make more money. And they get away with it because they have a virtual monopoly. I'm on the Freedom account and I'd be changing providers if I could. But I can't because the opposition, Cable and Wireless Optus, won't connect appartments (last I checked anyway). So even though I'm in the middle of Sydney, the largest city in the country (4 million) I have exactly one available broadband option and it's no longer unlimited volume.
I think they're talking about a setup that would run those 16 DVDs at once costing that much. Normal use as say, a computer monitor would only require the one PC - and the cost would be a LOT cheaper... Although they don't mention the cost of the monitor itself.
They mention in the article that the display itself is made by IBM. It is probably one of the ones mentioned in this/. article last year. What Intel have done is the 16 simultaneous DVDs, which sounds like a waste of time to me. They're not using all the display either: 4x720 by 4x480 is 2880 by 1920, only 5.5 of the 9.2 million pixels available. The monitor's resolution is 3820x2400 (info here) so they should have been able to display 25 DVDs at 720x480.
From the wording, I'd say it'll be in the neighborhood of at least $2000-4000:
More than that. IBM's T210 (20.8", 2048x1536) is around $6000. I'd say this monitor would be at least $20,000-$30,000. If you can buy it at all.
The claim that it requires 16 Pentium 4's to drive seems a bit dubious, either producing images on the screen requires a lot of math, or the media is just confused again.
The article's not perfectly clear but it does seem to mean that the 16 DVDs playing simultaneously require 16 P4s. Not the display itself.
Darren Reed raises some good points on his behalf. If one wants to create a piece of software, and then give it to the open source community, nobody should go to tell him that he should release it under some particular license.
The problem is that it's not clear that the license does give IPFilter to the open source community. From what I've been able to find out the course of events goes something like this:
IPFilter is released and everyone (including Darren) believe it is an BSD type OSS license.
A development version is released with a license that prohibits distribution of modified versions.
Darren and Theo get into some sort of flame-fest over IPFilter (I don't know nor want to know the details of this).
Darren gets the original IPFilter checked by a lawyer and then claims that the original license doesn't allow modification. He also pretty much refuses to publicly discuss it (saying "get a lawyer's opinion"), and comes off as an asshole.
Theo yanked IPFilter out of OpenBSD. That was pretty much all he could do, but he was his usual abrassive self about it.
Now Darren says the original IPFilter license does allow modification and that he won't change it because that would imply there's something wrong with it.
The problem is that the license is too vague. It doesn't mention modification anywhere. It does grant you the right to "use" the source code. Does "use" only mean study and compile or does it also include modification? This is a vital question to anyone who cares about only supporting/distributing open source software. Just seeing the source isn't enough (although MS would have you believe otherwise). What it boils down to is that whole reason this has become such an issue is that Darren got (rightly) annoyed that he was being made out to be the bad guy and got flammed heavily and then (wrongly) refused to clarify (until now) or change the license.
Slashdot Mirror
Also note that this object may be slightly larger than Charon but it is considerably smaller than Pluto (Charon is slightly over half the diameter and about 1/7 of the mass of Pluto). The arguments for and against Pluto being a major planet are both compelling and this discovery really doesn't add anything to either side of the debate.
As far as processors go I don't think Alpha has much that AMD would want, technology-wise. However they are looking to get into the server market so they might be interested in Alpha's existing marketshare. It'd give them a good headstart.
Kevin Smith is in the process of finishing his own next movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. We would he have found the time to do this too?
Everyone who reads hardware sites should check it out "Benchmarking: The Money Game" at RealWorldTech.com. They make similar points about how meaningless many hardware site reviews are.
One counter example doesn't mean it's not 99.9%. Frankly I'd be suprised if you could find one piece of hardware in a thousand which has poor support under Win 2000.
As for Fosters, well it's a standing joke that no one in Australia drinks it.
The big issue is that this account (the Freedom account) has been advertised as an unlimited (volume) flat-rate account. Suddenly it's not anymore.
- IPFilter is released and everyone (including Darren) believe it is an BSD type OSS license.
- A development version is released with a license that prohibits distribution of modified versions.
- Darren and Theo get into some sort of flame-fest over IPFilter (I don't know nor want to know the details of this).
- Darren gets the original IPFilter checked by a lawyer and then claims that the original license doesn't allow modification. He also pretty much refuses to publicly discuss it (saying "get a lawyer's opinion"), and comes off as an asshole.
- Theo yanked IPFilter out of OpenBSD. That was pretty much all he could do, but he was his usual abrassive self about it.
- Now Darren says the original IPFilter license does allow modification and that he won't change it because that would imply there's something wrong with it.
The problem is that the license is too vague. It doesn't mention modification anywhere. It does grant you the right to "use" the source code. Does "use" only mean study and compile or does it also include modification? This is a vital question to anyone who cares about only supporting/distributing open source software. Just seeing the source isn't enough (although MS would have you believe otherwise). What it boils down to is that whole reason this has become such an issue is that Darren got (rightly) annoyed that he was being made out to be the bad guy and got flammed heavily and then (wrongly) refused to clarify (until now) or change the license.