Well, what you say is true, but isn't the pre-selection ("hmmm the light is probably insufficient") somewhat comparable to post-selection ("well ok, it really was too dark *delete*") ?
Then there are photographs which would not be taken without digital cameras - like those in poor light conditions. Without digital cameras we might not get these shots at all.
Re:Ternary has been known to be efficient...
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
but it would be
harder to implement with transistors.
Very apt. A binary transistor has two states,
idealized "on" and "off". From a more analog view that's low current and high current - appropriately connected with a resistor that results in low and high voltages.
The nice feature is, that a high voltage at the
input opens the transistor, a low voltage closes it. So we get a relatively complete system, I can get from hi to lo, from lo to hi.
Tertary would put us into "middle" voltage.
But middle on the input, creates middle on the output, no direct way to get either high or low - making basic circuits more complex.
But the real killer with "middle" is manufacturing. Let's say we use 2.8 Volts for the high level, 0.2 Volts for the low level. Due to manufacturing tolerances some chips transistors would be "fully" open at 2.3 Volts, others at 2.7 Volts. Easy to compensate on binary designs, you just use the 2.8 to switch the transistor, but for the middle level? What's required to switch a transistor to middle on one chip, is sufficient to open the transistor completely on another chip...
So your manufacturing tolerances become way smaller, and that of course reduces yield which increases cost.
Add to that, that chips today work with a variety of "hi" voltages like 5, 3.3, 2.8...
Most lower-voltage chips are compatible with higher-voltage ones, they produce voltages which
are still over the switching point and accept higher voltages than they operate on.
With ternary that becomes impossible and chip manufacturers need to progressively lower the voltages for higher speed.
Plus disadvantages in power consumption and and and...
Admittedly the article doesn't seem to suggest that ternary is viable, just that it's pretty. Which may be true for a mathematician.:)
In one case, the access problems are caused by
using new features, eyecandy etc. In the other case specific browsers are locked out, even though they'd be perfectly able to display the content.
While you can find plenty of arguments to excuse the first case, it seems difficult to attribute the second to anything but malice.
But I'm tired of all these people acting like email is a God given right - its not. If your ISP choses to utilize MAPS or any other blacklist that is THEIR right as the company providing you teh service. Should they notify you? Sure, but if not - too bad.
Huh? They've agreed to provide me with a service, for a fee I'm paying. It's their duty to fulfill the contract. Companies have to obey the law, just like people do.
Huh? Just install it. Unless you're referring to that Qt thing? Just because Qt is ported doesn't mean KDE will run - it needs more to run than the widgets.
They'll suddenly start loving the general who arrested their elected president a year ago? Why? I'd still hate his guts in their position.
Don't think I don't understand why it's convenient to use this guy right now - I just think he should lose all support as soon as the Taliban has been flushed down the drain. Otherwise this is just going to be more, a lot more, trouble a few years down the road...
Well... you're giving them money *now*. I guess that counts as support? Eventually their dictator will be overthrown by people who hate him and (quite possibly) the people who supported him. And they'll have nukes.
Hey they don't even need a briefcase nuke - they can nuke 25% of the worlds oil reserves right on their doorstep, and bring the worlds economy to a grinding halt.
But the new ID cards will keep the US safe, I'm sure.
Oh by that time, the fact that the west supported a military dictatorship in a country that has nuclear weapons [1] will have paid of, so it's definately the nukes....
Just curious, but why would you want to visit the Windows Update page with Mozilla under X? What are you trying to do, patch Linux with a Windows service pack?
Well dispite of what MS seems to think, some people may want to download something on one computer, then use it on another. Of course typically their only download option is to use their damn tools. So if I want to upgrade the browser on the Windows PCs in our office I have to run their downloader on each PC - what a ludicrous waste of time and bandwidth.
If it was a normal program to download (like Opera for example) I'd load it once on our Server (SUN, running Samba) and then I could click on the file from each machine, but noooo.
Installing a harddrive in windows is an absolute pain! I just did that on my dad's PC, both drives had two partitions. So originally he had
C: D: on the first drive, after adding the drive he had:
C: first
D: second
E: first
F: second
Can you imagine how much installed software broke over that?
One of the programs handled the internet access, so I had to re-install an old version, then download the new connection software. With 28k instead of 56k because the old software didn't detect the modem properly. (Because the damn connection software won't let me download, it combines downloading and installing.)
Anyway, your average users is not going to install a harddrive, the software part is easy compared with the BIOS upgrade for bigger drives and doing the physical installation.
As far as XFree setup goes: at least SuSE let's you configure with a graphical tool - not all that more difficult than in Windows. (Most Windows installations have bad screen settings, btw, cause
the users can't figure it out...)
Kernel compilation hasn't been part of the installation of a long time either. Ok, you can do that to tweak your system, but that's comparable to registry editing.
Linux needs better plug and play support.
Just because I don't agree with your arguments doesn't mean I don't agree with your conclusion.:)
I can't stop myself to commenting on KDE and Gnome:
they *are* good window managers for average computer users. For the life of me, I don't see what could be missing.
Unless you were thinking of desktop apps - the office applications are not as mature as the MS offerings.
CMOS. = Complementry Metal Oxide Semiconductor. This is relatively slow and expensive, but it retains its state when there is no power, hence its use in Bios memory.
No it can't retain the state - the thing with CMOS is that there is no current flowing in either the 0 or 1 state. ("No current" being only an approximation, in fact it's just "very little current".) It will need current to switch from one state to the other, of course.
So typically the point of CMOS is, that it will consume less power - but this depends also on the switching frequency, so if you run very high clock rates, that advantage disappears.
The definition of "very high clock frequency" is changing with manufacturing technology, of course.:)
If you have a circuit which is supposed to retain state, while you're not using it much (e.g. having no clocks) then CMOS needs less battery power. It will loose all info if disconnect the battery. A way around this is to use Flash memory, but that's more expensive.
Any new interface requires some accomodation from the user.
Ok, that sounds fair, but I guess you'd want to have some sort of benefit after you invest your time?
I just don't see this sort of interface to catch on for standard applications. I mean - imagine you are in an office with 20 people grunting at their computers, the noise they make is just going to be unbearable. That's got to be worse than that annoying guy who's checking his voicemail via speaker phone. *shudder*
From the article:
By increasing the pitch of your voice, the scrolling speed increases. When you stop speaking, the scrolling ends.
Can you imagine sitting next to a guy who uses this, and not have a headache after 10 mins?
Now imagine if said card also contained or linked to a database containing your fingerprints, facial scans, and DNA sequencing. Better hope you don't ever drop your wallet, or get it stolen.
Not that I'm terribly in favour of ID cards, but wouldn't this make it less of an issue when it's stolen? I would think the point is, that it's easier to verify that the person who has the ID card, is in fact not you.
Just because Linux worms are more scarce isn't a credit to that system. They're less heard of because of less market share and dumber sys-admins.
But is that really true in this case? MS runs more desktops, but IIS has a much smaller market share than Apache. So if Apache and IIS had the same quality you'd expect Apache to cause more problems, but the opposite seems to be the case.
Just in case you're reading your replies on your users page, as I do, I want to add a response.:)
My objection to this definition of "republic", is that it seems very recent, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the term as used in the US constitution. (I doesn't seem to have been used in that way in the 1940s when treaties were signed to make liberated nations in Europe "democracies".) My impression is, that the definition has been modified in an attempt to re-interprete the constitution, to make it say something it clearly does not.:(
You're probably right about Aristotle's views of a
"representative democracy", but I'm not sure about demos=poor. The demos is the body of the citizens, and does e.g. not include the slaves.
Also mob-rule, I think is more typically the rule of a minority which manages to scare the rest of the citizens from excercizing their rights, e.g. by rioting. That happened of course in both Athens and Rome. I think in Rome the main cause was the absence of a police force, in Athens probably the lack of a division of power.
Athens had some non-democratic institutions, too (e.g. aerophagus), and also had some elected officials (e.g. generals). So considering that, all western states seem to have some sort of a mixture/derivation of these systems. Some states have provisions that certain laws need to pass a general vote before coming into effect, others may have provisions for the general populance to initiate laws. The US allows to elect certain parts of the judiciary and executive - certainly more democratic then the roman republic in that respect.:)
Thanks for your educated response, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Re:Behind every good GUI...
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But most of all, I'd like to thank the nameless girlfriend who wasn't afraid to
complain!
Well, that's (in my experience) not something girlfriends are typically afraid of.;)
I really can't agree with this classification of the US system, it seems to have originated from a right-wing soundbite "the US is a republic not a democracy" but has no foundation in the appropriate literature, that I know of.
States which have a system like the US are typically described as a "representative democracy". A democracy where you can vote on every single law is a "direct democracy".
A republic is not a system of government, but a form of state - i.e. one in which there is no king. You can verify this by comparing the various forms of government which Rome had - that's after all where the term republic comes from.
BTW, since this always comes up in these discussions: the Roman republic had frequent occassions of mob rule.:)
Privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of research, but these people have to get it through their heads that these companies don't give a fuck who you are.
Well, obviously I can't speak for all privacy advocates, but I suspect they don't give a fuck what these companies want.:)
So they want to target advertising at me? I don't care, I still don't want them to spy on me, nor do I want them to collect and trade my information. Whether that activity is useful for them or not, is totally irrelevant to me.
Maybe I'm interested in hearing what my neighbours say to each other? How does the amount of interest affect whether I have a right to wiretap their home?
If you do want targetted advertising, maybe it would make sense to set up a system which lets you specify your interests. That information could be placed in some sort of generally accessible "cookie", or maybe you'd have an opt-in system with advertisers, where you can allow them to track you. If the maintainers of that system take care of that data, maybe people would go for that too.
Slashdot Mirror
Then there are photographs which would not be taken without digital cameras - like those in poor light conditions. Without digital cameras we might not get these shots at all.
Very apt. A binary transistor has two states, idealized "on" and "off". From a more analog view that's low current and high current - appropriately connected with a resistor that results in low and high voltages.
The nice feature is, that a high voltage at the input opens the transistor, a low voltage closes it. So we get a relatively complete system, I can get from hi to lo, from lo to hi.
Tertary would put us into "middle" voltage. But middle on the input, creates middle on the output, no direct way to get either high or low - making basic circuits more complex.
But the real killer with "middle" is manufacturing. Let's say we use 2.8 Volts for the high level, 0.2 Volts for the low level. Due to manufacturing tolerances some chips transistors would be "fully" open at 2.3 Volts, others at 2.7 Volts. Easy to compensate on binary designs, you just use the 2.8 to switch the transistor, but for the middle level? What's required to switch a transistor to middle on one chip, is sufficient to open the transistor completely on another chip...
So your manufacturing tolerances become way smaller, and that of course reduces yield which increases cost.
Add to that, that chips today work with a variety of "hi" voltages like 5, 3.3, 2.8 ...
Most lower-voltage chips are compatible with higher-voltage ones, they produce voltages which
are still over the switching point and accept higher voltages than they operate on.
With ternary that becomes impossible and chip manufacturers need to progressively lower the voltages for higher speed.
Plus disadvantages in power consumption and and and...
Admittedly the article doesn't seem to suggest that ternary is viable, just that it's pretty. Which may be true for a mathematician. :)
In one case, the access problems are caused by using new features, eyecandy etc. In the other case specific browsers are locked out, even though they'd be perfectly able to display the content.
While you can find plenty of arguments to excuse the first case, it seems difficult to attribute the second to anything but malice.
Huh? They've agreed to provide me with a service, for a fee I'm paying. It's their duty to fulfill the contract. Companies have to obey the law, just like people do.
Well ok - but that's basically a Unix emulator it's running on, it doesn't really make use of the cross-platform features which Qt has, right?
Huh? Just install it. Unless you're referring to that Qt thing? Just because Qt is ported doesn't mean KDE will run - it needs more to run than the widgets.
Doubt it - the guerrila issue was the reason why the president of Pakistan wanted to get rid of the general in the first place... :(
Don't think I don't understand why it's convenient to use this guy right now - I just think he should lose all support as soon as the Taliban has been flushed down the drain. Otherwise this is just going to be more, a lot more, trouble a few years down the road...
Hey they don't even need a briefcase nuke - they can nuke 25% of the worlds oil reserves right on their doorstep, and bring the worlds economy to a grinding halt.
But the new ID cards will keep the US safe, I'm sure.
[1] that's Pakistan if you're wondering
I don't think that's different, but which sites are those? I don't think we should stop screaming about MS, but complain about all who do that.
Well dispite of what MS seems to think, some people may want to download something on one computer, then use it on another. Of course typically their only download option is to use their damn tools. So if I want to upgrade the browser on the Windows PCs in our office I have to run their downloader on each PC - what a ludicrous waste of time and bandwidth.
If it was a normal program to download (like Opera for example) I'd load it once on our Server (SUN, running Samba) and then I could click on the file from each machine, but noooo.
Guess MS isn't really ready for office use. :)
I'm worried to - this could easily distract Howard Stern from the important topics he usually covers... uhmm... hang on... :)
Well, I got a few cases I could spare. :)
What about that kernel bug which was discussed on Slashdot last week? Is that fixed in the new distro? I didn't see it in the announcement.
C: first D: second E: first F: second
Can you imagine how much installed software broke over that?
One of the programs handled the internet access, so I had to re-install an old version, then download the new connection software. With 28k instead of 56k because the old software didn't detect the modem properly. (Because the damn connection software won't let me download, it combines downloading and installing.)
Anyway, your average users is not going to install a harddrive, the software part is easy compared with the BIOS upgrade for bigger drives and doing the physical installation.
As far as XFree setup goes: at least SuSE let's you configure with a graphical tool - not all that more difficult than in Windows. (Most Windows installations have bad screen settings, btw, cause the users can't figure it out...)
Kernel compilation hasn't been part of the installation of a long time either. Ok, you can do that to tweak your system, but that's comparable to registry editing.
Linux needs better plug and play support.
Just because I don't agree with your arguments doesn't mean I don't agree with your conclusion. :)
I can't stop myself to commenting on KDE and Gnome: they *are* good window managers for average computer users. For the life of me, I don't see what could be missing.
Unless you were thinking of desktop apps - the office applications are not as mature as the MS offerings.
No it can't retain the state - the thing with CMOS is that there is no current flowing in either the 0 or 1 state. ("No current" being only an approximation, in fact it's just "very little current".) It will need current to switch from one state to the other, of course.
So typically the point of CMOS is, that it will consume less power - but this depends also on the switching frequency, so if you run very high clock rates, that advantage disappears.
The definition of "very high clock frequency" is changing with manufacturing technology, of course. :)
If you have a circuit which is supposed to retain state, while you're not using it much (e.g. having no clocks) then CMOS needs less battery power. It will loose all info if disconnect the battery. A way around this is to use Flash memory, but that's more expensive.
Ok, that sounds fair, but I guess you'd want to have some sort of benefit after you invest your time?
I just don't see this sort of interface to catch on for standard applications. I mean - imagine you are in an office with 20 people grunting at their computers, the noise they make is just going to be unbearable. That's got to be worse than that annoying guy who's checking his voicemail via speaker phone. *shudder*
From the article:
By increasing the pitch of your voice, the scrolling speed increases. When you stop speaking, the scrolling ends.
Can you imagine sitting next to a guy who uses this, and not have a headache after 10 mins?
That's presumably why Americans have the exact same system (right down to registration and fines) for their drivers licenses... :)
Not that I'm terribly in favour of ID cards, but wouldn't this make it less of an issue when it's stolen? I would think the point is, that it's easier to verify that the person who has the ID card, is in fact not you.
But is that really true in this case? MS runs more desktops, but IIS has a much smaller market share than Apache. So if Apache and IIS had the same quality you'd expect Apache to cause more problems, but the opposite seems to be the case.
My objection to this definition of "republic", is that it seems very recent, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the term as used in the US constitution. (I doesn't seem to have been used in that way in the 1940s when treaties were signed to make liberated nations in Europe "democracies".) My impression is, that the definition has been modified in an attempt to re-interprete the constitution, to make it say something it clearly does not. :(
You're probably right about Aristotle's views of a "representative democracy", but I'm not sure about demos=poor. The demos is the body of the citizens, and does e.g. not include the slaves.
Also mob-rule, I think is more typically the rule of a minority which manages to scare the rest of the citizens from excercizing their rights, e.g. by rioting. That happened of course in both Athens and Rome. I think in Rome the main cause was the absence of a police force, in Athens probably the lack of a division of power.
Athens had some non-democratic institutions, too (e.g. aerophagus), and also had some elected officials (e.g. generals). So considering that, all western states seem to have some sort of a mixture/derivation of these systems. Some states have provisions that certain laws need to pass a general vote before coming into effect, others may have provisions for the general populance to initiate laws. The US allows to elect certain parts of the judiciary and executive - certainly more democratic then the roman republic in that respect. :)
Thanks for your educated response, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Well, that's (in my experience) not something girlfriends are typically afraid of. ;)
Sorry, but I want to nitpick there, a bit...
I really can't agree with this classification of the US system, it seems to have originated from a right-wing soundbite "the US is a republic not a democracy" but has no foundation in the appropriate literature, that I know of.
States which have a system like the US are typically described as a "representative democracy". A democracy where you can vote on every single law is a "direct democracy".
A republic is not a system of government, but a form of state - i.e. one in which there is no king. You can verify this by comparing the various forms of government which Rome had - that's after all where the term republic comes from.
BTW, since this always comes up in these discussions: the Roman republic had frequent occassions of mob rule. :)
Well, obviously I can't speak for all privacy advocates, but I suspect they don't give a fuck what these companies want. :)
So they want to target advertising at me? I don't care, I still don't want them to spy on me, nor do I want them to collect and trade my information. Whether that activity is useful for them or not, is totally irrelevant to me.
Maybe I'm interested in hearing what my neighbours say to each other? How does the amount of interest affect whether I have a right to wiretap their home?
If you do want targetted advertising, maybe it would make sense to set up a system which lets you specify your interests. That information could be placed in some sort of generally accessible "cookie", or maybe you'd have an opt-in system with advertisers, where you can allow them to track you. If the maintainers of that system take care of that data, maybe people would go for that too.