Imagine walking around knowing you had no heart? Spooky.
Actually, you generally don't have your own heart taken out for these devices. Instead it is placed alongside your normal heart.
This has the advantage if you have some cardiac reserve that even if the device fails you don't necessarily die, as your own heart may have enough strength to keep you alive till the problem is fixed.
Your heart can actually recover if given a "rest" by these devices, which is another reason to not take it out. These devices have a strong role to play in end stage heart failure when there is a prospect of recovery.
Also, this is only one of many devices being trialled. I have been involved with many assist devices and some of them are more promising than the abiomed. I think that we will be seeing alot more of them in the future. I personally* know of one person in our unit who went nearly two years on a similar device whilst awaiting a heart transplant.
Michael
* For what its worth, I am an anaesthetist who works in a heart transplant unit, and we use these things alot - the surgeons put them in at the business end, but we run the controls on the slightly less biological end of things. I guess its something like IAACA (I am a cardiac anaesthetist).
I will be switching all of are desktop PCs, in mass, the minute I get my hands on a copy of Mac OS-X86. I will also be telling all of my other, on the side, clients to buy a mac. There are a million other people just like me that want to stick it to Microsoft, I've been waiting for this day for a long time. Umm and no, FreeBSD (and Linux) is not going anywhere. I will still keep on using it in the back office. UNIX in the desktop and UNIX in the server, what's not to love. FSCK you Microsoft! FSCK you SysV UNIX..... BSD UNIX forever!:-)
I think that you will have to buy apple hardware to run OS X on, even if you do have PC's currently. Apple has stated that they are not going to have OS X running on non-apple hardware.
So you will still have to migrate people over at a hardware level. Even so, hardware is the smallest part of the cost for most corporations. Support is usually the biggest, and I have no doubt that there will be some form of win32 API for the X86's very quickly. After all, we have virtual PC now for the PPC, which works ok even with emulation of a different microprocessor. It will get even easier for both virtual PC and VMware, as well as WINE, to make windows apps run on OS X, for legacy support.
Apple's thinking bigger than that. It's not just about the graphics card or altivec, it's about providing abstracted system libraries for just about anything. If you write a program that uses the system libraries, Apple will ship an implementation that runs fast on a sufficiently advanced GPU, one that runs fast on AltiVec, one that runs fast on SSE3, one that runs fast on whatever the next step is. If you use this library, you get the benefits on all platforms.
That would make it similar to.net, but designed for multiple platforms?
The issue for developers isn't that bad - after all, apple appears to be making it fairly easy to produce cross platform code. If you were going to develop before, why not now? It will be many years before there is a significant number of apple intel systems to run PC stuff quickly. If you were going to write for the apple PPC last week, your situation hasn't changed much and won't for the next couple of years. You will write with standard PPC tools, or use the latest version of Xcode (or similar) which produces fat binaries, and runs on both platforms without a performance hit.
Interestingly, the major improvements in Tiger, such as core video and so on, move all the graphically intensive stuff into the GPU. The cleverness of this is that the lack of the altivec units aren't such a big issue if you use the OS X core API's - everything is done in the graphics card, altivec is much less important, and this means that emulation of the PPC code will work fairly fast on their software emulator (rosetta). So your legacy code isn't going to suffer too much, and newer code even less so using the core API's even if you don't use fat binaries, which you will.
Of course, you could just write for windows, but then you are going to miss a large number of apple users and watch other developers make money in that market whilst you compete in the win32 sphere. Your choice as a developer I guess.
Eventually, the powerbook I am writing this on will be a legacy piece of hardware because the number of people using PPC will be too small to be worth developing for.
However, a similar situation exists for old windows boxes, not because the processor has changed, but because the hardware requirements are too high for big new apps to work on it.
This process will take many years to occur, and won't be a problem for developers unless all new purchases stop for apple.
If this happens, you will get alot of warning over the next 6-12 months that its time to bail from apple.
As a user of apple computers, after the initial concern, I am much less worried about making new purchases because the obsolescence of the current models will take years to occur. It really isn't so different from the transition of OS 9 to OS X. You can still run stuff in classic mode. And my current power book is still a magical 12" laptop that does what I need, and will be good for a few years no matter what, and for which I'll still buy new software for (if its good enough to buy). So the market will still be there.
I don't think that many apple fans will jump ship, even if they are not happy - after all, what is the alternative? Go back to windows? Get your apps working under linux (like iLife, Keynote, etc?). Even if you feel abandoned by apple, the alternatives are still either a malware ridden platform or alot of hard work and a significant drop in the eye candy factor.
In the longer run, its going to be more a case of alot more dissatisfied windows users jumping ship and the apple user base growing, in my opinion.
And what is this going to buy anyway? Intel starts a PowerPC division for ONE CUSTOMER? One thing's for sure, Intel's not going to be undercutting IBM on price, and if the aim is to put these chips in the Mac mini, that's going to be a big problem.
Well, microsoft is moving the X-Box over to IBM, so thats potentially a lead in to win back the CPU for the X-Box as well, something that Intel cannot do with the X86 architecture.
So lets see,
Once customer definite, plus one possible customer. Apple plus Microsoft.
No, that wouldn't be a big enough market to make intel consider switching, surely not.
What I meant is that you can desalinate at the coast and pump the water inland. Alot of people above have said something to the effect that this wouldn't help them as they are too far inland. The reply from someone else was that at least the power was easy to transmit over a grid (which it is you can easily send power 1000 km). I'm just adding that the water can also be pumped if you need too as well.
Not so. You wouldn't pipe the cold water all the way to where you are, but transmitting the electrical power is a very well-developed technology already.
Actually, you can pipe the the water too.
In Western Australia, we have a number of cities that are far inland from Perth (the capital of the state) where alot of the water is.
Kalgoorlie, a mining town, has had a pipeline from Perth to supply its entire water needs. Kalgoorlie is 600 km away from Perth, and has approximately 40000 people. This pipline was built 100 years ago (pipeing water is not a new technology). Kalgoorlie is not the end of the pipeline - the most distant towns are about 800 km inland at the end of the pipe.
Now that might not quite make it to the center of Australia, because we are a pretty big country. But if you tried to find all the places on the planet that were more than 1000 km from the sea, it wouldn't be a very long list.
The biggest problem for water in Perth is not pipeing it around, its getting a fresh supply in the first place.
This is typical microsoft FUD. They are so far behind they don't even have a creditable product to show an alternative to. But they will still tell you that there is a superior windows based solution available.
I guess they owe it to their shareholders to fly the flag. Hopefully nobody will actually believe them.
I think the whole situation with the FTA would be alot more fair if we could just buy things directly from the US. At least we could access the benefits of a large free market.
For example, we can't buy songs from the Apple USA store. The Australian price for a song was about $1.69 Australian according to some sources when the Austrialian apple store went online briefly before being pulled. At that price its way more than the US resident pays, even allowing for currency conversion rates its no more than $1.39 allowing for a profit on currency conversion.
And all the stuff about australia being a small market, etc, really doesn't wash to much when the website is already developed, etc, by apple. Particularly as Apple doesn't try to make much of a profit on all of this, the money all goes to the music industry. The majority of the songs will be common with the US site and shouldn't cost a cent more than it does in the US.
Its nice to see this posted on./ but I think that most people here know that point to point doesn't harm the industry.
The way I see it,we all have so much spare cash per week that we spend on something.
If its not music, its ringtones, video games, or something.
But point to point apps don't actually destroy money, its still there. People want to spend, and if they hear music they like, they are more likely to spend money in this way.
So when the industry says that there is x million dollars of "stolen" music, its actually a fairly spurious argument that people would have actually spent that money, or that they actually spent any less that month.
I don't know how I missed it, but "Peacekeeper Wars" is quite a contradiction, isn't it?
For the whole of farscape it was never explained why the peacekeepers seemed to be anything but that. At least with the Peacekeeper Wars they had the chance to wrap up the storyline, including explaining why the Peacekeepers were called that.
Its an absolutely fantastic piece of sci-fi, and despite having seen the whole series on DVD, I'm very tempted to buy the collection for myself. That would put it next to my Buffy collection as one of the few TV series worth owning.
My apologies, I was actually unaware that the British never sent anyone to NZ - I just presumed, incorrectly as it turns out.
If you ever meet someone with an "Australian" accent ask them if they come from NZ if they do they will be pleased you noticed the difference and if not who worries about upsetting Australians.
Your comment is entirely accurate, except with respect to New Zealand: people came here willingly, because they were trying to escape from Britain. Thank you for your attention.
My apologies, I was actually unaware that the British never sent anyone to NZ - I just presumed, incorrectly as it turns out.
I thought it was kinda funny. I'm pretty sure that was his intention in which case, people need to lighten up.
If you look at his posting history you will see that for whatever reason most of his posts seem to end up at -1. So its probably not just my perception of this post, its that of a lot of people who had mod points. Maybe he doesn't intend this, but he certainly achieves it in his posts.
If you were as much a farscape fan as I am, you would understand the frustration in not being able to get the peacekeeper wars by any legal means in Australia.
The dissapointing thing is that there is no reason why this shouldn't be available in Oz right now. Its not even like film, where the latest releases only have a certain number of reels to go around the world.
If I can get a high quality copy easily over the internet, why can't the networks figure out how to do it for a profit?
The large majority of the power in this province comes from Hydroelectric, which (depending on the impact of the dams build) is generally more environmentally friendly than your coal etc.
Well, I think you are underplaying the impact of hydro. One study reported in new scientist looked at the environmental impact of flooding areas to provide electricity. The areas flooded upstream of the generators decompose underwater and release large amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This has not been factored into the "green" calculations for most hydro stations.
Not that I'm against removing our dependence on fossil fuels - the future of humanity will depend on it (its just a question of when).
But the alternatives have to be looked at closely. Much as the current green movement doesn't like it, nuclear power is one of the cleaner short term options for power until we get true large scale renewable power available.
Uh okay. So let's see what exactly this "Spotlight" is, shall we?
Otay. We make an index of every file name on the harddrive. Then we'll make a big list, and on every keystroke, it will update the list based on what i have typed.
This is either a very ignorant post, or a troll. Either way, I'm biting.
Spotlight is much more than a file name search. Its a metadata search. The idea is that your search will look at the content of your files. And everyone elses, including apples.
This includes such things (as stated by Apple) as finding places on maps based on the text string that is included in the map. Finding out how to change system settings based on the text in the system preferences (control panel) sub programs. Finding relevant emails from their content.
And all of this based on a system wide search, not an email search, or a file system search, or going to a help file. All effectively instantly.
If you don't see the value of this, you probably don't understand why people use google. Google searches on content, not on file names, and its alot more useful for it.
But even Google struggles when it comes to some files, such as images or music, because it looks mostly at HTML, but not the image or music content. Spotlight indexes metadata, so that any information, properly categorised, is indexed. Given that apple includes apps such as mail, address book, iTunes, iPhoto and iChat in their distribution, all that will be searchable. As will your word, powerpoint and keynote documents, no doubt.
Google does similar, for some file types (eg PDF's), and it is much more valuable for it. Google actively looks for other sources of information (eg usenet) to incorporate into its searches.
Spotlight does everything, at least for your own file system.
No, its probably not a revolution in searching. But its an advanced evolution.
Downloading music is only "breaking the law" in countries which have artificial property laws.
You might be correct if in the USA, but elsewhere people can download what they want.
Well, here in Oz, its actually illegal to copy your CD's onto an iPod. Yes, that right, its considered stealing. Well, actually its copyright infringement, but most people on/. still don't seem to know the difference.
I think that the lack of fair use provisions is one of the major failings in copyright laws in Australia, but it does serve to emphasise how stupid the whole point is.
If you copy your purchased CD to an iPod in the US your choice of not using file sharing to obtain your music is considered to be supporting artists.
If you copy your purchased CD to an iPod in Australia, you are depriving artists of the income they should fairly deserve for producing their work
Go figure.
And when you have worked it out, let me know, because it still looks stupid from where I sit.
So, far example, you could use this technology to be invisible to light in the radio bands, which have wavelengths measured in meters?
Well, you can't see something much less than one wavelength big anyway. This is the limiting factor in optical microscope resolution (so we use electron microscopes as their "wavelength" is much smaller).
So its really a way of extending the natural "invisibility" of any object smaller than a wavelength up to the wavelength width.
2. Get sentenced to 7 years in a place where the seasons were the wrong way round, you were thousands of miles from England and the guards were the dregs of the British army.
Australia was only a paradise island for a little while, now we're becoming Mini-US.
Commentry for the majority of/. who live elsewhere:
Nah, it is paradise here. I've been to a few places, and its good in Oz. The fact that we posess alot of similarities to both the US and the UK doesn't make it bad here.
In fact, its part of why its good (eg democracy, separation of powers with independentent judiciary).
The seasons are just fine the way they are here.
Having said that, Canberra's weather is pretty poor... Too far inland, it gets very cold in winter and way too hot in summer.
Canberra is a city thats a compromise in location because they couldn't decide whether to make Sydney or Melbourne the capital, so they built a whole city in a paddock between the two and dug out an artificial lake to make it look pretty. (Ok, it does look pretty, but its still a man made lake).
Hopefully the weather won't be too bad at the conference, because the whole linuxconf thing has really taken off. I'm sure that this will be alot bigger than the 2003 one in Perth that I went to.
An analogy might be a car with the brake hooked up to the accelerator. If you had to push on the accelerator 'just right' to stop the car (otherwise it speeds up!) then it is not your fault if you have an accident. It is the car company's fault for a faulty design.
You may be trying to make a point, but I'll bite:)
Its just a little unfortunate for your argument that such a combined brake/accelerator design exists and its a feature that would save lives if it were implemented.
No argument with the concept you are putting forward, but its a bad analogy.
And what's hard about that? It's exceedingly unlikely that any particular version of any Windows system file will have the same MD5 checksum as a trojaned version. Plus, if you know that patch X contains this list of files with this list of checksums, you can determine what patchlevel it has. It's not easy to do as it takes some intelligent coding, but it's far from impossible. Or just go the lazy way -- based on the different versions of each file Microsoft has released, you will know that the file is either good (because of all the patched versions Microsoft has released, its MD5 checksum matches one) or the file is bad (because its checksum doesn't match one released by Microsoft).
Actually, its a little harder than this.
Because the rootkits don't need to touch the windows files, just add their own ones, which could be anywhere. If they can find any hook into the OS on bootup, it can be made to load up. There is no reason to delete any existing OS file. Part of what a rootkit can do is run files but tell anyone that asks that they are running another (untampered) file, which is probably in the normal location with the normal file name.
What this means is that every detection live-CD will have to have the equivalent of of an antivirus program with a list of all the exploits that have been detected to date.
Otherwise it finds a normal looking kernel and associated files, but which happen to get rooted at a later stage in the bootup, using an exploit that wasn't recorded or understood at the time the CD was pressed.
To eliminate this sort of problem you may well need to do a file sweep against all files on the filesystem, comparing them against known exploits, off a bootable CD. It certainly won't be an easy or quick task, and would probably require a connection to a network or the internet to download the up to date checksums (much like an AV program).
I don't know how long it will be before someone at MSN notices that a whole lot of people are interested in this trip; this has appeared on many newsgroups already.
1. http://mappoint.msn.com/DirectionsFind.aspx
2. Plan a trip from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway
3. Laugh
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine walking around knowing you had no heart? Spooky.
Actually, you generally don't have your own heart taken out for these devices. Instead it is placed alongside your normal heart.
This has the advantage if you have some cardiac reserve that even if the device fails you don't necessarily die, as your own heart may have enough strength to keep you alive till the problem is fixed.
Your heart can actually recover if given a "rest" by these devices, which is another reason to not take it out. These devices have a strong role to play in end stage heart failure when there is a prospect of recovery.
Also, this is only one of many devices being trialled. I have been involved with many assist devices and some of them are more promising than the abiomed. I think that we will be seeing alot more of them in the future. I personally* know of one person in our unit who went nearly two years on a similar device whilst awaiting a heart transplant.
Michael
* For what its worth, I am an anaesthetist who works in a heart transplant unit, and we use these things alot - the surgeons put them in at the business end, but we run the controls on the slightly less biological end of things. I guess its something like IAACA (I am a cardiac anaesthetist).
I will be switching all of are desktop PCs, in mass, the minute I get my hands on a copy of Mac OS-X86. I will also be telling all of my other, on the side, clients to buy a mac. There are a million other people just like me that want to stick it to Microsoft, I've been waiting for this day for a long time. Umm and no, FreeBSD (and Linux) is not going anywhere. I will still keep on using it in the back office. UNIX in the desktop and UNIX in the server, what's not to love. FSCK you Microsoft! FSCK you SysV UNIX..... BSD UNIX forever!
I think that you will have to buy apple hardware to run OS X on, even if you do have PC's currently. Apple has stated that they are not going to have OS X running on non-apple hardware.
So you will still have to migrate people over at a hardware level. Even so, hardware is the smallest part of the cost for most corporations. Support is usually the biggest, and I have no doubt that there will be some form of win32 API for the X86's very quickly. After all, we have virtual PC now for the PPC, which works ok even with emulation of a different microprocessor. It will get even easier for both virtual PC and VMware, as well as WINE, to make windows apps run on OS X, for legacy support.
Michael
Apple's thinking bigger than that. It's not just about the graphics card or altivec, it's about providing abstracted system libraries for just about anything. If you write a program that uses the system libraries, Apple will ship an implementation that runs fast on a sufficiently advanced GPU, one that runs fast on AltiVec, one that runs fast on SSE3, one that runs fast on whatever the next step is. If you use this library, you get the benefits on all platforms.
.net, but designed for multiple platforms?
That would make it similar to
Michael
The issue for developers isn't that bad - after all, apple appears to be making it fairly easy to produce cross platform code. If you were going to develop before, why not now? It will be many years before there is a significant number of apple intel systems to run PC stuff quickly. If you were going to write for the apple PPC last week, your situation hasn't changed much and won't for the next couple of years. You will write with standard PPC tools, or use the latest version of Xcode (or similar) which produces fat binaries, and runs on both platforms without a performance hit.
Interestingly, the major improvements in Tiger, such as core video and so on, move all the graphically intensive stuff into the GPU. The cleverness of this is that the lack of the altivec units aren't such a big issue if you use the OS X core API's - everything is done in the graphics card, altivec is much less important, and this means that emulation of the PPC code will work fairly fast on their software emulator (rosetta). So your legacy code isn't going to suffer too much, and newer code even less so using the core API's even if you don't use fat binaries, which you will.
Of course, you could just write for windows, but then you are going to miss a large number of apple users and watch other developers make money in that market whilst you compete in the win32 sphere. Your choice as a developer I guess.
Eventually, the powerbook I am writing this on will be a legacy piece of hardware because the number of people using PPC will be too small to be worth developing for.
However, a similar situation exists for old windows boxes, not because the processor has changed, but because the hardware requirements are too high for big new apps to work on it.
This process will take many years to occur, and won't be a problem for developers unless all new purchases stop for apple.
If this happens, you will get alot of warning over the next 6-12 months that its time to bail from apple.
As a user of apple computers, after the initial concern, I am much less worried about making new purchases because the obsolescence of the current models will take years to occur. It really isn't so different from the transition of OS 9 to OS X. You can still run stuff in classic mode. And my current power book is still a magical 12" laptop that does what I need, and will be good for a few years no matter what, and for which I'll still buy new software for (if its good enough to buy). So the market will still be there.
I don't think that many apple fans will jump ship, even if they are not happy - after all, what is the alternative? Go back to windows? Get your apps working under linux (like iLife, Keynote, etc?). Even if you feel abandoned by apple, the alternatives are still either a malware ridden platform or alot of hard work and a significant drop in the eye candy factor.
In the longer run, its going to be more a case of alot more dissatisfied windows users jumping ship and the apple user base growing, in my opinion.
My 2c worth
Michael
And what is this going to buy anyway? Intel starts a PowerPC division for ONE CUSTOMER? One thing's for sure, Intel's not going to be undercutting IBM on price, and if the aim is to put these chips in the Mac mini, that's going to be a big problem.
Well, microsoft is moving the X-Box over to IBM, so thats potentially a lead in to win back the CPU for the X-Box as well, something that Intel cannot do with the X86 architecture.
So lets see,
Once customer definite, plus one possible customer. Apple plus Microsoft.
No, that wouldn't be a big enough market to make intel consider switching, surely not.
My 2c
Michael
What I meant is that you can desalinate at the coast and pump the water inland. Alot of people above have said something to the effect that this wouldn't help them as they are too far inland. The reply from someone else was that at least the power was easy to transmit over a grid (which it is you can easily send power 1000 km). I'm just adding that the water can also be pumped if you need too as well.
Michael
Not so. You wouldn't pipe the cold water all the way to where you are, but transmitting the electrical power is a very well-developed technology already.
Actually, you can pipe the the water too.
In Western Australia, we have a number of cities that are far inland from Perth (the capital of the state) where alot of the water is.
Kalgoorlie, a mining town, has had a pipeline from Perth to supply its entire water needs. Kalgoorlie is 600 km away from Perth, and has approximately 40000 people. This pipline was built 100 years ago (pipeing water is not a new technology). Kalgoorlie is not the end of the pipeline - the most distant towns are about 800 km inland at the end of the pipe.
Now that might not quite make it to the center of Australia, because we are a pretty big country. But if you tried to find all the places on the planet that were more than 1000 km from the sea, it wouldn't be a very long list.
The biggest problem for water in Perth is not pipeing it around, its getting a fresh supply in the first place.
Just for your information,
Michael
Bill Gates predicting the demise of the ipod about a week ago?
This is typical microsoft FUD. They are so far behind they don't even have a creditable product to show an alternative to. But they will still tell you that there is a superior windows based solution available.
I guess they owe it to their shareholders to fly the flag. Hopefully nobody will actually believe them.
Michael
True anonymous p2p filesharing will never be possible - it is ALWAYS possible to find out who you are downloading from. Accept it.
I would have thought that is what your zombie window intermediary is for.
Michael
I think the whole situation with the FTA would be alot more fair if we could just buy things directly from the US. At least we could access the benefits of a large free market.
For example, we can't buy songs from the Apple USA store. The Australian price for a song was about $1.69 Australian according to some sources when the Austrialian apple store went online briefly before being pulled. At that price its way more than the US resident pays, even allowing for currency conversion rates its no more than $1.39 allowing for a profit on currency conversion.
And all the stuff about australia being a small market, etc, really doesn't wash to much when the website is already developed, etc, by apple. Particularly as Apple doesn't try to make much of a profit on all of this, the money all goes to the music industry. The majority of the songs will be common with the US site and shouldn't cost a cent more than it does in the US.
Just another example of greed by the **AA.
Michael
Its nice to see this posted on ./ but I think that most people here know that point to point doesn't harm the industry.
The way I see it,we all have so much spare cash per week that we spend on something.
If its not music, its ringtones, video games, or something.
But point to point apps don't actually destroy money, its still there. People want to spend, and if they hear music they like, they are more likely to spend money in this way.
So when the industry says that there is x million dollars of "stolen" music, its actually a fairly spurious argument that people would have actually spent that money, or that they actually spent any less that month.
Just my 2c.
Michael
I don't know how I missed it, but "Peacekeeper Wars" is quite a contradiction, isn't it?
For the whole of farscape it was never explained why the peacekeepers seemed to be anything but that. At least with the Peacekeeper Wars they had the chance to wrap up the storyline, including explaining why the Peacekeepers were called that.
Its an absolutely fantastic piece of sci-fi, and despite having seen the whole series on DVD, I'm very tempted to buy the collection for myself. That would put it next to my Buffy collection as one of the few TV series worth owning.
Michael
If you ever meet someone with an "Australian" accent ask them if they come from NZ if they do they will be pleased you noticed the difference and if not who worries about upsetting Australians.
Ok, my turn to dispel the presumptions here.
I am actually Australian.
Michael
Your comment is entirely accurate, except with respect to New Zealand: people came here willingly, because they were trying to escape from Britain. Thank you for your attention.
My apologies, I was actually unaware that the British never sent anyone to NZ - I just presumed, incorrectly as it turns out.
Michael
I thought it was kinda funny. I'm pretty sure that was his intention in which case, people need to lighten up.
If you look at his posting history you will see that for whatever reason most of his posts seem to end up at -1. So its probably not just my perception of this post, its that of a lot of people who had mod points. Maybe he doesn't intend this, but he certainly achieves it in his posts.
Michael
I didn't know australians had television....isnt that an island full of convicts?
Yes, sort of like the US, NZ and every other country that the British once colonised.
Thank you for your valuable contribution to slashdot.
Michael
If you were as much a farscape fan as I am, you would understand the frustration in not being able to get the peacekeeper wars by any legal means in Australia.
The dissapointing thing is that there is no reason why this shouldn't be available in Oz right now. Its not even like film, where the latest releases only have a certain number of reels to go around the world.
If I can get a high quality copy easily over the internet, why can't the networks figure out how to do it for a profit?
Michael
The large majority of the power in this province comes from Hydroelectric, which (depending on the impact of the dams build) is generally more environmentally friendly than your coal etc.
Well, I think you are underplaying the impact of hydro. One study reported in new scientist looked at the environmental impact of flooding areas to provide electricity. The areas flooded upstream of the generators decompose underwater and release large amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This has not been factored into the "green" calculations for most hydro stations.
Not that I'm against removing our dependence on fossil fuels - the future of humanity will depend on it (its just a question of when).
But the alternatives have to be looked at closely. Much as the current green movement doesn't like it, nuclear power is one of the cleaner short term options for power until we get true large scale renewable power available.
My 2c
Michael
Uh okay. So let's see what exactly this "Spotlight" is, shall we?
Otay. We make an index of every file name on the harddrive. Then we'll make a big list, and on every keystroke, it will update the list based on what i have typed.
This is either a very ignorant post, or a troll. Either way, I'm biting.
Spotlight is much more than a file name search. Its a metadata search. The idea is that your search will look at the content of your files. And everyone elses, including apples.
This includes such things (as stated by Apple) as finding places on maps based on the text string that is included in the map. Finding out how to change system settings based on the text in the system preferences (control panel) sub programs. Finding relevant emails from their content.
And all of this based on a system wide search, not an email search, or a file system search, or going to a help file. All effectively instantly.
If you don't see the value of this, you probably don't understand why people use google. Google searches on content, not on file names, and its alot more useful for it.
But even Google struggles when it comes to some files, such as images or music, because it looks mostly at HTML, but not the image or music content. Spotlight indexes metadata, so that any information, properly categorised, is indexed. Given that apple includes apps such as mail, address book, iTunes, iPhoto and iChat in their distribution, all that will be searchable. As will your word, powerpoint and keynote documents, no doubt.
Google does similar, for some file types (eg PDF's), and it is much more valuable for it. Google actively looks for other sources of information (eg usenet) to incorporate into its searches.
Spotlight does everything, at least for your own file system.
No, its probably not a revolution in searching. But its an advanced evolution.
My 2c
Michael
Downloading music is only "breaking the law" in countries which have artificial property laws.
You might be correct if in the USA, but elsewhere people can download what they want.
Well, here in Oz, its actually illegal to copy your CD's onto an iPod. Yes, that right, its considered stealing. Well, actually its copyright infringement, but most people on
I think that the lack of fair use provisions is one of the major failings in copyright laws in Australia, but it does serve to emphasise how stupid the whole point is.
If you copy your purchased CD to an iPod in the US your choice of not using file sharing to obtain
your music is considered to be supporting artists.
If you copy your purchased CD to an iPod in Australia, you are depriving artists of the income they should fairly deserve for producing their work
Go figure.
And when you have worked it out, let me know, because it still looks stupid from where I sit.
My 2c
Michael
So, far example, you could use this technology to be invisible to light in the radio bands, which have wavelengths measured in meters?
Well, you can't see something much less than one wavelength big anyway. This is the limiting factor in optical microscope resolution (so we use electron microscopes as their "wavelength" is much smaller).
So its really a way of extending the natural "invisibility" of any object smaller than a wavelength up to the wavelength width.
Michael
More likely
/. who live elsewhere:
... Too far inland, it gets very cold in winter and way too hot in summer.
1. Steal a loaf of bread
2. Get sentenced to 7 years in a place where the seasons were the wrong way round, you were thousands of miles from England and the guards were the dregs of the British army.
Australia was only a paradise island for a little while, now we're becoming Mini-US.
Commentry for the majority of
Nah, it is paradise here. I've been to a few places, and its good in Oz. The fact that we posess alot of similarities to both the US and the UK doesn't make it bad here.
In fact, its part of why its good (eg democracy, separation of powers with independentent judiciary).
The seasons are just fine the way they are here.
Having said that, Canberra's weather is pretty poor
Canberra is a city thats a compromise in location because they couldn't decide whether to make Sydney or Melbourne the capital, so they built a whole city in a paddock between the two and dug out an artificial lake to make it look pretty. (Ok, it does look pretty, but its still a man made lake).
Hopefully the weather won't be too bad at the conference, because the whole linuxconf thing has really taken off. I'm sure that this will be alot bigger than the 2003 one in Perth that I went to.
Michael
You may be trolling but I'll bite.
...
:)
An analogy might be a car with the brake hooked up to the accelerator. If you had to push on the accelerator 'just right' to stop the car (otherwise it speeds up!) then it is not your fault if you have an accident. It is the car company's fault for a faulty design.
You may be trying to make a point, but I'll bite
Its just a little unfortunate for your argument that such a combined brake/accelerator design exists and its a feature that would save lives if it were implemented.
No argument with the concept you are putting forward, but its a bad analogy.
Michael
And what's hard about that? It's exceedingly unlikely that any particular version of any Windows system file will have the same MD5 checksum as a trojaned version. Plus, if you know that patch X contains this list of files with this list of checksums, you can determine what patchlevel it has. It's not easy to do as it takes some intelligent coding, but it's far from impossible. Or just go the lazy way -- based on the different versions of each file Microsoft has released, you will know that the file is either good (because of all the patched versions Microsoft has released, its MD5 checksum matches one) or the file is bad (because its checksum doesn't match one released by Microsoft).
Actually, its a little harder than this.
Because the rootkits don't need to touch the windows files, just add their own ones, which could be anywhere. If they can find any hook into the OS on bootup, it can be made to load up. There is no reason to delete any existing OS file. Part of what a rootkit can do is run files but tell anyone that asks that they are running another (untampered) file, which is probably in the normal location with the normal file name.
What this means is that every detection live-CD will have to have the equivalent of of an antivirus program with a list of all the exploits that have been detected to date.
Otherwise it finds a normal looking kernel and associated files, but which happen to get rooted at a later stage in the bootup, using an exploit that wasn't recorded or understood at the time the CD was pressed.
To eliminate this sort of problem you may well need to do a file sweep against all files on the filesystem, comparing them against known exploits, off a bootable CD. It certainly won't be an easy or quick task, and would probably require a connection to a network or the internet to download the up to date checksums (much like an AV program).
Michael
Thats nothing. Try this on for size:
I don't know how long it will be before someone at MSN notices that a whole lot of people are interested in this trip; this has appeared on many newsgroups already.
1. http://mappoint.msn.com/DirectionsFind.aspx
2. Plan a trip from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway
3. Laugh
Shamelessly quoted from an ASR posting.
If you want the quick link for this, Click here
Michael