Yes (that's what the Eee uses), but the madwifi drivers use a binary blob HAL, though much of it is open-source. To be fair to Atheros, their reason for the blob is that the cards are capable of exceeding regulated frequency bands and power limits and they might conceivably get in trouble. The HAL enforces the legal limits. The fully open-source ath5k doesn't support the chipset in the Eee yet.
Yes, but it uses a buggy binary-blob driver for the Atheros WiFi. I'm always having trouble with it failing to connect when waking from sleep or when turned on and off and I'm far from alone. Given the WiFi uses about 10% of the power on an Eee, not being able to reliably turn it on and off when required is a noticeable extra drain on the battery. I wish they'd dump Atheros and go for a WiFi chipset with a proper open-source driver.
Even if we re-estimate the size, the shape of the rotation curve (how fast things are moving relative vs distance from galactic centre) is still wrong, if we assume most of the stuff is visible (emits or absorbs light). Irrespective of our estimates of the size and distance of galaxies, the observed rotation curve means one of: a) GR is wrong. b) There's a hell of a lot of stuff we can't see (a lot more than we can see) and it's distributed differently (in a halo around galaxies). c) Forces other than gravity play a much larger part than current consensus theories suggest. The shape of galactic rotation curves was the original evidence for dark matter.
This is why I fully support emulation. If you actually don't require the console in question to play a game, why the heck are you spending 400 freakin' dollars to play the games?
Don't fool yourselves. *ANY* game console is already defective by design.
I want a locked-down, dedicated platform to play my games on, thanks. I like having dedicated hardware for it, knowing the same device will do me for 4 or 5 years and every game will work fine. Having played PC games for years, in the end I just gave up because of the hardware upgrade treadmill and number of people using hacks. It's just no fun if the other guy can see through walls and aim perfectly in an instant. So far, I'm not aware of any hacks for PS3 games beyond a lag switch, which is external hardware anyway. If you don't want to buy a console then here's a radical idea: don't play console games. Is that so hard? There are plenty of PC games.
When I was doing my physics degree the big question was: Is dark matter WIMPS or MACHOs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or MAssive Compact Halo Objects). You're talking about MACHOs. Even if we can't see these objects, we do know where they must be, so if it was asteroid fields or dead stars of little black holes we can calculate how much light they would absorb and see the larger ones as they passed in front of stars, even if we couldn't see them individually. There have been many studies looking for them, but no evidence has been found. WIMPS have pretty much won that one. We've not seen any WIMPs either, but MACHOs are well understood so we know exactly what to look for so if it was them we'd expect to have seen the evidence.
All this is assuming dark matter really exists. I'm still still not wholly convinced. Basically all our long-distance measurements of gravity give the wrong answer. Even our longest distance solar-system probes (the Pinoeers) give the wrong answer, though that data isn't really good enough to be wholly convincing. Are all these answers wrong because there is hidden hidden matter (and energy, woo hoo!), or is GR just not a good enough approximation at those scales? Eric Lerner thinks it's all about plasmas.
I've never noticed twitter's trolling, assuming it exists. I have noticed the constant barrage of "you're a twitter sockpuppet", which is the only way I ever really notice the posts in question. So if twitter is trolling, they're not so trollish that they stand out above the background noise (I read at -1, so there's a fair bit of background noise). So, can you please shut the fuck up and stop polluting Slashdot with your whining? If I was a troll I'd have great admiration for twitter - they have succeeded where most fail in that every one of their posts gets numerous "stop trolling", "you're a twitter sockpuppet" replies. It's you and your ilk who need to stop feeding the trolls.
Please explain for the audience how exactly that's not still a Bulletin Board System.
Simple: not every system for bulletin boards is a BBS. You'll only confuse yourself if you try interpret literally phrases with well-defined meanings. If you go around expanding acronyms and then interpreting the expansion literally you're just being perverse. If you carry on like that you'll end up typing in your SSN at the ATM (an SSN is a PIN, right?). BBS may be common usage for web forums and the like in other parts of the world, but in English "bulletin board system" or "BBS" refers to the dial-up bulletin boards popular a couple of decades ago.
That doesn't sound much quicker than using T9 predictive text in English (or, presumably, other languages written in the roman alphabet). (Bank is just "2265", for those of you who don't T9 - yes, I know direct comparisons aren't very meaningful.) Capitals are automatic at the start of a sentence, you only need to do them manually for proper nouns. Anyway, it can't be that hard to write Japanese on a phone given people write entire novels on their phones.
I'm fucking glad you appreciate the effort. Jesus H. Christ it's a fucking nightmare sometimes, but someone has to do this shit. You tragic fuckers really would be lost without me. Who the fuck else is going to leap in and correct people on the internet, eh? Nobody, that's who. You know, I'm a god-damn motherfucking hero. I deserve a fucking medal or something. No, fuck that medal shit, I deserve knighthood, a billion quid and a bevy of supermodels to just, you know, hang around looking good. Naked, obviously. Hold your fucking horses! That's not all! I'd need some merely very hot chicks to fetch me beer - can't waste the supermodels on that trivial shit. A few nice pads around the world, supercars, yachts - you know the drill. I want some armour and a horse too, like a proper knight, none of this "I only use my title to get good tables in restaurants" crap. Any fucking commoner who doesn't call me "Sir Mollymoo" gets my fucking sword up their arse. You plebs can clean up the horse shit, but I imagine you'll be happy to as even the shit from my horse will contain more awesomeness than most continents can aspire to. Jesus, I probably have more awesomeness in my little finger than the rest of humanity has combined. It's glad at least one of you shitheads can see that.
Jesus, does nobody on this fucking planet understand patents? Microsoft have not and can not patent "proactive virus protection". They have patented a particular method of performing it. If it is novel (ie. not the same method as that used by the AV vendors) it won't impact the AV vendors, they can just carry on using whatever they use now. If the AV vendors do use the same method but chose to keep their methods a trade secret then, well, I guess they should have patented it when they had the chance.
The form factor is that of a dual-screened eBook, but they have a popup touch-screen keyboard as an application.
Arrrgh! There was some future computing expo featured on/. a few weeks ago that was full of touchscreen keyboards as well. It's a horrible idea. There's no tactile feedback and no give to absorb the impact, so your fingertips will take much more of a beating than using a conventional keyboard. Touchscreen keyboards are fine for, say, typing a few numbers at a checkout, but for anything like serious input they're just an awful idea.
I never really understood why the OLPC project insists on reinventing the wheel. The mesh networking and screen were impressive tech, but why reinvent the computer desktop in the form of Sugar? Now they're going with an untried form factor. Just build a decent, inexpensive, robust laptop and ship the damn thing. I find it more than a little patronising that kids in less developed countries apparently can't be expected to use similar software to kids in the first world. When they grow up chances are they're gonna be using Windows, Gnome or KDE (or Aqua, if they're incredibly rich by local standards). They're all more like each other than they are like Sugar. I say start 'em young.
In the UK many kinds of story are not covered here by agreement between the press and Government.
What kinds of story? I can think of details of court cases (eg. details of pending cases which may prejudice a jury) and details of actions in war (eg. location of troops, presence of high-ranking royals or politicians). In both cases the stories do get reported on after the need for censorship is over. So, other than the could-harm-justice kind and the could-risk-lives kind, what kinds of story are suppressed in the UK?
Having a free press may not be ideal, but then nor is having a democracy. The problem is who makes the decisions. If we could find a suitable benevolent dictator to run the country it would be a lot fairer and more efficient. If we could find a suitable benevolent censor to control the press it would be a lot fairer and more accurate. Unfortunately such people don't seem to be very common, power corrupts and nobody would be able to agree on which dictator/censor would be the most benevolent. So we have democracy and a free press, which is the least-bad way we've come up with.
My first PDA was a Palm III, and I still wonder to this day why windows tablet was never as elegant or as good at handwriting recognition as Grafiti on the palm.
Palms didn't do handwriting recognition, they did custom glyph recognition. You had to adapt to the device, rather than the other way round, which makes recognition a far simpler problem. So Windows was in fact infinitely better at handwriting recognition, because Palms didn't even bother to try.
It happens to me in FF2, though I never saw a correlation between 100% CPU usage (which is just Flash and Flash developers being shit) and it crashing the browser - though both were fairly frequent occurrences for me. Flash is fucking awful software (it's a fragile, insecure CPU hog), but I would like to access some content which is only available in Flash (eg. YouTube) so I too use FlashBlock. I do wish it could turn flash actually off, so I'd get the non-Flash version of a page if one was available, then click some widget to get the Flash version if I wanted it.
Incorrect. OS X can maximise windows (it's the green button, top left, with a + in it). The semantics are slightly different from Windows in that maxmise means make the window big enough to display all content or as big as the screen, whichever is the smaller.
Incorrect. I use a Mac as my primary desktop machine and have for years, I know the semantics. While what you say may be the theory, it is not the practice. In practice the green button means whatever the hell the developer wants it to mean. Firefox, for example, while displaying content larger then the screen (eg. a large image) will never expand to fill the entire screen, it always leaves a gap on the right. TextWrangler leaves a similar gap. This is horrible for usability, as it leaves no simple way to put the scroll bar at the edge of the screen using those applications. Safari, displaying the same content as Firefox, doesn't leave a gap. Don't think that's because Apple always do it right: iTunes will shrink to a minimalist player rather than expand to display as much of the playlist as possible. In theory the green button is nice and it does sometimes work. But I'd like a true Windows-style maximise as well, one which fills the screen to remove visual clutter and puts the scroll bar at the edge where it's an order of magnitude easier to hit.
Well, KDE 3 can be configured to look and act very much like OS X -- right down to the menu bar at the top.
It can, but not everything plays nicely. As on major example, Firefox won't put its menu bar at the top of the screen. An inconsistency with a major application like that renders putting the menu bar at the top of the screen pretty futile. Hopefully Firefox 3 fixes that. KDE also by default puts a border on maximised windows, which puts the scroll bar a couple of pixels away from the edge of the screen, which is just plain stupid. At least it actually can maximise windows, unlike OS X.
Comparable screen? No, not even close. The N800 (and N810, 770) have more than twice as many pixels as an iPod Touch. The N800 has an 800-pixel-wide screen, which means you don't need a tricksy browser scaling things.
Not only that, the hardware is open too - you can get complete schematics and it has an expansion card designed for easy addition of your homebrew electronics. You need an account (no Chumby required) and to agree to a not-too-onerous license to get the hardware docs. It's intentionally designed to be easy to hack, both hardware and software.
You may remember on of Bunnie Huang's previous exploits - he's the guy who hacked the XBox. He's a hardware-hacking demi-god and has a fantastic blog for electronics geeks. You can read all about getting the Chumby manufactured in China, as well as other topics.
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Do you get them on anything but IBM/Lenovo laptops? It might be a patent thing.
It's 1/4 the price of a MacBook Pro.
Yes (that's what the Eee uses), but the madwifi drivers use a binary blob HAL, though much of it is open-source. To be fair to Atheros, their reason for the blob is that the cards are capable of exceeding regulated frequency bands and power limits and they might conceivably get in trouble. The HAL enforces the legal limits. The fully open-source ath5k doesn't support the chipset in the Eee yet.
Yes, but it uses a buggy binary-blob driver for the Atheros WiFi. I'm always having trouble with it failing to connect when waking from sleep or when turned on and off and I'm far from alone. Given the WiFi uses about 10% of the power on an Eee, not being able to reliably turn it on and off when required is a noticeable extra drain on the battery. I wish they'd dump Atheros and go for a WiFi chipset with a proper open-source driver.
Even if we re-estimate the size, the shape of the rotation curve (how fast things are moving relative vs distance from galactic centre) is still wrong, if we assume most of the stuff is visible (emits or absorbs light). Irrespective of our estimates of the size and distance of galaxies, the observed rotation curve means one of: a) GR is wrong. b) There's a hell of a lot of stuff we can't see (a lot more than we can see) and it's distributed differently (in a halo around galaxies). c) Forces other than gravity play a much larger part than current consensus theories suggest. The shape of galactic rotation curves was the original evidence for dark matter.
When I was doing my physics degree the big question was: Is dark matter WIMPS or MACHOs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or MAssive Compact Halo Objects). You're talking about MACHOs. Even if we can't see these objects, we do know where they must be, so if it was asteroid fields or dead stars of little black holes we can calculate how much light they would absorb and see the larger ones as they passed in front of stars, even if we couldn't see them individually. There have been many studies looking for them, but no evidence has been found. WIMPS have pretty much won that one. We've not seen any WIMPs either, but MACHOs are well understood so we know exactly what to look for so if it was them we'd expect to have seen the evidence.
All this is assuming dark matter really exists. I'm still still not wholly convinced. Basically all our long-distance measurements of gravity give the wrong answer. Even our longest distance solar-system probes (the Pinoeers) give the wrong answer, though that data isn't really good enough to be wholly convincing. Are all these answers wrong because there is hidden hidden matter (and energy, woo hoo!), or is GR just not a good enough approximation at those scales? Eric Lerner thinks it's all about plasmas.
I think you've got it the wrong way round. I don't recall any Saudi military bases in the USA or the Saudis invading Canada.
They landed the Vikings that way over 30 years ago, it's hardly new.
I've never noticed twitter's trolling, assuming it exists. I have noticed the constant barrage of "you're a twitter sockpuppet", which is the only way I ever really notice the posts in question. So if twitter is trolling, they're not so trollish that they stand out above the background noise (I read at -1, so there's a fair bit of background noise). So, can you please shut the fuck up and stop polluting Slashdot with your whining? If I was a troll I'd have great admiration for twitter - they have succeeded where most fail in that every one of their posts gets numerous "stop trolling", "you're a twitter sockpuppet" replies. It's you and your ilk who need to stop feeding the trolls.
That doesn't sound much quicker than using T9 predictive text in English (or, presumably, other languages written in the roman alphabet). (Bank is just "2265", for those of you who don't T9 - yes, I know direct comparisons aren't very meaningful.) Capitals are automatic at the start of a sentence, you only need to do them manually for proper nouns. Anyway, it can't be that hard to write Japanese on a phone given people write entire novels on their phones.
I'm fucking glad you appreciate the effort. Jesus H. Christ it's a fucking nightmare sometimes, but someone has to do this shit. You tragic fuckers really would be lost without me. Who the fuck else is going to leap in and correct people on the internet, eh? Nobody, that's who. You know, I'm a god-damn motherfucking hero. I deserve a fucking medal or something. No, fuck that medal shit, I deserve knighthood, a billion quid and a bevy of supermodels to just, you know, hang around looking good. Naked, obviously. Hold your fucking horses! That's not all! I'd need some merely very hot chicks to fetch me beer - can't waste the supermodels on that trivial shit. A few nice pads around the world, supercars, yachts - you know the drill. I want some armour and a horse too, like a proper knight, none of this "I only use my title to get good tables in restaurants" crap. Any fucking commoner who doesn't call me "Sir Mollymoo" gets my fucking sword up their arse. You plebs can clean up the horse shit, but I imagine you'll be happy to as even the shit from my horse will contain more awesomeness than most continents can aspire to. Jesus, I probably have more awesomeness in my little finger than the rest of humanity has combined. It's glad at least one of you shitheads can see that.
Jesus, does nobody on this fucking planet understand patents? Microsoft have not and can not patent "proactive virus protection". They have patented a particular method of performing it. If it is novel (ie. not the same method as that used by the AV vendors) it won't impact the AV vendors, they can just carry on using whatever they use now. If the AV vendors do use the same method but chose to keep their methods a trade secret then, well, I guess they should have patented it when they had the chance.
Arrrgh! There was some future computing expo featured on /. a few weeks ago that was full of touchscreen keyboards as well. It's a horrible idea. There's no tactile feedback and no give to absorb the impact, so your fingertips will take much more of a beating than using a conventional keyboard. Touchscreen keyboards are fine for, say, typing a few numbers at a checkout, but for anything like serious input they're just an awful idea.
I never really understood why the OLPC project insists on reinventing the wheel. The mesh networking and screen were impressive tech, but why reinvent the computer desktop in the form of Sugar? Now they're going with an untried form factor. Just build a decent, inexpensive, robust laptop and ship the damn thing. I find it more than a little patronising that kids in less developed countries apparently can't be expected to use similar software to kids in the first world. When they grow up chances are they're gonna be using Windows, Gnome or KDE (or Aqua, if they're incredibly rich by local standards). They're all more like each other than they are like Sugar. I say start 'em young.
Yep, you can now wait two days between updates without having to spend five hours manually fixing a hideous mangle of mutually blocking packages.
What kinds of story? I can think of details of court cases (eg. details of pending cases which may prejudice a jury) and details of actions in war (eg. location of troops, presence of high-ranking royals or politicians). In both cases the stories do get reported on after the need for censorship is over. So, other than the could-harm-justice kind and the could-risk-lives kind, what kinds of story are suppressed in the UK?
Having a free press may not be ideal, but then nor is having a democracy. The problem is who makes the decisions. If we could find a suitable benevolent dictator to run the country it would be a lot fairer and more efficient. If we could find a suitable benevolent censor to control the press it would be a lot fairer and more accurate. Unfortunately such people don't seem to be very common, power corrupts and nobody would be able to agree on which dictator/censor would be the most benevolent. So we have democracy and a free press, which is the least-bad way we've come up with.
Palms didn't do handwriting recognition, they did custom glyph recognition. You had to adapt to the device, rather than the other way round, which makes recognition a far simpler problem. So Windows was in fact infinitely better at handwriting recognition, because Palms didn't even bother to try.
It happens to me in FF2, though I never saw a correlation between 100% CPU usage (which is just Flash and Flash developers being shit) and it crashing the browser - though both were fairly frequent occurrences for me. Flash is fucking awful software (it's a fragile, insecure CPU hog), but I would like to access some content which is only available in Flash (eg. YouTube) so I too use FlashBlock. I do wish it could turn flash actually off, so I'd get the non-Flash version of a page if one was available, then click some widget to get the Flash version if I wanted it.
Incorrect. I use a Mac as my primary desktop machine and have for years, I know the semantics. While what you say may be the theory, it is not the practice. In practice the green button means whatever the hell the developer wants it to mean. Firefox, for example, while displaying content larger then the screen (eg. a large image) will never expand to fill the entire screen, it always leaves a gap on the right. TextWrangler leaves a similar gap. This is horrible for usability, as it leaves no simple way to put the scroll bar at the edge of the screen using those applications. Safari, displaying the same content as Firefox, doesn't leave a gap. Don't think that's because Apple always do it right: iTunes will shrink to a minimalist player rather than expand to display as much of the playlist as possible. In theory the green button is nice and it does sometimes work. But I'd like a true Windows-style maximise as well, one which fills the screen to remove visual clutter and puts the scroll bar at the edge where it's an order of magnitude easier to hit.
It can, but not everything plays nicely. As on major example, Firefox won't put its menu bar at the top of the screen. An inconsistency with a major application like that renders putting the menu bar at the top of the screen pretty futile. Hopefully Firefox 3 fixes that. KDE also by default puts a border on maximised windows, which puts the scroll bar a couple of pixels away from the edge of the screen, which is just plain stupid. At least it actually can maximise windows, unlike OS X.
Comparable screen? No, not even close. The N800 (and N810, 770) have more than twice as many pixels as an iPod Touch. The N800 has an 800-pixel-wide screen, which means you don't need a tricksy browser scaling things.
Not only that, the hardware is open too - you can get complete schematics and it has an expansion card designed for easy addition of your homebrew electronics. You need an account (no Chumby required) and to agree to a not-too-onerous license to get the hardware docs. It's intentionally designed to be easy to hack, both hardware and software.
You may remember on of Bunnie Huang's previous exploits - he's the guy who hacked the XBox. He's a hardware-hacking demi-god and has a fantastic blog for electronics geeks. You can read all about getting the Chumby manufactured in China, as well as other topics.
How can we be born rejecting the existence of God when we have not yet been taught the concept of God? No, we're all born agnostic.