Not that it has any bearing on the validity your arguments, but what credentials do you have as a philosopher? The reason I ask is that one of the things philosophers learn about in school is how to think and argue logically. You don't seem to be very good at that. I suggest you go to school, finish school or ask for your money back, as appropriate.
If that code is important, then I'd like an explanation of why they think this is a good sort of randomness to depend on.
They do not depend on it. They just don't bother to eliminate it because it cannot decrease the randomness. Eliminating it (by explicitly clearing the memory) would cost cycles and bring no benefit in terms of the way the program works. That said, it would cost so few cycles I'd argue the cost is worth it to have code debuggers don't bitch about.
Orbit isn't the same as no gravity, but the difference is usually small enough to ignore. Any mass warps the spacetime around it, so there is a difference between orbit (freefall) and zero gravity (which is what you'd get a long, long way from anything). As one example, according to General Relativity, your proximity to a large mass affects the rate of the passage time. The clocks on GPS satellites are set to tick faster than ground-based clocks, so that when in orbit the clocks on the satellites appear to tick at the same rate as those on the ground. GPS is a fairly extreme example (calculating the distance, accurate to a few metres, of several objects 15 000 miles away in different directions, traveling on curved paths at 10 000 mph) and relativistic effects can be ignored for most applications. I very much doubt they'd be relevant for making alloys in orbit.
Many embedded processors have FP and DSP hardware in addition to an ARM core, because their applications demand that they perform non-trivial DSP. Smartass.
Floppies are going away, so there's not much point fighting about that one either:) Do you get equally annoyed by people calling tape casettes "tapes"?
3.5" (not really "floppy" - wonder if this is where the term "hard disk" came from?)
5.25" (ok, that flops)
8" (not many of us have seen these... and YES, quite floppy)
if that pattern continues, his 3' floppy must be made of wet noodle.
Were you feigning ignorance to make the joke? On the assumption that you weren't... The disk in floppy disks were all made of floppy plastic stuff. That's why they called them floppy disks. The casing around the disk ranged from flimsy (eg 5.25") to RPG-proof (3"), but that's just the casing. The disks in hard disk drives are all made of hard stuff - glass or metal. That's why they called them hard disks.
That's the problem with these types - they do the 2% inspiration, but skip the 98% perspiration. If somebody else does the 98%, they sue.
How do you know how much perspiration they (the company) put in? Have you read the patents? As it happens, they do actually perform R&D, though how close they come to finished products I don't know.
TFA didn't mention them buying patents. They have a bunch of absurdly clever, motivated people from different disciplines who get together and invent (conceptually) things. Those ideas are passed on to a bunch of merely extremely clever people who do the detail work and, if in the end they come up with something workable, they patent it and license the patents. That's a somewhat different process to merely buying and licensing patents. It's inventing without aiming to be the end producer, which is exactly how many inventors work.
As far as I'm concerned whether or not it's a good thing depends on how close their output is to working designs. If they invent a new type of safe nuclear reactor which runs on waste and just needs a bit of engineering to come up with blueprints before it can be put into production, how is that a bad thing? If they don't actually solve the core problems and can get away with overly-broad patents which essentially just convey a concept, but wouldn't allow someone skilled in the art to construct a working device then it's a bad thing (and indicative of a broken patent system). The fact that they're hiring a nuclear reactor core designer suggests they are at least making some attempt to produce workable designs.
Really? Can we just up and power the USA through the night with wind, solar, and hydro? I think not. These sources are intermittent.
Do the rivers where you live dry up at night? Do the reservoirs full of water instantly freeze solid? Hydro works just fine through the night. It is seasonal, but when it flow is lowest (summer) the output from solar is highest, so you can use the very same dams and hydro plants for pump-storage. It would cost a hell of a lot to power the entire US that way and likely isn't the best solution, but you certainly can use hydro all day and night and all year round. Norway does and they have power 24/7/365.
An example I used previously was that if you walk into a store, buy a product and pay the cashier, but the cashier pockets the money instead of putting it in the register, you can't expect someone to take what you bought away from you.
IANAL, but you can indeed expect to have the goods taken back from you. They do not belong to you, they are stolen property (stolen from the store owner by the cashier). The goods still belong to the store owner because they have not transferred ownership to anyone else and nobody bar the owner (and the courts) gets to transfer ownership. That probably doesn't happen much with store-bought items, but it happens all the time with cars. If you buy a stolen car it can be taken back by its owner, leaving you out of pocket. You then have to recover your money from the person who "sold" you the stolen car.
As an extreme example, if I sold you the Statue of Liberty (which I don't own) do you think you'd get to keep it?
You bought it for the battery life? Is barely 3 hours of web surfing (if you disable Flash) and standby so power-hungry that over a working day you'll be lucky to get two hours use considered good by some? I think it's crap. I'm waiting for the Atom-based 9" to come, then I can ditch my 701 and hopefully not have to carry a power adapter around (which kind of ruins the ultra-portable-ness).
The browser on Nokia's ARM-based Internet Tablets is built around the same version of the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 3.0. AJAX, Flash, RealPlayer; everything works.
Ummm, ever heard of Windows Mobile? Runs quite nicely on an ARM actually - that is what is in most smart phones, and many PDAs like iPaqs.
Nope, most smartphones run Symbian (65% of those sold in Q4 2007, according to Wikipedia).
Anyway, Windows Mobile might keep Microsoft in the OS-on-ARM game, but it's Windows by name only. It's no more XP or Vista compatible than Linux on ARM.
I mean with the default DHCP client (dhcpcd), not server. You have to configure it by hand in dhcpcd.conf; the installer doesn't do that for you and dhcpcd can't use the system's hostname. Having to manually duplicate and update the same information in two different places is just plain wrong - that's what I meant by "no clean way". Ubuntu and RedHat both patch dhcpcd to fix this - they add an option to send the system hostname to dhcpcd. Debian is waiting for upstream to fix it, which might take many more years. A Debian bug was filed about this six years ago.
FWIW, I'll betcha the fine folks at Rockstar put a drunk driving mission in there on purpose and leaked the info to MADD themselves.
I've not finished the game yet, so I'm not absolutely sure there is no drunk driving mission or scene in the game, but I've not seen one or heard about one. What you can do is go out and get drunk with a friend. You can also go bowling or play pool or several other things, if you prefer. It's a sandbox game, so when drunk you can do whatever the hell you like, including driving and throwing molatov cocktails at old ladies. You can get a taxi, walk or get the subway; there is no need to drive while drunk. There are in fact several warnings about driving when drunk - both on screen text and suggestions from the in-game friend you were out drinking with that it's not a good idea. If you drive drunk and get spotted by the police you immediately get a wanted star - this must be specific code, as driving similarly badly when not drunk doesn't get their attention. The screen and controls go wobbly when you're drunk, so it's harder than usual to escape from the police and (IMO) not very much fun, as you keep driving into things.
Rockstar go to some lengths to discourage you from driving while drunk, about as far as they could go without destroying the sandbox nature of the game or going wholly against the nature of the characters. Beyond making a game where it is possible, they do nothing to encourage drunk driving in the game and it's not required or beneficial to do so.
Are you saying the they rent rack space inside the shielded rooms? Surely not, as that would defeat the entire purpose. You could just put your sniffing kit into a rackmount enclosure and rent some space in the same shielded room as your target. The lack of noise would make it much easier to sniff.
I think where you're really going astray is in assuming that a system which doesn't typically need to perform a full reboot would somehow be incapable of doing so; you even imply OS developers might forget that's a requirement, which is a huge insult to every OS developer. Having a system be able to boot itself from a clean slate (as it would have to for a new install, replacement of memristor-RAM sticks etc.) is not only a blindingly obvious requirement, but code that would be required anyway to boot the first system. Of course they'll be able to perform a full reboot, even if doing so is not the default.
As to the comparison with hibernate, it sounds far more like suspend than hibernate. On a system with memristor-RAM everywhere, including the peripherals, suspend would be much simpler - you just stop the clocks and cut the power. You'd still need to code for the apparent huge shifts in external time suspending would produce, but you have to do that now, in addition to saving and restoring the internal state of peripherals and associated data structures.
Out of curiosity, why did you change back to Debian? I've just started running Debian as a desktop for the first time (been running it headless for years) and, as a desktop, it lacks some polish (eg WPA doesn't work in Gnome) and there are the ever-present annoyances (eg no clean way to send a DHCP hostname). Nothing I can't work around, but these days I like to hack the things I want to hack and have the things I don't fancy hacking Just Work. I rather hoped Ubuntu would be Debian with a polished desktop experience.
Incidentally, this particular geek doesn't block ads.
No, it would be xenophobia, or xeno-something-i-can't-be-arsed-to-look-up. It's not possible to make a racist comment about the British as a whole, because we're fairly racially diverse. It's also not possible to make a racist comment about the majority Caucasian population without including most of Europe and the US, because most of them are Caucasian too. On the whole, we are a pretty arrogant bunch - the empire, industrial revolution and WWII are sources of more pride than is perhaps healthy. And we do have bad teeth at the moment (only half the country has a dentist - the NHS is currently fucked in that department), but that's fairly recent (this century), so historically I don't know how that stereotype came about. Perhaps because cosmetic dentistry is less popular here than in the US (I've never heard the bad teeth stereotype from any other nationality), so you do actually see celebrities with normal teeth.
Erm, no, it's freely available because Reagan wanted it that way (IIRC after an airliner strayed into $evil_nation's airspace and was shot down - precise position information would have avoided that). If they wanted to block it it would be trivial, they'd just encrypt the signal like they still do for the more accurate L2 transmissions. If you can't decode the signals to extract the timing information they aren't much use. SA was introduced to make the intentionally freely available signal less accurate, so less useful for guiding enemy missiles and the like. Initially they turned SA off in the Gulf War because lots of US soldiers and allies had non-military GPS units and the Iraqis weren't really using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that it has any bearing on the validity your arguments, but what credentials do you have as a philosopher? The reason I ask is that one of the things philosophers learn about in school is how to think and argue logically. You don't seem to be very good at that. I suggest you go to school, finish school or ask for your money back, as appropriate.
There's also the 93% of the world's population who don't live in the USA. Some of them have businesses and computers too.
They do not depend on it. They just don't bother to eliminate it because it cannot decrease the randomness. Eliminating it (by explicitly clearing the memory) would cost cycles and bring no benefit in terms of the way the program works. That said, it would cost so few cycles I'd argue the cost is worth it to have code debuggers don't bitch about.
You still have to distribute those new keys manually. An update on my server isn't going to install the new key on my laptop.
Orbit isn't the same as no gravity, but the difference is usually small enough to ignore. Any mass warps the spacetime around it, so there is a difference between orbit (freefall) and zero gravity (which is what you'd get a long, long way from anything). As one example, according to General Relativity, your proximity to a large mass affects the rate of the passage time. The clocks on GPS satellites are set to tick faster than ground-based clocks, so that when in orbit the clocks on the satellites appear to tick at the same rate as those on the ground. GPS is a fairly extreme example (calculating the distance, accurate to a few metres, of several objects 15 000 miles away in different directions, traveling on curved paths at 10 000 mph) and relativistic effects can be ignored for most applications. I very much doubt they'd be relevant for making alloys in orbit.
Many embedded processors have FP and DSP hardware in addition to an ARM core, because their applications demand that they perform non-trivial DSP. Smartass.
Floppies are going away, so there's not much point fighting about that one either :) Do you get equally annoyed by people calling tape casettes "tapes"?
Now you've got me curious. Stacking up multiple platters in one casing?
Were you feigning ignorance to make the joke? On the assumption that you weren't... The disk in floppy disks were all made of floppy plastic stuff. That's why they called them floppy disks. The casing around the disk ranged from flimsy (eg 5.25") to RPG-proof (3"), but that's just the casing. The disks in hard disk drives are all made of hard stuff - glass or metal. That's why they called them hard disks.
How do you know how much perspiration they (the company) put in? Have you read the patents? As it happens, they do actually perform R&D, though how close they come to finished products I don't know.
TFA didn't mention them buying patents. They have a bunch of absurdly clever, motivated people from different disciplines who get together and invent (conceptually) things. Those ideas are passed on to a bunch of merely extremely clever people who do the detail work and, if in the end they come up with something workable, they patent it and license the patents. That's a somewhat different process to merely buying and licensing patents. It's inventing without aiming to be the end producer, which is exactly how many inventors work.
As far as I'm concerned whether or not it's a good thing depends on how close their output is to working designs. If they invent a new type of safe nuclear reactor which runs on waste and just needs a bit of engineering to come up with blueprints before it can be put into production, how is that a bad thing? If they don't actually solve the core problems and can get away with overly-broad patents which essentially just convey a concept, but wouldn't allow someone skilled in the art to construct a working device then it's a bad thing (and indicative of a broken patent system). The fact that they're hiring a nuclear reactor core designer suggests they are at least making some attempt to produce workable designs.
Do the rivers where you live dry up at night? Do the reservoirs full of water instantly freeze solid? Hydro works just fine through the night. It is seasonal, but when it flow is lowest (summer) the output from solar is highest, so you can use the very same dams and hydro plants for pump-storage. It would cost a hell of a lot to power the entire US that way and likely isn't the best solution, but you certainly can use hydro all day and night and all year round. Norway does and they have power 24/7/365.
IANAL, but you can indeed expect to have the goods taken back from you. They do not belong to you, they are stolen property (stolen from the store owner by the cashier). The goods still belong to the store owner because they have not transferred ownership to anyone else and nobody bar the owner (and the courts) gets to transfer ownership. That probably doesn't happen much with store-bought items, but it happens all the time with cars. If you buy a stolen car it can be taken back by its owner, leaving you out of pocket. You then have to recover your money from the person who "sold" you the stolen car.
As an extreme example, if I sold you the Statue of Liberty (which I don't own) do you think you'd get to keep it?
You bought it for the battery life? Is barely 3 hours of web surfing (if you disable Flash) and standby so power-hungry that over a working day you'll be lucky to get two hours use considered good by some? I think it's crap. I'm waiting for the Atom-based 9" to come, then I can ditch my 701 and hopefully not have to carry a power adapter around (which kind of ruins the ultra-portable-ness).
The browser on Nokia's ARM-based Internet Tablets is built around the same version of the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 3.0. AJAX, Flash, RealPlayer; everything works.
Nope, most smartphones run Symbian (65% of those sold in Q4 2007, according to Wikipedia).
Anyway, Windows Mobile might keep Microsoft in the OS-on-ARM game, but it's Windows by name only. It's no more XP or Vista compatible than Linux on ARM.
Where did you get the figure of 10-15% of CPU being used by ACPI? That seems awfully high.
I mean with the default DHCP client (dhcpcd), not server. You have to configure it by hand in dhcpcd.conf; the installer doesn't do that for you and dhcpcd can't use the system's hostname. Having to manually duplicate and update the same information in two different places is just plain wrong - that's what I meant by "no clean way". Ubuntu and RedHat both patch dhcpcd to fix this - they add an option to send the system hostname to dhcpcd. Debian is waiting for upstream to fix it, which might take many more years. A Debian bug was filed about this six years ago.
I've not finished the game yet, so I'm not absolutely sure there is no drunk driving mission or scene in the game, but I've not seen one or heard about one. What you can do is go out and get drunk with a friend. You can also go bowling or play pool or several other things, if you prefer. It's a sandbox game, so when drunk you can do whatever the hell you like, including driving and throwing molatov cocktails at old ladies. You can get a taxi, walk or get the subway; there is no need to drive while drunk. There are in fact several warnings about driving when drunk - both on screen text and suggestions from the in-game friend you were out drinking with that it's not a good idea. If you drive drunk and get spotted by the police you immediately get a wanted star - this must be specific code, as driving similarly badly when not drunk doesn't get their attention. The screen and controls go wobbly when you're drunk, so it's harder than usual to escape from the police and (IMO) not very much fun, as you keep driving into things.
Rockstar go to some lengths to discourage you from driving while drunk, about as far as they could go without destroying the sandbox nature of the game or going wholly against the nature of the characters. Beyond making a game where it is possible, they do nothing to encourage drunk driving in the game and it's not required or beneficial to do so.
Are you saying the they rent rack space inside the shielded rooms? Surely not, as that would defeat the entire purpose. You could just put your sniffing kit into a rackmount enclosure and rent some space in the same shielded room as your target. The lack of noise would make it much easier to sniff.
I think where you're really going astray is in assuming that a system which doesn't typically need to perform a full reboot would somehow be incapable of doing so; you even imply OS developers might forget that's a requirement, which is a huge insult to every OS developer. Having a system be able to boot itself from a clean slate (as it would have to for a new install, replacement of memristor-RAM sticks etc.) is not only a blindingly obvious requirement, but code that would be required anyway to boot the first system. Of course they'll be able to perform a full reboot, even if doing so is not the default.
As to the comparison with hibernate, it sounds far more like suspend than hibernate. On a system with memristor-RAM everywhere, including the peripherals, suspend would be much simpler - you just stop the clocks and cut the power. You'd still need to code for the apparent huge shifts in external time suspending would produce, but you have to do that now, in addition to saving and restoring the internal state of peripherals and associated data structures.
Out of curiosity, why did you change back to Debian? I've just started running Debian as a desktop for the first time (been running it headless for years) and, as a desktop, it lacks some polish (eg WPA doesn't work in Gnome) and there are the ever-present annoyances (eg no clean way to send a DHCP hostname). Nothing I can't work around, but these days I like to hack the things I want to hack and have the things I don't fancy hacking Just Work. I rather hoped Ubuntu would be Debian with a polished desktop experience.
Incidentally, this particular geek doesn't block ads.
Which court? The criminal court in which he wasn't proven to have been guilty, or the civil court which decided he did do it?
No, it would be xenophobia, or xeno-something-i-can't-be-arsed-to-look-up. It's not possible to make a racist comment about the British as a whole, because we're fairly racially diverse. It's also not possible to make a racist comment about the majority Caucasian population without including most of Europe and the US, because most of them are Caucasian too. On the whole, we are a pretty arrogant bunch - the empire, industrial revolution and WWII are sources of more pride than is perhaps healthy. And we do have bad teeth at the moment (only half the country has a dentist - the NHS is currently fucked in that department), but that's fairly recent (this century), so historically I don't know how that stereotype came about. Perhaps because cosmetic dentistry is less popular here than in the US (I've never heard the bad teeth stereotype from any other nationality), so you do actually see celebrities with normal teeth.
Erm, no, it's freely available because Reagan wanted it that way (IIRC after an airliner strayed into $evil_nation's airspace and was shot down - precise position information would have avoided that). If they wanted to block it it would be trivial, they'd just encrypt the signal like they still do for the more accurate L2 transmissions. If you can't decode the signals to extract the timing information they aren't much use. SA was introduced to make the intentionally freely available signal less accurate, so less useful for guiding enemy missiles and the like. Initially they turned SA off in the Gulf War because lots of US soldiers and allies had non-military GPS units and the Iraqis weren't really using it.