That horrible Concorde? During Concorde's cruise flight (which is the vast majority of its flight regime), Concorde's engines were the most thermodynamically [0] efficient turbine engines ever made. I believe they still hold this record even with the impressive efficiency of the super high bypass turbofans like the Trent 900.
Concorde in many respects was way ahead of its time, having fly-by-wire controls and various other features that only made it to the mainstream airliners a decade later.
Unfortunately, part of the excitement of this new plane getting launched is essentially it's just yet another conventional tube with wings. I'm disappointed Boeing didn't follow through with the Sonic Cruiser - it was a plane that was not only technically interesting, but looked interesting too. Instead, Boeing is also just making another tube with wings in the form of the 7E7.
[0] i.e turning fuel into thrust. Notwithstanding, on a fuel burned per passenger seat, Concorde is not efficient.
What are you complaining about? Slashdot was NEVER meant to be 'balanced' - it is at its heart a Unix/OSS enthusiast/advocate site. OS X is Unix-like. BSD is Unix-like. Linux is Unix-like. Windows is *not* Unix-like. Do you expect Windows advocacy sites to praise Unix equally? No!
It's obvious that on a site whose core are Unix and/or OSS lovers that Windows will get a rough ride; after all this is (forward) Slashdot - not C-colon-backslashdot! [0] If you don't like it - there are plenty of other sites that try to be balanced, and plenty of Windows enthusiast/advocacy sites.
In any case, it's difficult to assert that people wouldn't have had the same reaction had it been Bill Gates. There is more than one Slashdotter, that's why in some discussions you see many pro-DRM posts, and in others many anti-DRM posts, because the topics have attracted a different group of people.
[0] Yes, I know the origin of slashdot is a play on words over the http:slashslashslashdotdotorg URL, but the slashes have also become symbolic of Slashdot's unix nature.
And AAC itself isn't exactly an Apple-only format. I ripped all my CDs usin iTunes on my PowerBook. However, I also copied them onto my server, and often play them back on my PC using Xine.
The DRM that Apple does use for iTMS purchases is trivial to defeat by design; so trivial that it's really pointless and it's an annoyance as it means I have to burn a CD then rip them back to put them on my file server.
The trouble isn't that patents exist (even software patents) - the trouble is what's getting patented. It's so bad that the patent office has a term "pioneer patent" for real inventions, and says that makes only a tiny fraction of the patent applications!
IMHO, the only things that should be patentable now are the "pioneer patents" - everything else should be rejected. There should also be an easy way of overturning patents when it can reasonably be demonstrated that someone else independently came up with the same thing (i.e. making it easier to overturn on the grounds of not something that someone "ordinarily skilled in the art" can come up with). At the moment it costs so much to have a patent overturned, you may as well license it even though it should never have been patentable in the first place. The compression used by GIF had two separate patents for the same invention - one held by Unisys and one held by IBM. It's not novel if there can be two patents covering exactly the same "invention"!
I wonder what they will do with their NEF files in 20 years time when they are long obsolete and the software that converts them won't run on any modern hardware?
Why did Nikon actually go to extra effort to make their NEF output less useful?
Look at the troubles we face today. Point out ANYTHING that would cause natural selection to take place. It doesn't exist for a modern society. In essence, by the time a species is smart enough to realize the concept of evolution, they'll have stopped evolving.
No - we just changed the rules. Assuming that society doesn't collapse, I'm sure we'll be able to comprehensively control our genetic makeup. That will have a huge impact on what the human race looks like.
I'm not talking about the we as in those of us alive now: but say, some time in the future, a 'cyborg' is created by instead of using AI for the machine, they grow human brain tissue connected to the right interfaces that can be connected to various useful machine body parts. Eventually, that cyborg may down the line create new versions of itself that are entirely machines once technology has advanced in such a way you can make the brain of the machine out of something other than meat.
These machine intelligences, since they don't need all that messy life support, can be sent on space missions. If they also have the equipment to build new versions of themselves - well, essentially they are life, but not as we know it. But they are related to humans - maybe not by DNA - but by the new genetics of digital information.
Bam, asteroid wipes out old fashioned meat humans, but mankind's machine offspring can continue. Essentially, they have out-evolved the meat humans.
There's nothing really sinister about it either, and it's almost inevitable so long as we don't wipe ourselves out through war or ecological collapse first.
Grim? Hardly. Most users don't even need a 1.5GHz processor. We've got plenty of older boxes around here (733 MHz Compaq P3 systems) which are running the latest office software quite happily.
It's only going to get grim for gamers - well, not even then. I'm sure Carmack and company will figure out a way of taking advantage of multiple cores and multiple GPUs in their future generations of games.
I started to learn Objective-C, Cocoa (and indeed GNUstep) about 2 weeks ago to help port a Mac OSX project to Linux, and I'm getting to quite like Objective-C. The language has quite a few features that I'd have killed for when I was writing C++ full time.
So basically the GCC developers are damned if they do, damned if they don't - if they fix their bugs to make their compiler ISO C++ compliant, they are whined at for following the standard, if they preserve the bugs, they are whined at for not following the standard!
Personally, I prefer GCC to be standards compliant.
3) "Packaged" configuration - if I get a new PC, there is no real good way to transfer settings or applications. Data is not so difficult if you don't fall into the problem listed above. It would be nice if we could just transfer apps and settings by simply transferring a couple "packages". I realize that this affects #1.
I've found when getting a new PC, copying my home directory off the old one is sufficient - all my settings and documents and other work carries over just fine. Most local settings are kept in.files in your homedir.
If you run the raw numbers - 600 coders at $2000 a year instead of 600 US coders at $50000 a year. So long as your operating costs aren't more than $78,000 per day more expensive than being base on land you're ahead of the game.
Now how much cheaper to make it worthwhile is the question.
Even if your running costs are $30,000 per day cheaper than running a 600-coder office in the US, I agree - it's still a shitty idea. You may have eliminated productivity problems caused by the timezone difference between.ca.us and.in, but in the place of those are the psychological problems you'll have which will reduce the productivity of the coders. Plus the difficulty in finding 600 coders who can work during a storm without getting seasick, let alone homesick.
I hope we can evolve into something else within the next thousand that allows us to not need fragile, biological bodies. Imagine the possibilities - instead of being in a spaceship you could BE the spaceship. Transfer the mind to a new machine, and then you can be the rover.
It's probably the only way we'll actually have a life off this planet.
For Indians (or other 3rd worlders) a B visa is *also* very difficult to get. When I lived in the US, I had a few Indian friends whose younger family members coulnd't visit simply because (in particular) young third-worlders have a lot of difficulty getting any kind of visa. Older family members were OK (probably because they were judged to be settled and unlikely to be an illegal immigration risk).
This ship will be filled with young third worlders who will have severe difficulty getting a B visa, especially when their home address is a ship.
In 25 years time, when there are no computers that can run the Nikon tool any more (have you tried running some DOS programs from 15 years ago?), how are you going to access your images?
It's like Nikon has gone to extra effort to deliberately make their camera worse. Why?
The thing is if the server admins were lazy, the default configuration of any caching DNS server that I've come across is to do the Right Thing. Therefore if you have a lazy admin, it should be working.
They've actually had to go to extra effort to break it on purpose.
Note the TTL of 7184 seconds (this is how long the nameserver at 192.168.0.1 will continue to use the cached record for before fetching it again from slashdot.org's authoratative nameservers).
Flourescents with old ballasts flicker at 100 (on 50Hz systems) or 120Hz (on 60Hz systems) because there is an 'on' for every half cycle since each cycle contains two peaks (one positive and one negative).
However, any flourescent fitting made in the last 15 years or so probably has a solid-state ballast, and flickers in the multi-kHz (20kHz and up) range.
3% might sound small. Indeed, it would be small if the market for computers was a few dozen a year. But it's not. 3% of a colossal market is still an enormous amount of revenue. Witness how Apple's market cap has now overtaken Sun's.
I'm guessing (if I remember that part of the UK well enough) that you have to change trains at least once, and the trains you are getting are local 'all stops' (or at least most stops). Even with the world's most efficient train operators, you're not going to improve much on that.
What where you doing to run up a bill *that* large?
I seldom use more than 2 or 3 megs of traffic a month on GPRS (most of my uses are low bandwidth), and that's included within the monthly fixed cost of the contract. I use it regularly but only in small chunks (I read my email over an ssh connection, so someone sending a large image won't blow it out the water).
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That horrible Concorde? During Concorde's cruise flight (which is the vast majority of its flight regime), Concorde's engines were the most thermodynamically [0] efficient turbine engines ever made. I believe they still hold this record even with the impressive efficiency of the super high bypass turbofans like the Trent 900.
Concorde in many respects was way ahead of its time, having fly-by-wire controls and various other features that only made it to the mainstream airliners a decade later.
Unfortunately, part of the excitement of this new plane getting launched is essentially it's just yet another conventional tube with wings. I'm disappointed Boeing didn't follow through with the Sonic Cruiser - it was a plane that was not only technically interesting, but looked interesting too. Instead, Boeing is also just making another tube with wings in the form of the 7E7.
[0] i.e turning fuel into thrust. Notwithstanding, on a fuel burned per passenger seat, Concorde is not efficient.
What are you complaining about? Slashdot was NEVER meant to be 'balanced' - it is at its heart a Unix/OSS enthusiast/advocate site. OS X is Unix-like. BSD is Unix-like. Linux is Unix-like. Windows is *not* Unix-like. Do you expect Windows advocacy sites to praise Unix equally? No!
It's obvious that on a site whose core are Unix and/or OSS lovers that Windows will get a rough ride; after all this is (forward) Slashdot - not C-colon-backslashdot! [0] If you don't like it - there are plenty of other sites that try to be balanced, and plenty of Windows enthusiast/advocacy sites.
In any case, it's difficult to assert that people wouldn't have had the same reaction had it been Bill Gates. There is more than one Slashdotter, that's why in some discussions you see many pro-DRM posts, and in others many anti-DRM posts, because the topics have attracted a different group of people.
[0] Yes, I know the origin of slashdot is a play on words over the http:slashslashslashdotdotorg URL, but the slashes have also become symbolic of Slashdot's unix nature.
And AAC itself isn't exactly an Apple-only format. I ripped all my CDs usin iTunes on my PowerBook. However, I also copied them onto my server, and often play them back on my PC using Xine.
The DRM that Apple does use for iTMS purchases is trivial to defeat by design; so trivial that it's really pointless and it's an annoyance as it means I have to burn a CD then rip them back to put them on my file server.
But whilst the vast majority of Americans live comfortable middle class or better lives - it ain't gonna happen.
The trouble isn't that patents exist (even software patents) - the trouble is what's getting patented. It's so bad that the patent office has a term "pioneer patent" for real inventions, and says that makes only a tiny fraction of the patent applications!
IMHO, the only things that should be patentable now are the "pioneer patents" - everything else should be rejected. There should also be an easy way of overturning patents when it can reasonably be demonstrated that someone else independently came up with the same thing (i.e. making it easier to overturn on the grounds of not something that someone "ordinarily skilled in the art" can come up with). At the moment it costs so much to have a patent overturned, you may as well license it even though it should never have been patentable in the first place. The compression used by GIF had two separate patents for the same invention - one held by Unisys and one held by IBM. It's not novel if there can be two patents covering exactly the same "invention"!
I wonder what they will do with their NEF files in 20 years time when they are long obsolete and the software that converts them won't run on any modern hardware?
Why did Nikon actually go to extra effort to make their NEF output less useful?
No - we just changed the rules. Assuming that society doesn't collapse, I'm sure we'll be able to comprehensively control our genetic makeup. That will have a huge impact on what the human race looks like.
I'm not talking about the we as in those of us alive now: but say, some time in the future, a 'cyborg' is created by instead of using AI for the machine, they grow human brain tissue connected to the right interfaces that can be connected to various useful machine body parts. Eventually, that cyborg may down the line create new versions of itself that are entirely machines once technology has advanced in such a way you can make the brain of the machine out of something other than meat.
These machine intelligences, since they don't need all that messy life support, can be sent on space missions. If they also have the equipment to build new versions of themselves - well, essentially they are life, but not as we know it. But they are related to humans - maybe not by DNA - but by the new genetics of digital information.
Bam, asteroid wipes out old fashioned meat humans, but mankind's machine offspring can continue. Essentially, they have out-evolved the meat humans.
There's nothing really sinister about it either, and it's almost inevitable so long as we don't wipe ourselves out through war or ecological collapse first.
Grim? Hardly. Most users don't even need a 1.5GHz processor. We've got plenty of older boxes around here (733 MHz Compaq P3 systems) which are running the latest office software quite happily.
It's only going to get grim for gamers - well, not even then. I'm sure Carmack and company will figure out a way of taking advantage of multiple cores and multiple GPUs in their future generations of games.
I can see why.
I started to learn Objective-C, Cocoa (and indeed GNUstep) about 2 weeks ago to help port a Mac OSX project to Linux, and I'm getting to quite like Objective-C. The language has quite a few features that I'd have killed for when I was writing C++ full time.
So basically the GCC developers are damned if they do, damned if they don't - if they fix their bugs to make their compiler ISO C++ compliant, they are whined at for following the standard, if they preserve the bugs, they are whined at for not following the standard!
Personally, I prefer GCC to be standards compliant.
If you run the raw numbers - 600 coders at $2000 a year instead of 600 US coders at $50000 a year. So long as your operating costs aren't more than $78,000 per day more expensive than being base on land you're ahead of the game.
.ca.us and .in, but in the place of those are the psychological problems you'll have which will reduce the productivity of the coders. Plus the difficulty in finding 600 coders who can work during a storm without getting seasick, let alone homesick.
Now how much cheaper to make it worthwhile is the question.
Even if your running costs are $30,000 per day cheaper than running a 600-coder office in the US, I agree - it's still a shitty idea. You may have eliminated productivity problems caused by the timezone difference between
I hope we can evolve into something else within the next thousand that allows us to not need fragile, biological bodies. Imagine the possibilities - instead of being in a spaceship you could BE the spaceship. Transfer the mind to a new machine, and then you can be the rover.
It's probably the only way we'll actually have a life off this planet.
Do Sudanese families eat cat5e, fibreoptic cable and DSLAMs?
What's wrong with Objective-Sea?
For Indians (or other 3rd worlders) a B visa is *also* very difficult to get. When I lived in the US, I had a few Indian friends whose younger family members coulnd't visit simply because (in particular) young third-worlders have a lot of difficulty getting any kind of visa. Older family members were OK (probably because they were judged to be settled and unlikely to be an illegal immigration risk).
This ship will be filled with young third worlders who will have severe difficulty getting a B visa, especially when their home address is a ship.
In 25 years time, when there are no computers that can run the Nikon tool any more (have you tried running some DOS programs from 15 years ago?), how are you going to access your images?
It's like Nikon has gone to extra effort to deliberately make their camera worse. Why?
The thing is if the server admins were lazy, the default configuration of any caching DNS server that I've come across is to do the Right Thing. Therefore if you have a lazy admin, it should be working.
They've actually had to go to extra effort to break it on purpose.
For example
dig @your-isps-nameserver.net -t A www.example.com
For example:Note the TTL of 7184 seconds (this is how long the nameserver at 192.168.0.1 will continue to use the cached record for before fetching it again from slashdot.org's authoratative nameservers).
Flourescents with old ballasts flicker at 100 (on 50Hz systems) or 120Hz (on 60Hz systems) because there is an 'on' for every half cycle since each cycle contains two peaks (one positive and one negative).
However, any flourescent fitting made in the last 15 years or so probably has a solid-state ballast, and flickers in the multi-kHz (20kHz and up) range.
You know you can actually turn off a computer that's not being used :-)
3% might sound small. Indeed, it would be small if the market for computers was a few dozen a year. But it's not. 3% of a colossal market is still an enormous amount of revenue. Witness how Apple's market cap has now overtaken Sun's.
I'm guessing (if I remember that part of the UK well enough) that you have to change trains at least once, and the trains you are getting are local 'all stops' (or at least most stops). Even with the world's most efficient train operators, you're not going to improve much on that.
What where you doing to run up a bill *that* large?
I seldom use more than 2 or 3 megs of traffic a month on GPRS (most of my uses are low bandwidth), and that's included within the monthly fixed cost of the contract. I use it regularly but only in small chunks (I read my email over an ssh connection, so someone sending a large image won't blow it out the water).