Here's a better one: I co-own a small record label and we're working on music videos for one of our bands (shameless plug http://www.jackwithoneeye.com/). I don't need permission from anyone because I own the masters. Yet this system doesn't give me any way to control use of the music. I'm worried we won't be able to upload the music videos because this system will tag the songs as copyrighted works. As far as the label and the band goes, we are more than happy to have people use the music in mashups, home videos, or whatever else. But we have no way to declare this electronically. That's the real reason none of this nonsense is going to work out in the long run. If there were a way to say "I have permission" or "I own this, no really I do", how would YouTube know if that were true or not? Even if YouTube had that system, what about every other site? We need a compulsory licensing system for copyright. Let copyrighted works be registered and standard royalties paid to a central clearing house.
Most people don't realize that songs (not the mechanical recording but the song itself) work this way - you don't need permission, licenses, or whatever else. You just send in your report of how many times you used the song and a check to cover the license fee. Congress passed this law in response to artists/companies refusing to allow their songs to be played on the radio (or only on certain radio stations). This was when most radio music was performed live, so compulsory licensing meant that a radio station was now free to play whatever songs they wanted and paid a reasonable licensing fee for it. That's also why you don't technically need permission to do a cover version of someone else's song.
As long as copyright licensing is an issue that must be negotiated between millions of individual players (from large labels to indie artists, from movie studios to hobbyist filmmakers, etc) there is absolutely positively no way to fairly police the system. It just descends into infighting, stagnation, lawsuits flying, takedown notices, and complete chaos.... oh wait, that's exactly what we have.
Unicode doesn't cover the full set of CJK characters used for names, nor does it cover all writing systems in actual use.
But it will some day. True, Unicode gets expanded to cover more writing systems... but the reality is that our inter-connected world is converging toward standardized writing systems and languages. Other systems are going extinct. That can have negative elements to it (lost culture/history), but it increasingly means that human beings can talk to other human beings and exchange cultures without a language barrier. That leads to a lot of good things including more peace and less war.
In 1,000 years I expect that almost every human alive will speak a common language. (Whether that will be everyone's second/third/etc language or whether most other languages will have died out I wouldn't hazard a guess.)
Sorta, but the eye's color sensing mechanism works on an opposing color system because the biological pigments in the cones of the retina don't just respond to one frequency of light, they have a bell-curvish response centered on one frequency, and the curves overlap. The M and L cones almost entirely overlap, while S cones are way off in the blue region, though light that only stimulates S without any M is typically seen as a violet color. When you "see" green light, it just means the M cones are stimulated more than the L cones, whereas deep reds will trigger more of the L cones, but also some M cones.
What most people think of "pure" green is right around where the response curves for M and L meet in the middle. Yellow is where light peaks on the L cones but is still stimulating the M cones about half-strength. Both L and M overlap S on one tail end, on the other there is a very tiny range where the L cones are the only ones responding and that color is interpreted as a brownish color. Light that can stimulate only S and L cones without really triggering M cones is interpreted as magenta-ish.
Some theories posit that trichromatic vision is a genetic mutation where the M cone gene was copied and mutated to result in a slight shift. If it were a truly independent adaptation, you might expect it to be much further away, about the same distance S and M are, which would give humans near infrared vision. (Dogs/etc that have bi-color vision only have the mammal's original S and M cones, so their brain gets the blue vs yellow and light vs dark signals. A few mammals have only rods, resulting in true monochromatic vision).
Also, the retina ends up sending differential signal pairs to the brain: red vs green, blue vs yellow, and light vs dark, which has a huge effect on how the brain processes visual information. The naive expectation would be that it would just send the output of the three cones and the intensity, but that's not how it works. Not to mention the real-time color correction and processing, edge detection, shadow compensation, three-dimensional processing, etc.
To sum up: Any attempt to compare raw pixels is idiotic by definition. A corollary to that is the only way to measure the quality of a display device is subjectively.
Second, they knew about the potential for failure and were working on setting up a backup data center. TxDOT denied them rights of way to lay fiber along the highway into a facility in Tarrant county, so they were looking at other potential sites in Garland. Unfortunately this happened before they got it all resolved.
TxDOT might have had good reasons for denying the request, I don't know, but I would wager that the backup site would be a lot further along if they had been able to run that fiber. Sometimes you know there is a problem, management agrees, and you even have a budget to fix it... but someone else (another department, another company, a government agency, etc) stands in the way.
having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.
You hit the nail on the head. Xcode's integration with Interface Builder is absolutely terrible. I'm sure it works if you design UI by committee and have everything drawn out in detail before anyone writes a single line of code, but for rapid development or prototyping (with functionality, not just the GUI look) it really sucks. You spend a lot of time switching back and forth and dragging lines between various bits (often in the reverse from the order you logically think about things hooking together).
Plus I hate Objective-C. Not the features - protocols, message passing, et al are just fine and have definite benefits. But the awful syntax just drives me insane. I'm not just talking about the endless nested brackets and the resulting bizzaro-land way all statements turn into infix notation 47 bracket levels deep because you've gotta rearrange the messages *just so*... I'm also talking about the hilarious way you define an "interface" (class definition), public/private, properties, etc. Who needs curly braces to organize components of an object into one place? Just slap random lines of code wherever the hell you want. Who needs namespaces either?
It is obvious that Objective-C is just an extremely thin shim on top of C - they didn't even go through the trouble of having a single message to create and initialize a new object.
The idea that the ancients or even medieval Europeans believed the earth to be flat is an urban legend and 100% provably false. Eratosthenes, the librarian of the Alexandrian Library, came to within 300 to 10,000km of the actual circumference of the earth (depending on exactly how long one "stadia" is taken to be) back around 200 BC.
The Roman Catholic church likewise carried a lot of Greek scholarship forward and you would have been laughed at for suggesting the earth was flat in any court, monastery, etc. This actually came back to bite them re:Galileo though I suggest reading up on that as well (Pope Urban VIII is the one who allowed Galileo's works to be published with formal approval of the Inquisition, there is a lot of history there and his persecution was more about personal dynamics and politics than anything to do with the actual science... how oddly relevant today)
No one thought Christopher Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth, they merely assumed that the distance was too great to cross due to danger from storms or the amount of supplies a ship could reasonably carry. Given the number of ships that were regularly lost making the Atlantic crossing for hundreds of years, their skepticism wasn't exactly misplaced.
I have to say that I disagree completely; Patents are a good thing so long as patents are only granted for truly novel inventions. It seems to me that the majority of these patent battles would not be relevant if the patent office didn't approve so many business method, general, vague, or non-innovative patents. (I think there are also some reforms that would help protect small inventors against large corporations, without opening the floodgates to companies being pestered by individuals needlessly.)
The Supreme Court has been helping out a bit by setting some clearer standards for what constitutes a novel invention, but some of this broken stuff should have been fixed by Congress a long time ago. One of the biggest is the way the lower courts have distorted the concept of "willful" copying of patented technology, to the point that most companies have strict policies against employees doing any kind of patent searches if they think they have a patentable idea or if they want to attempt a workaround, because some courts have interpreted that as intentional and slapping triple damages on you. They would rather ignore the issue and not know than attempt to design around the patent, in which case the only real defense you have is to attempt to patent everything you can possibly think of to build up a defensive portfolio of patents, which of course doesn't protect against patent trolls.
If you think about that for a moment, isn't it exactly the opposite of the stated purpose of patents in the Constitution - to promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Are they asserting patents against the open source project itself, or against a company making money off selling support for the open source project? It seems like the latter - their beef seems to be with a company that is their direct competitor, not the actual open source project. It may even be that they are attacking some closed-source goodies the company provides its customers, at this point I don't really know.
Can anyone with more direct info about the case shed some light on it?
In Windows, when a program loads, all executable code is immediately mapped into the process address space, but may not actually be loaded into memory yet - those mapped pages have their "swapped to disk" flag set. They just happen to live in the original DLL instead of the page file... just because a page lives on disk doesn't necessarily mean it lives in the page file. Prefetch keeps stats about what pages from what DLLs are actually used most of the time and it pre-loads them into RAM, but the rest of the pages will stay on disk until you need them. All of this stuff shows up as page faults because technically they are, but it doesn't mean you are swapping to disk.
Windows will also not overwrite free'd pages immediately; if they are not allocated and get touched, it just flips the bit back to put the page in use. Windows 7 also greatly increased the caching mechanism, which aims to put 90% of all free RAM to use as cache, the majority of that is read cache so it can be thrown away at a moment's notice if an application needs it. Again, all this activity makes the page fault count tick upward.
Bottom line (as others have pointed out): This is a total non-story.
It doesn't always take a competition; we know it as "Not Invented Here Syndrome". Even when there isn't a competition internally, other departments will still oppose you because they weren't the ones to come up with the idea. Eliminating that sort of thing requires a massive push from the top for better leadership throughout the organization and rare is the CxO/VP that has that kind of head for business, vision for leadership, and political clout to pull off the change without getting quashed.
Indeed, this is often the problem in the Dallas area, so we have a lot of sympathy for them. The Chicago/New England arseholes like to point and laugh because people freak out over a single day of snow with 3 inches of accumulation, but our problem isn't that it snows/ices like this. The problem is that it only happens for an average of 1-2 days per winter. Some winters we have zero ice and snow. Others we have 5 days, but never more than a week.
How can you justify a huge fleet of salt trucks, snow plows, people, and training for something that only happens rarely? How can you expect 5 million people to have snow chains, etc when they might use them once every 10 years? The answer is that you don't - everyone just rushes home and the whole city takes a day or two off, then resumes business as normal when things thaw.
There are large degrees of severity with snow/ice, only an ignorant person would assume that everyone lives under the same circumstances as they do.
The problem is that everything seems obvious in hindsight. If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology? SCOTUS already ruled that a patent holder cannot sue 3rd party users of a technology for infringement committed by an upstream supplier, so there is no need to license it to protect yourself from lawsuits. Perhaps the technology offers something of value; Nintendo isn't the only one either.
Again, I am not saying RAMBUS' hands are entirely clean here - we know they aren't. But the core issue, I think, is that an American company developed memory technology that foreign corporations desperately wanted to avoid paying royalties for and they colluded to try to bankrupt RAMBUS to increase profits (and screw consumers).
I can just imagine if I patented a legitimate invention that the RAMBUS case would give companies like Samsung the idea that they can just bankrupt me, rather than pay royalties. We've seen it happen many times before, why not here?
You should dig into the details of the case in depth, more than what you've read on slashdot. RAMBUS did do some shady things, but let us not forget that all the major memory makers plead guilty to price fixing and collusion. Some of their executives went to jail. They paid the largest antitrust fines in the history of the USA. We also have documented proof that they admitted (in regards to RAMBUS) that "all memory will be made this way... hopefully without the royalties going to RAMBUS".
Perhaps it is likely that RAMBUS was not really welcome on JEDEC because the major memory makers knew their patents applied to the technology and wanted to avoid paying royalties.
Whatever the truth is, RAMBUS is not a patent troll by any means. They do real R&D to develop legit memory technologies, which is legitimately licensed by manufacturers. And in fact without the use of techniques RAMBUS pioneered, we would not have DDR/DDR2/DDR3. They just haven't necessarily played nice or avoided doing shady things. That doesn't make them an IP holding company that snaps up patentns with the goal of trolling larger companies.
As others have hinted at, this is really about Nokia refusing to license their GSM patents under the RAND terms that are required of GSM Association members, the same license terms that all the other handset manufacturers got from Nokia.
Instead, Nokia wanted more than the normal fee PLUS free access to Apple's patent portfolio. When Apple refused, they tripled their asking rate and again insisted that they get free cross-licensing of Apple's patents.
Nokia is violating both the spirit and the letter of their GSM agreements. If you want to talk about companies (Microsoft) using patents against others even while using the open specifications promise and other promises not to sue, here is a prime example of a company getting their standard adopted, licensing the tech to the other industry players, then attempting to use their patents to force an upstart competitor out of the market (or at least rob them financially).
I'll also note that they are using what seems to be a standard tactic: try to get import of the products stopped, rather than fighting the court case. Even if they lose the court case, if they can stop Apple from importing products for a few years it will be a severe strain. The best part is they can pay off some bureaucrats instead of getting a judge to issue an injunction.
Claiming that other Apple products violate their patents is just more posturing to try and force a settlement on terms that are very unfavorable to Apple.
The super mario game in question is rendered in full 3D, it just has a locked point of view to simulate the 2D side scroller/platformer. This is actually a fairly common tactic these days; even "true" 2D games themselves are rendered in 3D space as ordered sprites, which is why you see some of them using shaders or other effects. In fact the Mac OS X and Windows 7 desktops are also rendered as a texture over a 3D polygon. If you could change the "camera" on the desktop you'd see a two triangles forming a rectangle floating in space with the desktop rendered as a texture on top of it.
Anyway the reason Mario looks good scaled up is that a lot of the fill in is it is done with simple shaders, cartoony textures, or gradients that either scale along with the geometry or don't look too bad when blown up, but if you look really closely at the footage you can certainly tell in a few spots that the artists didn't design the game for that resolution.
Still, the reason I haven't bought any Wii games in 1.5+ years is the lack of HD; The games just look terrible on my HDTV and I end up playing my Xbox 360. I swore not to buy any PS3 games after the first one I bought said 1080i on the back but didn't actually support that resolution. That's when I found out Sony saved $1.00 by not including a hardware scaler like the Xbox 360, so if the game can't render to 1080i I'm forced to drop back to 480i/p. Since the boxes lie about what resolutions they support, I simply won't buy PS3 games.
I'm not an Xbox fanboy (I've got a real job and don't have time to argue about which console is better), I just know that the Xbox always renders in high-def to my TV and it is the only console to do so. If Nintendo would release a Wii HD that was also backwards-compatible with the Wii (which can obviously be done as dolphin shows), I would grab one without question.
Apparently, their owners were mostly happy with the thing, despite its 1990s shortcomings and lack of charging stations, until GM decided to kill the program and take away all the vehicles, in typical GM-style idiotic managerial fashion
They were happy because GM leased the cars to them at a loss. If they were forced to pay retail rates for the vehicles I doubt many people would have kept them. Not to mention the expensive and frequent battery replacements (they used lead-acid batteries and given the EV discharge/recharge cycles, they weren't expected to last very long).
Only the most recent developments in Lithium Ion technology have made it possible to get good performance, life, and range out of the large battery packs you need in a vehicle.
GM's mistake wasn't killing the EV1, it was discontinuing the entire program after the EV1 phase was complete. If they had kept developing better batteries and EV technologies the entire time they would be much further ahead re: the Volt than they are now.
I got tired of having to buy a new color laser printer every time the cartridges ran out, so I just buy toner refill kits now. The average drum can last 3-6 refills and the company provided replacement chips to fool the printer into thinking it was a new cartridge.
Inkjet refills are also fairly easy, or you can buy cheap replacements online. Just be wary of the vacuum-sealed carts (I think Epson liked to use those) that cause major issues if you try to refill them.
That's also why I generally preferred Canon printers back when I owned Inkjets: Their inks were in individual tanks so you could replace just the colors that needed it. The heads were also a separate assembly, so the tank only held ink. Official replacement tanks were about 10 bucks each, which is not bad when you compare it to HP's outrageous prices.
Indeed, think about the one instruction set computer or languages like Brainf*ck; you can do a lot with just a few simple instructions, especially if you accept that no human being will be able to follow control flow by looking at the assembly. You may end up with a *lot* of instructions to encode relatively simple programs, but it certainly will work.
There has been work done in this sort of area before. Look at the EICAR virus test file http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm/. Although it isn't english prose, it is all upper-case letters and symbols (printable ASCII), and when executed it prints its message and exits.
Kudos to the researchers here for their hard work.
e have a semantic language (HTML) and a language that describes how to present that (CSS), right? This is good, let's keep it that way.
But things aren't as good as they could be. On the semantic side, we have many elements in the language that don't really convey any semantic information, and a lot of semantics there isn't an element for. On the presentation side, well, suffice it to say that there are a _lot_ of things that cannot be done, and others that can be done, but only with ugly kludges. Meanwhile, processing and rendering HTML and CSS takes a lot of resources.
The problem is that worrying about semantic vs presentation is something that almost no one gives a s**t about, because it is an artificial division that makes sense for computer science reasons, not human reasons. I don't sit down to make a web page and completely divorce the content vs the layout; the layout gives context and can be just as important as the content itself in terms of a human brain grasping an attempt at communication.
I know I shouldn't use tables for presentation but I just don't care. They are so simple and easy to visualize in my head, and using them has never caused a noticeable slowdown in my app, caused maintenance headaches, cost me any money, etc. The only downside is listening to architecture astronauts whine about how incorrect it is while they all sit around and circle-jerk about how their pages pass this-or-that validation test.
In oh so many ways writing a web app is like stepping back into computer GUI v1.0; so much must be manually re-implemented in a different way for every app. Heck, you can't even reliably get the dimensions of an element or the currently computed styles on an element. Lest you think this is mostly IE-vs-everyone else, no browser can define a content region that automatically scrolls its contents within a defined percentage of the parent element's content region; you've gotta emit javascript to dynamically calculate the size. This is double-stupid because browsers already perform this sort of layout logic for things like a textarea that has content that exceeds its bounds. And guess what? This is one of the #1 reasons people want to use overflow:auto. Don't waste screen real-estate showing scrollbars if they aren't necessary, but don't force me to hard-code height and width because then I can't scale to the user's screen resolution.
This kind of crap is so frustrating and wastes MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of man-hours year after year, yet we can't even get the major browser vendors to agree to HTMLv5 and what little bits (though very useful) it brings to the table. So please spare me the semantic vs presentation argument. If just a few people gave a s**t and stopped stroking their own egos on these bulls**t committees and actually tried to solve the problems that developers and designers deal with every day then they wouldn't have to worry about forcing everyone to adopt their standard (IPv6), the desire to adopt it would come naturally.
1. Criminals smart enough to even understand what this issue is about are probably smart enough to do something useful with their lives
2. Otherwise if they are that smart and still engaged in crime, they're probably involved in major organized crime, in which case they already know (or should know) that wiretaps are a possibility so this brings nothing new to the table.
3. Law enforcement is probably going to notice (at some point) that their systems are getting jacked with and the reaction will not be a mellow one.
Most criminals get caught because they're stupid or lazy. Most smart criminals get caught because they got careless and made mistakes. Neither of these two things are likely to change anytime soon so I suspect that law enforcement will continue to be able to easily catch most criminals without employing fancy CSI zoom-enhance techniques.
Food addicts are one of the few cases where addicts can't quit getting their fix. There is no detox because you must eat to live.
Imagine trying to help someone who wants to quit using heroine or coke, but they still need to inject/snort some every day or they will die... they just need to use a little bit less. If anyone seriously proposed such a thing we would laugh at them for being so stupid.
Yet it is possible... I should know, I used to wear size 50 pants and weigh 320+ lbs. Losing the weight was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, but I am so glad that I did. I haven't reached my goal yet, but wearing pants in the 34-36 range makes me feel like a person again and not a bloated man-blob.
What do you mean Windows requires it to work like this? On Windows accessing a NULL pointer is always an exception, no process is ever allowed to map the bottom page of memory. This has been true since Windows has existed. So in fact it is only Windows systems that are immune to this class of exploit because writing programs and kernel code vulnerable to it leads to an immediate crash.
If you wanted to specify this invariant on Linux you could, you'd just break some existing apps that depend on it. Ironically, it seems that Wine depends on this behavior.
If the Chinese weren't manipulating their currency so heavily, then the expansion of their economy would cause their currency to appreciate, thus offsetting some of the "cheapness" of their exports while making our exports much cheaper to Chinese citizens. Chinese labor is cheaper than American labor, but not by nearly as much as the artificial exchange rate implies.
The only way this can work in the long term without turning everyone everywhere into poor people is if China expands internal demand and there is much more two-way trade between them and other countries (especially the USA). The only way that can happen is if China stops manipulating their currency. There isn't any other population on earth poised to replace the American middle class as an economic engine within the next few decades so I'm not sure how the Chinese think this game can go on forever.
WARNING: Intel has pulled the firmware because there appears to be a chance of bricking the drive. Users report that the firmware updates successfully, but after rebooting Windows detects changed hardware, installs drivers, and after rebooting again the system BSODs and/or won't boot at all. The drives appear to be bricked unless reformatted.
I have one of these drives and I'm holding off until the dust settles.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a better one: I co-own a small record label and we're working on music videos for one of our bands (shameless plug http://www.jackwithoneeye.com/). I don't need permission from anyone because I own the masters. Yet this system doesn't give me any way to control use of the music. I'm worried we won't be able to upload the music videos because this system will tag the songs as copyrighted works. As far as the label and the band goes, we are more than happy to have people use the music in mashups, home videos, or whatever else. But we have no way to declare this electronically. That's the real reason none of this nonsense is going to work out in the long run. If there were a way to say "I have permission" or "I own this, no really I do", how would YouTube know if that were true or not? Even if YouTube had that system, what about every other site? We need a compulsory licensing system for copyright. Let copyrighted works be registered and standard royalties paid to a central clearing house.
Most people don't realize that songs (not the mechanical recording but the song itself) work this way - you don't need permission, licenses, or whatever else. You just send in your report of how many times you used the song and a check to cover the license fee. Congress passed this law in response to artists/companies refusing to allow their songs to be played on the radio (or only on certain radio stations). This was when most radio music was performed live, so compulsory licensing meant that a radio station was now free to play whatever songs they wanted and paid a reasonable licensing fee for it. That's also why you don't technically need permission to do a cover version of someone else's song.
As long as copyright licensing is an issue that must be negotiated between millions of individual players (from large labels to indie artists, from movie studios to hobbyist filmmakers, etc) there is absolutely positively no way to fairly police the system. It just descends into infighting, stagnation, lawsuits flying, takedown notices, and complete chaos.... oh wait, that's exactly what we have.
Unicode doesn't cover the full set of CJK characters used for names, nor does it cover all writing systems in actual use.
But it will some day. True, Unicode gets expanded to cover more writing systems... but the reality is that our inter-connected world is converging toward standardized writing systems and languages. Other systems are going extinct. That can have negative elements to it (lost culture/history), but it increasingly means that human beings can talk to other human beings and exchange cultures without a language barrier. That leads to a lot of good things including more peace and less war.
In 1,000 years I expect that almost every human alive will speak a common language. (Whether that will be everyone's second/third/etc language or whether most other languages will have died out I wouldn't hazard a guess.)
Sorta, but the eye's color sensing mechanism works on an opposing color system because the biological pigments in the cones of the retina don't just respond to one frequency of light, they have a bell-curvish response centered on one frequency, and the curves overlap. The M and L cones almost entirely overlap, while S cones are way off in the blue region, though light that only stimulates S without any M is typically seen as a violet color. When you "see" green light, it just means the M cones are stimulated more than the L cones, whereas deep reds will trigger more of the L cones, but also some M cones.
What most people think of "pure" green is right around where the response curves for M and L meet in the middle. Yellow is where light peaks on the L cones but is still stimulating the M cones about half-strength. Both L and M overlap S on one tail end, on the other there is a very tiny range where the L cones are the only ones responding and that color is interpreted as a brownish color. Light that can stimulate only S and L cones without really triggering M cones is interpreted as magenta-ish.
Some theories posit that trichromatic vision is a genetic mutation where the M cone gene was copied and mutated to result in a slight shift. If it were a truly independent adaptation, you might expect it to be much further away, about the same distance S and M are, which would give humans near infrared vision. (Dogs/etc that have bi-color vision only have the mammal's original S and M cones, so their brain gets the blue vs yellow and light vs dark signals. A few mammals have only rods, resulting in true monochromatic vision).
Also, the retina ends up sending differential signal pairs to the brain: red vs green, blue vs yellow, and light vs dark, which has a huge effect on how the brain processes visual information. The naive expectation would be that it would just send the output of the three cones and the intensity, but that's not how it works. Not to mention the real-time color correction and processing, edge detection, shadow compensation, three-dimensional processing, etc.
To sum up: Any attempt to compare raw pixels is idiotic by definition. A corollary to that is the only way to measure the quality of a display device is subjectively.
First, this is Dallas County, not Dallas city.
Second, they knew about the potential for failure and were working on setting up a backup data center. TxDOT denied them rights of way to lay fiber along the highway into a facility in Tarrant county, so they were looking at other potential sites in Garland. Unfortunately this happened before they got it all resolved.
TxDOT might have had good reasons for denying the request, I don't know, but I would wager that the backup site would be a lot further along if they had been able to run that fiber. Sometimes you know there is a problem, management agrees, and you even have a budget to fix it... but someone else (another department, another company, a government agency, etc) stands in the way.
having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.
You hit the nail on the head. Xcode's integration with Interface Builder is absolutely terrible. I'm sure it works if you design UI by committee and have everything drawn out in detail before anyone writes a single line of code, but for rapid development or prototyping (with functionality, not just the GUI look) it really sucks. You spend a lot of time switching back and forth and dragging lines between various bits (often in the reverse from the order you logically think about things hooking together).
Plus I hate Objective-C. Not the features - protocols, message passing, et al are just fine and have definite benefits. But the awful syntax just drives me insane. I'm not just talking about the endless nested brackets and the resulting bizzaro-land way all statements turn into infix notation 47 bracket levels deep because you've gotta rearrange the messages *just so*... I'm also talking about the hilarious way you define an "interface" (class definition), public/private, properties, etc. Who needs curly braces to organize components of an object into one place? Just slap random lines of code wherever the hell you want. Who needs namespaces either?
It is obvious that Objective-C is just an extremely thin shim on top of C - they didn't even go through the trouble of having a single message to create and initialize a new object.
The idea that the ancients or even medieval Europeans believed the earth to be flat is an urban legend and 100% provably false. Eratosthenes, the librarian of the Alexandrian Library, came to within 300 to 10,000km of the actual circumference of the earth (depending on exactly how long one "stadia" is taken to be) back around 200 BC.
The Roman Catholic church likewise carried a lot of Greek scholarship forward and you would have been laughed at for suggesting the earth was flat in any court, monastery, etc. This actually came back to bite them re:Galileo though I suggest reading up on that as well (Pope Urban VIII is the one who allowed Galileo's works to be published with formal approval of the Inquisition, there is a lot of history there and his persecution was more about personal dynamics and politics than anything to do with the actual science... how oddly relevant today)
No one thought Christopher Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth, they merely assumed that the distance was too great to cross due to danger from storms or the amount of supplies a ship could reasonably carry. Given the number of ships that were regularly lost making the Atlantic crossing for hundreds of years, their skepticism wasn't exactly misplaced.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth/
I have to say that I disagree completely; Patents are a good thing so long as patents are only granted for truly novel inventions. It seems to me that the majority of these patent battles would not be relevant if the patent office didn't approve so many business method, general, vague, or non-innovative patents. (I think there are also some reforms that would help protect small inventors against large corporations, without opening the floodgates to companies being pestered by individuals needlessly.)
The Supreme Court has been helping out a bit by setting some clearer standards for what constitutes a novel invention, but some of this broken stuff should have been fixed by Congress a long time ago. One of the biggest is the way the lower courts have distorted the concept of "willful" copying of patented technology, to the point that most companies have strict policies against employees doing any kind of patent searches if they think they have a patentable idea or if they want to attempt a workaround, because some courts have interpreted that as intentional and slapping triple damages on you. They would rather ignore the issue and not know than attempt to design around the patent, in which case the only real defense you have is to attempt to patent everything you can possibly think of to build up a defensive portfolio of patents, which of course doesn't protect against patent trolls.
If you think about that for a moment, isn't it exactly the opposite of the stated purpose of patents in the Constitution - to promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Are they asserting patents against the open source project itself, or against a company making money off selling support for the open source project? It seems like the latter - their beef seems to be with a company that is their direct competitor, not the actual open source project. It may even be that they are attacking some closed-source goodies the company provides its customers, at this point I don't really know.
Can anyone with more direct info about the case shed some light on it?
In Windows, when a program loads, all executable code is immediately mapped into the process address space, but may not actually be loaded into memory yet - those mapped pages have their "swapped to disk" flag set. They just happen to live in the original DLL instead of the page file... just because a page lives on disk doesn't necessarily mean it lives in the page file. Prefetch keeps stats about what pages from what DLLs are actually used most of the time and it pre-loads them into RAM, but the rest of the pages will stay on disk until you need them. All of this stuff shows up as page faults because technically they are, but it doesn't mean you are swapping to disk.
Windows will also not overwrite free'd pages immediately; if they are not allocated and get touched, it just flips the bit back to put the page in use. Windows 7 also greatly increased the caching mechanism, which aims to put 90% of all free RAM to use as cache, the majority of that is read cache so it can be thrown away at a moment's notice if an application needs it. Again, all this activity makes the page fault count tick upward.
Bottom line (as others have pointed out): This is a total non-story.
It doesn't always take a competition; we know it as "Not Invented Here Syndrome". Even when there isn't a competition internally, other departments will still oppose you because they weren't the ones to come up with the idea. Eliminating that sort of thing requires a massive push from the top for better leadership throughout the organization and rare is the CxO/VP that has that kind of head for business, vision for leadership, and political clout to pull off the change without getting quashed.
Indeed, this is often the problem in the Dallas area, so we have a lot of sympathy for them. The Chicago/New England arseholes like to point and laugh because people freak out over a single day of snow with 3 inches of accumulation, but our problem isn't that it snows/ices like this. The problem is that it only happens for an average of 1-2 days per winter. Some winters we have zero ice and snow. Others we have 5 days, but never more than a week.
How can you justify a huge fleet of salt trucks, snow plows, people, and training for something that only happens rarely? How can you expect 5 million people to have snow chains, etc when they might use them once every 10 years? The answer is that you don't - everyone just rushes home and the whole city takes a day or two off, then resumes business as normal when things thaw.
There are large degrees of severity with snow/ice, only an ignorant person would assume that everyone lives under the same circumstances as they do.
The problem is that everything seems obvious in hindsight. If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology? SCOTUS already ruled that a patent holder cannot sue 3rd party users of a technology for infringement committed by an upstream supplier, so there is no need to license it to protect yourself from lawsuits. Perhaps the technology offers something of value; Nintendo isn't the only one either.
Again, I am not saying RAMBUS' hands are entirely clean here - we know they aren't. But the core issue, I think, is that an American company developed memory technology that foreign corporations desperately wanted to avoid paying royalties for and they colluded to try to bankrupt RAMBUS to increase profits (and screw consumers).
I can just imagine if I patented a legitimate invention that the RAMBUS case would give companies like Samsung the idea that they can just bankrupt me, rather than pay royalties. We've seen it happen many times before, why not here?
You should dig into the details of the case in depth, more than what you've read on slashdot. RAMBUS did do some shady things, but let us not forget that all the major memory makers plead guilty to price fixing and collusion. Some of their executives went to jail. They paid the largest antitrust fines in the history of the USA. We also have documented proof that they admitted (in regards to RAMBUS) that "all memory will be made this way ... hopefully without the royalties going to RAMBUS".
Perhaps it is likely that RAMBUS was not really welcome on JEDEC because the major memory makers knew their patents applied to the technology and wanted to avoid paying royalties.
Whatever the truth is, RAMBUS is not a patent troll by any means. They do real R&D to develop legit memory technologies, which is legitimately licensed by manufacturers. And in fact without the use of techniques RAMBUS pioneered, we would not have DDR/DDR2/DDR3. They just haven't necessarily played nice or avoided doing shady things. That doesn't make them an IP holding company that snaps up patentns with the goal of trolling larger companies.
As others have hinted at, this is really about Nokia refusing to license their GSM patents under the RAND terms that are required of GSM Association members, the same license terms that all the other handset manufacturers got from Nokia.
Instead, Nokia wanted more than the normal fee PLUS free access to Apple's patent portfolio. When Apple refused, they tripled their asking rate and again insisted that they get free cross-licensing of Apple's patents.
Nokia is violating both the spirit and the letter of their GSM agreements. If you want to talk about companies (Microsoft) using patents against others even while using the open specifications promise and other promises not to sue, here is a prime example of a company getting their standard adopted, licensing the tech to the other industry players, then attempting to use their patents to force an upstart competitor out of the market (or at least rob them financially).
I'll also note that they are using what seems to be a standard tactic: try to get import of the products stopped, rather than fighting the court case. Even if they lose the court case, if they can stop Apple from importing products for a few years it will be a severe strain. The best part is they can pay off some bureaucrats instead of getting a judge to issue an injunction.
Claiming that other Apple products violate their patents is just more posturing to try and force a settlement on terms that are very unfavorable to Apple.
The super mario game in question is rendered in full 3D, it just has a locked point of view to simulate the 2D side scroller/platformer. This is actually a fairly common tactic these days; even "true" 2D games themselves are rendered in 3D space as ordered sprites, which is why you see some of them using shaders or other effects. In fact the Mac OS X and Windows 7 desktops are also rendered as a texture over a 3D polygon. If you could change the "camera" on the desktop you'd see a two triangles forming a rectangle floating in space with the desktop rendered as a texture on top of it.
Anyway the reason Mario looks good scaled up is that a lot of the fill in is it is done with simple shaders, cartoony textures, or gradients that either scale along with the geometry or don't look too bad when blown up, but if you look really closely at the footage you can certainly tell in a few spots that the artists didn't design the game for that resolution.
Still, the reason I haven't bought any Wii games in 1.5+ years is the lack of HD; The games just look terrible on my HDTV and I end up playing my Xbox 360. I swore not to buy any PS3 games after the first one I bought said 1080i on the back but didn't actually support that resolution. That's when I found out Sony saved $1.00 by not including a hardware scaler like the Xbox 360, so if the game can't render to 1080i I'm forced to drop back to 480i/p. Since the boxes lie about what resolutions they support, I simply won't buy PS3 games.
I'm not an Xbox fanboy (I've got a real job and don't have time to argue about which console is better), I just know that the Xbox always renders in high-def to my TV and it is the only console to do so. If Nintendo would release a Wii HD that was also backwards-compatible with the Wii (which can obviously be done as dolphin shows), I would grab one without question.
Apparently, their owners were mostly happy with the thing, despite its 1990s shortcomings and lack of charging stations, until GM decided to kill the program and take away all the vehicles, in typical GM-style idiotic managerial fashion
They were happy because GM leased the cars to them at a loss. If they were forced to pay retail rates for the vehicles I doubt many people would have kept them. Not to mention the expensive and frequent battery replacements (they used lead-acid batteries and given the EV discharge/recharge cycles, they weren't expected to last very long).
Only the most recent developments in Lithium Ion technology have made it possible to get good performance, life, and range out of the large battery packs you need in a vehicle.
GM's mistake wasn't killing the EV1, it was discontinuing the entire program after the EV1 phase was complete. If they had kept developing better batteries and EV technologies the entire time they would be much further ahead re: the Volt than they are now.
I got tired of having to buy a new color laser printer every time the cartridges ran out, so I just buy toner refill kits now. The average drum can last 3-6 refills and the company provided replacement chips to fool the printer into thinking it was a new cartridge.
Inkjet refills are also fairly easy, or you can buy cheap replacements online. Just be wary of the vacuum-sealed carts (I think Epson liked to use those) that cause major issues if you try to refill them.
That's also why I generally preferred Canon printers back when I owned Inkjets: Their inks were in individual tanks so you could replace just the colors that needed it. The heads were also a separate assembly, so the tank only held ink. Official replacement tanks were about 10 bucks each, which is not bad when you compare it to HP's outrageous prices.
Indeed, think about the one instruction set computer or languages like Brainf*ck; you can do a lot with just a few simple instructions, especially if you accept that no human being will be able to follow control flow by looking at the assembly. You may end up with a *lot* of instructions to encode relatively simple programs, but it certainly will work.
There has been work done in this sort of area before. Look at the EICAR virus test file http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm/. Although it isn't english prose, it is all upper-case letters and symbols (printable ASCII), and when executed it prints its message and exits.
Kudos to the researchers here for their hard work.
e have a semantic language (HTML) and a language that describes how to present that (CSS), right? This is good, let's keep it that way.
But things aren't as good as they could be. On the semantic side, we have many elements in the language that don't really convey any semantic information, and a lot of semantics there isn't an element for. On the presentation side, well, suffice it to say that there are a _lot_ of things that cannot be done, and others that can be done, but only with ugly kludges. Meanwhile, processing and rendering HTML and CSS takes a lot of resources.
The problem is that worrying about semantic vs presentation is something that almost no one gives a s**t about, because it is an artificial division that makes sense for computer science reasons, not human reasons. I don't sit down to make a web page and completely divorce the content vs the layout; the layout gives context and can be just as important as the content itself in terms of a human brain grasping an attempt at communication.
I know I shouldn't use tables for presentation but I just don't care. They are so simple and easy to visualize in my head, and using them has never caused a noticeable slowdown in my app, caused maintenance headaches, cost me any money, etc. The only downside is listening to architecture astronauts whine about how incorrect it is while they all sit around and circle-jerk about how their pages pass this-or-that validation test.
In oh so many ways writing a web app is like stepping back into computer GUI v1.0; so much must be manually re-implemented in a different way for every app. Heck, you can't even reliably get the dimensions of an element or the currently computed styles on an element. Lest you think this is mostly IE-vs-everyone else, no browser can define a content region that automatically scrolls its contents within a defined percentage of the parent element's content region; you've gotta emit javascript to dynamically calculate the size. This is double-stupid because browsers already perform this sort of layout logic for things like a textarea that has content that exceeds its bounds. And guess what? This is one of the #1 reasons people want to use overflow:auto. Don't waste screen real-estate showing scrollbars if they aren't necessary, but don't force me to hard-code height and width because then I can't scale to the user's screen resolution.
This kind of crap is so frustrating and wastes MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of man-hours year after year, yet we can't even get the major browser vendors to agree to HTMLv5 and what little bits (though very useful) it brings to the table. So please spare me the semantic vs presentation argument. If just a few people gave a s**t and stopped stroking their own egos on these bulls**t committees and actually tried to solve the problems that developers and designers deal with every day then they wouldn't have to worry about forcing everyone to adopt their standard (IPv6), the desire to adopt it would come naturally.
1. Criminals smart enough to even understand what this issue is about are probably smart enough to do something useful with their lives
2. Otherwise if they are that smart and still engaged in crime, they're probably involved in major organized crime, in which case they already know (or should know) that wiretaps are a possibility so this brings nothing new to the table.
3. Law enforcement is probably going to notice (at some point) that their systems are getting jacked with and the reaction will not be a mellow one.
Most criminals get caught because they're stupid or lazy. Most smart criminals get caught because they got careless and made mistakes. Neither of these two things are likely to change anytime soon so I suspect that law enforcement will continue to be able to easily catch most criminals without employing fancy CSI zoom-enhance techniques.
The paper: http://discovery.csc.ncsu.edu/pubs/ccs09-HookSafe.pdf
And the required Schneier blog post: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/protecting_oss.html
Food addicts are one of the few cases where addicts can't quit getting their fix. There is no detox because you must eat to live.
Imagine trying to help someone who wants to quit using heroine or coke, but they still need to inject/snort some every day or they will die... they just need to use a little bit less. If anyone seriously proposed such a thing we would laugh at them for being so stupid.
Yet it is possible... I should know, I used to wear size 50 pants and weigh 320+ lbs. Losing the weight was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, but I am so glad that I did. I haven't reached my goal yet, but wearing pants in the 34-36 range makes me feel like a person again and not a bloated man-blob.
What do you mean Windows requires it to work like this? On Windows accessing a NULL pointer is always an exception, no process is ever allowed to map the bottom page of memory. This has been true since Windows has existed. So in fact it is only Windows systems that are immune to this class of exploit because writing programs and kernel code vulnerable to it leads to an immediate crash.
If you wanted to specify this invariant on Linux you could, you'd just break some existing apps that depend on it. Ironically, it seems that Wine depends on this behavior.
If the Chinese weren't manipulating their currency so heavily, then the expansion of their economy would cause their currency to appreciate, thus offsetting some of the "cheapness" of their exports while making our exports much cheaper to Chinese citizens. Chinese labor is cheaper than American labor, but not by nearly as much as the artificial exchange rate implies.
The only way this can work in the long term without turning everyone everywhere into poor people is if China expands internal demand and there is much more two-way trade between them and other countries (especially the USA). The only way that can happen is if China stops manipulating their currency. There isn't any other population on earth poised to replace the American middle class as an economic engine within the next few decades so I'm not sure how the Chinese think this game can go on forever.
WARNING: Intel has pulled the firmware because there appears to be a chance of bricking the drive. Users report that the firmware updates successfully, but after rebooting Windows detects changed hardware, installs drivers, and after rebooting again the system BSODs and/or won't boot at all. The drives appear to be bricked unless reformatted.
I have one of these drives and I'm holding off until the dust settles.