If it doesn't perform off the shelf, practically speaking it doesn't perform period.
I never said Mandrake was as slow as WindoZZZe. When I tried playing a DVD with the pre-installed DVD player it skipped like crazy, it didn't even come close to Mandrake in performance, much less Gentoo.
As far as prelinking goes this would improve load times for Windows binaries too, but probably not as much because in Linux distributions the distributor gets to compile the programs so they go for dynamic linking, decreasing the memory efficiency and shrinking security update download times. Remember when a zlib bug was found? Practically every statically linked application had to be patched including MS Word. The point of gentoo is that if you have shitloads of RAM and want quick startup times you can take the Microsoft approach (just put "static" in you USE variable.). The second point was that if you're using Linux there are innovative tools like pre-linking that will get you faster load times at the cost of running a command after installs or nightly if you like. This is superior to static linking because you still get the efficiency of Linux with the load times of a large monolothic Windows program.
There are places where Windows XP is better, like the startup time of the OS, they even have a tool for optimizing this. They do this at the cost of a hellishly slow shutdown time. But I bet if we worried about startup time a little we could shorten it without the cost at shut-down. Just figuring out the disk access pattern at startup and providing a hook in the kernel for drivers to look up cached info might go a long way...(and we should time startup to, without a metric the developers won't think about the 20 msec their server takes to startup.. unless they see it takes longer than someone else's similar server.) OS Startup time just hasn't been a priority until now that Windows NT is starting to compete, it's good for the community that they are. BSD will probably ignore it and do things the "UNIX Way" for a while, but if we don't mess up they'll come around and "do it right."
As someone else has already pointed out - comments are not for YOU.
Well written code is code that someone else can start working with without having to ask the previous developer any questions.
While I'll tell my managers that the code isn't commented if they are expecting me to make a small change to a large project, the truth is most comments aren't that useful. Comments describing the architecture are, but the kind of function by function, or even line by line comments that managers asking for comments want aren't. Usually it's quicker to read the code than either of those. English is much more ambiguous and needs many more words to describe something than any decent code. It's only when the comments are sufficiently "meta" so that they describe conventions and architecture that they're useful (or pointing out exceptions to those conventions or architecture).
Oh, and let's not talk about load times for X window managers. Even with XP's "bug" KDE nor Gnome stand a chance*. * Disclaimer: this is based on my experience RH8. I'm currently downloading the Mandrake 9.1 ISO's
If you really want to see KDE startup fly try gentoo. Compile aggressively, on my laptop I have:
gentoo will mask out dangerous optimizations where they really are dangerous (like the kernel). But, you might not want to risk something like -ffast-math if you chart orbits for NASA using bc... The align-functions and align-loops should probably be 32 & 3 resp, for my xp, but I lifted these from my P4 with minor modification. (For P4 you want those alignments and -msse2 -march=pentium4 & not -march=athlon-xp -m3dnow, gcc can explain them better than I, and some of these are actually redundant with -O3, but its good to still have them listed if you want to make one of them a "no-" option or make it -O2, cuz you know something about the package.)
And THEN, run
prelink -afmR
The startup time of C++ programs in Linux is usually so slow because of all the dynamic linking that gcc encourages by making it the default. Prelinking changes the binaries and libraries so that this can be done faster (the linker will default to full relinking if any of the libraries an application requires changes after you run prelink). You can probably run prelink on a modern distribution like MDK 9.1 so you might just want to try it there. But gentoo has really breathed new life into my laptop, it just managed a single DVD quality stream with MDK 9, with gentoo I can play a DVD while looping the 1024 pixel wide matrix reloaded trailer as my X background, and still I can continue to use my laptop without any problem (aside from battery drain...)
...mostly because I didn't even know there was a "Sun Linux."
I'd be annoyed if I got such a thing with a Sun x86 system too. I would be left wondering what customization I might lose if I moved to Mandrake or RedHat 8.0 or Gentoo for that matter. It makes much more sense to ship the Sun specific changes as rpm's I can apply on top of whatever my favorite distribution for the job is. I would expect at least some recent version of RedHat and SuSe to be officially supported of course, but if Sun ships RPM's or better yet SRPM's I'd be confident that I could apply it to Mandrake or Gentoo as long as the dependencies were satisfied.
(I would probably stick to RedHat, though maybe a different version, since a Sun x86 is most likely a server. But for desktop ease of use Mandrake is great, and for getting that extra 30% performance boost Gentoo just rocks.)
What I was talking about was a theoretical system which could create a non-divergent beam of light, the beam would always look like a column of light with a fixed diameter. I just don't remember the details and I'm not about to go dig up my Fourier optics book to figure it out.
Hmmm, I never read about that. If it was theoretical, wouldn't a perfectly specular parabolic mirror suffice? Perhaps some kind of magnetic lens could be near perfect? I dunno, I'm just guessing. I never really got an intuitive feel for doing optics with Maxwell's equations, and you can do all kinds of impossible things with "classical optics" so I'm not terribly trusting of it.
I still think our "Star Wars" program assumes lasers will work, the problem has always been that the opponent can simply throw up millions of fake targets and you never have enough time to shoot enough of them to make a difference.
I don't remember the details but I learned in Fourier Optics class about a system to focus a laser such that it wouldn't diverge as it passed through air.
Laser light diverges, just much more slowly than something you try to focus with a conventional lens (be it a curved reflector, curved refractor or a holographic lens). If you point one at the moon it will illuminate the whole thing, but if you point it at a satelite in low earth orbit it still only illuminates a small part of the craft.
the special requirement of graphics specific RAM is the simultaneous in/out access. (At least that's my understanding of VRAM (video RAM))
This is only really important for the Framebuffer. It simplifies scanning out to the screen if you don't have to contend with the other parts of the GPU. But most of the memory today is used for textures and streamable data (vertex lists, etc), where VRAM wouldn't be as useful. nVidia is very proud these days that it uses the same memory for all three functions, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone jumps ship and goes for high latency, high bandwidth memory for the streamable data and low latency, low bandwidth memory for the textures.
The framebuffer isn't where the pressure is at the moment so it can go wherever there is room. (Also, if you think about it a properly banked, V-synced, double buffered app never benefits from dual ported memory, though it still simplifies the design.)
Of course, in order to "register" a copyright (which gets you better legal protection, and used to be mandatory for any protection at all) you need to send a copy to the LIbrary of Congress--so those old books from the 30s and 40s are, theoretically, stored at the LoC.
Unfortunately that's not true. The LoC discards those two copies if the book is published, they only keep unpublished registered work on the theory that once a book is published someone is likely to hold on.
CDT have demoed small displays in the past, but I don't know how stable they were.
I talked with someone working with them 2 years ago (at IBM). At that point they only lasted a few days in a darkened labs... but a lot of progress could have been made since then. They had a lot of promise even then though, low power & high-res, though they seem to have abandoned high-res here. Perhaps so they "live" longer? It could just be a yield thing though... (Or they are/were aiming for HDTV?)
The interesting part is that it seems to allow you do distribute derivative works with a license with an addition like "This software may be used for any purpose but may not be examined or run by any employee of a corporation convicted of monopoly abuse in any juristiction."
Of course, it only looks BSD like, the "all rights reserved" part bans anyone from examining, compiling or using code created under this license. So the fact that you can ban Microsoft from using your derivative is beside the point.
MySQL is a glorified file system, and works well for people who need a SQL-like interface to a fast file system.
Yup, nothing wrong with that. It's like BerkleyDB except with the same SQL interface so you can test your queries without compiling. Pretty neat. It's also fast, which is great. You need a good DB admin to get performance out of Oracle, and mostly you get that by avoiding stored procedures and views... I worked on a n-tier system where one version major version release was simply eliminating 90% of the stored procedures and the view based "Security" system. These were all moved to a Java program on a server sitting next to the DB server. They had a fast connection so all the extra data that had to be sent because we didn't use views anymore never made it out of the rack. A huge performance boost (I don't think our DB admin was the best...). I don't think that company will ever move away from SQLServer/Oracle unless a customer requests it, just cuz you stick with what you know works. But it could be done, in n-tier the DB doesn't need much smarts. (Well ACID, but they say that's coming to MySQL, and is in PostgreSQL...)
Still there are a LOT of places where flat files are still used and BerkleyDB as well, just replacing BerkleyDB with a 'SQLish' DB is a major win for 'real databases.'
Right. And since this plan doesn't put any cash in any Congress Critter's campaign fund coffers, there's no motivation for Congress to make it law.
How about extending the compromise a little further then. In order to get your copyright renewed you must get a representitive to champion your work. And with a limit of one work per year per congress woman you effectively will get market adjusted rates for copyright renewal. The "fee" would no longer be cash, but influence. You can buy influence with bribes, but you can also get it by thoughtful arguement. plus if the renewal term is 2 years, you are limited to less than 900 perpetual copyright rackets.
Unfortunately those solid state things die too. If you're lucky and all the packaging is ceramic and not plastic even the chips grow little connectors when operating and short themselves out. If you kept them very cool or never power them up, they would last a very long time, but diffusion will get them eventually. Especially with the tiny transistors in today's chips, when you can count the atoms on your hands and toes between two signals that should never cross you know that you will probably outlive the chip.
Generally speaking, you don't suddenly become deathly allergic to things. It usually goes the other way around. Sensitive as a kid, and get stronger as an adult. You don't wake up one morning in your 17th year and become allergic to Carbon Dioxide.
I tend to lean toward the assumption that many people like this are hypochondriacs. BUT, I got an entirely new alergy as an adult. Some nuts, most notably hazelnut, just make my mouth numb. I know they didn't do that before because I loved the stuff. The whole numbness thing has made them drop a few rungs on the desireability index. I no longer drink a hazelnut coffee unless I have a big craving. I still eat Nutella, I just make sure it's in the dessert... Still the reaction didn't show up until I was in my early 20's, which helps me believe people that claim to aquire allergies.
(I've lost the childhood asthma, so the 'we tend to get stronger' arguement seems to apply to me.)
publicly release the software for non-commercial use. American is complaining about the bandwidth a few web-crawlers have on their infrastructure. I'd like to see them deal with 5 million users crawling their website every day.
I want whatever crack the judge is smoking. I can see how the web pages TOS could apply after the user signs the thing. But, this non-commercial use clause sounds too anti-competitive to be legal (I don't even think a non-commercial organization like the Red Cross should be able to get anyone to sign that contract, much less a commercial organization with a huge portion of the market). If I were the judge I would have hinted to the defense to seak a injunction against the AA TOS and then suspended this trial while trying American for economic harm to Farechase with their illegal contract terms.
I wonder how massive this Judge's bribe was. Oh wait! Texas.. Was this judge appointed by President Dunce? Maybe the Judge's 70 on his IQ test looked like a very high "C average" to someone...
So I'm back with Mandrake 9.0. Which I'm generally happy with SAVE FOR ONE BIG HEADACHE. I installed the "dev workstation" setup. But I still find I must keep installing -devel.rpm's left and right. O.k., this isn't a real problem, but I've found that these -devel.rpm's and their dependencies are quite equally distributed across ALL 3 DARN CDs!! I normally have to put in 2 of the CDs if not 3 to install any one devel package. This is infuriating!! Why?
I was annoyed with this too. My solution was to mount the iso's and reconfigure urpmi to use those instead of the CDs, saves me alot of time. It eats up almost two gigs of space, but I can live with that.
What's the procedure for renouncing US citizenship, anyone?
I think for the US to respect it you have to renounce it in front of an foreign service official. This is probably usually done by signing some papers in the US embassy or consulate in the country you've moved to. With the way things are these days I'd recommend trying to do it in the consulate where the local laws apply. If they don't agree to that, or only have an embassy in that country most host countries will prolly let you send a notarized letter. If you have time is probably best to aquire local citizenship first so that you can take advantage of any benefits they have negotiated for their citizens in their extradition treaty with the US. If they claim you as a citizen many countries simply won't extradite you unless the US has some proof you commited a crime, ig
I'm in a research lab in New York so everyone here got their foreign passports shortly after 9/11 when the government turned openly fascist. Only a few have already left though, not that most of us haven't spent a month in some country checking for DSL deals and the like since then.;) I met someone a few weeks ago that was programming in some cafe that had recently gotten his New Zealand passport by way of his mother's ancestry. The poor guy was trying to decide if he could live there, "they don't allow region coded DVD players, but they have an almost Australian love of censorship..." I told him to look at South America, on the face of it they have tough immigration laws, but they often just require you to take a daytrip accross the border every few months to remain legally resident. Or you can pay $30 for a visa to stay for longer periods. If you marry there I think all of them grant you citizenship without a fuss. Brazil is prolly the toughest and everyone there tells me no one bothers, you can live there 'illegally' all your life so long as you don't mind not being able to vote or hold public office.
As the donut (or sphere or what-have-you) represents space itself, the concept of something "outside" it doesn't really work. Only relationships between different parts of the universe are defined. Treating the universe as the surface of some object is just a trick to make it easier to visualize (otherwise it would just be a set of functions defining relationships between points).
If you define the universe as everything related to the Big Bang, then we couldn't we conceivably interact with other universes? A part of our universe could already be interacting with a "nearby" universe resulting from another big bang or some previous collision of universes(it's effects would only travel 1ft/ns, light very slow on the cosmic scale, or if you're trying to make fast processors, but that's another discussion.) The whole assumption of the closed universe under this definition doesn't preclude another universe far enough away that it is outside of the envelope that forces, like gravity and electric(static/magnetism), from can travel from within our universe. But this doesn't preclude universes expanding into each other, does it? This would change the nature of the envelope, the genus would skyrocket while the lumpy bits collided, then close to only a few holes. I have a hard time thinking of the universe being in motion, but say there was an initial motion to the big bang 'particle' wouldn't that motion remain, if it was small could we observe it? What's to say that, even if our universe and everything we observe is not moving on average, most universes aren't on the move? If so couldn't we also collide with another universe by running into it? I somehow doubt it since big bangs must be sufficiently rare or we would observe some smaller bangs within our universe, no? Still not impossible even in a closed universe under the definition. I think there is confusion because the science can only describe the observable universe, which might always be limited to the results of the big bang, while we civilians think of the universe as "everything" something we can't know about unless there is some unnatural/unlikely out from the known laws of physics.
Of course, you can just believe in some god or mystisism to see an out, but that doesn't mean all of us can't imagine what lies outside the observable universe. Maybe it's a waste of time, but it might lead to some interesting novels or theories that inform our understanding of the 'real' observable universe.
sun light is bad for beer. The lighting in your average convenience store is not the problem, more likely being left on the shelf too long or wide variations in temperature during shipping are the enemy. If your deli leaves the beer in the sun for hours or points an arc lamp at them you've already lost the war.
Besides it wouldn't be illegal or even noticably more expensive to the customer. If the beer maker thinks the bottle color is important to marketing to you, or even for giving them a few extra hours of shelf life they will swallow the cost, if not they will make your bottle 5 or 10 cents more than their competitor in a clear bottle. I can't imagine chosing a clear bottled Newcastle Brown over a brown bottled Sierra Nevada Pale Ale because of a few cents, they taste different. But the cost would still be accounted for, and in the long term it would probably result in some changes in packaging for some beers, like say a paper cover or UV blocking plastic coating to lower your jitters about light exposure. Hey maybe someone will figure out a cheap way to dope clear glass for UV protection, the point is even if it doesn't happen the cost is accounted for, with the benefit of not forcing clear bottles on the producer that doesn't want them, unlike a 'clear bottle only' mandate.
Look, they are not saying we shouldn't be recycling. Recycling metals, especially aluminum, makes a lot of sense. Recycling paper from offices, where lots is generated, saves energy and resources.
But, sometimes the cost of sorting is greater than the savings. This is the case with mixed packaging (paper & plastic), and mixed color glass, and sometimes household paper. This is all they are saying. The Telegraph is trying to say they don't want you to recycle, this is not the case.
Mixed glass could be easily delt with by just recycling clear glass, and levying a $10 per lb tax on the non-recycled glass. This would encourage beer makers to use clear glass on their new brands and properly account for the added costs of the non-recycled stuff. Same thing could be done with plastics, just recycle one type, and levy a sin/sorting tax on the other stuff. And it's also not a huge loss to just burn plastics, most of it is non-toxic if burned at a high enough temperature. Those that aren't like epoxy, bakelite, teflon, etc have specialized uses (make at home, high temperature, good sealing properties and non-stick in these examples). An extra levy on these wouldn't hurt the producers unless they could be using the non-toxic stuff, in which case the levy would encourage the users to use the non-toxic stuff. Sure these taxes would hit the lower middle class disproportionately, but we could just adjust for that by raising the income tax exemption to 30 or 40 k and/or eliminating sales taxes, there is plenty of room for use taxes. Hell, you could have a $50/gallon gas tax and still make it revenue neutral by simply killing the payroll tax and raising the income tax exemption. (Not that I'm recommending such a high gas tax, that would distort the market in the other way. My point is simply that you could do it without lowering people's after tax income.)
Finally some stuff just doesn't make sense to reuse, this you can either burn or ship to a landfill in Virginia. Plastic still has a lot of hydrocarbon chains you can suck energy out of, and even household waste if properly aerated produces some methane you can combust.
Is there some magic ingrediant i missed? I know modutils changed, but i don't even seem to get to a point where that could make the slightest difference
The only things that bit me were the modutils and the broken initrd in some of the newest kernels. But if you're not getting that far... are you getting kernel panics? ide-scsi kernel panics on my machine, even as a module. Try compiling in as few drivers as possible and enabling them one by one. Also make user you are compiling in the console and aren't using the framebuffer devices, or switching the vga mode in your lilo.conf More and more drivers have started working since about 2.5.44 or so, but there might be one you need that's still borked.
I've known some Christians and they're definately not all fascist. Unfortunately, we get that impression from the ones that gain power to the little old ladies who lash out at young people to the imbalanced men on the subway. I live in New York where practically everone thinks of Christians as ignorant small minded bigots, but for every Christian that hates immigrants or Muslims, whatever, I'll find you a Jew that hates Poles, an Athiest that hates Southerners, etc. Evil is not confined to any religion, I'd bet dollar to donut most evil is committed by Christians only because you currently have the most power. When someone else is on top, evil won't take a holiday.
Well maybe a holiday, but it will be a matter of weeks, not months...
Believe it or not, the UK is still repaying the USA for its help during the second world war (look towards the bottom of the page - I believe the debt is still partly outstanding).
There was a big news story in the US last year about the UK finally writing the last check on that. Not that that's true, there is little if anything true in our media. *sigh* But there was a story about it on NPR, it's not like I'm taking Disney or AOL on their word here.
It would make no difference if the entire team was made of CIA operatives- in fact, they'd probably be better at it than a bunch of chemists.
There is a difference, the security council created UNSCOM with a law saying that the team members could not be serving in any country's military. If the newspapers were correct and there were CIA operatives on the team then the USA violated a security council resolution and under it's own logic should be militarily deposed by any other member states ready and willing. (Canadians! Now is the time for retribution for the 1812 invasion of your soil, you only burned the White House last time, this time get the job done right! hehe).
Of course, the UN has never attacked a country for violating a security council law without first debating it and voting on the use of force directly.
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If it doesn't perform off the shelf, practically speaking it doesn't perform period.
I never said Mandrake was as slow as WindoZZZe. When I tried playing a DVD with the pre-installed DVD player it skipped like crazy, it didn't even come close to Mandrake in performance, much less Gentoo.
As far as prelinking goes this would improve load times for Windows binaries too, but probably not as much because in Linux distributions the distributor gets to compile the programs so they go for dynamic linking, decreasing the memory efficiency and shrinking security update download times. Remember when a zlib bug was found? Practically every statically linked application had to be patched including MS Word. The point of gentoo is that if you have shitloads of RAM and want quick startup times you can take the Microsoft approach (just put "static" in you USE variable.). The second point was that if you're using Linux there are innovative tools like pre-linking that will get you faster load times at the cost of running a command after installs or nightly if you like. This is superior to static linking because you still get the efficiency of Linux with the load times of a large monolothic Windows program.
There are places where Windows XP is better, like the startup time of the OS, they even have a tool for optimizing this. They do this at the cost of a hellishly slow shutdown time. But I bet if we worried about startup time a little we could shorten it without the cost at shut-down. Just figuring out the disk access pattern at startup and providing a hook in the kernel for drivers to look up cached info might go a long way...(and we should time startup to, without a metric the developers won't think about the 20 msec their server takes to startup.. unless they see it takes longer than someone else's similar server.) OS Startup time just hasn't been a priority until now that Windows NT is starting to compete, it's good for the community that they are. BSD will probably ignore it and do things the "UNIX Way" for a while, but if we don't mess up they'll come around and "do it right."
As someone else has already pointed out - comments are not for YOU.
Well written code is code that someone else can start working with without having to ask the previous developer any questions.
While I'll tell my managers that the code isn't commented if they are expecting me to make a small change to a large project, the truth is most comments aren't that useful. Comments describing the architecture are, but the kind of function by
function, or even line by line comments that managers asking for comments want aren't. Usually it's quicker to read the code than either of those. English is much more ambiguous and needs many more words to describe something than any decent code. It's only when the comments are sufficiently "meta" so that they describe conventions and architecture that they're useful (or pointing out exceptions to those conventions or architecture).
Oh, and let's not talk about load times for X window managers. Even with XP's "bug" KDE nor Gnome stand a chance*.
* Disclaimer: this is based on my experience RH8. I'm currently downloading the Mandrake 9.1 ISO's
If you really want to see KDE startup fly try gentoo. Compile aggressively, on my laptop I have:
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -mfpmath=sse -m3dnow -foptimize-sibling-calls -fstrength-reduce -fcse-follow-jumps -fcse-skip-blocks -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -fgcse -fdelete-null-pointer-checks -funroll-loops -falign-functions=64 -falign-loops=4 -pipe"
gentoo will mask out dangerous optimizations where they really are dangerous (like the kernel). But, you might not want to risk something like -ffast-math if you chart orbits for NASA using bc... The align-functions and align-loops should probably be 32 & 3 resp, for my xp, but I lifted these from my P4 with minor modification. (For P4 you want those alignments and -msse2 -march=pentium4 & not -march=athlon-xp -m3dnow, gcc can explain them better than I, and some of these are actually redundant with -O3, but its good to still have them listed if you want to make one of them a "no-" option or make it -O2, cuz you know something about the package.)
And THEN, run
prelink -afmR
The startup time of C++ programs in Linux is usually so slow because of all the dynamic linking that gcc encourages by making it the default. Prelinking changes the binaries and libraries so that this can be done faster (the linker will default to full relinking if any of the libraries an application requires changes after you run prelink). You can probably run prelink on a modern distribution like MDK 9.1 so you might just want to try it there. But gentoo has really breathed new life into my laptop, it just managed a single DVD quality stream with MDK 9, with gentoo I can play a DVD while looping the 1024 pixel wide matrix reloaded trailer as my X background, and still I can continue to use my laptop without any problem (aside from battery drain...)
I'd be annoyed if I got such a thing with a Sun x86 system too. I would be left wondering what customization I might lose if I moved to Mandrake or RedHat 8.0 or Gentoo for that matter. It makes much more sense to ship the Sun specific changes as rpm's I can apply on top of whatever my favorite distribution for the job is. I would expect at least some recent version of RedHat and SuSe to be officially supported of course, but if Sun ships RPM's or better yet SRPM's I'd be confident that I could apply it to Mandrake or Gentoo as long as the dependencies were satisfied.
(I would probably stick to RedHat, though maybe a different version, since a Sun x86 is most likely a server. But for desktop ease of use Mandrake is great, and for getting that extra 30% performance boost Gentoo just rocks.)
What I was talking about was a theoretical system which could create a non-divergent beam of light, the beam would always look like a column of light with a fixed diameter. I just don't remember the details and I'm not about to go dig up my Fourier optics book to figure it out.
Hmmm, I never read about that. If it was theoretical, wouldn't a perfectly specular parabolic mirror suffice? Perhaps some kind of magnetic lens could be near perfect? I dunno, I'm just guessing. I never really got an intuitive feel for doing optics with Maxwell's equations, and you can do all kinds of impossible things with "classical optics" so I'm not terribly trusting of it.
I still think our "Star Wars" program assumes lasers will work, the problem has always been that the opponent can simply throw up millions of fake targets and you never have enough time to shoot enough of them to make a difference.
I don't remember the details but I learned in Fourier Optics class about a system to focus a laser such that it wouldn't diverge as it passed through air.
Laser light diverges, just much more slowly than something you try to focus with a conventional lens (be it a curved reflector, curved refractor or a holographic lens). If you point one at the moon it will illuminate the whole thing, but if you point it at a satelite in low earth orbit it still only illuminates a small part of the craft.
the special requirement of graphics specific RAM is the simultaneous in/out access. (At least that's my understanding of VRAM (video RAM))
This is only really important for the Framebuffer. It simplifies scanning out
to the screen if you don't have to contend with the other parts of the GPU. But most of the memory today is used for textures and streamable data (vertex lists, etc), where VRAM wouldn't be as useful. nVidia is very proud these days that it
uses the same memory for all three functions, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone jumps ship and goes for high latency, high bandwidth memory for the streamable data and low latency, low bandwidth memory for the textures.
The framebuffer isn't where the pressure is at the moment so it can go wherever there is room. (Also, if you think about it a properly banked, V-synced, double buffered app never benefits from dual ported memory, though it still simplifies the design.)
Of course, in order to "register" a copyright (which gets you better legal protection, and used to be mandatory for any protection at all) you need to send a copy to the LIbrary of Congress--so those old books from the 30s and 40s are, theoretically, stored at the LoC.
Unfortunately that's not true. The LoC discards those two copies if the book is published, they only keep unpublished registered work on the theory that once a book is published someone is likely to hold on.
CDT have demoed small displays in the past, but I don't know how stable they were.
I talked with someone working with them 2 years ago (at IBM). At that point they only lasted a few days in a darkened labs... but a lot of progress could have been made since then. They had a lot of promise even then though, low power & high-res, though they seem to have abandoned high-res here. Perhaps so they "live" longer? It could just be a yield thing though... (Or they are/were aiming for HDTV?)
The interesting part is that it seems to allow you do distribute derivative works with a license with an addition like "This software may be used for any purpose but may not be examined or run by any employee of a corporation convicted of monopoly abuse in any juristiction."
Of course, it only looks BSD like, the "all rights reserved" part bans anyone from examining, compiling or using code created under this license. So the fact that you can ban Microsoft from using your derivative is beside the point.
MySQL is a glorified file system, and works well for people who need a SQL-like interface to a fast file system.
Yup, nothing wrong with that. It's like BerkleyDB except with the same SQL interface so you can test your queries without compiling. Pretty neat. It's also fast, which is great. You need a good DB admin to get performance out of Oracle, and mostly you get that by avoiding stored procedures and views... I worked on a n-tier system where one version major version release was simply eliminating 90% of the stored procedures and the view based "Security" system. These were all moved to a Java program on a server sitting next to the DB server. They had a fast connection so all the extra data that had to be sent because we didn't use views anymore never made it out of the rack. A huge performance boost (I don't think our DB admin was the best...). I don't think that company will ever move away from SQLServer/Oracle unless a customer requests it, just cuz you stick with what you know works. But it could be done, in n-tier the DB doesn't need much smarts. (Well ACID, but they say that's coming to MySQL, and is in PostgreSQL...)
Still there are a LOT of places where flat files are still used and BerkleyDB as well, just replacing BerkleyDB with a 'SQLish' DB is a major win for 'real databases.'
Right. And since this plan doesn't put any cash in any Congress Critter's campaign fund coffers, there's no motivation for Congress to make it law.
How about extending the compromise a little further then. In order to get your copyright renewed you must get a representitive to champion your work. And with a limit of one work per year per congress woman you effectively will get market adjusted rates for copyright renewal. The "fee" would no longer be cash, but influence. You can buy influence with bribes, but you can also get it by thoughtful arguement. plus if the renewal term is 2 years, you are limited to less than 900 perpetual copyright rackets.
for going solid state all the way.
Unfortunately those solid state things die too. If you're lucky and all the packaging is ceramic and not plastic even the chips grow little connectors when operating and short themselves out. If you kept them very cool or never power them up, they would last a very long time, but diffusion will get them eventually. Especially with the tiny transistors in today's chips, when you can count the atoms on your hands and toes between two signals that should never cross you know that you will probably outlive the chip.
Generally speaking, you don't suddenly become deathly allergic to things. It usually goes the other way around. Sensitive as a kid, and get stronger as an adult. You don't wake up one morning in your 17th year and become allergic to Carbon Dioxide.
I tend to lean toward the assumption that many people like this are hypochondriacs. BUT, I got an entirely new alergy as an adult. Some nuts, most notably hazelnut, just make my mouth numb. I know they didn't do that before because I loved the stuff. The whole numbness thing has made them drop a few rungs on the desireability index. I no longer drink a hazelnut coffee unless I have a big craving. I still eat Nutella, I just make sure it's in the dessert... Still the reaction didn't show up until I was in my early 20's, which helps me believe people that claim to aquire allergies.
(I've lost the childhood asthma, so the 'we tend to get stronger' arguement seems to apply to me.)
publicly release the software for non-commercial use. American is complaining about the bandwidth a few web-crawlers have on their infrastructure. I'd like to see them deal with 5 million users crawling their website every day.
I want whatever crack the judge is smoking. I can see how the web pages TOS could apply after the user signs the thing. But, this non-commercial use clause sounds too anti-competitive to be legal (I don't even think a non-commercial organization like the Red Cross should be able to get anyone to sign that contract, much less a commercial organization with a huge portion of the market). If I were the judge I would have hinted to the defense to seak a injunction against the AA TOS and then suspended this trial while trying American for economic harm to Farechase with their illegal contract terms.
I wonder how massive this Judge's bribe was. Oh wait! Texas.. Was this judge appointed by President Dunce? Maybe the Judge's 70 on his IQ test looked like a very high "C average" to someone...
So I'm back with Mandrake 9.0. Which I'm generally happy with SAVE FOR ONE BIG HEADACHE. I installed the "dev workstation" setup. But I still find I must keep installing -devel.rpm's left and right. O.k., this isn't a real problem, but I've found that these -devel.rpm's and their dependencies are quite equally distributed across ALL 3 DARN CDs!! I normally have to put in 2 of the CDs if not 3 to install any one devel package. This is infuriating!! Why?
I was annoyed with this too. My solution was to mount the iso's and reconfigure urpmi to use those instead of the CDs, saves me alot of time. It eats up almost two gigs of space, but I can live with that.
What's the procedure for renouncing US citizenship, anyone?
;) I met someone a few weeks ago that was programming in some cafe that had recently gotten his New Zealand passport by way of his mother's ancestry. The poor guy was trying to decide if he could live there, "they don't allow region coded DVD players, but they have an almost Australian love of censorship..." I told him to look at South America, on the face of it they have tough immigration laws, but they often just require you to take a daytrip accross the border every few months to remain legally resident. Or you can pay $30 for a visa to stay for longer periods. If you marry there I think all of them grant you citizenship without a fuss. Brazil is prolly the toughest and everyone there tells me no one bothers, you can live there 'illegally' all your life so long as you don't mind not being able to vote or hold public office.
I think for the US to respect it you have to renounce it in front of an foreign service official. This is probably usually done by signing some papers in the US embassy or consulate in the country you've moved to. With the way things are these days I'd recommend trying to do it in the consulate where the local laws apply. If they don't agree to that, or only have an embassy in that country most host countries will prolly let you send a notarized letter. If you have time is probably best to aquire local citizenship first so that you can take advantage of any benefits they have negotiated for their citizens in their extradition treaty with the US. If they claim you as a citizen many countries simply won't extradite you unless the US has some proof you commited a crime, ig
I'm in a research lab in New York so everyone here got their foreign passports shortly after 9/11 when the government turned openly fascist. Only a few have already left though, not that most of us haven't spent a month in some country checking for DSL deals and the like since then.
As the donut (or sphere or what-have-you) represents space itself, the concept of something "outside" it doesn't really work. Only relationships between different parts of the universe are defined. Treating the universe as the surface of some object is just a trick to make it easier to visualize (otherwise it would just be a set of functions defining relationships between points).
If you define the universe as everything related to the Big Bang, then we couldn't we conceivably interact with other universes? A part of our universe could already be interacting with a "nearby" universe resulting from another big bang or some previous collision of universes(it's effects would only travel 1ft/ns, light very slow on the cosmic scale, or if you're trying to make fast processors, but that's another discussion.) The whole assumption of the closed universe under this definition doesn't preclude another universe far enough away that it is outside of the envelope that forces, like gravity and electric(static/magnetism), from can travel from within our universe. But this doesn't preclude universes expanding into each other, does it? This would change the nature of the envelope, the genus would skyrocket while the lumpy bits collided, then close to only a few holes. I have a hard time thinking of the universe being in motion, but say there was an initial motion to the big bang 'particle' wouldn't that motion remain, if it was small could we observe it? What's to say that, even if our universe and everything we observe is not moving on average, most universes aren't on the move? If so couldn't we also collide with another universe by running into it? I somehow doubt it since big bangs must be sufficiently rare or we would observe some smaller bangs within our universe, no? Still not impossible even in a closed universe under the definition. I think there is confusion because the science can only describe the observable universe, which might always be limited to the results of the big bang, while we civilians think of the universe as "everything" something we can't know about unless there is some unnatural/unlikely out from the known laws of physics.
Of course, you can just believe in some god or mystisism to see an out, but that doesn't mean all of us can't imagine what lies outside the observable universe. Maybe it's a waste of time, but it might lead to some interesting novels or theories that inform our understanding of the 'real' observable universe.
light is bad for beer
sun light is bad for beer.
The lighting in your average convenience store is not the problem, more likely being left on the shelf too long or wide variations in temperature during shipping are the enemy. If your deli leaves the beer in the sun for hours or points an arc lamp at them you've already lost the war.
Besides it wouldn't be illegal or even noticably more expensive to the customer. If the beer maker thinks the bottle color is important to marketing to you, or even for giving them a few extra hours of shelf life they will swallow the cost, if not they will make your bottle 5 or 10 cents more than their competitor in a clear bottle. I can't imagine chosing a clear bottled Newcastle Brown over a brown bottled Sierra Nevada Pale Ale because of a few cents, they taste different. But the cost would still be accounted for, and in the long term it would probably result in some changes in packaging for some beers, like say a paper cover or UV blocking plastic coating to lower your jitters about light exposure. Hey maybe someone will figure out a cheap way to dope clear glass for UV protection, the point is even if it doesn't happen the cost is accounted for, with the benefit of not forcing clear bottles on the producer that doesn't want them, unlike a 'clear bottle only' mandate.
Look, they are not saying we shouldn't be recycling. Recycling metals, especially aluminum, makes a lot of sense. Recycling paper from offices, where lots is generated, saves energy and resources.
But, sometimes the cost of sorting is greater than the savings. This is the case with mixed packaging (paper & plastic), and mixed color glass, and sometimes household paper. This is all they are saying. The Telegraph is trying to say they don't want you to recycle, this is not the case.
Mixed glass could be easily delt with by just recycling clear glass, and levying a $10 per lb tax on the non-recycled glass. This would encourage beer makers to use clear glass on their new brands and properly account for the added costs of the non-recycled stuff. Same thing could be done with plastics, just recycle one type, and levy a sin/sorting tax on the other stuff. And it's also not a huge loss to just burn plastics, most of it is non-toxic if burned at a high enough temperature. Those that aren't like epoxy, bakelite, teflon, etc have specialized uses (make at home, high temperature, good sealing properties and non-stick in these examples). An extra levy on these wouldn't hurt the producers unless they could be using the non-toxic stuff, in which case the levy would encourage the users to use the non-toxic stuff. Sure these taxes would hit the lower middle class disproportionately, but we could just adjust for that by raising the income tax exemption to 30 or 40 k and/or eliminating sales taxes, there is plenty of room for use taxes. Hell, you could have a $50/gallon gas tax and still make it revenue neutral by simply killing the payroll tax and raising the income tax exemption. (Not that I'm recommending such a high gas tax, that would distort the market in the other way. My point is simply that you could do it without lowering people's after tax income.)
Finally some stuff just doesn't make sense to reuse, this you can either burn or ship to a landfill in Virginia. Plastic still has a lot of hydrocarbon chains you can suck energy out of, and even household waste if properly aerated produces some methane you can combust.
Is there some magic ingrediant i missed? I know modutils changed, but i don't even seem to get to a point where that could make the slightest difference
The only things that bit me were the modutils and the broken initrd in some of the newest kernels. But if you're not getting that far... are you getting kernel panics? ide-scsi kernel panics on my machine, even as a module. Try compiling in as few drivers as possible and enabling them one by one. Also make user you are compiling in the console and aren't using the framebuffer devices, or switching the vga mode in your lilo.conf More and more drivers have started working since about 2.5.44 or so, but there might be one you need that's still borked.
Geez, well if its NPR it must true then.
No, but the odds are better.
He's not a Christian, he's a fascist.
I feel for you.
I've known some Christians and they're definately not all fascist. Unfortunately, we get that impression from the ones that gain power to the little old ladies who lash out at young people to the imbalanced men on the subway. I live in New York where practically everone thinks of Christians as ignorant small minded bigots, but for every Christian that hates immigrants or Muslims, whatever, I'll find you a Jew that hates Poles, an Athiest that hates Southerners, etc. Evil is not confined to any religion, I'd bet dollar to donut most evil is committed by Christians only because you currently have the most power. When someone else is on top, evil won't take a holiday.
Well maybe a holiday, but it will be a matter of weeks, not months...
Believe it or not, the UK is still repaying the USA for its help during the second world war (look towards the bottom of the page - I believe the debt is still partly outstanding).
There was a big news story in the US last year about the UK finally writing the last check on that. Not that that's true, there is little if anything true in our media. *sigh* But there was a story about it on NPR, it's not like I'm taking Disney or AOL on their word here.
It would make no difference if the entire team was made of CIA operatives- in fact, they'd probably be better at it than a bunch of chemists.
There is a difference, the security council created UNSCOM with a law saying that the team members could not be serving in any country's military. If the newspapers were correct and there were CIA operatives on the team then the USA violated a security council resolution and under it's own logic should be militarily deposed by any other member states ready and willing. (Canadians! Now is the time for retribution for the 1812 invasion of your soil, you only burned the White House last time, this time get the job done right! hehe).
Of course, the UN has never attacked a country for violating a security council law without first debating it and voting on the use of force directly.