And while I'm confirming my hand-waving stupidity, I'd like to cite http://cubesat.wikidot.com/opticalflux, which has a quick calculation showing on the order of 2.55453 x 1020 photons.s-1.m-2, so when I cleverly said 'less than a trillionth of that amount', you should read 'less than 1^1020th' of that amount instead.
Fortunately for me, 1^1020 is more than a trillionth, so dividing it out would result in 1/1^1020, which is less than a trillionth. So it kind of works out.
The figure of 0.0002 pounds of pressure per photon is off by a vast degree. The Wikipedia article on Solar Sails cites a figure of 4.57x106 N/m2, or.00000457 Newtons of force ( 0.000001027 pound-feet) against a square meter of sail material given the full flux of the Sun at Earth's orbit. A single photon would provide less than a trillionth of that amount.
Java's strength in a multithreading context is due to the fact that multithreadedness was built into the language, and library authors and programmers have known to explicitly document what libraries are safe for multithreaded use and which are not.
Java the language provides just enough support (the Hoare Monitor and explicit memory model) to enable higher level thread-aware libraries, like the Java 5 concurrency classes.
Using those higher level classes can give you really good support, better than anything this side of Erlang, anyway.
I don't have to read it. A government takeover of healthcare is wrong on its face.
And one of the main reasons is that it requires laws thousands of pages long that nobody can possibly understand.
As opposed to all of the other bills that go through Congress every year? Every interest group (commercial, union, or private) has a huge number of lobbyists and legislative specialists who pore over every bill that goes through congress.
Believe me, they have read this bill.
And government isn't "taking over" healthcare. They are not privatizing the health care market, they are setting up conditions to allow a real market in individual / small business insurance to exist.
Mitt Romney did something similar with MassachusettsCare, and the Republicans proposed something similar in opposition to the Clinton plan back in 1994.
Many in the Republican party act as if any Democratic initiative is the end of the republic and must be blocked, even if they do worse themselves when in power.
By that I suppose you mean those Democrats who have supported the Republican opposition to health care takeover (which reflects the majority opinion of the American people), since there have been no overtures to bipartisanship from the Democratic leadership.
The polling on the bill has moderated a great deal in recent weeks as Obama has come out and started fighting for the bill. A number of polls now show the public fairly evenly balanced between opposing and supporting the bill.
Bruce Sterling wrote what is still probably the best article for the layman about the inevitability and dangers of bacteriological antibiotic resistance.
If Firefox 4.0 isn't multi-threaded and significantly stripped down, you can pretty much kiss it goodbye. This is a terrible shame. I want to continue to support it, however the Mozilla team is shooting itself in the foot far too much.
Firefox has always been multithreaded, just like Netscape Navigator to the beginning of time.
I assume you mean multi-process, in the same way that Chrome and/or IE8 are?
What do you want to see stripped down about it? It's already very stripped down compared to what Netscape Communicator and/or Mozilla was.
I had to struggle with merging in Subversion a good while before I ever took much notice of any of the newer generation of revision control systems.
I'd create a branch (so easy!), do some development on it for awhile, and then discover that I was S.O.L. when it came time to merge it back into my trunk. Likewise, we have four instances of a project in development running here at the lab, two for development and testing of the application and business rules, one for user test, and one for production. I wanted to have each instance's code in its own branch in Subversion, but Subversion provided no help in managing merges from the dev instances to test and then production.
Git makes that easy.
You're absolutely right that Git isn't a perfect replacement for Subversion, though. Git compresses its repository to an amazing extent if you are working with source code, but only a few Word and Open Office odt files in a documentation directory in our Subversion tree wound up massively dominating the Git conversion of that tree.
We had to learn to use git filter-branch to sculpt and shape Git copies of our Subversion repository in order to produce a set of well-defined Git repositories that could reasonably stand on their own.
As far as tools, I actually find the tools on Linux rather superior to what I've seen with Subversion, with the exception of Eclipse. On Windows, Git definitely lacks anything like tortoisesvn. We still use Subversion for a Windows-only project, for that reason.
But I think that the trends are positive for Git. The energy and enthusiasm around Git, both 'plumbing' and 'porcelain', is profound, and the richness and simplicity of the underlying Git model facilitates that.
And, I must confess, I've spent rather too much of my life struggling to get Subversion built and installed. Getting Subversion integrated into Apache has at times been very 'special', shall we say. I like that Git-http merely requires the standard mod_dav module (which was developed in significant part by Subversion contributors, as I understand it).
The deficit Git has, the deficit Git always will have, is the relative level of conceptual difficulty involved in using it. I don't ever expect Git to fully replace Subversion or CVS, just like CVS never fully replaced RCS.
But I know which one I'd prefer to be stuck on a desert island with.
(And, hi! from another 4 digit Slashdotter. Fancy user number you've got there.;-)
The 1.5 'merge tracking' is hardly a resolution. Subversion's approach is fragile, elementary, and when you look at the history of the project, you have no visible tracking of who merged what from where.
You can absolutely do a central, reference repository with Git. Git goes so far as to allow gpg signing of tags, if you want to unambiguously 'bless' a particular release.
We run a number of Git repositories here, one for each of our projects, and we have both a reference repository and then whatever repositories, branches, etc., we care for in our own workspaces.
I think you can be sure that Matt Dillon is not developing Dragon Fly BSD on Windows.;-)
I looked closely at Mercurial vs. Git for Ganymede, but found that Git just seemed more energetic and well developed than Mercurial.
Windows and Eclipse support is not adequate yet, but Git is really pretty simple under the covers, and people are working on it. I have no worries that Git will be a blocking factor for people wanting to use my (largely Unix-focused) software.
Ugh. Subversion 1.5 has 'merge tracking', if you want to call it that, in the most primitive fashion imaginable. Subversion has no way of tracking merge history in its essential structure, and certainly no way to do anything between multiple repositories.
With Git, it's all content addressable, so you have complete flexibility, no matter the order or sequencing of branches and merges, across any number of branches and/or repositories you care to have, foreign and domestic.
I used Subversion for several years with a large project, and it was a lot better than when we were using CVS, and I was rather fond of it.
But Git is *so* *much* *better* with regards to branching and merging that it's not even funny. Add in fantastic tools like 'git gui', 'gitk', 'gitweb', and public project hosting sites like repo.or.cz, and there's no contest.
If there were no DRM on Digital Media, I'd agree with you 100%. In practice, though, the DRM on Digital Media means that you don't have a durable copy when you purchase movies through most of these services, and if the DRM servers go away, your access to the media might as well. A physical disc has the virtue that as long as you possess the disc, you can play the content as much as you like, wherever you like, whenever you like, so long as a disc reader is there.
"Physical object" DRM can be much less restrictive than some of the types of DRM policies that studios are trying to push on digital copies.
It seems to me that the inherent problem with Blu-Ray is that it marginally improves upon DVD's strengths, but is still subject to its weaknesses. DVD was a no-brainer improvement over VHS because it doesn't degrade over time, does not require rewinding, it takes up less space, offers better AV quality, carries multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles and just a great deal of interactivity in general. Blu-Ray does all these things, sure, but it still vulnerable to fingerprints and scratches.
Have you tried scratching your Blu-Ray disc? The hard coating on them makes them much more durable than DVD's.
Add that it's more expensive, and you've got a deal-breaker, hands-down. Quite frankly, I don't understand why we bothered with it, at all.
Why are people bothering with HD televisions at all? The technology has improved, the picture is much better, the sound is much better. It's now comparatively affordable for the masses to have a really good quality home theater set up.
It's enabling that kind of home theater set up that makes Blu-Ray worthwhile. If you don't have a big screen HDTV set or a decent sound system, no, Blu-Ray isn't for you. Yet. And you won't notice you're missing a thing, for awhile. But gradually, the level of expectation for home media viewing will rise as the technology diffuses into the home, just as happened for stereo radio and color television.
Blu-Ray will be one of the key technologies allowing that to happen. It will be ubiquitous as a cross-platform standard, able to be supported on anyone's hardware, as opposed to digital downloads that are silo'ed into whatever subset of playback devices your digital download vendor's proprietary DRM will allow.
It is still quite early days for Blu-Ray, but its future looks bright to me.
Blueray isn't natural for HDTV owners. It's natural for 1080p HDTV owners which is a far smaller subset. Generally anyone who bought a TV smaller than 42" can only get 720P so they aren't going to experience what bluray legitimately offers.
Of course 1080p is coming to smaller sets now but its pretty late in the game especially when there is greater interest in ondemand movies from their cable or satellite provider which will limit them to 720P once again. Diverting from broadcast quality screws them as it limits the number of people who have any interest in it at all.
Combine all that with more expensive media, players, and especially burners and you have a product which a very limited appeal.
To you, perhaps. It's rather silly asking people who haven't invested in an HDTV whether they'd be interested in going to Blu-Ray right now. No, of course they wouldn't be.
But Blu-Ray is actually doing quite well given its time in the market, especially given that it has just seen off a pretender to the HD packaged media thrown.
The vast majority of televisions purchased now are HD, and HDTV sets will be ubiquitous in a few years. Blu-Ray player prices will come down, computers will come with the drives, and Blu-Ray will grow along with the HD market.
Modern JVMs on the modern Linux Kernel can spawn quite a hellacious amount of threads these days, actually.
The problem with Java is the shared-state synchronization that is often necessary, and the extra work required to distribute state to threads across different VMs. A functional language and programming style could work quite well on top of the JVM, though, and could leverage RMI and some kind of message port facility for the distribution.
He didn't specifically allege that Monster US didn't have standing to bring suit in relation to the patents, he merely pointed out that he would be making a lot of noise about Monster's corporate structure, and should there be anything amiss in that area, he'd be sure to bring it to the judge's attention.
I'm a Firefox user on both Windows and Linux, but I think you unfairly downplay Konquerer. Konquerer has benefited from its common source base with Safari, and actually does better in some ways (Acid 2 test?) than Firefox 2.x does.
Slashdot Mirror
And while I'm confirming my hand-waving stupidity, I'd like to cite http://cubesat.wikidot.com/opticalflux, which has a quick calculation showing on the order of 2.55453 x 1020 photons.s-1.m-2, so when I cleverly said 'less than a trillionth of that amount', you should read 'less than 1^1020th' of that amount instead.
Fortunately for me, 1^1020 is more than a trillionth, so dividing it out would result in 1/1^1020, which is less than a trillionth. So it kind of works out.
And your use of "pound-feet" is amusingly incorrect. That would be torque. Did you mean pounds-force? -Taylor
Ups, of course I did, thanks.
The figure of 0.0002 pounds of pressure per photon is off by a vast degree. The Wikipedia article on Solar Sails cites a figure of 4.57x106 N/m2, or .00000457 Newtons of force ( 0.000001027 pound-feet) against a square meter of sail material given the full flux of the Sun at Earth's orbit. A single photon would provide less than a trillionth of that amount.
Got evidence?
Java's strength in a multithreading context is due to the fact that multithreadedness was built into the language, and library authors and programmers have known to explicitly document what libraries are safe for multithreaded use and which are not.
Java the language provides just enough support (the Hoare Monitor and explicit memory model) to enable higher level thread-aware libraries, like the Java 5 concurrency classes.
Using those higher level classes can give you really good support, better than anything this side of Erlang, anyway.
I don't have to read it. A government takeover of healthcare is wrong on its face.
And one of the main reasons is that it requires laws thousands of pages long that nobody can possibly understand.
As opposed to all of the other bills that go through Congress every year? Every interest group (commercial, union, or private) has a huge number of lobbyists and legislative specialists who pore over every bill that goes through congress.
Believe me, they have read this bill.
And government isn't "taking over" healthcare. They are not privatizing the health care market, they are setting up conditions to allow a real market in individual / small business insurance to exist.
Mitt Romney did something similar with MassachusettsCare, and the Republicans proposed something similar in opposition to the Clinton plan back in 1994.
Many in the Republican party act as if any Democratic initiative is the end of the republic and must be blocked, even if they do worse themselves when in power.
By that I suppose you mean those Democrats who have supported the Republican opposition to health care takeover (which reflects the majority opinion of the American people), since there have been no overtures to bipartisanship from the Democratic leadership.
The polling on the bill has moderated a great deal in recent weeks as Obama has come out and started fighting for the bill. A number of polls now show the public fairly evenly balanced between opposing and supporting the bill.
Bruce Sterling wrote what is still probably the best article for the layman about the inevitability and dangers of bacteriological antibiotic resistance.
Bitter Resistance
Check it out, peeps.
Firefox has always been multithreaded, just like Netscape Navigator to the beginning of time.
I assume you mean multi-process, in the same way that Chrome and/or IE8 are?
What do you want to see stripped down about it? It's already very stripped down compared to what Netscape Communicator and/or Mozilla was.
I had to struggle with merging in Subversion a good while before I ever took much notice of any of the newer generation of revision control systems.
I'd create a branch (so easy!), do some development on it for awhile, and then discover that I was S.O.L. when it came time to merge it back into my trunk. Likewise, we have four instances of a project in development running here at the lab, two for development and testing of the application and business rules, one for user test, and one for production. I wanted to have each instance's code in its own branch in Subversion, but Subversion provided no help in managing merges from the dev instances to test and then production.
Git makes that easy.
You're absolutely right that Git isn't a perfect replacement for Subversion, though. Git compresses its repository to an amazing extent if you are working with source code, but only a few Word and Open Office odt files in a documentation directory in our Subversion tree wound up massively dominating the Git conversion of that tree.
We had to learn to use git filter-branch to sculpt and shape Git copies of our Subversion repository in order to produce a set of well-defined Git repositories that could reasonably stand on their own.
As far as tools, I actually find the tools on Linux rather superior to what I've seen with Subversion, with the exception of Eclipse. On Windows, Git definitely lacks anything like tortoisesvn. We still use Subversion for a Windows-only project, for that reason.
But I think that the trends are positive for Git. The energy and enthusiasm around Git, both 'plumbing' and 'porcelain', is profound, and the richness and simplicity of the underlying Git model facilitates that.
And, I must confess, I've spent rather too much of my life struggling to get Subversion built and installed. Getting Subversion integrated into Apache has at times been very 'special', shall we say. I like that Git-http merely requires the standard mod_dav module (which was developed in significant part by Subversion contributors, as I understand it).
The deficit Git has, the deficit Git always will have, is the relative level of conceptual difficulty involved in using it. I don't ever expect Git to fully replace Subversion or CVS, just like CVS never fully replaced RCS.
But I know which one I'd prefer to be stuck on a desert island with.
(And, hi! from another 4 digit Slashdotter. Fancy user number you've got there. ;-)
The 1.5 'merge tracking' is hardly a resolution. Subversion's approach is fragile, elementary, and when you look at the history of the project, you have no visible tracking of who merged what from where.
Better than nothing? Yes.
Acceptable? Decent? Laudable? No.
You can absolutely do a central, reference repository with Git. Git goes so far as to allow gpg signing of tags, if you want to unambiguously 'bless' a particular release.
We run a number of Git repositories here, one for each of our projects, and we have both a reference repository and then whatever repositories, branches, etc., we care for in our own workspaces.
I think you can be sure that Matt Dillon is not developing Dragon Fly BSD on Windows. ;-)
I looked closely at Mercurial vs. Git for Ganymede, but found that Git just seemed more energetic and well developed than Mercurial.
Windows and Eclipse support is not adequate yet, but Git is really pretty simple under the covers, and people are working on it. I have no worries that Git will be a blocking factor for people wanting to use my (largely Unix-focused) software.
Ugh. Subversion 1.5 has 'merge tracking', if you want to call it that, in the most primitive fashion imaginable. Subversion has no way of tracking merge history in its essential structure, and certainly no way to do anything between multiple repositories.
With Git, it's all content addressable, so you have complete flexibility, no matter the order or sequencing of branches and merges, across any number of branches and/or repositories you care to have, foreign and domestic.
I used Subversion for several years with a large project, and it was a lot better than when we were using CVS, and I was rather fond of it.
But Git is *so* *much* *better* with regards to branching and merging that it's not even funny. Add in fantastic tools like 'git gui', 'gitk', 'gitweb', and public project hosting sites like repo.or.cz, and there's no contest.
Third that.
If there were no DRM on Digital Media, I'd agree with you 100%. In practice, though, the DRM on Digital Media means that you don't have a durable copy when you purchase movies through most of these services, and if the DRM servers go away, your access to the media might as well. A physical disc has the virtue that as long as you possess the disc, you can play the content as much as you like, wherever you like, whenever you like, so long as a disc reader is there.
"Physical object" DRM can be much less restrictive than some of the types of DRM policies that studios are trying to push on digital copies.
It seems to me that the inherent problem with Blu-Ray is that it marginally improves upon DVD's strengths, but is still subject to its weaknesses. DVD was a no-brainer improvement over VHS because it doesn't degrade over time, does not require rewinding, it takes up less space, offers better AV quality, carries multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles and just a great deal of interactivity in general. Blu-Ray does all these things, sure, but it still vulnerable to fingerprints and scratches.
Have you tried scratching your Blu-Ray disc? The hard coating on them makes them much more durable than DVD's.
Add that it's more expensive, and you've got a deal-breaker, hands-down. Quite frankly, I don't understand why we bothered with it, at all.
Why are people bothering with HD televisions at all? The technology has improved, the picture is much better, the sound is much better. It's now comparatively affordable for the masses to have a really good quality home theater set up.
It's enabling that kind of home theater set up that makes Blu-Ray worthwhile. If you don't have a big screen HDTV set or a decent sound system, no, Blu-Ray isn't for you. Yet. And you won't notice you're missing a thing, for awhile. But gradually, the level of expectation for home media viewing will rise as the technology diffuses into the home, just as happened for stereo radio and color television.
Blu-Ray will be one of the key technologies allowing that to happen. It will be ubiquitous as a cross-platform standard, able to be supported on anyone's hardware, as opposed to digital downloads that are silo'ed into whatever subset of playback devices your digital download vendor's proprietary DRM will allow.
It is still quite early days for Blu-Ray, but its future looks bright to me.
Blueray isn't natural for HDTV owners. It's natural for 1080p HDTV owners which is a far smaller subset. Generally anyone who bought a TV smaller than 42" can only get 720P so they aren't going to experience what bluray legitimately offers.
Of course 1080p is coming to smaller sets now but its pretty late in the game especially when there is greater interest in ondemand movies from their cable or satellite provider which will limit them to 720P once again. Diverting from broadcast quality screws them as it limits the number of people who have any interest in it at all.
Combine all that with more expensive media, players, and especially burners and you have a product which a very limited appeal.
To you, perhaps. It's rather silly asking people who haven't invested in an HDTV whether they'd be interested in going to Blu-Ray right now. No, of course they wouldn't be.
But Blu-Ray is actually doing quite well given its time in the market, especially given that it has just seen off a pretender to the HD packaged media thrown.
The vast majority of televisions purchased now are HD, and HDTV sets will be ubiquitous in a few years. Blu-Ray player prices will come down, computers will come with the drives, and Blu-Ray will grow along with the HD market.
The Wii is the leader in sales only if you don't count the PS2, which is still selling well every month.
Modern JVMs on the modern Linux Kernel can spawn quite a hellacious amount of threads these days, actually.
The problem with Java is the shared-state synchronization that is often necessary, and the extra work required to distribute state to threads across different VMs. A functional language and programming style could work quite well on top of the JVM, though, and could leverage RMI and some kind of message port facility for the distribution.
Mach? What does that mean?
He didn't specifically allege that Monster US didn't have standing to bring suit in relation to the patents, he merely pointed out that he would be making a lot of noise about Monster's corporate structure, and should there be anything amiss in that area, he'd be sure to bring it to the judge's attention.
The PS3 is $399 for the 40 gig model, $499 for the 80 gig model these days.
I'm a Firefox user on both Windows and Linux, but I think you unfairly downplay Konquerer. Konquerer has benefited from its common source base with Safari, and actually does better in some ways (Acid 2 test?) than Firefox 2.x does.
Props to the Konquerer team, I say.
Will we be able to recover the freedoms taken away from us under the guise of protecting us from global warming now?
What freedoms were taken away from us, pray tell?