Currently, Gnome is simply too slow in reacting to interrupts like mouse movements or keyboard input. The lag between the physical action and the action on the screen is much greater than in KDE or (yech) Windows. 2.8 seems to have improved this a lot and I will be happy to finally have it on the base install.
Unfortunately, the problems with security that Gnome has (namely unchecked buffer overruns) are still lurking there. So despite the speed which the C implementation gives, the boundary checking taketh away.
So it goes.
But compared to Windows, Linux (and especially Debian) is really secure.
This technology is really a poor man's method of reproducing what can already be produced with much greater depth and detail.
Take a look at the final image of the engine. If someone didn't tell you what it was, you wouldn't be able to discern it from random noise.
The key thing here is the ability to do this all in real time, which is not really interesting from an imaging perspective, but rather from a computing perspective. That we can do multiple image processing without flickering is very good.
The way to "fight" spammers is by following the law and litigating against them. Childish things like using illegal hacking tools just puts gasoline on an already out of control blaze. More stringent laws and serious punishments for spammers is the final key to doing away with the vast numbers of spammers.
The "technological" solution to spam has shown itself to be totally ineffective. The solution which has worked to not only put a small dent in the daily dose of spam but also enrich the general public has been to take the spammers to court and eventually to jail when necessary.
Spam is like selling kids crack cocaine. No one wants that kind of shit in the neighborhood, but the only people willing to "take back the streets" are ninnies and other gang members.
China is a sovereign nation. I don't think you'd hear the end of it if you suggested that Americans be required to have their votes counted in the open.
Leave China alone and pay attention to the problems in your own country.
In any urban area, the number and variety of free radio stations (supported by volunteers or commercial sponsors) is staggering. There really isn't any reason to splurge on an expensive device when a twist of the dial can tune in just about any type of music that an individual would be interested in. If you can't find a station that interests you in those areas, perhaps it's time to turn the radio off altogether.
I think it's time to put to rest this idea that because you wrote some obscure piece of software that you have some sort of cachet with the community. The biggest abuser of this myth is ESR. After writing Sendmail, perhaps the biggest security threat to Unix-systems evar, he tries to take advantage of his notoriety by making bland proclamations which disturb no one at all.
The fact of the matter is that only those companies with real money backing them are making serious contributions to large open source projects. Yes, there are a million and one open source "Hello World" projects on Sourceforge, but there is only one Linux, only one Apache. The companies behind those two projects are flush with cash and not staffed by "open source volunteers".
ESR needs to cash in his worthless stock and buy himself some coffee. He has long since faded into irrelevance and his current blatherings show more the bad side of the Open Source movement (the zealots, the true believers, etc) and does nothing to help the good side (realists).
First of all, no species has ever been shown to evolve into another species. No scientific experiment has ever proved this.
But back to the topic at hand, I don't think we have anything to fear from inserting human genes into non-human subjects. As long as the resulting creatures are kept isolated from the general population of creatures, such a "mutation" is highly unlikely to infect the general population with abnormal genes.
But then again, this all throws in the trash the whole idea of genetic engineering which is to develop cures for our current problems using the existing genetic materials which may be helpful. The development of insulin-building cells is a direct result of genetic engineering. So too are the "skin farms" which generate sheets of usable skin for burn victims.
The main problem is in how to decide to whom these benefits should go. Given unlimited supplies, anyone who had need should get them, but with current limited supply, it is difficult to decide who ought to be eligible for these.
Should the gay guy with AIDS be allowed to take advantage of these skin cells? Or should it go to the cancer patient who is losing skin like crazy as he quickly descends down the path of mortality? Should we only give these benefits to the ones who are likely to be healthy?
The problem is not the technology. We can develop greater technology. The problem is a philosophical one, because we can't offer these advances to everyone. We must decide who is important and who is not..
The Windows Server system allows for this type of thing with little more than a click of a checkbox. Your local Windows admin probably already knows about this, and just needs the go-ahead to put it into practice.
An office that I was in charge of needed exactly this kind of thing and the Windows solution was the most straightforward of all the other choices. There are a lot of third party possibilities, but setting people up with an RDP connection to the main server (user-restricted, of course) was the best choice for all involved. The VPN solution which introduced a new computer onto the network each time was not the right solution, though.
China is one of those funny places where they really crack down on the incoming news. Taking a look at some of their latest news, it's hard to reconcile the rosy glow that they have in regards to their country with the actual happenings of their military overseas (submarine in Japanese waters) and communist neighbors (not a word about the imminent overthrow of Kim Jong Illmatic).
On the other hand, unlike many Western countries *cough cough* that send the secret police to "visit" people who wish to express an unpopular opinion, China allows its dissidents a full voice. They of course drown out the voices with their own party-led voices proclaiming the benefits of the Komintang. But as far as stifling free speech, China has one of the best records in that area.
The fact is that in order to improve the quality of a digital photo, the CCD or CMOS must be enlarged. The smaller the area of the sensor is, the more crowded it becomes for each photosite.
Have you ever taken a digital picture with some bright point in it and seen a white stripe from that point up to the top of the picture? That is a CCD photosite area getting overloaded and spilling over into adjoining areas. It NEVER happens with film because film does not rely on electricity to save the image.
The way to avoid this and other digital 'noise' is to put more space between each photosite, which of course requires either less photosites (like cutting sensors by 1/3 by using Foveon) or increasing the sensor area.
If you want Foveon, you will be paying out the nose for it.
If you want a larger area, you had better be prepared to upgrade the lens as well as the camera body. Thicker body and wider lens, IOW.
A phone has a limited amount of volume that it can grow to. Current phones may seem small, but operators are loath to accept larger phones. So even though this LG phone may sport 7 megapixels, it is unlikely that it will be rendering pictures with any sort of acceptable quality.
The main problem I've seen with QR codes is that they are printed too small and can't be scanned with cellphone cameras. Other than that, they are great for business cards when combined with WAP. You can print up your WAP-enabled code and zap your contact data directly into someone's cellphone.
Extrapolate all that data about each artist's technique, then turn around and paint a bunch of "authentic" art "authored" by those masters.
They already have "pencil sketch", "charcoal sketch", and "regular photo" settings at the picture booths down at your local mall. It's just a matter of running a filter over an original image and reproducing the image with the desired effects.
If they have the filter database built for each master, how hard would it be to have it Markov chain an image with that data?
This seems like the wrong direction if they want to authenticate images.
Just about any service offered by a government is going to put some private enterprise in a pinch by undercutting the private company's prices. Doesn't this show that the government can, in some rare cases, beat the market in pricing? How much more is Verizon planning on gouging customers than the market can bear?
It sounds more like Verizon can't beat the competition with market prices, so they seek to put the competition out of business. Of course, the competition is actually the government, so Verizon is going to have a hell of a time trying to beat them.
At the Federal level, the government should be responsible for very little. Protection of citizens, regulation of interstate/international commerce/etc. But on the local level, it is nice to have the community band together to solve local problems. Go Pennsylvania!
Vodafone bought J-Phone which was essentially a second-rate cellphone service over there. With the partnership, though, VOD is pushing some pretty serious upgrades and is adapting the European market to be more like the Japanese keitai market.
In Europe, you define your phone by the device maker. Nokia, Seimens, etc. They define what the phones will be and how they will function. The operators are along for the ride. Whereas in Japan, the phone is defined by the operator. DoCoMo, Au (KDDI), Vodafone, etc. The operators define at the high level what they expect in a feature set and the device makers (D505 is Mitsubishi, for example) have to design their phone to meet the market level. The DoCoMo 505i level was the last of the Mova 2.5G line and pretty full featured. Every 505i phone was required to have a certain minimum spec.
Operators in Europe have always been at the whim of the device makers precisely because it is the device makers who are providing the operators with the equipment to run their networks. So Orange buys its tower equipment and software from Nokia and Seimens and spends all its time trying to make sure that things work together. Because of this, moving a phone from one operator to another is pretty easy, just switch out the SIM. However, the functionality between two different devices is very different. The operators are not capable of specifying to Nokia (for example) a common set of baseline requirements for that operator's phones. Nokia markets its phones for a wide range of operators and can't really be bothered to bow to the demands of one.
This is where the VOD thing comes in. Taking a cue from the Japanese market, VOD has made itself huge. It is currently the #1 cell phone operator in the world, about triple the customer base of DoCoMo. With this power, it is finally demanding that device makers design to their spec rather than delivering whatever they'd like. This has always been the case in Japan where the operators have been the dominant power and device makers have been anxious to be accepted by the operators. It also means the end of operator switching, unfortunately, but considering that the price of a new cell phone in Japan is 1 yen (free with rebate), the future looks bright for the European market.
The American market is a huge clusterfuck, of course, just like how it is with every other worldwide standard-led technology. American's are happy with their Zack Morris phones which are workable for calls but nothing else. So the world leaves them alone. But, like as in the past, eventually they will come on board and pick up the best of the winning technologies and be up to par with the rest of the world.
It's a media player. There are a bunch of them available, not to mention one built directly into Windows which runs on at least 80% of the computers out there (where someone would be interested/able to listen/watch media files).
Winamp is an application that has reached commodity status. Inifinitely replaceable. Cheap, to the point of being free.
And to top it off, we've got the source. What more do you need. Even if 100% of those developers were laid off, what's the loss to the community? Nuthin.
This phrase is so loaded that it's hard to broach anything resembling a middle ground here. If you refer to Microsoft as the "enemy" and everyone else (excluding SCO) the "Good Guys", how can you expect to be partial when delivering judgement.
Take a look at what's going on in Iraq. The American "Good Guys" are wiping out the "Bad Guys". From the other perspective, the Iraqi "Good Guys" are being slaughtered at the hands of the American "Bad Guys". It all depends on your perspective. Until you give up the notion of "good vs. evil" in your considerations, you will never be able to find a common ground and eventually peace.
You have to understand that not only are Microsoft and Novell's hands completely clean, they are not completely dirty either. The Iraqi resistor may be shooting at the American soldier because he believes that the occupation is unjust. The American soldier may be shooting back only because he has been trained to kill instead of think. Each one has their reasons, and to them, their actions are perfectly reasonable.
Until you can find a way to reason with the "enemy" and truly come to an understanding, you will never win. You will only fight.
There's an old saying, "The only way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend."
Radio, or electromagnetic radiation, is a fancy name for a special spectrum of invisible light. Yes, Virginia, your radio is replaying music broadcast over light!
Also, a laser is a special form of coherent light. It just means that all the wavelengths in the beam of light are the same wavelength. It also means that the beam of light doesn't disperse very much unlike incoherent light (which no one can make heads or tails of what it is trying to say).
Since the radio requires a specific band to tune in to, it makes sense that the broadcasting station not waste time generating unnecessary wavelengths and focus on only those wavelengths that correspond to our chosen band. This restricts us to AM (amplitude modulation) bands only, but since we're trying to get data signals and not Martian stereo there is no big loss.
So why deal with visible light lasers when it could be invisible and work just as well?
What with the current crop of professional mixers so intent on recording at levels well above the maximum range of the media the music is written onto, it hardly seems necessary to invest in such outdated devices in an effort to recapture that unique sound of yesteryear.
If that doesn't prove to you the utter lack of graphics skill in the Open Source community, I don't know what would convince you. Coming here asking for help from Open Source "artists" is like going to a Sci-fi convention asking for tips on literature: you'll get a lot of input, but it will be mostly useless.
If you want to have professional icons, hire a professional. There are people that do this for a living. They studied and practiced and now are eking out a living doing it. Same as how you studied and practiced and are now making a nice living writing code. Let those people do their job, and concentrate on your job. The product will be better if you let everyone stick to their area of expertise.
Does Microsoft's dropping of the Itanium from it's supported platform list herald the end of Itanium? No. In fact, Microsoft wasn't even the first to drop it, rather HP was the first to go ahead and stop using it in its high end servers. The whole thing boils down to the cost/benefit ratio which is insanely high for Itanium-based machines.
So Intel now gets a boost to its Xeon line of chips which are leading the high-performance server market percentage-wise. With this, Intel can put more effort into ramping Xeon production and subsequently driving the prices down there, and likewise continue producing the superfast Itaniums in servers running Linux or some other proprietary supercomputer operating system.
The demand for supercomputers is low. It will always be low. As technology progresses, the normal users like us get to reap the rewards of this high technology and eventually those supercomputers will be available to us on a single board. The supercomputers of that future will be supersupercomputers and the demand will still be small.
So let the Itanium fit its niche in the super-highend market. Let the Xeons fill in the normal server market. And let Microsoft stay out of the supercomputer market where it simply doesn't fit.
So here's my dilemma. I look across the ocean and see that Eastern countries like Japan and Korea have VoIP integrated directly into the phone network. None of this "plug the doodad into the USB port and talk through the cheap Soundblaster microphone" crap. You actually just use the phone like your normal phone and it automatically uses VoIP for all calls.
The charges for long distance are apparently very low, though not eliminated, altogether. This is the only benefit I can see to strapping a headset on and sitting in front of your computer rather than walking around with a normal 2.4GHz cordless phone.
But what's the hold up? Why can't the Western countries get their technologies up to speed with Eastern countries? You can't tell me that it's a problem of "vast spaces" because this is a problem at the central switching network level, not something esoteric like bandwidth falloff.
You may think that the Asians are supreme copycats, but when it comes to technology, sometimes I wish that the West would copycat right back.
Does anyone even have a ground line anymore? I'd be happy if I could just get the ADSL service without the vestigial phone service.
So this "freebie" is only good for house-to-house calling, basically. I guess if I was some old geezer in his workshop that needed to call another old geezer this might be a good deal. Otherwise, I'm using my cellphone.
Face it, Open Source is not as well-staffed as we'd like. Sure, Linux experts abound (many of them right here on Slashdot) as do many Apache administrators. But beyond that, most users are on their own when it comes to looking for good help with Open Source products.
There, again, did you see that word? Product. Open Source is mainly concerned with Projects, not Products. So while the person who initially opened the project on Sourceforge and the people who joined up early are all experts, those outside the main circle are not usually so well versed in the projects. Put a company behind the project, turn it into a product, and then you'll have a serious chance of getting "expertise".
When a project is just a project, no one benefits from having many users sitting around bitching on the mailing list. But when someone is trying to sell that product, the company trying to make a buck benefits by having people out there who are experts in the product and can provide support to a whole range of customers.
So yes, on the micro level some Open Source projects are well staffed with experts and companies can feel secure in their decision to go with that project because of the large pool of experts. But on the macro level, most Open Source projects are ill-funded, undocumented, and flat out bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
How about the Department of Fish and Game releasing their report on Bigfoot? That coming soon?
Currently, Gnome is simply too slow in reacting to interrupts like mouse movements or keyboard input. The lag between the physical action and the action on the screen is much greater than in KDE or (yech) Windows. 2.8 seems to have improved this a lot and I will be happy to finally have it on the base install.
Unfortunately, the problems with security that Gnome has (namely unchecked buffer overruns) are still lurking there. So despite the speed which the C implementation gives, the boundary checking taketh away.
So it goes.
But compared to Windows, Linux (and especially Debian) is really secure.
This technology is really a poor man's method of reproducing what can already be produced with much greater depth and detail.
Take a look at the final image of the engine. If someone didn't tell you what it was, you wouldn't be able to discern it from random noise.
The key thing here is the ability to do this all in real time, which is not really interesting from an imaging perspective, but rather from a computing perspective. That we can do multiple image processing without flickering is very good.
The way to "fight" spammers is by following the law and litigating against them. Childish things like using illegal hacking tools just puts gasoline on an already out of control blaze. More stringent laws and serious punishments for spammers is the final key to doing away with the vast numbers of spammers.
The "technological" solution to spam has shown itself to be totally ineffective. The solution which has worked to not only put a small dent in the daily dose of spam but also enrich the general public has been to take the spammers to court and eventually to jail when necessary.
Spam is like selling kids crack cocaine. No one wants that kind of shit in the neighborhood, but the only people willing to "take back the streets" are ninnies and other gang members.
China is a sovereign nation. I don't think you'd hear the end of it if you suggested that Americans be required to have their votes counted in the open.
Leave China alone and pay attention to the problems in your own country.
In any urban area, the number and variety of free radio stations (supported by volunteers or commercial sponsors) is staggering. There really isn't any reason to splurge on an expensive device when a twist of the dial can tune in just about any type of music that an individual would be interested in. If you can't find a station that interests you in those areas, perhaps it's time to turn the radio off altogether.
I think it's time to put to rest this idea that because you wrote some obscure piece of software that you have some sort of cachet with the community. The biggest abuser of this myth is ESR. After writing Sendmail, perhaps the biggest security threat to Unix-systems evar, he tries to take advantage of his notoriety by making bland proclamations which disturb no one at all.
The fact of the matter is that only those companies with real money backing them are making serious contributions to large open source projects. Yes, there are a million and one open source "Hello World" projects on Sourceforge, but there is only one Linux, only one Apache. The companies behind those two projects are flush with cash and not staffed by "open source volunteers".
ESR needs to cash in his worthless stock and buy himself some coffee. He has long since faded into irrelevance and his current blatherings show more the bad side of the Open Source movement (the zealots, the true believers, etc) and does nothing to help the good side (realists).
First of all, no species has ever been shown to evolve into another species. No scientific experiment has ever proved this.
But back to the topic at hand, I don't think we have anything to fear from inserting human genes into non-human subjects. As long as the resulting creatures are kept isolated from the general population of creatures, such a "mutation" is highly unlikely to infect the general population with abnormal genes.
But then again, this all throws in the trash the whole idea of genetic engineering which is to develop cures for our current problems using the existing genetic materials which may be helpful. The development of insulin-building cells is a direct result of genetic engineering. So too are the "skin farms" which generate sheets of usable skin for burn victims.
The main problem is in how to decide to whom these benefits should go. Given unlimited supplies, anyone who had need should get them, but with current limited supply, it is difficult to decide who ought to be eligible for these.
Should the gay guy with AIDS be allowed to take advantage of these skin cells? Or should it go to the cancer patient who is losing skin like crazy as he quickly descends down the path of mortality? Should we only give these benefits to the ones who are likely to be healthy?
The problem is not the technology. We can develop greater technology. The problem is a philosophical one, because we can't offer these advances to everyone. We must decide who is important and who is not..
A tough choice, to say the least.
The Windows Server system allows for this type of thing with little more than a click of a checkbox. Your local Windows admin probably already knows about this, and just needs the go-ahead to put it into practice.
An office that I was in charge of needed exactly this kind of thing and the Windows solution was the most straightforward of all the other choices. There are a lot of third party possibilities, but setting people up with an RDP connection to the main server (user-restricted, of course) was the best choice for all involved. The VPN solution which introduced a new computer onto the network each time was not the right solution, though.
China is one of those funny places where they really crack down on the incoming news. Taking a look at some of their latest news, it's hard to reconcile the rosy glow that they have in regards to their country with the actual happenings of their military overseas (submarine in Japanese waters) and communist neighbors (not a word about the imminent overthrow of Kim Jong Illmatic).
On the other hand, unlike many Western countries *cough cough* that send the secret police to "visit" people who wish to express an unpopular opinion, China allows its dissidents a full voice. They of course drown out the voices with their own party-led voices proclaiming the benefits of the Komintang. But as far as stifling free speech, China has one of the best records in that area.
The fact is that in order to improve the quality of a digital photo, the CCD or CMOS must be enlarged. The smaller the area of the sensor is, the more crowded it becomes for each photosite.
Have you ever taken a digital picture with some bright point in it and seen a white stripe from that point up to the top of the picture? That is a CCD photosite area getting overloaded and spilling over into adjoining areas. It NEVER happens with film because film does not rely on electricity to save the image.
The way to avoid this and other digital 'noise' is to put more space between each photosite, which of course requires either less photosites (like cutting sensors by 1/3 by using Foveon) or increasing the sensor area.
If you want Foveon, you will be paying out the nose for it.
If you want a larger area, you had better be prepared to upgrade the lens as well as the camera body. Thicker body and wider lens, IOW.
A phone has a limited amount of volume that it can grow to. Current phones may seem small, but operators are loath to accept larger phones. So even though this LG phone may sport 7 megapixels, it is unlikely that it will be rendering pictures with any sort of acceptable quality.
7 megapixels of noise is still noise.
The main problem I've seen with QR codes is that they are printed too small and can't be scanned with cellphone cameras. Other than that, they are great for business cards when combined with WAP. You can print up your WAP-enabled code and zap your contact data directly into someone's cellphone.
They said it's an authentic Pollock!
Damn racists!
Extrapolate all that data about each artist's technique, then turn around and paint a bunch of "authentic" art "authored" by those masters.
They already have "pencil sketch", "charcoal sketch", and "regular photo" settings at the picture booths down at your local mall. It's just a matter of running a filter over an original image and reproducing the image with the desired effects.
If they have the filter database built for each master, how hard would it be to have it Markov chain an image with that data?
This seems like the wrong direction if they want to authenticate images.
Just about any service offered by a government is going to put some private enterprise in a pinch by undercutting the private company's prices. Doesn't this show that the government can, in some rare cases, beat the market in pricing? How much more is Verizon planning on gouging customers than the market can bear?
It sounds more like Verizon can't beat the competition with market prices, so they seek to put the competition out of business. Of course, the competition is actually the government, so Verizon is going to have a hell of a time trying to beat them.
At the Federal level, the government should be responsible for very little. Protection of citizens, regulation of interstate/international commerce/etc. But on the local level, it is nice to have the community band together to solve local problems. Go Pennsylvania!
Vodafone bought J-Phone which was essentially a second-rate cellphone service over there. With the partnership, though, VOD is pushing some pretty serious upgrades and is adapting the European market to be more like the Japanese keitai market.
In Europe, you define your phone by the device maker. Nokia, Seimens, etc. They define what the phones will be and how they will function. The operators are along for the ride. Whereas in Japan, the phone is defined by the operator. DoCoMo, Au (KDDI), Vodafone, etc. The operators define at the high level what they expect in a feature set and the device makers (D505 is Mitsubishi, for example) have to design their phone to meet the market level. The DoCoMo 505i level was the last of the Mova 2.5G line and pretty full featured. Every 505i phone was required to have a certain minimum spec.
Operators in Europe have always been at the whim of the device makers precisely because it is the device makers who are providing the operators with the equipment to run their networks. So Orange buys its tower equipment and software from Nokia and Seimens and spends all its time trying to make sure that things work together. Because of this, moving a phone from one operator to another is pretty easy, just switch out the SIM. However, the functionality between two different devices is very different. The operators are not capable of specifying to Nokia (for example) a common set of baseline requirements for that operator's phones. Nokia markets its phones for a wide range of operators and can't really be bothered to bow to the demands of one.
This is where the VOD thing comes in. Taking a cue from the Japanese market, VOD has made itself huge. It is currently the #1 cell phone operator in the world, about triple the customer base of DoCoMo. With this power, it is finally demanding that device makers design to their spec rather than delivering whatever they'd like. This has always been the case in Japan where the operators have been the dominant power and device makers have been anxious to be accepted by the operators. It also means the end of operator switching, unfortunately, but considering that the price of a new cell phone in Japan is 1 yen (free with rebate), the future looks bright for the European market.
The American market is a huge clusterfuck, of course, just like how it is with every other worldwide standard-led technology. American's are happy with their Zack Morris phones which are workable for calls but nothing else. So the world leaves them alone. But, like as in the past, eventually they will come on board and pick up the best of the winning technologies and be up to par with the rest of the world.
It's a media player. There are a bunch of them available, not to mention one built directly into Windows which runs on at least 80% of the computers out there (where someone would be interested/able to listen/watch media files).
Winamp is an application that has reached commodity status. Inifinitely replaceable. Cheap, to the point of being free.
And to top it off, we've got the source. What more do you need. Even if 100% of those developers were laid off, what's the loss to the community? Nuthin.
This phrase is so loaded that it's hard to broach anything resembling a middle ground here. If you refer to Microsoft as the "enemy" and everyone else (excluding SCO) the "Good Guys", how can you expect to be partial when delivering judgement.
Take a look at what's going on in Iraq. The American "Good Guys" are wiping out the "Bad Guys". From the other perspective, the Iraqi "Good Guys" are being slaughtered at the hands of the American "Bad Guys". It all depends on your perspective. Until you give up the notion of "good vs. evil" in your considerations, you will never be able to find a common ground and eventually peace.
You have to understand that not only are Microsoft and Novell's hands completely clean, they are not completely dirty either. The Iraqi resistor may be shooting at the American soldier because he believes that the occupation is unjust. The American soldier may be shooting back only because he has been trained to kill instead of think. Each one has their reasons, and to them, their actions are perfectly reasonable.
Until you can find a way to reason with the "enemy" and truly come to an understanding, you will never win. You will only fight.
There's an old saying, "The only way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend."
Radio, or electromagnetic radiation, is a fancy name for a special spectrum of invisible light. Yes, Virginia, your radio is replaying music broadcast over light!
Also, a laser is a special form of coherent light. It just means that all the wavelengths in the beam of light are the same wavelength. It also means that the beam of light doesn't disperse very much unlike incoherent light (which no one can make heads or tails of what it is trying to say).
Since the radio requires a specific band to tune in to, it makes sense that the broadcasting station not waste time generating unnecessary wavelengths and focus on only those wavelengths that correspond to our chosen band. This restricts us to AM (amplitude modulation) bands only, but since we're trying to get data signals and not Martian stereo there is no big loss.
So why deal with visible light lasers when it could be invisible and work just as well?
What with the current crop of professional mixers so intent on recording at levels well above the maximum range of the media the music is written onto, it hardly seems necessary to invest in such outdated devices in an effort to recapture that unique sound of yesteryear.
If that doesn't prove to you the utter lack of graphics skill in the Open Source community, I don't know what would convince you. Coming here asking for help from Open Source "artists" is like going to a Sci-fi convention asking for tips on literature: you'll get a lot of input, but it will be mostly useless.
If you want to have professional icons, hire a professional. There are people that do this for a living. They studied and practiced and now are eking out a living doing it. Same as how you studied and practiced and are now making a nice living writing code. Let those people do their job, and concentrate on your job. The product will be better if you let everyone stick to their area of expertise.
Does Microsoft's dropping of the Itanium from it's supported platform list herald the end of Itanium? No. In fact, Microsoft wasn't even the first to drop it, rather HP was the first to go ahead and stop using it in its high end servers. The whole thing boils down to the cost/benefit ratio which is insanely high for Itanium-based machines.
So Intel now gets a boost to its Xeon line of chips which are leading the high-performance server market percentage-wise. With this, Intel can put more effort into ramping Xeon production and subsequently driving the prices down there, and likewise continue producing the superfast Itaniums in servers running Linux or some other proprietary supercomputer operating system.
The demand for supercomputers is low. It will always be low. As technology progresses, the normal users like us get to reap the rewards of this high technology and eventually those supercomputers will be available to us on a single board. The supercomputers of that future will be supersupercomputers and the demand will still be small.
So let the Itanium fit its niche in the super-highend market. Let the Xeons fill in the normal server market. And let Microsoft stay out of the supercomputer market where it simply doesn't fit.
So here's my dilemma. I look across the ocean and see that Eastern countries like Japan and Korea have VoIP integrated directly into the phone network. None of this "plug the doodad into the USB port and talk through the cheap Soundblaster microphone" crap. You actually just use the phone like your normal phone and it automatically uses VoIP for all calls.
The charges for long distance are apparently very low, though not eliminated, altogether. This is the only benefit I can see to strapping a headset on and sitting in front of your computer rather than walking around with a normal 2.4GHz cordless phone.
But what's the hold up? Why can't the Western countries get their technologies up to speed with Eastern countries? You can't tell me that it's a problem of "vast spaces" because this is a problem at the central switching network level, not something esoteric like bandwidth falloff.
You may think that the Asians are supreme copycats, but when it comes to technology, sometimes I wish that the West would copycat right back.
Does anyone even have a ground line anymore? I'd be happy if I could just get the ADSL service without the vestigial phone service.
So this "freebie" is only good for house-to-house calling, basically. I guess if I was some old geezer in his workshop that needed to call another old geezer this might be a good deal. Otherwise, I'm using my cellphone.
Face it, Open Source is not as well-staffed as we'd like. Sure, Linux experts abound (many of them right here on Slashdot) as do many Apache administrators. But beyond that, most users are on their own when it comes to looking for good help with Open Source products.
There, again, did you see that word? Product. Open Source is mainly concerned with Projects, not Products. So while the person who initially opened the project on Sourceforge and the people who joined up early are all experts, those outside the main circle are not usually so well versed in the projects. Put a company behind the project, turn it into a product, and then you'll have a serious chance of getting "expertise".
When a project is just a project, no one benefits from having many users sitting around bitching on the mailing list. But when someone is trying to sell that product, the company trying to make a buck benefits by having people out there who are experts in the product and can provide support to a whole range of customers.
So yes, on the micro level some Open Source projects are well staffed with experts and companies can feel secure in their decision to go with that project because of the large pool of experts. But on the macro level, most Open Source projects are ill-funded, undocumented, and flat out bad.