IF IT WERE A VIABLE MEANS OF MASS PRODUCING ELECTRICITY
To generate a useful amount of power from a wind turbine, it would require massive farms of these things which would devalue property in the surrounding areas, kill the birds flying overhead, destroy the natural habitat of the area, and be completely dependent upon having WIND at a constant or controlled speed. One tornado and your beautiful windmill farm is kaput.
If you want to do something like this, you want to have a predictable source of energy. Coal, oil, and natural gas are pretty predictable. It's predicted that they will be depleted in the next xx number of years. Nuclear power is predictable. It's predicted that the underground caverns in which we toss our nuclear waste will contaminate the ground water and kill wildlife for miles around not to mention any humans who depend on the contaminated water table.
No, the only power generation system that is both clean and dependable is one based on harnessing the tides. The Moon isn't going to be hurtling off into space or crashing down to Earth any time soon, so the tides aren't going to stop either. Other ideas like Geothermal are dependent on underground flows of magma which are inherently unpredictable.
So the answer to "Will wind power change Earth's climate?" is NO. Wind power will never reach sufficient capacity to have that kind of effect.
Look. The source code to Perl 1 is only 5000 lines long. The source code is open and available for anyone who wants to use it for research and investigation as well as for educational purposes. If we had to release all our source code because at one time in our lives we saw some source code that was covered by the GPL, none of us could ever get jobs programming.
The source is there. Use it as a base for your own program. Change it enough that you aren't blatantly copying it. Release it under your own license. If you like the GPL, then do that. Some of us like less restrictive licenses like BSD or the original (non-GPL compatible) Artistic License.
Definitely, go with Perl 1. From the look of it, it seems to have some pretty good foundations to build upon. Taking a look at where the language itself is now, there's much improvement needed in v1. It seems like a pretty good place to start.
Don't be restricted by licenses on small projects, much less ones that are essentially abandoned.
Finally a real hardware story! How many YRO stories did we have to slog through to get to this kind of meaty story?
Clustering XBoxes? What kind of maniac would even consider that kind of thing? My kind of maniac, I guess!
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I didn't even have to click it. I'm already there, man!
Cool... Drool... XMas present, anybody?
on
Sony U750P Handtop
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've read U50 reviews stating that the U50/70 is expensive. That's relative -- do you really NEED such a device? Nobody really NEEDS to watch movies or do any of the other myriad things one could do with a U50, the point is that you CAN watch movies and listen to music, you CAN check your email, you CAN play games, restart your HTTPD and sendmail daemons all from the comfort of your couch, or train. This is a luxury device, and given the specs and amount of effort that must have gone into making it, I don't think the price is expensive at all. This is the Rolls Royce of iPods, you pay for quality and finesse. The U50 is an extravegance that makes life more fun, and as such, it's worth every penny.
I realize that the primary use of tracking graphics is for spam, but wouldn't something like that be useful here?
If someone is unable to read the email in a way that loads the tracking image, then the server can just assume that the email was never received. Once the image has been downloaded, the request countdown can begin at T-minus 5 days.
This wouldn't even affect pico mail users because the image wouldn't load in the first place, thus the countdown would never begin. If they receive the email, they can always respond, even if the tracking image does not get loaded and the countdown does not get started.
I understand that number sequences like Fibonacci manifest themselves in Nature and others like pi provide a fairly decent random number generation method. However, aside from the interesting property that they can't be divided by anything other than themselves and 1, I do not 'get' what is interesting or useful about prime numbers.
But then again, I haven't studied mathematics to any great extent beyond the multi-var calc and linear algebra back in high school. That was such a long time ago. Any math Geniuses out there want to clue is in on why primes are interesting?
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text. No matter how you cut it, the problem lies in having too much information immediately available.
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess of string and you couldn't realistically get any enjoyment out of the book. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get more information about something, it is easy to go to an outside source to look it up. It does not need to be easier, because by making it easier than it must be you necessarily end up cluttering the thing you want to illuminate.
There is an old saw, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness. The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to the uselessness of such an over-engineered web space.
Yeah I know, it's probably a lot different than Windows' search function, but the way it seems to work is very similar (according to the Apple press release in any case).
I wonder how one would go about disabling the feature. On Windows, it was only a matter of time after including the "continually chew up CPU time indexing the hard disk" in Windows 95 that Microsoft was forced to add in a menu item to turn that off. It just consumed too many I/O resources and CPU cycles to continually update the system search feature.
Yes, the searches were blazingly fast when executed, and they were excruciatingly slow when the indexing was removed. However, how often does one do a blind search of the whole system anyway?
Filesystem metadata is great, but "instantly" updated search indexes sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Any compiled language is susceptible to security holes. The problem is that the process of turning source code into binary code is opaque to the developer. He puts some code through the compiler and some binary object code pops out. Things like memory offsets, code areas, data areas, and all these esoteric issues that need to be dealt with are simply left to the compiler to decide.
Unlike interpreted languages which for the most part implement all code as either line-by-line interpretation or in bytecode form, compiled languages talk directly to the CPU. Interpreted environments have the additional benefit that they run inside of a sandbox that is abstracted from the hardware by some large degree. Because of this, the running code never actually touches the CPU directly.
Things like the "no-execute" bit on modern CPUs provide an additional layer of security and prevent purposely damaged code from running directly on the CPU. However, until operating systems implement this in their own code, any application that does not want to adhere to the no-exec flag does not have to. This is like flock on Unix which only sets a file locking flag which applications are expected to obey rather than true file locking as implemented on other systems.
What seems to be most clear from the article is that HP is interested in developing these devices but not interested in actually doing a significant amount of the R&D for it. With Linux, though they had a large amount of control over the featureset as well as the functionality at a low level, they probably spent too much money performing the customizations. With Microsoft doing all the development, HP is free to focus on the look and feel of the device rather than the OS level driver tweaking.
In this day and age, the operating system is pretty much a commodity. It is the software features on top that give a device any sort of real value. Since a device like this never exposes the underlying operating system to users, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money developing something yourself, especially when someone else has already invested the development effort.
So blue screen jokes aside, this is probably a good business decision for HP. Maybe not so good for those embedded Linux engineers who don't have a job on that team anymore, but fiscally the best choice for the company.
The problem on the surface is obviously the game itself, though I have doubts as to the importance of putting so much starch in your clothes that you look like a character in CS.
The games put the ideas in the head. The games provide a sort of desensitization to the violence. The games do not provide a real penalty in losing.
That said, the effect of the violent games, while undoubtedly unwholesome and mentally unhealthy, is largely overstated and likely only the most miniscule part of the reason this guy went on his murder spree.
Most people are not affected adversely, in any serious way, by these violent games. Social adjustment, upbringing, as well as other factors like mental stability at a chemical level protect most people from the violent imagery and its deleterious effects on the psyche.
However, for those who have had bad social experiences (social outcasts like Klebold and Harris), bad upbringing (this guy), or a history of mental illness (this guy again) are ripe for the kind of psychological damage that a violent game can do.
The difference between a game and news, which is always brought up by opponents to this kind of comparison, is that the news is passive. Something bad happened to someone else, no matter how gory or evil it may be. A game, though, requires that the player carry out the action themselves. It is the difference between seeing and doing. A soldier may watch another man die by his friend's gun, but his experience will be wholly different when he watches that a man die from his own gun.
I don't doubt that there are other factors involved here. I also don't think that such games ought to be outlawed, though some certainly do think their penalty outweighs any benefits of having such a game. However I do think that it is important not to look away from these games as having a dangerous effect on certain elements in society who are ill-equipped to handle the violent imagery inherent in such games.
So Bleasdale, open source advocate in UK, gets it absolutely right. The current system is already based on MS products, and to try to replace that with Linux all at once would cost more than the half a billion pounds that the new Microsoft license costs.
However, NHS probably doesn't need all those licenses and MS has them over a barrel with regards to the number of licenses (though expanded by almost 100% in this latest contract). The great number of "cheap" licenses is a disincentive to move to other currently non-supported platforms.
The key here is that Microsoft has no hold on them to stay with Windows in the long run. Every 3 years the contract comes up for reapproval and during that time if NHS deems it worth switching some systems to Linux, then they can renegotiate for fewer MS licenses at that time. After 9 years, you'd hope that NHS has implemented a solid system framework that can handle a heterogeneous environment of Windows and Linux systems.
That said, I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much. Support for Windows by private consulting companies is far greater in numbers than support for Linux. Linux of course is not tied to a single vendor, but then again it isn't really that big a deal whether the money goes to Redhat or Microsoft, is it?
The fact is that they will need service on the systems whether they be Windows or Linux. In the short term, Linux is more painful because of the upfront application porting costs involved in switching, but in the long term Linux is still more expensive because of the higher cost support fees demanded by non-Windows consultants.
This contract is a win/win for all involved. NHS gets the systems it needs, Microsoft gets a boatload of money, and Linux advocates are not barred from introducing Linux systems into the NHS systems.
God knows how many times I've sat in front of my source code knowing that not only could it be made better, but that there is probably a better way to do it. Unfortunately, the reason old code stays around hobbling around the system with plaster casts around its legs and band aids covering its heads, yes more than one head because at some point I figured that it would be better to stick a brand new head on there rather than refactor the functionality out and create a brand new program. No, reuse of old code is like the Jesus of programming. No matter how dead and in the grave Lazarus.exe may be, somehow we can reach in and squeeze just a few more years of life out of the system be applying just another patch, just another incantation. Lazarus, come forth! When in reality, it would have been better to leave that rotting corpse in the grave.
A ritual like they describe in the article seems like a really good way of encouraging long-needed rewrites and the tossing out of old code. Good code lives on, always young and fresh and rosy fingered. Timeless, never aging, good code does its job and does it well. Good systems are built around good code and intuitive use cases are built around good systems. A system that needs constant tweaking and patching and magic to keep it going is a system that is hopelessly falling towards the tomb. Better to print that code out and bury it in the cemetary and replace it with good code than to find another way to keep the herking and jerking system from collapsing under its own weight.
'Sharing' of these copyrighted works is not legal in the first place. While it's not going to engender any great love for the film industry, this move is one of the many legal recourses that they have against copyright violators.
To be honest, I'd rather see a return to the days of 5 dollar tickets and extra extra buttered popcorn and a Coke for a couple bucks more than see the movie industry devolve into this legal sewer. With DVD sales doing well, it becomes more and more reasonable to watch a movie in your house. With the proliferation of file-shared movies online, the quality of playback becomes less an issue as viewers get attuned to the lower bitrates.
Personally, I'd rather go see the films in a theater and don't mind paying a couple bucks to do so. Lately, it's been getting outrageously expensive, well passed the point where one could argue that it was merely inflation. I'm not saying that file sharing would be curbed by cheaper theater tickets, god knows the addictive powers of the free movie drug. But I do think that they could really recreate the concept of the "blockbuster" with a little less take at the box office.
In short, file sharing copyrighted works is illegal. The movie industry probably shouldn't do this, but are well within their rights to litigate. I'd like to watch movies at the theater but not pay so much.
More like tells you in the most general of terms what they implemented.
Obviously what is going to be the real killer app is VoIP in a wireless setup. Instead of having a wall jack for your desk phone, it just hooks into the wireless mesh seamlessly.
I'm sure this has already been done. I'd love to see an article about it.
The benefit to today's high-functionality embedded operating systems like Linux, Symbian, iTron, and Windows CE is that they implement a preemptive task switching operating system. At any time, the clock interrupt may fire and the operating system will then queue up the next thread into the CPU.
Nowadays, the whole CPU is not powered at any one time. If an instruction does not access certain parts of the chip, they are dark. Now this does not hold for some predictive processors which may be processing not-yet-accessed instructions, but in general if an instruction is not using some part of the chip, that part of the chip does not require juice.
Taking out the clock and relying on the chip parts to fire and return means that each application in the system must return to the OS at some point to allow the OS a chance to queue up the next thread. Without the clock interrupt, the OS is at the mercy of the program, back to the bad old days of cooperative multitasking.
The clock is what tells the OS that it is time to give a time slice to another thread. If we say "OK, well we'll just stick a clock in there to fire an interrupt every x microseconds," then what have we accomplished? We are back at square one with a CPU controlled by a clock. No gain.
This kind of system would work in a dedicated embedded system which did not require a complex multitasking operating system. Industrial solutions for factories, car parts, HVACs, and other things that need reliability but don't really do that much feature-wise seem to be prime candidates for this technology. "Smart" devices? Not so much.
In my current abode, I only have a single WiFi access point which is the wireless router. It seems to work fine, but for times when I'd like to use my laptop downstairs (approx. 2 storeys away) the signal strength is always poor with signal dropping out every now and then. With the least amount of cash outlay, I'd like to get more signal into other parts of the igloo.
Obviously, this DeVaan guy is a networking whiz. I'd like to replicate this same 'rebroadcasting' of WiFi coverage inside my home. The article does not mention the type of machinery he uses beyond the media van that it's all stored in. Do any of the networking engineers here at Slashdot know of a way to boost the signal strength of my home wireless network?
What I would really like, more than the arrest of identity thieves, is the entire identification system become more immune to this kind of theft. By simply eliminating the suspects, the actual threats posed by them have only been reduced in number, not in level of threat. All those identity insecurities still exist in the system waiting to be taken advantage of the next time some palooka decides it's worth it to skim off a few credit card numbers.
I surely don't have the solution to fix the identity theft problem. In fact, I would leave it to my colleagues here at Slashdot who are much more knowledgable about security issues than I am to hammer out the fine details of a more secure system.
As we become more dependent upon our identification numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and every other number which identifies and tracks us, we open ourselves up to this kind of identity theft threat. The solution is not simply to lock up the perpetrators, it must be a technical solution which makes it difficult or impossible to steal an identity.
The American Federal government already has a law enforcement agency, that being the ever-venerated FBI. In addition, the Secret Service also acts in some cases as a law enforcement agency, providing protection for the President, government buildings like the U.S. mints, and, of course, as the chief investigator of counterfeiting schemes.
Now the DHS seems to see its role as more than a simple anti-terrorist investigative agency. They think of themselves as another arm of Federal law enforcement. To some extent, they are correct. The role they play is vital to American national security, and to reach the goals of the agency it is mandatory that they have the ability to use law enforcement tactics.
However, to stretch the fairly narrow initial charter of the DHS to include such things as "defending the national economy" is nothing short of stupid and dangerous. When the DHS was formed, their purview only included possible terrorist attacks. Now it is expanded to include just about any crime that someone deems undesirable.
The government should not have many overlapping law enforcement agencies. Indeed, this is what led to the massive intelligence failure on 9/11 with the lack of communication between the various government agencies. The DHS would be better absorbed into the FBI as a anti-terror division than to continue expanding its powers unabated.
It's easy to look back now and scoff at what seem to be ridiculous ideas. "Sell catfood over the internet?" Yeah, well, that's what Petsmart is doing now.
The problem was not an abundance of bad ideas, it was that no matter what new market arises, in this case the Internet, the entrenched business community will usually be able to make significant headway into the new market beyond what a startup with a good idea can do. The cost of starting up a new company and putting into place the infrastructure to support doing business is much greater than simply adjusting an existing business model to take advantage of the benefits of the new business environment.
The result is that the startups get bought up, stomped down, or suffocated out of the market that they themselves created. The entrenched companies have the resources and mindshare to do that to the smaller companies. Only in a handful of success stories do we see a startup taking over a market where entrenched business was too late, too hesitant, or unwilling to take advantage of the new paradigm (Amazon vs. B&N/Borders).
The moral of the story isn't that you shouldn't bet the farm on a silly idea. The silly idea isn't always going to seem to silly if it takes off. Most of those dot-bomb creators are rolling in money. The ones who scoff are still making $40,000 a year writing articles for Wired.
The surface has no shadow detail, so it is impossible to determine whether peaks and valleys exist on the ground.
Here's the quote: Because of the global haze layer, Porco says, "we do not see shadows on the surface of Titan. And because we don't see shadow, we can't look at an image and immediately deduce what's up and what's down." There could be massive mountains and deep valleys there, or the surface could be completely flat. At this point, there's no way to tell.
Also, the interesting thing about Titan is that the cloud cover which should be methane seems to be composed of something else, altogether. Particles such as ethane and even polystyrene have been suggested as possible cloud particles. But until further investigation, it only seems to be that our initial theories of methane clouds were off the mark.
Comparing the Western European countries with vast freedoms of the press to the dictatorial or communist countries with outright persecution of journalists is eye-opening. What is most disturbing is that in this day and age that there still exists repression of thought in some countries. Control the media and you can control the minds of your subjects. To have a truly free thinking society means that the media cannot be controlled.
The only problem with this is that it leads to significant growth of tabloid press. Look at Europe again with its outrageous papers like the Sun or Pravda. Just because the press is free does not mean that the information is better, just more voluminous.
Like the internet, anyone in a free press country can publish what they like. Like the internet, it is up to the reader to filter out the gems from the trash.
Why does it take so long to build a super computer and why do they seem to be redesigned each time a new one is desired?
It's a little like how Canada's and France's nuclear power plant system are built around standardized power stations, cookie cutter if you will. The cost to reproduce a power plant is negligble compared to the initial design and implementation, so the reuse of designs makes the whole system really cheap. The drawback is that it stagnates the technology and the newest plants may not get the newest and best technology. Contrast this with the American system of designing each power plant with the latest and greatest technology. You get really great plants each time, of course, but the cost is astronomical and uneconomical.
So to, it seems with supercomputers. We never hear about how these things are thrown into mass production, only about how the latest one gets 10 more teraflops than the last and all the slashbots wonder how well Doom 3 runs on it or whether Longhorn will run at all in such an underpowered machine.
But each design of a supercomputer is a massive success of engineering skill. How much cheaper would it become if instead of redesigning the machines each time someone wants to feel more manly than the current speed champion, that the current design be rebuilt for a generation (in computer years)?
The idea behind voter challenges is that anyone can challenge the legitimacy and eligibility of a voter. This is especially important in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California where there are large numbers of illegal immigrants who may be influenced to illegally vote. This is also a problem because there are even American citizens who are not eligible to vote such as felons.
Unfortunately, this law is also a door to abuse. Indiscriminate use of the challenge procedure is akin to Scientology's use of lawsuits to silence the opposition. It produces a chilling effect and keeps people away from the polls.
However, despite this list being available, the article (neither of them) does not delve deeply into the names nor the reasoning behind them, only going so far as to say that it could possibly be a Republican plot. However, if the names all belong to felons who are not eligible to vote in the first place, such a list is absolutely necessary.
This is a story looking for more research, not more explosives. Unfortunately, most people would rather toss bombs than to do the hard work of finding out what is really going on.
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IF IT WERE A VIABLE MEANS OF MASS PRODUCING ELECTRICITY
To generate a useful amount of power from a wind turbine, it would require massive farms of these things which would devalue property in the surrounding areas, kill the birds flying overhead, destroy the natural habitat of the area, and be completely dependent upon having WIND at a constant or controlled speed. One tornado and your beautiful windmill farm is kaput.
If you want to do something like this, you want to have a predictable source of energy. Coal, oil, and natural gas are pretty predictable. It's predicted that they will be depleted in the next xx number of years. Nuclear power is predictable. It's predicted that the underground caverns in which we toss our nuclear waste will contaminate the ground water and kill wildlife for miles around not to mention any humans who depend on the contaminated water table.
No, the only power generation system that is both clean and dependable is one based on harnessing the tides. The Moon isn't going to be hurtling off into space or crashing down to Earth any time soon, so the tides aren't going to stop either. Other ideas like Geothermal are dependent on underground flows of magma which are inherently unpredictable.
So the answer to "Will wind power change Earth's climate?" is NO. Wind power will never reach sufficient capacity to have that kind of effect.
Look. The source code to Perl 1 is only 5000 lines long. The source code is open and available for anyone who wants to use it for research and investigation as well as for educational purposes. If we had to release all our source code because at one time in our lives we saw some source code that was covered by the GPL, none of us could ever get jobs programming.
The source is there. Use it as a base for your own program. Change it enough that you aren't blatantly copying it. Release it under your own license. If you like the GPL, then do that. Some of us like less restrictive licenses like BSD or the original (non-GPL compatible) Artistic License.
Definitely, go with Perl 1. From the look of it, it seems to have some pretty good foundations to build upon. Taking a look at where the language itself is now, there's much improvement needed in v1. It seems like a pretty good place to start.
Don't be restricted by licenses on small projects, much less ones that are essentially abandoned.
Finally a real hardware story! How many YRO stories did we have to slog through to get to this kind of meaty story?
Clustering XBoxes? What kind of maniac would even consider that kind of thing? My kind of maniac, I guess!
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I didn't even have to click it. I'm already there, man!
I've read U50 reviews stating that the U50/70 is expensive. That's relative -- do you really NEED such a device? Nobody really NEEDS to watch movies or do any of the other myriad things one could do with a U50, the point is that you CAN watch movies and listen to music, you CAN check your email, you CAN play games, restart your HTTPD and sendmail daemons all from the comfort of your couch, or train. This is a luxury device, and given the specs and amount of effort that must have gone into making it, I don't think the price is expensive at all. This is the Rolls Royce of iPods, you pay for quality and finesse. The U50 is an extravegance that makes life more fun, and as such, it's worth every penny.
I realize that the primary use of tracking graphics is for spam, but wouldn't something like that be useful here?
If someone is unable to read the email in a way that loads the tracking image, then the server can just assume that the email was never received. Once the image has been downloaded, the request countdown can begin at T-minus 5 days.
This wouldn't even affect pico mail users because the image wouldn't load in the first place, thus the countdown would never begin. If they receive the email, they can always respond, even if the tracking image does not get loaded and the countdown does not get started.
I understand that number sequences like Fibonacci manifest themselves in Nature and others like pi provide a fairly decent random number generation method. However, aside from the interesting property that they can't be divided by anything other than themselves and 1, I do not 'get' what is interesting or useful about prime numbers.
But then again, I haven't studied mathematics to any great extent beyond the multi-var calc and linear algebra back in high school. That was such a long time ago. Any math Geniuses out there want to clue is in on why primes are interesting?
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text. No matter how you cut it, the problem lies in having too much information immediately available.
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess of string and you couldn't realistically get any enjoyment out of the book. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get more information about something, it is easy to go to an outside source to look it up. It does not need to be easier, because by making it easier than it must be you necessarily end up cluttering the thing you want to illuminate.
There is an old saw, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness. The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to the uselessness of such an over-engineered web space.
Yeah I know, it's probably a lot different than Windows' search function, but the way it seems to work is very similar (according to the Apple press release in any case).
I wonder how one would go about disabling the feature. On Windows, it was only a matter of time after including the "continually chew up CPU time indexing the hard disk" in Windows 95 that Microsoft was forced to add in a menu item to turn that off. It just consumed too many I/O resources and CPU cycles to continually update the system search feature.
Yes, the searches were blazingly fast when executed, and they were excruciatingly slow when the indexing was removed. However, how often does one do a blind search of the whole system anyway?
Filesystem metadata is great, but "instantly" updated search indexes sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Any compiled language is susceptible to security holes. The problem is that the process of turning source code into binary code is opaque to the developer. He puts some code through the compiler and some binary object code pops out. Things like memory offsets, code areas, data areas, and all these esoteric issues that need to be dealt with are simply left to the compiler to decide.
Unlike interpreted languages which for the most part implement all code as either line-by-line interpretation or in bytecode form, compiled languages talk directly to the CPU. Interpreted environments have the additional benefit that they run inside of a sandbox that is abstracted from the hardware by some large degree. Because of this, the running code never actually touches the CPU directly.
Things like the "no-execute" bit on modern CPUs provide an additional layer of security and prevent purposely damaged code from running directly on the CPU. However, until operating systems implement this in their own code, any application that does not want to adhere to the no-exec flag does not have to. This is like flock on Unix which only sets a file locking flag which applications are expected to obey rather than true file locking as implemented on other systems.
What seems to be most clear from the article is that HP is interested in developing these devices but not interested in actually doing a significant amount of the R&D for it. With Linux, though they had a large amount of control over the featureset as well as the functionality at a low level, they probably spent too much money performing the customizations. With Microsoft doing all the development, HP is free to focus on the look and feel of the device rather than the OS level driver tweaking.
In this day and age, the operating system is pretty much a commodity. It is the software features on top that give a device any sort of real value. Since a device like this never exposes the underlying operating system to users, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money developing something yourself, especially when someone else has already invested the development effort.
So blue screen jokes aside, this is probably a good business decision for HP. Maybe not so good for those embedded Linux engineers who don't have a job on that team anymore, but fiscally the best choice for the company.
The problem on the surface is obviously the game itself, though I have doubts as to the importance of putting so much starch in your clothes that you look like a character in CS.
The games put the ideas in the head. The games provide a sort of desensitization to the violence. The games do not provide a real penalty in losing.
That said, the effect of the violent games, while undoubtedly unwholesome and mentally unhealthy, is largely overstated and likely only the most miniscule part of the reason this guy went on his murder spree.
Most people are not affected adversely, in any serious way, by these violent games. Social adjustment, upbringing, as well as other factors like mental stability at a chemical level protect most people from the violent imagery and its deleterious effects on the psyche.
However, for those who have had bad social experiences (social outcasts like Klebold and Harris), bad upbringing (this guy), or a history of mental illness (this guy again) are ripe for the kind of psychological damage that a violent game can do.
The difference between a game and news, which is always brought up by opponents to this kind of comparison, is that the news is passive. Something bad happened to someone else, no matter how gory or evil it may be. A game, though, requires that the player carry out the action themselves. It is the difference between seeing and doing. A soldier may watch another man die by his friend's gun, but his experience will be wholly different when he watches that a man die from his own gun.
I don't doubt that there are other factors involved here. I also don't think that such games ought to be outlawed, though some certainly do think their penalty outweighs any benefits of having such a game. However I do think that it is important not to look away from these games as having a dangerous effect on certain elements in society who are ill-equipped to handle the violent imagery inherent in such games.
So Bleasdale, open source advocate in UK, gets it absolutely right. The current system is already based on MS products, and to try to replace that with Linux all at once would cost more than the half a billion pounds that the new Microsoft license costs.
However, NHS probably doesn't need all those licenses and MS has them over a barrel with regards to the number of licenses (though expanded by almost 100% in this latest contract). The great number of "cheap" licenses is a disincentive to move to other currently non-supported platforms.
The key here is that Microsoft has no hold on them to stay with Windows in the long run. Every 3 years the contract comes up for reapproval and during that time if NHS deems it worth switching some systems to Linux, then they can renegotiate for fewer MS licenses at that time. After 9 years, you'd hope that NHS has implemented a solid system framework that can handle a heterogeneous environment of Windows and Linux systems.
That said, I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much. Support for Windows by private consulting companies is far greater in numbers than support for Linux. Linux of course is not tied to a single vendor, but then again it isn't really that big a deal whether the money goes to Redhat or Microsoft, is it?
The fact is that they will need service on the systems whether they be Windows or Linux. In the short term, Linux is more painful because of the upfront application porting costs involved in switching, but in the long term Linux is still more expensive because of the higher cost support fees demanded by non-Windows consultants.
This contract is a win/win for all involved. NHS gets the systems it needs, Microsoft gets a boatload of money, and Linux advocates are not barred from introducing Linux systems into the NHS systems.
God knows how many times I've sat in front of my source code knowing that not only could it be made better, but that there is probably a better way to do it. Unfortunately, the reason old code stays around hobbling around the system with plaster casts around its legs and band aids covering its heads, yes more than one head because at some point I figured that it would be better to stick a brand new head on there rather than refactor the functionality out and create a brand new program. No, reuse of old code is like the Jesus of programming. No matter how dead and in the grave Lazarus.exe may be, somehow we can reach in and squeeze just a few more years of life out of the system be applying just another patch, just another incantation. Lazarus, come forth! When in reality, it would have been better to leave that rotting corpse in the grave.
A ritual like they describe in the article seems like a really good way of encouraging long-needed rewrites and the tossing out of old code. Good code lives on, always young and fresh and rosy fingered. Timeless, never aging, good code does its job and does it well. Good systems are built around good code and intuitive use cases are built around good systems. A system that needs constant tweaking and patching and magic to keep it going is a system that is hopelessly falling towards the tomb. Better to print that code out and bury it in the cemetary and replace it with good code than to find another way to keep the herking and jerking system from collapsing under its own weight.
'Sharing' of these copyrighted works is not legal in the first place. While it's not going to engender any great love for the film industry, this move is one of the many legal recourses that they have against copyright violators.
To be honest, I'd rather see a return to the days of 5 dollar tickets and extra extra buttered popcorn and a Coke for a couple bucks more than see the movie industry devolve into this legal sewer. With DVD sales doing well, it becomes more and more reasonable to watch a movie in your house. With the proliferation of file-shared movies online, the quality of playback becomes less an issue as viewers get attuned to the lower bitrates.
Personally, I'd rather go see the films in a theater and don't mind paying a couple bucks to do so. Lately, it's been getting outrageously expensive, well passed the point where one could argue that it was merely inflation. I'm not saying that file sharing would be curbed by cheaper theater tickets, god knows the addictive powers of the free movie drug. But I do think that they could really recreate the concept of the "blockbuster" with a little less take at the box office.
In short, file sharing copyrighted works is illegal. The movie industry probably shouldn't do this, but are well within their rights to litigate. I'd like to watch movies at the theater but not pay so much.
More like tells you in the most general of terms what they implemented.
Obviously what is going to be the real killer app is VoIP in a wireless setup. Instead of having a wall jack for your desk phone, it just hooks into the wireless mesh seamlessly.
I'm sure this has already been done. I'd love to see an article about it.
The benefit to today's high-functionality embedded operating systems like Linux, Symbian, iTron, and Windows CE is that they implement a preemptive task switching operating system. At any time, the clock interrupt may fire and the operating system will then queue up the next thread into the CPU.
Nowadays, the whole CPU is not powered at any one time. If an instruction does not access certain parts of the chip, they are dark. Now this does not hold for some predictive processors which may be processing not-yet-accessed instructions, but in general if an instruction is not using some part of the chip, that part of the chip does not require juice.
Taking out the clock and relying on the chip parts to fire and return means that each application in the system must return to the OS at some point to allow the OS a chance to queue up the next thread. Without the clock interrupt, the OS is at the mercy of the program, back to the bad old days of cooperative multitasking.
The clock is what tells the OS that it is time to give a time slice to another thread. If we say "OK, well we'll just stick a clock in there to fire an interrupt every x microseconds," then what have we accomplished? We are back at square one with a CPU controlled by a clock. No gain.
This kind of system would work in a dedicated embedded system which did not require a complex multitasking operating system. Industrial solutions for factories, car parts, HVACs, and other things that need reliability but don't really do that much feature-wise seem to be prime candidates for this technology. "Smart" devices? Not so much.
In my current abode, I only have a single WiFi access point which is the wireless router. It seems to work fine, but for times when I'd like to use my laptop downstairs (approx. 2 storeys away) the signal strength is always poor with signal dropping out every now and then. With the least amount of cash outlay, I'd like to get more signal into other parts of the igloo.
Obviously, this DeVaan guy is a networking whiz. I'd like to replicate this same 'rebroadcasting' of WiFi coverage inside my home. The article does not mention the type of machinery he uses beyond the media van that it's all stored in. Do any of the networking engineers here at Slashdot know of a way to boost the signal strength of my home wireless network?
What I would really like, more than the arrest of identity thieves, is the entire identification system become more immune to this kind of theft. By simply eliminating the suspects, the actual threats posed by them have only been reduced in number, not in level of threat. All those identity insecurities still exist in the system waiting to be taken advantage of the next time some palooka decides it's worth it to skim off a few credit card numbers.
I surely don't have the solution to fix the identity theft problem. In fact, I would leave it to my colleagues here at Slashdot who are much more knowledgable about security issues than I am to hammer out the fine details of a more secure system.
As we become more dependent upon our identification numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and every other number which identifies and tracks us, we open ourselves up to this kind of identity theft threat. The solution is not simply to lock up the perpetrators, it must be a technical solution which makes it difficult or impossible to steal an identity.
The American Federal government already has a law enforcement agency, that being the ever-venerated FBI. In addition, the Secret Service also acts in some cases as a law enforcement agency, providing protection for the President, government buildings like the U.S. mints, and, of course, as the chief investigator of counterfeiting schemes.
Now the DHS seems to see its role as more than a simple anti-terrorist investigative agency. They think of themselves as another arm of Federal law enforcement. To some extent, they are correct. The role they play is vital to American national security, and to reach the goals of the agency it is mandatory that they have the ability to use law enforcement tactics.
However, to stretch the fairly narrow initial charter of the DHS to include such things as "defending the national economy" is nothing short of stupid and dangerous. When the DHS was formed, their purview only included possible terrorist attacks. Now it is expanded to include just about any crime that someone deems undesirable.
The government should not have many overlapping law enforcement agencies. Indeed, this is what led to the massive intelligence failure on 9/11 with the lack of communication between the various government agencies. The DHS would be better absorbed into the FBI as a anti-terror division than to continue expanding its powers unabated.
It's easy to look back now and scoff at what seem to be ridiculous ideas. "Sell catfood over the internet?" Yeah, well, that's what Petsmart is doing now.
The problem was not an abundance of bad ideas, it was that no matter what new market arises, in this case the Internet, the entrenched business community will usually be able to make significant headway into the new market beyond what a startup with a good idea can do. The cost of starting up a new company and putting into place the infrastructure to support doing business is much greater than simply adjusting an existing business model to take advantage of the benefits of the new business environment.
The result is that the startups get bought up, stomped down, or suffocated out of the market that they themselves created. The entrenched companies have the resources and mindshare to do that to the smaller companies. Only in a handful of success stories do we see a startup taking over a market where entrenched business was too late, too hesitant, or unwilling to take advantage of the new paradigm (Amazon vs. B&N/Borders).
The moral of the story isn't that you shouldn't bet the farm on a silly idea. The silly idea isn't always going to seem to silly if it takes off. Most of those dot-bomb creators are rolling in money. The ones who scoff are still making $40,000 a year writing articles for Wired.
The surface has no shadow detail, so it is impossible to determine whether peaks and valleys exist on the ground.
Here's the quote: Because of the global haze layer, Porco says, "we do not see shadows on the surface of Titan. And because we don't see shadow, we can't look at an image and immediately deduce what's up and what's down." There could be massive mountains and deep valleys there, or the surface could be completely flat. At this point, there's no way to tell.
Also, the interesting thing about Titan is that the cloud cover which should be methane seems to be composed of something else, altogether. Particles such as ethane and even polystyrene have been suggested as possible cloud particles. But until further investigation, it only seems to be that our initial theories of methane clouds were off the mark.
Comparing the Western European countries with vast freedoms of the press to the dictatorial or communist countries with outright persecution of journalists is eye-opening. What is most disturbing is that in this day and age that there still exists repression of thought in some countries. Control the media and you can control the minds of your subjects. To have a truly free thinking society means that the media cannot be controlled.
The only problem with this is that it leads to significant growth of tabloid press. Look at Europe again with its outrageous papers like the Sun or Pravda. Just because the press is free does not mean that the information is better, just more voluminous.
Like the internet, anyone in a free press country can publish what they like. Like the internet, it is up to the reader to filter out the gems from the trash.
Why does it take so long to build a super computer and why do they seem to be redesigned each time a new one is desired?
It's a little like how Canada's and France's nuclear power plant system are built around standardized power stations, cookie cutter if you will. The cost to reproduce a power plant is negligble compared to the initial design and implementation, so the reuse of designs makes the whole system really cheap. The drawback is that it stagnates the technology and the newest plants may not get the newest and best technology. Contrast this with the American system of designing each power plant with the latest and greatest technology. You get really great plants each time, of course, but the cost is astronomical and uneconomical.
So to, it seems with supercomputers. We never hear about how these things are thrown into mass production, only about how the latest one gets 10 more teraflops than the last and all the slashbots wonder how well Doom 3 runs on it or whether Longhorn will run at all in such an underpowered machine.
But each design of a supercomputer is a massive success of engineering skill. How much cheaper would it become if instead of redesigning the machines each time someone wants to feel more manly than the current speed champion, that the current design be rebuilt for a generation (in computer years)?
The idea behind voter challenges is that anyone can challenge the legitimacy and eligibility of a voter. This is especially important in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California where there are large numbers of illegal immigrants who may be influenced to illegally vote. This is also a problem because there are even American citizens who are not eligible to vote such as felons.
Unfortunately, this law is also a door to abuse. Indiscriminate use of the challenge procedure is akin to Scientology's use of lawsuits to silence the opposition. It produces a chilling effect and keeps people away from the polls.
However, despite this list being available, the article (neither of them) does not delve deeply into the names nor the reasoning behind them, only going so far as to say that it could possibly be a Republican plot. However, if the names all belong to felons who are not eligible to vote in the first place, such a list is absolutely necessary.
This is a story looking for more research, not more explosives. Unfortunately, most people would rather toss bombs than to do the hard work of finding out what is really going on.
What if they spy aliens? Won't that cause a little alarm amongst the general population?