Re:Of Course The Microwave Beam...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2
Microwave beams? Is that really much more effektive than "light" beams that exist just at a bit lower frequency, and are pretty harmless. Yes let us transmit the energy in form from light beams to earth. Okay? Hey wait, we have already an astronomical object like this that does that freely, so why not just catch them directly from the sun?
OpenSource is not allways that easy to install and use and interoperable as Microsoft product are. Support is not as well available. If we think in terms of competition on the desktop, OpenSource falls flat on the belly.
To take some words right, you use "OpenSource" in the wrong way. You should mean general GNU Source or anything like that. Any product for windows _could_ be OpenSource, which has nothing to do with easy installation, it's just a matter of trust.
And get the difference between FreeSoftware and OpenSource Software, OpenSourced software must not be free (merely most times it is) Infact GNU is _free_ software.
Basically, it comes down to accountability. When the RFP responses come back, the government agency needs to see that there is a clearly defined orginization that it can access to resolve issues. If they see 'free' or 'open source', red flags will go up. "You mean anyone can change this? No thanks"
Maybe I'm just totally confused, but that argumentation is so stupid in my eyes, just because anybody _can_ change this, doesn't mean the software they used it changed by anybody. But is provided and serviced from the entity they bought it from. Or the software they give to "consumers", either the software is unaltered, (hash key matches) or you loose all support, it's the same as opening my TV and ironing a new transistior to a place where I think it will do some good.
I can change assembler code of released products also, it's just ultmativly more work and time consuming, but does that change anything on it's support?
It was on a school guide through the CD factory of sony, the guidance first explained the "popular" explanation how CD's work (with reflecting and scattering) and then said, "You're all technicans, right? Okay than I can explain how they _really_ work" (destructive interference of the laser):o)
something more exact then a laser reading pits and grooves burned into plastic that are invisible to the human eye?
Maybe you should look closer to the CD, I do see them. There is a difference between a burned CDR and a blank one. You can also tell how much space is left on the CDR by looking at it. However yes I deny to be able to read the data with blank eye:o)
Contrary to popular belief, plastic doesn't last forever.
Thats true CD's might be no permanent storage medium. However lifetime of a well handed CD is still unknown as the CD's out of the 70'ies still work fine. Maybe it are mere hundred years, maybe just 50 or forever. Who knows? My grandchilds will:o)
The beam will bounce off the pit and either scatter or reflect back up into the mirror striking the focal point
Thats how you learn how CD`s work in school, but it isn't true. In past it was the classical approach of not telling the whole truth to keep others from copying it.
First the beam is not scattered or reflected, it is _always_ reflected. The CD consits of two layers, the back one is solid and 100% reflective. The distance between the two layers has to be exactly lambda / 4 of the lasers wave length. Now the first layer is semitransparent. Meaning 50% of the light gets through 50% gets reflected. In the first layer you have the pits representing the data. If this layer has a pit 100% of the light gets reflected, but if it hasn't only 50% get through, get reflected at the back layer and then has a destructive interference with the light reflect first. (That's why the distance has to be wavelength/4)
I fear that the interference will not work if the light is not angeled with 90 degree on the disk.
How about using 700 Million lasers, not spinning at all? You could read a CD at once:o)
I thought I read that you can't dump a product on market in EU
Wrong, there is nothing wrong mith low prices (even if below manufacturing costs. There is sometihng wrond and illegal with the technique called dumping. That is sell at very low prices to drive the competion out, and then to raise prices. The raising of prices is illegal and dumping then thus illegal but just low prices is okay, as long as you keep them.
Maybe I'm thinking in the wrong dimensions, but I think with that amunt of money you con simply buy any microsoft share on the free stock exchange. However I don't know if that sufficies for a takeover, anybody know how many percent of their shares are traded freely? What the net would cost, including the strong raise when slurping them all?
Please don't write "Micro$oft" write "microsoft" instead, nobody gets an advantage by the $, and only makes us technicans looking unserious. Really a non-geek looking at a text will be normally repelled by the $ sign in the name, so the content is not even looked at, no matter how serious it is.
(for example I signed the anti software patent petition a year ago..) but nevertheless the are already thousends of sw patents granted, and future is not looking to bright, if you have some time left on your hand I would encourage you alse to follow the site and help when you can..
A patent does not specifically have any legal standing by itself. It is up to the courts to decide the legitimacy of a patent. To require a full level of investigation of a patent and prior art would make getting any patent far too difficult. The way patents work now are they way they *should* work.
How should then a developer like me be able to honor any patent? What you suggesting implicitly is to simply infringe a patent, and then see how the lawsuit that comes works out.
BTW: Here in Austria (EU) they check for prior art before a patent is applied. It makes patents not too cheap, but thats the sense behind it, a patent should pretect something worthable. Note that each patent for itself is a risk for public development. I'm not saying patents are bad after all, but thuy should be handed with care, patents are there to allow people to finance research, so it should be made sure there was a worthable research behind a patent.
Scenario 1: An implementation can be released under the BSD license, which can then be 'forked' by a third party (the fork being GPL) and the original abandoned. Microsoft can do nothing. This license means nothing.
Again as it has been answered a dozend times already, it's not about the license, but the software patents they have, They allow royality free use of the patents for everything but (L)GPL.
So if you release the module under BSD it's fine for them. If you forkit then under the GPL you're infringing their patent.
reduces time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files.
Now I'm really nosy how in freak'n hell any memory technology can reduce multimedia download times? That's just non-sense, it seems the word "multimedia" must be in everything you want to sell.
Download times dependand on things like your internet connection, compression used, your providers connetion, etc. but not my memory.
I still remember an intel guy claiming thi Pentium 3 will make the internet faster... how can somebody even dare to claim nonsense like this? And the really sad thing is: nobody started laughing as he said that...
What's the big deal? VI rocked back in the days when 80x24 amber/green monitors / terminals were the thing to use, but today editors which are SMART are way more productive, since they let the developer focus on the job that has to be done, instead of looking up information that should be available at the fingertips. Any editor without intellisense-like functionality is a waste of time. Seriously.
Thats what I would call the windows way of thinking. My edtior of choice is the one beeing effektive, not the one with the most tricks in it's sleeve. Yes tricks are these things that make people ohhh and ahhh, when showing, but in a day-to-day live they hardly proove useful. vim keycodes and sequences - once you know them - are very very very effektive, I can edit files twice as fast as with i.e. visual things like visual studio. About code insight, I don't like it as it is. It doesn't show right either way, how can the editor know how the compiler really sees the file?
Well to got support from the economy police isn't difficult. I used to wark at a place where we had quite some more PC's running than ms licenses, then one worker left enraged, and one month later me had the economy police knocking on the door. No need to say it's not fun te be handed like a criminal. BTW: the fine for priating here is ten times the list price.But thuy were friendly enough just to take the double amount for agreeing without lawsuit.
Unik dead, how could one thing of it?
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
The poster must have only considered machines he personally sees on a day by day basis.How could unix dead? Just image all UNIX machines on this world would just disappear overnight (or formated,(( or worst running windows tomorrow:o)). The world would stop spinning! Well at least nearsy that, we would have a crisis hundurt times bigger than i.e. the Black Friday. Stock market would stop functioning, the telphone network would be unusable, bonks would completly loose track on their accounts. insurances databases away. traffic control out of order. satellites uplink stations away, power supply control etc. etc. etc. etc. How can be something that is such a spine of our modern world even considered to be dead?
Re:Elaborating reply to self
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
If the twins are the only thing in the universe, they can't accelerate indepentantly, one would need something to push away, actio is reactio:o)
You need a twin couple, one twin holding four balls, The twin shots a ball off (with remarkable speed to get near the light:), and accelerates away from the other. Then after a while it fires two balls and shoots himself backward to his brother. Then it shoots the forth to stop. Now are they the some age, or is one of them younger?
Does the remaining twin "feel" anything from the change in the universe whan is brother shoots away? I his guess gravitation to him will change, bet dunno with that has any effekt.
The most intersting thing is, if the universe would be "ligther" would inertia be still the same? Is inertia dependant on the mass of the universe?
Re:He really isn't a nut
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
There are people how believe in this deterministic reality, but I really don't.
You're right you _belive_ it's not, and thats okay. But it isn't scintific, but alse science cannot answer yet this question.
This is now actually a famous philisophical discussion, "is there a free will", which I guess every philosphy student must come accross, I don't think we can now answer a famous question on/. that's there for hundret of years:o)
Re:Feeling the acceleration
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
The mass issue is different (although I must say, It is good food for thought)
Exactly, and remember according to general relativity, inertia and gravity are from the same base. In a black box you cannot tell if you're standning on earth, or you're accelerated with 9.81 m/s. In the mass case one twin settles down on a huge mass, and lives there for some time, in the other case the twin accelerates.
Slashdot Mirror
Microwave beams? Is that really much more effektive than "light" beams that exist just at a bit lower frequency, and are pretty harmless. Yes let us transmit the energy in form from light beams to earth. Okay? Hey wait, we have already an astronomical object like this that does that freely, so why not just catch them directly from the sun?
And imagine what a mega weapon a moon covered with solar cells is. Just send the amazing energy as non-"harmless" to your country of favorite hate.
Man I'm happy this project is technically impossible, and don't tell me US army wouldn't have thought of that use of such an installation.
OpenSource is not allways that easy to install and use and interoperable as Microsoft product are. Support is not as well available. If we think in terms of competition on the desktop, OpenSource falls flat on the belly.
To take some words right, you use "OpenSource" in the wrong way. You should mean general GNU Source or anything like that. Any product for windows _could_ be OpenSource, which has nothing to do with easy installation, it's just a matter of trust.
And get the difference between FreeSoftware and OpenSource Software, OpenSourced software must not be free (merely most times it is) Infact GNU is _free_ software.
Basically, it comes down to accountability. When the RFP responses come back, the government agency needs to see that there is a clearly defined orginization that it can access to resolve issues. If they see 'free' or 'open source', red flags will go up. "You mean anyone can change this? No thanks"
Maybe I'm just totally confused, but that argumentation is so stupid in my eyes, just because anybody _can_ change this, doesn't mean the software they used it changed by anybody. But is provided and serviced from the entity they bought it from. Or the software they give to "consumers", either the software is unaltered, (hash key matches) or you loose all support, it's the same as opening my TV and ironing a new transistior to a place where I think it will do some good.
I can change assembler code of released products also, it's just ultmativly more work and time consuming, but does that change anything on it's support?
I say it's not, got any proof on hand?
Well they are already 50% reflective. Best go and search the internet a bit how cd's _really_ work. Not how you're teacher told you.
:o)
I desribed it very roughly here
It was on a school guide through the CD factory of sony, the guidance first explained the "popular" explanation how CD's work (with reflecting and scattering) and then said, "You're all technicans, right? Okay than I can explain how they _really_ work" (destructive interference of the laser)
something more exact then a laser reading pits and grooves burned into plastic that are invisible to the human eye?
:o)
Maybe you should look closer to the CD, I do see them. There is a difference between a burned CDR and a blank one. You can also tell how much space is left on the CDR by looking at it. However yes I deny to be able to read the data with blank eye
Contrary to popular belief, plastic doesn't last forever.
:o)
Thats true CD's might be no permanent storage medium. However lifetime of a well handed CD is still unknown as the CD's out of the 70'ies still work fine. Maybe it are mere hundred years, maybe just 50 or forever. Who knows? My grandchilds will
The beam will bounce off the pit and either scatter or reflect back up into the mirror striking the focal point
:o)
Thats how you learn how CD`s work in school, but it isn't true. In past it was the classical approach of not telling the whole truth to keep others from copying it.
First the beam is not scattered or reflected, it is _always_ reflected. The CD consits of two layers, the back one is solid and 100% reflective. The distance between the two layers has to be exactly lambda / 4 of the lasers wave length. Now the first layer is semitransparent. Meaning 50% of the light gets through 50% gets reflected. In the first layer you have the pits representing the data. If this layer has a pit 100% of the light gets reflected, but if it hasn't only 50% get through, get reflected at the back layer and then has a destructive interference with the light reflect first. (That's why the distance has to be wavelength/4)
I fear that the interference will not work if the light is not angeled with 90 degree on the disk.
How about using 700 Million lasers, not spinning at all? You could read a CD at once
Come'on how fast is a hotmail, altavista, gmx or any other free email service account registered?
I thought I read that you can't dump a product on market in EU
Wrong, there is nothing wrong mith low prices (even if below manufacturing costs. There is sometihng wrond and illegal with the technique called dumping. That is sell at very low prices to drive the competion out, and then to raise prices. The raising of prices is illegal and dumping then thus illegal but just low prices is okay, as long as you keep them.
Step 1) Earn $400 billion
Maybe I'm thinking in the wrong dimensions, but I think with that amunt of money you con simply buy any microsoft share on the free stock exchange. However I don't know if that sufficies for a takeover, anybody know how many percent of their shares are traded freely? What the net would cost, including the strong raise when slurping them all?
Please don't write "Micro$oft" write "microsoft" instead, nobody gets an advantage by the $, and only makes us technicans looking unserious. Really a non-geek looking at a text will be normally repelled by the $ sign in the name, so the content is not even looked at, no matter how serious it is.
I also do live in europa (austria) and I'm afraight I have to inform you we _do_ have software patents.
See http//www.eurolinux.org for further information.
(for example I signed the anti software patent petition a year ago..) but nevertheless the are already thousends of sw patents granted, and future is not looking to bright, if you have some time left on your hand I would encourage you alse to follow the site and help when you can..
A patent does not specifically have any legal standing by itself. It is up to the courts to decide the legitimacy of a patent. To require a full level of investigation of a patent and prior art would make getting any patent far too difficult. The way patents work now are they way they *should* work.
How should then a developer like me be able to honor any patent? What you suggesting implicitly is to simply infringe a patent, and then see how the lawsuit that comes works out.
BTW: Here in Austria (EU) they check for prior art before a patent is applied. It makes patents not too cheap, but thats the sense behind it, a patent should pretect something worthable. Note that each patent for itself is a risk for public development. I'm not saying patents are bad after all, but thuy should be handed with care, patents are there to allow people to finance research, so it should be made sure there was a worthable research behind a patent.
Scenario 1: An implementation can be released under the BSD license, which can then be 'forked' by a third party (the fork being GPL) and the original abandoned. Microsoft can do nothing. This license means nothing.
Again as it has been answered a dozend times already, it's not about the license, but the software patents they have, They allow royality free use of the patents for everything but (L)GPL.
So if you release the module under BSD it's fine for them. If you forkit then under the GPL you're infringing their patent.
reduces time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files.
Now I'm really nosy how in freak'n hell any memory technology can reduce multimedia download times? That's just non-sense, it seems the word "multimedia" must be in everything you want to sell.
Download times dependand on things like your internet connection, compression used, your providers connetion, etc. but not my memory.
I still remember an intel guy claiming thi Pentium 3 will make the internet faster... how can somebody even dare to claim nonsense like this? And the really sad thing is: nobody started laughing as he said that...
Yup, as long it integrates into mozilla :o)))
In vim hit the keyboard key "insert", it switches between overwrite and insert.
What's the big deal? VI rocked back in the days when 80x24 amber/green monitors / terminals were the thing to use, but today editors which are SMART are way more productive, since they let the developer focus on the job that has to be done, instead of looking up information that should be available at the fingertips. Any editor without intellisense-like functionality is a waste of time. Seriously.
Thats what I would call the windows way of thinking. My edtior of choice is the one beeing effektive, not the one with the most tricks in it's sleeve. Yes tricks are these things that make people ohhh and ahhh, when showing, but in a day-to-day live they hardly proove useful. vim keycodes and sequences - once you know them - are very very very effektive, I can edit files twice as fast as with i.e. visual things like visual studio. About code insight, I don't like it as it is. It doesn't show right either way, how can the editor know how the compiler really sees the file?
Well to got support from the economy police isn't difficult. I used to wark at a place where we had quite some more PC's running than ms licenses, then one worker left enraged, and one month later me had the economy police knocking on the door. No need to say it's not fun te be handed like a criminal. BTW: the fine for priating here is ten times the list price.But thuy were friendly enough just to take the double amount for agreeing without lawsuit.
The poster must have only considered machines he personally sees on a day by day basis.How could unix dead? Just image all UNIX machines on this world would just disappear overnight (or formated,(( or worst running windows tomorrow:o)). The world would stop spinning! Well at least nearsy that, we would have a crisis hundurt times bigger than i.e. the Black Friday. Stock market would stop functioning, the telphone network would be unusable, bonks would completly loose track on their accounts. insurances databases away. traffic control out of order. satellites uplink stations away, power supply control etc. etc. etc. etc. How can be something that is such a spine of our modern world even considered to be dead?
If the twins are the only thing in the universe, they can't accelerate indepentantly, one would need something to push away, actio is reactio :o)
:), and accelerates away from the other. Then after a while it fires two balls and shoots himself backward to his brother. Then it shoots the forth to stop. Now are they the some age, or is one of them younger?
You need a twin couple, one twin holding four balls, The twin shots a ball off (with remarkable speed to get near the light
Does the remaining twin "feel" anything from the change in the universe whan is brother shoots away? I his guess gravitation to him will change, bet dunno with that has any effekt.
The most intersting thing is, if the universe would be "ligther" would inertia be still the same? Is inertia dependant on the mass of the universe?
There are people how believe in this deterministic reality, but I really don't.
/. that's there for hundret of years :o)
You're right you _belive_ it's not, and thats okay.
But it isn't scintific, but alse science cannot answer yet this question.
This is now actually a famous philisophical discussion, "is there a free will", which I guess every philosphy student must come accross, I don't think we can now answer a famous question on
The mass issue is different (although I must say, It is good food for thought)
Exactly, and remember according to general relativity, inertia and gravity are from the same base. In a black box you cannot tell if you're standning on earth, or you're accelerated with 9.81 m/s. In the mass case one twin settles down on a huge mass, and lives there for some time, in the other case the twin accelerates.