That won't work on modern systems, or systems with a lot of virtual memory available (lots of RAM or large swap).
A modern OS will not actually commit memory until it is actually used, and while malloc() involves some bookkeeping, most of the bookkeeping is very little. It's quite likely you'll actually run out of process RAM (2GB or 3GB, depending on settings on a 32 bit machine) space first before the system starts to strain. On Linux, the recent kernels will kill processes that start hogging RAM when free memory falls below the low-water mark. And each malloc() really allocates 8/16/32 bytes of RAM for even a 1 byte allocation.
Pre-.NET Visual Basic was far from the best programming language. Its support for object-oriented programming constructs was half-hearted at best. VB6 was released in 1998; people should be moving on by now, or they should have used a better tool in the first place.
The problem is, there aren't many tools that rivaled the simplicity and rapidness of VB. If you need a GUI frontend to some command line program, VB would be the best language because you'd just design the GUI, generate the appropriate arguments, and called the program - depending on the number of arguments it takes, it can be anywhere from a few minutes to a day to do.
Writing the Win32 C code (or MFC) would take a while longer to do. Sure it's more powerful, but writing GUI code is rather boring, and the less one had to do, the better.
Just like there are multiple languages for purposes, like C for systems programming, C++/Java/etc for applications programming, Perl/Python for high-level glue programming, VB helps with even higher level programming than Perl and Python, and lets you do it without having to learn too much GUI stuff. A frontend to a database is trivial in VB, including input verification. Bit more work in Perl/Python (having to do the widget stuff manually), even more work in C++/Java, etc.
The right tool for the right job. Luckily, I believe there's a VB workalike coming along that's F/OSS.
I never did. Most movies transfer at 24 fps, although a lot of older, home formats used 15 fps, but digital camcorders record at 29.97 fps. I'm guessing that the higher speed of the camcorder compensated for that. If you go frame by frame, you might see spots where the projector was switching to the next frame, but at 1/30th of a second it would not be easy to see.
Regardless, I never did see any flickering of any note. Even if you look at transfered movies on DVD, such as the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, you might see that every sixth frame is a duplicate because of capturing 24 fps within ~30 fps. But it happens so quickly, even at every 1/6th second, that you don't notice it... well... I don't notice it.:)
Actually, most good projectors will actually do a "double exposure" of each frame. Your 24 fps movie in the theatre is projected at 48 shutter openings (or more) per second - each frame is exposed multiple times. This gives you the effect of a higher "framerate" and cuts down the flickering. Your 12fps and 15fps projectors would also do a similar thing - 12fps would otherwise be *very* flickery. Considering that 29.97 and 30fps are so close to each other, it would be difficult to spot the missing frame (1 frame in 1000), so your projector is probably doing a double-exposure.
This was also a reason why TVs use interlaced scanning - 30 frames per second made for awful flicker, but the technology couldn't go higher. So you interlace it to give you 60 fields per second (or did I just get my fields and frames mixed around?). And to avoid the need for precision crystals, you can get the clocking from the power lines.
Alas, when color TV came around, the added colorburst signal dropped the framerate ever-so-slightly, giving us 29.97 fps over 30 fps.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing
The oft-forgotten addition to that - "Any landing where you can use the aircraft again is a great landing".
Of course, if you're taking flying lessons, don't let the instructors overhear any bets being made about how high you can make the dirt line of the nose oleo (tricycle gear aircraft only) go. For some odd reason or other, instructors seem to cringe when you talk about things like that.
Current lithium batteries are slow to recharge because they have a high internal resistance, and low tolerance for overvoltage. A typical battery cell with 3.6V idle voltage takes no more than 4.3V when charging, and the.7V drop over the internal resistance allows very little current through the battery, which is why it takes 3hr to recharge fully.
Actually, LiIon has a low internal resistance - it's somewhere between that of NiCd and NiMH chemistries (when new). However, as it ages (i.e., the moment it leaves the factory), the internal resistance gets higher and higher until it can no longer usefully power the load (generally 2-5 years after manufacture).
The reason LiIon is slow to charge is because it requires a complex charge regimen. Plus you can't trickle charge them (destroys them). So you charge them at a constant current up around 90% or so, then switch to constant voltage until the cell stops accepting charge. Then you stop and switch off the charger until it drains to around 95% (estimated), and do a CV charge again.
The end result is you get around 90% charge very quickly, but the last 10% take forever as the charger puts in less and less current.
Given the costs of shipping (and the time it takes to deliver), I think Internet shopping can only survive if there is no sales/use tax. If I have to pay tax and shipping, I simply won't buy online.
Ah, but then it's a form of corporate welfare by allowing "internet" transactions to be tax-free. Internet (and mail-order) companies are supposed to be able to offer wider selection and lower prices because of the way they operate (i.e., you don't have to hire X people per store to man the stores 12 hours a day, pay property tax on every store, pay leasing fees for your store, etc.). Instead, you pay for a giant warehouse in some oddball part of the US where taxes are literally $1/year. All you need is an Internet link, power, and road to the airport (remember that IBM commercial of $3/square foot?). You don't have to distribute the goods to every store, you don't have to run stores. Just a few computers to take transactions (cheap), a few bodies to package, ship, receive and program computers (much less than X people for Y stores), and a much wider selection since you don't have to maintain 5 pieces of product per store, but can maintain 50 pieces in a warehouse.
You see, the margins of internet stores is supposed to be larger, allowing them to discount more (enough to make up the difference in shipping). And you know, the lower cost of entry should give one a much larger market. There are people who sell only one product worldwide, which is easier than trying to convince thousands of stores to carry their product.
So cutting taxes is a form of corporate welfare. The cost of shipping should be eaten by the savings that an internet based company should be able to achieve by not having stores (and bodies to man them - remember labor is the largest cost in a company). And large shippers can often get breaks on shipping by the shipping companies (and the postal system, to an extent).
Might want to consider if "List Price" is really what you should be paying for an item via e-commerce vs. picking it up from a store. Of course, if a local store doesn't have it, then it's not like you'd have paid more now...
For example this plane would be able to do London-Sydney in one hop (Note that it won't be able to do Sydney-London though, I read, because of headwinds). Although this will mean approximately 20 hours in the air on a single flight, I think i'd rather the stop over (nearly) half-way in SE Asia.
Partly true. OTOH, it means more airlines can offer more direct routes without stopping over in the US (remember, nowadays if you're going to land in the US, even for just a stopover where you don't leave the airport, you *must* have a visa (except for a few countries)). Sometimes the extra cost of a plane ticket is peanuts compared to the hassles of having to land on US soil and arrange visas and stuff. There already are a number of airlines that rerouted to avoid landing in the US because of this. And yes, traditional stopover airports are complaining about it because they don't get all the fees associated with the stopover (landing, terminal, fuel, etc).
OTOH, the 777 does have the advantage that it can use any airport equipped to handle 747s (though, if you could design, 777 support would expedite matters). The Airbus A380 requires a larger terminal and a larger runway, leading to only a few airports being able to land it. (It sounds exactly like backwards compatibility in software...).
Plain Text Links gives you the ability to select a url, right click and go to it. Needed for those lazy slashdot posters. It'll remove spaces from URLs as well, a very nice Slashdot-friendly feature.
Of course, for those who print, the following is essential. Nuke Anything removes practically any element of a web page (images, styles, tables, etc) from the DOM, and Firefox will re-render the page without it. Great when printing out articles since you can remove the ads, annoying left and right columns, headers, etc before printing. A simple refresh will bring them all back.
If anyone remembers Neo-Geo, the other big flaw with their strategy was the out of this world cost for each and every game. I do not remember specifics, but it was up in the $200 range for a game
That might actually be due to raw material cost, actually. Given that the good games often run into megabytes of space (on a MC68000 CPU with 24 address lines offering a whopping 16MB of address space), it's a wonder it sold at all. Remember, this was early 90's, and the NES/SNES/etc using cartridges were all typically under 1MB. And out comes a console whose games consume 16-32MB of raw program data (code, graphics, sound). ROMs are fairly expensive devices (and PCs of that era typically were lucky to have that much RAM), so the raw material cost was probably up there.
Then you have the huge games which came later (late 90's) consuming on the same hardware 64MB+ (possibly 128MB as well).
Of course, it's no wonder why the games were huge (honestly, the graphics are quite good for a system of its age). I think only the N64 started to match cartridge sizes to the Neo-Geo (though, being Nintendo, they just buy several million mask ROMs per game, or more to their standard, custom-design the ROMs to be handed to a memory manufacturer).
"Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life.'"
Umm....no.
In fact most MMORPGs reflect the compulsive narcessistic attitude of most young americans today accumulating hand-over-fist anything they can get their mitts onto. At least this is why I play MMORPGs. The atmosphere, music, humor and scenery help to disuade me from needing to possess all the power in the realm, and thus provide a kind of light fantasy backdrop to my compulsive and irrepressible greed.
Uh, you just contradicted your statement right there. The "Puzzle to Solve" in this case is "How do I acquire as much in-game wealth and property to satisfy my insatiable greed without mindlessly acquiring it?" (The humor and fantasy make your imagination and other thought parts of the brain work - maybe not a lot, but at least better than running a bot).
The "Puzzle to Solve" in a game isn't necessarily the obvious goal of the game (kill the bad guy). In fact, it's likely different for every person. One person it might be "I'm frustrated, and I want to kill people" ("How do I kill people legally?"). Another might be "I want some mindless violence to take my mind off the real world". Or maybe, "I feel like saving the world today." (FPS type of goals)
Sometimes the puzzle is "I want a nice fantasy world where I can fully immerse myself attempting to do [good|evil|etc]" (e.g., an RPG).
Actually, no. SD and MMC are completely incompatible. Their physical formfactors are different, even (SD is thicker). SD has more pins than MMC also (SD has 11, MMC 9). And they're from two different groups, too (MMC and SD Association, I believe). And yes, the command sets are different - the controller sends an invalid MMC command (but valid SD) to check if there's an SD card present.
The only reason they call it an SD/MMC slot is because the SD association made it a requirement that SD slots accept MMC cards. But MMC has no such requirement. So SD cards may get jammed into an MMC slot (and not work), but it works the other way around. Luckily, there aren't many MMC-only slots around.
I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. The aesthetic concerns are...concerning.
Well, there's vim already installed as part of the BSD subsystem on OS X, and there's gVim available from the official site that's native OS X (not X11).
So the program's there. Now we just need the Rendezvous support for it. Or add vi to SubEthaEdit.
What I want to know is when a vi-style interface would be put into SubEthaEdit. (I know the FAQ says vi/etc. can't do this, but I don't see what's wrong with putting a vi-interface on SubEthaEdit then). I'd register SubEthaEdit once implemented!
Surely I can't be the only one with source code littered with ":q" and other stuck vi-isms until we realize the editor doesn't support them...
Oh, they can. I'd estimate the cost at no more than $180, possibly lower than $150. They have volume - the are probably the biggest single consumer of Motorola processors.
Actually, it was Motorola that let Apple down (which is why they started courting IBM's CPUs). Apple is *NOT* Motorola's biggest customer (though, they probably were the ones pushing for faster CPUs). Motorola's largest customers are the like of Cisco and the various subcontractors of the US military (who do like PowerPCs).
Apple had a hard enough time trying to get fast CPUs from Motorola that lead to the decline in performance (there was a time when PowerPC was megahertz-by-megahertz at par with, or faster than x86 parts available.) Motorola basically decided it was far more profitable to sell PowerPCs for embedded computing platforms (e.g., scientific VME backplanes, routers, etc), rather than as a desktop CPU. (Where else would you find a 1.5GHz CPU hobbled by a puny 166MHz bus? Even given it's 32-bit unidirectional (thus two 166MHz links), it's still an awkward combination, and is more of a bottleneck than RAM is.
Another valid 5 digit combination that one can say out loud as "1-2-3-4-5" is "24445" (one 2, three 4's, then 5). So there are two possible combinations for "1-2-3-4-5".
Of course, if your lock can't handle multiple digits being the same, well, it's time for a new lock!
Actually, the most secure way of communicating is to simply appear normal. If you try to hide your communications, it sticks out in the normal flotsam and jetsam of data. But if your traffic looks more or less like Joe Sixpack's traffic, it's hard to tell.
E.g., consider two coffeeshops across the street from one another. One guy sits in one and has a cup of coffee, reads the paper, etc. The other sits in the other and does the same. If they see each other every day, no attack. If one is absent, *boom*. Given the way people work, it's a regular, repeatable event, and can be used to communicate data (albeit slowly) - perhaps the paper is folded slightly differently, or carried away vs. left on the table.
The real trick to hiding is to make it look like you have nothing to hide. And that is what makes it difficult.
There's also the problem that the list of side effects was generated from clinical trials and observed reactions. If a side effect takes 10 years to develop by someone who's been taking it every day for 10 years, well, you won't see that in the ad until much later.
Even worse when it's the interaction of two drugs that cause it - perhaps a certain herbal remedy plus the drug. In a way, it's a lot like software - all the various little interactions and changes one does to one's computer makes it almost impossible to know all the possible conflicts and interactions beforehand. Except, this living computer doesn't have a reset button.
Try a seagate barracuda if you want to be sure (they're known for low noise level, hence the name).
Funny. The Seagate Barracudas used to be the hottest and loudest drives available. In fact, they were known for their heat and noise production. Of course, this was back when they pioneered 10kRPM (or 15kRPM, I can't remember which) SCSI drives. Then Seagate moved on, and since Barracuda drives were quite good, moved the name onto their IDE drive line. To which the only real innovation was their fluid bearings that made them *much* quieter.
They are quiet drives *now*, but they weren't in the past.
Oh, yeah! I remember that! Personally, I like Begin, better, though. Remember NetTrek on Apple Mac classics? I wish that were still around.
Actually, you can still grab it from the original author's site. Found it a while back. Email him to request he resurrect it - I'm not sure if the color version runs under Classic (else whip out Basilisk...).
It is likely that GPS service would ONLY be interrupted in the event that the government believes that GPS is being used in some significant manner by the terrorists. Let's assume that they take a bunch of model airplanes and load them down with sarin, a GPS, and a microcontroller to drive the thing. In this instance, shutting down GPS for a day or so makes sense.
So in effect, you've just found a way for the terrorists to basically, uh, do their deeds without using GPS. Terrorism isn't *just* blowing stuff up. A mass poisoning of candies around Hallowe'en can also be considered a terrorist attack, this time striking at parents who really would be afraid to let their kids out the door. A more subtle form is economic attacks - start a rumor about a bank having problems, and spread it far and wide, causing a run on the bank (there are laws that help protect banks in this case - but paranoia of not being able to get at your money will make the public do stupid things).
In fact, shutting down GPS has, like you said, so many economic ramifications, that if a terrorist were to buy about $1000 worth of equipment (plane, microcontroller, GPS, bottles of water, etc - just enough to make it appear real) that it causes the system to be shut down locally for a day, it's possibly worth it. Do it over the course of a month and the economic damage could be quite significant. Any longer and people would probably just try to recall how they lived pre-GPS. But it also shows how reliant we've gotten with GPS.
So now you have a good dilemma. Disable GPS - is the threat really real, or is it designed to get GPS disabled? Leave GPS, and are you sure they're not going to use GPS to attack you?.
Unfortunately, the problem with hibernate/sleep/shut down is that it loses the system state, or partially loses the state.
I'd shutdown/hibernate my machines more often, but reopening a half-dozen ssh sessions, cd'ing to my previous directory, and setting up special environments (PATH can vary by the window, special script environment variables, etc.) starts to get annoying quick. It turns that 2 minute boot time into a 10 minute boot-and-re-establish-a-working-system irritance.
Screen works, to a point (until you have a half dozen screens running and no clue which PID is the one you want.
Now, a low-power mode in which the computer wakes up periodically to keep alive the connections, that would be handy.
Um, IIRC, IDE is I/O command based. You *need* the write line in order to write to the registers that tell the drive what sector to read (as well as telling it what to do - read/write/reset/get ID etc). (And IDE is really a modification of the ISA bus (not talking about the latest ATA-5 spec, or even DMA modes, just plain old backwards-compatible IDE), since the drive has its controller built in).
That's not to say there aren't devices that do securely do read-only access (and other handheld devices that can serve as a USB, Firewire adapter, RAID array controller, etc, plus a variety of standalone functions (zero drive, secure erase drive, copy drive, etc) so that you really only have to connect the suspect drive up, make a copy, remove suspect drive, plug in computer to box, and examine away...
Ideally, hitting either Pause or Rec would unpause the recording, similar to how hitting Play or Pause would unpause playback. Some people treat Pause as a toggle operation (because it's On or Off, and since there's only one button for it...), others treat it as a task (you pause, then you hit what you want the VCR to do next). But in that example, there's nothing really preventing one from supporting *both* options, making it intuitive to everyone.
As for dash controls, you'll find that the iconic interface is relatively standard among all vehicles - the rear-window defogger has the same icon in all cars these days, no matter where it's positioned, the hazard indicator switch is usually red with the "alert" icon, etc. The layout and positioning is different, but the general operation stays the same (just like programs - the "Play" button is the right-pointing equilateral triangle, and may be located in different positions on the screen, but it's intuitive what the icon means and what ought to happen when pushed/clicked/tapped/etc).
And you mention after a short period of familiarization, you can cope with those differences. Guess what? That's from UI design and research! If you can grasp the basic elements of an interface, be it GUI, car, VCR, airplane, whatever, it adds to intuitiveness immediately. Going back to the VCR example, you'll note that the Rewind button is always to the left of Fast Forward (whether the Play button is in the middle, or on one side (typically left) is debateable) because it's intuitive to think directionally like that (a timeline).
There's no ideal interface, but there are interface elements that, through either cultural influence or experience, belong or look in a certain way. A car with text labels would be immediately unintuitive (if not provided with icons) because we've all grown up with cars that have iconic labels (though, you can't get rid of text completely - "Check Engine" being one whose icon isn't well known and needs to be explained).
Slashdot Mirror
while(1) { malloc(1); }
That won't work on modern systems, or systems with a lot of virtual memory available (lots of RAM or large swap).
A modern OS will not actually commit memory until it is actually used, and while malloc() involves some bookkeeping, most of the bookkeeping is very little. It's quite likely you'll actually run out of process RAM (2GB or 3GB, depending on settings on a 32 bit machine) space first before the system starts to strain. On Linux, the recent kernels will kill processes that start hogging RAM when free memory falls below the low-water mark. And each malloc() really allocates 8/16/32 bytes of RAM for even a 1 byte allocation.
Pre-.NET Visual Basic was far from the best programming language. Its support for object-oriented programming constructs was half-hearted at best. VB6 was released in 1998; people should be moving on by now, or they should have used a better tool in the first place.
The problem is, there aren't many tools that rivaled the simplicity and rapidness of VB. If you need a GUI frontend to some command line program, VB would be the best language because you'd just design the GUI, generate the appropriate arguments, and called the program - depending on the number of arguments it takes, it can be anywhere from a few minutes to a day to do.
Writing the Win32 C code (or MFC) would take a while longer to do. Sure it's more powerful, but writing GUI code is rather boring, and the less one had to do, the better.
Just like there are multiple languages for purposes, like C for systems programming, C++/Java/etc for applications programming, Perl/Python for high-level glue programming, VB helps with even higher level programming than Perl and Python, and lets you do it without having to learn too much GUI stuff. A frontend to a database is trivial in VB, including input verification. Bit more work in Perl/Python (having to do the widget stuff manually), even more work in C++/Java, etc.
The right tool for the right job. Luckily, I believe there's a VB workalike coming along that's F/OSS.
I never did. Most movies transfer at 24 fps, although a lot of older, home formats used 15 fps, but digital camcorders record at 29.97 fps. I'm guessing that the higher speed of the camcorder compensated for that. If you go frame by frame, you might see spots where the projector was switching to the next frame, but at 1/30th of a second it would not be easy to see.
... well ... I don't notice it. :)
Regardless, I never did see any flickering of any note. Even if you look at transfered movies on DVD, such as the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, you might see that every sixth frame is a duplicate because of capturing 24 fps within ~30 fps. But it happens so quickly, even at every 1/6th second, that you don't notice it
Actually, most good projectors will actually do a "double exposure" of each frame. Your 24 fps movie in the theatre is projected at 48 shutter openings (or more) per second - each frame is exposed multiple times. This gives you the effect of a higher "framerate" and cuts down the flickering. Your 12fps and 15fps projectors would also do a similar thing - 12fps would otherwise be *very* flickery. Considering that 29.97 and 30fps are so close to each other, it would be difficult to spot the missing frame (1 frame in 1000), so your projector is probably doing a double-exposure.
This was also a reason why TVs use interlaced scanning - 30 frames per second made for awful flicker, but the technology couldn't go higher. So you interlace it to give you 60 fields per second (or did I just get my fields and frames mixed around?). And to avoid the need for precision crystals, you can get the clocking from the power lines.
Alas, when color TV came around, the added colorburst signal dropped the framerate ever-so-slightly, giving us 29.97 fps over 30 fps.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing
The oft-forgotten addition to that - "Any landing where you can use the aircraft again is a great landing".
Of course, if you're taking flying lessons, don't let the instructors overhear any bets being made about how high you can make the dirt line of the nose oleo (tricycle gear aircraft only) go. For some odd reason or other, instructors seem to cringe when you talk about things like that.
Current lithium batteries are slow to recharge because they have a high internal resistance, and low tolerance for overvoltage. A typical battery cell with 3.6V idle voltage takes no more than 4.3V when charging, and the .7V drop over the internal resistance allows very little current through the battery, which is why it takes 3hr to recharge fully.
Actually, LiIon has a low internal resistance - it's somewhere between that of NiCd and NiMH chemistries (when new). However, as it ages (i.e., the moment it leaves the factory), the internal resistance gets higher and higher until it can no longer usefully power the load (generally 2-5 years after manufacture).
The reason LiIon is slow to charge is because it requires a complex charge regimen. Plus you can't trickle charge them (destroys them). So you charge them at a constant current up around 90% or so, then switch to constant voltage until the cell stops accepting charge. Then you stop and switch off the charger until it drains to around 95% (estimated), and do a CV charge again.
The end result is you get around 90% charge very quickly, but the last 10% take forever as the charger puts in less and less current.
Charge it incorrectly and they go boom.
Given the costs of shipping (and the time it takes to deliver), I think Internet shopping can only survive if there is no sales/use tax. If I have to pay tax and shipping, I simply won't buy online.
Ah, but then it's a form of corporate welfare by allowing "internet" transactions to be tax-free. Internet (and mail-order) companies are supposed to be able to offer wider selection and lower prices because of the way they operate (i.e., you don't have to hire X people per store to man the stores 12 hours a day, pay property tax on every store, pay leasing fees for your store, etc.). Instead, you pay for a giant warehouse in some oddball part of the US where taxes are literally $1/year. All you need is an Internet link, power, and road to the airport (remember that IBM commercial of $3/square foot?). You don't have to distribute the goods to every store, you don't have to run stores. Just a few computers to take transactions (cheap), a few bodies to package, ship, receive and program computers (much less than X people for Y stores), and a much wider selection since you don't have to maintain 5 pieces of product per store, but can maintain 50 pieces in a warehouse.
You see, the margins of internet stores is supposed to be larger, allowing them to discount more (enough to make up the difference in shipping). And you know, the lower cost of entry should give one a much larger market. There are people who sell only one product worldwide, which is easier than trying to convince thousands of stores to carry their product.
So cutting taxes is a form of corporate welfare. The cost of shipping should be eaten by the savings that an internet based company should be able to achieve by not having stores (and bodies to man them - remember labor is the largest cost in a company). And large shippers can often get breaks on shipping by the shipping companies (and the postal system, to an extent).
Might want to consider if "List Price" is really what you should be paying for an item via e-commerce vs. picking it up from a store. Of course, if a local store doesn't have it, then it's not like you'd have paid more now...
For example this plane would be able to do London-Sydney in one hop (Note that it won't be able to do Sydney-London though, I read, because of headwinds). Although this will mean approximately 20 hours in the air on a single flight, I think i'd rather the stop over (nearly) half-way in SE Asia.
Partly true. OTOH, it means more airlines can offer more direct routes without stopping over in the US (remember, nowadays if you're going to land in the US, even for just a stopover where you don't leave the airport, you *must* have a visa (except for a few countries)). Sometimes the extra cost of a plane ticket is peanuts compared to the hassles of having to land on US soil and arrange visas and stuff. There already are a number of airlines that rerouted to avoid landing in the US because of this. And yes, traditional stopover airports are complaining about it because they don't get all the fees associated with the stopover (landing, terminal, fuel, etc).
OTOH, the 777 does have the advantage that it can use any airport equipped to handle 747s (though, if you could design, 777 support would expedite matters). The Airbus A380 requires a larger terminal and a larger runway, leading to only a few airports being able to land it. (It sounds exactly like backwards compatibility in software...).
A couple more from Ted's Mozilla Page
Plain Text Links gives you the ability to select a url, right click and go to it. Needed for those lazy slashdot posters. It'll remove spaces from URLs as well, a very nice Slashdot-friendly feature.
Of course, for those who print, the following is essential. Nuke Anything removes practically any element of a web page (images, styles, tables, etc) from the DOM, and Firefox will re-render the page without it. Great when printing out articles since you can remove the ads, annoying left and right columns, headers, etc before printing. A simple refresh will bring them all back.
If anyone remembers Neo-Geo, the other big flaw with their strategy was the out of this world cost for each and every game. I do not remember specifics, but it was up in the $200 range for a game
That might actually be due to raw material cost, actually. Given that the good games often run into megabytes of space (on a MC68000 CPU with 24 address lines offering a whopping 16MB of address space), it's a wonder it sold at all. Remember, this was early 90's, and the NES/SNES/etc using cartridges were all typically under 1MB. And out comes a console whose games consume 16-32MB of raw program data (code, graphics, sound). ROMs are fairly expensive devices (and PCs of that era typically were lucky to have that much RAM), so the raw material cost was probably up there.
Then you have the huge games which came later (late 90's) consuming on the same hardware 64MB+ (possibly 128MB as well).
Of course, it's no wonder why the games were huge (honestly, the graphics are quite good for a system of its age). I think only the N64 started to match cartridge sizes to the Neo-Geo (though, being Nintendo, they just buy several million mask ROMs per game, or more to their standard, custom-design the ROMs to be handed to a memory manufacturer).
"Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life.'"
Umm....no.
In fact most MMORPGs reflect the compulsive narcessistic attitude of most young americans today accumulating hand-over-fist anything they can get their mitts onto. At least this is why I play MMORPGs. The atmosphere, music, humor and scenery help to disuade me from needing to possess all the power in the realm, and thus provide a kind of light fantasy backdrop to my compulsive and irrepressible greed.
Uh, you just contradicted your statement right there. The "Puzzle to Solve" in this case is "How do I acquire as much in-game wealth and property to satisfy my insatiable greed without mindlessly acquiring it?" (The humor and fantasy make your imagination and other thought parts of the brain work - maybe not a lot, but at least better than running a bot).
The "Puzzle to Solve" in a game isn't necessarily the obvious goal of the game (kill the bad guy). In fact, it's likely different for every person. One person it might be "I'm frustrated, and I want to kill people" ("How do I kill people legally?"). Another might be "I want some mindless violence to take my mind off the real world". Or maybe, "I feel like saving the world today." (FPS type of goals)
Sometimes the puzzle is "I want a nice fantasy world where I can fully immerse myself attempting to do [good|evil|etc]" (e.g., an RPG).
There's two possible combinations that are valid from that sequence, when spoken.
Literally - "12345", but also "24445", which one can speak as "one two, three four(s), five"
Secure Digital and MMC are compatible
Actually, no. SD and MMC are completely incompatible. Their physical formfactors are different, even (SD is thicker). SD has more pins than MMC also (SD has 11, MMC 9). And they're from two different groups, too (MMC and SD Association, I believe). And yes, the command sets are different - the controller sends an invalid MMC command (but valid SD) to check if there's an SD card present.
The only reason they call it an SD/MMC slot is because the SD association made it a requirement that SD slots accept MMC cards. But MMC has no such requirement. So SD cards may get jammed into an MMC slot (and not work), but it works the other way around. Luckily, there aren't many MMC-only slots around.
I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. The aesthetic concerns are...concerning.
Well, there's vim already installed as part of the BSD subsystem on OS X, and there's gVim available from the official site that's native OS X (not X11).
So the program's there. Now we just need the Rendezvous support for it. Or add vi to SubEthaEdit.
What I want to know is when a vi-style interface would be put into SubEthaEdit. (I know the FAQ says vi/etc. can't do this, but I don't see what's wrong with putting a vi-interface on SubEthaEdit then). I'd register SubEthaEdit once implemented!
Surely I can't be the only one with source code littered with ":q" and other stuck vi-isms until we realize the editor doesn't support them...
I do believe one of the D70 CPUs run iTRON, a version of that Japanese open-source embedded OS. Examine the firmware update file and you'll find it.
Don't know what the other CPU runs, though.
Oh, they can. I'd estimate the cost at no more than $180, possibly lower than $150. They have volume - the are probably the biggest single consumer of Motorola processors.
Actually, it was Motorola that let Apple down (which is why they started courting IBM's CPUs). Apple is *NOT* Motorola's biggest customer (though, they probably were the ones pushing for faster CPUs). Motorola's largest customers are the like of Cisco and the various subcontractors of the US military (who do like PowerPCs).
Apple had a hard enough time trying to get fast CPUs from Motorola that lead to the decline in performance (there was a time when PowerPC was megahertz-by-megahertz at par with, or faster than x86 parts available.) Motorola basically decided it was far more profitable to sell PowerPCs for embedded computing platforms (e.g., scientific VME backplanes, routers, etc), rather than as a desktop CPU. (Where else would you find a 1.5GHz CPU hobbled by a puny 166MHz bus? Even given it's 32-bit unidirectional (thus two 166MHz links), it's still an awkward combination, and is more of a bottleneck than RAM is.
Another valid 5 digit combination that one can say out loud as "1-2-3-4-5" is "24445" (one 2, three 4's, then 5). So there are two possible combinations for "1-2-3-4-5".
Of course, if your lock can't handle multiple digits being the same, well, it's time for a new lock!
Actually, the most secure way of communicating is to simply appear normal. If you try to hide your communications, it sticks out in the normal flotsam and jetsam of data. But if your traffic looks more or less like Joe Sixpack's traffic, it's hard to tell.
E.g., consider two coffeeshops across the street from one another. One guy sits in one and has a cup of coffee, reads the paper, etc. The other sits in the other and does the same. If they see each other every day, no attack. If one is absent, *boom*. Given the way people work, it's a regular, repeatable event, and can be used to communicate data (albeit slowly) - perhaps the paper is folded slightly differently, or carried away vs. left on the table.
The real trick to hiding is to make it look like you have nothing to hide. And that is what makes it difficult.
There's also the problem that the list of side effects was generated from clinical trials and observed reactions. If a side effect takes 10 years to develop by someone who's been taking it every day for 10 years, well, you won't see that in the ad until much later.
Even worse when it's the interaction of two drugs that cause it - perhaps a certain herbal remedy plus the drug. In a way, it's a lot like software - all the various little interactions and changes one does to one's computer makes it almost impossible to know all the possible conflicts and interactions beforehand. Except, this living computer doesn't have a reset button.
Try a seagate barracuda if you want to be sure (they're known for low noise level, hence the name).
Funny. The Seagate Barracudas used to be the hottest and loudest drives available. In fact, they were known for their heat and noise production. Of course, this was back when they pioneered 10kRPM (or 15kRPM, I can't remember which) SCSI drives. Then Seagate moved on, and since Barracuda drives were quite good, moved the name onto their IDE drive line. To which the only real innovation was their fluid bearings that made them *much* quieter.
They are quiet drives *now*, but they weren't in the past.
Oh, yeah! I remember that! Personally, I like Begin, better, though. Remember NetTrek on Apple Mac classics? I wish that were still around.
Actually, you can still grab it from the original author's site. Found it a while back. Email him to request he resurrect it - I'm not sure if the color version runs under Classic (else whip out Basilisk...).
It is likely that GPS service would ONLY be interrupted in the event that the government believes that GPS is being used in some significant manner by the terrorists. Let's assume that they take a bunch of model airplanes and load them down with sarin, a GPS, and a microcontroller to drive the thing. In this instance, shutting down GPS for a day or so makes sense.
So in effect, you've just found a way for the terrorists to basically, uh, do their deeds without using GPS. Terrorism isn't *just* blowing stuff up. A mass poisoning of candies around Hallowe'en can also be considered a terrorist attack, this time striking at parents who really would be afraid to let their kids out the door. A more subtle form is economic attacks - start a rumor about a bank having problems, and spread it far and wide, causing a run on the bank (there are laws that help protect banks in this case - but paranoia of not being able to get at your money will make the public do stupid things).
In fact, shutting down GPS has, like you said, so many economic ramifications, that if a terrorist were to buy about $1000 worth of equipment (plane, microcontroller, GPS, bottles of water, etc - just enough to make it appear real) that it causes the system to be shut down locally for a day, it's possibly worth it. Do it over the course of a month and the economic damage could be quite significant. Any longer and people would probably just try to recall how they lived pre-GPS. But it also shows how reliant we've gotten with GPS.
So now you have a good dilemma. Disable GPS - is the threat really real, or is it designed to get GPS disabled? Leave GPS, and are you sure they're not going to use GPS to attack you?.
Unfortunately, the problem with hibernate/sleep/shut down is that it loses the system state, or partially loses the state.
I'd shutdown/hibernate my machines more often, but reopening a half-dozen ssh sessions, cd'ing to my previous directory, and setting up special environments (PATH can vary by the window, special script environment variables, etc.) starts to get annoying quick. It turns that 2 minute boot time into a 10 minute boot-and-re-establish-a-working-system irritance.
Screen works, to a point (until you have a half dozen screens running and no clue which PID is the one you want.
Now, a low-power mode in which the computer wakes up periodically to keep alive the connections, that would be handy.
Um, IIRC, IDE is I/O command based. You *need* the write line in order to write to the registers that tell the drive what sector to read (as well as telling it what to do - read/write/reset/get ID etc). (And IDE is really a modification of the ISA bus (not talking about the latest ATA-5 spec, or even DMA modes, just plain old backwards-compatible IDE), since the drive has its controller built in).
That's not to say there aren't devices that do securely do read-only access (and other handheld devices that can serve as a USB, Firewire adapter, RAID array controller, etc, plus a variety of standalone functions (zero drive, secure erase drive, copy drive, etc) so that you really only have to connect the suspect drive up, make a copy, remove suspect drive, plug in computer to box, and examine away...
Ideally, hitting either Pause or Rec would unpause the recording, similar to how hitting Play or Pause would unpause playback. Some people treat Pause as a toggle operation (because it's On or Off, and since there's only one button for it...), others treat it as a task (you pause, then you hit what you want the VCR to do next). But in that example, there's nothing really preventing one from supporting *both* options, making it intuitive to everyone.
As for dash controls, you'll find that the iconic interface is relatively standard among all vehicles - the rear-window defogger has the same icon in all cars these days, no matter where it's positioned, the hazard indicator switch is usually red with the "alert" icon, etc. The layout and positioning is different, but the general operation stays the same (just like programs - the "Play" button is the right-pointing equilateral triangle, and may be located in different positions on the screen, but it's intuitive what the icon means and what ought to happen when pushed/clicked/tapped/etc).
And you mention after a short period of familiarization, you can cope with those differences. Guess what? That's from UI design and research! If you can grasp the basic elements of an interface, be it GUI, car, VCR, airplane, whatever, it adds to intuitiveness immediately. Going back to the VCR example, you'll note that the Rewind button is always to the left of Fast Forward (whether the Play button is in the middle, or on one side (typically left) is debateable) because it's intuitive to think directionally like that (a timeline).
There's no ideal interface, but there are interface elements that, through either cultural influence or experience, belong or look in a certain way. A car with text labels would be immediately unintuitive (if not provided with icons) because we've all grown up with cars that have iconic labels (though, you can't get rid of text completely - "Check Engine" being one whose icon isn't well known and needs to be explained).