This is probably going to cost me some carma, but what the heck:
Councellor McKee:
"Listen kids and listen good. I'm only going to say this once: Bug are baaaaad. Okay? But mozilla is goood. But mozilla has a lot of bugs, which is bad. Mmm-Okay? They now got more than 100,000, which is really bad. That why they fix bugs. Fixing bugs is good. Mmm-Okay? That's why mozilla is better than microsoft. Okay? But somethimes mozilla misses a bug. That bad. Okay? That's why reporing a bug is good. Okay? You report a bug, which is bad, to mozilla so they can fix it, which is good. Okay?"
Stan: "Mister McKee?"
Coucellor McKee: "Yes son?"
Stan: "Why is it that reporting bugs is good and reporting people is bad?"
Councellor McKee: "Erm. I don't now actually"
It's nice and all that a processor can go up to 100 GHz+, but how will you ever get the info there on time?
Motherboards nowadays have memory running at 133 MHz and I doubt they could go much faster.
I myself have a PIII 450 MHz on a 133 MHz bus. For every memory cycle, the CPU does 3.38 cycle. That's reasonable. Nowadays a PIII 1.4 GHz is nearly standard, that's a factor 1:10.5! And a 210 GHz would be 1:1052!!!
I know that the on-board cache will help close this gap, but most programs nowadays just don't fit in cache, not to mention fitting in memory. Isn't it true that most CPU's nowadays are ilde; just waiting for info to come?
P.S. I've noticed time and time again that if you run Picosoft Winblows, not the CPU, not the memory, the hard disk determines the overall speed.
Organic is interpreted differently by different scientists in different fields. Some would define organic as "molecules only containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and/or sulphur" others as "molecules derived form molecules/compounds that are present in living cells". Other definitions are also possible. So which one is it?
If this article uses the first definition, it think you should have a look at the Philips homepage. There's a piece about their PolyLED (Polymer Light Emitting Diodes) displays.
Now if only this would happen in the Unites States. That would really shake the earth in the land where making idiotic pattents and sueing over them has become a form of art. Do you think it's in their genes?
* Next part: off-topic *
Ok. Funny story: At a university in the Netherlands a speed (ice-)scate was invented which is only at one attached to the scate so that it opens when you lift your heel off the ice. The so-called "klapschaats" or clapscate. After they introduced it the world records went down with about 10% and everybody made new personal records. But when they wanted to patent it they were quite surprised it was denied. It seems some bloke in the late 1800's patented the exact same thing. Only then there was technically impossible to make them. Tough luck.
Here in the Netherlands the TV-series "Big Brother" was a big hit. For the persons who don't know the format, here's an introduction:
In that programme about 11 people lived together in a house for about 100 days and every week 1 person would be voted away by the audience. The house would be under constant surveillance by vidio cameras which could be watched 24 hours/day over the internet. The last person in the house after 100 days would get about $50.000
After that the clones just kept popping up.
"De Bus" - The subjects live in a bus instead of a house.
"Starmaker" - Several people who want to be pop stars. The grand prise is, how surprising, becoming a pop star. Also helps to make loads'a money selling the demo CD.
"Big Diet" - Several people suffering from obesity in a caslte. The person who looses most gets his lost weight in gold. (The leading man is allready down 25 kg)
And I'm so worried that I will soon see an announcement:
"Big Nerd" - Sereval computer zippos in a luxorious mounain resort somewhere in America. The one voted "Biggest Computer Idiot" (voting done on internet) has to leave and gets some some computer lesons for free. The winner gets a Multimedia PC. Courtesy of some PC-clone manufacturer.
"Researchers have...", I know who they are...
on
Nanotube Transistors
·
· Score: 4
"Researchers have already found a way to form the nanotubes into transistors 500 times smaller than today's silicon based transistors, IBM said."
The researchers they are referring to are, amongst others, from the "Delft Univeristy of Technology" (Delft, The Netherlands) better know as "de TU-Delft"
I know they did a Science article on this subject, but since www.sciencemag.org doesn't even have abstracts on-line, I can't verify that this is the one:
Well, the Betuwelijn is the exeption to the rule. What do you expect if you make a Female minister of Transportation and Water (Verkeer en Waterstaat).;-)
And... Aaarrgggg!
*The Writer was chased out of the building by an angry mob of women*:)
Yes this might be one of the BRILLIANT ideas of my government (Yes, I'm Dutch). The govenment LOVES electronic...er...thingys. Since a few years you can submit your tax form electronically, you guessed it, by the internet.
The idea for the 'peronal database' itself is not surprising, they have been trying for years 'dicourage' fraudulence by connecting databases of the Taxes, Socail security and others using the so-called SOFI number (The Social-Fiscal Number) (Yes we Dutchmen give eachother numbers!:) ) . The are trying to add-in more databases every day.
To prevent misuse of this combined database, the government in all it's whisdom instituted law ('De Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens') and an independant organization to execute this law. Yeh, right.
Anyone who said Big Brother didn't exist: Think again, it's already here.
I don't think this project is even going to be implemented. Because it's too expensive or they find out they don't really need it. And when they do implement it they probably get some very cheap (read:bad) IT people on the case and I'll be such a mess that nobody uses it.
Finally somebody who understands... The person who made this April-fools joke watched Armageddon and Deep Impact too often.
For the moon (and all things in orbit) the orbit closest to the earth (or wherever it's revolving around) constitutes the higest energy since it moves the fastest. The lowest energy is, ligically, no orbit at all. Loosing energy means a LAGRER orbit.
But has anybody thought about the fact that the tides actually slow down the earth (like the moon has allready stopped rotating relative to the earth). And so does the sun. Oh my gosh! If the earth stopped rotating there will be one hot side and one cold side. Massive storms will ravage our planet! Help!
Don't count on it. The sun will have died before that time. What?! Argggh! The sun is dying! The end is near!
I don't beleive this protection is going to hold long. I've seen several new protection mechanisms in software and it was broken usually broken the next morning.
I would like to make three points.
Fistly, The manufactuers of CD-burners have enormously cut down on hardware, to keep the price low. This is especially true for IDE drives. All actions of the drive are gided by software drivers, which can be bypassed. I've seen some rippes do some really strange things with my drive like: "reading data beyond readable area". Heck, I even think it could burn the logo of your favorite footballteam on a CD!
Secondly, There are a hundred people at most working on a single protection and several thousands of people working on breaking it. This isn't a ridiculous number; The amount of people who own a computer (USA, Europe and Japan) should be close to 100 million. If one assumes only a 1/100000th (that about your chance to win a prise the lotery) part is active in the protection-cracking-bizz you still end up with several thousend people. By the way, in theory you only need one person the crack a protection.
Thirdly, the all mighty thing: Money. I think there are some pretty powerfull people who would give a lot of money to bypass this problem. It would probably not be available for "the ordinary computeruser".
Basically, from the copyright point of view the CD is a lost cause.
I heard a talk from someone working in this field. I don't know if he called it a Peltier pump, but here's how it went:
You take a stack of conductor (read: metal), semiconductor (read: not so conductive as a metal), conductor, semiconductor and so forth and so on. Basically (in energy terms) the conductor forms the valleys and the semiconductor froms the mountains forming a hilly landscape. (Just like a crossection of an egg-box.) All electrons are in the valleys. Some of the electrons move fast and are called "hot" and some move slow "cold". (a bit crude difference since it is a gaussian distibution bla bla bla...)
When a potential is applied over this stack, all electrons want to go over the mountans, but the "cold" electrons cannot pass them since they have too little energy and the "hot" ones can. The "hot" ones end up at one end and the cold ones are left at other end, respectively giving a "hot" and a "cold" side.
But it is far from being a sellable product. One of them being: Resistance. Resistance heats up the system making every electron "hot" and thus ruining the effect. They also had problems with electron orbital resonance effects, but I'm not going into detail there...;)
I'm a firm beleiver of free competition. It's never a good idea to have a monopolist in this (see Windows). One of the things that must be observed is the cross-compatibility. If you constantly have to change software when you have to change distibution, peolple feel like their stuck inside a distrib. Thake the installation procedure for instance. Sometimes it's a tarball, then an rpm, then is a binary with an install script allways assuming a different configuration (read: distubution). Usually it's possible to make them work, but it annoys me every time.
Slackware rulez! But I would appricate it if Slack 8.0 would be released soon...
Since I use Slackware 7.1 it usua
403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later.
Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists." ...Mmm, nice.
*Reload*
Oh, here it is. And no mention of the new series. Then it must be a rumour, because "when it's not on startrek.com it still a rumour" (yeah right)
If they are not doing the "Birth of the Federation"-thing they might as well introduce the quantum slipstream drive. Than they can really go where noone has gone before...
I'll try to miss the first two series of the show. Because both ST:DS9 and ST:V started out pretty lame and became better near the end.
Anyone for a "Star Trek: Birth of the Federation"-drinking mug?;)
I tried this one before and it worked:
When a programme searches for glibc 2.1.x (where x = integer) and you have glibc 2.2 installed i make a sybolic link glibc2.1.x which links to glibc 2.2.
It works, sometimes...
So why don't we all make a symbolic link named glibc which points at glibc2.178.978 (whatever version you want) and have all programmes look for the file glibc. This will give some compatibility problems, but I'm sure you guys will come up with something...
Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, the Netherlands
(aka "Natlab") is working on it for quite some time now. And it's looking quite promicing. They have a working prototypes now. But it lags on allmost every point: Computational speed, minituralization, and (for the moment) cost. The problem is getting it to market. It will NEVER compete with silicon on the computational speed bit (the conductance of plastic just isn't high enough) so they are aiming on the cost bit(cheaper than 0.05 euro a pice) which is theoretically possible. Result: Disposable computer chips... Mmm. I'll have a side order of PolyLED screens they're making.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably going to cost me some carma, but what the heck:
Councellor McKee:
"Listen kids and listen good. I'm only going to say this once: Bug are baaaaad. Okay? But mozilla is goood. But mozilla has a lot of bugs, which is bad. Mmm-Okay? They now got more than 100,000, which is really bad. That why they fix bugs. Fixing bugs is good. Mmm-Okay? That's why mozilla is better than microsoft. Okay? But somethimes mozilla misses a bug. That bad. Okay? That's why reporing a bug is good. Okay? You report a bug, which is bad, to mozilla so they can fix it, which is good. Okay?"
Stan: "Mister McKee?"
Coucellor McKee: "Yes son?"
Stan: "Why is it that reporting bugs is good and reporting people is bad?"
Councellor McKee: "Erm. I don't now actually"
The similarity is really remarkable. Could it be that we are dealing with an old-fashioned canard?
It's nice and all that a processor can go up to 100 GHz+, but how will you ever get the info there on time?
Motherboards nowadays have memory running at 133 MHz and I doubt they could go much faster.
I myself have a PIII 450 MHz on a 133 MHz bus. For every memory cycle, the CPU does 3.38 cycle. That's reasonable. Nowadays a PIII 1.4 GHz is nearly standard, that's a factor 1:10.5! And a 210 GHz would be 1:1052!!!
I know that the on-board cache will help close this gap, but most programs nowadays just don't fit in cache, not to mention fitting in memory. Isn't it true that most CPU's nowadays are ilde; just waiting for info to come?
P.S. I've noticed time and time again that if you run Picosoft Winblows, not the CPU, not the memory, the hard disk determines the overall speed.
If this article uses the first definition, it think you should have a look at the Philips homepage. There's a piece about their PolyLED (Polymer Light Emitting Diodes) displays.
Hurray! Hozay! And other happy words.
Now if only this would happen in the Unites States. That would really shake the earth in the land where making idiotic pattents and sueing over them has become a form of art. Do you think it's in their genes?
* Next part: off-topic *
Ok. Funny story: At a university in the Netherlands a speed (ice-)scate was invented which is only at one attached to the scate so that it opens when you lift your heel off the ice. The so-called "klapschaats" or clapscate. After they introduced it the world records went down with about 10% and everybody made new personal records. But when they wanted to patent it they were quite surprised it was denied. It seems some bloke in the late 1800's patented the exact same thing. Only then there was technically impossible to make them. Tough luck.
That these notebooks could set themselves on fire was no design flaw. They were meant to hold top-secret information.
;)
"This Notebook will destruct in 5 seconds..."
Catch my drift?
Here in the Netherlands the TV-series "Big Brother" was a big hit. For the persons who don't know the format, here's an introduction:
In that programme about 11 people lived together in a house for about 100 days and every week 1 person would be voted away by the audience. The house would be under constant surveillance by vidio cameras which could be watched 24 hours/day over the internet. The last person in the house after 100 days would get about $50.000
After that the clones just kept popping up.
"De Bus" - The subjects live in a bus instead of a house.
"Starmaker" - Several people who want to be pop stars. The grand prise is, how surprising, becoming a pop star. Also helps to make loads'a money selling the demo CD.
"Big Diet" - Several people suffering from obesity in a caslte. The person who looses most gets his lost weight in gold. (The leading man is allready down 25 kg)
And I'm so worried that I will soon see an announcement:
"Big Nerd" - Sereval computer zippos in a luxorious mounain resort somewhere in America. The one voted "Biggest Computer Idiot" (voting done on internet) has to leave and gets some some computer lesons for free. The winner gets a Multimedia PC. Courtesy of some PC-clone manufacturer.
The researchers they are referring to are, amongst others, from the "Delft Univeristy of Technology" (Delft, The Netherlands) better know as "de TU-Delft"
I know they did a Science article on this subject, but since www.sciencemag.org doesn't even have abstracts on-line, I can't verify that this is the one:
Kouwenhoven L, Science Vol. 275 (28 March 1997) pages 1896-1897. Title: "Single-Molecule Transistors"
There are also a few other articles about Nanowires in Science by the same guy. There's also a (very) short piece on the "TU-Delft" homepage.
Ah! The bleeding SWITCHPOINT. Can't use it with my T1 as well...
Well, the Betuwelijn is the exeption to the rule. What do you expect if you make a Female minister of Transportation and Water (Verkeer en Waterstaat). ;-)
:)
And... Aaarrgggg!
*The Writer was chased out of the building by an angry mob of women*
Yes this might be one of the BRILLIANT ideas of my government (Yes, I'm Dutch). The govenment LOVES electronic...er...thingys. Since a few years you can submit your tax form electronically, you guessed it, by the internet.
:) ) . The are trying to add-in more databases every day.
The idea for the 'peronal database' itself is not surprising, they have been trying for years 'dicourage' fraudulence by connecting databases of the Taxes, Socail security and others using the so-called SOFI number (The Social-Fiscal Number) (Yes we Dutchmen give eachother numbers!
To prevent misuse of this combined database, the government in all it's whisdom instituted law ('De Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens') and an independant organization to execute this law. Yeh, right.
Anyone who said Big Brother didn't exist: Think again, it's already here.
I don't think this project is even going to be implemented. Because it's too expensive or they find out they don't really need it. And when they do implement it they probably get some very cheap (read:bad) IT people on the case and I'll be such a mess that nobody uses it.
Finally somebody who understands... The person who made this April-fools joke watched Armageddon and Deep Impact too often.
For the moon (and all things in orbit) the orbit closest to the earth (or wherever it's revolving around) constitutes the higest energy since it moves the fastest. The lowest energy is, ligically, no orbit at all. Loosing energy means a LAGRER orbit.
But has anybody thought about the fact that the tides actually slow down the earth (like the moon has allready stopped rotating relative to the earth). And so does the sun. Oh my gosh! If the earth stopped rotating there will be one hot side and one cold side. Massive storms will ravage our planet! Help!
Don't count on it. The sun will have died before that time. What?! Argggh! The sun is dying! The end is near!
I'm haveing a deja-vu. Wasn't there a security flaw last week and the week before?
Microsoft is just one big security flaw. Or one big flaw for that matter...
I don't beleive this protection is going to hold long. I've seen several new protection mechanisms in software and it was broken usually broken the next morning.
I would like to make three points.
Fistly, The manufactuers of CD-burners have enormously cut down on hardware, to keep the price low. This is especially true for IDE drives. All actions of the drive are gided by software drivers, which can be bypassed. I've seen some rippes do some really strange things with my drive like: "reading data beyond readable area". Heck, I even think it could burn the logo of your favorite footballteam on a CD!
Secondly, There are a hundred people at most working on a single protection and several thousands of people working on breaking it. This isn't a ridiculous number; The amount of people who own a computer (USA, Europe and Japan) should be close to 100 million. If one assumes only a 1/100000th (that about your chance to win a prise the lotery) part is active in the protection-cracking-bizz you still end up with several thousend people. By the way, in theory you only need one person the crack a protection.
Thirdly, the all mighty thing: Money. I think there are some pretty powerfull people who would give a lot of money to bypass this problem. It would probably not be available for "the ordinary computeruser".
Basically, from the copyright point of view the CD is a lost cause.
I heard a talk from someone working in this field. I don't know if he called it a Peltier pump, but here's how it went:
;)
You take a stack of conductor (read: metal), semiconductor (read: not so conductive as a metal), conductor, semiconductor and so forth and so on. Basically (in energy terms) the conductor forms the valleys and the semiconductor froms the mountains forming a hilly landscape. (Just like a crossection of an egg-box.) All electrons are in the valleys. Some of the electrons move fast and are called "hot" and some move slow "cold". (a bit crude difference since it is a gaussian distibution bla bla bla...)
When a potential is applied over this stack, all electrons want to go over the mountans, but the "cold" electrons cannot pass them since they have too little energy and the "hot" ones can. The "hot" ones end up at one end and the cold ones are left at other end, respectively giving a "hot" and a "cold" side.
But it is far from being a sellable product. One of them being: Resistance. Resistance heats up the system making every electron "hot" and thus ruining the effect. They also had problems with electron orbital resonance effects, but I'm not going into detail there...
Hope this helps
I'm a firm beleiver of free competition. It's never a good idea to have a monopolist in this (see Windows). One of the things that must be observed is the cross-compatibility. If you constantly have to change software when you have to change distibution, peolple feel like their stuck inside a distrib. Thake the installation procedure for instance. Sometimes it's a tarball, then an rpm, then is a binary with an install script allways assuming a different configuration (read: distubution). Usually it's possible to make them work, but it annoys me every time.
Slackware rulez! But I would appricate it if Slack 8.0 would be released soon...
Since I use Slackware 7.1 it usua
What do Microsoft and a mosquito have in common?
They acquire their tagets, suck them dry and leave a bad itch when they leave.
What do Microsoft and your new gilfriend have in common? They both suck real good, and when they go away they leave you broke.
Anyone got better ones?
It sais:
"HTTP Error 403
403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later.
Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists."
...Mmm, nice.
*Reload*
Oh, here it is. And no mention of the new series. Then it must be a rumour, because "when it's not on startrek.com it still a rumour" (yeah right)
If they are not doing the "Birth of the Federation"-thing they might as well introduce the quantum slipstream drive. Than they can really go where noone has gone before...
I'll try to miss the first two series of the show. Because both ST:DS9 and ST:V started out pretty lame and became better near the end.
Anyone for a "Star Trek: Birth of the Federation"-drinking mug? ;)
I tried this one before and it worked:
When a programme searches for glibc 2.1.x (where x = integer) and you have glibc 2.2 installed i make a sybolic link glibc2.1.x which links to glibc 2.2.
It works, sometimes...
So why don't we all make a symbolic link named glibc which points at glibc2.178.978 (whatever version you want) and have all programmes look for the file glibc. This will give some compatibility problems, but I'm sure you guys will come up with something...
Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (aka "Natlab") is working on it for quite some time now. And it's looking quite promicing. They have a working prototypes now. But it lags on allmost every point: Computational speed, minituralization, and (for the moment) cost. The problem is getting it to market. It will NEVER compete with silicon on the computational speed bit (the conductance of plastic just isn't high enough) so they are aiming on the cost bit(cheaper than 0.05 euro a pice) which is theoretically possible. Result: Disposable computer chips... Mmm. I'll have a side order of PolyLED screens they're making.