We had a re-implementation of the then-current flash running on a slow 486-level Cyrix back in 1999 for a "webpad" product that was never launched. SOME features of flash require quite a bit of CPU these days, but most of it really doesn't.
... or does the author of this tool seemingly not realize that Google Trends reports volume of searches, while what he's tracking is amount of documents indexed for a search term, and that there's no basis for assuming the two are correlated in a meaningful way?
Most game worlds are polygon based because that's what works with current engines. Nobody would start rewriting their current games for a system like this, but next time someone rewrite a significant portion of their engines or write a new engine, they might look at whether raytracing is becoming viable for them. Sooner or later it will be. Once it's viable, it's a question of whether it delivers as good or better quality and whether it can potentially cut their development times.
Of course, in the real world even flat seemingly featureless surfaces has lots of different reflections of light from multiple sources. Just looking around the office now, there are lots of shiny surfaces, and even the walls have complex reflective patterns on them based on reflection of light from the windows, a large number of lamps, and from secondary reflections from windows, interior glass walls etc.
The number of hacks to get anything resembling realistic scenes with rasterization is just so staggeringly high, and given the performance of current systems it's only a question of when raytracing will be "fast enough" to deliver better results in far less development time than what rasterization does.
So Intels current demo uses 16 cores. We buy servers with 8 cores now for less than $2k. Give it a couple more years and you'll start seeing consumer systems that are getting fast enough.
And the nice things about raytracing is that it scales almost linearly with the number of cores.
I don't care what that technique is, just tell me what it is
It is called "asking the recipient to confirm that they agree to the terms before mailing out the discs".
That's all it takes: The moment the recipient have agreed to abide by certain terms in order to receive the disc, then the sender would have a legal claim if they try to resell it.
To see why this was the RIGHT ruling, consider this: If a sender could enter you into a contract just by sending you an item, people would start just shipping you random items with a "contract" requiring you to purchase the item from them at outrageous prices, and any number of stupid things like that.
I don't disagree with you regarding Labour becoming more authoritarian - I'm far left wing, and I'd rather have the Liberal Democrats in power than Labour - but to pretend that the Tories have historically been against government interference in civil liberties is pretty ignorant. They just want to interfere in different areas.
It's mostly hypothetical. The UK Parliament has the right to depose the monarch, and combined with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the Parliament Act, the House of Commons has all the tools it needs to override whatever it bloody well pleases.
Withholding Royal Assent would cause a slight delay and creating a media frenzy. It might be enough to cause some MP's to change their minds, but it would also seriously jeopardize the future of the monarchy.
The way parliament has gotten unfettered power in the UK has been by using the power it did have to hint, threaten or force the monarchs into yielding more and more of their power, and they have not been shy of doing it - the monarchy in the UK is there because the British rather enjoy tradition and because the current monarch is putting on a decent show and not being a bother. If she does start being a bother, it would likely start a process towards the monarchy at the very least being stripped of the last vestiges of influence.
You've gotten one reply showing you why those people aren't good examples, but more importantly you're confusing the issue:
The House of Lords aren't "rulers". They don't even have any power to prevent the House of Commons from passing a law - the Parliament Act of 1911 (and it's subsequent replacements) effectively took away the Lords power by asserting the supremacy of the Commons and allowing them to override the Lords at any point. It is considered bad form to do so without trying to address the concerns raised by the Lords and voting on an act again in both chambers, and so it's only been used a handful of times since 1911, but it's up to the Commons.
Even before the Parliament Act the Lords had for a long time had their powers severely restricted, as the governments of the time tended to have ways of forcing the Lords into submission on more than one occasion. The Parliament Act itself was passed, after having previously been rejected by the Lords, by getting George V to agree to create a large number of new liberal peers (that would then get seats in the Lords) to essentially stack the Lords in favor of the Parliament Act.
We can argue about the benefit of having a non-elected chamber, but as non-elected chambers go, comparing the House of Lords to despotic rulers is at best ignorant.
The difference was that the hunting ban didn't see anywhere near the same kind of opposition in the Commons. In this case Gordon Brown had to rely on the DUP, and the only other non-Labour MP to vote for it was Ann Widdecombe, while 36 Labour MP's also voted against it.
If there's enough of an uproar about it, it won't take much before some of those voting for it starts worrying about their re-election and vote against it if it's sent back to the Commons.
Except it's not unwritten. All of what's considered part of UK constitutional law is written in the form of acts, treaties and to a very limited extent precedent.
(IANAL, but I'm married to one, and one of the first things they drill into UK law students when dealing with constitutional law is that they better not ever write on an exam that it's unwritten).
Re:Norway set aside the comittees no, and said yes
on
ISO Puts OOXML On Hold
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Torvald? Wrong Stoltenberg (PM's dad is Thorvald - the PM is Jens).
Most people have very specific ideas about what an interface should do. I've yet to find any editor that I've been happy with in terms of everything they offer. An editor that is programmable has a huge advantage in that respect by offering customization options that allows it to satisfy a whole lot of people that won't be satisfied otherwise. And with an editor like Emacs there are tons of ready made solutions available for you.
I don't particularly like emacs, but I've yet to find another editor that is both capable enough to replace it in terms of pure functionality and that runs fine in a terminal (I do the majority of my text editing via ssh connections to remote hosts, some on a different continent where latency is too high for me to even consider VNC or similar)
If someone come up with an editor that can beat Emacs on those points and that has a nicer UI, then I'd certainly consider paying for it... I do buy software when there are no comparable OSS - most notably the diagram editor OmniGraffle (don't even think of suggesting Dia or xFig - I really, really want an open source alternative, but they simply are nowhere near competing with OmniGraffle) - but it actually has to offer advantages to outweigh the lack of access to the source, which is for me very rarely the case.
The free market is efficient at allocating resources according to supply and demand.
To start with, there's no requirement that a society needs to be capitalist to use a working free market. There's no inherent contradiction in having a free market in a socialist society, for example - the thing that would define such a society as socialist would be how capital is allocated, while the selection of providers of services and products could be left to the free market.
Personally I'm a strong believer in socialized medicine, for example, but at the same time I wouldn't see a problem with a system where private providers competed for the "business" of people needing treatment, while the base payment is provided by government. After all, the goal of socialized medicine isn't for the state to run hospitals, it's for the state to guarantee a certain level of medical services to all.
You may notice that most European countries operate somewhere along a scale from completely government operated services, to a hybrid model. Some indeed shows signs of both - the UK National Health Service is one of the largest employers in the world, with 1.3 million employees (depending on who you believe and how you count it's it could be considered the 4th largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army, Walmart and Indian national Railways), at the same time a lot of services are outsourced to private companies, and both GP's and dentists that gets some or all of their income from the NHS compete for business.
I'm politically far to the left of the sitting UK Labour government, yet I actually wish they'd open up larger parts (most) of the NHS to free market pressures, as long as they keep their eyes on the goal of providing top quality healthcare for everyone.
In fact, some would argue that a lot of government intervention that they support should be done in the form of markets. CO2 quotas being one example: Create a competition driven market to achieve the government goals rather than set hard requirements, as it acts as an incentive for innovative solutions that you're unlikely to have thought of from the outset.
But apart from all of this, which is not dependent on a capitalist society (to make that clearer: none of this require private ownership of capital even - a free market can still function in a society where all actors are private citizens or publicly owned companies instead of privately owned), a free market is only effectively allocating resources when two conditions are met:
It is actually free. That means it almost inevitably need to be regulated to prevent monopolies etc.. Free != unregulated. On the contrary, the part of "free" that is important is unhindered competition. Unhindered both by government and by abuse of dominant positions, or inefficiencies introduced by government will just be replaced by inefficiencies introduced by dominant players.
When the immediate needs of actors serve their long term needs.
Looking at for example the cellphone and broadband markets you see a classic example of when more regulation actually contribute to more competition, because it prevents monopolies from strangling the market:
Several European countries have extensive unbundling of services baked into their laws. In Norway, for example, the network operators are required by law to offer unhindered access to their networks by third parties at "cost plus" terms (they can charge their cost plus up to a certain margin), and at the same time all operators are limited as to how long contract periods they can require as part of handset bundles.
This has created a massively competitive market for operators, with a large number of "virtual operators" that don't own their own network, and at least one operator with only a limited network that depends on roaming in rural areas. In all I believe there are more than 40 GSM and 3G operators in Norway, with a population of about 4 million. That's a testament to successful re
I've traveled quite a lot in Europe over the last 25 years, and yet I've never had a problem finding people who speak English everywhere I've gone. Now, if they don't like you they might not want to speak English to you, but the trick to avoid that problem is to not act like an arrogant prick, and ideally to try to speak the local language, however limited your skills are, first. I find trying to speak the local language works everywhere in the world - when you do people tend to fall over themselves trying to be friendly and helpful, and suddenly people put a hell of a lot more effort into speaking understandable English to you.
It's been 15 years since I last came across anyone in mainland Europe that didn't speak any English at all - a very helpful French shop owner in a tiny town in Provence that, when he realized we were talking past each-other with my limited French, stopped a couple of random people who were passing by his shop and got them to translate.
On my last proper visit to Paris a couple of years ago it had been 12 years since last time I'd spent any amount of time there (I'd been on a couple of business trips where I spent 3-4 hours in town and then went back to London) in fact, I find it hard to practice my French as contrary to my last holiday there every French person I came across switched to English the second I had problems finding the right word, or butchered their language too much (my French teacher used to say that the one thing you should always make sure to get right in France is the sounds - if you pronounce things correctly you'll get away with almost anything - so far I think she's been right)
LA to San Jose is too far unless there's enough other attractive destinations in between to make it sustainable.
If there's one thing worth learning from trains in Europe it's that high speed train routes are mainly competitive if they're short enough that their lower speed (compared to planes) doesn't cancel out the advantage of shorter travel to/from the city centres and reduced security/checkin times.
London to Paris for example is very competitive in time:
The stations on either end are in the city centres, and you only need to show up 30 minutes before the train leaves, meaning that from leaving home in London I can be in the centre of Paris in less than 4 hours.
Compare to a plane from London Heathrow, where I'd have to leave home about 3 hours before the plane leaves due to checkin time and travel, and it'd take me a further hour or so from disembarking at Paris CDG to stepping off a train in the city centre. So I'm above 4 hours before even counting the flight.
But if I were to go to, say Nice (south coast of France, it's not nearly as attractive anymore, as the flight is only about 20-30 minutes longer, but it adds hours (and a change) to the train ride.
20 times as many people is highly unlikely. The French TGV for example can take around 550 passengers in a single bi-level train set, and while they have experimented with coupling multiple train sets together, it wasn't considered a good option due to the impracticalities of extremely long platforms.
In London passenger trains are typically 12 cars for congested lines, and that seems to be the practical limit in terms of length - on stations where entry to the platforms are from one end, people only bother walking to the other end if they arrive a long time before the train is due and/or they know their exit will be towards the other end (we're talking several minutes to walk along the train even at a high pace).
I'd be surprised if I'd see trains with much more than 1000-1200 passengers, and that would require bi-level trains and/or extreme length. Seeing as there's plenty of planes with passenger capacity above 400, 20 times would be 8000 passengers... Not going to happen.
And of course with even 1000-1200 passenger trains you WILL have to pay for a crew and more conductors on platforms etc.
Because of size and weight. I'm considering getting one of them, and I explicitly DON'T want a 14", and I want something around the 1kg mark. For my normal use I have a 15" Macbook Pro, but I'd like something I can comfortably bring around "everywhere" with me.
This is legally required throughout the EU, and it's part of the reason why the UK had to pass laws to require the use of metric in trade in the first place.
Nice try. In the UK at least the various ethnic groups have been jockeying for position as the "worst" group for a long time. A few years ago it was west-indian black boys that did worst. Lots of effort was put in to improve the situation, and then white boys suddenly did worst.
So "they" had a choice, and blaming minorities is just a way of deflecting from lack of investment in combating the real problems: Poverty - because the common theme when it comes to who underperfom is social situations, not race -, and too little investment in education.
Go to your local African food store and ask for Plaintain. Eat it (note that Plaintains are usually cooked first). Now you see why this is not going to be a problem.
Being married to an African woman (Nigerian to be precise), I've had the misfortune of tasting Plaintain, and while I don't mind most of her food (it's usually either too bland and uniformely textured or too spicy for me, but generally edible), with Plaintain I see no redeemable qualities.
It's a very acquired taste, as a lot of African staple food, and it's certainly no replacement for the types of Banana exported to the west.
Slashdot Mirror
We had a re-implementation of the then-current flash running on a slow 486-level Cyrix back in 1999 for a "webpad" product that was never launched. SOME features of flash require quite a bit of CPU these days, but most of it really doesn't.
... or does the author of this tool seemingly not realize that Google Trends reports volume of searches, while what he's tracking is amount of documents indexed for a search term, and that there's no basis for assuming the two are correlated in a meaningful way?
Most game worlds are polygon based because that's what works with current engines. Nobody would start rewriting their current games for a system like this, but next time someone rewrite a significant portion of their engines or write a new engine, they might look at whether raytracing is becoming viable for them. Sooner or later it will be. Once it's viable, it's a question of whether it delivers as good or better quality and whether it can potentially cut their development times.
The number of hacks to get anything resembling realistic scenes with rasterization is just so staggeringly high, and given the performance of current systems it's only a question of when raytracing will be "fast enough" to deliver better results in far less development time than what rasterization does.
So Intels current demo uses 16 cores. We buy servers with 8 cores now for less than $2k. Give it a couple more years and you'll start seeing consumer systems that are getting fast enough.
And the nice things about raytracing is that it scales almost linearly with the number of cores.
You're assuming the tool would only test connections to Google. There's no reason to assume that.
It is called "asking the recipient to confirm that they agree to the terms before mailing out the discs".
That's all it takes: The moment the recipient have agreed to abide by certain terms in order to receive the disc, then the sender would have a legal claim if they try to resell it.
To see why this was the RIGHT ruling, consider this: If a sender could enter you into a contract just by sending you an item, people would start just shipping you random items with a "contract" requiring you to purchase the item from them at outrageous prices, and any number of stupid things like that.
If you get them to mail it to you, and you truly did nothing to solicit it, then yes, you'd be legally protected. Which doesn't sound very likely.
I don't disagree with you regarding Labour becoming more authoritarian - I'm far left wing, and I'd rather have the Liberal Democrats in power than Labour - but to pretend that the Tories have historically been against government interference in civil liberties is pretty ignorant. They just want to interfere in different areas.
Withholding Royal Assent would cause a slight delay and creating a media frenzy. It might be enough to cause some MP's to change their minds, but it would also seriously jeopardize the future of the monarchy.
The way parliament has gotten unfettered power in the UK has been by using the power it did have to hint, threaten or force the monarchs into yielding more and more of their power, and they have not been shy of doing it - the monarchy in the UK is there because the British rather enjoy tradition and because the current monarch is putting on a decent show and not being a bother. If she does start being a bother, it would likely start a process towards the monarchy at the very least being stripped of the last vestiges of influence.
The House of Lords aren't "rulers". They don't even have any power to prevent the House of Commons from passing a law - the Parliament Act of 1911 (and it's subsequent replacements) effectively took away the Lords power by asserting the supremacy of the Commons and allowing them to override the Lords at any point. It is considered bad form to do so without trying to address the concerns raised by the Lords and voting on an act again in both chambers, and so it's only been used a handful of times since 1911, but it's up to the Commons.
Even before the Parliament Act the Lords had for a long time had their powers severely restricted, as the governments of the time tended to have ways of forcing the Lords into submission on more than one occasion. The Parliament Act itself was passed, after having previously been rejected by the Lords, by getting George V to agree to create a large number of new liberal peers (that would then get seats in the Lords) to essentially stack the Lords in favor of the Parliament Act.
We can argue about the benefit of having a non-elected chamber, but as non-elected chambers go, comparing the House of Lords to despotic rulers is at best ignorant.
If there's enough of an uproar about it, it won't take much before some of those voting for it starts worrying about their re-election and vote against it if it's sent back to the Commons.
(IANAL, but I'm married to one, and one of the first things they drill into UK law students when dealing with constitutional law is that they better not ever write on an exam that it's unwritten).
Torvald? Wrong Stoltenberg (PM's dad is Thorvald - the PM is Jens).
I don't particularly like emacs, but I've yet to find another editor that is both capable enough to replace it in terms of pure functionality and that runs fine in a terminal (I do the majority of my text editing via ssh connections to remote hosts, some on a different continent where latency is too high for me to even consider VNC or similar)
If someone come up with an editor that can beat Emacs on those points and that has a nicer UI, then I'd certainly consider paying for it... I do buy software when there are no comparable OSS - most notably the diagram editor OmniGraffle (don't even think of suggesting Dia or xFig - I really, really want an open source alternative, but they simply are nowhere near competing with OmniGraffle) - but it actually has to offer advantages to outweigh the lack of access to the source, which is for me very rarely the case.
To start with, there's no requirement that a society needs to be capitalist to use a working free market. There's no inherent contradiction in having a free market in a socialist society, for example - the thing that would define such a society as socialist would be how capital is allocated, while the selection of providers of services and products could be left to the free market.
Personally I'm a strong believer in socialized medicine, for example, but at the same time I wouldn't see a problem with a system where private providers competed for the "business" of people needing treatment, while the base payment is provided by government. After all, the goal of socialized medicine isn't for the state to run hospitals, it's for the state to guarantee a certain level of medical services to all.
You may notice that most European countries operate somewhere along a scale from completely government operated services, to a hybrid model. Some indeed shows signs of both - the UK National Health Service is one of the largest employers in the world, with 1.3 million employees (depending on who you believe and how you count it's it could be considered the 4th largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army, Walmart and Indian national Railways), at the same time a lot of services are outsourced to private companies, and both GP's and dentists that gets some or all of their income from the NHS compete for business.
I'm politically far to the left of the sitting UK Labour government, yet I actually wish they'd open up larger parts (most) of the NHS to free market pressures, as long as they keep their eyes on the goal of providing top quality healthcare for everyone.
In fact, some would argue that a lot of government intervention that they support should be done in the form of markets. CO2 quotas being one example: Create a competition driven market to achieve the government goals rather than set hard requirements, as it acts as an incentive for innovative solutions that you're unlikely to have thought of from the outset.
But apart from all of this, which is not dependent on a capitalist society (to make that clearer: none of this require private ownership of capital even - a free market can still function in a society where all actors are private citizens or publicly owned companies instead of privately owned), a free market is only effectively allocating resources when two conditions are met:
Looking at for example the cellphone and broadband markets you see a classic example of when more regulation actually contribute to more competition, because it prevents monopolies from strangling the market:
Several European countries have extensive unbundling of services baked into their laws. In Norway, for example, the network operators are required by law to offer unhindered access to their networks by third parties at "cost plus" terms (they can charge their cost plus up to a certain margin), and at the same time all operators are limited as to how long contract periods they can require as part of handset bundles.
This has created a massively competitive market for operators, with a large number of "virtual operators" that don't own their own network, and at least one operator with only a limited network that depends on roaming in rural areas. In all I believe there are more than 40 GSM and 3G operators in Norway, with a population of about 4 million. That's a testament to successful re
It's been 15 years since I last came across anyone in mainland Europe that didn't speak any English at all - a very helpful French shop owner in a tiny town in Provence that, when he realized we were talking past each-other with my limited French, stopped a couple of random people who were passing by his shop and got them to translate.
On my last proper visit to Paris a couple of years ago it had been 12 years since last time I'd spent any amount of time there (I'd been on a couple of business trips where I spent 3-4 hours in town and then went back to London) in fact, I find it hard to practice my French as contrary to my last holiday there every French person I came across switched to English the second I had problems finding the right word, or butchered their language too much (my French teacher used to say that the one thing you should always make sure to get right in France is the sounds - if you pronounce things correctly you'll get away with almost anything - so far I think she's been right)
If there's one thing worth learning from trains in Europe it's that high speed train routes are mainly competitive if they're short enough that their lower speed (compared to planes) doesn't cancel out the advantage of shorter travel to/from the city centres and reduced security/checkin times.
London to Paris for example is very competitive in time:
The stations on either end are in the city centres, and you only need to show up 30 minutes before the train leaves, meaning that from leaving home in London I can be in the centre of Paris in less than 4 hours.
Compare to a plane from London Heathrow, where I'd have to leave home about 3 hours before the plane leaves due to checkin time and travel, and it'd take me a further hour or so from disembarking at Paris CDG to stepping off a train in the city centre. So I'm above 4 hours before even counting the flight.
But if I were to go to, say Nice (south coast of France, it's not nearly as attractive anymore, as the flight is only about 20-30 minutes longer, but it adds hours (and a change) to the train ride.
In London passenger trains are typically 12 cars for congested lines, and that seems to be the practical limit in terms of length - on stations where entry to the platforms are from one end, people only bother walking to the other end if they arrive a long time before the train is due and/or they know their exit will be towards the other end (we're talking several minutes to walk along the train even at a high pace).
I'd be surprised if I'd see trains with much more than 1000-1200 passengers, and that would require bi-level trains and/or extreme length. Seeing as there's plenty of planes with passenger capacity above 400, 20 times would be 8000 passengers... Not going to happen.
And of course with even 1000-1200 passenger trains you WILL have to pay for a crew and more conductors on platforms etc.
You're Too late (sort of - just an interpreter)
Because of size and weight. I'm considering getting one of them, and I explicitly DON'T want a 14", and I want something around the 1kg mark. For my normal use I have a 15" Macbook Pro, but I'd like something I can comfortably bring around "everywhere" with me.
This is legally required throughout the EU, and it's part of the reason why the UK had to pass laws to require the use of metric in trade in the first place.
So "they" had a choice, and blaming minorities is just a way of deflecting from lack of investment in combating the real problems: Poverty - because the common theme when it comes to who underperfom is social situations, not race -, and too little investment in education.
Being married to an African woman (Nigerian to be precise), I've had the misfortune of tasting Plaintain, and while I don't mind most of her food (it's usually either too bland and uniformely textured or too spicy for me, but generally edible), with Plaintain I see no redeemable qualities.
It's a very acquired taste, as a lot of African staple food, and it's certainly no replacement for the types of Banana exported to the west.
You wouldn't like this then. A Swedish company is offering freeze drying of corpses as a more environmentally friendly alternative to cremation.
There simply isn't any.