How about Kobol? It comes with a compiler and an IDE, or you can use plugins with Eclipse. It runs on Linux, Windows, and (they promise in the near future) Mac OS X. I wonder how theKompany has been doing selling this product?
No, only a facsimile of an artistic work can be exchanged over the internet.
There are two kinds of works produced by artists: ones that are easily digitized and copied and ones that are not. They are both valuable to society, and both equally worthy of the name "art".
Some types of artists produce more of one, and some produce more of the other. Artists such as sculptors who produce hard-to-copy works can continue to use the copyright system as it was designed (...until we get our 3D printers!). But artists such as movie directors who produce nothing that is hard to duplicate will have a hard time surviving when all their works can be had for free over the Internet. Artists who produce both kinds of works equally will have their revenue suddenly cut in half.
The government would like to encourage the production of easily-copied works. Copyright isn't a good solution to the problem because it requires us to enforce the law in a heavy-handed way and cripple technology, losing many of its benefits. In addition, even the heavy-handed law enforcement may fail, making copyright basically useless. Abolishing copyright with no replacement isn't a good solution because that would be a serious disincentive for the production of easily-copied works, which are valuable to society. This system seems better than both alternatives to me.
Yes, but giving artists money costs us money, and therefore we won't do it without an incentive. The incentive used to be that we would get a copy of the artistic work, but on the Internet where any artistic work can be copied instantly for free that incentive is out the window. Using one of these vouchers costs nothing to the person using it, so artists can still get money from us even though we have less of a reason to pay them because we can get their works for free.
When the artists' works are free, the only reasons we have to pay them are our sense of fairness (the author deserves to get paid) and to encourage more works (if the author gets paid, he will produce more cool stuff). These reasons aren't enough to make us spend our own money, but we'll happily spend someone else's money if it costs nothing to ourselves. That's what these vouchers are: a way to spend someone else's money on supporting artists that you like.
Wow, Blender3d.org wins the award for "coolest non-flash website pop-up menus". Those menus are awesome, and they even work in Mozilla and Konqueror! I may have to steal them for my site.
What's unreasonable is that the flag *can't* enforce those kind of restrictions. The only way to enforce those kinds of restrictions is: A. make it illegal to sell any device that outputs flagged programs in analog form,
B. make it illegal to sell any device that captures and saves flagged programs in their original unencrypted form (adding encryption would be necessary to enforce the restrictions), and C. make it illegal to create software that unencrypts HDTV programs without somehow checking that you are "authorized" to view the program.
Let me list the problems with this scheme. Firstly, shows flagged with this flag are not encrypted, so currently available hardware that does not follow these restrictions will be able to recieve and copy programs marked with this flag. Already you've got millions of devices that would have to be made illegal for this scheme to work! Secondly, illegal hardware that doesn't follow these restrictions will always be available on the black market (or legal hardware that can be hacked or converter boxes that strip the broadcast bit or modchips); and the thing about Internet distribution is that once one person has obtained an unprotected copy of something, they can easily distribute it all over the world. This will do nothing to stop Internet redistribution of HDTV movie broadcasts or Simpsons episodes stripped of commercials. Thirdly, this leaves Linux out in the cold again, with no support for the encryption used in broadcast-flag-compliant HDTV cards (until someone inevitably breaks the encryption, rendering it useless). Fourthly, there is no standard encryption for HDTV content, so TV tuner card manufacturers will have to invent their own, making everyone's products and software incompatible with everyone else's. Furthermore, having multiple encryption systems increases the probability that one of them will be fatally flawed. Need I go on?
Interesting. I'd never heard of Maxima or JACAL before, it seems like they could be useful. I looked for free symbolic math software before and didn't find much, I guess I missed those.
Octave is fine and all, but it doesn't really do the same things as a TI-89 (which is identical to the 92 except for the case and screen size, by the way). Octave, being a clone of Matlab, is good for numerical calculations, but the 89/92 can do symbolic algebra and calculus. This makes it a lot more useful for students in math courses. Now if there was an open-source clone of Maple or Mathematica, that would beat the 89/92. But Octave isn't a replacement for Maple or Mathematica.
I've seen cooler things than that; how about a more practical device simulator? Virtual TI emulates all TI graphing calculator models. When you open it up you get a window shaped just like the actual calculator, with clickable buttons. Using Virtual TI is exactly the same as using the real calculator, only faster because you can type with the keyboard and use your Athlon to do the calculations. The TI-89 has symbolic algebra and calculus capabilities so it's actually much better than any Windows calculator application I've ever used. It can calculate things like the integral of (sin(x)tan(x))^2 dx for you. Of course, using a calculator ROM without owning the calculator is illegal...
Hm, I hadn't considered hotmail. It does appear to be the majority of msn.com traffic. hotmail.msn.com is visited by 76% of all visitors to *.msn.com). Search.msn.com is only visited by 7% of visitors to msn.com. That still gives it over 10 times more monthly visitors than Slashdot. I find it hard to believe that that many people would choose search.msn.com over google voluntarily. They just use it because it's the default or because they typed an address wrong and IE sends them there automatically to get more ad exposures (it's almost worse than Verisign's SiteFinder).
Wow. You are so right. It's actually ironic. They've been sitting around waiting for "Interactive TV" to become the next best thing, and now that it's here nobody noticed. Interactive TV is here and it's even better than everyone thought it would be. Visions of interactive TV as icons that pop up over your program presenting you with the "opportunity" to learn more about "special offers" are wrongheaded. Video games are interactive TV. Anything less is doomed to failure.
Oh, there must be another reason msn.com is the second most visited site on the Internet, above Google. Must be their wonderful, uncluttered, advertising-free portal site that everyone loves, and the accurate, unbiased search tool. NOT. MSN's integration with Windows is the only reason it's the second most visited site on the Internet. I think Google and Yahoo should start another antitrust suit. This is a classic example of Microsoft abusing its monopoly position to extend its reach into other business areas. I don't see how they could possibly lose.
Re:It beats etching boards for the home experiment
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Circuits Everywhere
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but the packages aren't the size of a whole page. There is hardly any drift on small scales so any one component would match up fine. If you had a single component that was 10 inches long that needed to connect to a paper circuit with smaller than 1mm pads, then the pads might not match up. But who wants that? Maybe if you wanted to make a robotic assembly line that always put components in the same place down to the millimeter across the whole page, you would have problems. But if you're making an assembly line you're going to be using a higher quality printer than your "we're giving them away to sell cartriges" type printer. Accuracy shouldn't be a problem on those.
Re:It beats etching boards for the home experiment
on
Circuits Everywhere
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· Score: 1
Printers don't drift more than a few millimeters per page at the very most. If you make the pads larger than a millimeter or so and the components are smaller than a whole page, you won't have any problems at all. I thought that was pretty obvious.
P.S. You might want to talk to a psychologist about that anger problem you have. Too much stress can give you a heart attack, you know.
Re:It beats etching boards for the home experiment
on
Circuits Everywhere
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· Score: 1
Why would drift be a problem? As long as things match up on a small scale, everything should work fine.
Actually, I was thinking "Tide" before I read the first item in the list. Tide's marketing is a little too good; I think you need a better example. And put the list before the question too, or maybe put the question in the middle of the list.
Well, I certainly hope that they throw this mockup away and start on a new one.
I'm well aware of the arguments over the GTK file selector, and I already know that this was worthy of a Slashdot story. I just don't like the mockup, that's all.
I do think that a full-blown explorer instance in the file dialog is a good thing, actually. It is an interface for navigating through files that users are already familiar with. There's no extra learning curve, and all the features of the normal file browsing windows are accessible. Why make a totally separate interface for the file dialog? It causes code duplication and it causes confusion among users who must learn two separate interfaces for file browsing. I don't see any benefit to inventing a new interface for the file dialog. In fact, I would love to have the preview window from the KDE file dialog in regular Konqueror windows, and even the quick-access buttons on the side might be nice. Having only one interface to file browsing is the way to go.
The KDE file dialog is simple to use. It works just like a browser with forward and back buttons, except it has a preview pane and a pane on the left for large icons of frequently used locations, both of which are practically required in a modern file dialog. The dialog works exactly how you would expect it to work. There's no learning curve at all. When features can be added without detracting from usability, then they should be added, because features are good. They help us get our work done faster.
This new GTK file dialog, OTOH, looks like it will have a learning curve. It doesn't work like most other file dialogs, and it doesn't use icons on the files. Plus it has less features than a normal file dialog. What the GTK folks have done here is *remove* features while *decreasing* usability! Exactly the opposite of what you want in both respects. Simplicity is not the end-all of computer interfaces. Usability is what counts. Plus I would argue that this dialog is not simple. For one thing, it contains a treeview, and for another, the main part of the file dialog is connected to the treeview. If you click something in the treeview, the other pane changes completely. This kind of invisible connection is confusing to unsophisticated users, which is the type GNOME is trying to target with all this simplicity stuff.
...until some warez group releases a tool that scrapes Amazon's site for book pages automatically for you. Or uses such a tool to extract a recent bestseller from Amazon and releases it in a.rar file on some bittorrent site. Then it becomes much easier to read an entire book through this service. It would be pretty much just like reading a regular ebook.
The authors are right on this. A service that allows Internet access to a scanned image of an arbitrary page of any book is just begging to be misused. The service doesn't require images of the actual pages to be served. Removing this feature would allow the search to still be useful but would remove the possibility of people downloading the entire book for free.
Yes, you're right. Technically, nothing is a "power source" per se, since energy is neither created or destroyed. However, it is convenient to call certain things "power sources" when they convert useless energy into energy we can use. This technology does that, but only on a small scale and not very efficiently. The article is worded to make it sound like this could rival coal or hydroelectric turbine power as a method of generating electricity on a large scale. At the moment, it doesn't look like it can do that at all.
As for whether this is misleading or not, you just have to look at the root post of this thread, or others on this topic, to see that it was misleading.
Whoa there, buddy. Looks like you have a little angst problem. You should probably get professional help for that.
Anyway, I'm not saying that it's inaccurate to call it a power source, as you'll see if you reread my post. All I'm saying is that it's misleading. You only need to look at the other comments here (like the root post of this thread) to see that many people were fooled into thinking this is something that it is not (a new way of generating power on a large scale from water that's just lying around). The wording of the article is deliberately chosen to give that impression.
Secondly, this is indeed intended as a power storage technology, as you would have found if you actually understood the article. I think you're slighly confused: for a power storage technology you store the energy *before* it's produced, not after. They most certainly mention how the energy could be stored: "This technology could provide a new power source for devices such as mobile phones or calculators which could be charged up by pumping water to high pressure." Half the article talks about how this could be a replacement for batteries. Did you totally miss that part or what?
I do realize that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's not really valid to say that anything is a "power source" at all; it's just a convenient way to describe things that convert useless energy into useful energy. When you refer to "power source" in a general sense, the implication is that you're talking about a large-scale process for turning naturally occurring energy into useful energy (electricity). The way this article is worded is seemingly a deliberate attempt to make it sound like this discovery is more important than it is (by implying that it is a new way to generate power from water that's just lying around). You can't deny that many people thought that was what had been discovered; just look at the comments here (even the title of this post). Such misleading wording is typical of science journalism, and it annoys me to no end. It causes the public's faith in science to falter when every little discovery is hyped up like it's going to save the human race and then forgotten. You probably won't hear anything about this technique for the next 10 years, and if it turns out the efficiency can't be increased by ten times at least then you'll never hear about it again.
The article title is misleading. This appears to be a new way to generate electricity from a pressure difference, using water flowing through small channels. It is not a method of generating electricity "from water," it is a method of generating electricity with water. The BBC article is guilty too, they misleadingly call it a "power source" when it is clearly a power storage technology (unless you have pre-pressurized water, maybe from geothermal activity or something). These few sentences from the article reveal the true nature of this discovery:
What Professor Kostiuk and his team have achieved is create a kind of turbine device that does not have moving parts. "Efficiency is a fraction of 1% and right now we are trying to fully understand the characteristics of such devices. The real goal is to find ways of improving its efficiency to around four to 16% to compete with other energy sources."
Numbers may be misleading, but at least they are objective. Personal experience is misleading and subjective. It is often affected more by factors that are unrelated to the actual sound than by the sound itself, even for self-proclaimed "audiophiles" with "golden ears". The only thing in audio that is neither misleading nor subjective is double-blind listening tests. Unfortunately, they are hard to do and often are contrary to what audiophiles like to believe, so they don't happen very often.
Slashdot Mirror
How about Kobol? It comes with a compiler and an IDE, or you can use plugins with Eclipse. It runs on Linux, Windows, and (they promise in the near future) Mac OS X. I wonder how theKompany has been doing selling this product?
There are two kinds of works produced by artists: ones that are easily digitized and copied and ones that are not. They are both valuable to society, and both equally worthy of the name "art".
Some types of artists produce more of one, and some produce more of the other. Artists such as sculptors who produce hard-to-copy works can continue to use the copyright system as it was designed (...until we get our 3D printers!). But artists such as movie directors who produce nothing that is hard to duplicate will have a hard time surviving when all their works can be had for free over the Internet. Artists who produce both kinds of works equally will have their revenue suddenly cut in half.
The government would like to encourage the production of easily-copied works. Copyright isn't a good solution to the problem because it requires us to enforce the law in a heavy-handed way and cripple technology, losing many of its benefits. In addition, even the heavy-handed law enforcement may fail, making copyright basically useless. Abolishing copyright with no replacement isn't a good solution because that would be a serious disincentive for the production of easily-copied works, which are valuable to society. This system seems better than both alternatives to me.
When the artists' works are free, the only reasons we have to pay them are our sense of fairness (the author deserves to get paid) and to encourage more works (if the author gets paid, he will produce more cool stuff). These reasons aren't enough to make us spend our own money, but we'll happily spend someone else's money if it costs nothing to ourselves. That's what these vouchers are: a way to spend someone else's money on supporting artists that you like.
Wow, Blender3d.org wins the award for "coolest non-flash website pop-up menus". Those menus are awesome, and they even work in Mozilla and Konqueror! I may have to steal them for my site.
A. make it illegal to sell any device that outputs flagged programs in analog form,
B. make it illegal to sell any device that captures and saves flagged programs in their original unencrypted form (adding encryption would be necessary to enforce the restrictions), and
C. make it illegal to create software that unencrypts HDTV programs without somehow checking that you are "authorized" to view the program.
Let me list the problems with this scheme. Firstly, shows flagged with this flag are not encrypted, so currently available hardware that does not follow these restrictions will be able to recieve and copy programs marked with this flag. Already you've got millions of devices that would have to be made illegal for this scheme to work! Secondly, illegal hardware that doesn't follow these restrictions will always be available on the black market (or legal hardware that can be hacked or converter boxes that strip the broadcast bit or modchips); and the thing about Internet distribution is that once one person has obtained an unprotected copy of something, they can easily distribute it all over the world. This will do nothing to stop Internet redistribution of HDTV movie broadcasts or Simpsons episodes stripped of commercials. Thirdly, this leaves Linux out in the cold again, with no support for the encryption used in broadcast-flag-compliant HDTV cards (until someone inevitably breaks the encryption, rendering it useless). Fourthly, there is no standard encryption for HDTV content, so TV tuner card manufacturers will have to invent their own, making everyone's products and software incompatible with everyone else's. Furthermore, having multiple encryption systems increases the probability that one of them will be fatally flawed. Need I go on?
Interesting. I'd never heard of Maxima or JACAL before, it seems like they could be useful. I looked for free symbolic math software before and didn't find much, I guess I missed those.
Octave is fine and all, but it doesn't really do the same things as a TI-89 (which is identical to the 92 except for the case and screen size, by the way). Octave, being a clone of Matlab, is good for numerical calculations, but the 89/92 can do symbolic algebra and calculus. This makes it a lot more useful for students in math courses. Now if there was an open-source clone of Maple or Mathematica, that would beat the 89/92. But Octave isn't a replacement for Maple or Mathematica.
I've seen cooler things than that; how about a more practical device simulator? Virtual TI emulates all TI graphing calculator models. When you open it up you get a window shaped just like the actual calculator, with clickable buttons. Using Virtual TI is exactly the same as using the real calculator, only faster because you can type with the keyboard and use your Athlon to do the calculations. The TI-89 has symbolic algebra and calculus capabilities so it's actually much better than any Windows calculator application I've ever used. It can calculate things like the integral of (sin(x)tan(x))^2 dx for you. Of course, using a calculator ROM without owning the calculator is illegal...
Hm, I hadn't considered hotmail. It does appear to be the majority of msn.com traffic. hotmail.msn.com is visited by 76% of all visitors to *.msn.com). Search.msn.com is only visited by 7% of visitors to msn.com. That still gives it over 10 times more monthly visitors than Slashdot. I find it hard to believe that that many people would choose search.msn.com over google voluntarily. They just use it because it's the default or because they typed an address wrong and IE sends them there automatically to get more ad exposures (it's almost worse than Verisign's SiteFinder).
Wow. You are so right. It's actually ironic. They've been sitting around waiting for "Interactive TV" to become the next best thing, and now that it's here nobody noticed. Interactive TV is here and it's even better than everyone thought it would be. Visions of interactive TV as icons that pop up over your program presenting you with the "opportunity" to learn more about "special offers" are wrongheaded. Video games are interactive TV. Anything less is doomed to failure.
Oh, there must be another reason msn.com is the second most visited site on the Internet, above Google. Must be their wonderful, uncluttered, advertising-free portal site that everyone loves, and the accurate, unbiased search tool. NOT. MSN's integration with Windows is the only reason it's the second most visited site on the Internet. I think Google and Yahoo should start another antitrust suit. This is a classic example of Microsoft abusing its monopoly position to extend its reach into other business areas. I don't see how they could possibly lose.
Yeah, but the packages aren't the size of a whole page. There is hardly any drift on small scales so any one component would match up fine. If you had a single component that was 10 inches long that needed to connect to a paper circuit with smaller than 1mm pads, then the pads might not match up. But who wants that? Maybe if you wanted to make a robotic assembly line that always put components in the same place down to the millimeter across the whole page, you would have problems. But if you're making an assembly line you're going to be using a higher quality printer than your "we're giving them away to sell cartriges" type printer. Accuracy shouldn't be a problem on those.
P.S. You might want to talk to a psychologist about that anger problem you have. Too much stress can give you a heart attack, you know.
Why would drift be a problem? As long as things match up on a small scale, everything should work fine.
Actually, I was thinking "Tide" before I read the first item in the list. Tide's marketing is a little too good; I think you need a better example. And put the list before the question too, or maybe put the question in the middle of the list.
I'm well aware of the arguments over the GTK file selector, and I already know that this was worthy of a Slashdot story. I just don't like the mockup, that's all.
I do think that a full-blown explorer instance in the file dialog is a good thing, actually. It is an interface for navigating through files that users are already familiar with. There's no extra learning curve, and all the features of the normal file browsing windows are accessible. Why make a totally separate interface for the file dialog? It causes code duplication and it causes confusion among users who must learn two separate interfaces for file browsing. I don't see any benefit to inventing a new interface for the file dialog. In fact, I would love to have the preview window from the KDE file dialog in regular Konqueror windows, and even the quick-access buttons on the side might be nice. Having only one interface to file browsing is the way to go.
This new GTK file dialog, OTOH, looks like it will have a learning curve. It doesn't work like most other file dialogs, and it doesn't use icons on the files. Plus it has less features than a normal file dialog. What the GTK folks have done here is *remove* features while *decreasing* usability! Exactly the opposite of what you want in both respects. Simplicity is not the end-all of computer interfaces. Usability is what counts. Plus I would argue that this dialog is not simple. For one thing, it contains a treeview, and for another, the main part of the file dialog is connected to the treeview. If you click something in the treeview, the other pane changes completely. This kind of invisible connection is confusing to unsophisticated users, which is the type GNOME is trying to target with all this simplicity stuff.
The authors are right on this. A service that allows Internet access to a scanned image of an arbitrary page of any book is just begging to be misused. The service doesn't require images of the actual pages to be served. Removing this feature would allow the search to still be useful but would remove the possibility of people downloading the entire book for free.
You can set it up so that the power button does a proper shutdown instead of immediately cutting the power. Some distros do that by default.
As for whether this is misleading or not, you just have to look at the root post of this thread, or others on this topic, to see that it was misleading.
Anyway, I'm not saying that it's inaccurate to call it a power source, as you'll see if you reread my post. All I'm saying is that it's misleading. You only need to look at the other comments here (like the root post of this thread) to see that many people were fooled into thinking this is something that it is not (a new way of generating power on a large scale from water that's just lying around). The wording of the article is deliberately chosen to give that impression.
Secondly, this is indeed intended as a power storage technology, as you would have found if you actually understood the article. I think you're slighly confused: for a power storage technology you store the energy *before* it's produced, not after. They most certainly mention how the energy could be stored: "This technology could provide a new power source for devices such as mobile phones or calculators which could be charged up by pumping water to high pressure." Half the article talks about how this could be a replacement for batteries. Did you totally miss that part or what?
I do realize that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's not really valid to say that anything is a "power source" at all; it's just a convenient way to describe things that convert useless energy into useful energy. When you refer to "power source" in a general sense, the implication is that you're talking about a large-scale process for turning naturally occurring energy into useful energy (electricity). The way this article is worded is seemingly a deliberate attempt to make it sound like this discovery is more important than it is (by implying that it is a new way to generate power from water that's just lying around). You can't deny that many people thought that was what had been discovered; just look at the comments here (even the title of this post). Such misleading wording is typical of science journalism, and it annoys me to no end. It causes the public's faith in science to falter when every little discovery is hyped up like it's going to save the human race and then forgotten. You probably won't hear anything about this technique for the next 10 years, and if it turns out the efficiency can't be increased by ten times at least then you'll never hear about it again.
Numbers may be misleading, but at least they are objective. Personal experience is misleading and subjective. It is often affected more by factors that are unrelated to the actual sound than by the sound itself, even for self-proclaimed "audiophiles" with "golden ears". The only thing in audio that is neither misleading nor subjective is double-blind listening tests. Unfortunately, they are hard to do and often are contrary to what audiophiles like to believe, so they don't happen very often.