If you think about it, probably the only parts of the entire Saturn V setup that actually made the full round trip from the earth to the lunar surface and back were some photographic film, space suits and the astronauts themselves. Kinda strange.
AFAIKT, SuSE used to ship with the patented Freetype bytecode interpreter turned on. A couple of releases ago, the fonts suddenly looked worse because they turned it off. (At least this seems to be what happened when I did some searching on the subject.)
However, if you read a few HOWTOs, you can install the source RPM, change a #define to turn it back on, recompile and reinstall. I think it's a big improvement, but people seem to have varying opinions on whether the patented or non-patented hinting looks better.
Personally, I prefer MS Verdana over any of the fonts supplied with SuSE (although the Bitsream fonts are a close second). Luckily, Microsoft was generous enough to release their fonts with a perpetual free redistribution license, so getting them is no problem. SuSE also includes an RPM that automatically downloads the MS fonts (the license doesn't allow actual bundling with the OS). I've never experienced any instability caused by the fonts.
Seriously, I'm happy I live in a country that will protect me from the ROUGE RUBICS CUBE!
This just incident just reinforces Kerry's point in the debates that 90% of the cargo containers in our nation's ports aren't even being inspected.
If we had adequate inspections in our ports, these rogue cubes would never have penetrated so deeply into our homeland. Not intercepting these cubes until after the general public has possibly suffered exposure to them is completely unacceptable.
OK, I just pulled out my cable contract and reviewed it. It mentions nothing about not recording PPV. (Although it does go on at length about not showing the PPV in a commercial establishment.) I can get PPV by pushing a button on my remote; I don't need to sign any additional agreements.
Maybe I could have signed away my fair use rights on a contract, but in my case, I *didn't*. It is pretty cut and dried: I the current law gives me the right to timeshift the content I purchased, and I never relinquished that right.
Then the service provider in the US dries up and forces you to register with them every 3 months with looming promises of having to pay for the right to access it.
Are you talking about zap2it? They still let you sign up for free. If they ever stop, people in the US will go back to using screen scrapers like people in other countries. Where's the problem?
With Pay Per View, you are QUITE SPECIFICALLY buying a license to watch a movie once. You are PAYing PER VIEW.
That may be what the provider intends, but unless there is law backing that up, I am entitled record it and view it later as I please.
Standard copyright case law allows me to timeshift, and I didn't sign any contract with the cable company that said I specifically couldn't record a PPV show.
There's no ambiguity about buying physical media vs the content, about buying a license, and so on. You're paying to have a movie playing to your sat/cable box at a specific time and date. Done.
As I just pointed out, you're just plain wrong. I don't need a license as an end user because standard copyright law allows me to timeshift the show without one. There is no license. I payed to have the movie play on my box, and I'm entitled to save it for later viewing.
X86s have SIMD units too; they are comparable to the PPC units. The PPC may have better CPI as you point out, but many X86s go to higher frequencies. The difference means little to the end user.
Any difference in "experience" is most likely due to a combination of your OS and the placebo effect.
Yes, most CPUs have converged to a very similar feature set. However, I don't think that you can blame it on the "X86ness" of it. It's just because those are the features that seem to work with today's chip-making technology. It's probably the same reason that all modern jet airliners look almost exactly the same.
oh dear, again someone who doesnt; understand that exceptiosn are designed never to be thrown.
I disagree. Exceptions are appropriate in many cases for conditions like "file not found" errors. These can be expected to happen in the ordinary operation of the program.
The whole advantage of exceptions is removing the need for complex deeply-nested if (errorcode) statements or error-prone goto exit jumps. It also removes the dilemma of functions returning useful information and an error code at the same time (without exceptions APIs usually provide a messed-up combination of in-band and out-of band information).
If you never use exceptions, you have to deal with all of that garbage even if the language is prepared to help you. Why not use the feature to clean up your code? Handle errors in a few choice spots where you're prepared to deal with them, not on every alternate line of your app.
And x86 isn't bad, in itself... it's bad that it will be one of the few (only?) left. That annoys me. That people think it a good thing, that's plain frightening.
Can you name one feature (other than endianness or a few percent benchmark edge) that a user or even a C developer would notice that's different between an modern X86 CPU and any other modern CPU?
X86 is just an instruction bytecode format. The internals of today's X86 CPUs vary almost as much as the internals of CPUs with differring instruction sets.
Would I have ever owned a C64 for under $1000 bucks (at launch) if not in part for it's built-in BASIC interpreter by Micro Soft of Palo Alto?
Sure you would. Commodore would have picked up some other vendor because the barriers to entry in the system software market had not yet been erected. Any competent developer could have written 8K of code to implement a BASIC interpreter. I bought a Sinclair ZX81 for under $100 that used a non-Microsoft BASIC interpreter. No big deal.
plus you paid for a license for use of the game, subject to copyright restrictions.
Copyright law says nothing about arbitrary "license" restrictions imposed by the publisher. It does say that you get to use the CD, box and manuals you purchased.
The EULA may look like a contract, but it isn't worth the paper it's printed on because nobody signed it and you weren't allowed to read it before the transaction closed. So that's not a "license" either.
How do you leave your house each day when you are this consumed with fear? People like you are afraid of everything - you sit up at night thinking of new things to be afraid of. I doubt our forefathers foresaw a future of such utter wimps. Grow some balls.
The fear is not irrational. Statistically, you're more likely to die young in an auto accident (around 1% lifetime risk) than from any other single cause. Every month of every year as many people die in car accidents as in the 9/11 attacks. Even if terrorists got WMDs, they would have a hard time creating an overall lifetime risk that equals that of car accidents.
I do go out of the house despite these risks, but the risks placed on everyone don't need to be made worse just so YOU can selfishly watch fsking TV in your car, mkay? I don't need more balls, you need some priorities.
Having the video system turn off once the car starts moving over 3mph sounds like a great idea.
So now you're going to have a bunch of people who can't pull away from their TV show and remain at a dead stop long after the light has turned green. This will undoubtedly cause rear-end collisions and countless episodes of road rage.
Enabling drivers to squeeze in a couple more minutes of TV per day just isn't that crucial.
Subtract the output power from the input and supply power, and whats left (ignoring the small ammount that might be radiated as energy other than heat) turns to heat.
The only "power" coming out of the CPU is a few milliwatts of signal energy that is dissipated in the motherboard traces and interface chip receiver gates. It's negligible compared to the ~100W being fed into it. My "essentially" qualifier accounts for this detail.
Since floating point registers in most modern CPU's are 64-bit wide already.
Actually, since most modern CPUs are x86 variants, the floating point registers are usually 80 bits wide (and have been since the 1981 introduction of the 8087).
As far as "complex mathematical calculations" go, 64-bit integers aren't really that big a deal. It's pretty rare to need integers bigger than 2^32 but no bigger than 2^64; floating point usually handles big numbers more flexibly.
The big deal with 64-bit CPUs is 64-bit address pointers and operations on them (which usually aren't more complex than adding and shifting).
If the CPU was capable of turning 100 W of electricity into 100 W of heat while also doing any work at all (much less the very significant work a CPU does)
A CPU has no moving parts. It does zero thermodynamic work. Essentially all of the electricity being fed into the CPU is directly converted into heat.
The patterns of information computed by the CPU that you seem classify as "work" do not count in energy calculations. They cannot be converted back into any form of useful energy.
it's a windows world, and this is just a bad business decision
I'm not so sure that it's such a bad business decision. At this early stage in the HDTV market, the overlap between people who will be recording HDTV and people who can run Linux may be pretty high.
Moreover, to market it for Windows machines on a larger scale than the Linux market they would probably need to slog through the Microsoft programs to get the little "Designed for Windows" logos on their products (which could involve adding extra Redmond-approved DRM hooks), and they would probably need to somehow break into the big retail sales channels to make the extra effort worth it. All that might be a pretty big capital investment. Maybe they see a niche where they can make some money without a lot of up-front investment.
50 years ago everybody *did* pay for their own healthcare plans.
50 years ago, there wasn't much that could be done for you beyond a couple of thousand dollars.
Most people could be expected to pay for their own healthcare.
Now it's not unheard of to spend more than 1 million dollars on a single patient (one of my former employers mentioned in a benefits meeting that they had 5 $1 million patients in the previous year). Any reasonable person needs to have insurance, unless they're willing to die for the principal of frugality.
Health savings accounts are fine, as long as everybody qualifies, and as long as they always come with full insurance past some deductible that most people can afford. I do think that all health insurance plans should be required to have a high deductible to encourage people to shop on price. However, I also think that one way or another, there should be a single risk pool that amortizes the risk evenly over the whole population. This would greatly reduce both the outrageous costs of accounting in the insurance industry and the stress most people needlessly experience when they change jobs.
Even Cuba, which is under an embargo that covers medical supplies, has almost as long of a lifespan as the average American does.
I wonder if that's at least partially because Cuba has been denied access to American hamburgers, potato chips, donuts and soda pop (not to mention 1/10 mile car trips)?
That being said no matter how you do it it'll be unfair. I personally happen to believe that it's *least* unfair when you directly pay for a service.
The percentage of people who have the personal resources to personally pay for the worst case health problems is in the low single digits. That means that health care gets rationed here in the USA, too. It's just a different system; people who have full-time jobs at large corporations usually get first priority. (Why does the size of your employer have anything to do with health care? Who knows.) Then come the perfectly healthy people who are allowed to buy individual policies, and people who work at small employers where none of their coworkers are too sick to lose the group plan. Lowest in the rationing pecking order are uninsured who rely on emergency room triage.
Oh, I forgot that half of the healthcare in this country is fully socialized. It's just for everyone who is old enough to get on medicare so that they can get free coveraged paid for by those of us who actually have to work (but don't get to actually benefit from the socialized healthcare we pay for ourselves).
At the end of the day, almost nobody is actually directly paying for their healthcare in the US anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think about it, probably the only parts of the entire Saturn V setup that actually made the full round trip from the earth to the lunar surface and back were some photographic film, space suits and the astronauts themselves. Kinda strange.
However, if you read a few HOWTOs, you can install the source RPM, change a #define to turn it back on, recompile and reinstall. I think it's a big improvement, but people seem to have varying opinions on whether the patented or non-patented hinting looks better.
Personally, I prefer MS Verdana over any of the fonts supplied with SuSE (although the Bitsream fonts are a close second). Luckily, Microsoft was generous enough to release their fonts with a perpetual free redistribution license, so getting them is no problem. SuSE also includes an RPM that automatically downloads the MS fonts (the license doesn't allow actual bundling with the OS). I've never experienced any instability caused by the fonts.
This just incident just reinforces Kerry's point in the debates that 90% of the cargo containers in our nation's ports aren't even being inspected.
If we had adequate inspections in our ports, these rogue cubes would never have penetrated so deeply into our homeland. Not intercepting these cubes until after the general public has possibly suffered exposure to them is completely unacceptable.
We may finally have found an ecologically compatible place to dispose of all of those unrecyclable #6 plastic containers and packing inserts.
Maybe I could have signed away my fair use rights on a contract, but in my case, I *didn't*. It is pretty cut and dried: I the current law gives me the right to timeshift the content I purchased, and I never relinquished that right.
Are you talking about zap2it? They still let you sign up for free. If they ever stop, people in the US will go back to using screen scrapers like people in other countries. Where's the problem?
That may be what the provider intends, but unless there is law backing that up, I am entitled record it and view it later as I please.
Standard copyright case law allows me to timeshift, and I didn't sign any contract with the cable company that said I specifically couldn't record a PPV show.
There's no ambiguity about buying physical media vs the content, about buying a license, and so on. You're paying to have a movie playing to your sat/cable box at a specific time and date. Done.
As I just pointed out, you're just plain wrong. I don't need a license as an end user because standard copyright law allows me to timeshift the show without one. There is no license. I payed to have the movie play on my box, and I'm entitled to save it for later viewing.
Any difference in "experience" is most likely due to a combination of your OS and the placebo effect.
Yes, most CPUs have converged to a very similar feature set. However, I don't think that you can blame it on the "X86ness" of it. It's just because those are the features that seem to work with today's chip-making technology. It's probably the same reason that all modern jet airliners look almost exactly the same.
I disagree. Exceptions are appropriate in many cases for conditions like "file not found" errors. These can be expected to happen in the ordinary operation of the program.
The whole advantage of exceptions is removing the need for complex deeply-nested if (errorcode) statements or error-prone goto exit jumps. It also removes the dilemma of functions returning useful information and an error code at the same time (without exceptions APIs usually provide a messed-up combination of in-band and out-of band information).
If you never use exceptions, you have to deal with all of that garbage even if the language is prepared to help you. Why not use the feature to clean up your code? Handle errors in a few choice spots where you're prepared to deal with them, not on every alternate line of your app.
Can you name one feature (other than endianness or a few percent benchmark edge) that a user or even a C developer would notice that's different between an modern X86 CPU and any other modern CPU?
X86 is just an instruction bytecode format. The internals of today's X86 CPUs vary almost as much as the internals of CPUs with differring instruction sets.
Sure you would. Commodore would have picked up some other vendor because the barriers to entry in the system software market had not yet been erected. Any competent developer could have written 8K of code to implement a BASIC interpreter. I bought a Sinclair ZX81 for under $100 that used a non-Microsoft BASIC interpreter. No big deal.
Copyright law says nothing about arbitrary "license" restrictions imposed by the publisher. It does say that you get to use the CD, box and manuals you purchased.
The EULA may look like a contract, but it isn't worth the paper it's printed on because nobody signed it and you weren't allowed to read it before the transaction closed. So that's not a "license" either.
The fear is not irrational. Statistically, you're more likely to die young in an auto accident (around 1% lifetime risk) than from any other single cause. Every month of every year as many people die in car accidents as in the 9/11 attacks. Even if terrorists got WMDs, they would have a hard time creating an overall lifetime risk that equals that of car accidents.
I do go out of the house despite these risks, but the risks placed on everyone don't need to be made worse just so YOU can selfishly watch fsking TV in your car, mkay? I don't need more balls, you need some priorities.
So now you're going to have a bunch of people who can't pull away from their TV show and remain at a dead stop long after the light has turned green. This will undoubtedly cause rear-end collisions and countless episodes of road rage.
Enabling drivers to squeeze in a couple more minutes of TV per day just isn't that crucial.
The only "power" coming out of the CPU is a few milliwatts of signal energy that is dissipated in the motherboard traces and interface chip receiver gates. It's negligible compared to the ~100W being fed into it. My "essentially" qualifier accounts for this detail.
Because bigger pointers eat more cache, and external memory bandwidth is already the biggest performance bottleneck in most systems.
Actually, since most modern CPUs are x86 variants, the floating point registers are usually 80 bits wide (and have been since the 1981 introduction of the 8087).
As far as "complex mathematical calculations" go, 64-bit integers aren't really that big a deal. It's pretty rare to need integers bigger than 2^32 but no bigger than 2^64; floating point usually handles big numbers more flexibly.
The big deal with 64-bit CPUs is 64-bit address pointers and operations on them (which usually aren't more complex than adding and shifting).
"Its" is also a possessive pronoun. So live with it.
A CPU has no moving parts. It does zero thermodynamic work. Essentially all of the electricity being fed into the CPU is directly converted into heat.
The patterns of information computed by the CPU that you seem classify as "work" do not count in energy calculations. They cannot be converted back into any form of useful energy.
As a taxpayer, I'm not. What we currently do with the shuttle could probably be done at 1/10 the cost if we used a more suitable launch system.
I'm not so sure that it's such a bad business decision. At this early stage in the HDTV market, the overlap between people who will be recording HDTV and people who can run Linux may be pretty high.
Moreover, to market it for Windows machines on a larger scale than the Linux market they would probably need to slog through the Microsoft programs to get the little "Designed for Windows" logos on their products (which could involve adding extra Redmond-approved DRM hooks), and they would probably need to somehow break into the big retail sales channels to make the extra effort worth it. All that might be a pretty big capital investment. Maybe they see a niche where they can make some money without a lot of up-front investment.
50 years ago, there wasn't much that could be done for you beyond a couple of thousand dollars. Most people could be expected to pay for their own healthcare.
Now it's not unheard of to spend more than 1 million dollars on a single patient (one of my former employers mentioned in a benefits meeting that they had 5 $1 million patients in the previous year). Any reasonable person needs to have insurance, unless they're willing to die for the principal of frugality.
Health savings accounts are fine, as long as everybody qualifies, and as long as they always come with full insurance past some deductible that most people can afford. I do think that all health insurance plans should be required to have a high deductible to encourage people to shop on price. However, I also think that one way or another, there should be a single risk pool that amortizes the risk evenly over the whole population. This would greatly reduce both the outrageous costs of accounting in the insurance industry and the stress most people needlessly experience when they change jobs.
I wonder if that's at least partially because Cuba has been denied access to American hamburgers, potato chips, donuts and soda pop (not to mention 1/10 mile car trips)?
The percentage of people who have the personal resources to personally pay for the worst case health problems is in the low single digits. That means that health care gets rationed here in the USA, too. It's just a different system; people who have full-time jobs at large corporations usually get first priority. (Why does the size of your employer have anything to do with health care? Who knows.) Then come the perfectly healthy people who are allowed to buy individual policies, and people who work at small employers where none of their coworkers are too sick to lose the group plan. Lowest in the rationing pecking order are uninsured who rely on emergency room triage.
Oh, I forgot that half of the healthcare in this country is fully socialized. It's just for everyone who is old enough to get on medicare so that they can get free coveraged paid for by those of us who actually have to work (but don't get to actually benefit from the socialized healthcare we pay for ourselves).
At the end of the day, almost nobody is actually directly paying for their healthcare in the US anyway.