But the upcoming DVD replacements you mention are backwards compatible with the DVD and CD format. That doesn't mean that DVDs will become "obsolete".
Even today, 20 years after the CD was introduced and 8 years after the DVD came out, the vast majority of 4-inch shiny disks are still CDs. Content producers only need to use the technology that's big enough for the task. Most software and music still fits on a CD, so they don't put them on DVDs.
Likewise, not everything is going to need as much data as a BluRay disk will hold, so CDs and/or DVDs will be used for those applications. Even for video, HD will probably used as a price differentiator for many years to come. Since HD will cost more, cheaper shows on standard-def DVDs will be around for a while. Additionally, anything that was originally produced on standard video tape will probably never come out on an HD format.
Apparently the guy is able to find enough time to work on these problems. That kind of freedom is what money buys.
It probably would only take $15K in the US to rent a small apartment in a cheap city and buy food for a year, allowing him to work on his problems. I think the point is that this guy may have been able to make a significant contribution to human knowledge and maybe centuries of notoriety with what it cost to live for a few years. Most of the rest of us would have taken the same amount of money and just dumped it into buying an upscale SUV.
What about the cost implications of using non-reusable orbiters?
A simple capsule design can be reusable; just slap a fresh heat shield on the bottom an launch it again. The Gemini capsules were initially designed for reuse. They were going to use a parasail to glide to a landing on a runway on extendable skids. They only used splashdowns on the actual missions because parasails weren't fully debugged by 1965; that probably wouldn't be an issue today. The Soviet Union also test-flew a reusable capsule design.
The bulk of the shuttle system isn't very "reusable" anyway. The huge fuel tank that helps to orbit the extra dead weight costs as much as many smaller rockets by itself. I saw a blurb somewhere that claimed that it costs more to recover and rebuild the solid boosters than fresh ones would cost. The high-strung liquid fuel engines also require hugely expensive overhauls at regular intervals.
Bottom line is that the space shuttle serves mainly as a glaring example of the old phrase "Penny wise, Pound foolish".
That's why it's so incredibly stupid to include tons of dead weight in the form of wings, landing gear, 1st stage engines and extra heat shields to protect them all in addition to the payload.
I don't believe in making it harder (or less financially attractive) for drug companies to cure diseases.
Well, then why not abolish drug patents? That way drug companies wouldn't have to pay high licensing fees to produce the drugs that cure diseases. That would lower their costs and be financially attractive. The government seems to be handing out free money to do the R&D anyway, so what do they have to lose?
What a ripoff. A company gets almost 2 billion dollars and all their customers get is "not dying from cancer"?
That's great. But you forgot about the other $700 million taken from the taxpayers, most of whom weren't dying from cancer. The company now has that money, too.
Perhaps the first $700M of any patent-related profits on this drug should go to reimbursing the taxpayers for the risk-free capital provided to the company.
My god when will OSS developers grow a pair and go out on a limb to try something new?
Like what? Do you have any specific suggestions in mind?
It's no good to be different just for the sake of being different. The Gimp had an interface that seemed to come from another planet; it was heavily criticized for being different from Photoshop and has now been made somewhat more mainstream.
The Linux Naysayers already harp on how much retraining will add to TCO of Linux deployments. You're proposing that they should further increase that cost with far-out experiments.
Other than eye candy, the 2D GUI concept really hasn't changed all that much over the last 20 years. Maybe that's because there's just not that much more that can be done with it. There is huge room for improvement in the UI area, but a lot of those improvements would require fundamental breakthroughs in AI-related technologies. We'd all like a computer to work like the one on Star Trek, but nobody knows how to do it, including the hackers at X.org. In the mean time, they might as well continue to improve the quality of their current products.
No, there isn't. This isn't illegal. But it is irresponsible.
And you're being irresponsible by seeming to acknowledge that such launches even take place in a particular geographic location.
Now if a terrorist wanted to observe these launches, he'd have a good idea of where to look, and you've just helped to confirm that.
Thanks for putting all of our lives in grave danger.
Whenever someone brings up a topic like military rocket launches to me, I do the right thing and say "I'm unaware any such activities. I wouldn't be surprised if they are just unfounded rumors." This helps to ensure all of our safety. Hopefully everyone else here will follow my example and stop posting on this thread about these alleged operations.
I don't have "everything installed". The bulk of the patch files on my system are 5 sets of kernel and kernel source RPMs at 50MB per set. I only have patches that got automatically downloaded for what is installed on my typical development workstation install, and that's what I showed.
Obviously, SuSE didn't bother with deltas on those patches even though they supposedly have this technology; they sent the whole thing. The ".patch" versions for the kernel and many others aren't listed in SuSE's site either.
Five kernel updates is redundant, but you have to download each one when it comes out, so the bandwidth still got used 5 times. On dialup, it would have been extremely annoying.
Your assertion was that Linux always uses trivially small packages; you claimed that delta patches were therefore unnecessary anyway. I proved that assertion false with the example of how many large package updates have been downloaded to my real-world system in 5 months. My "statistics" are valid.
The real issue is that linux doesnt really need binary diffs. Linux distros already have fine grain packages ( lots of little packegs not a few bigs ones). Security updates usally just require a one or very few packegs to be updated.
I beg to differ. SuSE 9.1 came out only 5 months ago:
That's almost a whole CD worth of patches in half of a year. All of this is to correct for mistakes in probably no more than a few hundred total lines of code.
It's not a question of whether it's illegal; that's a given. The problem is that the media industry is claiming that their very livelyhoods are being destroyed by new technology.
They are using this assertion to lobby the government to divert significant taxpayer-funded resources assist with their pet issues; resources that might be better allocated for other uses or not taken with the taxpayers in the first place. They are also lobbying for new laws that further curtail each citizen's rights to use electronic equipment without government-mandated oversight and interfence.
Everything in life is a tradeoff. The media industry is demanding that more public resources and funds be allocated to them vs. other uses because they are being severely harmed by improper use of advances in technology. The problem is, it seems that they are not really being harmed. Therefore, the additional costs to the public to remedy the media industry's grievances probably aren't justified, especially with the huge current budget deficits and the vast list of actual serious problems that this nation is currently dealing with.
Let me get this straight, you're telling people to use Windows if they want to stay in control?
You stay in control by selling complex and ever-changing software. So to use Windows for this purpose, you would first have to somehow buy the Windows source code and copyrights from Microsoft.
Not really a new strategy for IBM, ISA of course was open from the start, IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC. Looking further back I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports. (Of course IBM *didn't* share the details of OS/360, leaving RCA with a box but no OS.)
This was probably the same model they had in mind for the PC. They wanted to use commodity hardware and even encourage clone makers because they knew that would help allow them to match hardware prices of other high-volume competitors. They figured that they would maintain control of the platform through their proprietary BIOS, and that any clone manufacturers would have to license the BIOS from IBM.
Software vendors would write to the BIOS calls, and IBM would command a position akin to the present-day Microsoft, where they would be the arbiter of the standard interface between application software and hardware. That may explain why they outsourced the DOS OS to Microsoft; they may have thought of it as just a layer over the BIOS. They knew that versions of DOS that ran over other low-level APIs (of which there were a few examples) wouldn't be quite compatible enough to become popular, so they didn't bother to get exclusive control of DOS.
Unfortunately for IBM, the BIOS wasn't that hard to reverse engineer in a clean room environment, clones of the BIOS enabled Microsoft to sell 100% compatible versions of DOS to anyone, and the rest was history.
I guess the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to use software to maintain control over a commodity hardware market, make sure that the software is too crufty and complex to reverse engineer in a reasonable amount of time.
What happened to NASA's famed over-engineering? I would have thought these things would have been designed to take a Class 5 (>155mph).
Aren't a lot of the facilities left over from the Apollo program? Maybe they figured that they only needed them for the ~5 years that they'd be using the Saturn V. At the time, they probably figured that by now spacecraft would be routinely taking off from your local airport.
Given the weather risks, if the shuttle program does get wiped out from the storm, it might be a good idea to go back to using the Gemini spacecraft. These were launched on Titan II ICBM boosters, which could be stored in and launched from underground silos.:)
Once you've identified a song, the database could tell you what the beginning and end should sound like, and the program could automatically toss songs that get hosed by the DJ.
There's probably a lot of stations where you'd never get a clean song, but I listen to a couple stations that probably play at least half of the songs without stepping on them. Of course, the best bet would be one of the interruption-free subscription music sources.
"We are very concerned about a variety of technologies that essentially transform performances into music libraries," RIAA spokesman Steve Marks said.
That might be any PC. If anyone were to invent an algorithm that can do an "analog checksum" on a sound file (assuming it hasn't been invented already), then all of this functionality would be available to anybody with a computer and a sound card.
Software could continuously record the audio source, cross reference checksums against an online database akin to the freedb CD database, and catalog and save whatever is new. Hook it to an FM radio, Music Choice on digital cable, Muzak, XM, whatever, and you could start accumulating your very own digital music library.
I've been involved with engineering projects since long before Microsoft Project hit the market, and from my vantage point schedules slip equally well either with or without it.
There's no reasonably priced alternative to Project, for what it does.
AFAIKT, what it does is print out quarter-inch thick stacks of Gantt charts that are distributed at staff meetings each week. Each week, this flexible program empowers the program manager to slip out the final target date on the printouts by ~1 more week.
Ha... I'm getting a little old, but I'll always know how to use a computer. It's like riding a bicycle.
They're going to have to invent a whole new gadget to make me look stupid.
(My prediction: one day somebody is going to use biotech to manufacture stand-alone super brains. I'll refuse to learn how to use them because they'll seem to "wishy washy" compared to old-fashioned deterministic digital computers.)
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They're mainly useful a a reminder of how infuriating it was to deal with hard failures for every few dozen megabytes of data transferred.
Even today, 20 years after the CD was introduced and 8 years after the DVD came out, the vast majority of 4-inch shiny disks are still CDs. Content producers only need to use the technology that's big enough for the task. Most software and music still fits on a CD, so they don't put them on DVDs.
Likewise, not everything is going to need as much data as a BluRay disk will hold, so CDs and/or DVDs will be used for those applications. Even for video, HD will probably used as a price differentiator for many years to come. Since HD will cost more, cheaper shows on standard-def DVDs will be around for a while. Additionally, anything that was originally produced on standard video tape will probably never come out on an HD format.
It probably would only take $15K in the US to rent a small apartment in a cheap city and buy food for a year, allowing him to work on his problems. I think the point is that this guy may have been able to make a significant contribution to human knowledge and maybe centuries of notoriety with what it cost to live for a few years. Most of the rest of us would have taken the same amount of money and just dumped it into buying an upscale SUV.
A simple capsule design can be reusable; just slap a fresh heat shield on the bottom an launch it again. The Gemini capsules were initially designed for reuse. They were going to use a parasail to glide to a landing on a runway on extendable skids. They only used splashdowns on the actual missions because parasails weren't fully debugged by 1965; that probably wouldn't be an issue today. The Soviet Union also test-flew a reusable capsule design.
The bulk of the shuttle system isn't very "reusable" anyway. The huge fuel tank that helps to orbit the extra dead weight costs as much as many smaller rockets by itself. I saw a blurb somewhere that claimed that it costs more to recover and rebuild the solid boosters than fresh ones would cost. The high-strung liquid fuel engines also require hugely expensive overhauls at regular intervals.
Bottom line is that the space shuttle serves mainly as a glaring example of the old phrase "Penny wise, Pound foolish".
That's why it's so incredibly stupid to include tons of dead weight in the form of wings, landing gear, 1st stage engines and extra heat shields to protect them all in addition to the payload.
Well, then why not abolish drug patents? That way drug companies wouldn't have to pay high licensing fees to produce the drugs that cure diseases. That would lower their costs and be financially attractive. The government seems to be handing out free money to do the R&D anyway, so what do they have to lose?
You must be new on this planet.
That's great. But you forgot about the other $700 million taken from the taxpayers, most of whom weren't dying from cancer. The company now has that money, too.
Perhaps the first $700M of any patent-related profits on this drug should go to reimbursing the taxpayers for the risk-free capital provided to the company.
Right, zero.
That's about the same number of games that are bottlenecked by CPU clock frequency as opposed to memory bandwidth or GPU operations.
Like what? Do you have any specific suggestions in mind?
It's no good to be different just for the sake of being different. The Gimp had an interface that seemed to come from another planet; it was heavily criticized for being different from Photoshop and has now been made somewhat more mainstream.
The Linux Naysayers already harp on how much retraining will add to TCO of Linux deployments. You're proposing that they should further increase that cost with far-out experiments.
Other than eye candy, the 2D GUI concept really hasn't changed all that much over the last 20 years. Maybe that's because there's just not that much more that can be done with it. There is huge room for improvement in the UI area, but a lot of those improvements would require fundamental breakthroughs in AI-related technologies. We'd all like a computer to work like the one on Star Trek, but nobody knows how to do it, including the hackers at X.org. In the mean time, they might as well continue to improve the quality of their current products.
And you're being irresponsible by seeming to acknowledge that such launches even take place in a particular geographic location.
Now if a terrorist wanted to observe these launches, he'd have a good idea of where to look, and you've just helped to confirm that. Thanks for putting all of our lives in grave danger.
Whenever someone brings up a topic like military rocket launches to me, I do the right thing and say "I'm unaware any such activities. I wouldn't be surprised if they are just unfounded rumors." This helps to ensure all of our safety. Hopefully everyone else here will follow my example and stop posting on this thread about these alleged operations.
Obviously, SuSE didn't bother with deltas on those patches even though they supposedly have this technology; they sent the whole thing. The ".patch" versions for the kernel and many others aren't listed in SuSE's site either.
Five kernel updates is redundant, but you have to download each one when it comes out, so the bandwidth still got used 5 times. On dialup, it would have been extremely annoying.
Your assertion was that Linux always uses trivially small packages; you claimed that delta patches were therefore unnecessary anyway. I proved that assertion false with the example of how many large package updates have been downloaded to my real-world system in 5 months. My "statistics" are valid.
I beg to differ. SuSE 9.1 came out only 5 months ago:
That's almost a whole CD worth of patches in half of a year. All of this is to correct for mistakes in probably no more than a few hundred total lines of code.They are using this assertion to lobby the government to divert significant taxpayer-funded resources assist with their pet issues; resources that might be better allocated for other uses or not taken with the taxpayers in the first place. They are also lobbying for new laws that further curtail each citizen's rights to use electronic equipment without government-mandated oversight and interfence.
Everything in life is a tradeoff. The media industry is demanding that more public resources and funds be allocated to them vs. other uses because they are being severely harmed by improper use of advances in technology. The problem is, it seems that they are not really being harmed. Therefore, the additional costs to the public to remedy the media industry's grievances probably aren't justified, especially with the huge current budget deficits and the vast list of actual serious problems that this nation is currently dealing with.
Then you'd both owe gift taxes for the fair market value of the CD.
You stay in control by selling complex and ever-changing software. So to use Windows for this purpose, you would first have to somehow buy the Windows source code and copyrights from Microsoft.
This was probably the same model they had in mind for the PC. They wanted to use commodity hardware and even encourage clone makers because they knew that would help allow them to match hardware prices of other high-volume competitors. They figured that they would maintain control of the platform through their proprietary BIOS, and that any clone manufacturers would have to license the BIOS from IBM.
Software vendors would write to the BIOS calls, and IBM would command a position akin to the present-day Microsoft, where they would be the arbiter of the standard interface between application software and hardware. That may explain why they outsourced the DOS OS to Microsoft; they may have thought of it as just a layer over the BIOS. They knew that versions of DOS that ran over other low-level APIs (of which there were a few examples) wouldn't be quite compatible enough to become popular, so they didn't bother to get exclusive control of DOS.
Unfortunately for IBM, the BIOS wasn't that hard to reverse engineer in a clean room environment, clones of the BIOS enabled Microsoft to sell 100% compatible versions of DOS to anyone, and the rest was history.
I guess the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to use software to maintain control over a commodity hardware market, make sure that the software is too crufty and complex to reverse engineer in a reasonable amount of time.
Aren't a lot of the facilities left over from the Apollo program? Maybe they figured that they only needed them for the ~5 years that they'd be using the Saturn V. At the time, they probably figured that by now spacecraft would be routinely taking off from your local airport.
Given the weather risks, if the shuttle program does get wiped out from the storm, it might be a good idea to go back to using the Gemini spacecraft. These were launched on Titan II ICBM boosters, which could be stored in and launched from underground silos. :)
Rebuilding that critically flawed and obscenely expensive launch system would be the height of insanity.
It's an OEM drive. I don't see on that listing where it shows any software, much less a Linux DVD player w/CSS decoder.
There's probably a lot of stations where you'd never get a clean song, but I listen to a couple stations that probably play at least half of the songs without stepping on them. Of course, the best bet would be one of the interruption-free subscription music sources.
That might be any PC. If anyone were to invent an algorithm that can do an "analog checksum" on a sound file (assuming it hasn't been invented already), then all of this functionality would be available to anybody with a computer and a sound card.
Software could continuously record the audio source, cross reference checksums against an online database akin to the freedb CD database, and catalog and save whatever is new. Hook it to an FM radio, Music Choice on digital cable, Muzak, XM, whatever, and you could start accumulating your very own digital music library.
I've been involved with engineering projects since long before Microsoft Project hit the market, and from my vantage point schedules slip equally well either with or without it.
AFAIKT, what it does is print out quarter-inch thick stacks of Gantt charts that are distributed at staff meetings each week. Each week, this flexible program empowers the program manager to slip out the final target date on the printouts by ~1 more week.
They're going to have to invent a whole new gadget to make me look stupid.
(My prediction: one day somebody is going to use biotech to manufacture stand-alone super brains. I'll refuse to learn how to use them because they'll seem to "wishy washy" compared to old-fashioned deterministic digital computers.)