I'd take any CPU architecture "research" with a grain of salt until I see benchmarks and prices of the resulting production hardware. Just a few years (and a few $Billion) ago, Intel and HP had research that said moving all branch prediction and speculative execution into the software compiler was the wave of the future, and it was going to blow away the competition.
The low profile introduction can be explained by the official designation for the new instruction set features: they will be known as the IA32-NIH extensions.
I would imagine that TV repairmen were originally regulated because they had to know how to safely work on open TV cabinets containing dangerous high voltages, operate test equipment on those high voltage circuits, and install suitable replacement parts that wouldn't catch on fire.
I doubt that most computer repair techs have ever opened a monitor (or even a power supply). The entire thing is treated as a disposable unit. Most servicable computer components are relatively idiot-proof, only fit into the appropriate sockets, and operate at no more than 12V.
If they weren't just going for a money grab, they'd exempt all computer techs who don't open up monitors or power supplies.
Well, I guess that could be a problem. I personally don't use Firefox, mainly because it's still in beta and doesn't yet integrate with my system's package management. (Plus, it doesn't offer huge feature improvements over Konqueror or Mozilla.) The non-beta browsers that did come with my system, however, are already fixed.
Those companies did not have to make the massive up-front investments that space colonization would require. When they started, they could hire a few ships and crews for today's equivalent of a few million dollars, and the trade profits rolled in immediately. They eventually grew to a huge size, but they were able to do so incrementally.
Companies today rarely make risky investments unless they'll bring a return over the next few quarters. Space colonization would require hundreds of billions (or even trillions) of dollars invested over decades before any return would be seen.
(The unsavory histories of the East India companies are also good examples of the dangers of letting private corporations and private armies run amok.)
Re:Space ownership is a necessity
on
Lawyers In Space...
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Companies aren't going to spend the hundreds of billions needed for facility developments on the Moon, Mars, Titan, and more without having property rights and mineral rights to those location.
Companies aren't going to spend hundreds of billions for those developments, period.
No private enterprise has ever made an investment of anywhere near that size, especially when the payback would take decades, if ever.
Any development of outer space will be strictly on a government-subsidized pork barrel basis for a long, long time.
Programmers and advanced sysadmins can get a fixed version right now. Every normal person has to wait "a few weeks".
Umm... the point-and-drool update utility in my SuSE box automatically installed the patch last night. No programming or advanced sysadmining was required on my part.
I've got a better solution: A universal anonymous disposable payment system that works like phone cards.
No registration, no accounts, no privacy concerns. Just type in a code from the card to charge 50 cents off it and read the paper.
Of course, no company would be interested in participating in such a system because then they couldn't snarf information from their customers, so we'll probably never see it.
When I buy and deploy MS, at least I know that EOLAS won't/can't come after me.
Why not? If a patent holder were in a dispute with Microsoft, harassing Microsoft's customers with lawsuits to generate FUD would be an excellent tactic to pressure Microsoft to quickly settle the matter.
I do understand using a fly by to increase Velocity
To reach Mercury orbit, you have to decrease velocity. Remember that in outer space, it's just as hard to slow down as to speed up. (Unless you find a convenient atmosphere to help you brake, which Mercury doesn't have.)
The Americans won the first race, but the Russians might beat them back to the moon.
The sentence is clearly referring particularly to the effort to send a manned mission to the moon, since it is predicated on the thing that the Americans did first.
It's interesting to note that the US also nearly lost the race to be the first to circle the moon, as revealed here. Evidence suggests that the Soviets tried to beat Apollo 8 by mere days by launching a mission profile similar to this current tourist scheme. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the new Proton booster required to launch the unmanned half of the mission was still problem-prone at that time:
A week later, the Soyuz booster is being removed from its pad, but now a Proton / L1 combination is on the Proton pad. This seems to clearly indicate that attempts were being made, right up to and beyond the day Apollo 8 was launched, to beat the Americans to the moon. The authors theorise that an attempt at a manned launch to the moon using the two-launch podsadka scenario was attempted, but that some serious spacecraft problem must have resulted in the Proton launch being scrubbed.
This is basically the whole story of the "space race". The Soviets were first with everything that they could achieve with their outstanding R-7 booster (which was used to launch Sputnik, and evolved into the Soyuz booster still in use today). However, they had problems scaling past that in either size or complexity, and the Americans were first to do most things outside of low earth orbit (with the exception of their moon probes and their way-cool Venus landers).
If it had been an American invention you can bet that the story would have been quite different.
The US was developing its own SST. However, after experiments with the XB-70 supersonic bomber prototype revealed that sonic booms were going to be an issue even at high altitudes, they wisely cancelled the American SST. So the story wasn't really any different.
You couldn't even compile the Python interpreter on half of the platforms that Autoconf targets.
And yet Python somehow manages to run natively on that one platform that is installed on most of the world's computers, whereas AFAIKT, Autoconf just blows it off.
I don't expect them to fix it for me. That's one reason I use KDE.
If you could comprehend what I said before, you'd realize it's not about my convenience, and it's not about your willingness to suffer, it's about thousands of hapless others' wasted time.
It is ONE extra click and moving your trackball/mouse 1 inch.
If you have do it hundreds of times per day, then IT IS TOO GODDAMNED HARD! Maybe you have wrists of rubber and steel, or maybe you just enjoy doing pointless extra steps to build manual dexterity, but most people don't.
You just want to bitch, if you spent 1/2 the time looking how to solve the problem you spend bitching about it you would have it fixed.
It's not just about one person's time. The problem affects countless users.
Because right clicking and selecting BROWSE FOLDER would be TOO FUCKING HARD!
Yes, it is. It's several times harder than just left-clicking on the folder.
And all for what? Just to avoid a brain-dead behavior left over from the days of Win95. At least in Win95 you could turn off that behavior without having to use regedit.
I don't know... I kind of like all the different schemes in a strange way. It takes me back to the days of Missile Command, where as you progressed through the game, each level featured a more headache-inducing combination of colors than the last. Sore eyeballs was a small price to pay for the honor of high score.
It may cost the employer $135K, but that's not the programmer's take-home pay. One rule of thumb I've seen is to multiply salary by ~2 to get the employer's total costs including equipment, office costs, taxes, etc. That would imply a salary of around $67K.
The issue is that a competing company reverse engineered their technology in order to bring in more money for themselves.
So? This has been going on in many industries for over a century. Go into any auto parts store and you'll find thousands of reverse-engineered compatible auto parts.
People KNOW that it is not supposed to work with the Real store. End of story. If Apple wanted it to work with other stores, they'd license it.
People also KNOW that they're not supposed to use a flat-blade screwdriver as a pry bar. Has that ever stopped anyone? Should Sears be surprised at what people are using their tools for?
This statement had me a little confused for a while:
Several bug fixes
for POSIX compliance came in from Apple; their assistance is appreciated.
Then I looked through the POSIX spec, and sure enough I found this section, which explained things:
POSIX section 23.4.18 (SHELL):
To the extent possible on the terminal hardware, the shell
shall
present to the user the appearance mimicing a translucent plastic material.
The shell rendering material model should incorporate prominent
specular highlights suggesting a shiny smooth surface.
The shell should cast fuzzy shadows on any user interface elements
that lay below it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd take any CPU architecture "research" with a grain of salt until I see benchmarks and prices of the resulting production hardware. Just a few years (and a few $Billion) ago, Intel and HP had research that said moving all branch prediction and speculative execution into the software compiler was the wave of the future, and it was going to blow away the competition.
The low profile introduction can be explained by the official designation for the new instruction set features: they will be known as the IA32-NIH extensions.
I doubt that most computer repair techs have ever opened a monitor (or even a power supply). The entire thing is treated as a disposable unit. Most servicable computer components are relatively idiot-proof, only fit into the appropriate sockets, and operate at no more than 12V.
If they weren't just going for a money grab, they'd exempt all computer techs who don't open up monitors or power supplies.
Well, I guess that could be a problem. I personally don't use Firefox, mainly because it's still in beta and doesn't yet integrate with my system's package management. (Plus, it doesn't offer huge feature improvements over Konqueror or Mozilla.) The non-beta browsers that did come with my system, however, are already fixed.
Companies today rarely make risky investments unless they'll bring a return over the next few quarters. Space colonization would require hundreds of billions (or even trillions) of dollars invested over decades before any return would be seen.
(The unsavory histories of the East India companies are also good examples of the dangers of letting private corporations and private armies run amok.)
Companies aren't going to spend hundreds of billions for those developments, period.
No private enterprise has ever made an investment of anywhere near that size, especially when the payback would take decades, if ever.
Any development of outer space will be strictly on a government-subsidized pork barrel basis for a long, long time.
Umm... the point-and-drool update utility in my SuSE box automatically installed the patch last night. No programming or advanced sysadmining was required on my part.
No registration, no accounts, no privacy concerns. Just type in a code from the card to charge 50 cents off it and read the paper.
Of course, no company would be interested in participating in such a system because then they couldn't snarf information from their customers, so we'll probably never see it.
Why not? If a patent holder were in a dispute with Microsoft, harassing Microsoft's customers with lawsuits to generate FUD would be an excellent tactic to pressure Microsoft to quickly settle the matter.
To reach Mercury orbit, you have to decrease velocity. Remember that in outer space, it's just as hard to slow down as to speed up. (Unless you find a convenient atmosphere to help you brake, which Mercury doesn't have.)
The first race to the moon:
The sentence is clearly referring particularly to the effort to send a manned mission to the moon, since it is predicated on the thing that the Americans did first.
It's interesting to note that the US also nearly lost the race to be the first to circle the moon, as revealed here. Evidence suggests that the Soviets tried to beat Apollo 8 by mere days by launching a mission profile similar to this current tourist scheme. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the new Proton booster required to launch the unmanned half of the mission was still problem-prone at that time:
This is basically the whole story of the "space race". The Soviets were first with everything that they could achieve with their outstanding R-7 booster (which was used to launch Sputnik, and evolved into the Soyuz booster still in use today). However, they had problems scaling past that in either size or complexity, and the Americans were first to do most things outside of low earth orbit (with the exception of their moon probes and their way-cool Venus landers).
The US was developing its own SST. However, after experiments with the XB-70 supersonic bomber prototype revealed that sonic booms were going to be an issue even at high altitudes, they wisely cancelled the American SST. So the story wasn't really any different.
That's easy... just yank out the wires to the subwoofers.
And yet Python somehow manages to run natively on that one platform that is installed on most of the world's computers, whereas AFAIKT, Autoconf just blows it off.
If you could comprehend what I said before, you'd realize it's not about my convenience, and it's not about your willingness to suffer, it's about thousands of hapless others' wasted time.
If you have do it hundreds of times per day, then IT IS TOO GODDAMNED HARD! Maybe you have wrists of rubber and steel, or maybe you just enjoy doing pointless extra steps to build manual dexterity, but most people don't.
You just want to bitch, if you spent 1/2 the time looking how to solve the problem you spend bitching about it you would have it fixed.
It's not just about one person's time. The problem affects countless users.
Yes, it is. It's several times harder than just left-clicking on the folder.
And all for what? Just to avoid a brain-dead behavior left over from the days of Win95. At least in Win95 you could turn off that behavior without having to use regedit.
I don't know... I kind of like all the different schemes in a strange way. It takes me back to the days of Missile Command, where as you progressed through the game, each level featured a more headache-inducing combination of colors than the last. Sore eyeballs was a small price to pay for the honor of high score.
How does a pilot make money flying through free air?
It may cost the employer $135K, but that's not the programmer's take-home pay. One rule of thumb I've seen is to multiply salary by ~2 to get the employer's total costs including equipment, office costs, taxes, etc. That would imply a salary of around $67K.
While it's not nearly as big as CPAN, I often find Python code I need in the Vaults of Parnassus
So? This has been going on in many industries for over a century. Go into any auto parts store and you'll find thousands of reverse-engineered compatible auto parts.
People also KNOW that they're not supposed to use a flat-blade screwdriver as a pry bar. Has that ever stopped anyone? Should Sears be surprised at what people are using their tools for?
Then I looked through the POSIX spec, and sure enough I found this section, which explained things:
POSIX section 23.4.18 (SHELL):
Did you drive your car on a federal highway this year? I'm sorry, you're disqualified to vote.