Unless there are some nuclear reactions going on in there, I really don't think it is creating any energy at all, much less "creating enough energy to power 70,000 homes".
The cost of a 45 nm wafer was higher than that of a 65 nm wafer, etc. It was only the cost of an individual die that went down, because with a smaller geometry an equivalent die was smaller, thus there were more of them per wafer.
If you hear of an app called Good Times, don't download or install it. It is a virus that will erase your hard drive and put your phone's processor into an nth-complexity infinite binary loop.
NASA claims that the US government still owns these artifacts. I think they're mistaken. The artifacts are not salvage, but rather abandoned property. NASA intentionally allowed them to be abandoned more than 40 years ago with no stated or demonstrable intention of ever recovering them. Since they were outside the territory of any US state, I don't think they are subject to any form of escheat. I think Bezos has clear title and ownership. If there's some US law providing to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing the legal citation.
If Bezos wants to give them to NASA out of his own generosity, that's great, but I don't think he's under any actual legal obligation to do so.
I only have that problem if I'm working a lot of overtime for the day job, or working at an extremely boring or unpleasant day job. I try to avoid those, though sometimes there's not much choice.
I'm sure that having hobbies or personal projects that are non-computer-related would be good, but I don't really have any. However, my computer-related personal projects are so dissimilar to my day job that they almost do seem like different fields to me.
If so, working on personal projects that don't necessarily have any likelihood of financial reward may be much more satisfying than doing paying work in your spare time. I've certainly found that to be the case. I spend my spare time on projects that are just things I'm personally interested in. Often they're very obscure, and only of interest to a small number of other people. However, I enjoy them very much. Sometimes I publish them as free software, and when I do, it is very cool to meet the few other people with similar interests. Because I'm interested in a wide variety of things, I've got enough ideas for personal projects to keep me busy for hundreds of years, so I almost never get bored.
I also was very lucky that a very-long-term project project in which I invested a huge amount of time (thousands of hours) starting in 1995, with absolutely no expectation of financial reward, actually started making me a non-trivial amount of money starting in 2009. I'm certainly not going to claim that this is a likely outcome, but it can happen.
As an example of a small and very obscure personal project, in July of 2011 I rewrote the Apple I ROM monitor to work on an MC6800 microprocessor (rather than the 6502), because the Apple I hardware design was theoretically capable of being configured for the MC6800. It's of no practical value whatsoever, and will never make me any money, but I submitted it as a RetroChallenge contest entry and actually won second place and a small prize. Just recently someone in Australia actually installed an MC6800 in an Apple 1 replica, did a little hardware debugging, and got my monitor code running on it. (I'd only run it in simulation with MESS.) It was very satisfying watching the video on Youtube.
Doesn't work with BitLocker and a TPM chip. The key is kept in protected memory on the chip and only authenticated code can use it.
I don't think that's true. The passphrase (perhaps hashed?) pay only be in the TPM chip, but the actual cryto key used to decrypt disk sectors is in main memory, because the main CPU is used to do the decryption. There's nowhere near enough bandwidth to and from the TPM chip to let it do the actual disk encryption/decryption. There's not even enough bandwidth to ask the TPM for the key each time you want to do a disk transfer, and erase it from memory after the disk transfer is completed.
This means that software that extracts the encryption key from memory probably can't turn it back into the passphrase that the user enters, but if you have a copy of the disk and the key, you don't actually need that passphrase.
The TPM is not a high-performance device and doesn't do anything but give out the keys on (authenticated) request. What the software does with those keys is up to the software. If someone has privileged or physical access to the machine while the keys are in use, all bets are off.
Note that the 558 is not retriggerable. This led to bugs in joystick (or game paddle) reading in many Apple II programs. If you trigger the 558 to read input 0, then want to read input 1, do NOT just trigger it again. Make sure that input 1 has timed out first, before triggering it to be read. Otherwise you'll read an incorrect value. Or trigger once, then read all inputs you're interested in at the same time.
In the 1970s, magnetic bubble memory was expected to be the next big thing in nonvolatile data storage, and there were commercial products from Hitachi, Intel, Rockwell, and TI. Commercial bubble memory devices were fabricated using garnet films, though there was research into the use of other materials.
Due to high cost, bubble memory was successful only in limited niches, so by the mid-1980s it was discontinued. Intel stopped development at the 4 Mbit level; I don't think the other vendors even pushed it that far. Late 1980s research results suggested the possibility of 64 Mbit devices. I suspect that the technology probably wouldn't have scaled much further anyhow.
More recently, IBM has been working on "racetrack memory", which works similarly to magnetic bubble memory.
You have to do more than "make it available". Since it is being commercially distributed, and isn't accompanied with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, they need to satisfy section 3b of the GPLv2:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
Can anyone who has a Xoom confirm whether it came with such a written offer?
As others have pointed out, this only applies to any GPL'd components of the software, which includes the Linux kernel but little else.
Slashdot Mirror
...and again and again, while I wait in the queue.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743435370/0743435370.htm
Unless there are some nuclear reactions going on in there, I really don't think it is creating any energy at all, much less "creating enough energy to power 70,000 homes".
That excuse may be the most pathetic thing I've ever heard.
Presumably MoFoQ meant aluminized mylar. It will attenuate RF, and if the bag is sealed, will act as a Faraday cage.
The cost of a 45 nm wafer was higher than that of a 65 nm wafer, etc. It was only the cost of an individual die that went down, because with a smaller geometry an equivalent die was smaller, thus there were more of them per wafer.
The name needs a few more words. Instead of IAM, the acronym should be IAMNOT.
... in Microsoft's opinion, I don't think there's much preventing them from open-sourcing their own software to get that same advantage.
If you hear of an app called Good Times, don't download or install it. It is a virus that will erase your hard drive and put your phone's processor into an nth-complexity infinite binary loop.
The 10% is for salvage rights. Deliberately abandoned property is different than salvage.
NASA claims that the US government still owns these artifacts. I think they're mistaken. The artifacts are not salvage, but rather abandoned property. NASA intentionally allowed them to be abandoned more than 40 years ago with no stated or demonstrable intention of ever recovering them. Since they were outside the territory of any US state, I don't think they are subject to any form of escheat. I think Bezos has clear title and ownership. If there's some US law providing to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing the legal citation.
If Bezos wants to give them to NASA out of his own generosity, that's great, but I don't think he's under any actual legal obligation to do so.
I only have that problem if I'm working a lot of overtime for the day job, or working at an extremely boring or unpleasant day job. I try to avoid those, though sometimes there's not much choice.
I'm sure that having hobbies or personal projects that are non-computer-related would be good, but I don't really have any. However, my computer-related personal projects are so dissimilar to my day job that they almost do seem like different fields to me.
I also was very lucky that a very-long-term project project in which I invested a huge amount of time (thousands of hours) starting in 1995, with absolutely no expectation of financial reward, actually started making me a non-trivial amount of money starting in 2009. I'm certainly not going to claim that this is a likely outcome, but it can happen.
As an example of a small and very obscure personal project, in July of 2011 I rewrote the Apple I ROM monitor to work on an MC6800 microprocessor (rather than the 6502), because the Apple I hardware design was theoretically capable of being configured for the MC6800. It's of no practical value whatsoever, and will never make me any money, but I submitted it as a RetroChallenge contest entry and actually won second place and a small prize. Just recently someone in Australia actually installed an MC6800 in an Apple 1 replica, did a little hardware debugging, and got my monitor code running on it. (I'd only run it in simulation with MESS.) It was very satisfying watching the video on Youtube.
If they agree with the Qur'an they're redundant, and if they disagree they're heretical.
I don't think that's true. The passphrase (perhaps hashed?) pay only be in the TPM chip, but the actual cryto key used to decrypt disk sectors is in main memory, because the main CPU is used to do the decryption. There's nowhere near enough bandwidth to and from the TPM chip to let it do the actual disk encryption/decryption. There's not even enough bandwidth to ask the TPM for the key each time you want to do a disk transfer, and erase it from memory after the disk transfer is completed.
This means that software that extracts the encryption key from memory probably can't turn it back into the passphrase that the user enters, but if you have a copy of the disk and the key, you don't actually need that passphrase.
The TPM is not a high-performance device and doesn't do anything but give out the keys on (authenticated) request. What the software does with those keys is up to the software. If someone has privileged or physical access to the machine while the keys are in use, all bets are off.
Note that the 558 is not retriggerable. This led to bugs in joystick (or game paddle) reading in many Apple II programs. If you trigger the 558 to read input 0, then want to read input 1, do NOT just trigger it again. Make sure that input 1 has timed out first, before triggering it to be read. Otherwise you'll read an incorrect value. Or trigger once, then read all inputs you're interested in at the same time.
I, for one, welcome our old protozoan overlords.
Due to high cost, bubble memory was successful only in limited niches, so by the mid-1980s it was discontinued. Intel stopped development at the 4 Mbit level; I don't think the other vendors even pushed it that far. Late 1980s research results suggested the possibility of 64 Mbit devices. I suspect that the technology probably wouldn't have scaled much further anyhow.
More recently, IBM has been working on "racetrack memory", which works similarly to magnetic bubble memory.
Is ther e a way to send a PM on Slashdot? I've got the skills you need, and am available. You can email me at
The LEM wasn't capable of doing this in earth gravity. It was *extremely* specialized for use on the moon.
Why should only the criminal side of the malware equation get the benefits of open-source?
Some of my cells were travelling self-propelled at 5 km/h earlier today. In fact, all of the were.
Which is "better than an hour", 59 minutes or 61 minutes, and why is it better?
This is why we can't have nice things!
well, you only have to "make it available"
You have to do more than "make it available". Since it is being commercially distributed, and isn't accompanied with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, they need to satisfy section 3b of the GPLv2:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
Can anyone who has a Xoom confirm whether it came with such a written offer?
As others have pointed out, this only applies to any GPL'd components of the software, which includes the Linux kernel but little else.
It's now obvious that it's really Goldman Sachs that is the Bank of Evil.