The one useful thing I'd like to see is a bit of information overload instead of this (or in conjunction with) simple summary ratings. Some of the subscription channels such as HBO go part of the way in describing what kind of content actually exists, but I want something more in-depth.
I mean, I don't want to start looking at a site rated NC-17 just to find out it's because of language and not porn.
Now, compiling the low down on a site including number of nipples, instances of the word 'shit', rape scenes, suicides, etc will really help me sort out the more entertaining sites from the average plain janes of the web with a glance. I can imagine a feature in my web browser to warn me if a site doesn't have enough profanity, violence or sex... my goodness that would help me avoid all the boring content out there.
Oh wait, they probably want this for child filters or something of that nature.
Still, my definition of "profane" is probably different from everyone elses, so I can imagine allowing a child to view all the violence they want without any of the sex (or vice-versa for those across the pond).
And you need access to 16 exabytes (or 8 w/ signed pointers) of address space in your desktop applications because....? (not total memory, but memory per application as you can have more than 4 gigs of memory on a x86 processor in a single machine.)
I don't know where this idea that 64 bit memory addressing makes programs run faster came from, but there is nothing inherent about 64 bit addressing that would make it faster for your average integer based desktop applications.
Of course, I guess it all depends on your definition of a "64 bit" chip architecture. I tend to define it as an architecture's registers, data bus and ALU are all 64 bits wide.
I don't know about you, but unless I need more than 4 gigabytes of memory per process or I'm doing some heavy floating point where I need 64 bits of precision, I don't particularly want my data structure heavy applications using up to twice the memory they used to.
Of course that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
All this achieved was to raise the cost of a fake ID to about 5000FF ($600-700) on the black market. The best forgeries come of course from corrupt officials who fabricated cards with fake IDs using the state-approved machines.
My goodness... physical security is not a good means of preventing copying. A well run ID system with enough memory on the card to do real cryptographic signatures would provide both security and tracability making forgeries nearly impossible to do.
A good ID card would contain a very small memory chip on it which contained a cryptographically signed message including the person who issued the ID, expiry time, issue time, distinguishing characteristics and possibly a photograph that was directly linked to a read-only id number embedded on every card to prevent the transfer of the information and signature to another card.
Information about each applicant would be captured on a machine which generated it's own cryptographic signature to ensure tracability. If in the case of a falsified record being entered into the system, you could expire every single ID card on the back-end and require each applicant to come back in.
You of course make providing false records a felony in federal courts punishable by a hefty amount of jail time.
These kinds of cards could eliminate drivers licenses and social security cards and as long as there was no physical printed number on the card itself and the readers for such cards were only issued to specific areas (aiports, police cars, etc), corporate interests would not be able to ask you for the information.
The only way to forge this particular type of cards requires either cracking the key, social engineering or some level of corruption.
Cracking the key is unlikely, but the nice thing about a realtime lookup system is you can do things like revoke CA keys and make IDs invalid. You then proceed to stagger the issue of cards with different signing keys so that the number of cards you'd invalidate if worst came to worst would be kept to a minimum.
Social engineering is a problem, but again, with a nice lookup system you could not ever get two IDs with different names. Once you registered, your biometic information would be checked against a master database to insure you haven't registered before. Obviously, registering under the wrong information the first time would lead to some rather nasty concequences down the road in case you actually wanted to have a life.
Corruption is a harder problem to deal with, but as stated before, revoking cards is not a problem with this type of system. You also have a nice paper trail which would make corruption very risky. Obviously paying the people who have control over the system well would help immensely.
They are most definately not immature high tech for finding duplicate persons. When doing real-time analysis maybe... but if you have more than a minute to make a decision, the quality of these types of biometrics systems goes up dramatically (with the exception of DNA and photo recognition, I just threw those in as things they'd want to get from you anyway:)
Granted, the type of CPU power you'd need to do a fingerprint match against 300 million people in a reasonable amount of time is a bit staggering, but it is completely doable.
There is a rather large difference in the US with regards to copyrightable material.
One must understand that all music is actually owned by the general public in the US, not by the creators of the works. The government hands the creators of the work limited temporary control over their work to (originally at least) promote artistic expression.
When a corporation takes this limited temporary control that was intended to promote artistic expression and uses to extend a monopoly which has the side effect of *limiting* artistic expression, the copyright can no longer be considered valid.
Frankly, the very fact that copyrights have been extended past the original 20 years without any evidence that such an increase would do any more to promote artistic expression should have been considered a crime of criminal proportions as it has ended up making the public pay for works that they already own without any additional reward (additional artistic works) which amounts to extortion.
Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong.
Exactly what advantage does yet another card have? I'm sure they'll be just as easy to counterfeit as current identification methods...
Uhm, no. The current security of ID cards relies on the fact that it's hard to create a physical duplicate of the card itself. This is mediocre compared to the system being proposed.
A real smart card would have enough space on it for a real cryptographic signature that can guarantee (unless of course the key is comprimised) that this particular card was issued by the good old USA. Coupled with issue and expiration dates, this alone would be vastly superior to anything we have currently and provide a significant barrier to counterfietters.
But that's not all. If you had a real-time lookup system to verify that an ID was in fact issued at all and each card itself had it's own unique entry in the system you end up with a system that is resistant to even key comprimises.
On top of that, if you require unique characteristics such as fingerprint, DNA, retinal scan, heat signature and photo to be gathered at the time of issue of the ID so you could do duplicate scanning (one person can't have two IDs) you end up with a system which is orders of magnitude more secure than what currently exists.
You could even go a step further and only allow a particular machine to be able to read the cards that are only allowed to be operated by government workers subjected to stringent FBI background checks and self-destruct if tampered with. The card itself would obviously also be tamper-resistant.
Even more impressive is that if this was done properly, you could subject every person entering the country to it and in real-time issue temporary IDs that would allow even foreigners who may lie about themselves to never be allowed to lie twice.
Of course, what would be better than a national ID is an international ID (which passports are for, but are pretty poor... ink stamps when entering and leaving a country, please.) Though at least they have barcodes and pretty holograms.
Then again, you have to understand how traditional counterfietting is done. Rarely does anyone actually create a fake ID. Instead, you find an incompetent DMV in some state, steal enough ID information and let them create a nice new ID for you. A well run national ID program would prevent this.
2) A Standard C Library (libc) is standard for every Unix and Unix-like operating system. For 99 systems out of 100, this libc will NOT come from GNU. If you write a program that makes use of glibc extensions, your program will not be portable. It will only make you look stupid.
This isn't most definately not true. The C library on Unices implements a set of standards, but which standards are implemented is up to the implementators. There are quite a few conflicting functions in between ANSI, SUS, SVID, BSD, ISO, and POSIX though most of them have to do with simple things such as errno values, but there are more serious cases such as the setjmp(3) conflict between BSD and POSIX.
Now, even without the conflicts, not every Unix has a complete implementation of these standards, especially given how frequently they've been coming out in recent years. POSIX 1003.1* for instance contains a good amount of optional functionality (SUSv2 made a lot of it mandatory however) including extremely useful features such as read-write locks for threads.
Now, that's not to say that I don't wish every Unix was at least was SUSv2 conformant, but OS specific code is a fact of life in cross-platform Unix development unless you are working on just Linux and *BSD. Calling someone stupid because they check to see if sigaction(2) exists because they want SA_RESTART to simplify their code just doesn't fly.
I look forward to the day when autoconf doesn't need to exist.
I took a nice three week vacation to Japan recently and had a chance to take a look at their wireless products first hand and I have to admit, their cell phones are geared towards a very different market than the US.
For instance, while walking down the street, the number of people I saw talking on a cell phone was significantly less than the number of people I saw playing games on their cell phones or simply picking them up and checking them periodically to show them off (well, I guess they could have been receiving text messages as that is hugely popular.)
When visiting several large electronics stores, at first I noticed that the sheer number of cell phones was astouding and then quickly realized that there weren't a huge number of cell phones, there were a huge number of styles of cell phones. Given their relatively cheap price (toy phones here cost more), every teenage girl and guy I saw had one and it was really a fashion statement. Three shades of pink with various color antenna ringer lights, huge numbers of patterns were what drew people to buy them.
When it comes to actual technology of the cell phone, there is no doubt that the Japanese phones have significantly more features (and most not in any way shape or form related to using it as a communications device), but they weren't really all that small. Large color screens were more important than small size, so for instance, the Motorola V. series and the Nokia 8900 series are much smaller than most of the phones I saw.
I have to say that I don't believe the same thing will really ever happen in the US. When I walked into a store (well... most cell phones are sold at street level so you rarely have to walk "in"), there were boxes filled to the brim with last years cell phones that people would throw away when they bought a new one and I can't see the average American consumer buying a new cell phone because it comes in a new color or can store 32 randomized wallpapper styles rather than 16. The lifetime of a cell phone in the US just appears to be significantly longer.
Sevice providers also have a hand to play in keeping the variety of phones out. In Japan, as far as I can tell... there is basically one cell phone provider, NTT DoCoMo. In comparison, in the US there dozens operating on multiple frequency bands, multiple standards (AMPS, TDMA, GSM*, CDMA, PCS, iDEN) each having different CODECs based on service provider plus proprietary modifications to protocols and every change affects battery life and features available.
I really wish the FCC would restructure the frequency band allocations so that all cell phone providers would at the very least use one band. Of course, they couldn't use AMPS and TDMA in this case without significant interoperability between providers, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice:).
Frankly, I believe only three measures are absolutely necessary for preventing hijacking:
* Eliminate all carry-on luggage, period.
* Wire video and sound in the cockpit and cabins of all plane broadcast to towers 24/7 for monitoring. There really aren't that many jumbo jets in the sky when it comes right down to it.
* Provide an emergency remote method of engaging the flight control computer and locking out manual override to be controlled by a secure domestic or international military installation.
Of course, these measures only apply to large aircraft. Small aircraft are a completely different matter.
There were several webcams in the WTC on the top floors which are obviously now no longer working.
The washington post has a webcam pointed at the pentagon which updates every 30 seconds showing the fire which is bellowing smoke into the air.
I have a feeling that this disaster will be the most highly covered one in history simply because of the number of webcams scattered around both DC and NYC.
Bring back Que! Que was in my opinion the most entertaining character ever to grace ST. Ok, maybe I just like the idea of a morally blank omnipotent person who moves people around like chess peices to see how the other side responds.
Everyone else was so emotionally blank and serious that having someone inject a little fun into their otherwise by-the-book lives was interesting.
Of course, from what I understand, Enterprise is supposed to be before there was a book to go by, which might make things a bit more entertaining.
Maybe they should just bring back the really, really short skirts, move it to Showtime beside SG-1 and do something more... interesting once in a while. Actually, compared to the original ST, TNG was a bit bland in that regard, but compared to TNG, the last generations of ST were seriously devoid of any serious long-term sexual tension.
Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
Re:When will we see some improvements from the Alp
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Alan Shurgart (the man credited for creating the floppy drive) left Shurgart Associates in 1974 due to a dispute about the direction of the company.
In 1979, Finis Conner (who later founded Conner which was bought by Seagate) approached Shurgart to develop 5 1/4" hard drives and the two founded Seagate.
I believe Shurgart Associates was purchased by Xerox around the time when Seagate was founded.
Re:Diminishing clock speeds
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Intel will most likely not face the same problems AMD has with regards to marketting of their CPU due to the target market.
When you buy a machine with $2000-$5000 CPUs, you tend to do real research on the performance of the system you are buying.
I should have gone into greater depth. There are two major methods of flipping the standard 3:2 35mm frame to a wide aspect ratio.
The first is called a matte whereby the top and bottom of the film are simply not used.
The second method involves using an anamorphic lens which stretches the image vertically to fill the full frame. In the theaters, another lense is used to do the reverse.
There is actually a third method which is used by a few high profile directors involving a lens which projects onto the sound strip area of the frame in conjunction with a matte, but I won't go into that.
35 mm's film's full frame aspect ratio is 36:24 or 3:2, not 16:9.
16:9 and other wide aspect ratios were created by movie industry to differentiate themselves from traditional broadcast media in an attempt to drive people to movie theaters.
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
I have always wondered about this one. If Apple is a hardware company, why do they sell software, including their own OS instead of just giving it away for free to drive up sales of their hardware?
It would seem to me that if you bloated Mac OS and added lots of fancy applications that load all sorts of extensions and gave it away for free, you could sell a lot more hardware after poor unsuspecting users "upgrade" and realize after a time that their computers seem sort of slow.
Of course, that's just the sneaky evil person inside me talking.
All I really want is for Tivo, Replay or, god forbid, Ultimate TV to get it's channel listings and data over ethernet instead of the phone line.
I don't even have a phone line installed at my house. Why should I? I have a cell phone and I have cable internet access. Why should I pay $20/month for a service I would use only for a 2 minute phone call for a VTR to dial up.
Supposedly, Microsoft is planning to support the USB to Ethernet adapters to let me do this, but they want to improve the "quality" of the interface first.
Actually, the Unicode specification for UTF-8 places an artificial limit of 4 8 bit code units for variable length encoding as that is all that Unicode currently requires.
ISO 10646 defines UTF-8 as having up to 6 8 bit code units.
At 4 bytes, UTF-8 can only map to 0x10FFFF. At 6, it can map to 0x7FFFFFFF.
The current permutation of Unicode gives a theoretical maximum of approximately 65,000 characters (actually limited to 49,194 by the standard).
The biggest problem with Unicode is that no one understands what it is. Unicode defines two things, a character set that maps a character into a character code and a number of encoding methods that map a character code into a byte sequence.
ISO 10646, the Universal Character Set defines a 31 bit character set (2,147,483,648 character codes), not a 16 bit character set. Unicode 3.0's character set corresponds to ISO 10646-1:2000. Unicode 3.1 which was recently released goes a bit further.
UCS-2, as mentioned by this article, is the same as UTF-16 and is severely limited by it's 16 bit implementation. UTF-16 is unfortunately used by Windows and Java, but is rarely used on the web. The article claims UTF-16 can only map 65,000 characters, but using surrogate pairs can actually map over 1 million characters.
Thankfully, there are several other encoding methods for Unicode. UTF-8, which is a variable length encoding most commonly used on the web allows a mapping of Unicode from U-00000000 to U-7FFFFFFF (all 2^31 character codes). It also has a nice feature of the lower 7 bits being ASCII, so there is no conversion necessary from ASCII to UTF-8.
UTF-32 or UCS-4 is a 32 bit character encoding used by a number of Unix systems. It's not exactly the most space efficient form (UTF-8 requires roughly 1.1 bytes per character for most Latin languages), but it can handle the entire Unicode character set.
Sen. Harp, the mother of three apparently unfortunate children, argues that "these are games that train people to kill."
Quake teaches many valuable lessons that can be directly applied to every day life.
1. Moving towards and to the left or right (diagonally) of an incoming projectile is an effective way of dodging explosives with a blast radius about the size of 3 people.
2. Shotguns and automatic weapons are worthless unless you are out of ammo for your rail gun or rocket launcher.
3. Never stand still while shooting because someone else can sneak up behind you and cap 30 bullets in your ass (or 2 rail slugs or 2-3 rockets). Very good to know when you are trying to kill a wild animal that it's better to pull out your rail gun and shoot just a couple of times rather than fire off 30 rounds.
4. Aiming a rocket launcher down at the ground while jumping allows reaching high places not normally available. Very useful when trying to get on my roof to install the satellite dish.
5. You can run at the same speed if you are carrying 100 rockets or just 1. Good to know as I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to run around with 100 rockets, 100 slugs, 100 shotgun shells, some plasma cells and of course, the rocket launcher, rail gun, shot gun, etc. Also good to know that even if I get shot, I can still run at full speed.
My goodness. Has anyone even given any thought to why boys like games associated with war and strategy?
Frankly, I believe that if we remove all the virtual outlets for male aggresion, we'll see a whole lot more violence amoung those kids who aren't typically interested in sports (most sports being war-like games themselves).
I'm quite surprised that there hasn't been an attempt from the private sector to create a complete database of personal information similar to records kept by various government agencies.
With cameras in supermarkets tracking what people look at, various security cameras and microphones posted around cities, car tracking systems, software registration system, huge mailing lists, and other monitoring, a well funded company should be able to track virtually every person in the US from 18 (or younger) to death.
I can imagine voice and face recognition systems identifying unknown individuals and entering them into a system. Various conversations recorded with others that would pick up information about their name and other vital information. Taste in music, movies, clothes and what have you can be obtained via various department store camaras.
You could track friends and form associations between individuals. Even with minimal monitoring a company could get a wealth of information about a person.
Once home networks become popular, chips in your CD player or receiver (or a combination) could report how loud music you are playing is and you could automatically be billed if your neighbors can hear the music (public performance) or if more than a certain number of people are at your house.
Of course, there are a lot of good that could be accomplished with this information as well. Advertisements that come would be tailored to you so junk mail you are not interested in would cease to exist (track comments about items you made in a department store about a TV for instance).
Of course there are legal issues that would need to be removed. I could see this company acting as a proxy for all other companies to collect personal information. If Sun, for example, wanted to mail everyone who had blue eyes between 20 and 30 years old with at least $40,000 in the bank working in the tech industry about a new monitor made for blue eyed people, they could hand over the mail to this proxy company to send out instead. That would avoid the need to transfer the personal information between companies.
Interesting world we live in.
Re:Mundie's real argument, and why it doesn't matt
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Section 3 of the GPL states that all components of an executable that normally accompany it in a distribution must be available in source code form under the terms of Section 1 and 2 of the GPL. There are certain components that are explicitly exempt, but any component that normally ships with an executable is not.
The GPL basically infects any object code that it links with. This includes dynamically linked libraries as well as statically linked libraries.
The LGPL on the other hand does not infect object code that it links with. This appears to be the major difference between the GPL and
LGPL.
Of course, this is just my interpretation, I could be wrong.
Re:Mundie's real argument, and why it doesn't matt
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There is one other point that is most likely the most difficult for Microsoft to deal with:
- GPL'ed software can not be ported to operating systems where the underlining libraries the application must link to are not under a GPL compatible license.
For instance, you could not port a GPL'ed game to Windows and use DirectX because the DirectX icense is not GPL compatible.
This is of course not the case for LGPL'ed software, but since the standard appears to be to GPL applications and LGPL libraries, Microsoft is out of luck unless they agree to make all the libraries which link against the typical Windows application available in a GPL compatible license.
Of course, the big loophole with GPL software is IPC interfaces such as COM and CORBA which allow external applications to use it without actually linking to it, but at a speed hit.
Sidenote: Actually I'm a little curious about the Doom source that ID released under GPL. Technically, the OpenGL libraries for Windows are not under a GPL compatible license, so you should not see any mods for the original Doom source appearing on Windows unless they use something like Mesa.
Slashdot Mirror
The one useful thing I'd like to see is a bit of information overload instead of this (or in conjunction with) simple summary ratings. Some of the subscription channels such as HBO go part of the way in describing what kind of content actually exists, but I want something more in-depth.
I mean, I don't want to start looking at a site rated NC-17 just to find out it's because of language and not porn.
Now, compiling the low down on a site including number of nipples, instances of the word 'shit', rape scenes, suicides, etc will really help me sort out the more entertaining sites from the average plain janes of the web with a glance. I can imagine a feature in my web browser to warn me if a site doesn't have enough profanity, violence or sex... my goodness that would help me avoid all the boring content out there.
Oh wait, they probably want this for child filters or something of that nature.
Still, my definition of "profane" is probably different from everyone elses, so I can imagine allowing a child to view all the violence they want without any of the sex (or vice-versa for those across the pond).
my interest has always of having a 64bit desktop.
And you need access to 16 exabytes (or 8 w/ signed pointers) of address space in your desktop applications because....? (not total memory, but memory per application as you can have more than 4 gigs of memory on a x86 processor in a single machine.)
I don't know where this idea that 64 bit memory addressing makes programs run faster came from, but there is nothing inherent about 64 bit addressing that would make it faster for your average integer based desktop applications.
Of course, I guess it all depends on your definition of a "64 bit" chip architecture. I tend to define it as an architecture's registers, data bus and ALU are all 64 bits wide.
I don't know about you, but unless I need more than 4 gigabytes of memory per process or I'm doing some heavy floating point where I need 64 bits of precision, I don't particularly want my data structure heavy applications using up to twice the memory they used to.
Of course that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
All this achieved was to raise the cost of a fake ID to about 5000FF ($600-700) on the black market. The best forgeries come of course from corrupt officials who fabricated cards with fake IDs using the state-approved machines.
My goodness... physical security is not a good means of preventing copying. A well run ID system with enough memory on the card to do real cryptographic signatures would provide both security and tracability making forgeries nearly impossible to do.
A good ID card would contain a very small memory chip on it which contained a cryptographically signed message including the person who issued the ID, expiry time, issue time, distinguishing characteristics and possibly a photograph that was directly linked to a read-only id number embedded on every card to prevent the transfer of the information and signature to another card.
Information about each applicant would be captured on a machine which generated it's own cryptographic signature to ensure tracability. If in the case of a falsified record being entered into the system, you could expire every single ID card on the back-end and require each applicant to come back in.
You of course make providing false records a felony in federal courts punishable by a hefty amount of jail time.
These kinds of cards could eliminate drivers licenses and social security cards and as long as there was no physical printed number on the card itself and the readers for such cards were only issued to specific areas (aiports, police cars, etc), corporate interests would not be able to ask you for the information.
The only way to forge this particular type of cards requires either cracking the key, social engineering or some level of corruption.
Cracking the key is unlikely, but the nice thing about a realtime lookup system is you can do things like revoke CA keys and make IDs invalid. You then proceed to stagger the issue of cards with different signing keys so that the number of cards you'd invalidate if worst came to worst would be kept to a minimum.
Social engineering is a problem, but again, with a nice lookup system you could not ever get two IDs with different names. Once you registered, your biometic information would be checked against a master database to insure you haven't registered before. Obviously, registering under the wrong information the first time would lead to some rather nasty concequences down the road in case you actually wanted to have a life.
Corruption is a harder problem to deal with, but as stated before, revoking cards is not a problem with this type of system. You also have a nice paper trail which would make corruption very risky. Obviously paying the people who have control over the system well would help immensely.
They are most definately not immature high tech for finding duplicate persons. When doing real-time analysis maybe... but if you have more than a minute to make a decision, the quality of these types of biometrics systems goes up dramatically (with the exception of DNA and photo recognition, I just threw those in as things they'd want to get from you anyway :)
Granted, the type of CPU power you'd need to do a fingerprint match against 300 million people in a reasonable amount of time is a bit staggering, but it is completely doable.
There is a rather large difference in the US with regards to copyrightable material.
One must understand that all music is actually owned by the general public in the US, not by the creators of the works. The government hands the creators of the work limited temporary control over their work to (originally at least) promote artistic expression.
When a corporation takes this limited temporary control that was intended to promote artistic expression and uses to extend a monopoly which has the side effect of *limiting* artistic expression, the copyright can no longer be considered valid.
Frankly, the very fact that copyrights have been extended past the original 20 years without any evidence that such an increase would do any more to promote artistic expression should have been considered a crime of criminal proportions as it has ended up making the public pay for works that they already own without any additional reward (additional artistic works) which amounts to extortion.
Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong.
Exactly what advantage does yet another card have? I'm sure they'll be just as easy to counterfeit as current identification methods...
Uhm, no. The current security of ID cards relies on the fact that it's hard to create a physical duplicate of the card itself. This is mediocre compared to the system being proposed.
A real smart card would have enough space on it for a real cryptographic signature that can guarantee (unless of course the key is comprimised) that this particular card was issued by the good old USA. Coupled with issue and expiration dates, this alone would be vastly superior to anything we have currently and provide a significant barrier to counterfietters.
But that's not all. If you had a real-time lookup system to verify that an ID was in fact issued at all and each card itself had it's own unique entry in the system you end up with a system that is resistant to even key comprimises.
On top of that, if you require unique characteristics such as fingerprint, DNA, retinal scan, heat signature and photo to be gathered at the time of issue of the ID so you could do duplicate scanning (one person can't have two IDs) you end up with a system which is orders of magnitude more secure than what currently exists.
You could even go a step further and only allow a particular machine to be able to read the cards that are only allowed to be operated by government workers subjected to stringent FBI background checks and self-destruct if tampered with. The card itself would obviously also be tamper-resistant.
Even more impressive is that if this was done properly, you could subject every person entering the country to it and in real-time issue temporary IDs that would allow even foreigners who may lie about themselves to never be allowed to lie twice.
Of course, what would be better than a national ID is an international ID (which passports are for, but are pretty poor... ink stamps when entering and leaving a country, please.) Though at least they have barcodes and pretty holograms.
Then again, you have to understand how traditional counterfietting is done. Rarely does anyone actually create a fake ID. Instead, you find an incompetent DMV in some state, steal enough ID information and let them create a nice new ID for you. A well run national ID program would prevent this.
2) A Standard C Library (libc) is standard for every Unix and Unix-like operating system. For 99 systems out of 100, this libc will NOT come from GNU. If you write a program that makes use of glibc extensions, your program will not be portable. It will only make you look stupid.
This isn't most definately not true. The C library on Unices implements a set of standards, but which standards are implemented is up to the implementators. There are quite a few conflicting functions in between ANSI, SUS, SVID, BSD, ISO, and POSIX though most of them have to do with simple things such as errno values, but there are more serious cases such as the setjmp(3) conflict between BSD and POSIX.
Now, even without the conflicts, not every Unix has a complete implementation of these standards, especially given how frequently they've been coming out in recent years. POSIX 1003.1* for instance contains a good amount of optional functionality (SUSv2 made a lot of it mandatory however) including extremely useful features such as read-write locks for threads.
Now, that's not to say that I don't wish every Unix was at least was SUSv2 conformant, but OS specific code is a fact of life in cross-platform Unix development unless you are working on just Linux and *BSD. Calling someone stupid because they check to see if sigaction(2) exists because they want SA_RESTART to simplify their code just doesn't fly.
I look forward to the day when autoconf doesn't need to exist.
I took a nice three week vacation to Japan recently and had a chance to take a look at their wireless products first hand and I have to admit, their cell phones are geared towards a very different market than the US.
:).
For instance, while walking down the street, the number of people I saw talking on a cell phone was significantly less than the number of people I saw playing games on their cell phones or simply picking them up and checking them periodically to show them off (well, I guess they could have been receiving text messages as that is hugely popular.)
When visiting several large electronics stores, at first I noticed that the sheer number of cell phones was astouding and then quickly realized that there weren't a huge number of cell phones, there were a huge number of styles of cell phones. Given their relatively cheap price (toy phones here cost more), every teenage girl and guy I saw had one and it was really a fashion statement. Three shades of pink with various color antenna ringer lights, huge numbers of patterns were what drew people to buy them.
When it comes to actual technology of the cell phone, there is no doubt that the Japanese phones have significantly more features (and most not in any way shape or form related to using it as a communications device), but they weren't really all that small. Large color screens were more important than small size, so for instance, the Motorola V. series and the Nokia 8900 series are much smaller than most of the phones I saw.
I have to say that I don't believe the same thing will really ever happen in the US. When I walked into a store (well... most cell phones are sold at street level so you rarely have to walk "in"), there were boxes filled to the brim with last years cell phones that people would throw away when they bought a new one and I can't see the average American consumer buying a new cell phone because it comes in a new color or can store 32 randomized wallpapper styles rather than 16. The lifetime of a cell phone in the US just appears to be significantly longer.
Sevice providers also have a hand to play in keeping the variety of phones out. In Japan, as far as I can tell... there is basically one cell phone provider, NTT DoCoMo. In comparison, in the US there dozens operating on multiple frequency bands, multiple standards (AMPS, TDMA, GSM*, CDMA, PCS, iDEN) each having different CODECs based on service provider plus proprietary modifications to protocols and every change affects battery life and features available.
I really wish the FCC would restructure the frequency band allocations so that all cell phone providers would at the very least use one band. Of course, they couldn't use AMPS and TDMA in this case without significant interoperability between providers, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice
Frankly, I believe only three measures are absolutely necessary for preventing hijacking:
* Eliminate all carry-on luggage, period.
* Wire video and sound in the cockpit and cabins of all plane broadcast to towers 24/7 for monitoring. There really aren't that many jumbo jets in the sky when it comes right down to it.
* Provide an emergency remote method of engaging the flight control computer and locking out manual override to be controlled by a secure domestic or international military installation.
Of course, these measures only apply to large aircraft. Small aircraft are a completely different matter.
There were several webcams in the WTC on the top floors which are obviously now no longer working.
The washington post has a webcam pointed at the pentagon which updates every 30 seconds showing the fire which is bellowing smoke into the air.
I have a feeling that this disaster will be the most highly covered one in history simply because of the number of webcams scattered around both DC and NYC.
Bring back Que! Que was in my opinion the most entertaining character ever to grace ST. Ok, maybe I just like the idea of a morally blank omnipotent person who moves people around like chess peices to see how the other side responds.
Everyone else was so emotionally blank and serious that having someone inject a little fun into their otherwise by-the-book lives was interesting.
Of course, from what I understand, Enterprise is supposed to be before there was a book to go by, which might make things a bit more entertaining.
Maybe they should just bring back the really, really short skirts, move it to Showtime beside SG-1 and do something more... interesting once in a while. Actually, compared to the original ST, TNG was a bit bland in that regard, but compared to TNG, the last generations of ST were seriously devoid of any serious long-term sexual tension.
Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
Alan Shurgart (the man credited for creating the floppy drive) left Shurgart Associates in 1974 due to a dispute about the direction of the company.
In 1979, Finis Conner (who later founded Conner which was bought by Seagate) approached Shurgart to develop 5 1/4" hard drives and the two founded Seagate.
I believe Shurgart Associates was purchased by Xerox around the time when Seagate was founded.
Intel will most likely not face the same problems AMD has with regards to marketting of their CPU due to the target market.
When you buy a machine with $2000-$5000 CPUs, you tend to do real research on the performance of the system you are buying.
I should have gone into greater depth. There are two major methods of flipping the standard 3:2 35mm frame to a wide aspect ratio.
The first is called a matte whereby the top and bottom of the film are simply not used.
The second method involves using an anamorphic lens which stretches the image vertically to fill the full frame. In the theaters, another lense is used to do the reverse.
There is actually a third method which is used by a few high profile directors involving a lens which projects onto the sound strip area of the frame in conjunction with a matte, but I won't go into that.
Anyhow, a great site which explains most of this stuff is http://www.hometheaterforum.com/home/wsfaq.html.
35 mm's film's full frame aspect ratio is 36:24 or 3:2, not 16:9.
16:9 and other wide aspect ratios were created by movie industry to differentiate themselves from traditional broadcast media in an attempt to drive people to movie theaters.
I actually do as well. I got hooked on SG-1 and actually the now cancelled Total Recall 2040 (to a lesser degree).
It would seem to me that if you bloated Mac OS and added lots of fancy applications that load all sorts of extensions and gave it away for free, you could sell a lot more hardware after poor unsuspecting users "upgrade" and realize after a time that their computers seem sort of slow.
Of course, that's just the sneaky evil person inside me talking.
All I really want is for Tivo, Replay or, god forbid, Ultimate TV to get it's channel listings and data over ethernet instead of the phone line.
I don't even have a phone line installed at my house. Why should I? I have a cell phone and I have cable internet access. Why should I pay $20/month for a service I would use only for a 2 minute phone call for a VTR to dial up.
Supposedly, Microsoft is planning to support the USB to Ethernet adapters to let me do this, but they want to improve the "quality" of the interface first.
Oh well, maybe someday.
Actually, the Unicode specification for UTF-8 places an artificial limit of 4 8 bit code units for variable length encoding as that is all that Unicode currently requires.
ISO 10646 defines UTF-8 as having up to 6 8 bit code units.
At 4 bytes, UTF-8 can only map to 0x10FFFF. At 6, it can map to 0x7FFFFFFF.
Of course, my math could be wrong.
ISO 10646, the Universal Character Set defines a 31 bit character set (2,147,483,648 character codes), not a 16 bit character set. Unicode 3.0's character set corresponds to ISO 10646-1:2000. Unicode 3.1 which was recently released goes a bit further.
UCS-2, as mentioned by this article, is the same as UTF-16 and is severely limited by it's 16 bit implementation. UTF-16 is unfortunately used by Windows and Java, but is rarely used on the web. The article claims UTF-16 can only map 65,000 characters, but using surrogate pairs can actually map over 1 million characters.
Thankfully, there are several other encoding methods for Unicode. UTF-8, which is a variable length encoding most commonly used on the web allows a mapping of Unicode from U-00000000 to U-7FFFFFFF (all 2^31 character codes). It also has a nice feature of the lower 7 bits being ASCII, so there is no conversion necessary from ASCII to UTF-8.
UTF-32 or UCS-4 is a 32 bit character encoding used by a number of Unix systems. It's not exactly the most space efficient form (UTF-8 requires roughly 1.1 bytes per character for most Latin languages), but it can handle the entire Unicode character set.
A good document on this is available at UTF-8 And Unicode FAQ
Except PowerBook G4's have an extremely loud fan which comes on any time the thing does any real work (like playing a DVD).
Quake teaches many valuable lessons that can be directly applied to every day life.
My goodness. Has anyone even given any thought to why boys like games associated with war and strategy?
Frankly, I believe that if we remove all the virtual outlets for male aggresion, we'll see a whole lot more violence amoung those kids who aren't typically interested in sports (most sports being war-like games themselves).
I'm quite surprised that there hasn't been an attempt from the private sector to create a complete database of personal information similar to records kept by various government agencies.
With cameras in supermarkets tracking what people look at, various security cameras and microphones posted around cities, car tracking systems, software registration system, huge mailing lists, and other monitoring, a well funded company should be able to track virtually every person in the US from 18 (or younger) to death.
I can imagine voice and face recognition systems identifying unknown individuals and entering them into a system. Various conversations recorded with others that would pick up information about their name and other vital information. Taste in music, movies, clothes and what have you can be obtained via various department store camaras.
You could track friends and form associations between individuals. Even with minimal monitoring a company could get a wealth of information about a person.
Once home networks become popular, chips in your CD player or receiver (or a combination) could report how loud music you are playing is and you could automatically be billed if your neighbors can hear the music (public performance) or if more than a certain number of people are at your house.
Of course, there are a lot of good that could be accomplished with this information as well. Advertisements that come would be tailored to you so junk mail you are not interested in would cease to exist (track comments about items you made in a department store about a TV for instance).
Of course there are legal issues that would need to be removed. I could see this company acting as a proxy for all other companies to collect personal information. If Sun, for example, wanted to mail everyone who had blue eyes between 20 and 30 years old with at least $40,000 in the bank working in the tech industry about a new monitor made for blue eyed people, they could hand over the mail to this proxy company to send out instead. That would avoid the need to transfer the personal information between companies.
Interesting world we live in.
Section 3 of the GPL states that all components of an executable that normally accompany it in a distribution must be available in source code form under the terms of Section 1 and 2 of the GPL. There are certain components that are explicitly exempt, but any component that normally ships with an executable is not.
The GPL basically infects any object code that it links with. This includes dynamically linked libraries as well as statically linked libraries.
The LGPL on the other hand does not infect object code that it links with. This appears to be the major difference between the GPL and
LGPL.
Of course, this is just my interpretation, I could be wrong.
There is one other point that is most likely the most difficult for Microsoft to deal with:
- GPL'ed software can not be ported to operating systems where the underlining libraries the application must link to are not under a GPL compatible license.
For instance, you could not port a GPL'ed game to Windows and use DirectX because the DirectX icense is not GPL compatible.
This is of course not the case for LGPL'ed software, but since the standard appears to be to GPL applications and LGPL libraries, Microsoft is out of luck unless they agree to make all the libraries which link against the typical Windows application available in a GPL compatible license.
Of course, the big loophole with GPL software is IPC interfaces such as COM and CORBA which allow external applications to use it without actually linking to it, but at a speed hit.
Sidenote: Actually I'm a little curious about the Doom source that ID released under GPL. Technically, the OpenGL libraries for Windows are not under a GPL compatible license, so you should not see any mods for the original Doom source appearing on Windows unless they use something like Mesa.